Brains

  Thursday, October 20

  Queens

  Perez's motorized wheelchair rolled smoothly off the van's lift, and up the ramp to the elevator. He went up to the third floor and installed himself in the conference room. He stared out the window, thinking about Santiago. The failure was incontrovertible. He had had his old enemy in hand, and let him slip away. Inexcusable. Except, he had to admit, he himself had also let the man escape all those years ago. Still, inexcusable. He picked up the phone, gave a few terse instructions to Maxwell, and told him to send Santiago in as soon as things were ready.

  A few minutes later, Santiago arrived with two other men. He was sweating, just enough that the odor of his anxiety made Perez's nostrils flare slightly.

  “Let's go downstairs,” Perez said evenly. “We need to discuss our next steps.”

  Santiago said nothing as they moved down the hall to the elevator. This time it went down all the way to the first sub-basement below the garage. They entered a room with a large glass wall, where Maxwell was waiting with three other men. On the other side of the glass was an emaciated man, walking slowly, holding a handrail. He was wearing the helmet which indicated a metallic mesh implant, and cables were attached to the helmet and his spine. He was making good progress, his steps close to natural. Loud rhythmic music was playing, and he was trying to step along with the beat. They watched for a few minutes, then Perez turned to Santiago.

  “This man is dying. We are barely keeping ahead of the infection. The man who you brought up from Florida – what did you say his name was?”

  “Hansen,” Santiago said, his throat dry.

  “Yes, Hansen. Cameron Hansen.” Perez smiled ruefully. “He had another name when I knew him. In any case, I was going to use him as a replacement. Your failure has made that impossible. Regrettable.”

  He waved his arm, and five men grabbed Santiago, flipping him neatly and effortlessly onto his stomach on a table to the left of the glass. His arms and ankles were handcuffed to the legs of the table, and thick leather straps were tightened around his thorax and buttocks. Santiago's head was turned towards the glass, where the mesh man was still walking slowly back and forth, clearly oblivious to what was happening on the other side of what was, to him, a mirror.

  Maxwell brought in a rig, and two of the men used a Craftsman drill to secure it to Santiago's pelvis with four long screws. Santiago bit through his lip, but made no sound as blood dripped from his mouth. One of the men took a small sledge, and at Perez's nod, brought it down hard on the center of the rig. Santiago gasped as his breath was forced out. Then gasped again as he realized that there was no real pain. The chisel had not been placed in the rig. He turned his head the other way, where he saw Perez, who had a pencil-thin smile on his lips, and a deadness to his eyes.

  “Never fail me again. The next time, I will not be merciful.”

  Perez and Maxwell left the observation room through a side door. “It's a question of value,” Perez said once the door closed behind them. “I did not become who I am by wasting resources, financial or human. I am confident that I have made my point. Santiago is still a useful asset. For now.”

  Maxwell had also understood the lesson, and it was now the stench of his fear that Perez was inhaling as they entered a room filled with computers and servers. Blaylock was seated in front of a desk with a small monitor showing the man walking, and a large monitor with several dozen rows of irregular lines which were scrolling from left to right. There were labels down the left side, grouping the lines into sections, including left and right frontal cortex, motor cortex, sensory cortex, Broca's area, visual cortex, auditory cortex, hippocampus, and so forth.

  “Show el jefe what you've got,” Maxwell directed Blaylock.

  “Progress, definitely progress,” Blaylock enthused. “What you are looking at is real time. Let me show you some of what we've put together.” He tapped rapidly on his keyboard, and the screen split into five columns.

  “Each column is about three seconds of activity, but that is enough to get the idea. The first column is just walking. Note that the auditory line and frontal lines are almost flat, most of the activity is in the motor areas. The second column is when we added music – see how not just the auditory lines become much more active, but also the frontal and speech-center areas and even the hippocampus, as he processes and remembers the sounds. The third column is after about fifty repetitions of the same piece of music. See how the auditory line is about the same, but the other areas are quieter? Once the music is memorized, it does not get everything going in quite the same way.” He pointed at the fourth column. “This one is really interesting. You know how we were concerned about how to get, shall we say, less-cooperative subjects to actively remember things? Well, after the fifty repetitions, we play a few seconds of the music, then stop it. The subject will always actively remember the next few seconds.” He superimposed the fourth column over the second. “See how the auditory and frontal areas are almost identical in the memory phase to how they were in the acquisition phase? It's beautiful.” He was beaming.

  “And the fifth column?” Perez was leaning forward.

  “Okay, so the fifth column was done in a silent room, where, instead of recording from the whole brain, we input signal into the auditory cortex identical to what we recorded when the music was playing, and record from the rest of the brain. You can see that the recording from the rest of the brain is similar to when there was music. Again, the subject is less than cooperative, but when we watch his gait and how he bobs to the rhythm, it appears that he is having the same experience from the mesh as from actual music.”

  “How does this compare to prior subjects?”

  “On the one hand, beautifully; on the other, not very well. The broad activity is similar, but nothing specific enough to allow for, say, playing a song into a new subject's brain and having it be immediately recognizable as music. Each brain has to be analyzed and programmed individually. Vision is much easier, better subject-to-subject conformity. I can stream visual almost as easily as showing a movie.”

  “What about tapping into the subjects' memories?” Perez kept his tone level.

  “That is a major cooperation problem,” Blaylock shook his head. “If we had been able to keep subject F3 going a little longer, we may have had more. He really seemed to want to help with the project. Anxious, almost. We got to the point that if he actively remembered something, we could see how the memory diffused across the brain and we could record it.”

  “Diffused across the brain?” Perez asked. “What do you mean?”

  “Well, it turns out that memories are not lodged somewhere in the temporal lobe like a lot of people think. That is more like a trigger area, but the different parts of a memory are stored in the cortex where they originated. For example, if you are remembering a day at the beach, the feel of the sand is in the sensory cortex, the view in the visual, the sound of the waves in the auditory, the emotions in the frontal, and so forth. We actually got to where we could shock a point in F3's temporal lobe and trigger a memory that we could interpret correctly.”

  “What about recording the entirety of a subject's memory. A cooperative subject, naturally.”

  “Well, first of all, I would need the new mesh to do that with any kind of resolution. Next, although the total storage capacity of the human brain is probably around fifteen terabytes, which is manageable, the relationship between various memories and thought would require a similar amount of RAM in order to be useful. That is truly state-of-the-art supercomputing. I now have a combination of eighty-five high speed units, linked in an integrated network of parallel and series combinations. I need about sixty more. My techs are working full time at installation, but it will take about two more weeks to operationalize. Finally, the biggest problem is that, at this point, it would take me about as long to record each memory as it took for it to occur, since we would be depending on the subject to make the connections by thinking about them. So, forty years
of work for the memories of a forty-year-old, working full time all of his waking hours. During which time he would have made another forty years’ worth. See the problem?”

  Perez saw the problem. “I want you to devote all your resources to that particular problem. Experiment with rapid stimulation, amphetamines, depressants, whatever you think might make a difference. I need a solution. And have the computers ready in one week, not two.” He spun the wheelchair around, then turned back. “You have off-site back up?”

  “Your instructions were to keep all the data off-line, so just the raw data which is written to hard drives and taken to storage every day.”

  “Set up a second site with the whole necessary array, and configure to transmit all the data on the main project as it is gathered. Backup will be more important at that point than security. I don’t want all my eggs in one basket.” His fingers drummed. “I think a new CompServ site was just brought on line near Seattle. There should be two hundred servers set up. Have them linked up and configured.” He wheeled out, and took the elevator to his fourth floor apartment, intending a swim in his roof-top enclosed pool.

  Blaylock turned to Maxwell. “Is the new mesh going to work? I really need the higher resolution.”

  “Works great in dogs. Don't have a human yet.”

  “You know, I think I could do some of the memory research on dogs,” Blaylock mused. “That might make it a lot easier to get a line on things. How many do you have up there?

  “Eleven,” replied Maxwell.

  “That's a start. I'll get going.”

  ◆◆◆

  “The problem with the dogs,” Blaylock was telling Maxwell several hours later, “is that, although they clearly have memories, the sense of smell appears to be their biggest trigger, and it is hard for us to really relate to what is going on in their minds. Nonetheless, I think we have come up with something which may be useful. That semiconducting mesh is amazing. I have designed a way to produce thousands of synchronized current loops, which effectively produces a magnetic coil on the surface of the brain, which can be pulsed on and off in fractions of a millisecond. That causes the field fluctuations that I can use to read the signals produced by the brain tissue. So, instead of delivering shocks and looking for surface electrical activity, we can instead look through the entire thickness of the cortex for changes related to the activity. It is like functional MRI, only with ten thousand times the resolution. Stimulation of the dogs’ olfactory areas leads to activity in the rest of the brain which can only be due to memory of whatever odor is evoked.”

  “How does that help us?” Maxwell was intrigued.

  “Well, if we could calibrate to known memories, we should be able to stimulate these impulses and record the memories at an accelerated pace.”

  “How accelerated?”

  “By a factor of nearly ten thousand. Meaning that we could record a year's worth of waking memories, meaning sixteen hour days, in as little as thirty-five minutes. If we could choose just the waking hours. Which we cannot, but only REM sleep seems to generate actual memories, so let's say about forty-five minutes per year of life.”

  “Would the subject need to be conscious?”

  “Well, yes, for the calibration, meaning the recording of what sights, sounds, colors, odors, pain, touch, etc., look like in that particular subject's cortex. That would probably take twelve to fourteen hours. An extremely unpleasant and painful twelve to fourteen hours, I might add. But for the memories themselves, I don't know yet whether awake or sleeping may actually be best.”

  “Drug-induced sleep?”

  “No, that would possibly lead to altered interpretation of the meanings. Regular sleep. Also, I should point out that this process does not require active cooperation. We could trial on a regular subject. The difficulty would be in verifying the memories. Cross-checking with known events should give us that information, if that were available.”

  ◆◆◆

  Maxwell finished explaining Blaylock's findings. Perez, always a quick study, immediately saw the next step.

  “How soon can Blaylock be ready to trial the process?”

  “His techs are still building the mega-computer, but should be done early next week, as you requested.”

  “It will take that long to acquire a subject, spin a mesh, and implant it. Good work.”

  Maxwell was dismissed, and Perez went to his pool, where he was lowered into the water, and began to swim his laps. He thought about the details, turning them over and over in his mind, and by the time he was finished, he had a plan. He was just being helped out of the water, when the pain in his belly returned, more intense. If his man hadn't been right there, he could easily have drowned. As it was, the spasm passed. “Have Santiago here in an hour,” he barked as he was helped off the hoist and into his chair. The man pulled out his phone and made the call, as Perez glided down the hall to his apartment.

  ◆◆◆

  Santiago was given very complete, very detailed instructions on exactly what they required. “I need them at the Queens facility by Sunday evening,” he intoned flatly. “I don't have to remind you that there will be no further need for your services if you are not completely successful with this assignment.”

  Santiago nodded, setting his jaw. He would not fail.

  Chapter 16

  Friday, October 21

  New York

  Cameron was going crazy. Not figuratively, like being annoyed, but literally, like he was starting to have hallucinations. He had been in a meeting in a large conference room at JFK with the TSA director and representatives from FBI, CIA, State Department, Commerce Department, and, of course, Homeland Security, for just over two hours. Nothing had happened. Nothing. Now if he closed his eyes, he both saw and heard things that weren't really there. Mostly flashbacks of the videos he had been forced to watch in Perez's cell. He could almost feel the point of the chisel entering his spine, hear the sounds of his own lips screaming.

  “Hansen!” He did not react. “Earth to Hansen,” the TSA director repeated. “Are you with us? Or is the safety of airline travel not a compelling issue for a master spy?”

  Cameron sat up with a start. The FBI drone next to him sniggered. He looked like an ad for Middle Aged Spread. They had met that morning while consuming the slightly stale bagels with not enough cream cheese provided by their hosts, and for Cameron, it had been contempt at first sight. Not just the usual CIA vs FBI competition, but something more visceral. Phillips reminded Cameron of the AV guy at his high school who would change the internet passwords during the middle of class, so he would have to be called in to save the day by rescuing a crashed presentation. Or hack into the web cams on the girls' laptops and drool with his buddies while they watched their unsuspecting victims pick their noses or put on deodorant or change their clothes. Now, all grown up, with a badge and a gun, he was able to torture a much broader segment of the population. Worse, Phillips did not seem to be cognizant of Cameron's instant loathing, but actually seemed good-old-boy friendly.

  The director was asking him a direct question, which he had clearly missed.

  “Sorry sir, could you repeat that?” His face burned.

  “What is the current rate of chatter from known terrorist facilities in Tunisia?

  Cameron flipped through his notes, missing the pertinent graphic until Phillips stuck his fat middle finger in the stack and gave him the knowing “I saved you, pathetic Muggle” smirk.

  “Nothing off of the curve, slightly more than last week, but no significant change.”

  “Thank you.” The director continued his interminable pontification.

  Cameron's mind started to wander again. His assertions to Mitzi notwithstanding, after a half day at TSA, he knew he could not just let the Perez matter go. He kept coming back to the same question. What was the goal? What was the ultimate point of the research?

  At the coffee break, he walked down the hall and called Mitzi.

  “Three hours,” she said. �
�Well done. I was sure you would only be able to hold out for two.”

  He ignored the jibe. “I can't concentrate on this crap. I keep seeing those videos.” He was more than a little embarrassed, worried that Mitzi would think him weak, or damaged, or, heaven forbid, try to connect with him in sympathy. He needn't have worried.

  “Not interested,” she shot back. “Call your boss and get a couple of weeks off. They should have offered you a leave of absence after this week. I'm going up to Boston to talk to a guy I know at MIT. You can come.”

  Cameron took a deep breath. The DDO had, in fact told him to take some time. He had refused. “I'll call you back.” He hung up and dialed the Center.

  The boss' secretary did not even put him through. “He left the papers with me,” she said. “He figured you would call. He wants you to check back in two weeks. And no, he does not want to talk to you.”

  Cameron was about to hang up, grateful to have avoided an encounter, when she said, “And Hansen. Leave Perez alone. If he finds out you have been working on that case, your leave may be extended. Indefinitely.” SHE hung up.

  He walked back down to the conference room, picked up his things, and started to leave. Phillips was just coming back in, his bulk blocking the exit.

  “Leaving so soon?" His smile was so large and so irritating that Cameron almost took a swing at him.

  “Change in assignment,” he said. “Tell the Director they'll be sending someone else over.”

  He called Mitzi as he walked to the parking lot. “So, when are we going to Boston?”

  “We leave from La Guardia in ninety minutes. My guy has some time this afternoon. Chop chop.” She hung up.

  “Only Mitzi,” Cameron thought, heading for the Grand Central Parkway.

  ◆◆◆

  They caught the 1:00 p.m. American flight to Boston. The meeting was set for four, and they were almost an hour early getting to the MIT campus. Mitzi grabbed Cameron's elbow and dragged him a few doors down Massachusetts Ave to the Flour Bakery, where they split a roasted lamb sandwich at a tiny table by the window.