Abandoned World: The Awakening

— I'll be right there. — He summarized and hung up the phone, then turned to Natalie. — We're gonna have to go. We have a suicide in the lab.

***

Natalie had never seen dead people before, and she couldn't even imagine the picture she had seen in the lab. It was next door to the room where, a few hours ago, she and Morgan had been studying the blueprints for the new fusion plant. And she didn't even want to think that maybe this death was already there. It was so close.

Reagan Shadow lay with his head on the table covered in blood. It was on the table, on his blond hair, on his lab coat, on the floor, and everywhere around him. It looked like he was literally throwing the blood around, just to get more of it on everything around him. And it was also strange that nothing was actually broken or scattered. Considering that there was obviously a hell of a thing going on here, the neatness with which everything was standing around was even more striking.

And the first thought was, of course, that it wasn't suicide. Why would they even think that? Could he have tortured himself like that, literally dancing on the spot, spurting blood from his veins and arteries? And yet at the same time trying not to touch anything on the racks, shelves, the row of magazines on the table — not to touch anything at all, but only to splatter his blood on it.

— Suicide, then? — Morgan asked restrainedly, but still surprised at that.

Tanner Knight, Deputy Chief of the Security Section, was already here, of course. Small, slightly overweight, balding, and with a small beard, he was always in the places where people-to- people relations came to the brink or went beyond it. He liked to be the one who was in control of the situation and knew its background. And if he wasn't here now, it would raise questions, not the other way around.

— If it wasn't a suicide, Mr. NPP Chief, we wouldn't have called you here. — replied Tanner. — First, I want you to watch the surveillance footage, and then I'll ask my questions.

He walked over to the labeled SB (this section, more than any other, liked to label all their property, as if that made it work better or only when they used it themselves) laptop and, pressing a few keys, started the video.

At first, everything looked pretty decent. The camera recorded Reagan shifting something in a folder with papers, making some notes, then closing the folder, taking out a new one and doing the same thing with it, and so on for five minutes. It seemed as if Tanner wanted to show us enough time on purpose to make it clear that nothing special was going on, because at one point Reagan grabbed the pen he was writing with in his hand like a knife and stuck it in his left eye, and then pulled it out and tried to stick the same pen in his left hand, but it shattered.

— What the hell! — Natalie shouted, clamping her hands over her mouth. It seemed to her that she wasn't looking at the past, but at the present, which was happening right this minute, and the more realistic she thought about it was that the corpse itself continued to lie quietly on the table.

While the infernal dance continued on the laptop screen.

Reagan stood up from the table and looked around, apparently searching for some new object. As he did so, his injured eye was pouring a stream of blood all around him. Reagan got up from the table and walked over to the refrigerator, a small square refrigerator that usually held all sorts of experimental materials, and very rarely used in experiments. Everything was usually checked on paper to the last minute, and only after the calculations were approved could an experiment be performed-not for speed, but to save money.

From this refrigerator Reagan took out a thin strip of metal, probably a scalpel, and sat back in his seat and began to cut his flesh on the left side: fingers, palm, base of the hand. And so easily and smoothly, as if he were moving his hand through the air. After half a minute, when he had drained enough blood, he cut the vein on the left side of his neck as carefully as before, and laid his head on the table.

Tanner pressed the stop key and turned to Morgan:

— Have you noticed anything unusual, Mr. Blackwood?

— Unusual?! — Natalie was outraged. — I wouldn't have believed you could do that to yourself if you hadn't seen it with your own eyes!

— Ms. Jackson, I know how important you've recently become, but still, you're not the one I'm asking now.

— Natalie, it's all behind us now. — Morgan hugged Natalie lightly and half turned to the Deputy Chief of Security and replied. — You mean the logic in his actions? There's definitely some. I don't even doubt it. It's not understood, but it's there… I haven't noticed any tendency to self- mutilation, much less suicide. But the pattern of his actions that I've seen now are absolutely

consistent with his normal behavior. The actions themselves are inadequate, and the manner in which he does them is perfectly normal. How long ago was this?