It didn’t really matter to me anymore whether things worked out well or not. I only hoped to remain true to myself in the future
An hour later a man wearing the battle armor of a mercenary came to the hospital, pushing his way through the crowded room. He saw me and raised a rifle to fire.
In that moment I achieved Instantaneity and dodged to the right. The shot slammed into the wall beside me.
I watched the barrel of the rifle, and it did not move toward me. The man seemed unbearably slow, as if he were sick and feeble; I felt I could have dodged his shots all day. I had never fought while in this mental state before, and I marveled at the difference.
An orderly who’d been standing around for the past two days jumped over a bed and kicked the mercenary in the head. He crumpled.
Several people pulled off the mercenary’s helmet and revealed a dark-skinned man of obvious Arab ancestry.
Another Alliance assassin.
The orderly jacked in a call to Garzón, then they hauled the assassin away. I was surprised and saddened by the event.
Garzón’s personal aid came to the hospital moments later and held a whispered conversation with Abriara.
She frowned at him, then he looked at me and left. She seemed disturbed, and for the next hour I watched her but didn’t ask any questions.
Finally, she waved me over and said, "Angelo, let’s go for a walk outside."
I put my arm around her and slid her off the bed. She didn’t speak as I guided her out the door. The sun was unbearably bright; the wind warm and humid.
The smell of ashes filled the air and the breeze whipped tiny white ashes along the street.
Abriara steered me to a large beige dome, and outside the dome on a table lay a set of battle armor and a flechette rifle. Abriara nodded toward the armor and said, "Put it on."
I did. There was no helmet.
When I’d dressed she looked in my eyes and said, "Garzón’s inside. He has a job for you. He says it’s dangerous." She embraced me.
I remembered Garzón’s hint that I should take a job as an assassin. I didn’t relish the idea of speaking with him. I picked up the flechette and walked into the dome, down a wide hallway of paneled wood. Garzón’s aide was sitting outside a door.
Chapter 36
"Garzón will see you inside," the aide said, nodding toward the door.
I opened the door and saw a room full of people, technicians working with holographic imaging equipment, a trio of cameras aimed at the door. I could not imagine what was going on. I thought they were making a movie of me entering the room. I swung the door wide, a little embarrassed to be on camera, stepped in, and saw a man standing ten paces away wearing the armor of a mercenary.
He raised a bolt pistol to chest height and I achieved Instantaneity. I shouted, "No!" and tried to dodge, thinking even as I rolled to the left that no one can dodge a bolt pistol.
Nothing happened. No blue ball of electricity shot across the room. A dozen people were seated behind the mercenary, including Tamara and Garzón. Tamara was hunched at a desk, a cranial jack rammed into the back of her skull.
She said, "Santos, play back the tape." On the table before her, a tiny image of me staggered back in surprise, shouted, "No!"
"I’d say the reaction shot looks very nice, very convincing, wouldn’t you?" Garzón asked her.
"Yes," Tamara agreed.
Garzón turned to me. "It seems we have a problem.
Captain Farouki is dismantling the Allied Marine base, preparing to return to Earth, and he is, loath to leave unfinished business." Garzón waved his hand: in the corner of the room, nearly obscured by machinery, the Arab assassin slept in a chair.
He wore a metal band around his head, a thin crown of platinum. The band was connected to a cranial jack. He was obviously drugged.
"For once," Garzón said, "I caught the assassin. The Idealist Socialist contingent in the Alliance blames you for their great failure in South America, and they know how to hold a grudge.
"We thought it best here in Intelligence to simulate your death, throw them off your trail. Tamara asked that you be brought in to see how we accomplish this. I thought that it might add to the realism of the moment if you believed that you were going to die.
"You will have to assume a new identity after this, understand?"
General Garzón turned to Tamara and nodded, indicating that it was her turn to speak.
Tamara didn’t turn her wheelchair to look at me. She simply told one of her aides, "Give me a neural map on the assassin."
An image appeared on the holo in front of Tamara, a ghostly rendition of the human brain. Within it, thousands of tendons of light curved like glowing worms through his parietal lobes, flashing across the cerebrum and dipping down into the limbic system, each light throbbing in intensity or dying.
I’d seen some brain maps. I knew that our assassin was a man focused on a plan. Garzón guided me nearer to the holograph.
"You’re familiar with neural mapping?" he said. "We monitor the electromagnetic fluctuations in the brain and pinpoint the firing of individual synapses. We’ve been playing with your killer for the past hour. We’ve hooked him up to a dream monitor and through associations we’ve been able to elicit the memories of his capture—the sights, sounds, smells, emotions.
"Here," he suggested, "let’s put it all up on the holograph."
He flipped a switch, and the memory played through.
The assassin himself was a blank space, a vacuum in an otherwise inhabited world. He was stalking toward the hospital, past mercenaries in green bug suits. He made no move to attack them, and had little to fear, for he was similarly attired. He reached the hospital and opened the door and fired, heard a noise, and whirled just as a blur struck him in the side of the head.
Garzón said, "The map you see here reveals the assassin’s exact memory of his capture. Tamara will stimulate the memory to keep it repeating. Now, watch:"
Garzón nodded. A technician stepped forward with a syringe and injected a small amount of opaque yellow fluid into the assassin’s carotid artery. After a period of two minutes, the pinpoints of light on the holograph all disappeared.
The assassin’s memory of his capture was completely erased.
The general said in a businesslike voice, "You no doubt know of omega-puromycin and a few other drugs used for mind wipes. Most are effective only in helping the target forget a recent memory, since they simply inhibit electrochemical activity in the brain. Yet the military has found even these crude tools useful in some situations.
"Yet other drugs can affect long-term memories—those that are chemically stored—by disrupting neuronal pathways between axons and dendrites in the cerebral cortex, thus turning a man’s mind into a tabula rasa, a clean slate. These too have been in use for centuries, but of course a complete mind-wipe is so ... conspicuous. These drugs are also clumsy, clumsy tools.
"But the drug that you’re seeing here is new. It’s effective at erasing select long-term memories—and therein resides its power." The general hesitated, clasped me on the shoulder, and chortled, "I won’t dare tell you the name of the drug. You might go home and figure out how to mix up a batch.
"But let’s just say that we have figured out how to take any man, any mind, and wipe exactly what we desire from it.
"Afterward, Tamara here can insert a new memory. We can make him recall, make him believe, almost anything that we want. We can program the human mind!"
The holograph in front of Tamara went clean, and she began to insert new memories, simple fantasies like one might watch for entertainment. But Tamara was a professional, an artistic genius.
She made her world seem perfect by controlling even the smallest detail. One would remember the dreams that she recorded as truth.
She began to fabricate the attack on me. Everything happened just as the killer had remembered—except that he caught me in a room alone. He fired his bolt pistol, and a blue ball of energ
y erupted from its barrel as I shouted and raised my hand, as if trying to ward off a blow.
The assassin then went to my corpse and inserted a needle, withdrawing a tissue sample, and quietly withdrew from the room.
At that moment, one of the general’s aides came and inserted a needle in my arm, withdrawing some blood so that he could plant it on the assassin as evidence of my demise.
I suddenly felt warm and very uncomfortable.
The general waved, and the technicians began to withdraw. They wheeled the assassin out, and I knew that the general was no telling me all of this simply to intrigue me.
He said, "When your killer awakens, he will be only momentarily confused, disoriented. But he will never know what happened."
Garzón watched me, his eyes glimmering with anticipation. There was an expression on his face of sadness, pity.
Suddenly I recalled being back home in Panamá, jacking out of my dream monitor, stumbling around the room, unable to recall the names of common household objects—a blank spot where recollections of my father memory should have been.
I remembered my compadres talking of General Quintanilla as if her were some grand hero, and I was a fool who knew nothing of history.
Something was wrong with me, terribly wrong. I’d left more than my compassion behind when I left my home.
All I want is away!
"You fucking whore!" I shouted at Tamara. "I never wanted to leave Panamá. Not once in my life had I ever wanted to leave! What did you do to me? You put your wishes in my head! What did you take from me?"
I glanced to my side. There was a pair of head phones on the table next to me. I grabbed them and threw them at Tamara, but at the last instant my arm spasmed and the shot went wide.
The very thought of hitting her filled me with consuming guilt.
I reached for my machete, intent on stabbing her.
Yet I couldn’t kill her. In a thousand years I knew that I would never be able to even consider harming her, no matter how justified I might feel.
I hurled my machete down and began to tremble. My breath came ragged and my teeth chattered, as they always do when I’m ready to kill.
"I think that Tamara would like to talk to you alone," Garzón said softly.
He studied me, kept between me and her for a moment, guarding her.
Tamara’s wheelchair spun and she faced me. Her face was slack, empty. Her microspeaker clattered, "Angelo won’t hurt me. He could never do it. He can’t harm a woman." Her voice issuing from the microspeaker sounded brutal, calculating. "Can you?"
I suddenly saw that she knew me better than I knew myself. I’d quit fighting in the battle for Hotoke no Za not because I’d hurt a person, but because I’d shot a woman. To kill men in battle, even innocent men, had hardly fazed me.
I felt like a fool. I’d been so self-congratulatory when I pretended that I had regained my compassion.
Tamara’s tone held a smirk as she informed Garzón, "His mother told him never to hit a girl." There was no apology in her eyes.
"That’s right! That’s right!" I shouted, recalling all of the times my mother had said it, until the idea was ingrained. I’d even shouted it as I slashed Lucío across the face. "You did that to me?"
I cursed and wanted to strike her, but found myself pacing back and forth like a mad dog in a cage.
Garzón watched us, confused, and I knew what confused him: Tamara’s challenging tone, her boastfulness. This was not at all like her.
He whispered to Tamara, "Very impressive! Impressive conditioning!"
Then he ordered me, "Don’t harm her. She altered the deep structures of your mind, erased patterns of thought built up over a lifetime. She won’t be able to fix that, but she can give you some of your true memories back. She’s been trying to recall what she took from you for nearly two years.
"I’ll leave you now."
The general exited the room, leaving it empty but for me and Tamara. His footsteps echoed loudly from the stone ceiling.
I shrugged and stood there, furious. I waited for her to speak.
Tamara regarded me distantly. I couldn’t fathom the meaning behind her empty gaze.
"I did my best work on you," she said. "I never got to make as many changes in the others—just minor reprogramming for intelligence work. But I wasn’t at my best that afternoon. I never was able to complete the job. I left some blank spaces in your memory, and that should have warned you that something was wrong.
"But you never caught on, did you?"
"I knew," I admitted. She sounded so sure of herself. "I found blank spaces. I can’t remember anything about my father except him weeping after my mother died."
"Fake," Tamara said. "I faked that dead-mother thing." Tamara watched me. "Still, you ran according to my program."
"What do you mean?"
Tamara watched me distantly. "You figure it out!" Her eyes focused on the tray where a package of syringes sat next to the vial of yellow liquid. "Give yourself point two milliliters of that. I have some cutting to do. I’ve got to delete the old radical program before I insert the new memories."
"You don’t need to cut out any more," I said, suddenly wary. "What do you mean by ‘radical program’?"
Tamara explained, "It’s just a term. A program is a set of memories we add to get you to act or behave differently than you otherwise would. For example, I’ll program our assassin here to tell his superiors that he killed you when he’d otherwise have to report his failure. We call that a program. But a radical program goes one step farther: we devise a program that leads to a specific compulsive behavior—one learns to think in certain patterns, to behave in certain ways based on past assumptions. A child who learns to lie his way out of trouble quickly develops a tendency to lie. Any time he’s faced with a dangerous situation he immediately tries to lie his way out of trouble. After years this response can become so ingrained it becomes the equivalent of a radical program." She admitted softly. "I put such a program in you."
I felt terribly defensive. "What kind?"
She looked down to the holograph in the corner. An image of a brain registered there, and worms of red fire wriggled through it. "I call it a parietal-hypothalamic loop. When you view any woman being harmed, you immediately associate it with the torture and murder of your mother, along with similar incidents that I programmed into your memory. This triggers an overwhelming sense of horror, and you remember the plans for vengeance that you never got to carry out. So you react with compulsive violence, regardless of the danger to yourself. I laid this program down hundreds of times across thousands of neuronal pathways. You’re incapable of acting in a manner contrary to your programming."
I knew that she spoke the truth. I’d reacted with violence to Abriara’s rape, and I’d seen Jafari’s attempt to capture Abriara as a form of rape. So I reacted according to programming, a marionette dancing on hits master’s strings.
Yet I could see no good reason to let her into my mind again, to risk letting her rob me of even more. "Why should I let you in?"
"Do you want to fly into a rage every time that you hear about a woman getting harmed?" Tamara asked. "Look what it’s already cost you. Inject yourself. Jack into the monitor." She glanced toward a dream monitor on the table.
The situation was so bewildering that I couldn’t think. I didn’t trust her fully, but she seemed sincere in her desire to do this for my own good. If she had had evil designs, I reasoned, she never would have needed to confide in me.
I filled the syringe, injected myself, and then plugged the monitor into the jacks at the base of my skull.
Chapter 37
I found myself in a cold desert where the wind swept over barren sands and seagulls whirled in the air like confetti.
The sky was gray. The scene made me tense. Tamara appeared before me, gazing deep into my eyes like a goddess, as if by merely peering into me with her black eyes she could fill my mind with revelations.
I suddenly recal
led General Quintanilla’s attempt to overthrow Guatemala, my mother’s blood spattered in droplets behind the china cabinet, my impotent rage, the rape of my sister Eva and my despair.
Suddenly it seemed that all of these things had happened only in dreams, vaguely disturbing dreams that were nearly forgotten.
I’d never haunted the alleys at night with a gun in my pocket searching for Quintanilla’s soldiers. I’d never suffered that keen rage and despair. Dozens of similar memories came to mind and dissipated in intensity in just the same way—a time in my youth when I’d got in a fight in a bar with a man who had laughed as he told of how he often beat his girlfriend, an incident where I’d slapped a young boy in the feria for hitting his sister.
A great pain filled my head. I heard a noise like strands of rubber snapping. I heard a great surging wind, and suddenly I blanked out.
I roused slowly and stared around, unsure where I was. A woman was sitting on a desert floor, staring up at seagulls. I walked over to her and just gazed at her silently. She paid no attention to me, and I wandered in circles till her name flashed in my mind, Tamara. I ambled back, recalling where I was.
She looked up at me and asked, "Ready?"
"Yes," I said, not sure what I was confessing readiness for.
A hundred memories came rushing into me.
I lived through’ them in dream time where a few seconds felt like hours. Moments from fifty years of life spread out before me, and I walked through them as if living for days. Most were shadowy things—a smell, a touch, voices whispering in a darkened room.
The mind doesn’t really store everything as some claim; rather, our mind tricks us when we push it too hard, filling in details from the imagination.
Rare were the memories that burst upon me in full clarity so that I understood all of the implications.
The memories didn’t come in single episodes, engraved in crisp detail. Rather, they were much in form like neurons within the brain—a cell reaching out, touching a cell, which reaches out to touches ten other cells. Each memory recalled ten other similar bits of memory, till the whole was woven inextricably together to form a story of a person or thing that had been important to my life.
On My Way to Paradise Page 50