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Date Posted: 01:57:35 09/19/05 Mon
Author: sk
Author Host/IP: puddle46.drizzle.com / 216.162.217.46
Subject: Fresh
In reply to: sk 's message, "Bathtub Challenge II" on 01:53:12 09/19/05 Mon

I'm not sure this really qualifies as a Bathtub Challenge story, but here it is all the same.

"One, two, three, lift."

They had to work fast and get the body back into the solution before rigor set in -- they were using it as a decoy for an incineration later today so it needed it look fresh. Marburg leaned over the lip of the table and started making an incision. Choi had been recruited in '97, and the trackers they fitted cold ops with back then were brittle. They'd lost a couple people to internal injuries before they figured out how to encapsulate them, but that made it a slippery business to extract it without muscle damage, so even after they developed better units they just left the old ones in place unless they had to sanitize someone.

It wouldn't do for this carefully planned corpse to have souvenirs of his life as a covert anti-terrorist floating around in his chest. He had to look like a bystander, not a player, someone who happened along to use the 24-hour cash machine and got caught in the flashover from the vault fire. A career's worth of tracking hardware, not even a handful of silicon and metal, but a red flag the size of a buffalo to anyone who knew what they were seeing -- Marburg had to fish all of them out and then mend the incisions so Choi became what he'd been, before Section and its need to keep all its operatives on invisible leashes.

"Three more to go" -- there was that patch job they'd all gotten after the war with Red Cell. With so many casualties, Section was extra-paranoid about the resources they had left. New hardware all round that time.

The preservative made the skin slippery, and so Marburg had to tie the arm off across the table to get to the ribs under there. At least it's an improvement over the old formaldehyde -- that scent was so powerful you couldn't really get much postmortem use out of a corpse unless the profile had a way to neutralize the stench. This new stuff was eucalyptus-based, like all those fancy "natural" colognes. It had been puddling-up on the protective film over the eyelids, and when they turned the body that dribbled down the face and into the gutter on the table.

There are times when you need a dead body but you don't even want to use an abeyance op, and so long ago Section began experimenting with their own dead -- the tech staff and the few cold ops who still had an intact corpse to work with. "Death by natural causes" might be the exception here, but it did happen, and Section didn't like wasting resources, so they started the program. Marburg had been an embalmer as well as a necrophiliac, and when he came on the team they really started to make some progress. The goal was to suspend decay without allowing rigor to take hold, keep the lungs and other organs fresh without replacing natural fluids, to confound the pathologists hoping to establish time of death. It was a shame, really, that they were using Choi in a fire -- dead over three years and you'd swear it was just a couple of hours ago. He was an excellent specimen and Marburg would be sorry to lose him. He had actually been in abeyance -- one of the first from that set of poison trials and a success all round, in death and in preservation.

"That's the last one -- we'll just close up and he's back in the tank till they want him." The storage tubs had plexiglass lids to cut down on evaporation and keep the fluid from sloshing out as they were wheeled down the corridors from the exam rooms to holding. Just deep enough to keep the body submerged, they looked like those cheap hotel bathtubs -- too shallow for a really good soak, but awkward to step out of after a shower. Marberg stripped off his gloves as the tech came in to get Choi, and stepped over to the comm box to let them know he was finished. There was flu going around some of the data analysis staff -- there'd be more work to do soon.

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