“He’s an arrogant little git, isn’t he?” Julia said to a stunned looking Ben when he had returned to the monitoring room. She was still sitting at the nurses’ station, only now the pencil was stuck between her teeth. “‘We’ll just ask Jayne,’” she mimicked, chewing on the end of the pencil. “That’s what he thinks. If that slab of meat moves without one of you playing glove puppets, I’ll take up nursing full time. In fact I’ll specialise in the elderly and infirm.”
Ben ignored her remarks and instead demanded, “You’re in here all the time, why the hell didn’t you see anything before?”
“Because that’s the first time that extra from ‘The Living Dead’ in there has moved without mine or Sandra’s hand up her back!” Julia retorted. “I swear it, Benjamin!”
“How can you be so sure Sandra hasn’t seen any movement?”
“Because she never stops gabbing. If she’d seen our favourite corpse raise even so much as an eyebrow, she would have talked me to death about it before she went home. For God’s sake, Ben, there’s no one else she can tell about her marvellously exciting day except me, so give me some credit.”
Ben was thoughtful for a moment before suddenly asking, “Are the Crays being downloaded each night as planned?”
Julia grunted. “Of course they are. And his mini-computer, and his lap-top, which he virtually sleeps with, so getting hold of that each night is a pain in the arse.”
“Alright, alright! So it’s a pain in the arse! So long as Tyler can use the data, I don’t give a shit!” Ben almost shouted.
“Don’t tell me you’re not pleased that sleeping beauty is going to awake?” Julia said with heavy sarcasm. “I thought the whole point of this was to help these poor people? Think of the lives you could save, think of the publicity, Benjamin! Think of the profits, too! And think of Grant’s smiling face when you tell him all about it!”
Ben glared at her. It was meant to shut her up, but all it did was make her laugh. “I don’t think this is at all funny,” Ben said sternly.
Julia’s laughter increased when she saw how un-amused Ben was. But finally it faded to a giggle, and she muttered, “Oh, Benjamin! Fancy starting out with motives like yours and ending up as a philanthropist. You have to see the funny side of it.”
“There isn’t a funny side of it, and you know it,” Ben said in dismay.
Ben suddenly felt very depressed. He sat down at the nurses’ station next to Julia, took a deep breath and sighed, resting his head in his hands. He glanced at the monitor, seeing Matthew still sitting by his computer as before, then he turned his eyes towards Julia and said, “How can I tell Grant that our project to manipulate the human memory has turned into a great medical breakthrough?”
“By phone, long distance,” Julia replied.
“Get serious, Julia.”
“I am serious. There’s still a lot of money to be made here, so if you tell him right, he might let you live.” Julia shrugged her shoulders and added, “He might break off all your limbs at the trunk, but he’ll let you live.”
Ben was already shaking his head. “This medical breakthrough isn’t going anywhere, at least not for a long while yet. If Grant can find a use for it, then it’ll be worth something. But that will be someone else’s job, not yours or mine. Our job was to find a method of permanently changing someone’s mind. To remove what was once there and replace it with something totally new and different. People whose minds can be changed like that in a guaranteed, foolproof way can be very useful to the Corporation. Not just in the matter of easing corporate expansion strategies where money won’t work and resistance is being met, but also in the matter of executing difficult and unsavoury tasks. As you well know yourself, finding the right person to carry out such tasks has always been a major problem. But if we can tailor make the person to fit the task, and then erase that person just as easily, then we will have a real breakthrough on our hands. And that’s the breakthrough that Grant expects, not the reawakening of trauma victims. So unless we can glean something from the data we’ve downloaded to satisfy his expectation, we’re all going to end up dead. Far more dead than Jayne Middleton ever was.”