Analog SFF, May 2011

by Dell Magazine Authors

  "Couriers are a dime a dozen,” I said. “Even if the crooks are rank amateurs, they wouldn't have any problem arranging for a bicycle courier we couldn't trace back to them. The one I need to talk to is the son, Michael. He would have known about the painting. He might even have known who would pay for it. And he certainly knew about Oblivion. Who better to fake having his memory wiped?"

  "You really think he would have sent the demands from his own e-mail account?"

  "Maybe. There's no love lost between him and the old man. Maybe he wants his father to know. Maybe that's his way of saying I did this, and there's nothing you can do about it."

  As we spoke, I kept an eye on the crowd of commuters coming into view from beneath the Market Street side of the balcony. They came in spurts. A few hurried along, pushing past those in front of them. Others meandered this way and that, like leaves drifting on the current. It had been raining that morning and most of the people wore raincoats in varying shades of tan and gray. As a result, I had no difficulty spotting Virginia in her pinstriped suit when she came striding through the crowd, pulling her green nylon suitcase behind her.

  "Got to go,” I said to Effie. “Time to earn my pay."

  From the corner of my eye I saw the cyber-waitress turn away, gliding back toward the restaurant proper as Effie relinquished control. Below, Virginia paused in front of the lockers on the far side of the station. When she found the one she wanted, she slid the suitcase into the locker, then she turned and headed back in the direction from which she'd come. Per my instructions, she never once glanced in my direction, even though she knew I would be watching from above. My assumption was that whoever was behind the plot would also be watching, so I didn't want Virginia to give away my position with even a casual glance.

  I wasn't sure how long I would have to wait for whoever was going to pick up the suitcase, but as the minutes dragged by, I began to wonder if I'd been spotted. I was just about to call Virginia on my cell phone and tell her to come back for the painting when a man with longish brown hair, rimless glasses and a tan raincoat stopped in front of the lockers. He studied the numbers on the doors, comparing them with the key in his hand, then he opened the locker with the painting, pulled out the suitcase, and headed toward the waiting trains.

  I was immediately out of my chair, hurrying for the escalator that led down to the station floor. As luck would have it, that was the moment a mob of East European tourists decided to head down the same escalator, pulling their unruly children along behind them. One of their children, a small boy in a clear rain hat, kept trying to fight his way back up through the crowd, making it impossible for me to force my way past him and his mother. As a result, I lost sight of my quarry halfway down the escalator when he descended a second escalator at the far end of the station on his way to the train platforms below.

  Fortunately, my commuter account was paid up, so the transponder card in my wallet allowed me to pass through the turnstile without slowing. Nevertheless, when I reached the first platform, I saw no sign of the man I was following. I immediately descended to the next platform, where a crosstown train was just pulling in. As the doors opened, I saw him at the far end of the platform. With the crowd in front of me, I just managed to jump into the nearest car as the doors closed. I pushed through the packed commuters, making my way from car to car as I headed for the front of the train. I reached the lead car just as we pulled into the next station. Looking out through the windows, I caught the briefest glimpse of my man exiting with the crowd that hurried toward the concrete stairway leading up to the street. I saw him only from the back, but his hair and raincoat were the right colors, and he was pulling the same green suitcase. As I pushed out the doors, he was bumped by a woman hurrying down the steps with an armful of packages. The collision turned him just enough for me to see his face. My heart sank. He wasn't the same man. I'd lost my quarry. At least I thought I had. Then I spotted him through the windows at the front of the first car. Turning, I made it back onto the train just as the doors closed and we pulled away from the platform. The fact that both men were dressed in similar raincoats, pulling identical suitcases, had almost cost me my pursuit.

  As the train picked up speed, my heart rate gradually slowed. I had my man in sight. Now all I had to do was keep my eye on him until I learned where he was going.

  He rode across the river, then three more stops to the Canal Street station, where he exited. We were now in the warehouse district. With the sun already setting behind the city's skyline, the streets above the station were almost deserted. I hung back so the man wouldn't notice me, but he never bothered to look behind him. He was either a rank amateur, as I'd suspected from the outset, or he'd spotted me on the train and was trying to figure out what to do. The one thought that never occurred to me was that he might be lost. But when I came around a corner into a cross street, he was standing motionless beneath a streetlight, staring down at the suitcase with a dazed expression.

  "Forget where you're going?” I asked, coming up beside him.

  He looked up at the soot-stained brick wall of the warehouse beside us. Then he looked at the building next to it. Then back at me, his dark eyes blank.

  "Where are you taking the suitcase?” I asked.

  He shook his head. His longish hair fell across his forehead as he again looked down at the suitcase. “I must have taken the wrong train."

  That's when I saw the ID card linked to a long keychain around his neck. With his raincoat unbuttoned, I had no difficulty reading his name. Owen Hempstead, the card said. It identified him as the chief of Nano-Mnemonic's Information Technology Department.

  "You didn't answer my question,” I said. “Where are you going?"

  "I, uh . . . I'm not sure . . ."

  "Come on,” I said. “The painting—where are you taking it?"

  He looked up at me. His mouth opened as if to speak, then he shook his head. “I must have taken the wrong train,” he said once again. “This is all warehouses."

  As I watched his dazed eyes move from building to building, I felt a sinking sensation in my stomach.

  "Don't move,” I ordered.

  Too disoriented to react, he simply stared at me as I yanked the suitcase from his hand, laid it on the sidewalk, and snapped it open.

  It was empty.

  "Where's the painting?” I demanded. “What did you do with it?"

  But already my mind was jumping back to the first station at which we'd stopped, to the man who'd headed up the concrete stairway with an identical suitcase.

  "I don't know what you're talking about,” he said. His eyes were still confused, but his jaw was beginning to harden.

  "The painting,” I said. “Who did you pass it off to?"

  "What painting? And who are you, anyway?” He voice was becoming firmer now, his resistance starting to rise.

  "The Botticelli,” I said. “You know damned well what I'm talking about!"

  He shook his head. “You're crazy. You have me mixed up with someone else."

  "Not a chance,” I said. But I've seen people who were lying before. Lots of them. Sometimes you see fear in their eyes, sometimes feigned anger; but lurking in the background, you always see this other person watching your reaction, checking to see if you're buying what he's telling you. But with Hempstead, that other person wasn't there. He didn't care whether I bought what he was telling me. He was having too much trouble deciding whether he believed it himself.

  "What do you do for Nano-Mnemonics?"

  "I, uh . . . That's none of your business."

  "Information Systems,” I said, taking his ID badge in my hand as I read the legend more carefully. “That's computer systems, right?"

  "So what?” he said, snatching the badge away from me. “So I work in I.T. What's that got to do with you?"

  "What about Oblivion? What do you know about Oblivion?"

  He shook his head, his brow tightening as though he were trying to remember.

  "The drug,”
I prompted. “Oblivion. What do you have to do with it?"

  "I don't have anything to do with drugs. I'm in information technology."

  I frowned, gritting my teeth. “Then what are you doing out here in the middle of the warehouse district with an empty suitcase?"

  He again looked down at the suitcase, scowling like it baffled him as much as it did me. “I, uh . . . I must have bought it at the train station. In one of the shops. I take trips."

  "What? You have a big conference coming up?"

  He looked at me, his eyes again blank.

  "You have no memory of actually buying the suitcase, do you?"

  He grimaced, his gaze turning inward as he searched his memory. “I bought it at one of the shops. At the train station. Where else would I have gotten it?"

  I shook my head, letting out a long, slow sigh. Where else, indeed?

  * * * *

  "The suitcase was empty?” Effie asked.

  "The suitcase and his head, both,” I said. “It was like his memories were reshaping themselves right there in front of me. Anything that had to do with the painting, where he was going, who he'd switched suitcases with—it was all just gone."

  We were standing on the deserted platform at the Canal Street Station, waiting for the train back to the city. That is, I was standing on the platform. Effie had seized control of the miniature help hologram that appears above the keypad on the information kiosk whenever you press the help key. She now hung suspended in the air in the guise of an attractive young woman in an old-fashioned train conductor's uniform. The fact that she was only a foot and a half tall in no way diminished the authoritative tone in her voice.

  "Based on what I found in Nano-Mnemonics’ online files, that's apparently how Oblivion was designed to work,” she said. “It destroys the synaptic threads to whatever you're focused on when you take it. That's why Michael Van Buren took it back off the shelf. He thought they could program it to treat phobias."

  "Phobias?"

  The hologram nodded. “Phobias are based on memories just like everything else. Theoretically, if you give someone Oblivion, then stimulate his fear of snakes, spiders—whatever it is that sets off his phobic reaction—the nano-transporters migrate to the areas of increased synaptic activity and dissolve away the memories that underlie the phobia."

  "It's that simple?” I said. “Just erase the memory of a spider dropping into my soup when I was three years old and my phobia will disappear?"

  "Actually, phobias go a lot deeper than that. In addition to any conscious response to whatever sets off your fears, your sensory impulses are routed along a second, faster pathway from your sensory thalamus directly to the fight-or-flight circuitry in your amygdala. That way, if you see a snake, you jump away immediately, before you even have a chance to think about whether it might be poisonous. You only realize what's happened after the fact. If you depended on the longer pathway through your sensory cortex to make a conscious decision, you'd get bitten."

  "So it's like a survival mechanism."

  "Exactly,” she said. “The nano-transporters search out the entire network of neurons that fire in response to the stimulus, no matter which pathway they follow."

  "Dissolving away all those connections—isn't that going to leave some big holes in my memory?"

  "Your memory's already full of holes,” she said. “The route you took to work this morning. Whether you remembered to take your pills. Whether you brushed your teeth. Most people don't actually remember those things. They just think they remember because their brain fills in the gaps with plausible explanations. The executive functions in your prefrontal cortex take the things you do remember and put them together in what appears to be a coherent whole. Their job is to create a consistent picture of the world around you, even though you aren't aware of most of it. The hole in your memory is like the blind spot in the center of your eye. Your brain compensates for it. You don't even know it's there."

  "What blind spot?"

  "The one that's right in the center of your retina. Where your optic nerve comes into the back of your eyeball. You can't actually see what's in the center of your visual field, so the circuitry in your occipital lobe makes up for the lack of visual data by putting together a coherent image for you."

  "You found all this out hacking into Nano-Mnemonics’ computer system?"

  "I don't hack,” the image said, puffing out its lower lip. “I simply follow information to its source."

  "Right. So you're telling me this is all data you followed to its source in Nano-Mnemonics’ computer system?"

  "I did,” she said. “And while I was there, I came across another interesting tidbit of information."

  "Oh?"

  She smiled. “The e-mail message with the extortion demand—the one that was sent from Michael Van Buren's account."

  "The one he doesn't remember."

  "That's the one,” she said. “Only it turns out it wasn't sent from his office computer, which any number of people might have gotten to. It was sent from the computer in his penthouse apartment."

  * * * *

  If the doorman in front of Michael Van Buren's apartment had been a robot, Effie might have been able to override his control program. Unfortunately, he was human, with all the gold braid and brass buttons human doormen have acquired down through the years. Which meant I would have to resort to the same tried and true methods my counterparts had devised down through those same years.

  "No,” he growled from beneath his peaked cap. “The first fifty bucks was for telling you he was home. You want me to take a powder so you can sneak in though the lobby, that's another fifty."

  I allowed myself a resigned sigh before transferring another fifty dollars from my handheld to his. Then, while he took his powder, as he called it, I took the elevator to Michael Van Buren's penthouse suite on the thirty-third floor. The doors opened to a spacious, high-domed alcove with a clear skylight. Opposite the elevator, a single set of elaborately carved wood doors led to the apartment proper. The curved walls on either side of the alcove were decorated with hand-painted scenes of young men and women in Louis XIV costumes frolicking in an idealized forest filled with deer and chattering squirrels. Several of the young women clung to ornate swings, trailing streamers of gauzy fabric as they glided back and forth beneath the branches.

  I knocked on the door and gave the eye that peered out through the peephole a quick flash of the ID card in my wallet.

  "Your father sent me to talk to you about the stolen Botticelli,” I said.

  "I told him I don't remember anything,” a muffled voice answered through the door.

  "You can open the door and discuss this inside, or we can go down to the station,” I said. “It's up to you.” I was bluffing, of course, since the only station to which I had access was the train station, and that wasn't exactly the best place to conduct the kind of interview I had in mind.

  I heard the whisper of voices through the doors, followed by what sounded like a command in a harsher tone; then the doors opened.

  Dressed in a white silk robe with no shoes, Michael Van Buren was everything his father was not—young, good-looking, with a too-expensive haircut and perfectly conditioned, pink skin. But there was also a puffiness beneath his eyes and a softness to his jaw that suggested he lacked the old man's grit.

  "Who has the painting?” I demanded as I stepped in through the door.

  "You aren't the police,” he protested. He looked me up and down, sneering at my inexpensive suit. “I don't have to tell you anything."

  "Actually, it's the police you don't have to tell anything. With me, you've got no Miranda rights."

  "It makes no difference. Like I told my father, I don't remember a thing."

  "Yeah? That line may work with him, but I'm not buying it."

  "He didn't buy it either. That's why he gave me the blood test."

  "Blood test?"

  He laughed. “Oh, so he didn't tell you about the blood test."r />
  I studied his face, trying to decide whether to believe him. “Why don't you tell me?"

  He gave me a bored sigh. “It's all pretty straightforward, really. The enzymes in Oblivion are metabolized within an hour or so. That's all it takes to erase the memory of whatever you were focused on. But the breakdown products from the nano-transporters hang around for forty-eight hours. You can detect them in a blood test."

  "That sounds good in theory,” I said, “but I'm betting a smart guy like you has some way to get those memories back, don't you? There's no way you're going to let someone wipe your mind clean, then just walk away."

  He shook his head. “In the future, maybe. Assuming we could program our nano-transporters to identify the atrophied synapses.” He paused, scrunching his mouth to one side in thought. “Of course, now that you mention it, that does raise some interesting possibilities, doesn't it?"

  "Possibilities?"

  "Sure. If we could put back memories that were there, could we also put back memories that weren't there? Memories of things that never actually happened?"

  "What are you talking about?"

  "Think about it,” he said. He pursed his lips, savoring the idea. “We can already do it with semantic memory—facts, figures. That's what our neural overlays are all about. Now that we've come this far, it's only a matter of time until we figure out how to do the same thing with episodic memory. That's really nothing but memories that have a time component associated with them—a sequence of events with you in the middle. Whatever ‘you’ is."

  I scowled. “That's ridiculous."

  He shrugged. “Like my father says, it's all a matter of neurotransmitters and synaptic connections. That's how everything gets recorded."

  "Michael . . .” a voice interrupted from behind us. “Is everything all right?"