The dream was still fresh in her mind when Jane found the alternate entrance into the laboratory. The door was a bland tan colour and where the handle should have been was just a couple of caps, one above the other. It was a one-way door, meant to get people out. She bent down, and using the multi-tool from Michael's backpack, Jane cut the latch. The door opened a little, as though the room had been pressurized. There was just enough door to grasp with her fingertips and with a little work Jane managed to pry it open.
Automatic lights came on once she stepped inside illuminating a long corridor with another closed door, identical to the one she had just come through, at the opposite end. She had not felt it before, but now that she was in this corridor, with nowhere for the air to escape, there seemed to be a distinct increase in pressure, as though even the air was against her. Each step she took made it harder to breath, each step she took made the pressure greater, until it felt like the air had become an elastic, pulled taut, and with every step forward, she increased the chance of being thrown back. Jane used the multi-tool and cut the latch of the second door, and when she did, the door popped away from the frame leaving a gap that could fit her whole body. She grasped the door before it closed.
The room beyond was dark, Jane looked up and found every light broken. The light from the corridor quickly faded as the door swung shut. Jane set Michael's backpack down, blocking the door open. Then Jane took out her portable light and shone it around.
The room was a rectangle and had only three items inside. A dark window of glass that reflected Jane's light back at her. A metal table that was sideways, so the flat part of the table was pressed against the only other item in the room: a door. The table was missing one leg, and those that had stayed intact were bent and twisted. The door was welded shut, and the table was welded to the door frame.
Jane rolled her lips inward and pinched them between her teeth. She approached the door, but before she had came even three steps closer she already knew that with the tools she carried, there was no way she could cut through that much metal and open this door. Both the door and the window joined the room she was in with the laboratory.
Jane turned her attention to the window. Whatever was beyond was impossible to see. After some hesitation, Jane held up her light. She pressed it into the window and then moved her face so close her nose touched. The glass was cold. Her light created shadows in the room beyond. Jane could just make out equipment on the walls, there was a machine shaped like a long tube, and fat silicon insulated wires with fibreglass braid that hung down from the ceiling. Jane tried to see beyond into the blackness, willing her light to stretch, to push through the darkness, but it would not.
Jane walked backwards until her back was against the wall, then she slid down and slumped on the floor. She drew her legs up to her chest, wrapping her arms around them, and then let her face drop into the safe space she had created. What was she supposed to do? Jane suddenly felt very small, as though the planet had come alive and it loomed over her, looking down on her, making her see all too clearly how inadequate she was.
A scraping sound from the corridor made Jane startle and turn to the door. John was standing in the doorway. "I'm sorry." John stepped into the room. "I didn't want to startle you, well, anymore than I had to. Would you like some company?"
"Ah, I hope you don't mind dust and darkness."
"Feels like home." John said as he came and sat beside Jane. Neither of them said anything for a long while. John finally spoke after watching Jane change positions for the tenth time.
"I couldn't help noticing that you woke up unsettled."
"That's an understatement."
"The dream again?"
"Ah. I thought coming here would give me some answers." After a pause Jane added, "Do you know what kind of room this is?"
John looked around, "No," was the summary of his surveillance.
"I do."
John looked at her.
"This room is for an audience. Beyond that window is a theatre. A medical theatre."
John shook his head, communicating that this was beyond his experience.
"They use them to learn—a costly kind of learning. And I bet they were learning about a new species found on a new planet of gray."
Understanding crossed John face making his eyes widen.
Jane was staring at her hands. "There were three profiles listed in the other Jane's files, the files I retrieved from the pink box. Three profiles...two of them I knew—one of them I didn't." She looked up at John. "Do you know how many times you fail when all you've got is trial and error. We're just copying nature, and what happens to the ones nature doesn't select? They die. The difference is nature doesn't care, but I do." Jane looked at her hands. "Is it wrong to kill to create? This is what I was doing at the university." She closed her eyes. "So many secrets... my entire life a secret...this room is a secret." Jane fixed her eyes on John. "But they know. They know."
"Who knows?"
"Seehoiah." Jane whispered. "He knows what we did to him."
Several rooms away, Evan suddenly opened his eyes.
"She was very good at what she did—the other Jane. If you wanted a certain trait, she would find it. She could implement it. Walking through genes was like strolling through the forest for her. Just a little fun."
"Are you saying they captured Kata'ahohpi's daughter?"
"Ah. They took her apart, piece by piece. And then used her genetics to further humankind. An audience... just like on Earth. They watched as I worked. And when it all came down to it I was the one to blame. I was the one who made the cuts, they were only watching. It's very easy then, they keep all the science, and I get all the morals."
John looked back and forth from the dark window to Jane. "I don't understand, help me to understand."
"Culture. It's strange, just like depression, just like running. When taken to the extreme, the very thing that helps you survive is the thing that kills you. And I know, I know the answer—it's killing the individual, but the species survives. And I get it, I do. I finally understand." Jane clenched her hands into fists. "It's easy to write off the excess."
"The Stealer has you. Nothing blinds as subtly and swiftly as he does. He will take from you forever, everything you have, if you let him."
Jane nodded. "Sometimes he can make the truth so clear. I can see it. It's our emotions, emotion gets in the way. It makes us act in ways we wouldn't normally act. Emotion has changed us, emotion has evolved us and then left us there to figure life out on our own. How much easier life would be if we just didn't care, if we let the Stealer take it all away. I feel crazy; I see so many conflicting truths, sometimes I sit back and want to cry, and sometimes they make me want to laugh hysterically. Is this life? Is this what it is all about? Or is it just our eyes, just the fact that somehow we are designed to see conflict. If we don't see it, does it exist?"
"I don't know the answers to these questions. But I will tell you what I do know. We each own something wonderful, our lives are ours. Life, your life, is what you make it. It is the one thing you truly own, worth sharing with others."
"Is it?"
"To see the beauty in yours is to see the beauty in others. I suppose if you get down to the very bottom, ah—call it truth or call it wisdom, I guess our vision is all we have. Our own window to our lives and all the lives around us. But what you see is up to you, and it's how we interpret that creates the emotion. And not everyone sees the same way and this is wisdom. But there is also wisdom in changing when the need is there. We all have to evolve."
"Don't get left behind." Jane looked up at the window. "Don't get trapped."
John sighed. "I don't know. Talk is like sand. It's late; I'm tired."
"I'm ashamed of what is beyond that window." Jane pointed straight ahead. "Ashamed at what I've done and afraid of what I will do."
"Then don't go that way. The power is in you—you decide."
Jane pressed herself against the wall, leaning her head back. In her mind Jane could see the three DNA maps from the pink box. Two, she knew, one she didn't. And one of the ones she knew was hers. "I hadn't even been born yet."
"Been born yet? I don't understand."
"She had to use a base she knew. It's what I would have done, it's what I have done. Built into that were traits they wanted from the Aurelias, that strange fungus from Beckdas 5. She fattened it up with traits from the third: photocellulation and lab report after lab report on voluntary pressurization on the cellular level, it must have been Seehoiah. She used the base profile again, to fill in the gaps." Jane turned to John, hands in supplication, eyes in desperation. "The base profile was mine. It was mine. I hadn't even been born yet! I can't be her. If there is any kindness in the universe please... I can't be her. I'm not ambitious; I just like to work with others."
John was thoughtful for a moment, eyes fixed on Jane, he reached out to her and held her hands in his. "I don't understand this. I don't know what I can do to help you, but I will say this: Ambition is not wrong. It is only wrong when it is trampling others in its path; it can be used just as well to lift, to give life rather than destroy."
"My life is already destroyed. It is not mine. You say our lives are the one thing we truly own; I've never owned mine. My life belongs to the other Jane."
"That's not what I see."
Jane closed her eyes, and two fat tears escaped, boldly rolling down her cheeks. Jane took her hands from John's and wiped them away. Feeling as bold as those tears she asked, "What do you see?"
"Her life belongs to you. It's yours, you can make it whatever you want. All she did was go first."
Jane was speechless, astonished beyond anything she had ever felt.
There was a sound in the corridor. John drew up his legs and went immediately into a fighting stance. In his hands was a weapon he had concealed. It was pointed at the door that was still held open by Michael's backpack. Blocking the light that spilled into the dark, shadowy room was Evan.
John instinctively backed up, and Jane could tell by his movements and body language that he was looking for another way out.
"There is no other way out." Jane stated.
"There is always another way out. It just isn't pretty, or easy."
Evan kept his eyes on the window, and when he heard Jane's voice, the corners of his mouth turned up slightly, but the moment he heard John's he scowled and his body stiffened. He began to draw in a long deep breath and Jane knew what was coming. She darted to him, cupping her hands over his face, blocking out everything but her, and then she began to sing the song. Evan looked up into her eyes, and for a moment she saw confusion, then fear, and then another set of eyes opened. Jane sang one more line of the song and then she pulled Evan close, burying his face into her shoulder. "I'm here." she whispered, and she didn't say those words of comfort in Evan's language, she said it in English. In one rapid movement, Evan's body exhaled his tension, not unlike collapsing in relief.
Jane effortlessly picked him up. "The dream, always, no way in. Open the door, open the door." Jane glanced at John. A sadness had come over John, the depth of which Jane recognized. "There is always another way in." Jane adapted John's words, "It just isn't pretty, or easy. The song—the song I sang when I first met Seehoiah and they couldn't quite see who I was. They know it too. When I sing it, they come to listen. I can see it in Evan's eyes, they can see through his eyes."
"Then for once they can see something other than their own blindness."
"Maybe I've been trying to open the wrong door." Jane felt a deep uneasiness come over her, a distinct coldness, like the feeling you get when you realize you've made a big mistake. And the way John uncomfortably shifted told her he felt it too. Jane moved quickly through the door and John followed, taking Michael's backpack. The door slowly and silently swung shut, deepening the room back to blackness. Through the window, twenty five meters back, crouched into an upper corner blackness stirred. Seehoiah opened its eyes and for the first time in one hundred and fifty years, it saw beyond its own prison.