The Dead Speak Ill Of The Living (The Dead Speak Paranormal Mysteries Book 1) (2 page)

  
He clearly hadn’t got that right, as the bemused smile turned into a half
scowl, and then a look of resignation. She seemed to heave out “it's short for
Dulcimer.”

  
“Dul…”

  
“Yes, the musical instrument.” Obviously annoyed, she added, “you don’t look
very French.”

  
“French?”

  
“le Tissier?”

  
“Oh, that was generations ago. Call me Joe.”

  
“Right. I’m Dee.”

  
“Indeed.”

  
“So, shall we go inside and you can show me around?”

  
That seemed like the right thing to do, so Joe led her into ‘his’ building,
first by swiping his card into a reader, allowing the locks to open, and
waiting for the door to catch up and open itself.

  
Looking at the walls, the roof, the inset lights, Dee came to a conclusion.
“It’s very white, very sterile.”

  
“My bosses are very minimalist. And to be honest they spend all the budget in
the lab, not on plants or anything.” Seeing her nod, he added, “please don’t
put that in the article.”

  
“You’ve been briefed to keep it all PR friendly?”

  
“Err…just to explain how things are.” But she smiled at the tremor of panic in
his voice, and nodded.

  
“That’s fine by me. So, how many people here?”

  
“The science park has the capacity for four full size research centres, hosting
several hundred people, but the economy has been tricky and we’re currently the
only facility working.”

  
“Perhaps they should have built it in London or Cambridge?”  Dee offered.

  
“Maybe.”

  
“So how many of you are their?”

  
“Forty eight people are employed here. That’s ten of us on the main project,
and everyone else in support roles. And Monroe.”

  
“What does he do?”

  
“Mostly bosses us around.”

  
“We share the same sort of employer then. If he’s not in charge, who is?”

  
“Doctor Scott is leading the team, he’s the brains. Err, did you want to write
this down?”

  
Dee held up her hand to reveal a small metal object. “Digital recorder.”

  
“Cool, very small.”

  
She waved it at him like she might a toy to a child. “So what exactly are you
working on?”

  
By now they had stopped in front of a double door, covered in warning signs.

  
“We’re pushing forward the field of quantum biology.”

  
Smiling at his evident pride, Dee nodded, “can you put that in a way my readers
will understand?”

  
“Ah, okay, well, how about quantum physics is essentially the study of the
miniscule building blocks of the universe, and biology the study of how living
organisms work. We’re looking into how both these interact.”

  
“Sounds interesting, so do you have many animals here?”

  
“No, no,” and Joe became insistent. “No animals, nothing like that at all.”

  
“So where does the biology come in?”

  
“Our main project, our pride and joy, is clarifying the quantum functions of
the brain.”

  
“Oh, so you have a load of brains in there.”

  
“No, no, no,” that would not sound good would it, “we’ve got cell cultures.
Nothing beyond cell cultures. No brains, no animals.” Jesus, if they ended up
getting bombed from this article Monroe would not be happy. “We looked at the
interaction of cells and the quantum world, and what we’re building is a
quantum foam, applied to a model we’ve made of the human brain on our
computers, and the aim is to find out how they work.”

  
In all his five years working on the project, Joe had never once considered
that some people might find it odd, freaky, horrible. Now, having garbled those
words out, he was worried Dee would. He scanned her face, trying to find any
trace of revulsion. Then he realised she was looking at him.

   A
man in his late twenties, average height but slim, with wire rimmed glasses and
hair that just fell about. Not your clichéd nerd, but clearly someone who lived
this. Maybe she had an angle. “So how old are you?”

  
“Twenty nine,” he replied confused.

  
“And how did you get a job here?”

  
“Oh, I finished my doctorate, and submitted some trial papers I’d written in my
spare time to Dr. Scott, and he recruited me.”

  
Which all sounded far easier than it had been for Dee to get a job on a
newspaper, but how many people gave a shit about quantum biology? Then again,
how many gave a shit about local newspapers?

  
“So if my readers liked what they hear about this lab, can they work here? Is
there a way to work up, or do you need a doctorate?”

  
Joe sucked his lower lip. He hadn’t been expecting this. “The ten of us on the
core team are all qualified, but we do have the support unit who is vital. I
mean, we have a local lady who inputs all our material into the proper
databases, she’s not a scientist but is picking it all up as we send it through
to her, and is easily vital, without her we’d all be lost within a week.”

  
“That sounds good. You’d better show me your lab then.”

  
Given that this was a high tech research area, Dee was expecting Joe to do more
than pull the door open with a silver handle, and then gesture for her to step
inside. She found herself in a small anteroom, with a coffee machine and a pile
of lunch boxes (she could see sandwiches through the plastic sides).

  
“So you’re not allowed food in the lab?” Dee correctly surmised.

  
“Yes, and now we go through this next door,” and again, a large, heavy, double
door covered in warnings was pulled open, and again they went through.

  
“I was expecting more security,” Dee wondered out loud.

  
“Oh, we have the men at the gates and then the main doors. If you get past them
you have the run of the place.”

  
“Indeed. I won’t mention that.”

  
Stepping through, Dee found herself in a large room, about the size of her old
school hall, with a large number of workstations and tables scattered across
it. There were no internal walls, no cubicles, and it was possible to see
across the entire thing from waist height up. All was white again, but this
time the sterility and minimalism of the outside was replaced by a clutter of
technology everywhere, from computers to wires to things she didn’t recognise.

  
“Now this looks like a lab,” she nodded, and as she spoke the other nine people
in the room, six men and three women, all stepped back from leaning over round
a table, snapped into attention as if the headmistress had walked in, and
murmured a ragged “hello.”

  
“Sorry,” Dee said raising her hand, “don’t mind me.”

  
“Just a second,” said a late middle aged man, in a white coat like them all,
but with greatly receded white hair and noticeable cheekbones. He tapped on a
keyboard, and all the computers in the room switched their screens to black.
“Just guarding our secrets.” He tried to smile, but there was something pained
about his face.

  
“You’re Dr. Scott?” Dee said, going over and shaking his firm hand.

  
“Yes. Err…” He had literally no idea what to say.

  
“How long have you been working on quantum biology?”

  
“I founded the Journal of Quantum Biology twenty years ago.”

  
“Oh, I see, so you’re a leader in the field?”

  
Scott pulled his pained look again, and looked over at Joe for assistance. He
dutifully came over and pointed back to the door. “Now you’ve seen the lab,
let’s get a coffee and I can explain more about the facility.”

  
Not bothering to conceal her amusement, Dee let herself be led out. When the
door shut, she asked “what was that about?”

  
“It’s not so much that he’s the leader in his field,” Joe said, whispering,
“it’s that he is the field.”

  
“Ah. The profession is somewhat sceptical?”

  
“Yes.”

  
“I can see why that might be. So you’ve no canteen?”

  
“They don’t make enough money with one facility in use, need two to reopen it.
But we have a lovely lunch budget.”

  
“If you don’t mind me asking, is this project short of funds?”

  
“Err, no,” and Dee noted he seemed genuinely confused. “We have enough for what
we’re doing.”

  
“There just seems a certain amount of, shall we say, small scale work on large
scale projects.”

  
“Well, we could be bigger I suppose.”

  
“This almost feels like you’re buried in a university burning through a rogue
grant than privately funded.”

  
“Monroe and Scott deal with all that.” Joe was clearly out of his depth on this
one, and Dee realised she’d have to do some digging to solve the financials. Then
she remembered she was writing a puff piece for the Gazette, not breaking a
story of science run amok. More’s the pity.

  
“But are you making progress?”

  
Joe smiled. “Oh yes. We’ll make a breakthrough before the year is up.”

  
Dee returned the smile. “Then I expect an invite to the press conference.”

  
Doctor Scott put a hand up to his clean shaven chin, stroked the stubble, and
concluded that at this rate they’d never make the breakthrough before
Christmas, and there’d be a whole host of those tedious meetings to get more
money. Maybe he could just let Monroe go along, although the latter did like to
wheel him out like a performing monkey, get him to run through lots of long
words and generally try and confuse the backers into handing over the money.
What had Joe once called it? Get them going with ‘science porn’?

  
“Hello,” came a voice from the other side of the lab, where Joe had just come
through the door.

  
“You’ve been a while,” Scott noted.

  
“Oh, we had a chat over lunch.”

  
Scott looked at the smile on Joe’s face, and there was a fleeting thought in
the paternal parts of his mind, but whatever concern this was it quickly went.
“She knew to bring lunch?”

  
“We split mine.”

  
“Oh yes, your palatial rolls. I’m surprised you’re so thin given you eat half
of Lancashire every day.”

  
“Turns out she loves food.”

  
“I love food,” came a voice from the other side of the lab, “she’s just
prepared to put up with your excessive sandwiches.”

  
Joe turned to Jane and shot back “you can love food and not spend two hundred
quid on a small plate cooked by a sociopath.”

  
“Chefs get very passionate about their work.”

  
“They’re all loonies who probably shouldn’t be near knives.”

  
“Anyway,” Scott said to keep things on track. “It’s good you’re back, we can
get on mob handed.”

  
“Is there a problem?”

  
“Ah Joe, yes there is. Although we’re certain the quantum construct is
functioning, and the connections are functioning, and the software we wrote is
functioning, in fact it all seems to be working, we just can’t work out what
the data means. Or if it’s data. It’s just a jumble that we can’t process.”

  
Joe walked over and looked at the screens on the table everyone was once again
stood around. A box showed input coming from the machine, but all the
analytical programs were so confused they couldn’t read it. “So the process is
doing something, you just don’t know what.”

  
“And it’s been doing this all morning since we switched it on” Jane explained,
hand on the mouse, pointer drifting randomly in equal confusion.

  
“Well it’s sort of good.”

  
Scott narrowed his eyes. “Sort of good?”

  
“Well, err, something is happening. We just need to find out what.”

  
Remembering he was leading a team, and most definitely not a chef, Scott
decided to be conciliatory. “I appreciate your attempts to lift my mood Joe,
but we might have invented the world’s most expensive white noise generator.”

  
“Okay, let me get into this and see what I can find.”

  
Which was exactly what the rest of the team wanted him to say, because Scott
now sanctioned everyone else going out for their lunch. This left Joe sat in
front of a bank of monitors, all run from the same computer which was humming
away under the desk. Someone coming in cold might have been overwhelmed by the
many different readouts in front of him, but as Joe had helped build this he
felt comfortable, and this was also why everyone else had buggered off to let
him solve it. No pressure then, just an opportunity to impress if he could get
it running.

  
First things first, make sure everything really was connected and plugged in,
even though if something wasn’t he’d have to lie about fixing it and come up
with something software related. But a check showed their box, their little
magic box of quantum possibility was secure and plugged into the power
(although it hardly needed any power, a battery would do), and connected to it
all. So, the easy solution wasn’t going to work.