Chapter 7: A Scientist Examines His Own Autopsy

The authorization came through at 6:14 AM, stamped with Hill's personal clearance code and routed through three redundant approval channels, which told Viktor that someone had argued about it before the clearance was granted. He read the access memo twice, noted the seventeen operational parameters listed in the attached protocol sheet, and spent the next eleven minutes writing responses to four of them in the margins before the escort arrived.

The laboratory was on sub-level five. He had expected worse.

It was a clean space, recently retrofitted in the way that SHIELD retrofitted things when it was trying to demonstrate good faith with one hand and retain full operational control with the other — new equipment, good ventilation, UV-filtered overhead lighting that someone had actually calibrated rather than simply installed. The workbenches were stainless steel. The secondary containment panels along the east wall were industrial polycarbonate, rated for what the spec sheet beside the door called "enhanced-individual force events," which was a phrase that told him something about what the room had been used for before him. There was a secondary drain in the floor. There was a sharps disposal unit, wall-mounted and labeled in four languages. There was, on the westernmost workbench, a centrifuge he recognized as a higher model than anything he'd had access to in Budapest.