Dead Hunt

CHAPTER 3 – Beinn Breagh

“Good morning, Robin,” Professor Patrick Heslin’s voice echoed in his empty laboratory.

“Good morning, father,” a computerized voice responded.

Heslin used his connections and his check book to hire the best engineers and developers to build him the Robin 1 Super Computer. a computer not only capable of helping him with his research, but one that spoke to him. It wasn’t just a set of canned responses like most computers; this one had a brain. Officially, it was called artificial intelligence but the truth was, the Robin 1 Computer was so advanced it appeared to be able to ‘think’ far outside its primary programming.

Using videotapes from his daughter’s twelfth birthday party, the last real birthday his daughter Robin ever had, the engineers and developers not only gave the AI brain Robin’s sweet and innocent voice but her angelic face as well, allowing the computer to simulate various facial expressions as she talked. Robin’s forever twelve year-old face filled the computer monitor as Heslin sipped his morning coffee.

“I checked the weather forecast, father. It is going to be very hot today. Shall I turn on the air conditioner?”

Robin controlled nearly every aspect of Heslin's lab, from the satellite internet uplink to the electrical and security systems, including the locks on the doors. Cameras placed throughout the entire building allowed Robin to monitor everything. Speakers and microphones allowed Heslin to talk to Robin from any room.

“Robin, you know I prefer fresh air from open windows,” Heslin responded. “What are the probability results of formula 25-41?”

“Did you forget, father?” Robin asked.

“Did I forget what?” Heslin inquired with a hint of a smile breaking across his lips.

“Did you forget what today is?” Robin replied.

Heslin smiled with a wide grin as he looked into Robin's face on the computer.

“Of course not,” he said lovingly. “How could I ever forget such an important day? Happy Birthday, Robin!”

Robin’s face smiled. Heslin’s mind drifted back to his daughter’s twelfth birthday--it was a beautiful, sunny day and their back yard was filled with balloons, games, pony rides and too many screaming children.

Heslin was known to be habitually late for just about everything. Important meetings, dinner engagements, Heslin was even late for his own wedding. His friends jokingly told him he would be late for his own funeral. But, when it came to Robin, Heslin was never late. He never missed a recital, a school play or a single birthday. For her, Heslin was always on time, always there for her.

Heslin, a man years ahead of his peers in the field of genetic research, now resembled a pitiful man talking to a computerized version of his daughter. To an outsider, it would look as though the award-winning scientist had finally lost his marbles, but to those who knew him well, it was exactly what Heslin needed to keep his sanity. He needed his Robin. Without her, Heslin simply could not go on.

It was only three short years ago that Heslin was working in his lab at the research center when he received an urgent phone call. At first Heslin understood the words, but as the news grabbed hold, the words became fuzzy, unclear. Heslin's hand released the grip on the phone, and it bounced on the desk with a loud bang. Heslin leaned back in his chair, staring straight ahead. His friend and colleague, Professor Lindsay Paulson, ran to Heslin to see what was the matter as the voice on the telephone handset repeated, “Hello? Hello? Professor Heslin, are you still there?”

“Patrick, are you ok?” Lindsay asked. Heslin did not reply.

“Hello?” The voice on the phone insisted, “Sir, are you still there?”

“Hello?” Lindsay questioned as she put the phone to her ear, “What’s going on?”

“Is Professor Heslin all right?”

“Not exactly,” she retorted. “What did you say to him? Who is this?”

“This is Sgt. O’Brian. Are you a family member of…”

“This is Lindsay Paulson,” she announced, “I work with Patrick. He is a friend of mine. What happened? What did you say to him?”

Tears raced down her face as the sergeant explained that a drunk driver slammed into Mrs. Heslin’s car, killing her and sweet little Robin.

“Oh my god,… No!” she sobbed. Lindsay looked at Heslin, “Patrick, I am so sorry.”

Heslin did not answer. He just sat there, staring ahead, a blank look on his face.

As the news of the tragedy spread, Heslin’s lab quickly filled with colleagues and lab assistants to help comfort the grieving man. Eventually the lab cleared, leaving Heslin alone with his sorrow. Lindsay stayed behind to further comfort him and made the obligatory offer:

“If there’s anything I can do, Patrick, you just let me know.”

Heslin lifted his eyes to Lindsay and uttered two simple words.

“There is.”

He scribbled on a piece of paper and handed it to Lindsay. Her eyes opened wide in disbelief.

“No, Patrick, do not ask me to do such a thing. You’re not thinking straight right now…”

“Do it!” Heslin’s sharp words cut her off. “I don’t care what it takes. I don’t care what it costs, just do it.”

This time it was Lindsay who stared blankly ahead.

Now, three years later, Heslin paced impatiently in front of his microscope, deep in concentrated thought. A thick, grey stubble on his face showed a tell-tale sign that he hadn't shaved in days. His wild, Einstein-like hairdo meant he hadn't showered either. Heslin often worked to the point of exhaustion, slept for three or four hours, and then started another marathon session that lasted for days at a time. Heslin glanced at his stop watch as he hovered over his microscope. Impatiently, he switched between staring into the eye piece and looking at the watch. The seconds slowly ticked by.

Heslin was an old-school scientist and preferred microscopes and test tubes instead of a completely computerized laboratory. Although everything under the microscope was hooked into the Robin 1 mainframe, Heslin still preferred to see it with his own eyes. Beneath the all-seeing eye of his microscope, a culture dish held reddish-gray cells that moved in a jerky motion when Heslin’s genetically modified, translucent green liquid touched the cells. Not really a touch, more like a gentle caress. The reddish-gray cells were human cells, long since dead, but now sparked of new life when Heslin’s translucent green cells caressed them. Life that never broke the two minute window. Heslin dared another look at his watch as Robin’s voice broke the deafening silence.

“Formula 25-41 approaching the two minute mark in 10, 9, 8, 7, 6…”

Robin stopped. Heslin’s heart sank as he closed his eyes knowingly and exhaled deeply. He didn’t have to look into the microscope to know the cells had stopped moving. He knew exactly what failure looked like. He had seen it too many times before, more times than he cared to count. He opened his tired eyes as Robin started to announce the results.

“Test complete. Sequence has failed. Formula 25-41 not capable of supporting…”

“I know.” Heslin blurted angrily, cutting her off. “I bloody well know. God dammit! Five more seconds! Is that too much to ask?”

Heslin's question echoed in the empty lab. The last of Heslin’s assistants had quit weeks ago when Heslin could no longer afford to pay them. Working Heslin’s marathon hours was practically suicide, but without the lure of money, his assistants quickly abandoned the maniacal professor.

Living off cold coffee and a few bites of the occasional sandwich, Heslin continued his research, oblivious to the world around him and the hunger pains that often growled in his empty belly. His appetite was for something bigger, something monumental and more important than mere food. He was so close to succeeding that he could practically smell victory. Despite his countless defeats, he never flinched in his pursuit. He was determined to prove his theories right… and his colleagues wrong.

The scientific community laughed at him when he first presented his proposal. He was convinced that dead tissue and dead blood cells could be regenerated back into living organisms. He proposed that the dead brain cells of Alzheimer’s patients could be brought back to life. He even dared to say that loved ones lost in terrible accidents could be brought back to life.

Knowing of his recent loss, his peers thought his intentions were “misplaced”. Others had simply labeled his ideas as Frankenstein-ish, and although none would admit it, many feared that if he did succeed, the end result would not be that much different than the monster in Mary Shelley's famed novel.

Rage filled Heslin's already exhausted mind as the sound of mocking from his peers crept back into his memory. He grabbed a beaker of formula 25-41 and fired it across the room, smashing it against the wall, just inches above the opened window. The loud crash of shattering glass snapped him out of his rage. Heslin laughed in spite of himself.

"Well now, Paddy me boy, that was rather dumb now, wasn't it? Now you have a mess to clean up.”

“Father, is everything all right?” Robin asked.

“Not now, Robin,” Heslin answered abruptly, looking at his watch.

6:10 a.m.

Quietly, Heslin picked up a small garbage pail and began to pick up the broken shards of glass as the thick, translucent green liquid succumbed to gravity and slowly oozed down the wall. His mind lost on his recent failure, Heslin grabbed a piece of broken glass the wrong way, and as he clenched his fingers a sharp pain jolted him back to the task at hand. Blood poured from the deep cut. Instinctively, he put the cut to his mouth. He knew it didn't really help the pain, He knew that it was just a psychological link to when his mother had the power to heal hurt with a loving kiss, but he sucked the cut anyway.

Overcome with disappointment, yet clinging on to a fragile hope, he peered inside the microscope’s eyepiece once more. Nothing moved. He adjusted the magnification as a small trail of blood trickled down his badly cut hand. A solitary drop of blood hung suspended from his hand, daring to fall. In less than a heartbeat the tiny drop of blood began its descent. It splashed in the culture dish, hardly noticeable to the naked eye, but under the magnification of his powerful microscope, the tiny splash was huge. It looked like a giant wave of red reaching up to grab him. It startled Heslin as if someone had jumped out of a dark corner. He quickly collected his thoughts and looked at his hand. Blood was streaking down his forearm.

“I have to stitch this,” Heslin said to himself as he headed out of the laboratory.

Robin spoke up. “Father…”

“Not now, Robin.”

“Father…” she repeated.

“Go to sleep now, Robin,” Heslin commanded, cutting her off.

The computer monitors instantly went black.

The command, “Go to sleep now, Robin” was a built-in fail-safe known only to Heslin and the programmers of the Robin 1 Mainframe. Robin prevented everyone, Heslin included, from accessing her AI brain, so no one could tamper with her programming. The command was created so Robin could be shut down to allow for routine maintenance of the system. At the end of a one hour period, a second fail-safe timer automatically rebooted the main system, turning Robin back on.

Heslin hissed in pain as he fumbled about trying to stitch the deep gash on his finger. The folks down the mountain may have called him “Doc”, but his feeble attempt to stitch his wound proved he knew very little about practical procedures. He was a scientist after all, not a medical doctor.

Heslin thought about the good folks in the Valley, hard working people who welcomed the scientist with open arms and, as he requested, left him alone so as not to disturb his research. Once a month they ran supplies up to him, mostly by 4-wheel drive, but during the harsh winter months, a snowmobile was the only thing that could make the trip up the secluded mountain road.

Perched on the mountainside, he sometimes felt like his idol, the great inventor, Alexander Graham Bell. Bell had settled in the nearby village of Baddeck, not more than an hour away. Heslin proudly hung a picture of Bell above his mantle. Below it, a plaque displayed Bell's immortal words:

“I have traveled the globe. I have seen the Canadian and American Rockies, the Andes and the Alps and the highlands of Scotland, but for simple beauty, Cape Breton outrivals them all.”

Sitting on the mantle above a giant fireplace was an old fiddle that had belonged to Heslin's father. Occasionally, when he needed to clear his thoughts, Heslin would play the old fiddle, but that was a rare occasion as he was usually too busy working in his lab, trying to perfect his formula. The rest of the pictures in the massive lounge area were all of Robin. There was one old wedding photograph with a much younger Heslin and his pretty bride but the other pictures were of his sweet, little Robin.

Heslin hoped to acquire some of Bell's inspiration by building his lab on his own Beinn Breagh, which was Gaelic for Beautiful Mountain. Gaelic was a dying language on the island, save for a few small communities buried deep in the highlands. Heslin understood some of the Scot Gaelic words and he marveled at the fact that Scottish musicians often traveled here to learn the Cape Breton style of fiddling, which remained practically unchanged by time. Cape Breton fiddling was said to be closer to original Scottish fiddle music than in Scotland itself.

On a quite summer night, Heslin could sometimes hear the faint sounds of a fiddle, carried by the warm summer breeze. Other times, he heard the majestic drone of highland pipes. Both were music to his ears and a welcomed distraction.

Heslin’s lab, controlled by Robin and filled with modern equipment, was a stark contradiction to Bell’s modest laboratory, forever captured in time at the Bell Museum located in the village of Baddeck, a place Heslin occasionally visited for inspiration. Unlike Bell’s modest lab, Heslin's was a sterile, clinical white, lit by huge florescent lights and flickering computer monitors. He had everything a modern laboratory needed. Well, almost everything.

At first, just like all his junior lab assistants when they first arrived on the mountain, he too had been taken aback by the sheer size and beauty of the old log cabin, standing proud on the mountain with a million dollar view. The spruce and pine trees seemed to hug the giant log building as if the lodge was meant to be there. It was beautiful and breathtaking. And, just like his assistants, he quickly grew to hate the fact that this kind of beauty and seclusion had a very steep price: modern conveniences, or lack thereof.

No cable, no phone, and no running water except for a small electric pump that drew water from an outdoor well, and worst of all, no proper toilet. An outhouse stood ten yards from the back door and proved to have two major flaws: In the summertime it smelled really, really bad. And it was freezing cold in the winter.

When the construction of the lab was completed on the main lodge, Heslin had planned on installing proper facilities, but with the lab ready, every day a new idea or a new experiment took hold, it pushed further renovations aside.

Now, three years later, Heslin still used an old diesel generator as backup power for the lodge. The main power was supplied by massive solar panels. A temporary hot water shower was installed in one of the upstairs rooms by running rows of copper pipe across the roof. In the summer time, the sun baking the pipes on the black shingles provided them with all the hot water anyone could ever need. In the wintertime the pipes had to be drained and everyone settled for sponge baths.

Solar panels supplied enough electricity to keep the lab warm during the winter, but Heslin had to manually pump water from the deep well because the sub zero temperatures of a typical Margaree winter froze the waterline; and every winter he still had to freeze his ass off in the outhouse. Heslin hated that outhouse. He hated it so much that some days he prayed for constipation just so he would not have to go to that disgusting place. But, his steady diet of cold coffee made sure that prayer was never answered.

With his hand freshly wrapped in too much gauze, Heslin headed to the lounge area and poured himself a scotch. He swallowed it in one drink then refilled his glass. Distraught with failure, he flopped in the big Lazy Boy chair and stared at the picture of Bell hanging above the fireplace. He took another drink, stood up, and walked towards the picture.

"Well Alex," he said to the picture, "now what do I do?"

Heslin stared at the picture as if he was waiting for an answer. The picture said nothing. Heslin gently picked up his father's old fiddle and tucked it under his whiskered chin. He fumbled with the bow, the gauze on his hand making it difficult to tighten the bow or properly hold it. With a soft, quiet breath, Heslin gently pulled the bow across the strings.

The once quiet room was now filled with sound as Heslin played the old Scottish tune, “Neil Gow's Lament for the Loss of His Second Wife”.

Playing the tune always seemed to clear Heslin’s cluttered mind and soothe his feelings of failure. As he played, Bell’s picture seemed to take on a new look.

The picture itself never changed, only Heslin's image of it. In his mind, Bell seemed to smile in appreciation.

Birds and crickets seemed to appreciate it as well, for their singing became louder, drifting in the open windows in harmony to Heslin’s playing. The sound of the little creek that flowed just a few feet from Heslin’s lab before traveling down to the valley also seemed to bubble a little bit louder. A symphony of nature joined the gentle sounds of Heslin’s fiddle.

As he played, Heslin's mind drifted back to a time three years earlier when he’d sat looking across a large, oak conference table with the twelve men he had invited to hear his proposal. They were all wearing tailored suits and expensive watches, obvious signs of wealth. Each knew of Heslin’s recent loss, but when a Nobel Prize winning scientist requested a meeting, especially one whose last proposal had generated a huge return on investment, only a fool would not attend that meeting.

It was at this meeting they quickly learned his new proposal was far beyond anything they could have ever imagined.