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THE NEXT DAY, she still hadn't gotten a chance to speak to Jenner directly about anything but she didn't mind. She had spent the rest of the night before taking anything that reminded her of her family and getting rid of it. It was almost like her own kind of closure, a funeral for the people whom she knew were certainly dead.
She stood near the back of the big room as Jenner ordered the screens on, displaying a very familiar experiment on the monitor. Her morale had certainly gone up with a shower and some fresh clothes, but trying to forget her abandoned task of searching for her family was difficult.
"Is that a brain?" Carl asked curiously as he looked up to the outline of a person's head in wonder.
"An extraordinary one," Jenner confirmed with the ghost of a smile, his expression quickly turning back to stone when he turned back to the screen. "Not that it matters in the end. Take us in for E.I.V." He seemed to have really taken what Arden had told him before she left seriously. His persona now seemed much more hopeless than hers had ever been while dwelling in the place.
"Enhanced internal view," VI spoke, zooming in on the brain part of the live diagram of sorts. Synapses were shown close up, sparks of light jolting through them normally.
"What are those lights?" Shane asked as he stared at what was happening.
"It's a person's life - experiences, memories. It's everything," he described, gesturing into the air with his hands. Arden finally felt like she was in familiar territory; this was the kind of thing she had always worked with, what she had been passionate enough about to come work at the CDC to begin with. "Somewhere in all of that organic wiring, all those ripples of light, is you - the thing that makes you unique. And human."
"You don't make sense, ever?" Daryl chimed in with a puzzled look on his face, completely confused as to what Jenner was getting at.
"Those are synapses," he said, pointing to the display. "Electric impulses in the brain that carry all the messages. They determine everything a person says, does, or thinks from the moment of birth, to the moment of death."
"Death? That's what this is? A vigil?" Rick questioned, walking closer to the screen skeptically. Arden herself would have been confused about the whole point of what they were seeing had she not been there when it had all happened.
"Yes. Or rather the playback of the vigil," Jenner affirmed with a small nod.
"This person died?" Andrea asked, her face now painted with a solemn, saddened look. "Who?"
"Test subject nineteen," he answered, not daring to take his eyes off of the screen that was replaying the last moments of her life.
"Test subject? Really?" Arden spoke up, unmoving from her position near the ramp. Jenner cast a dark look back at her, but she still stood firm, knowing that he was only reducing her to an experiment, a simple number. The only reason that she had stayed so long was because of a promise that she had made to the dying woman which in turn had given her some hope. One that she believed didn't help in the end regardless, but she had made good on most of it. Or at least that's what she liked to think.
