NLI-10

by Lee Isserow

  “I was only trying to be helpful...” said the nurse.

  Sarah apologised and deleted the insulting tags. The nurse said it was fine and sat with her as she recalled sitting in the rec room, having breakfast, waking up, going to sleep, Leah's freakout, the test the previous day, giving each of them mundane tags. She looked over to the nurse, who was visibly bored.

  “I think I've got the hang of this.” said Sarah. “You're welcome to go get a coffee or something.”

  “If you don't mind, love.” said the nurse. “That would do me the world of good.”

  After she left, Sarah continued to go through the memories, glad not to be watched over. She knew that as she got farther back in time, she'd undoubtedly pass memories of her intentions in the facility, and although she wouldn't tag them, didn't trust that the NeuralNet wasn't spying on her mind somehow.

  An hour passed and she had managed to go back nine years, the nurse only checked in on her once to make sure the electrodes hadn't fallen off. Sarah was worried what would happen when she got to the memories of her parents. If the NeuralNet was only monitoring her vitals then it wasn't a problem, but if it was doing more, if it were somehow connecting to the OS installed in her subconscious, then maybe it would be able to discern their faces like her FaceRecog was able to recognise the other members of the group.

  Without thinking, she found herself remembering the day she was told about her parent's accident. Coming home early in the morning from a party, ecstasy and alcohol still milling in her blood. The drugs glazed the emotion with a neon tint, distracted from the tears unconsciously rolling down her face as the policeman told her she'd have to identify them. Her mind was all over the place, body telling her to touch his hat and feel the textures of his uniform whilst her consciousness was trying to stay afloat between devastation of the news and elation of the MDMA. She went in his car, her hands shaking uncontrollably, wishing it were all a dream, floating on a storm cloud of serotonin peaks and troughs. They pulled the sheet back and she saw their faces. Their lifeless, pale faces.

  The NeuralNet monitor beeped.

  Pulled out of the memory and back in the room, Sarah looked over to the monitor, a red alert blinking. She got up, careful not to disturb any of the electrodes and tried to activate the console. It wasn't coded for her biometric profile, and wouldn't respond to her touch.

  Whark watched intently at the monitor as Sarah was visibly panicking. She scanned through the logs of the facility's NeuralNet and saw the alert. FaceRecog had picked up the profiles of two former APEX employees in her mind's eye. The alert asked if she wanted to forward the memo off to the external A-Eye system and she hovered over the options. Whark watched as Sarah continued to fret, knowing that she would never report it to the wider system. That would tell the superiors at APEX that she was finishing up a very personal vendetta with company resources. She wanted to see what Sarah would do next.

  Sarah gave up trying to battle with the console she couldn't operate, and sat back in the chair, making sure the electrodes were all in place. They were monitoring her. Connecting to her, to the software installed in her brain. She tried to think about how that could possibly work, wished she had read more, or asked Micah about NeuralNets, it was the type of thing he'd probably know all about. She went in to her memories, using the tags to pull out all the times she read or heard about NeuralNets. Every memory in which they had ever been mentioned, articles she had half-read, conversations she had tried to ignore, documentaries that were left on in the background. They were all displayed in front of her, each titled like albums on iTunes. She span them all through as quick as they would play, listening and looking out for important information.

  “Artificial Neural Networks are inspired by biological neural networks, built using neuromorphic engineering to –“ she span past the physical process of how they were put together, it wasn't important. The more she searched, the more it seemed like a fruitless endeavour, none of the information seemed relevant. She had never talked or read enough about them. But it was connected to her right now, it was monitoring her very thoughts, seeing what she saw in her mind's eye. If it could see what she saw, Sarah started to wonder if maybe she could see what it saw. There was a tingling in the back of her head, the familiar feeling of the operating system's gears whirring, an app unlocking and activating. She closed her eyes as she tried to comprehend the data that was appearing in her interface. It was all too much, overwhelming her senses, it wasn't meant to be accidentally triggered, she wasn't experienced enough with the operating system to deal with the uncontrolled burst of data exploding through her cortex. She opened her eyes, and realised they weren't just her eyes.

  The lights went out.

  When they came back on, Sarah was seeing from her own perspective, but was also watching herself from the corner of the room. She turned and looked up at her own point of view, from the LED of the A-Eye, staring at herself whilst she stared at herself. One of a thousand eyes she could feel connected out across the facility.

  Whark watched as Sarah looked up at the camera, the electrodes barely gripping to her skin. She daren't blink. Her eyes locked on Sarah as she turned to the console. Whark briefly glanced over to the screen with the alert, then back to the camera feed.

  Sarah looked at the alert, thinking about the heartbeat-in-her-head, willing it into being. A pressure was building in the back of her mind, like someone was blowing into a washing-up glove in her head, a sense of inflation with fingers crawling on the inside of her skull, making their way along the channels in her neural tissue, she could see every feed of every camera all at once, a thousand eyes each on a different room. It was disorienting, but she couldn't let the connection go. She went through all the feeds, pulled back to the room she was in, watched herself standing in front of the console, and tried to get the biometric profile to be lifted. It wasn't working, it wasn't something she knew how to do. But the console was on the NeuralNet, she could get in to the system without having to touch it. She didn't know how she was going to do so, but it was as if her thoughts were ten steps ahead of her. Mind's eye flooded with electric light, subconscious speeding through pathways, turning through digital corridors that she knew had to just be graphic representations her mind was coming up with to allow her to comprehend what she was doing. Twisting and turning through the maze of light, she came to a door, and somehow knew that it operated and brought up the alert. As she reached for it, with a hand that only existed in her imagination, she read the alert from within the system.

  FaceRecog has scanned profiles of former APEX employees in subject's memory.

  Do you wish to forward alert

  to the external A-Eye Net?

  She cancelled the notification, and delved back in to the NeuralNet. If she could get access to the console, maybe this was her way to get all the intel she so desperately wanted without even having to step foot in a physical room.

  Her thoughts were cut off. She couldn't keep them out any longer, the eyes in every corridor in the facility, every room. it was overwhelming. She ripped the electrodes from her head, falling to the floor in a daze. Head pounding. Eyes aching. As if she had been staring at something too bright, too close, for too long.

  Whark watched as the nurse eventually returned and helped Sarah back up into the chair, the subject giving her an excuse of 'wanting to stretch her legs and slipped'. Whark scoffed at the nurse's gullibility, but didn't care about employing an idiot. Her favourite from this experiment's toy box had just become top of the class.

  8

  “Red walls.” said the nurse.

  The subjects stared into middle-distance as they brought up all the images of red walls from the depths of their memories. Rooms, paintings, music videos, buildings, everything relevant to the key phrase.

  “Play the memory, describe it.” she said, as she had done with each key phrase for the last hour of testing the memory tagging process.

  Alex recalled a Rothko. Sarah discovered a long
lost memory of a cafe her parents took her to when she was ten. Micah picked the red backdrop of Nirvana's Heart Shaped Box. Rob recalled the red curtain around Twin Peaks' Black Lodge. Farah pulled the memory of a photo from an interior design magazine she flipped through once at a dentist's office. Pete found the memory of a strip club he was once forced to go to by a straight friend. But Leah had nothing.

  “It's still not working!” she said, pursing her lips, eyes glazed with tears waiting to fall.

  “Take a deep breath.” said the nurse. “Think about the words again, 'Red. Walls.' Let your unconscious mind do all the work, deep breaths all the way through, until the images start to form.”

  She stared hard at the black wall ahead of her, leaning forward, squinting, trying to concentrate, and the nurse could see she was having trouble.

  “Stop trying so hard, dear. This works without you having to think about it. Sit back and relax.”

  Leah did so, breathing deep and holding each inhalation for a few seconds before exhaling.

  “Red. Walls.” the nurse said again.

  Leah closed her eyes and the images began to propagate slowly. She opened them and the images faded. Closing her eyes, she tried again, thinking over and over 'red walls, red walls, red walls'. Finally, an image came. A painting of Dante's Inferno her father had once shown her. She opened her eyes and couldn't hold back the tears any longer. The nurse told them they'd take a break for fifteen minutes, whilst the others comforted her.

  “Don't worry about it. And don't be so hard on y'self.” said Alex, with a forced smile trying to reassure the distraught blonde.

  “I can't do this! It's not coming easy like it is for the rest of you!” she said.

  “It's not your fault.” said Micah “Nobody is judging you. I reckon it's because you haven't, uh, experimented with psychedelics.”

  “So it's not working because I'm not 'cool' enough to do drugs?” she spat back at him.

  “No, it's not that. Maybe this is a blind trial, do you know what that means?” she didn't, so Micah explained. “A blind trial is where the subjects, we, don't have all the information about the trial and take part in it. If it's double-blind, the people watching us, like the doctors and nurses, don't know which of us have psychedelically altered brains. And if it's triple-blind, then the people who look at the results don't know either.”

  “What are you saying?” she said, her frustration withdrawn, replaced by confusion.

  “Maybe they needed a 'normal' brain to compare with the rest of us. So, if this experiment requires screwed up brains, we're going to excel at it, and you're the test subject that's going to show how it all effects a neurotypical person. Does that make sense?”

  It didn't, but she took a modicum of solace in the idea of being normal in comparison to the rest of the group.

  “Are you feeling better?” asked the nurse.

  Leah was, and the test resumed, another two hours of words and phrases fired at them.

  “Well done everyone!” the nurse said enthusiastically, as the third hour drew to a close. “Now that your memory tagging is working to full effect, your brain should subconsciously be tagging all your new memories for instant recall. So, if I say 'session where I asked you to recall memories' --”

  They all found themselves bringing up and playing back the memory of the test from the very beginning, then realised they could spin it backwards and forwards like a VHS tape. The audio played like a whisper inside their heads, the visuals hanging in their mind's eye, but vivid and almost three-dimensional.

  “Pause it.” said the nurse. “Look around.”

  They all did so. The paused memory hung in the air in front of them, and as they turned their heads, discovered they could look in directions they hadn't been looking when the memory took place. What was once periphery was now an almost holographic recreation of the room.

  “We call it projection.” said the nurse. “And we'll be practising it more as the day goes on. But now it's time for lunch!” She held the door open for them, where the orderlies were waiting to take them back to the mess hall.

  When they returned to the room an hour later, the group were full of excitement for the impending test. Micah and Alex had monopolised talk during their break, bouncing back and forth about comparisons to Star Trek's holodeck and Star Wars holograms, Minority Report interfaces and Iron Man's heads-up display. They were living their science fiction dreams. Sarah's attention had wandered off during the conversation, trying to work out why she and the others no longer seemed to have fear or anxiety about the surgery, as if it wasn't a massive, terrifying discovery. And yet she felt nothing. Her task at hand was still in the back of her mind, but even the emotion that was driving her forward seemed like it wasn't as prescient. As if being successful in the experiment itself was now more of a priority.

  The nurse sat them back down in their deep leather chairs and told them to get comfortable before they started the afternoon's session.

  “Remember when you first got here.” she instructed.

  The group stared ahead and conjured the images from memory. Sarah looked down and saw a holographic hand emanating from her body, holding a phone. The imagined screen was browsing the Wikipedia article about the Cultybraggan Base she was reading when she arrived.

  “Breath deep through your nose, explore the scents around you.” said the nurse, standing beyond their projections.

  Sarah could smell the leather interior, and beyond that, the aftershave of the driver. It wasn't an aroma she could remember noticing when she was actually in the car. This frozen moment in time was more vivid than when it was happening. She had more control of her senses, could isolate the scents and sights better than when they originally occurred.

  “Play it forwards, to when you first met Miss Whark.”

  Sarah spun the memory forward, approaching the hillside with the other Bentleys, the doors unlocking, each of them emerging from the cars looking at their surroundings, and then Whark coming out of the halogen-lit tunnel carved into the hill. She paused the memory.

  “I want you to stand up and explore the memory.” the nurse instructed. The subjects all did so, walking around the ground in front of them, the smell of the countryside lingering in the air, their feet touching the ground and something in their nervous systems creating feedback in the soles of their feet that felt like they were walking on the holographic grass that lay before them.

  “May I have your attention?” said holo-Whark as she emerged from the tunnel, Sarah walking around her, the memory playing out from perspectives she couldn't possibly have seen, as if her brain was filling in the missing information with data it had been gathering in the background.

  She walked right up to Whark, eye-to-eye, stared at the woman, inhaling her perfume deeply and studying her face. The upward lilt of her lips that faked a smile, the eyes that weren't cooperating with the false emotion. Sarah wondered if the woman ever displayed any real feelings, and found herself playing back other memories of Whark, her non-smiles, her attempts at displaying normal human feelings. The only time she had actually seen the woman reveal anything close to an honest reaction was when she instructed them in the process for initiating the OS. In that moment she was proud, of herself it seemed, rather than of them. Sarah wound forward to the only other genuine emotion she had ever witnessed Whark present, when she watched Leah's breakdown later in the same session. There was disdain on her face, anger or hate, an undercurrent of scheming in her eyes. Sarah didn't know where the analysis was coming from, but she watched Whark's expressions, and could detect her micro-expressions. Somehow, she knew that the woman who presented herself as their inductor and quasi den-mother over this period of lucrative incarceration was, in that moment, hatching a plan to deal with Leah. Sarah didn't know what to do with the information, especially given that it was based entirely on supposition and a whisper of neural activity she couldn't quite describe. What she did know was that the experiment was continuing to give her
the tools to bring it down from the inside. She could now remember every door she had been through, every hallway, every camera. The map was so clear, a three-dimensional projection of the facility, and with every passing day of the remaining two months she'd fill in the remaining blanks until it was time to strike. Until then, she'd be the best damn test subject she could be.

  At the end of the week the group was told that they were going on a field trip. They were given a new set of clothes, thick grey trousers and shirts, a coat and hiking boots. For the first time in a month, they walked back along the corridor leading to the world outside, the daylight from the door ahead was blinding, its fingers of light stretching down the hallway towards them. Micah likened it to a DMT experience he once had, crossing over to the afterlife, and some of the others agreed. It took them a little while to adjust to the natural light, and as they did, were guided to the door of a matte black van with spacious leather interior. The Balderlies and nurse took up occupancy in the spare seats in the back, pulling the doors shut behind them as the driver started their journey.

  Through tinted windows they looked out over the countryside, greens and blues of hills and sky on the horizon felt like a revelation. None of them had realised how much they missed the outside world, having seen nothing but concrete walls and metal girders for the last four weeks. After ninety minutes of driving, the van came to a stop at the banks of a lake, and they were instructed to depart.

  “When you said we were going on a 'field trip', I didn't think it would be to a literal field!” said Pete to smiles from the others.

  They were herded together by the Balderlies.

  “How's it feel being back outdoors?” asked the nurse, to positive responses. “The tests today are a little different, as I'm sure you've gathered. I hope you were all paying attention to the route we took, because you'll be walking back!”