A Quantum Murder

by Peter F. Hamilton

  There was another sensor pillar outside the big glass entrance doors. Greg showed his card again. The reception hall had a semicircular desk on one side and a row of plastic chairs lined up opposite. Walls and ceiling were all composite, powder-blue in colour; the linoleum was a marble swirl of grey and cream. Biolum panels were set along the walls, below tracks of boxy service conduits. The place had the same kind of utilitarian lay-out as a warship interior.

  That military image was reinforced by the two guards sitting behind the desk; they both wore crisp blue uniforms with peaked caps. One of them took Greg's proffered card and showed it to a terminal. An ID badge burped out of a slot.

  "Please wear it on your lapel at all times, sir," he said as he handed it over along with the card.

  He was fixing the badge on when one of the doors at the far end of the reception hall opened. The woman who came through was in her late thirties, dark hair cut short without much attempt at styling. Her face had pale skin, slender winged eyebrows, a long nose, and strong lips. She wore a white coat of some shiny material, there was no hint of what clothes might be worn underneath. Her shoes were sensible black leather with a small buckle, flat heels. A cybofax was gripped in her left hand.

  "Mr Mandel?" She stuck out her hand.

  "Greg, please."

  "I'm Stephanie Rowe, Dr MacLennan's assistant. I'll take you to him."

  The corridors were windowless, running through the centre of the building. They passed several warders, all in the neat navy-blue uniforms, and always walking in pairs or larger groups. On two occasions they were escorting prisoners. The men had shaven heads, wearing loose-fining yellow overalls, white plastic neural-jammer collars clamped firmly around their necks.

  Greg frowned at the retreating back of the second prisoner.

  "Are all the prisoners fitted with neural jammers?"

  "Yes, all the ones in the Centre. We house some of the country's most ruthless criminals here. I don't mean the gang lords or syntho barons. These are the violence and sex orientated offenders, killers, rapists, and child molesters."

  "Right. Do many of them try and escape?"

  "No. There were only two attempts in the last twelve months. The collar's incapacitation ability is demonstrated to each inmate as they arrive. Besides, most of them are resigned when they arrive here, depressed, withdrawn. The kind of crimes they commit mean even their families have rejected them. They were loners on the outside, there is nowhere they can go, no organization which will hide and take care of them. It's our experience that a high percentage of them actually wanted to be caught."

  "And do you think you can cure them?"

  "The term we use now is behavioural reorientation. And yes, we've had some success. There's a lot of work still to be done, naturally."

  "What about public acceptance?"

  She grimaced in defeat. "Yes, we anticipate a major problem in that area. It would be politically difficult releasing them back into the community after the treatment is complete."

  "Was Liam Bursken one of the two who tried to escape?" Greg asked.

  "No."

  "Has he ever tried?"

  "Again, no. He's kept in solitary the whole time. Even by our standards, he's considered extremely dangerous. We cannot allow him to mix with the other inmates. It would cause too much trouble. Most of them would want to attack him simply for the kudos it would bring them."

  "No honour amongst thieves any more, eh?"

  "These aren't thieves, Greg. They are very sick people."

  "Are you a doctor?"

  "A psychiatrist, yes."

  They climbed a staircase to the second floor. Greg mulled over what she had said. A professional liberal, he decided, she had too much faith in people. Maybe too much faith in her profession as well if she believed therapy could effect complete cures. It couldn't, papering over the cracks was the best anyone could ever hope for, he knew. But then the gland did give him an advantage, allowing him to glimpse the true workings of the mind.

  "So why do you want to work here?" he asked as they started off down another corridor.

  She gave him a brief grin. "I didn't know I was the one you wanted to question."

  "You don't have to answer."

  "I don't mind. I'm here because this is the cutting edge of behavioural research, Greg. And the money is good."

  "I've never heard anyone say that about civil service pay before."

  "I don't work for the government. The Centre was built by the Berkeley company, they run it under licence from the Home Office. And they also fund the behavioural reorientation research project, which is my field."

  "That explains a lot. I didn't think the Home Office had the kind of resources to pay for a place like this."

  Stephanie shrugged noncommittally, and opened the door into the director's suite. There was a secretary in the outer office, busy with a terminal. She glanced up, and keyed an intercom.

  "Go straight through," she said.

  The office was at odds with the rest of the Centre. Wall units, desk, and conference table were all customized blackwood, ancient maps and several diplomas hung on the wall, louvre blinds stretched across the picture window, blocking the view, It was definitely a senior management enclave, its occupier claiming every perk and entitlement allowed for in the corporate rule book.

  Dr James MacLennan rose from behind his desk to greet Greg, a reassuring smile and a solid handshake. He was thirty-seven, shorter than Greg, with thick dark hair, heavily tanned with compact features. His Brazilian suit was a shiny grey-green.

  "For the record, and before we say anything else, I'd like to state quite categorically that Liam Bursken did not slip out for a night, it simply isn't possible," MacLennan said.

  His mannerisms were all a trifle too gushy and effusive for Greg to draw any confidence the way he was intended to. He guessed that Berkeley's directors were none too happy at suggestions that psychopaths like Bursken could come and go as they pleased. The method of Kitchener's murder hadn't been lost on the press.

  "From what I've seen so far, I'd say the Centre looks pretty secure," Greg said.

  "Good, excellent." MacLennan gestured at a long settee.

  Greg settled back into the bouncy cushioning. "I will have to ask Bursken himself."

  "I understand completely. Stephanie will arrange your interview. Make as many checks as you like. I like to think our record is flawless."

  "Thank you, I'm sure it is."

  Stephanie leant over the desk and muttered into the intercom, then came and sat at the table next to the settee.

  "Right, so how can we help?" MacLennan crossed his legs, and gave Greg his undivided attention.

  "As you probably saw in the newscasts, I'm a gland psychic appointed to the Kitchener inquiry by the Home Office."

  MacLennan rolled his eyes and grunted. "God, the press. Don't tell me about the press. I've had the lot of them clamouring on the door to interview Bursken, harassing the staff when they come off duty. You see them on the channel 'casts, these packs which follow politicians and royalty around, but I just never appreciated what it was like to be on the receiving end. And that kind of microscopic attention is precisely what we didn't want, Stocken is supposed to be a low-key operation."

  "Suppose you fill me in on some background. What exactly is this behavioural reorientation work you're doing here?"

  "You know what kind of inmates we hold here?"

  "Yeah. That's why I'm so interested in meeting Liam Bursken. I saw the holograms of Kitchener in situ. Tell you, it was plain butchery. I've seen atrocities in battle, and not just committed by the other side. But the kind of mind which perpetrated that was way outside my experience. I want to know what it looks like."

  MacLennan nodded sympathetically. "Well, the motivation behind their crimes are basically psychological, in all cases deep-rooted. None of the serial killers sell drugs, or steal, or commit fraud, any of the normal range of criminal activities.

  "That sor
t of everyday crime is mostly a result of sociological conditioning; broadly speaking, solvable if they were given better housing, improved education, a good job, stable home environment, etc.—it's a process for social workers and parole officers—whereas the Centre's inmates probably had those advantages before they came in. They do tend to have reasonable IQs, steady jobs, sometimes even families."

  "Do any of them have exceptional IQs?" Greg asked.

  MacLennan flicked an enquiring glance at Stephanie Rowe. "Not that I'm aware of," he said. "Why do you ask?"

  "Kitchener's students are all very bright people."

  "Ah, I see, yes."

  "No one here has anything above average intelligence," Stephanie announced; she was studying her cybofax. "Certainly we have no geniuses resident. Do you want me to request past case histories?"

  "No, that's all right," Greg said.

  "What we are trying to do at Stocken," MacLennan said, "is alter their psychological profiles, eradicate that part of their nature which extracts gratification from performing these barbaric acts."

  "Brainwashing?"

  "Absolutely not."

  "It sounds like it."

  MacLennan gave him a narrow smile. "What you refer to as brainwashing is simply conditioned response. An example: strap your subject in a chair and show him a picture of an object, say a particular brand of whisky. Each time the whisky appears you give him an electric shock. Repeated enough times the subject will become averse to that brand. I have grossly over simplified, of course. But that is the principle, installing a visually triggered compulsion. What you are doing in such cases is ingraining a new response to replace the one already in place. But it can only produce results on the most simplistic level. You cannot turn criminals into law-abiding citizens by aversion therapy, because criminality is their nature, derived subconsciously, not a single yes/no choice. And what we are dealing with in Stocken's inmates is a behaviour pattern often formed in childhood. It has to be erased and then replaced."

  "How?"

  "Have you heard of educational laser paradigms?"

  "No," Greg said drily.

  "It's an idea which goes back several decades. It was the subject of my doctoral thesis. I started off in high-density data-handling techniques, but got sidetracked. Educational paradigms were so much more interesting. They are the biological equivalent of computer programs. You can literally load subject matter into the human brain as though you were squirting bytes into a memory core. Once perfected, there will be no need for schools or universities. You will be given all the knowledge you require in a single burst of light, sending the information through the optic nerve to imprint directly on the brain." MacLennan shrugged affably. "That's the theory, anyway. We are still a long way off achieving those kind of results."

  "It sounds impressive," Greg said. "And you can use it to install new behaviour patterns as well?"

  "Behaviour is rooted in memory, Mr Mandel. Conditioning again. You fall into a pool when you are a young child, nearly drowning; and in adult life you are wary of water, a poor swimmer, nor do you have any enthusiasm to improve. It is these countless cumulative small events and incidents in your formative years which decide the composition of your psyche. You are a soldier, I believe, Mr Mandel?"

  "Was a soldier. I'm retired now."

  "You volunteered for the army?"

  "Yeah."

  "And were you any good as a soldier?"

  Greg shifted his weight on the settee's amorphous cushioning, conscious of Stephanie's stare. "I was mentioned in dispatches once or twice."

  "And yet thousands, hundreds of thousands, of men your age were totally unsuitable for the military life you excelled in. Physically no different, but mentally, in outlook, your exact opposite. The respective attitudes both determined in the period between your fourth and sixteenth birthdays. We are what we are because of that time, the child being the father of the man. And that is the time we must alter in order to eradicate real-time psychoses. My aim is to substitute false paradigmatic memories for real recollections, thus effecting a radical change of temperament."

  "Have you had any success?"

  "Limited, but most promising given we have only been here two years. We have already succeeded in assembling some highly realistic synthetic memories. There is one, a walk through a forest." He closed his eyes and the eagerness and tension which had built up as he spoke drained out of his face, leaving him strangely peaceful. Almost the same expression as a synthohead, Greg thought.

  "I can see the trees," MacLennan said, his voice reduced to a placid lilt. "They are large, tall as well as broad, in full leaf, oaks and elms. This is pre-Warming, midsummer, with sunbeams breaking through the overhead branches. I can see a squirrel, a red one; he's racing up an oak, round and round the trunk. I'm standing below watching him, touching the bark. It's rough, crinkled, dusted with a powdery green algae. The grass is ankle-high, dewy, wetting my shoes. There are foxgloves everywhere, and weasel-snout; I can smell honeysuckle."

  "Lasers can imprint a smell?" Greg asked sceptically.

  "The memory of a smell," Stephanie said pedantically. "We adapted the paradigm from a high-definition virtual reality simulation, then added tactile and olfactory senses, as well as emotional responses."

  "Emotional responses?"

  "Yes. Interpretation is a strong part of memory. if you see a particularly beautiful flower in the forest, you feel good about it; tread in a dog turd on the path, and you're disgusted."

  Greg thought about it. He couldn't fault the logic, it was just that the whole concept seemed somewhat fanciful. But someone on the Berkeley board obviously had enough faith to invest in it. Quite heavily, judging by the facilities the Centre offered.

  "Have you received this memory as well?" he asked her.

  "Yes. It's very realistic. It feels like I was actually in that forest. James forgot to mention the birdsong. The thrushes are warbling the whole time."

  Greg turned back to MacLennan, who was watching him levelly.

  "How does this help to cure axe murderers?" Greg asked.

  "Imagine when you were young if you took that same walk through a tranquil forest for half an hour instead of having to endure your drunken father beating you. If you had that walk, or played football, every evening he came home drunk; if you could remember your mother giving him a kiss instead of crying and screaming for mercy, I think you'd find your outlook on life would be very different."

  "Yeah, and is it going to be possible?"

  "I believe so. Once we have solved the problem of how to erase, or at the very least weaken, old memories. This is the area of research which requires the most effort in order for the project to succeed. Neurology and psychology to date have concentrated on memory recovery, helping amnesic victims, developing hypnotic recall techniques for vital witnesses, even preserving memories in the face of encroaching senility. The only comparable work in the opposing direction is with drugs which induce a form of transient amnesia, like scopolamine. These are no use to us, as they only prevent memories from being retained while the drug is in effect. What we need is something which will go into a subject's mind and hunt down the original poisonous memories."

  "Sounds like a job for a psychic," Greg said.

  "It's an option we've considered. In fact it was one reason I was particularly delighted when I was informed you would be coming today. I wanted to quiz you on the parameters of psi. The Home Office said you were one of the best ESP-orientated psychics to emerge from the Mindstar project. Are you able to interpret individual memories?"

  "No. Sorry, I'm strictly an empath."

  "I see." He clasped his hands together and rested his chin on the knuckles. "Do you know of any psychic who can do that?"

  "There were a couple in Mindstar who had the kind of ability you're talking about. They used to be able to lift faces and locations out of a suspect's thoughts." He almost said prisoner, but with Stephanie leaning forward in her seat, hanging on to every w
ord, that would never do. He wanted her wholehearted co-operation. "I don't think they could perform anything like the deep-ranging exploration you require."

  "That's a pity," MacLennan said. "I might apply for a licence to practise with a themed neurohormone if one could be developed along those lines."

  "Are you completely stonewalled without psychic analysis?"

  "No. There are several avenues we can pursue. Paradigms could be structured to wipe selected memories. A sort of anti-memory, if you like. The major trouble is again one of identification. We need to know a memory in order to wipe it—the nature of it, the section of the brain where it is stored."

  "A real-time brain scan might just tell us," Stephanie said. "If the subject recounts a particularly traumatic incident it may be possible to locate the specific neurons which house it. The erasure paradigm could then be targeted directly at them. Magic photons, we call it, after the magic bullet; like cancer treatments which kill tumour cells without harming the ordinary cells around it."

  "You would need some very sophisticated sensors to scan a brain that accurately," Greg pointed out. "Not to mention processing capacity. Part of my psi-assessment tests involved a SQUID scan, but there was no way you could get the focus fine enough to resolve individual neuron cells."

  "Berkeley has allocated us considerable resources," MacLennan said. His chirpy everything-under-control smile had returned. "We have one SQUID brain scanner already installed here at the Centre. Although, admittedly, its resolution does fall some way short of the requirement Stephanie envisages for the magic photons concept to function. But it is a modest first step. And several medical equipment companies are working on models which offer a higher resolution. I have high hopes for the project."

  "This paradigm research is an expensive venture," Greg said. "The Board must have a lot of faith in you."

  "They do. I didn't promise them instant results and success. They fully understand that it is a medium-term project, commercial viability will not be realized for at least another seven to ten years. But they agreed to back it because of the potential. You see, if paradigm-based treatment does work, it will revolutionize the entire penal system. We would have to rebuild our institutions from the ground up. The only people who will actually require detention are petty criminals, everyone else will be reformed in medical facilities."