Pia staggered back until she leaned against the wall. She looked around the warm, humid room and saw it was cavernous, with a high black ceiling with exposed piping and duct work. The light coming from above was dim and seemed to be ultraviolet with a decidedly blue cast. Most of the light in the room came from the tank, which was brightly lit from above like a kind of huge aquarium. Pia noticed that there were more of these tanks, maybe as many as ten, but couldn’t see from where she was standing if they were all occupied. Most of them were.

There were people in the room, possibly lab workers or custodians, gowned with their faces covered with surgical masks. They stood about forty feet away, clustered around one of the aquarium-like tanks and were involved in a discussion. Pia couldn’t hear their voices amid the deep-throated hum and bubbling of powerful pumps that dominated the environment. There were three, no, four individuals: it was hard for Pia to tell. One looked over and spotted Pia. Pia made it a point to walk over to a nearby countertop, where there was a clipboard. She picked it up and pretended to study it.

“Oh my God, oh my God, oh my God . . .” Pia said to herself under her breath. What the hell was going on here? In her mind Berman’s comment only hours before kept replaying: “No one is being abused, trust me. Everything is totally voluntary.” Yeah, sure, thought Pia. “These half-dissected people volunteered to be human physiological experiments.” Pia’s mind went back to the poor dogs they had used in the lab in medical school. That was sickening enough, but this?

“Volunteers?” Pia whispered. “My ass!”

A tank with a woman inside was lined up facing the first one, so that the two victims could look at each other Pia thought morbidly. This female was submerged in liquid like the man in the first tank, and had obviously been partially dissected as well. Pia could also see a portion of her lungs expanding with each respiration. Pia shuddered. What she was seeing was far worse than her worst nightmare. These people were being kept in a semi-living state, artificially respired and monitored. But why?

The blood.