This was the pivot, the moral event horizon. Yelena, pale and fading, would grasp his hand with her weakening one. "Frederick," she'd whisper, her voice a rustle of leaves, "must you have an answer for everything? Is the question itself not sometimes a beautiful enough thing to hold?"
He would kiss her forehead, his heart a stone. "The question without an answer is a torment, my love. I will not let the torment take you."
As she slipped further, his research grew merciless. He told himself it was for her. He began with terminal patients, volunteers who wished their deaths to mean something. He recorded their final moments with the Resonator. The "Release Signature," as he called it, was consistently similar to Yelena's spike a brilliant, compact burst of the pseudo-electromagnetic energy, lasting 1.8 to 2.1 seconds. But as his data grew, so did his resolution. He noticed subtle, yet undeniable, variations. The signature of a devout old woman showed a more harmonic, wave-like pattern in its decay. A soldier's held a sharper, more abrupt termination. A child's was startlingly complex, almost a miniature symphony of frequencies.
Madness, perhaps, is the systematic removal of context. Frederick removed the context of personhood, reducing these profound moments to data. He assigned numerical values to the frequency, amplitude, and harmonic decay of each signature, creating a mathematical "soul-print." His obsession with saving Yelena metastasized into a cold fixation on the data itself. When voluntary subjects grew scarce, he did not stop.The forgotten, the condemned, the unseen they became his subjects. He would induce near death states through controlled bloodletting or alkaloid administration, recording the Resonator's panic, then reviving the subject. Each experiment refined his model. Each was a step towards his goal.
The line, once so bright in his moral landscape, began to blur, then erode entirely. Near-death circumstances, induced with clinical precision, provided rich data, but it was data with a limit, a terrifying peak, but one that always tapered back into the baseline noise of life. He needed to capture the full termination. The complete, unmitigated transition from something to nothing. The first time he made the conscious decision not to administer the antidote, it was on a condemned thief, a man already resigned to the gallows. Frederick promised his body a quick end and a contribution to science. The man, sedated, showed no fear. The Resonator captured the first clean, full Release Signature of a terminated life. The data was pristine, perfect. It was also addicting.
The next subject was not condemned. She was a fever riddled woman from the poor quarter, bought from uncaring relatives for a bag of silver. Her illness made her a likely candidate; her death would raise few questions. As Frederick administered the final, lethal agent, her sedation slipped. In the moment between the injection and the failure of her nervous system, her eyes fluttered open. They locked onto his. There was no confusion, no pain, just a crystal clear, abyssal terror. It was the raw, unmediated fear of the conscious mind witnessing its own annihilation. Then, it was gone. The eyes emptied. And the Resonator's stylus etched its most brilliantly complex signature yet. The horror of what he had seen in her eyes was immediate and visceral, a cold nausea that gripped him. But it was swiftly buried, crushed under the colossal weight of the resulting data. That signature held nuances,
harmonic fractures, and a cascade frequency he had never recorded before. The fear was in the waveform. It was a breakthrough. The end, he reasoned with a chilling clarity, justified the means. The human conscience was a luxury for those who did not bear the burden of ultimate knowledge. He had moved from observer to reaper, and the harvest was too bountiful to stop.
The night Yelena finally left him, the lab was silent save for her shallow breath and the soft tick-tick of the Resonator's clockwork. He held her hand, watching the instrument. As her breath hitched, then ceased, the stylus once more etched its violent, beautiful peak onto the glass. This time, there was no revival. The line fell silent and flat. Frederick did not weep. He meticulously removed the glass plate, labeled it "Y-01: Primary Source," and placed it in a vault. His grief was a frozen lake, and beneath it swam leviathans of purpose.
He had her signature. The pure, unadulterated code of her essence, he believed, captured at the moment of transition. All he needed was the vessel and a way to write the code back into it.