‘Is there no way to accelerate the procedure? As you can see, Mr Ma is very … eager … to get inside Aboubakar’s head.’
‘I’m t-, terribly sorry sir,’ she stammered, quickly regaining her confidence as she continued, ‘but we’re talking about something that’s currently beyond the limits of what we can do. We’re, we’re trying to push through these boundaries as fast as we can … but there are still boundaries.’
Mr Ma scowled, the valleys and crags of his wrinkled face twisted with naked disgust and unbridled anger, but he turned around to continue watching the procedure, and retracted his withering barbs from Ms Fang’s eyes.
‘You may return to your work now, Ms Fang,’ Mr Wang said coolly. ‘Thank you, we will speak again later.’
‘Thank you, sir,’ she replied, a chilly sweat icing the small of her back, and she then turned on her heels and scurried off.
Mr Wang turned to Mr Ma and spoke to him in an uncharacteristically candid tone.
‘I’m sorry that you are disappointed sir, but as Ms Fang said, we must exercise patience here. Her team do seem to be doing their utmost to achieve a breakthrough. Putting more pressure on them isn’t likely to help, if I may say so … it might have the opposite effect, in fact.’
Mr Ma tilted his head ever so slightly toward Mr Wang and fired a fierce glare out of the corner of his eye. However, he replied to his bodyguard in calm, undramatic gestures.
‘Thank you sir,’ Mr Wang said, ‘I know you do appreciate my advice, blunt as it is sometimes. Tell me, are you absolutely sure that nobody else on the board knows about the actual details of this experiment?’
Mr Ma nodded and signed a few sentences.
‘Ah, excellent strategy, sir. It is good that the other board members – especially Deveraux and his camp – are kept in the dark about the full extent of the power that lies in this technology. And we will make sure that we keep things deliberately vague at the upcoming meeting at Sigurd’s headquarters. You have done well to fool them into thinking that it is a mere tool for memory and brain-probing analysis. There is, of course, a great deal of power in that itself – in being able to access all of the information that is stored in the minds of these monsters – but nowhere near the level of power contained in being able to control them. And then, of course, to potentially find and control what has been lost and hidden for so long … such a thing is beyond imagining. But it seems that the unimaginable may become a real possibility with this technology.’
Mr Ma simply nodded in response to this.
‘Excellent, sir. Once you have this card in your pocket, it will assure you of absolute power. However, we must make a contingency plan in case anything happens to you. Forgive me for saying this sir, but you know how it is, with your age and your ailing health. You do have the best physicians in the world working for you, and the regular transfusions of teenagers’ blood, that much is true, but I see you every day, all day, and some days it … it breaks my heart, sir, to see how fragile your health can be.’
Mr Ma remained dispassionate, and he replied to this comment by gesticulating slowly.
‘As you wish sir. I will prepare a secret brief for your grandson, explaining everything about this facility, and what the ultimate goal is with implanting this chip into the brain of a beastwalker. If anything should happen to you, the brief will go straight to him. He alone will inherit the power you are going to wield through this new technology, and he will become the new CEO of the Huntsmen Corporation when your time is over.’
Mr Ma nodded, and the faintest shadow of a smile creased the corners of his mouth. He looked up at Mr Wang, and his eyes were a lot warmer than they usually were. He gave him a gentle nod, and then resumed watching the surgical procedure below.
***
Aboubakar opened his eyes, and rising tide of potent nausea caused him to sit up immediately. With his stomach feeling as if it had been wrung into a tight knot, he leaned over the side of the bed, expecting a torrent of vomit to cascade out of his mouth. For a few moments it did feel as if it were creeping up the back of his throat, like magma tentatively probing a fissure in the earth, but then the urge subsided. His head throbbed with a dull, constant pain, and his mouth was dry as any midday desert, but aside from that he didn’t feel too terrible; as with most drugs and poisons, his beastwalker blood was able to deal with the anaesthetic in a far more efficient and speedy manner than that of a mortal.
He was back in the white room. Everything white, as if someone had left a window open during a blizzard the night before. He had to squint and half close his eyes against the dazzling brightness of his surroundings; the intensity was too much for his dilated pupils to handle.
‘Hello?’
A tentative croak, dragged from his parched mouth with the reluctance of two rough planks pressed together and scraped in opposing directions. He waited for a good few seconds after the word had evaporated into the air before trying again.
‘Someone? I need water! Please!’
Even speaking these few words seemed to hurt; it felt as if the words were strands of barbed wire hauled up from his stomach and pulled through his throat.
Nobody responded. From the top corner of the room the unblinking convex eye of a security camera stared down at him. A tiny red light was glowing on the side of the
