Cole sat up in bed. Waking up in a hospital bed began to trigger memories, some of them his own and some other people’s, but Cole recognized them all, so he pushed them aside. New memories. That’s all he was interested in. As he sat up, he heard a man near his bed call out, “Nurse! Nurse! He’s getting up.”
“Who are you?” Cole asked, staring at the man.
The man took a few steps closer to him. “I’m Pete.” He looked like he wasn’t sure if he should extend his hand to Cole or not. He chose not to. “I’m your partner on this case.”
Cole looked Pete up and down. He began his usual search through his memories to see if he could remember anything. Pete was an older cop. He probably had a decade on Cole. Cole thought for a second about asking what happened to Ed, but he knew better. He knew how much people hated working with him, hated being his partner. It didn’t take long for Cole to be confident that he had no memory of his new partner. “Why you?” Cole asked. “I haven’t seen you before.”
Pete shook his head. “I know. I usually work up in the Bronx, but I have some relevant experience with these types of cases.”
Cole didn’t bother to ask what his new partner meant. He knew. Pete had experience hunting serial killers. It didn’t matter. A young female nurse came in through the door. “Is there something you need?” the nurse asked.
“Yes,” Cole said, “there is. Did you assist on my procedure?” he asked sharply.
“No,” the nurse said, glancing at Pete nervously for help that he couldn’t give her.
“I need to talk to someone who worked on my procedure,” Cole said, “preferably a doctor, but anyone will do.” The nurse stood frozen for a moment. “It’s urgent,” Cole said, trying to get her to move.
The nurse still hesitated. “Can I ask why? I mean, it will help me to find someone if I can tell them why you need to see them.” She obviously knew who Cole was and, knowing what she knew, staring into his pale face and dark eyes clearly made her more than a little uncomfortable. Cole recognized the fear in her eyes. To some people, he was a comic-book hero, to others he was a monster. She was definitely in the monster camp.
“I want to find out what went wrong,” Cole informed her. “The procedure didn’t take.”
The nurse looked confused. Nobody had told her that anything had gone wrong with the procedure. “Okay, I’ll see who I can find,” she muttered before nearly running out of the room.
“What do you mean, it didn’t take?” Pete asked Cole after the nurse left.
Cole looked up at him, annoyed that he had to deal with this guy’s questions. He assumed their partnership was going to be short-lived anyway, that it might not even last the rest of the day. “I mean exactly what I said. The procedure didn’t take. Something went wrong.”
“How do you know?” Pete asked. Cole could hear a tinge of panic in his voice. He needed this to work. Cole’s memory was supposed to be the key to everything.
Cole looked at Pete. He didn’t want to be wasting his time with him. “Because I have no new memories.”
“You’re sure?” Pete asked. “Nobody told me anything went wrong. They wanted me to be here when you woke up, to start collecting details right away.”
“The procedure didn’t take,” Cole repeated. “So, unless you were in the operating room, I suggest you help find somebody who can tell me what happened.”
“Fine,” Pete said, and went off, following behind the nurse.
Cole waited. He didn’t give up yet. He continued searching his head even though he was confident the search would be fruitless. It was another twenty minutes before anyone answered Cole’s call.
“I hear you think that something went wrong,” the doctor interrupted as Cole was flipping through the memories in his head.
“You did the procedure?” Cole asked. He might have recognized the doctor but couldn’t be sure.
“I was one of two doctors. The procedure went swimmingly. What makes you think something went wrong?”
“Because something did,” Cole pressed. “I don’t have any new memories.”
The doctor chuckled. Cole had a sudden urge to punch him in the face. “You have to give it a little time,” the doctor said. “This is a normal reaction. People often complain that it didn’t work at first, but the memories eventually come.”
“Listen, Doctor, I know what it’s like to have new memories. How many memory transplants have you done?”
“Nine,” the doctor said, “including yours today.”
“Well, this is my fifteenth. So you’ve been a part of six fewer procedures than I have.” Cole gritted his teeth. “Something went wrong.”
“No,” the doctor said, taken aback by Cole’s anger. He softened his voice. “There were no issues with the procedure. Everything went perfectly.”
“Maybe it was the body,” Cole said. “Maybe the body was too old. They say that after, what, forty-eight to seventy-two hours, depending on the age of the deceased and the circumstances surrounding their death, all the memories may have deteriorated?” The doctor nodded. Cole had it exactly right. Cole knew what he was talking about. The doctors in Boston studied him, but they taught him as well. “Maybe the body was dead longer than they thought. I need you to bring me the coroner’s report.”
“I’m not sure we’re allowed to show you that,” the doctor said.
“Get me the fucking report,” Cole snapped at the doctor. His brain was scrambling, trying to figure out every possibility that could explain what went wrong. He was quickly becoming afraid. He tried to ignore the most reasonable explanation, but the questions wouldn’t stop. What if he’d finally done all the memory transplants that his brain could handle? What if he’d reached his limit? What if he would never be able to inherit a new memory again? Cole’s hands began to tremble at the thought.
The nurse came back ten minutes later with the coroner’s report but without the doctor. She handed the report to Cole, and he nearly ripped it open. He flipped the pages, looking for the time-of-death estimates. He found them: thirty-nine hours before Cole’s procedure, give or take three hours. The confidence level on the time-of-death estimate was eighty-plus percent. They’d gotten better at these estimates as memory transfers became more and more popular. They needed to give families an accurate timeline for the decisions they had to make about their loved ones’ memories. The numbers weren’t definitive, but the body seemed to be well within the transfer window. Cole’s heart raced.
As he riffled through the coroner’s report, the doctor came back, this time with a second doctor in tow. “Cole,” the new doctor said with a nod. “I hear you don’t think the transfer worked.”
Cole recognized this doctor. He’d performed procedures on Cole in the past. Cole trusted him, as much as he trusted any doctor outside of Boston. “It’s not a theory, Doc. I don’t think. I know. The memories aren’t there.” The doctor could hear the frustration in Cole’s voice.
“I hate to say this, Cole, but sometimes the transfers simply don’t work, even when everybody does everything right.”
“So nothing strange happened during the procedure? How long were the memories outside of our bodies?”
“Less than thirty seconds. I can assure you that the procedure was flawless.”
“What about the body? What about water?” Cole asked. “Could the fact that the body was found in water mean anything?”
The doctor shook his head. His white hair and beard gave him an air of authority which, instead of calming Cole down, made him more nervous. “There are plenty of documented cases of successful memory transplants after pulling bodies out of water: people lost at sea, bridge jumpers. The theory is that if anything, the cold water helps preserve the memories. Certain people think that you could successfully transfer the memories from a body that had been floating in cold water for up to four days after death, though that’s really just conjecture at this point.”
“So what should I do?” Cole asked. He didn’t want conjecture
. He wanted answers. He wanted an assurance that he was still capable of receiving new memories.
The doctor shrugged. “There’s no going back for more. Once the memories are removed from a body, that’s it. There is nothing else we can do.”
Cole wasn’t satisfied. “There is one thing I can do,” he said.
“What’s that?” the doctor asked. He knew that Cole knew as much about memory transfers as he did, maybe more.
“I can go to Boston,” Cole said. “Where’s my phone?”
Cole made two phone calls. The first was to the station, asking for Ed to be reassigned as his partner and allowed to accompany Cole to Boston. Cole wasn’t even sure why he wanted Ed to go with him. He simply trusted him. Ed had saved his life. And Cole didn’t want to do this alone. The second was to the Memory Clinic. He wanted Dr. Tyson to be as ready for him as possible under such circumstances. She told him to give her three days. He tried to push back, but she said she wanted to be able to give him the time he needed, and she couldn’t free up that time for three more days. Cole gave in, even though he knew that those three days were going to seem like an eternity.
Chapter 25
After some cajoling from his superiors, Ed agreed to accompany Cole to Boston. It wasn’t what Ed would have considered a plum job. Ed didn’t like Cole much, and he hated working with him. He was briefed on the case, though, and, in the end, whether it was out of a sense of duty or fear that saying no might hurt his career, Ed gave in. Like that, Pete was out of the picture. When Ed asked Cole why he wanted to work together again, Cole didn’t mention the fact that Ed had saved his life. Instead, he simply said, “You don’t remind me of anyone who I can remember hating.” When Ed laughed, Cole told him, “You’d be surprised how rare that is for me.”
Nobody told Ed why they were going to Boston. He assumed there was a witness there, or some sort of potential evidence. He figured that, at some point during the five-hour trip, Cole would have to fill him in on what exactly they were doing. Four hours into the painfully quiet drive, Ed finally asked. “You know that Boston is a little bit out of our jurisdiction, right?”
“I know,” Cole answered him.
“So what are we doing? Where are we going? What lead are you following up on in Boston?”
“I’m not following up on any leads,” Cole told Ed. “I’m following up on the lack of leads.”
Ed shook his head. “Jesus, Cole, can you just tell me what the hell we’re doing?”
“There’s a memory clinic in Boston. It was founded by one of the guys who invented memory transplants. They’ve got a bunch of doctors there, and all they do is study human memory. I work with them. They’ve been studying me for years. That’s where we’re going.”
“Okay,” Ed responded. “But why?”
“I come up here every couple months and let them study me and run experiments on me. Years ago, after my second transplant, the force sent me up here to meet with the lead doctor, a guy named Dr. Combray, a pioneer in the memory transplant field. They wanted him to sign off before they let me take a third memory. I worked with him a bit. He was a good guy. When he died, I started working with one of their other doctors, Dr. Tyson. She wanted to expand on Dr. Combray’s work. She wanted to study me by interviewing me and conducting brain mapping and brain scan studies. None of it sounded too appealing, so I asked her what was in it for me. She offered me a deal. I let her study me and, in exchange, she had to talk to me, answer my questions, try to explain to me what was going on in my head.”
“And you agreed to that?”
Cole nodded. “Yeah. I’m pretty sure she’s the only thing that’s kept me sane through all of this. She understands what I’m dealing with better than anyone.”
“How do they study you?”
Cole shrugged. “They ask me a lot of questions. I answer them and they write my answers down. Sometimes they hook me up to a machine or sometimes they put me inside a machine before they ask me questions. It’s all so they can get a read on how all of these memories are affecting my brain and my body.”
“That doesn’t sound too bad. No needles or electric shock or anything?”
“Nope,” Cole said, “just hours and hours of intensely personal questions while they stare at machines.”
“Okay,” Ed said, “but why are we going up there now? And what am I doing here? You do know that you pulled me away from my wife and kids for this, right?”
“You know about the body they fished out of the river?” Cole asked.
“Yeah,” Ed confirmed.
“They told you everything?” Cole asked.
“I can’t know what I don’t know,” Ed replied.
Cole looked out the window of the car. He was amazed at how little the scenery changed during the drive from New York to Boston. Every suburb looked the same. They would have had to slow down to notice the differences. “Let’s just say that I need Dr. Tyson’s help and leave it at that.” Cole wasn’t ready to reveal more than that to Ed. Not yet. He was hoping to get some of his own answers first. “And what are you doing here? After our last case together, I thought that having you around could help. You’re a good cop with good instincts. You give me some balance.”
Ed sensed that Cole was holding something back, but he didn’t want to push it. He had another question that he wanted to ask and figured that he would never have a better chance. “So what’s it like?” Ed asked Cole.
“What’s what like?”
“What’s it like having all those memories in your head?”
Cole had been asked this question many times by many people, and he still didn’t know how to answer. “Do you know anyone who’s done a memory transfer before?”
Ed nodded. “My wife. She inherited her mother’s memories when her mother passed away. But that’s different.”
“How is it different?” Cole asked.
“It’s different because my wife knew her mother. She was already a big part of her mother’s memories. And besides, my mother-in-law had a really nice life. The memories that you take…” Ed trailed off. He didn’t know how to finish what he was going to say without defaming the dead.
“People’s lives are not that different,” Cole said. “Everyone has highs and lows and nobody leaves their life on a high note.”
“But what’s it like?”
Cole shrugged. He wasn’t about to tell Ed about the addiction, but he could give him something. “It’s like life without all the bullshit, life stripped of all those nagging little things that seem important at the time but aren’t important at all. It’s life but super-focused on only the important moments, good and bad.”
Ed still didn’t get it, not entirely. How could he? Cole only understood because he lived it. “But wouldn’t it be great if you could inherit the memories of somebody who lived a truly amazing life and not the ones, may they rest in peace, that you get? I mean, wouldn’t it be great if the memories you got to inherit were full of only the good parts?”
“I don’t think so,” Cole responded without even having to think about it. “Let’s just get to Boston.”
“You’re the boss,” Ed said. Then he pushed down on the accelerator to try to get them there a little bit faster.
Chapter 26
Carter Green was leaving his apartment for the first time in three days. Fergus had accompanied him there in the windowless car, after the Company finally deemed it safe for him to go back out into the world. Even with his freedom restored and the world opened up to him again, Carter had no desire to go outside. Since his release, he spent nearly all of his time in his apartment exploring his new memories. His head was swimming as he tried to get a handle on the power the new memories had over him. It wasn’t limited to his brain. He felt better. He felt young again and physically more alive than he’d felt in years. It was as if the memories of all the surfing, exploring, and sex tricked his own body into believing that he had done those things. After all that time, Carter knew his body needed a break.
As good as he felt, he knew that what he was doing to himself wasn’t healthy. But he wasn’t ready to slow down. He didn’t think he’d ever be ready.
The only reason he even left his apartment was that the flow of memories had begun to slow down. It worried Carter. It had been less than a week since the procedure. They had warned him about this, though. They had told him that the memories would come in fits and starts, that sometimes they would just flow and sometimes he would have to work for them. In between immersions, he read and reread the literature. In the meantime, Carter could pull up the memories that he’d already remembered, but he couldn’t immerse himself in them anymore. They were still powerful the second time but by the third time, he could feel the power receding. Soon they began to feel distant. That’s not what he’d paid for. He wanted immersion. His body craved new memories.
Carter walked out of his apartment and took the elevator down. The elevator was fast, but it still took time to go all the way to the lobby from his apartment. Carter was eager to get outside, eager to try some of the techniques he’d read about. The elevator opened and he walked out. His footsteps echoed off the shiny black marble floor as he walked toward the doors leading outside. The doorman in his crisp gray uniform opened the door for him when he was still ten strides away.
“Your driver already has your bags, sir,” the doorman said as Carter approached.
Carter reached into his pocket, took out one of the loose twenty-dollar bills that he kept there for such purposes, and slipped it to the doorman. “Thank you, Freddie,” Carter said as he walked past. He didn’t bother to stop or even slow down.
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