Witness X: ‘Silence of the Lambs meets Blade Runner’ Stephen Baxter

by SE Moorhead

They stood for a moment, eyes locked. A defiance rose in Kyra.

  ‘I’m disappointed, that’s all.’ Her heart was thumping as Carter glared at her, ‘But no matter, at least the criminal justice system will get full permission from their clients when they use it.’

  Brownrigg looked at Carter, confused. ‘This isn’t what we’d agreed.’

  Kyra saw something pass between the two men.

  ‘No, this is merely a misunderstanding. A lack of communication, that’s all,’ Carter stammered.

  ‘This has to remain Classified,’ Brownrigg said firmly, his expression serious. He pointed at Kyra and Jimmy. ‘You do understand the implications if this sort of technology gets into the wrong hands? Do you realise just how powerful what you’ve invented is?’

  Kyra didn’t know whether to be flattered or outraged. Who was he to tell her what she could and couldn’t do with her own invention?

  ‘Imagine how this could be used against us if—’ Brownrigg began.

  ‘Us?’ snorted Kyra.

  Carter scowled at her.

  ‘Doctor Sullivan,’ Brownrigg said in a low, menacing voice. ‘Your technology is going to save people’s lives and, in order to do that, it must be kept top secret.’

  ‘Top secret?’ Kyra guffawed. She looked over at Jimmy, but his face was white. It hit then that Brownrigg was deadly serious.

  ‘What I am trying to express to you, Doctor Sullivan, in no uncertain terms, is that this technology would be dangerous in the wrong people’s hands. It needs to be kept confidential. We can’t take the risk.’

  ‘I invented this technology.’ She was openly angry now. ‘It’s not for you to decide.’

  ‘You’ll be compensated,’ he said coldly.

  ‘I don’t want to be compensated! I want this tech to go to people who need it! The criminal justice system—’

  ‘Sort this,’ Brownrigg commanded Carter, making a waving movement with his hand.

  ‘Of course. It will be sorted,’ Carter said obsequiously. ‘Let me show you to my office and we can talk privately.’

  Brownrigg moved through the doorway and Carter jabbed a finger at Kyra angrily.

  Nausea suddenly overwhelmed her and she sat back down on the recliner, exhausted and disappointed.

  This wasn’t what she’d had in mind.

  Not at all.

  Chapter Two

  THURSDAY 1 FEBRUARY 2035

  6.02 p.m.

  ‘I’m absolutely fine,’ Kyra insisted as Jimmy’s fingers flitted over the virtual keyboard and he focused on the computer screen, intently reading the output from her monitors. The blue-white light highlighted his aquiline nose and reflected as tiny bright squares in his dark blue eyes. She drained the second glass of water he had brought her, to help cool her body and swallow down the bitterness of her interaction with Brownrigg.

  ‘Just following protocol, Doctor Sullivan,’ he said with a smile. Jimmy brushed his dark curly hair out of his eyes. Kyra thought he had a pleasant face and he could certainly turn on the charm. He worked mainly with bio-chips and tracking devices. He had tested one on her car and she’d teased him about being a stalker, or Q from James Bond. She’d never asked why he’d left his previous job as a GP. She didn’t want to pry.

  She had spent ten minutes in CASNDRA’s scanner, seething, after Brownrigg and Carter had left. Now she was standing next to Jimmy looking at images of her own brain.

  ‘All looks good to me,’ he said, studying the screen. ‘Your amygdala is lit up like a Christmas tree.’ He faced her, curious now. ‘What was it like in his memory?’

  ‘Stressful,’ she said, exhaling. ‘It’s a shame I don’t get some sort of heads-up beforehand of what I might see.’ Her hand reached up to her neck again. ‘It’s not every day you get your throat cut.’

  ‘It proved the tech worked. He seemed pretty impressed.’

  ‘I wish I’d lied now and told him I couldn’t see anything,’ she said, deflated.

  ‘I’m sorry. I know it’s not what you wanted.’

  ‘Bloody Carter. He only sees the money,’ she grunted.

  ‘Watch yourself,’ Jimmy said, turning back to the screen. ‘You’re on thin ice with him after the last row. You know what he’s like.’

  She ignored this and sat back down on the recliner. ‘Cosmo, look up Lieutenant General Brownrigg.’ A montage of photographs and articles immediately filled the wall-mounted screens in front of her – Brownrigg as a young handsome soldier, sandy hair, green eyes; then older, with medals, bravery awards, leading his men out on the field. It all appeared so noble. Nothing to do with the death of a boy. She couldn’t imagine the forces would want that highlighted. Even the hypernet didn’t always get to the hidden truth.

  ‘Your heart rate is coming down. It should be lower though. It never goes up like this when you’re in my head. Cosmo, lights one hundred per cent.’

  She shielded her eyes against the brightness as the computer obeyed. ‘Why did you call the lab computer Cosmo?’

  ‘Name of my first dog,’ he replied, looking at the screen. ‘Loved that animal.’

  She nodded approvingly.

  Reading memories was different with Jimmy. CASNDRA had been her innovation, she’d developed the nano- and pico- technology for it, but Jimmy had built most of the equipment using her blueprint. He had been one of the first people she’d dared to test her work on other than her lab assistant, Phil Brightman. Jimmy trusted her enough to let her rummage around in his brain. It was an intimate experience which she dealt with gently. She’d gone looking for very specific details in his memory to test the machine. It was like a game of hide and seek. Jimmy would ask her something she couldn’t possibly have known, and she’d had to find the answer somewhere in his memory.

  She could still remember the first time, the most thrilling of all, when they knew the tech worked. They had spent most of the day playing games, Kyra trying to discover tiny snippets of information from Jimmy. What set my asthma off in Spain when I was thirteen?

  She’d seen it clearly, a beautiful young Spanish girl, her long dark lashes over brown eyes, Jimmy trying to talk to her in broken Spanish. The girl had suddenly reached her arms around his neck and kissed him on the lips and then ran away laughing. Jimmy had been so thrilled or panicked, maybe even both, that it had triggered a mild asthma attack. Later, when they were laughing about it in the lab, Jimmy had said he’d been so embarrassed that he hadn’t told a soul.

  He didn’t laugh so much when Kyra told him some weeks later that she had been experiencing a tightness of her chest occasionally, usually immediately after they’d used the technology. It was then that she had begun to wonder about the less obvious side effects of CASNDRA. Was it really possible to pick up physical traits after being in someone else’s memories?

  Going into Jimmy’s memories was like going into a friend’s house to collect an important item. She knew her way around and didn’t feel uncomfortable poking about or peering behind the scenes, as long as she was quick and respectful.

  By contrast, travelling into Brownrigg’s mind had felt like trespassing. She’d never met him before and hadn’t known anything about him before she’d gone in. Who knew what she might have found inside his brain, what she might have picked up?

  Jimmy grabbed a small scanner and wheeled his chair over to the recliner and passed it over her face and neck.

  ‘He’s seen some awful things. It was literally like Hell.’

  Jimmy checked the reading. ‘All looks good here.’

  He faced the main screen and Kyra stood up and stretched.

  ‘What time is it?’ she asked.

  ‘The time is eighteen hours four minutes,’ came a disembodied electronic male voice.

  ‘Thank you, Cosmo. CASNDRA, reset please,’ Kyra commanded. There was a mechanical gliding sound as the bed moved back into position, then two beeps and a small red light on the main circular part of the machine turned green.

  ‘Are you sure you’re okay
?’ Jimmy asked. ‘Tight chest again. Anything we should worry about?’

  ‘No,’ she shook her head. ‘I’m just annoyed.’

  God, if she could pick asthma up from Jimmy, what the hell might she have inherited from Brownrigg?

  ‘Psychosomatic at worst.’ She paused and then said tentatively, ‘You don’t think Phil Brightman’s heart attack had anything to do with CASNDRA, do you?’

  Helping Kyra with testing the kit in the initial stages of development had been one of Phil’s main duties. He had died in his sleep, not long after a transference experiment. That had been when Jimmy had stepped in, taking time out of his own work in the lab next door to Kyra’s to see how the kit he had helped build worked.

  ‘No,’ Jimmy said, concentrating on the screen in front of him. ‘I don’t think people have psychosomatic heart attacks.’

  ‘I suppose not,’ Kyra took off her white coat and hung it on the back of the door.

  ‘Undiagnosed heart condition. Could have seen him off at any time,’ Jimmy added.

  ‘Yes, of course. Nothing to do with CASNDRA,’ she reassured herself.

  He turned away from the screen to look at her. ‘Have you been having any more of those dreams?’

  She wished she hadn’t told him if he was going to keep on making a fuss about it.

  They had decided that the vivid dreams she sometimes had after transferences were residual memories, things that had somehow stuck in her brain. But they seemed bloody real in the middle of the night when she was in the dark, alone.

  ‘No.’ The corners of her mouth dipped as she shook her head, but there was tension in her jaw, and she didn’t meet his eyes.

  ‘Well, here’s my prescription,’ he said, scribbling on a piece of paper and handing it to her.

  She knitted her eyebrows, anxious for a moment. There was one word on the piece of paper.

  Coffee.

  ‘On me,’ she said, relieved for the time being.

  Kyra pushed open the heavy glass door to the lab and Jimmy followed, the rubber soles of his shoes making a slight squeaking sound on the grey, matt tiles. The lights in the corridors were a series of spotlights from above which caused pools of brightness intermittently along the dark floor, and at the base of the walls there were glowing strips of light-beading which gave a kind of backgammon board pattern.

  Carter had done a good job of designing this space. He was good at what he did, using money to make money. Quality attracts quality, he said often enough.

  Many of the walls in CarterTech were glass. Kyra could often see Jimmy working in his own lab, next to hers. His tech was increasingly in demand – he inserted bio-chips under the skin for banking, handy if you left home without any money, and bio-tracking devices for children of paranoid parents, or errant husbands as he sometimes joked. More recently, he had developed a tech that allowed him to implant nano-mobile communication devices under the skin – bio-phones he nicknamed them – but Kyra wasn’t too sure she liked the idea of being ever-available.

  The coffee machine was in the waiting area, or the ‘foyer’ as Carter liked to call it. He had placed large canvases of what Kyra supposed he considered ‘arty’ paintings around the room – images of various parts of the human body in gaudy colours in thick lines of paint; a blue hand, an orange back, a green face. There was a ceramic sculpture of the human brain on a pedestal on the reception desk, the phrenological areas marked out in black lines and glossy lettering. Kyra hated that the most.

  She flashed her credit card towards the coffee machine for payment. ‘Two black coffees.’ She wasn’t ready for a banking chip under the skin, she had decided, even though Jimmy had offered her one.

  Jimmy sprawled onto one of the grey angular sofas whilst the machine took its time to dispense the coffee. As soon as one cup was full, Kyra picked it up and moved over to hand it to him.

  Carter burst in from the main door. She jumped, hot coffee spilling on her hand. Jimmy sat up straight.

  ‘Thanks for nearly fucking that up!’ He stood in front of her, shoulders squared, face florid. ‘I’ve shown Brownrigg out but, believe me, I have had to do some serious work in the last half hour to convince him to go through with this deal.’

  Jimmy stood up, took his coffee from Kyra and quietly made his way back to his own lab.

  ‘Human rights? What on earth were you thinking? Have you any idea how long it took me to set up this meeting, how important the lieutenant general is?’

  Kyra turned her attention back to the coffee machine, her blood feeling like the churning hot water being spewed out from the nozzle onto the synthetic coffee granules.

  ‘The army, Carter? Don’t you think I should have known that before I went into the war zone in his head? The things I saw in there … You could have bloody warned me!’

  ‘I said from the start, when we made this partnership, you’re the brains, I’m the business.’ He screwed up his eyes and then opened them. ‘You have the ideas and I sell them. I let you do whatever you want in that lab, and I pay for all of it,’ he growled. ‘You have to let me do my job. You’ve got to trust me that I have the interests of the company at heart. I approached the MOD first because we have the tech, they have the money: it’s a straight trade.’

  She turned to face him. ‘Yes and look how they’re going to use it. We’re talking about going into someone’s memory without their consent, Carter! It’s not a bloody police state. You can’t go into someone’s house without a search warrant. There’s no way the government would sanction this. I wouldn’t have left criminal profiling if I’d known my tech was going to be used for brain-hacking people against their will.’

  ‘It’s a necessary evil to beat the terrorists. Think of the recent anti-poverty protests, the acid attacks, the arson, the water poisonings. They’re not going to go away, Kyra! The public is afraid, and where there’s fear there’s money! Come on, think about what you could do for your family – pay your mum’s mortgage off, university fees for your niece.’

  ‘Leave Molly out of this,’ she hissed. How dare he use her niece to emotionally blackmail her. ‘Brownrigg clearly seems to think this is cut and dried. In fact, he says I can’t use my own technology because it’s got to be top secret!’ The hand holding the coffee was shaking. She put the cup down on the reception desk.

  ‘Jesus, Kyra, for a smart woman you’re being really stupid right now!’ He sighed heavily. ‘Don’t you get it? The MOD are terrified your tech is going to get into the wrong hands and—’

  ‘Wrong hands!’ she spat.

  ‘Brownrigg says it’s good if we have it on our side, catastrophic if it’s on theirs.’

  ‘Our side?’ snorted Kyra. ‘All of a sudden you’re interested in politics and terrorism?’

  He stepped in close to her and she leaned back a little. ‘Yes, if they’re going to offer the sort of money that Brownrigg’s suggested! We won’t need to sell the tech to anyone else, we’ll be flush!’ His eyes always lit up when he talked about money.

  ‘Carter, how many times do we have to fight about this before you get the message? You knew all along why I designed this tech. You knew I wanted it to go to the justice system. Imagine the accurate witness statements, helping innocent people who have been wrongly convicted and assisting families who need closure.’

  His facial expression changed momentarily, becoming softer. Was he going to be swayed? But then his eyes narrowed again.

  ‘That’s pie in the sky, Kyra! You know there’s no way that you could use this sort of tech-accessed witness statements in court, not for years yet. There’s still work to be done before it gets to that stage. More empirical evidence to show it’s one hundred per cent reliable, more testing needed. There’s no way we’d get any money from the justice—’

  ‘Jesus, Carter, it’s not all about money!’

  ‘Look, I know you’re upset,’ he began.

  ‘I’m not upset, I’m furious –’ she jabbed a finger towards him ‘– with you. And yet
here you are, ready to sell it to the highest bidder exclusively,’ she said, picking up her cup and turning back to face him. ‘So not only will it go to brain-hacking interrogators, but I won’t be able to use it for anyone else!’

  ‘Calm down!’

  ‘We’re partners. You shouldn’t have agreed to anything before speaking to me. You saw the money and thought: screw Kyra’s opinion.’

  ‘We both signed that agreement when we made this partnership. If you break the contract, then you might as well go. We don’t have to work together, Kyra. If you can find someone who will fund your work and let you invent what the hell you like, then fine, you can go and work with them.’

  ‘Is that a threat or a promise?’

  ‘If you go against me again, you’ll find out.’

  She focused on the sculpture of the brain. So crass.

  ‘It’s out of my hands, Kyra. The MOD will take it from us anyway, even if we don’t sell it to them. It’s too powerful. Might as well make some money on it. Move on to a new project. What about the memory-loss project you told me about; that sounds like a goer.’

  She didn’t answer, was too busy fighting back hot tears. She didn’t want him to see her cry, so she turned back and picked up her cup, sipped at the coffee and winced. She remembered when she was little and her dad used to make a pot of real coffee and the smell of it would waft around the house. Not like this man-made rubbish.

  ‘I know you want to do what’s right. Look on the bright side …’ He paused, dropped his hands to his waist. ‘Selling to the MOD will do good. You can’t argue against preventing terrorism. They’ve really upped their game lately. You can’t go shopping these days without someone setting off a device nearby because they’re pissed off that someone else has more money than them, or some eco-warriors are kicking off.’ He sighed, clearly burned out. ‘There’re other people out there who would be grateful to work here.’

  She faced him, unable to hide her fury. ‘What, you’re going to take your ball home, Carter? You’re going to sack me?’ she goaded.

  ‘Don’t make this difficult for both of us. I picked you because you were the best.’ He scowled at her. ‘But don’t mess this up. You’ve got to focus on the future, your future.’