The Sollen building at 1:45 a.m. on a Tuesday in November looked like a monument to something that hadn't happened yet glass and steel and empty light, the lobby floored in marble that reflected the security desk's glow like a lake reflecting a cold moon.
They approached from the southeast. The service entrance was on the building's back face, a grey metal door between a loading dock and a dumpster enclosure that smelled of rust and the sweet chemical decay of discarded lab supplies. Henrik led. He moved with the particular confidence of a man who had used this door two hundred times in two years of working late the muscle memory of routine, applied now to a purpose the routine was never meant to serve.
The door had a keypad. Henrik entered the code 4-7-7-1, unchanged since his first month, because the facilities department had the security ambition of a screen door and the lock clicked open.
Inside: a corridor, fluorescent-lit, linoleum floor, the institutional nothing of a space designed to be passed through, not occupied. The sound of ventilation. The distant hum of a building that never fully slept.
They walked to the freight elevator. Henrik pressed B3 sub-basement three. The number wasn't labeled on the panel; the button was there, but the nameplate beside it was blank, as though the floor existed in the building's architecture but not in its identity.
The elevator descended. The sound changed the mechanical groan of a car moving through a shaft, then a softer quality, a muffled thickness, the sound of going underground.
B3.
The doors opened.
The corridor was narrow, unpainted concrete, lit by caged bulbs spaced too far apart. It looked nothing like the rest of the Sollen building. Nothing glass, nothing steel, nothing designed to impress. This was infrastructure the building's unconscious, the level that existed to support what happened above without being acknowledged.
They walked fifty feet. The corridor terminated at a door heavy, grey, the kind of door that seals rooms from sounds on both sides. A keycard reader glowed red beside it.
Henrik checked his phone. 1:57 a.m.
"Three minutes," he said.
They waited. The silence in the corridor was not the absence of sound but the presence of something thicker the particular acoustic quality of underground spaces, where every noise is swallowed by concrete and earth and the weight of a building pressing down from above. Maren could hear her own pulse.
She'd brought a USB drive 256-gigabyte, encrypted, purchased at the same CVS where she'd bought the burner phone. She held it in her left hand, feeling the plastic casing warm in her grip, and watched the keycard reader and counted seconds.
Henrik had his revoked card in his right hand. He held it the way a man holds a key to a room he's not sure he wants to enter between thumb and forefinger, tilted slightly, ready.
1:59.
The keycard reader flickered. Red to amber. The firmware update was beginning the system cycling through its weekly diagnostic, resetting the authorization database, temporarily suspending all access restrictions.
2:00.
Amber to green.
Henrik pressed the card to the reader. The lock disengaged with a sound like a held breath releasing.
They were in.
• •
The room on the other side of the door was the sleep lab's dark twin.
Twelve beds, arranged in the same configuration as the lab Maren worked in two floors above two rows of six, pale blue curtains, monitoring stations. But down here, nothing was operational. The beds were stripped. The curtains were drawn back and pinned. The polysomnography machines stood dark and silent, their screens black, their leads coiled and clipped to metal stands like sleeping snakes.
This was Phase 0's clinic. The room where fourteen people had been wired and dosed and exposed to the 6 Hz signal while their brains rewrote themselves in the dark.
Maren stood in the doorway and felt the room press against her like a hand on her chest. She had been here before. She didn't remember it that was the point but her body knew. Something in the way her shoulders tightened, the way her breath shortened, the way her eyes tracked immediately to the bed nearest the monitoring station Bed 3, on the left side and didn't let go. Her body remembered, even if her mind had been wiped.
"The server," Henrik said.
He was already moving toward the far wall. The segregated server was housed in a steel cabinet rack-mounted, physically isolated from Sollen's main network, with no wireless capability and no internet connection. Access was limited to a single terminal a desktop workstation on a small desk beside the cabinet, with a wired Ethernet connection and a login screen glowing faintly in the dark room.
Henrik powered the terminal. The screen blued. A login prompt appeared.
"Guest access won't work here," he said. "This terminal requires Level 4 credentials."
"But the firmware reset "
"Suspended the keycard restrictions. The terminal login is a separate system." He typed. His fingers were quick, precise the muscle memory of a data analyst, applied now to a task that could end his career and possibly his freedom. "But during the reset, the terminal also cycles through a diagnostic mode. There's a twelve-second window where the admin account is logged in automatically for system checks. If I can catch it "
He typed. Waited. The cursor blinked.
The screen changed. A system-diagnostic menu appeared white text on blue background, the ugly, functional interface of a maintenance mode that was never meant to be seen by anyone who wasn't a system administrator.
"I'm in," Henrik said. "But this access won't last. The diagnostic auto-terminates after the firmware update completes. We have " He checked the clock in the terminal's corner. " nine minutes and forty seconds."
Maren plugged in the USB drive. The terminal recognized it. She navigated the file system standard directory structure, well-organized, the kind of clean architecture that suggested a person who cared about order. She found the Phase 0 root directory.
It was larger than the fragment on Henrik's original USB drive. Much larger.
Fourteen subject files the ones she'd seen. But also: a template library containing 847 compressed memory files. A donor database with twelve entries. A signal-specification document with technical parameters for the 6 Hz protocol. A session log with dates, times, and subject IDs for every Phase 0 recording. And a folder labeled ADMIN containing what appeared to be emails, memos, and authorization documents.
Maren selected everything. She initiated the transfer.
The progress bar appeared. A thin line of blue inching across the screen with the particular cruelty of progress indicators visible but slow, informative but useless, showing you exactly how far you had to go and offering no way to get there faster.
Estimated time: 9 minutes.
They had nine minutes and forty seconds when she started. The transfer needed nine minutes. The margin was forty seconds.
Maren stared at the progress bar and felt time become a physical substance thick, viscous, pouring through a gap too narrow for the volume it carried.
3%... 7%... 11%...
Henrik stood beside her. He'd stopped talking. They both watched the bar as though watching it could make it move faster, as though attention were a form of propulsion.
15%... 22%...
The room around them was silent except for the hum of the server a low, steady vibration that Maren could feel in the desk, in the floor, in her teeth. The hum of sleeping machines. The hum of stored data. The sound, she thought, of all those recorded minds their memories harvested, compressed, filed waiting in silicon cabinets for someone to play them back.
The hum of sleeping minds, recorded and filed.
29%... 34%...
Maren looked at Bed 3. She didn't want to. Her eyes went there by themselves drawn by the gravity of a body's memory, the kind of memory that lives in muscle and bone and doesn't need a hippocampus. She'd been in that bed. She'd slept there for seventy-two hours while machines mapped the inside of her skull and someone probably Lena, sitting at this exact terminal watched her brain give up its contents like a library in a flood.
41%... 48%...
Henrik checked the time. Six minutes remaining. The transfer was at 48%. The math was tight. The math was, Maren thought, the kind of math that separated the possible from the theoretical.
53%... 59%...
The server hummed. The progress bar crept. Maren counted seconds a habit, an anchor, a way of staying in the present tense while the present tense tried to escape.
64%... 71%...
Four minutes remaining. The progress bar was accelerating smaller files transferring faster as the queue emptied and for the first time since they entered the room, Maren allowed herself to believe this might work.
77%... 82%...
Three minutes.
The progress bar reached 84%.
The lab door opened.