by Jan Coffey
“These two arrived only an hour ago,” Sid pointed to the other doctors in the room. “I didn’t think you meant me.”
She shook her head and smiled, walking to the bed.
Actually, Sid had arrived before the Sunday morning receptionist. The night shift security attendant, after seeing his ID, had let him in. Sid couldn’t sleep last night. And he couldn’t explain what was going on in his own mind, either. It was a crazy mix of worry, bewilderment, fascination. Things that he preferred not to voice, for it confused the hell out of him. The only thing that soothed him was being here.
“Did she recognize you when you came in this morning?” Jennifer wanted to know.
“No. She woke up early but made no eye contact. She’s been facing that direction all morning. No response to any stimuli.” Sid had even tried the trigger of the day before by mentioning the sister’s name. There’d been no response to it, at all. He figured it might be because of what was going on in her mind—if the printouts that he held in his hand were correct.
“I see you have her all connected already. Anything good?” Jennifer asked, fussing over the young woman’s bed and blanket. She touched the patient’s hand, and Sid watched carefully. There was no reaction.
“I don’t know. I don’t know if what we have is good or bad. I can’t really understand it.” Sid looked at Mark. He was still standing by the doorway watching Amelia. He knew how the other man felt. She had a hypnotic effect on you.
“Maybe this,” Sid said to him, “is something you can make some sense out of.”
Mark walked over. “What do you have?”
“Pages of technical information,” Sid handed the papers to the other man. “But the very fact that we’re picking up the readings makes no sense.”
“What do you mean?”
“Well, do you see where she is looking?”
“At the wall.”
“Right.” Sid knew he had to simplify the issues he was grappling with, if Shaw was to understand it, at all. “Okay…none of us—Amelia included—become aware of visual information—or rather, what we’re seeing—until that information reaches the frontal area of the visual cortex—”
“Like a chain reaction?” Mark interrupted.
“More or less. Let me give you a streamlined version of the way we see something.” Sid thought for a moment. “The image our eye takes in bounces along the retina, which consists of three layers of neurons. Those neurons are responsible for detecting the light from the image and then causing impulses to be sent to the brain along the optic nerve. The brain eventually decodes these images into information that we know as vision, but that happens after the impulses pass through the visual cortex at the rear of the cerebellum and reach the cortex neurons at the frontal area of the visual cortex.”
Mark was holding his hands out to Sid to stop. “Hold on. Let me get this straight. The image comes through the eye along the optical nerve to the rear of the…the…”
“The cerebellum, a section of the brain.”
“And then the image passes to the frontal area of the…visual cortex?”
“Right. It’s there that the impulses are decoded as an image.”
“Okay,” Mark said. “I’ve got that part.”
“Well, we’re picking up our readings—intercepting messages—from the frontal part of the visual cortex.”
“So?”
“That indicates that what we’re intercepting is an instant visual experience.”
“What do you mean by instant visual experience?”
Sid rubbed the back of his neck.
“The initial brain reading device used by researchers was a master predictor,” Sid finally said. “They showed a number of patients photographs of different things, and at that very instant, the equipment captured the same image in the visual cortex of the participant’s brain. You showed them a picture of a dog, and in an instant you captured the picture of the same dog.”
Mark nodded.
“Well, we can see what Amelia is looking at. She is not looking at the images that she is decoding. It’s as if she is not seeing what she is looking at. She’s seeing something else.”
“And that ‘something else’ is on these sheets of paper?”
“Exactly. She’s looking at the blank wall…but she’s seeing what amounts to pages of technical data.”
Jennifer was staring at Sid. The other doctors were now leaning over Desmond’s shoulder.
“Could it be memory?” Mark asked.
“No. If memory were involved, we’d be seeing other, specific areas of the brain lighting up on our equipment. Besides, in my opinion, there is no way Amelia could memorize detail this specific in this kind of volume. Everything points to the conclusion that what we’ve captured on these pages is some kind of instant visual experience.”
“But not the same visual experience that Amelia is having at this instant,” Mark said in a low voice. “There are no pages of data in her line of vision.”
Sid nodded.
“And this is what she was seeing.” Mark was looking at the sheets.
“And there seems to be a very logical order in what she is showing us,” Desmond added. “This is a sequence of material. Pages. And I have a lot more data that we haven’t printed yet.”
“Some of this looks like hieroglyphics.”
“A lot of it is garbled, but more of it is not. The garbled portions are due to the limitations of our computer programs.”
“We’re operating the most advanced programs on a huge system of linked computers,” Sid said. “But we’re still no match for the human brain.”
“She makes me feel stupid,” Nat Rosen commented from his computer.
It was tempting to tell Nat to go with the feeling, but Sid decided this was probably not the right moment for humor.
Mark paged quickly through the sheets of paper. “It seems to be a manual—a facilities manual of some kind.”
Sid put his hand on Mark’s arm. “Remember our discussion last night?”
“About twins.”
Sid nodded. “Look at this…” He took a page that Desmond printed and handed it to Mark. “Read this out loud.”
Mark took the page and read it. “‘Such a multidisciplinary approach was also followed for the characterization of fracture zones at the GTS, especially by attempting to relate seismological parameters to mechanical and hydrogeological properties of fractures.’” He stopped.
“This is not a phone number that she’s memorized,” Sid said.
“You think Marion would have known or read this kind of material.”
“Except that Marion is dead,” Sid said bluntly. “And there’s no way anyone, no matter how bright, could have memorized all of this. We’re talking about word by word.”
Jennifer broke in. “Some people have a photographic memory.”
“This precise?” Sid asked, shaking his head. “Maybe, but as I told you before, this is not memory.”
“What are you saying?” Mark asked.
“I don’t know. I have no clue.” With the back of one hand, Sid rapped the stack of papers that continued to spill out of the printer. “I don’t know what this stuff is. I don’t know how she’s doing it.”
Silence fell across the room. Mark had been struck speechless, too. Sid looked over at Jennifer. She had moved to the other side of the bed, where Amelia’s face was directed. She was sitting on the edge of the bed, watching the young woman.
“She starts with a phone number,” Nat said, breaking the silence. “The next day she’s feeding us some kind of technical manual. I can’t wait for tomorrow.”
They all looked at him.
He shrugged. “I looks to me like she’s getting ready to teach us how to build an atomic bomb.”
“Do something useful,” Desmond snapped at the other man, “and go get me a cup of coffee.”
As the two young physicians started bickering, Sid watched Mark move to where Jennifer was sitting. He followed
him.
Amelia was looking at an empty space on the wall. This was the most detached from her surroundings Sid had seen her when she was awake. The printer continued its rhythmic production of paper.
“Speaking plainly…” Jennifer started hesitantly in a quiet voice. “You’re saying that telepathy between the two sisters is the only way to explain this. Amelia is seeing everything that Marion is reading right now.”
Sid and Mark both looked at the nurse. No one needed to say it. They all knew what every news media outlet was reporting. Marion couldn’t be reading anything if she was dead.
“They haven’t found the bodies. They’re assuming that they are all dead,” Jennifer said, frowning. “If you’re right, this is the reason for the changes in Amelia. For six years, there was no progress at all in her condition. And then last week, even before you arrived, she started having episodes. She’s trying to tell us something.”
The nurse looked in the direction of the medical charts at the foot of the bed. Sid grabbed the clipboard and flipped the pages back to last week.
“Thursday. Both you and Doctor Baer made notes in here.”
“The explosion in the Gulf of Mexico was last Thursday morning,” Mark told them. “My cell phone number. The way she looked at me when I first met her yesterday…like she knew me. The response to Marion’s name. And now the facility handbooks. This is important. She is trying to tell us that there are survivors in the research facilities.” He looked up at them urgently. “We have to notify the authorities. Tell them all of this.”
“Mark…” Sid started to object. He knew how bureaucracy worked. They wouldn’t take their findings seriously, for what they were doing wasn’t an established and approved method. Not yet. And the telepathic communication between twins added a whole additional level of implausibly to it. “Everything we have is hypothetical. What we have here is…a lot of assumptions.”
“All the information is lining up so much better in my head,” Mark told them. “Clearer. Now I know why Amelia would give you my number and not a friend in California or someone in her family. And as far as not having exact facts, I come with the training that says you respond to every 911 call.”
“Do you really think you can get whoever is in charge down at the Gulf of Mexico to believe that there’s been a call?” Sid asked.
“I have to try,” Mark said. “I have to.”
CHAPTER 33
Nuclear Fusion Test Facility
“Two facility names. Two set of books. Two different locations.”
Marion’s words cut through the darkness and the silence. It was comforting to hear her own voice, especially when things were getting worse than she’d ever thought possible. She turned on another flashlight and propped it on the floor of the maintenance room.
She sat with her back against the wall. Empty bottles of water and a couple of green granola bar wrappers indicated that she’d met some of her basic needs of survival. But the two separate piles of the documents sitting by her feet on the floor made her wonder why she’d bothered.
Marion had looked through hundreds of pages in the manuals.
“NMURL and WIPP.”
Two separate sets of books. She had thought their group was stationed in the New Mexico Underground Research Lab. The documentation she’d grabbed off Andrew Bonn’s shelves confirmed it. But the books sitting on the top shelf of this room identified this facility as the Waste Isolation Pilot Plant.
There was a complete layout of the facility in WIPP booklets. Room by room, the drawings matched this facility, the one she’d been working and living in from day one. The WIPP booklets appeared to be complete, professionally done. But she’d been told they were in NMURL.
She closed her eyes and took a deep breath trying to calm the feeling of panic that once again lay like an icy snake between her shoulder blades. She tried to think back to the first days, to the information she’d been given.
They were operating under a grant funded by the New Mexico Power Company. Originally, they were to be working at an underground research facility by the Gulf of Mexico. She knew her salary, the duration of project, and the medical benefits. There were pages and pages of confidentiality agreements that she’d had to sign. Though the principal researchers probably had separate contractual agreements, hers stated that anything she discovered would belong to the power company. Even for her to refer to this project in any scientific papers she wanted to publish, she needed their permission. Dr. Lee told her those kinds of restrictions were fairly standard.
As far as the facility itself, she hadn’t been given much detail up front. And she hadn’t asked many questions, either. It didn’t matter, she’d thought.
“Stupid.”
Too excited about what she considered an amazing opportunity, she’d only followed like a sheep in the flock. She’d left her future in the hands of people she considered experts.
Marion wondered how many of the other scientists in this group had been clueless. How many of them had had no idea where they were? And what about the people at the power company? The heading used in their daily communications was NMURL. The liaisons up top had even been sending them weather reports for the Gulf.
Only once during their time down here had Marion suspected that they weren’t being told all the details. It was during their first week working at the lab. The quantity of live nuclear test lots on hand was higher than research labs were normally allowed. The safety precautions were the same, however, so she hadn’t lost any sleep over it.
She thought back to when they’d first arrived at the site. She had been somewhat surprised that so few people had been involved in the actual transportation here. They’d arrived at the lab by helicopter in the middle of the moonless night. Beneath them, everything had been nearly black, and for some time before landing, she had seen only in the distance an occasional flicker of lights. She remembered being surprised that the Gulf coast was so deserted, but she hadn’t thought anything more of it. It was not until they were hovering directly over the facility that she’d said something to Dr. Lee about it. The lights along a perimeter fence and a square patch of tarmac had lit up. At the center sat a two story concrete building with a line of garage doors along the side facing the landing pad. On the roof, she saw what appeared to be a small crane. There was nothing to indicate that a research facility was housed beneath the building.
She hadn’t smelled the salt air she’d been expecting. That’s the only thing Marion remembered thinking was at all odd. But her mentor had only shrugged. He wasn’t much on flying, and his gaze was riveted to the landing area. So she’d shrugged it off, as well. She didn’t know how close exactly to the Gulf the Underground Research Lab was supposed to be located. And once they were on the ground, she’d been so completely focused on making sure all the equipment they’d carried was moved into the building and loaded onto the elevator.
“Idiot.”
She dug her fists into her eyes, forcing them to stay open. Too late.
They’d dropped beneath the radar, clearly. Why, though? What were they doing that would cause anyone to have a group of killers come down that elevator and eliminate them all?
She thought of all the online chatter about conspiracy theories. Ever since the ‘50s, it seemed, television and movies teemed with tales of UFOs, government cover-ups, and major corporations in league with everyone from Satanists to Freemasons. She’d always had a more than passing interest in such stories, but she had never thought any of it might actually touch her own life. As far as she could tell, not one of the scientists in her group had considered even for an instant that some harm might befall them.
She didn’t know if she was on the right track, even, but nibbling along the edge of her consciousness was the nagging thought that someone might not have wanted the research they were doing to surface. Why else come down and kill them?
Their project goal was to design and build portable nuclear energy devices without the fear of leakage or acci
dents. Because of the demands of the world energy market, it was just a matter of time before size could no longer be a limiting factor. The unique alloy of stainless steel for plutonium storage they’d discovered was not only the answer to small applications—like factories or apartment buildings—but could lead to storage devices for individual homes, or even transportation vehicles. Because of the work they were doing, the possibility actually existed that an automobile would only have to be fueled one time for its entire life, or that any building could be self-sufficient in meeting its heating, cooling and electrical needs for decades.
There was, of course, a lot of money to be made. And their work would add huge gains in the effort to break the world’s dependence on oil. That was the most worthy outcome, as far as Marion was concerned.
The power company. The New Mexico Power Company. She wracked her throbbing brain trying to come up with a reason why the power company would ‘kill the project.’ The irony of the term didn’t escape her. If it weren’t for the dead bodies of people she knew lying not forty yards from where she was sitting, she might be amused. Robert Eaton. Arin Bose. Stephan Huang. Eileen Arrington. Dr. Lee...
If the power company was somehow behind it, she tried to imagine how they could possibly get away with this. They couldn’t. They’d made the grant very public. There’d been so many press releases in science magazines and in notes in technical journals about what the group was on the verge of accomplishing. Naturally, the specific technical details were to be published once the study was over. In fact, now that she thought about it, Marion realized that the importance of the project had to be the reason behind all the security regarding the location.
Another thought in defense of the New Mexico Power Company popped into Marion’s head. They were the ones set to make the most money in the production of the portable reactors and energy devices.
It couldn’t be them. It had to be someone else.
The word conspiracy was again burning a hole in her brain.