were for questions that were no longer asked.
Doc pressed his face against the glass, breath misting and obscuring the image
that seared on his retina. But not enough…no, never enough.
Behind the glass lay the rat king. At last he understood why Wallace—and the
hellish whitecoat minds that had conceived the Totality Concept—had used the
term.
In the middle of the sterile floor space stood a master computer. Its terminals
were attached to a series of cables that snaked across the floor in six
different directions. The screen attached to the mainframe was constantly filled
with a series of 3-D images and strings of words that Doc’s eyes were unable to
translate from blinking lights into coherent sentences. Although, looking at
where the images and words had surely to emanate, coherence was the last thing
that occurred to Doc.
For the six different directions terminated in six padded chairs. In each chair
was something that had once been human, but was no longer—six very old men,
their clothes almost perfectly preserved in the sterile atmosphere, but hanging
off them where they had become emaciated. They were fed and watered by a series
of intravenous tubes that coiled away toward a central bank of a smaller
mainframe, located in an antechamber of the room, presumably, Doc imagined, to
try to cut down the amount of outside interference in the sterile room.
The six once-human men were blank eyed and staring, their mouths fixed in rictus
grins of what could have been agony or ecstasy…or some inhuman mix of the two.
Muscle wastage made it hard to tell, as their faces were little more than skulls
with skin clinging, papery and thin, to them. Their wrists and hands were
painfully thin as they poked from the end of immaculately laundered and starched
sleeves.
Two of the men wore Air Force uniforms, one an Army uniform, another the attire
of a general in the Marines, and the last two were garbed in suits that were
conservatively but tastefully cut in a preskydark fashion. Doc recognized the
style from some of the high-ranking security and government officials who had
visited him during his brief sojourn in the late twentieth century.
The most horrific sight, however, wasn’t their emaciated forms, but what had
been done to their skulls above the brow.
Tn his native Vermont, Doc had been familiar with the practice of trepanning,
whereby a Jiole was drilled in the skull, or some portion of the skull removed,
in order to relieve pressure on the brain. It was a medical practice of dubious
worth, and was also used by some cultists and followers of ancient religions as
a path to release the mind and induce euphoric states. Often, it resulted merely
in drooling idiocy, which was, Doc supposed, a euphoria of sorts.
What had been done to these men looked like trepanning on a larger scale. The
snaking cables that ran from the mainframe terminals ended in electrodes that
were directly attached to portions of each man’s brain. It appeared to Doc that
the cables disappeared into a network of small holes drilled in the skull.
“And this is what you have in store for me, is it?” he asked, turning back to
Wallace.
The Gen nodded. “Uh-huh. You see Secretary of Defense Sethna?” He indicated a
figure in a suit whose only defining characteristic left was that he was of a
darker skin than the others, possibly an Asiatic origin. “Well,” Wallace
continued, “he’s dead…basically.”
“Are not they all?” Doc queried.
Wallace smiled. “Depends what you mean, Doctor. We try and keep them going, as
it’s the interaction of them all that makes the mechanism work. We recycle body
parts, but in this one it just looks like the brain finally gave out. Now,
there’s no way we could find any part comparable to that…until you arrived.”
Doc turned back to the glass and looked at the rat king. “Madness,” he muttered.
“Sheer folly and madness.”
Whether it was a comment directed toward Wallace’s plans, or the minds that had
originally conceived the rat king was lost as Doc felt a needle plunge into his
arm.
He turned to face the drooling, cretinous tech, hypodermic still in hand, as the