100TWC - Day 24: Rebirth

The smell of formaldehyde was overpowering, evoking long-buried memories of my ham-fisted attempts at dissection as an 'A' Level Biology student. Bunsen burners didn't appear to have evolved much in the last 30 years either. One rasped its curling yellow tongue of flame at the ceiling from a bench on one wall of Professor Manneheim's laboratory.

The Professor himself, his face hidden by a shock of wild grey hair in true stereotypical mad scientist style, gave his rapt attention to a series of dials on a control device at the far side of the lab. He remained outwardly undistracted by my entrance, but called out as I started across the polished tile floor.

"Have you disinfected?"

The anti-bacterial regimen was posted on every wall of the approach corridors. They were impossible to miss. The laboratory doors would not unlock unless the automated hand gel dispensers had been activated during the previous minute. The professor's question was redundant. I humoured him.

"Disinfected, masked and gloved," I informed him from behind my surgical mask.

He beckoned me over to his console.

"The final stage is almost complete," he said, snapping a toggle switch on his console. It was the first time I had ever seen him show even the faintest excitement, or apprehension. "Do you have a recording device?"

I showed him my digital camcorder.

"Does it have enough capacity?"
"Unless the experiment is going to take longer than a day," I laughed.

The professor offered me a withering stare. He was a famous man, but not for his sense of humour.

"Turn it on," he snapped. I turned it on, and set it on the bench beside the console, adjusting the viewfinder so I could check the professor was in shot. A few feet in front of the bench, a large glass panel provided a view into the sterilised room beyond. Several arc lights flared into life as Manneheim flicked another switch, revealing a hospital gurney surrounded by several large canisters, each of which was topped with a motorised valve. From the valves, surgical tubing snaked across to the gurney on which lay the pale naked body of a man.

"Rebirth Experiment #665," intoned the professor for the benefit of the recording. "Twentieth August Twenty Twelve, six twenty-one a.m. Professor Otto Manneheim conducting, James Reilly observing. Preliminary stages one through eighteen complete, subject has been dormant for twenty-four hours according to protocol, cell function nominal."

The professor proceeded through his experimental protocol, reading off measurements from his dials even though the computerised telemetry recorded everything. It was impossible to tell whether he did it from a sense of occasion, importance, or because he thought it was what later observers would expect -- to provide a sense of theatre.

Finally, he fell silent. For one moment I thought he was hesitating on the brink of history. The full weight of the implications of his experiment bent his shoulders. He seemed to shrink, crumpled by the responsibility. The possibility of failure. The moment passed. He shrugged off his fleeting doubts, flipped the cover of a red switch at the right of the console, and threw it.

Bright blue liquid oozed along the tube leading from the canister marked "A", shortly followed by a thin yellow liquid from "B".