"Do you want help carrying that, miss?"

Morgan lurches around in a panic. The speaker behind her is a young man in a white coat, fair-haired and soft-voiced. He is just about the least threatening person she can imagine, which in her line of work means bupkis. At least he's offering to help, which suggests that he's not going to disembowel her at random.

"It's fairly heavy," she says hesitantly.

"I don't mind."

This realm isn't the forest that resists static descriptions; nor is this man a shambling faceless horror keen to feast on her warm entrails. She'll take her chances on accepting.

"Thank you," she says appreciatively, setting it down.

The young man hoists the briefcase with one hand, holding it a good four inches away from his body with no apparent effort.

He looks at it contemplatively. "My goodness. What are you keeping in here, lead bricks?"

"Research materials," she says vaguely, offering him a handshake. "I don't believe we've met. Morgan Waller, clinical virology and infectious disease."

"Herbert West, neurology." He shakes her hand. "We haven't met, no. First time at the conference?"

Time to start pumping the residents for information. The field agents have advised her to act like nothing is out of the ordinary until the anomaly does so itself, so at least she has a starting point.

"First time! They've picked an interesting location for it. I've never been to a conference anywhere like here before."

He chuckles. "It's a new conference center every time. I've heard the management has tried to sign long-term agreements with venues before, but to my knowledge it's never worked out. Not that I'm complaining – variety is the spice of life."

"Huh. Sounds like you've been to a few of these before."

"I have, and I heartily recommend the experience. Academic collaboration has been invaluable to my research career, and the conference has no shortage of like-minded physicians. I take it you'll be presenting some of your own work here?"

"That's what the invitation stipulated. I'm doing my presentation on novel viral infections of interest tomorrow morning."

"Then I'll be sure to attend. I'm conducting my own presentation this afternoon, if you're interested."

"Anything else you'd recommend, apart from the networking opportunities?"

He thinks for a moment. "Some of the seminars double as continuing medical education. They'll be listed as such on the itinerary. Ask the presenter for documentation at the end so you can post it to your licensing board when you go home."

Morgan isn't sure what's more horrifying, the idea of a memetic document that looks like a CME credit or the possibility that the conference is actually registered with American medical licensing boards. That's going to be a nightmare to cover up, if it comes to it, though hopefully not as bad as the Star Signals debacle of '06.

"Thank you for the tip. What will you be presenting?" she asks, probing in a different direction.

"Efficiency gains in mitochondrial transcription and translation… I'm sorry, are you familiar with my body of work?"

"Not really. It does sound interesting, though. Do we have time for a primer?"

Herbert glances at the country club. Still a minute or two away at their current pace, which is not being helped by the briefcase.

"We should. Err, as I'm sure you're aware, the body remains largely intact for six to twelve minutes following cardiopulmonary death. What ensues is autolysis – the enzymes of the cells are no longer directed by metabolism and begin to dissolve the body's membranes – caused by insufficient delivery of glucose and oxygen via the blood. Now, when I was in medical school, it occurred to me that the engines of life are entirely undamaged immediately postmortem. They could theoretically be restarted, so to speak, by the careful application of an external force before too much degradation renders the organism inoperable."

"Like a defibrillator?"

He snaps his fingers excitedly. "Just so! 'A method to stimulate the activity of animal cells in the absence of circulation.' That was the original title of my thesis, though my formulation at the time wasn't effective. I later read the work of von Helmholtz and Gibbs, which suggested that the reagent needed to carry a certain amount of chemical energy in order to overcome the thermodynamic stagnation of death. I added a small quantity of glycogen for energy and dilute oil of vitriol as an oxidizing agent."

"Did that… work?"

"It was promising, but my results were insufficient to garner funding. Luigi Galvani made the limbs of dead frogs twitch with mere electricity in the eighteenth century; modern grantmakers have higher standards." He waves his hand dismissively. "I later determined that although the limit was twelve minutes, a specimen deceased for as little as sixty seconds had much greater odds of seeing a full recovery. With that taken care of, I was able to make the critical refinements that later lead to my reagent accomplishing its intended effect."

"Fascinating. Where were you sourcing volunteers for the procedure?"

"I and my assistant worked as medics with the Red Cross during the war. It was fairly straightforward to locate men whose time of death was scribed in stone and who rather wished it wasn't. That was when we did the bulk of the research."