While the space race was soon spun off and put under the purview of NASA, DARPA—originally named ARPA—had made enormous contributions to technology over the decades, funding and pursuing public and secret projects alike. ARPA had created ARPANET, the early precursor to the Internet, and other transformational technologies like NavSat, the predecessor to the modern Global Positioning Satellite, whose importance in modern technology and commerce could not be overstated.
But what DARPA might accomplish on this very day could make birthing the Internet and GPS look like small potatoes. Even if the odds of success were only one in a hundred, Melanie was giddy at the prospect.
She glanced at the man whom she had chosen to lead the most far-reaching project ever conceived, Dr. Gustavo Guerrero, standing in silence beside her. Guerrero was as driven as she was, and even more brilliant.
Both stood facing the thick Plexiglas window that comprised the front wall of the small observation hut they were in, staring down at the ten-thousand-square-foot concrete bunker below, eighty yards away. The crudity of the structure’s appearance belied the marvel of technology housed within.
The building was nestled at the base of steep rock formations on three sides, two-thirds of it buried beneath the burning sands. Others would watch and monitor this historic attempt, the Blackest of Black projects taking place, fittingly, within the Blackest of Black sites—Area 51—but only she and Guerrero would have the honor of being this close.
It was silly to care about proximity. After all, the concrete hut they were in was packed with monitors that they would need to view the computer system inside the bunker, like everyone else. And even had they been standing next to TUC, this told them nothing about what was going on inside of him. They would only learn the extent of their success or failure through extensive remote testing.
Still, Melanie wanted to be able to see the location at which history was being made with her naked eyes, even if those viewing the site remotely would have the identical experience.
“T minus forty-six minutes,” said Dr. Guerrero unnecessarily, looking to be every bit as anxious as she was. “This must be how the folks at mission control felt during the first Moon launch. Years of working around the clock, and it all comes down to one singular event.”
“Thrilling and terrifying at the same time, isn’t it?”
Guerrero winced. “Very,” he replied, and then, forcing a smile, added, “but I’m trying to keep a healthy perspective. Einstein spent ten years killing himself to find the key insight necessary to go from his Special Theory of Relativity to his General Theory. And he’s one of any number of examples. Extraordinary breakthroughs require extraordinary perseverance.”
“Amen to that. But wouldn’t it be nice if this worked the first time?”
The Director of DARPA was about to continue when her phone issued a telltale ring. The only person she could think of who would dare call her now was her boss, Troy Dwyer, the recently installed Secretary of Defense. But Dwyer wasn’t a science geek, and as important as this was, he had told her he had no interest in looking over her shoulder.
She answered her phone and said maybe ten words before ending the call three minutes later.
“You don’t look happy,” noted Guerrero as soon as she finished, eyeing her warily. “What’s up?”
“You’re never going to guess in a million years,” she said to him in disgust.
“A last-second issue with TUC?” he replied anxiously. “Some kind of malfunction?”
“No. A warning. We’re about to have a surprise visitor. President David Strausser.”
“You have to be shitting me!”
“Lucky us,” she said dryly. “I’ve been assured that he’ll leave his Secret Service contingent outside of our observation hut so as not to further disturb our, um . . . moment.”
“What will he tell people about why he’s here?”
“He won’t. He ditched his press pool. They still think he’s in DC.”
“Goddammit!” hissed Guerrero as he reflected on the unfairness of it all. “Even Nixon had the decency to leave mission control alone to do their thing during the Moon landing.”
“Well, to be fair, we’re really only needed to push a button on a touch screen. Then, whatever will happen, will happen.”
“Still, are you really in the mood to babysit right now?”
“You know I feel the same way about this as you do,” she replied.
“I’d rather try to explain science to a tree than to a politician,” he added in contempt.
Melanie couldn’t help but laugh. Guerrero had said the word politician with so much disgust she was reminded of an old joke. In the joke, a grade school teacher asks a student to have her father come in for career day and explain his occupation. The father explains to the class that he is a male prostitute, servicing drug addicts and ex-cons.
When he leaves, the teacher rushes to the principal to report this appalling revelation. The principal just shakes his head and says, “I’m afraid it could have been worse. This man was lying. You see, he isn’t a male prostitute who services drug addicts and ex-cons. He’s really a politician.” After a pause the principal adds, “He was just too ashamed to admit it.”
Guerrero waited until her brief bout of mirth had passed, and then continued. “I thought you said your boss had agreed not to tip off the president about this. Strausser was just sworn in two months ago, after all. Shouldn’t he still be busy with other things? You know, like learning how a bill becomes a law.”
“No one tipped him off,” said Melanie. “But if he zeroed in on DARPA as an area of interest, and specifically asked about our most important project, Dwyer could hardly lie to him.”
“I’m begging you. Please do most of the talking. I have no patience for fools, especially now.”
“I’ll do most of the talking, but not all. I know you aren’t political, but this isn’t a man you want to snub if you care about your career.”
The president arrived moments later. After quick handshakes all around, the Secret Service agents who had accompanied him left them alone in the small concrete hut.
“Welcome to Groom Lake, Mr. President,” said Melanie, forcing a smile. “I have to say we’re a little . . . surprised . . . by your visit. What can we do for you?”
7
Trish Casner opened her eyes with a start.
How was she still alive?
Or was she alive? She was pretty sure she had never believed in an afterlife, but perhaps one existed, after all, given that her frozen corpse wasn’t currently drifting through space.
Her last memory was of Burt Dalton injecting her with a drug that would send her as gently as possible into the great beyond. The final frontier, and not in the Star Trek sense. The truly final frontier, with the Grim Reaper controlling all access.
She found herself in a small room with no windows, sitting across a table from a tall clean-cut man in a white lab coat, who was holding a tablet computer. Not what she had expected in the afterlife.
Saint Peter standing before majestic pearly gates with a scroll, yes. A geeky man at an unremarkable table staring at a computer—not so much. But perhaps given the population explosion since biblical days, scrolls had given way to more modern methods of record keeping.
“Who are you?” she whispered weakly, her usual strength having not yet fully returned. What had returned, she realized, was gravity. She was back on Earth. No restraining strap needed to keep her firmly in her seat this time.
“Welcome back, Trish,” the man replied. “Instead of wasting my breath answering questions, I’ll just wait until you regain your full memory.” He glanced at the time on his smart-watch. “Shouldn’t take more than five or ten minutes.”
True to his word, he folded his hands and put on a serene expression, waiting for comprehension to return to her. Less than three minutes later, it did. Everything came rushing back, a white avalanche of memories cascading down a steep mountain. She gasped
from the force of it.
The man she was facing was Dr. John B. Brennan. He was there to interview her, as he had done dozens of times over many months. She could tell he saw the light of comprehension in her eyes, but he still waited patiently, giving her time to fully assimilate her past, and her current situation, and make sense of it all.
Her odyssey had begun almost thirteen months earlier. She had been living alone in Columbus, Ohio, in between relationships, managing a small boutique greeting card shop in Easton Town Center Mall. A psychology professor nearby, at the Ohio State University, had been advertising for volunteers to fill out an extensive human behavior questionnaire online. Those selected to participate would receive the gift of a fifty-dollar credit on Amazon.com for their troubles.
It sounded like fun, and she could use as much credit on Amazon as she could get.
She had no idea that this questionnaire was not an end to itself, but a means to find qualified candidates for something far bigger. She had no idea that her participation would trigger events that would change her life forever.
The day after she had completed the questionnaire, she was contacted by a woman who wanted to know if she might be willing to participate in a larger study, for a significantly larger sum. She offered to take Trish to lunch so she could review the opportunity. Intrigued, Trish agreed to meet with her.
The woman, who had introduced herself as Dr. Mary Willis, had told her she was with a private institute founded for the purpose of advanced studies into human behavior. They were looking for volunteers who fit a diverse set of parameters, ultimately up to a thousand of them.
And not to answer questionnaires or submit to interviews, but to agree to become human guinea pigs.
Questionnaires were limited in the truths they could reveal, Mary Willis had explained. Ask a man if he thought he’d be brave in battle or cower behind a tree, whimpering, and he could give you his best guess based on past experience. But unless he had been in this exact situation, not even he could know for sure how he would react. The only way to know for sure was to put him in a battle zone and observe.
According to Dr. Willis, this institute had perfected an ideal means to gather this data, the most comprehensive, accurate assessment of the human condition ever attempted. Selective memory suppression combined with a flawless virtual reality system, tied directly into the brain.
The fictional Matrix come to life, indistinguishable from reality.
A subject could wake up in a war zone with a gun in his hand—and with no memory that he was really in virtual reality and this was merely a test—and could learn just how brave he really was, without being in any real danger at the time.
The institute was looking to test behavior under field conditions to learn what no previous study could tell them, allowing them to shine a light on ugly behaviors and loose ethics that most would deny vigorously if simply asked, either lying to the interviewer or lying to themselves.
Would you ever betray a friend because you were jealous of them?
Who would answer this question in the affirmative? But when a test subject thought they were experiencing real life, and couldn’t be observed, perhaps the answer to this question wasn’t always so cut and dried.
At this point in the conversation, Trish had made it clear to Mary Willis that she had no interest in being a human guinea pig, of having her memory tampered with in the name of behavioral science. And especially of putting herself into the hands of some sinister-sounding secret institute that admitted to scary mind-tampering abilities that wouldn’t be out of place in a macabre horror film.
Her decision was final, she had told Dr. Willis, and no sum of money would ever be enough to get her to change her mind. Ever.
Which just proved that Trish wasn’t as imaginative as she had thought. She never considered the institute would be willing to pay her two million dollars for a year of her time. What she should have said was that no sum of money would ever be enough to get her to change her mind—unless that sum of money was two million dollars.
Trish had always been something of a math savant, but this was simple arithmetic. If the institute’s goal was to eventually recruit a thousand volunteers, and each was paid two million dollars, this would cost them two billion dollars. An amount that was beyond unrealistic. It was absurd.
Dr. Willis had simply smiled and told her that two billion was considered affordable by those behind the institute. If Trish agreed, she would be paid the first hundred thousand immediately. The institute would relocate her, and pay for her lodging and meals while she participated in the study.
When the year was up, she would get another hundred thousand, and a hundred thousand every year after this for eighteen years, as if she were a lottery winner. The only catch was that if she ever breached confidentiality, ever breathed a single word about the institute or what had transpired there, she would forfeit all future payments.
That was the deal.
So just how bad was the testing for this kind of financial inducement to be necessary?
Pretty bad, Dr. Willis had admitted. The goal was to grind her down and examine every aspect of her personality. Evoke a kaleidoscope of emotions, and examine each under the most severe conditions. Study her fears and her desires. Her sex drive, her instinct for self-preservation, for safety and control. Her ethics and morals, her philosophy of life. Levels of generosity, compassion, self-sacrifice, bravery, determination, loyalty, resourcefulness, and adaptability. Love, lust, and avarice. Addiction.
Sometimes the tests would be great fun, testing her sense of humor, friendship, and need for affection. Her creativity, her ambition, her loyalty, and her reactions to a wide variety of benign, and sometimes wild, social situations.
But just as often the tests would be harsh and even brutal. Trish would be put to sleep and her mind manipulated to enter a computer-generated virtual world, perfect down to the tiniest detail, the most subtle smell, taste, and sensation accounted for, while her memory of any interactions with the institute would be erased.
Where possible, she would remember her life prior to entering the institute, with a backstory provided to explain how she found herself in whatever test situation they put her in. In extreme cases, like the scenario in space she had just undergone, her old memories would be so incongruous that she would never accept the new reality, no matter how flawlessly presented, so she would be hit with temporary amnesia while she fought to come to terms with the situation she found herself in.
To Willis’s credit, she didn’t sugarcoat what Trish would be faced with, nor would Trish have ever trusted her if she had. Two million dollars was a lot of money. Had Willis said the testing was nothing but sugarplums and fairy dust, Trish would have run for the hills.
But the doctor had given examples of the kind of tests Trish might find herself in. She might be put in a situation in which a crazed powerhouse of a man was trying to stab her friend with a dagger, to see how Trish would react. Would she attack the man to try to get him to stop, with the likelihood that this would only serve to get her killed as well as her friend? Or would she flee and call for help, knowing this help would never arrive in time?
Would Trish steal if she knew she could never get caught? Would she betray a loved one for the greater good? What kind of sacrifices would she be willing to make for the benefit of a stranger? Would she cheat on a test if she knew she couldn’t get caught? Would she have sex with a man for money? If so, for how much? Would she torture a woman if the woman was withholding information that could save the life of a loved one?
And none of these cases would be hypothetical. She would live these scenarios, smell the breath of the man offering to pay her for sex, slip in the blood of a friend who was dying in her arms.
In each of these cases, she would only remember the test long enough to be interviewed about it before having her short-term memory erased. The institute would learn things about her that couldn’t be learned on paper. She would learn things about he
rself, albeit fleetingly.
When Dr. Mary Willis had finished her pitch, Trish was intrigued, to be sure, but mostly horrified. The tests that had been described were treacherous, inhuman.
Not that it mattered. This lunch date was probably the real test. Of human gullibility. How easily could a person be conned by what was obviously bullshit?
There was no secret institute with billions of dollars to throw around. There was no technology that could send her consciousness into a computer-operated matrix to test her, or drugs that could manipulate her memory so precisely. She would have suspected she was on a hidden camera TV show, only she couldn’t imagine a show choosing subject matter this bizarre or unsettling.
She told the doctor as much. She thanked her for lunch, and left, telling her that the day she saw an extra hundred grand in her bank account was the day she might be willing to take these ridiculous fabrications a little more seriously.
The next day Trish Casner received an email from Columbus First Bank, notifying her that a hundred thousand dollars had been deposited into her account.
Perhaps she had dismissed Dr. Willis too hastily, she decided.
A month later she began her stint at this not-so-mythical institute, and a year later, today, she had finally fulfilled her end of the contract. This was her last of endless tests—not that she could remember any but this latest.
She wondered how many of them had turned out to be like this one. She couldn’t help but be bitter about what she had just been forced to endure. What a nasty test this was. Hitting her with a debilitating total memory loss. Making her think she had been impetuous and foolish enough to stow away on a spaceship. A fatal mistake that would force her to choose to end her own existence, and also believe she was forever scarring the love of her life in the process. A man she couldn’t remember, but one rendered to be irresistibly appealing to her.
Of course she had thought Burt Dalton was her ultimate fantasy in a man. Because Burt Dalton actually was her ultimate fantasy—taken from her actual fantasies.
Infinity Born Page 5