by Sean Black
Graves was starting to get irritated. Muir was incapable of a yes/no answer. Ask the guy what he’d had for breakfast and you were risking a half-hour seminar about Joel Garreau’s work on genetically modifying human fat into pure energy.
‘There was a struggle going on between his conscious and unconscious mind. “Struggle” might be too light a word. It was more like a fistfight. Knock ’em down, drag ’em out, bare-knuckle brawl. Here, I’ll show you,’ said Muir, opening a door.
Graves followed him into a large white room. A Plexiglass wall fronted on to an fMRI scanner. The back wall was filled with displays. Muir powered them up with a swipe of his finger.
‘This is Byron’s brain.’
Graves noted the time code in the bottom left-hand corner of the screen. The scan would have been taken on the day of his arrival at the facility. The image showed a three-dimensional colored model. By now, Graves could pick out the main areas, and had a basic grasp of what they did. Go much beyond that, though, and he was lost. ‘What am I looking at here?’ he said.
Muir swept a laser pointer over the image on the screen, picking out the tiny sliver of metal in the center. ‘This is the central implant. We placed it inside the amygdala as a way of filtering emotional reactions, such as fear and guilt. The idea was that memory formation, retention and recall would be broadly unchanged but, because we were filtering emotional response, that traumatic memories would have zero impact.’
The red dot of the laser moved down. ‘These are the cortical areas.’ The laser moved up. ‘And this, as you know, is the frontal lobe. The cortical areas come into play when a person recalls an episodic memory. The frontal lobe intervenes to tell a person that an episodic memory is just that, an event or series of events and experiences from the past.’
The red dot moved to the bottom of the screen to reveal a set of video controls. Muir clicked the play icon and color swept across the image, like a summer storm. He clicked another button and Byron Tibor’s face appeared on an adjacent screen, his features held in a tight close-up. Graves could hear Muir’s voice as he spoke to Tibor from somewhere out of frame.
Graves checked the time code on the fMRI scan. This was data taken a couple of days before Tibor’s escape.
He heard Muir say, ‘How you doing, Byron?’
There was a slight pause before Tibor replied, ‘I’m fine.’
‘Everyone treating you okay?’
Muir clicked the pause button and looked at Graves, who had no idea what a brief casual exchange between Tibor and Muir was supposed to tell him.
‘The questions are irrelevant,’ said Muir. ‘It’s the activity between the cortical areas and the frontal lobe that’s key here.’
‘You want to give me this in plain English, Doc?’ Graves prompted.
‘Tibor was physically present but his mind wasn’t.’
‘So where was he?’
‘We’d planned on taking a closer look during the surgery so we can’t say for sure but, judging by what we saw from the fMRI, and observed from his behavior while he was here, he was back in Afghanistan.’
‘You’re fucking with me! That was before he entered the program.’
‘Just before he came to us,’ said Muir.
‘How is that even possible?’
Muir shrugged. ‘Between the implant and the propranolol we were pretty certain that the original trauma was absent.’
The original trauma that Muir was referring to was what had originally brought Tibor into the program. It had taken place prior to the withdrawal of US forces from Afghanistan. Tibor had been sent in as a lone operative to establish contact with an insurgent leader called Masori. The op had gone well but there had been a number of casualties, including a young Afghani girl. Shortly after his return, Tibor had begun to demonstrate the classic symptoms of PTSD, including vivid flashbacks. It had come as a shock. He had been exposed to high-threat, high-risk environments for a long period. He was regarded by those who worked with him as a trusted pair of hands. Next thing they knew he was stepping off a helicopter with a dead girl in his arms. No one had seen it coming. One minute he had been the best of the best. The next he was spiraling out of control.
There had been a period of assessment. The facility was already up and running. Tibor was offered a chance to get his life back. He had done the smart thing and taken it. A couple of the early enrollees hadn’t made it. The scientists had used them to refine the technology. By the time Lewis and Tibor had come along they were getting a handle on things. Both men had been success stories. They had returned to service, cycled through a number of covert operations without a hitch and shown no signs of instability. Then, seemingly from nowhere, Lewis had started to slip, and now Tibor had gone over the edge. The only difference was that Lewis hadn’t taken anyone else with him.
Graves rubbed his face. ‘Let me see where it happened.’
TWENTY-THREE
Even with the blood and tissue long scrubbed from the floors, walls and ceiling by a specialized clean-up team, Graves couldn’t help but feel a chill as he walked into the operating theater with Muir. A solitary CCTV camera mounted in the far-left corner had captured everything. Graves had reviewed it at least a half-dozen times. What he had seen was both horrifying and, not that he would admit it to a living soul, beautiful. The horror and the beauty were indivisible to him.
The footage had shown a seemingly unconscious Byron Tibor being wheeled in. The procedure was scheduled to take around six hours. His skull would be opened, the implant would be removed, updated and placed back where it had been.
The neurosurgery team flown in from Virginia had been about to begin when the monitors had gone crazy. Byron’s eyes had snapped open, he had grabbed the scalpel poised over him, and plunged it into the surgeon’s carotid artery. Rising up, he had killed the four other members of the team with a combination of his bare hands and the surgical instruments to hand. There was no security present to stop him. No one had anticipated that someone who had supposedly been placed under general anesthetic might be a threat. It was only later that forensic examination revealed the anesthetic had been tampered with. Tibor’s ability to control his heart rate and other vital signs had fooled everyone, including the machines he was hooked up to.
In the chaos that followed he had fled. It had been a carefully calculated and planned escape.
‘So?’ said Graves, picking up a scalpel from a tray of instruments set out next to a heart monitor. ‘He used the implant to get past security?’
Muir grimaced. ‘Not his implant. Each person who works here has a small RFID implant inserted in their arm. It stands for radio frequency identification device. All the doors have coils with electricity running through them. If you’re chipped, the metal coil in your implant is induced when you reach the door and it opens automatically. After he’d finished killing the medical team, Byron cut out one of their implants and used it to make his way out.’
‘Smart motherfucker,’ said Graves.
‘Quite,’ said Muir.
The official story relayed by the Department of Defense to the media was that the medical team had died when the light aircraft they were traveling in had crashed shortly after take-off. The cause was given as pilot error.
‘You were the last person to speak to him?’ said Graves.
Muir nodded. ‘It’s all in the statement I gave at the time.’
‘You have anything to add?’
‘No,’ said Muir.
‘You had lunch?’
‘I’m not particularly hungry.’
‘Gotta eat,’ said Graves.
Muir sat in the passenger seat of Graves’s car as they headed through the main gates. Neither of them had said much to the other since they’d walked out of the operating theater. Graves was turning over in his mind how he could keep this quiet and coming up blank. The routine protocols for such an event were already in play. There were people out looking for Byron Tibor. Maybe they’d get lucky and find him before he could do any mor
e damage or compromise the program. Graves doubted it.
About five miles from the facility, a distance that Tibor would have been able to cover in less than forty minutes, there was a truck stop. This was where they believed he had hitched a ride. They were in the process of hunting down and interviewing every single trucker that had passed through in the hours immediately after the escape.
There was a parking area, a gas station, a small motel and a diner. Graves pulled up outside the diner and they got out. Inside, they took a booth. A tired-looking Hispanic waiter brought them menus and water.
Graves stared out of the window as a big rig rolled out onto the highway. Byron Tibor could be anywhere in the country by now. The damage he could cause didn’t bear thinking about.
‘Tibor was full-spec wetware,’ he said.
The waiter was back. They ordered, and Muir waited until he was out of earshot before he said, ‘Yes, he was, but can we not use the term “wetware”?’
‘Hey,’ said Graves. ‘I didn’t come up with it.’
The term had come from the community of scientists and freaks called body-hackers. It was their term for the human beings who had implants placed inside their bodies. It was from this community, and others who called themselves trans-humanists that Muir had seized on the idea for the program. It was brilliant in its simplicity. The question Muir had asked was: why spend billions of dollars trying to create a soldier from the ground up when you could take someone who was already a high-level operator and upgrade them? Why reinvent the wheel? The human body was already the most sophisticated functioning organism on earth. All it needed was some tweaking using existing technology.
The human body was capable of unbelievable feats. The key, of course, was the mind and the ability of someone to control their own thoughts. A young mother should not be capable of lifting a full-size automobile. She wouldn’t have the strength. Yet if her child was trapped under it, she could do it.
Of course, they had also augmented Tibor’s physical abilities. Specially designed cochlear implants meshed with neurological transmitters not only made his hearing infinitely sharper than it had been but allowed him to screen background noise: he could, for instance, isolate the sound of a single human being’s breathing in a building with a firefight raging outside.
Laser eye surgery had long been standard for special-forces operatives but artificial corneal implants had provided Tibor with 20/8 high-definition vision in all light levels. Coupled with what was best described as a thermal-imaging capability, his eyes allowed him to track the enemy even in pitch darkness and from a distance of up to a thousand meters.
A modified endoskeleton of flexible Kevlar mesh, augmented by trauma plates made of ultra-high molecular weight polyethylene, protected his existing organs from injury, making him highly resistant to conventional weaponry, up to and including small IEDs.
There had also been something that Muir had explained as a series of sensory substitutions that had required further implants. Lewis had been the first to have them. They had scared the hell out of Graves.
Their food arrived. A cheeseburger for Graves, and a salad for Muir. Graves wondered if anyone had ever ordered the salad before. ‘You think he’ll take a bullet like Lewis?’ he asked Muir. ‘Is that where we’re headed with this?’
‘Lewis was single. It makes a difference.’
It was a good point. Muir’s team had seen Byron Tibor meeting his wife and their subsequent marriage as the ultimate endorsement of their work, even more so than the deadly abilities he had been imbued with. The relationship proved that Tibor could pass among regular people and, more importantly, that he could sustain a close personal relationship without showing any outward signs of aggression. Of course, there had been the incident with the two young men in New York, which Graves had ensured the NYPD didn’t pursue, but Muir had argued that the behavior Tibor had demonstrated that night was within normal range. But perhaps they had been wrong. Perhaps what had happened to the men had merely been a harbinger of what was to come, of Tibor’s inability to keep himself in check.
‘Speaking of her,’ Muir went on. ‘Does she know about … ?’ He trailed off.
‘Not yet. All she knows is that he left seven days ago and that he’s not been in touch since. But let me worry about her,’ said Graves.
TWENTY-FOUR
New York City
Julia
In the apartment she shared with her husband, Julia Tibor rolled over onto his side of the bed. Even though it took up almost all of their single bedroom she had purchased it so that when he was home he could sleep without his legs dangling over the end.
She dug under the duvet for his old sweatshirt, which lived there when he was gone. She bunched the soft wash-worn red cotton in her hand, brought it up to her face and breathed him in. Her smile widened. She stayed in bed, savoring one of the good mornings, which were by no means a constant. The constant was worry that she would get the call at work. Or, worse, that one of the department administrators would pull her out of teaching a seminar or class. Or that someone would be waiting for her when she returned home in the evening.
But that morning was different. He was safe. She knew it deep within her. He was safe and well and thinking of her. She closed her eyes, took another deep breath, and fell back into a state somewhere between sleep and waking.
Two years ago, the very idea that you could know when someone was thinking of you would have struck her as absurd. But meeting Byron had changed that, as it had changed so many things in her life. Not the superficial things, like her apartment, or her job, but the things that went deeper. He had stirred emotions in her that she had begun to doubt would ever exist for her. Not that she hadn’t dated or had crushes on boys growing up, but meeting Byron had been different.
He was the first man with whom she had truly fallen in love. Instantly. From the very first moment she had seen him. That evening was burned onto her mind. She could recall it now with unflinching clarity.
It had been a party following a conference hosted by the Department of International Relations at Columbia University. She later found out that Byron, who had been auditing some classes at George Washington and had been invited along by one of the Columbia faculty, was a reluctant guest. He had intended to spend the evening in Hoboken visiting with an Army Ranger buddy.
But that night he had made no mention of his military service. Or much of anything else for that matter. Beyond the immediate pulse of physical attraction he was unlike almost any other man she had ever met. Although he had reason to be, he was not arrogant. He was far more genuinely engaged with other people than he was with himself. And people responded to him in kind. He could start speaking to someone and within a few minutes they would be telling him things they had barely told another living soul. That was how he was.
She was in a far corner of the room nursing a warm glass of Pinot Grigio. She glanced over the shoulder of the rather earnest young graduate student from Finland, who was doing his best to impress her with a long-winded monologue about something she could barely remember, and there he was.
She could have said that his smile had struck her first, or his height, or just how handsome he was. But none of that would have been true because everything came at her in a rush. The floor seemed to tilt alarmingly under her feet and her vision seemed to telescope so that everyone and everything else in the room faded until there was only him, a man she felt she knew but had never seen before.
The grad student from Finland kept talking until he must have noticed that she was staring straight past him. ‘Of course,’ he said, ‘it’s just a theory that I’m not sure is supported by the GDP figures from India. What do you think?’
The question snapped her back into the present. ‘I need to visit the restroom,’ she said, ‘if you’d excuse me.’
‘Of course,’ he said, as she moved past him, suddenly conscious that she was wearing barely any makeup, that her long brown hair, which she hadn’t washed in th
ree days, was roughly pulled up, and she was wearing faded boot-cut blue jeans, a pair of red Converse high tops and an old black sweater. For a moment she thought about rushing back to her apartment to change — it was less than ten blocks away — but dismissed the idea as ridiculous. What if he was gone by the time she got back? What if she never saw him again?
She felt a breath of relief as she noticed that the man was talking to a professor she knew well — Gregory Lipshinsky, a noted expert on the Balkans. To her relief, Lipshinsky caught her eye as she approached. ‘Ah, Julia, come and meet this young man.’
‘I don’t know if I’m all that young.’
She had a sense that she wanted to remember those words. The first words that she had heard him say. Again, the thought struck her as somehow absurd. They would chat and then he would leave or his impossibly beautiful girlfriend would make an appearance to whisk him off to dinner.
Hell, for all she knew he could be married.
Then her hand was folded in his, the ridges of his palms hard and calloused, and he was saying, ‘I’m Byron, nice to meet you,’ his voice deep and rich.
‘Julia,’ she managed, as he held her hand a second longer than someone just being polite.
‘Julia here is one of our best doctoral candidates,’ said Gregory.
Byron let go of her hand but held her gaze and smiled. ‘Oh, yeah, what’s the subject?’ he asked, tilting back his glass.
She could feel heat rise to her cheeks. She never blushed and she hated herself for doing so now. She cleared her throat. ‘It’s about the impact on women’s rights of the destabilization of the Middle East by the Bush administration and how that’s continued with Obama.’
‘Because it was so stable before, right?’ Byron said.
Now Julia was able to catch her breath: her hackles had risen at the slightly patronizing tone in his voice. ‘I’m not defending the old regimes but we’ve had a habit of backing countries where women don’t even have the right to vote.’