The lighthouse had been decommissioned for eleven years before Maren moved in. She'd bought it at a council auction for less than a car, which should have told her something. The previous owner — a retired coastguard named Pol — had left in February without forwarding details, without his tools, and without, as far as anyone could establish, his boat.
The lighthouse was near ruined. The water had a brown tinge from the taps, the walls were filthy and covered in mould, and parts of the upper stories had collapsed. But that didn't matter to Maren. She just needed somewhere remote, somewhere private, somewhere she could continue her experiments uninterrupted. The experiments that had her run out of every university and research team in the country. But she knew the results would be worth it. Knew it in her bones. It had to be worth it. The cost had to be worth it.
She'd brought what she needed in two trips: the personal effects in the first, the equipment in the second. The equipment took longer. Twelve sealed crates, temperature-controlled, transported in a refrigerated van she'd hired under a name she no longer used. The driver had asked no questions, which she'd paid for in advance. What was inside the crates was not, strictly speaking, illegal. Not yet. The legislation was eighteen months behind the science, and Maren had always worked fast.
It took a month to get the equipment working. The closest Maren got to personal hygiene was occasionally walking into the ocean, fully clothed, to rinse off and rid herself of the worst of the blood. But she was making progress, pushing boundaries, finding secrets that no god would want known. They called her crazy. “Manic Maren.” The petty small men on the Board had tried to take her research. The Ethics Committee, who had looked at her with such horror, would change their tune eventually.
The subject was number forty-one. She had stopped naming them after the third.
Number forty-one was responding better than any of its predecessors. The musculature was holding, the neural tissue was integrating rather than rejecting, and for the first time in eleven months of failure she was recording sustained voluntary movement. Small things: a curl of the fingers, a slow rotation of the wrist. But voluntary. She was certain of that. The cameras confirmed it. She watched the footage back each night on a laptop balanced on a crate, eating cold food from tins, and each time she felt something she recognised distantly as joy, though it had been so long since she'd felt it that she couldn't be entirely sure.
The microphones were always off when she watched. She couldn't abide the screaming.
She told herself this was a practical decision. Sound was unreliable data; it introduced variables. The vocalisations were autonomic, she'd written in her notes, reflexive outputs from a nervous system being asked to do things nervous systems had not previously been asked to do. They meant nothing. They were not, she was careful to specify, indicative of subjective experience. The Ethics Committee would have disagreed, but the Ethics Committee had not seen what she had seen, had not understood what was becoming possible. You did not halt a revolution because it was loud.