damned_institute | Nightshift 38: Autopsy Room 2

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Nightshift 38: Autopsy Room 2

[from here]

This room was smaller. A quick sweep of Indy's flashlight revealed three human-sized tables, each paired with a stand that was obviously meant to hold surgical instruments. The cabinets this time were limited to the wall on their right, the one that backed against the hallway. There weren't any bodies here either (no place to store them in this room but the slabs, it looked like), but it sounded as though Pierson's interest had turned more toward looting the Institute than looting the dead. Indy, for one, was grateful.

"Might as well get started." He made his way around the tables to the cabinet, which opened easily. Inside were a lot of metal surgical instruments. The magnifying glass was the only one he could have identified really confidently by name. "On the hunt for anything in particular?" he asked, looking for some direction here. It seemed like the rules were that whatever you had in your hand when the clock ran out, you got to keep. If that was the case, then they might as well dump the whole cabinet into the pillowcase, since they weren't going to have to carry it back. Or was there a limit on how much you were allowed to stockpile, he wondered again.

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The room wasn't large enough for there to be many places to hide folders or charts, so when a quick sweep found nothing of the sort, Methos resigned himself to solely finding tools. It wasn't a bad bargain, though he would have liked to dig up at least a little bit of information. "Surgical instruments," he replied. "Scalpels and razors. Sutures, if they have them. They may, to stitch the incisions shut after the autopsies." He gave Jones another grim smile. "Those aren't for weaponry, if you were wondering. Just the usual use."

He wound his way between the tables to join Jones at the cabinet, gaze raking hastily over its contents. "And forceps," he added after a few seconds. "Those might be handy as well."

Indy was starting to distinguish a pattern here: Pierson preferred small, sharp weapons, the kind you could hide in the cuff of your sleeve as easily as in someone's neck. He'd obviously come to the right place. They were looking at the mother lode of razor-sharp blades of various sizes and descriptions.

In fact, Indy noticed with a wince, a lot more of this stuff looked like it was for cutting open than for sealing up again.

"Doesn't look like they're too worried about making everything nice and pretty again after they're done," he said, looking more closely at the array of blades in the cabinet. "Guess nobody's looking at the bodies." Now that was ominous. If they didn't have to justify patients' deaths to anyone--and they probably didn't, given how frequent those deaths seemed to be--even Landel's self-preservation instinct wasn't working in the prisoners' favor.

"I'm suddenly very glad I've only eaten identifiable meat so far." Though Methos doubted very much that the staff were serving the dead to their patients, he did wonder how they were disposing of the bodies. If people died in any volume, as seemed all too likely, most methods would get very risky very quickly, assuming anyone was taking notice. "Maybe they have an incinerator in the basement," he mused out loud. "It's something to check on."

He reached out to pluck a scalpel from the cabinet, and raised his flashlight to study it carefully. "At least they keep their instruments clean. There's nothing worse than an untidy psychopath." He picked up two more of the small blades, then paused to study the cabinet with a critical eye.

Indy wasn't big on this latest outburst of gallows humor from Pierson. If it was intended as humor, that was; the man gave you no way to tell. The alternative might be worse. He hadn't considered the question of where the dead went after the morgue, but he hoped it was somewhere better than the trash heap or--God forbid--the dinner plates. And here was Pierson treating it as an academic exercise.

"Very casual about all this, aren't you?" he commented. "They're real people, y'know. Kids, as likely as not. Maybe whoever sat across from you at breakfast." He almost asked whether Pierson felt even the slightest desire to shut this place down, but that was probably another question he didn't really want answered.

Indy had killed. Other people, sometimes accidentally and sometimes intentionally, in the heat of a fight. Part of him felt like a hypocrite moralizing like this. But Indy held the firm conviction that no matter what he had done in the past, his actions were not akin to this kind of evil. Landel had to be stopped. That was all there was to it.

"Would you rather I curl up in a corner and sob? Have screaming nightmares?" Methos turned from the cabinet to face Jones, his expression finally shifted outside its affected lines of indifference or wry humor. He looked grave and more than a little angry, eyes hard and jaw set. "Would a complete mental breakdown suit your idea of a proper reaction?"

He was weary of people prodding at his morality, trying to dredge up pieces of long-dead conscience. Acting as though their hands were spotless, as though holding to a particular sort of code was enough to confer innocence...

...No. It wasn't the same thing. Different men, different situations. This one had even less right to judge, as far as Methos was concerned, but at the same time was far more ignorant. He reined in his temper through act of will, and turned his back to Jones to run one hand along the edge of the nearest cadaver table.

"Worse atrocities than this have been committed throughout human history, and will be again. Everyone who dies is a real person, Doctor Jones. You can't mourn the whole world." His shoulders slumped, just a little, and he dropped his hand. He didn't turn around. "If we can find what they've done with the bodies, and where, we have proof. There are very few ways to dispose of a corpse entirely."

Well, at least that one had gotten some kind of reaction.

Indy, however, wasn't sure how to react at all. His first instinct was to bristle. The guy was practically dancing on the graves, whatever his motives were, and suddenly Indy had become the bad guy?

At the same time, though, the sudden flash of anger was comforting--rage, sorrow, anything, all of it seemed more appropriate than indifference when you were standing in the room where they took the bodies. Some seconds of silence later, the guilt dawned out of the oddly twisted little triumph. Judging by his reaction, it seemed obvious that Pierson had been through a lot more than he'd suspected--if you could trust his reaction, that was. Indy wasn't sure he could. He hadn't been catching a whole lot of flashes of compassion, either tonight or the night before. Frankly, Indy had absolutely no idea whether to trust Pierson or not, and that was galling. He usually had better instincts about people.

In the midst of these conflicting impulses, Indy almost came out with an apology, but then it hit him again that this wasn't his damn fault in the first place. He wasn't the one who was killing people and getting rid of their corpses, and he sure as hell wasn't the one who was making cracks about the food.

So he shot back, "Nobody's asking you to mourn the whole world. But hell if you're going to try to make me feel guilty when you're treating everything in this place like either fodder for your dissertation or a big joke. You don't see why it's unnerving to listen to you talk about why children make great test subjects or where the big body-burning furnace is as though it's all just more statistics rolling up in your head?" Indy's voice had risen over the course of this speech. He brought it back down again with an effort. "Call it a defense mechanism if you want. But yes, as a matter of fact, I probably would like you a lot better if I were convinced you weren't a sociopath."

Even as he was saying it, he was realizing what awful moves he was making here. But backing off in a situation like this had never been something he was able to do easily.

The look Methos shot back over his shoulder was incredulous. "Guilty? Why the hell would I care if you felt guilty? Or, for that matter, if you like me? You've been complaining about my reaction to this place from minute one. First the technology, now this, and I'm sure there've been things in between I've missed. I'm not terribly inclined to exert the sort of effort it might take to convince you I'm not going to turn you over to the guards, slit your throat in your sleep, or suddenly morph into a three-headed alien monster."

A defense mechanism, he repeated to himself. Maybe so. But it wasn't defending against the sort of things Jones expected. They hadn't seen any bodies yet, hadn't had any proof that anyone really had died. Until they did, it really was just statistics as far as Methos was concerned. Assuming otherwise was dangerous. It could all be a part of the twisted game being played, bundled in with rooms that were somehow repaired in less time than it should take to call a handyman. And that uncertainty, he definitely felt the need to defend himself against.

God help him if he should admit it, though.

For better or for worse, the flash of fury was gone, buried back under a thick layer of detachment. He rapped the side of the slab with one hand, then traced a finger around the rim of the gutters. It was clean when he raised his hand to inspect it. "It doesn't look like these have been used any time recently."

There it was again, the question that had been bothering him ever since he'd talked to the kid with the car this morning. Indy let all the rest of Pierson's reply slide and moved around the slab to stand face to face with the other man. A number of really good comebacks were popping into Indy's head--justifications, counterattacks, retorts, explanations, the works. For once, he let all that slide too. There was something much bigger at stake here, and he might as well air it. It wasn't as though he could make things much worse.

"When the hell are you from?" he demanded.

Methos gave Jones a hard look. His first instinct was to tell the other man off, or to give a flippant, meaningless reply to the demand. As far as he was concerned, he owed no answers. Certainly not that one, considering how well things had gone the last time years and relative advancement had even begun to surface. His jaw clenched, his expression turning stubborn and even more remote.

"Why?" he asked. He forced his voice to remain deliberately quiet and even. "Are you actually going to listen to a word I have to say, or will you just dismiss it out of hand because it doesn't suit you?"

"Because something is wrong here, and it's more than just the bugs and the autopsy rooms," Indy fired back. "And we're not going to get anywhere until we figure it out. I was in the library this morning, checking book publication dates and talking to another patient. And either it's 2009, or the people running this place have an interest in making it look like it it is."

He crossed his arms a little defensively. "I was ready to dismiss it as absurd. But then things started to add up. The radios, the Tetris you knew how to stop, the extension cords. The terminology, the references that didn't make any sense. Last night I thought you might be bluffing, but tonight I had you prove you knew what you were talking about. And there's no way to develop that kind of familiarity with technology that doesn't exist in the public eye in 1938, no matter what connections you've got.

"So if you don't want to work with me here, fine," he continued, fixing Pierson with a deliberate stare. "But whether you can stand me or not, sharing information is our best shot at piecing together what's really going on at Landel's and getting out of here." And swallowing his pride, Indy added, "Whatever you have to say, I'll listen."

Methos' eyes narrowed slightly. He studied Jones intently, then finally shook his head, baffled. "You really did think this was 1938, didn't you?" he asked. He hadn't precisely thought it was a joke the night before, the man had held to it too strongly. But that sort of displacement was strange enough to be hard to swallow, especially in normal humans."

"That year sounds about right, actually," he continued. Except 2009 was off by almost 15 years. "Which means even if I did share my conjectures, it would just sound like more jargon. Most of the science didn't even get a solid start until midway through...well, a geopolitical event that won't happen for more than a decade, from your perspective."

He raked a hand through his hair and shook his head, swallowing back a helpless little laugh. "I don't know if you're a madman, or if you really have been snatched through time somehow, but either way, I don't know that information sharing will cut it." He glanced narrow-eyed at the door. "Though you know, temporal anomalies would explain how the hell they fix things every night. Even if it does sound like something out of truly dreadful science fiction."

Indy sucked in a sharp breath, feeling almost as though he had just taken a sucker punch to the gut. "I'm not crazy, and I'm not lying," he said. He struggled briefly to find something that would demonstrate this. "The Nazis are in Czechoslovakia, since last month. The British prime minister is still talking as though everything's just great, but there's been a lot of controversy over the way the rest of Europe has been bowing to the German demands. Er, the New York Stock Exchange just announced this program to improve investment protection..." He trailed off, thinking, then burst out, "The Yankees won the World Series, third year in a row!"

It would've been almost comical if it hadn't been so pathetic, he thought. He'd been looking for something to prove that he was telling the truth, but Pierson had no way of knowing whether what he'd said was right. Did they even still have the World Series in 2009? "You might have to look some of that up in the history books when we get out of here," he said with a sigh. "Guess it'd all be before you were born, wouldn't it?"

Indy broke off his gaze and looked out into the darkness beyond his flashlight beam. He'd had some wild adventures before, but no one would ever believe this one. Assuming he ever got back home to tell it to anyone. If this really was some kind of time travel, he was dependent on whatever technology was responsible for it in order to get back. That put a new wrinkle into things--do any serious damage to the building, or kill the wrong person, and he might lose his shot at any meaningful escape.

After a minute, he said, "Sounds like time-travel isn't exactly an everyday occurrence in 2009 either, is it? You're not all just popping into ancient Rome for the weekend?" Although Pierson had a point--some sort of time jump would also explain why he'd felt fully rested this morning, even though he could only have gotten an hour or two of sleep at best. What the hell was going on here?

Methos shook his head slightly. "I've got no idea who won the World Series that year." A lie, he'd won decent money on a bet over it. "But the political situation in Europe at the time is something nearly everyone who's spent a single semester studying Western history has learned about." His hand found the slab again, fingers beating a stark tattoo against it before he caught himself. "It changed a great deal."

There was something entirely too surreal about the discussion they were having. And, he realized slowly, it meant danger beyond what alterations the theory made to the more general situation. If Jones really was from 1938, it meant the time period would be fresh in his memory. Methos would have to be careful of what he said on the topic, or else risk revealing familiarity a 28-year-old student shouldn't really have had.

"No," he admitted, allowing himself a dry sort of laugh. "I'm afraid visits to ancient Rome are a long ways off. At least for the general public." He looked over the room, then shrugged. "I'm not sure I can guess for certain what sort of equipment specialty organizations might have any more. Assuming that the theory is sound, and this group is contemporary."

Would they have time travel by 2009? Surely not.

Indy frowned, a little irrationally irritated with this rational response. But now that the initial shock had subsided a fraction, he was aware that it didn't particularly matter if anyone believed he was from 1938, as long as they were taking the possibility of time travel into account as another obstacle. It sounded like many of the patients he'd spoken with already were.

He wanted to ask what would happen--had happened--to make his era so important, but he could guess. That probably meant a war. Well, no surprise there, was there, especially with the other conflicts going on in Europe and the Pacific. He'd hoped the threats might be able to be averted, but perhaps that had always been wishful thinking. The United States likely came out of the war pretty well, given the way Pierson was talking about it and his conjecture that this technology was American. Britain too, if Pierson's accent was genuine. But as for all the gaps--

--he was better off not knowing about them, Indy told himself firmly. This wasn't like archaeology, in which you were just reconstructing history that had already happened in your time. He'd have to watch that tendency to play God.

"Too bad," he cracked aloud. "I wouldn't mind jetting off there for a day or two." Nay, months; the mind boggled at the possibilities. He wondered what Dad would say if he had the chance to witness actual Grail history as it happened. He'd probably have a heart attack.

Indy enjoyed this prospect briefly, then grew more serious. "But this opens up a whole new can of worms. If we accept--and you might not be prepared to, but I am, at least for now--that I'm from 1938 and this is 2009, then almost any of the crazy stories I've heard from other patients have the potential to be true. Who's to say that the kid who describes a civilization I've never head of isn't from a millennium into the future? The guy who talks about piloting some kind of rocket ship? Even if they're embellishing, their stories might be based on truth." Magic was still a stretch, but the prospect of time travel nevertheless cast heavy doubts on all the other crackpot theories he'd written off. And Indy wasn't too happy about that, either.

"Have a taste for gladiatorial matches and decadence?" Methos quipped. He considered the possibility himself, then dismissed it. It hadn't been a bad era, but he had no wish to repeat it. Most of it. Well, parts of it.

"Of course, time travel would have its downside, too," he mused. His own train of thought didn't run quite parallel to Jones's, but the routes were somewhat similar. "The temptation to change things, to involve oneself in events, would be remarkably hard to resist, wouldn't it?"

He frowned to himself, considering Jones's words, then shrugged. "I'm not about to go accepting whole-cloth every absurd story some patient comes up with, but I'm willing to entertain the possibility that things may not be entirely what we expect." A faint hint of amusement colored his voice before he smothered it out. "Of course, you do realize this poses another problem. If we accept, at least provisionally, that they do have some sort of door through time, that means they've got an unlimited supply of patients." He hesitated, lips thinning. "Along with God only knows what else."

"Why not? Here we've got the violent combat but no decadence," Indy replied. "And that's the fun part. Rome was arbitrary, though--just think of everything you could see with that kind of technology. It would cut so much of the guesswork out of archaeology if you could go back and see for yourself what that artifact was used for, or what those ruins looked like when they were whole and people used them every day. Visit the seven wonders of the world! All of history would be open to scholarship!"

Indy realized how hard he was enthusing and cooled it. In fact, it dawned on him, that power would probably make archaeology obsolete altogether. Why look at a shard of pottery in a museum if you could go back in time and buy the whole vessel fresh off a street vendor's wheel? Would it lead to class field trips to classical Greece? Sight-seeing tours in the Garden of Eden? Once you opened that kind of door, it would be nigh-impossible to shut it again.

Pierson was right--even for scholars, it would start as a simple desire to observe, to learn, to experience. But how could you know what the mere fact of your presence would change, let alone any deliberate attempts you made to affect the past? Better just to leave it alone, he knew. But he couldn't shake that nagging wish that he could see it all.

He made a conscious effort to turn his attention back to what Pierson was saying, then gave a shrug of his own. "They already had one, at least effectively. How many patients do you think are here right now--maybe a couple of hundred turning up at breakfast? With all those files of discharged patients, maybe a few hundred more. Unless this facility is just one small facet of a much larger plan, they can only process so many people, no matter what time they're coming from." Indy's brow furrowed. "Frankly, I'm a lot more more bothered by the question of what experiment they're running that warrants sample populations from different times. They seem to have covered every variable they could think of."

For one brief, mad instant, Methos wondered just what the archaeologist's reaction would be if he knew his roommate could tell him all of that and more. That he had journals and records going back as far as the art of writing, and had access to more. Had once had access to more. Jones would probably write him off as a madman, decide he was one of those who came by his admittance writ honestly.

Methos smiled mirthlessly. That would be the best possible reaction. Belief would be even more dangerous.

"But isn't the mystery part of the allure?" he asked quietly. "Humankind, even the scholars, romanticizes history because we weren't there. Even those of us who acknowledge that the past had its dark side can overlook it for the greater puzzle, because we don't have to live with the memory of it. Could you take the same joy in discovery, if it was tainted by the stink of someone dying of an infection you knew the cure to, or the look in the eyes of some child on a great city's slaver's block?"

He looked down and aside at the gutters in the slab, the movement shadowing his slight frown and making it look deeper. "But as it is, they can operate indefinitely, without even the slightest worry about the missing people tripping some flag, somewhere. It raises the stakes. Not a great deal, but some. But you're right. That is the more pertinent question. And I don't know about you, but I haven't a single clue about the answer."

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Nightshift 38: Autopsy Room 2

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