Dave frowned. "I'm not seeing anything."
"Look! It's starting to vibrate. It's definitely slower."
As the pair watched the toe slowly slide back to the foot and reattached itself.
"Let's go back to less than five centimetres," suggested Dave. "I just want to check that the slowdown of the reattachment is because of distance and not because Charlie is losing the ability to heal himself.
Josh nodded and quickly followed Dave's request. The severed toe promptly reattached itself in a much faster way than with their ten centimetre test.
"Now try about fifteen centimetres," said Dave.
The steps might appear tedious but Dave was just being meticulous. Josh chopped off Charlie's little toe and regathered it with the axe. Together, Josh and Dave watched the toe fade into a misty cloud and reform on the severed location making Charlie's foot whole again.
"Somewhere between ten and fifteen centimetres the process goes from using attraction to using teleportation."
"Teleportation? I don't think this is how it worked in the movies."
"This is the problem with seeing new phenomena, it can be a challenge to find ways to describe it that makes sense. 'Teleportation' is a word that's clearly not up to the task as the process implies that there is machinery involved - that is the teleporter. I go with that for now but I'll probably change it latter."
"I'm fucking stunned by this."
Dave looked thoughtful. "Me too. But reality is reality. We just have to accept it. Give me a moment to write this up. At this early stage, we shouldn't confuse speculation with observation."
Josh looked up at Dave with admiration - Dave was clearly more calm about this in a way that Josh didn't feel at all. Had Josh been alone with this knowledge he might have simply screamed uncontrollably. How Dave was maintaining his grip on reality was impressive.
While Dave scratched down some observations in his notepad, Josh looked back at Charlie. Charlie bared his teeth at Josh. Josh admired Charlie's seemingly blissful unawareness of the revelations that his body was offering up. Josh pressed the axe head against Charlie's chest causing Charlie to hiss slightly.
"Fuck," said Josh to himself.
* * *
A few days had passed, during which Dave and Josh had made a plodding progress. Improvements were made to the new defensive walls to make it harder for walkers to get through them. Charlie suffered through various experiments involving losing his feet and legs. Dave had written observation after observation inside his notepads. And every night a talker would visit but Dave and Josh had gotten so used to it that they just sleep through the nights with increasing calmness. The witnesses of madness had become mad themselves.
It was lunchtime and the pair were on the roof of the supermarket eating some warmed up soup.
"This never gets old," said Josh grimacing at his can of soup.
"Consider ourself lucky to have so much food," said Dave. "Water on the other hand is a bit of an issue."
"Don't worry about it. I'm getting the hang of fetching water from the river, filtering it and boiling it. In a few days we can stop using bottled water completely and save it for emergencies."
"You've really settled into this really well."
"That pretty much describes how I worked before this happened. I'm not the impressive one. Look at you and your experiments. I can't understand how my head hasn't exploded by all that we've learnt recently. I'm perplexed how we've remained approximately sane."
Dave looked down at Charlie. "It's all thanks to Charlie."
Josh also looked at Charlie. "Do you think he minds what we're doing to him?"
"Honestly, I have no idea. I can observe his behaviour, but I can't determine what his inner motivations might be."
"Does he have a soul?" as Josh looking thoughtful.
"This went really philosophical fast."
"I'm not a religious person but there's something about being alive. Besides being able to move about and do the basics, people have something extra. I call that extra piece the 'soul' for want of a better term."
Dave rubbed his chin with the back of his hand. "I once thought in a simple manner. If you were alive then you moved. If you stopped moving then you were dead. But Charlie can clearly move and yet there's something missing. Or maybe we just can't see it. Because we can't communicate with the walkers we come away thinking that they lack a soul."
"So what about animals? They live. They move. They don't talk and yet the animals that I've met give me the feeling that they have a soul. How can you not play with a dog and not see the soul within?"
Dave look straight at Josh. "I'm an atheist and I've always being bugged by the concept of the 'soul'. It always seemed like a magical concept that was outside the description of science. To me, it always seems that people use the soul as a shortcut. If science can't describe something then that's where the soul exists."
"So what the formula for consciousness?" asked Josh.
"What?" said a startled Dave.
"Science uses mathematical formulas to describe things that it understands, so what's the formula for consciousness or intelligence or creativity? I'd say that we are both conscious but yet there is no science that actually describes what that is."
Dave understood where Josh was coming from. "Science is currently incomplete, so there are things that we've not yet successfully explained. I find it odd that whenever a scientist claims to not know everything that there's someone who is happy to come forward and say that they do. And nearly always these people can't provide an explanation of their own, and instead defer to some invisible god."
A loud metallic crashing noise reached Dave and Josh who froze in place. In a moment they crouched down and snuck over to the table near the barbecue and put their spoons and now empty soup cans there. Josh pointed to the south
