“You’ve figured out a way to create synthetic memories?”
“I’m not even sure we should call it a memory yet. It’s just a protein that essentially stimulates the parts of a person’s brain associated with bad memories. We have no idea what they actually see or feel. We only know how powerful it is.”
“And you do this to all your customers?”
“Like I said, we don’t want to put our customers in any unnecessary danger, and we always hate to lose a customer. However, we can’t let one put all the others at risk.”
“And how many have you had to lose this way?”
Fergus took a long sip of his drink. “Fortunately, this was only the second.”
“How did you get the scent to the man in Costa Rica?” Cole asked, afraid that he already knew the answer.
“Open up the vial,” Fergus suggested again.
“I’d rather not,” Cole said, staring at the liquid inside it, afraid of the power that it held. Cole knew the awesome power that smell had to trigger memories.
Fergus reached over and grabbed the vial. Before Cole could react, he pulled the cork out of the top and spilled the contents on the counter in front of Cole. Cole snapped his head away from the counter, his fear reflex kicking in. Then he relaxed. He felt nothing. “I don’t smell anything,” Cole said.
“It’s very subtle. Take a deep breath. Don’t worry. I promise you that it won’t do anything to you.” Cole breathed in deeply through his nose. Now he smelled something. It was barely present, but it was there. He’d smelled it before, but he couldn’t place it. “Now smell your shirt,” Fergus said. Cole hadn’t had a chance to change his clothes since everything happened. He turned and stared at Fergus, who had a good, short laugh at the distraught expression on Cole’s face. “I put some on your shirt at the party at Johnny Dragon’s,” Fergus told Cole. “It was the simplest way. After all, we had no need to eliminate Mr. Green unless he spoke to you.”
“You’re telling me that I did it? I brought the smell to him, and he shot himself because he smelled something on my shirt?”
“Of course,” Fergus said. He paused and flexed his fist. He gave Cole a pitying look. “Haven’t you realized yet that you’re the villain in this story?”
“What’s that supposed to mean? I didn’t do anything wrong. You planted that smell on me. I didn’t know. I’m the one trying to help people.” It wasn’t lost on Cole how much he sounded like the man in Costa Rica.
The bartender walked over to them, and they both stopped speaking for a moment as she checked the status of their drinks. Cole felt dizzy. He didn’t want to drink any more. Fergus’s drink was still half full.
“Sure, you’re trying to help people,” Fergus said to Cole after the bartender walked away. “You’re trying to help them by taking away the thing that they love most in the world. To me, that doesn’t make you sound like the hero.”
“The company you work for kills people and sells their memories to the rich.”
“Yes,” Fergus conceded. “But only after giving them everything they’ve ever dreamed of. We give these poor kids a life they never would have the opportunity to live without us. And then the rich people who buy their memories get to remember lives spent in ways more exciting than simply getting rich and, when they do so, those kids get to live again through their memories. We give everyone what they want. Name me another business that can make that claim.”
“But the people whose memories you ultimately take, they don’t know what they’re getting themselves into.”
“They’re grown-ups,” Fergus said. “I work with them. I think they know exactly what they’re getting themselves into.”
“No,” Cole said. “They don’t understand what life is yet. They can’t. They’re too young. They don’t realize that what you’re giving them isn’t real. It’s a toy. What meaning can their lives have if they’re just a receptacle for memories that will eventually be sold to the highest bidder?”
“Meaning? Blah. I never figured you for a religious nut,” Fergus said. “I always had you pegged as a cynic.”
“You’re taking advantage of them.”
“You honestly believe that the kids we contract with are heading for meaningful lives?” Fergus chuckled. “When I find them, they’re already broken. They have nothing. What meaning are their lives going to have? Is it meaningful to slave away at a job that you hate for barely enough money to feed yourself? Is it meaningful to have your electricity or your heat turned off because you have no money to pay your bills? Is it meaningful to regret leaving the life you ran away from in the first place because it wasn’t quite as bad as the life you ran to? So we take away part of people’s lives. They don’t get a chance to grow old, but that’s the worst part of life, anyway. Besides, before we take it away, we give them greatness. Most jobs take away your life one hour at a time and give you a pittance in return. Where is your meaning in that?”
Cole didn’t answer him. He could have. He had answers, though none that he was sure the stranger would understand. Cole thought about Meg, flying around New York on her bike. He thought about Sam, about kissing her first thing in the morning. He thought about another dozen memories from the thousands he had inside him. All of them had meaning, but Cole wasn’t about to share them with this stranger. He still had other questions, though. “If you’re willing to kill Bon and your own customers because of my investigation, and if I’m the villain, then why am I still alive?”
“Some people think we should have taken you out already,” Fergus said, “and we will if we have to. Until then, you’re far too useful to kill.”
“I don’t understand,” Cole said.
“Let me tell you something about our business. We don’t make a lot of money on our customer’s first memory transplant. The first one is essentially a loss leader.”
“That can’t be right. I heard that this last transplant cost the customer eleven million dollars.”
“That’s right,” Fergus agreed. “We did charge him eleven million dollars, but that’s the cost of us doing business. It’s expensive granting wide-eyed, horny twenty-year-old kids their wildest dreams. Even poor kids’ dreams get expensive fast. No, we make our money when our customers come back for more.”
“And what does that have to do with me?”
Fergus shook his head as if disappointed that Cole wasn’t keeping up. “Your friend up in Boston—what’s her name? Dr. Tyson? Yes, that’s it. Well, her research on you has been essential for us. Without that research, we wouldn’t have known that our business model was viable. We used to price the first transfer so high that nobody wanted to buy. You showed us two things. First, you proved that people could inherit multiple memories with minimal negative impact—and your inclusion in our marketing material has been a godsend, by the way. More important, you proved that we could lower the price for the initial transfer because our customers were almost guaranteed to return. That’s what we learned from the research. We know about your addiction, and we had faith in our product. We were confident that people would want to come back to us after their first memory transfer. Until we looked into the research being conducted on you, however, we never factored in the fact that they would actually need to. When we realized that you were becoming addicted to the memories of your sad lot of murder victims, we imagined what it would be like for the people who bought the memories that we were selling, memories of people given the chance to live out their wildest fantasies. You of all people should be able to imagine what that’s like, the power that those memories must have. I mean, just imagine it.”
“That research is confidential,” Cole said, with a new kind of fear rising inside of him. Nobody was supposed to know about the things that he discussed with Dr. Tyson—nobody.
“Don’t worry,” Fergus said with a sarcastic laugh. “We’re not going to leak it to anyone. That information is far too valuable for us to want it to get out.”
“But how did you get it?” Cole a
sked, dreading the answer. He thought back to his recent interactions with Dr. Tyson, to how strange she had become ever since he told her about his Memory Vampire theories. He’d always trusted her. Sometimes, she was the only one he trusted. “Who was your source?”
“I think you may be misunderstanding the purpose of this conversation,” Fergus said. “I’m not here to clear everything up for you. I’m only here to tell you the things that I need you to understand”—Fergus paused to let the words sink in—“and the identity of our source is not information that I want you to know. All I can say is that the relationship is reciprocal. We take information, but we give a lot of information back too. You’re not the only interesting case study in the world. We have dozens of them. Besides, we pay far better than a not-for-profit research institute.”
“Was it Dr. Tyson? Did she give the information to you?” Cole asked directly.
Cole could see the intense look of disappointment in Fergus’s face. “Does it really matter?” Fergus asked after a few moments of chilling silence. “Don’t the researchers deserve a little reward for all they’ve done for you?”
Cole didn’t know what to say. He felt like he’d been punched in the gut. “It matters,” he muttered, almost under his breath. Everything seemed to be falling apart all around him, and it wasn’t even over. Cole wanted it to be over, but he knew that there was more. He tried to cut to the chase. “Why are you here? Why am I sitting in an airport bar talking to you? What exactly do you want from me?”
“I want to help you to come to your senses,” Fergus answered. “I want you to realize that we’re the good guys and that instead of fighting us, you can help us. In fact, you already have. You just didn’t know it. I wanted to convince you to stop acting like the fucking bad guy and to let us be. Look at all the damage and unnecessary death that you’ve already caused. And for what? You wanted answers. I’ve now given you answers. Now go back to your life and forget all of this. Don’t you already have enough other things swimming in that little brain of yours? Wouldn’t it be nice to forget something every once in a while?”
Cole took a slug of his drink. “And what if I can’t? What if I don’t believe that you are the good guys?”
Fergus reached back into the inner pocket of his jacket. From there, he pulled out a second tiny, corked vial. Cole could see the drops of clear liquid inside it. Fergus placed it carefully in front of Cole. “We still believe that we have a lot to learn from you. We still believe you can help us. We’re not asking that you do anything but go back to your regular life. But if you refuse to do that, we have this.” Fergus motioned toward the vial.
Cole stared at the vial. He was afraid to touch it. “What is that?” he asked even though he already knew.
“You can have this one. We have plenty more where that came from,” Fergus said. “I’d be more careful with it than with the last vial, though. I think your reaction to this one would be more, well, let’s just say dramatic than your reaction to the other one.”
“No,” Cole said, still unable to take his eyes off the vial. “It’s not possible.”
“Are you sure of that?” Fergus asked. Then he stood up. He took out another twenty-dollar bill and placed it on the bar. “Leave us alone and you’ll never have to find out. Meddle and you’ll know more than what it’s like to remember dying. You’ll know what it’s like to want to die. Trust me, from what I’ve seen, it’s far worse.”
“It’s not possible,” Cole repeated, thinking back on every memory transfer he’d ever had. Could they have planted something in his head during any of those procedures? Could he be sure that nothing extra had been transferred along with the memories of the dead? What about the transfer that Dr. Tyson performed in Montreal? Could she have possibly betrayed him that much? Would she? “It’s not possible,” Cole said one last time, turning his head to look up at the stranger, but he was already gone, disappearing again into the masses. Cole reached out and touched the vial. He lifted it in his hand. Then he placed it back down again and carefully smelled the tips of his fingers. He waited a moment. He didn’t even know what he was waiting for. He simply kept thinking back to the horrible expression on Carter’s face in that moment before he went for the gun. Nothing happened, but the cork was still inside the vial. Cole wasn’t sure of anything anymore, other than that he wasn’t about to pull that cork.
Chapter 52
Cole still couldn’t sleep during the flight from Miami to New York. His body wanted to but his brain wouldn’t let him. After an hour or so of struggling, he rang the bell to summon a flight attendant. One came to him almost immediately. “What can I help you with, sir?” she asked with a pleasant, if not all that authentic, smile.
“Is there any way that you can get me a pen and a pad of paper?” Cole asked.
“Of course,” the flight attendant said. A few minutes later, she returned with a ballpoint pen and a small pad with the airline’s name embossed on the top of each page.
“Thank you,” Cole said. He waited for her to walk away before he began to write anything.
Cole wrote three sentences on the pad. He knew that he wouldn’t be able to sleep until he’d put them in writing. As long as they were only in his head, it would be too easy for him to change his mind. They were proscriptions for the rest of his life, a life that this trip to Costa Rica had changed both permanently and dramatically. Cole had always believed that he understood the world around him. It was madness, but Cole believed that everything he’d done and everything he could remember had given him special insight into the madness. Now he realized that, despite all the memories in his head, he knew almost nothing and understood even less. Things had to change. Cole had to change. The three sentences read, in Cole’s hard-angled scrawl:
—NO GOING AFTER THE COMPANY
—NO MORE SPEAKING TO DR. TYSON OR ANYONE ELSE FROM MEMORY CLINIC (OR ANY MEMORY CLINIC, OR ANY DOCTORS AT ALL)
—NO MORE MEMORY TRANSFERS
The vial that Fergus had given him was in his backpack, wrapped in a series of napkins to protect it from accidentally cracking. Cole feared the contents of that vial like he had feared nothing before in his life. He wasn’t afraid of dying. He had come close enough to death and had enough memories of dying that death couldn’t scare him. But he had seen the expression on Carter’s face. What Cole was afraid of was madness, of smelling a scent he would barely recognize that would make him want to die. He was afraid of what he might see. He was afraid of seeing in his own head whatever it was that Carter had seen before he was overcome by a violent need to blow his own brains out. He was afraid, yet he was determined not to do anything to help the stranger’s company anymore, even if there were risks in that. The only way that he could think to avoid helping them would be to give up memory transfers altogether. He couldn’t do them without Dr. Tyson’s help, and he knew that he couldn’t trust Dr. Tyson anymore. So he was determined to quit cold turkey.
When Cole finally made it home, he spent two full days in his apartment alone before he decided he was ready to go back to work, whatever work would mean for him now. He wouldn’t be special anymore. He would merely be a cop like Ed and everybody else, only one dramatically out of practice.
When Cole finally found his way back to his desk at the precinct, he found an envelope on his chair, his name written on it in neat, boxy letters. Cole felt a pang of recognition when he saw the handwriting. He leaned down and picked up the envelope. Staring at the letters made him feel something, some sort of tingle, a touch of excitement. He peeled open the envelope and pulled out a note, written in the same boxy handwriting as the envelope. I would like to speak to you. I learned that you have Meg’s memories. I have so many questions. Can we talk? Please? Then he saw the name at the bottom of the note and he froze. It was signed Sam. A phone number was scrawled beneath the name. He could hear Sam’s voice in his head as he reread the words. Then he dropped the note into the trash can next to his desk.
Cole spent the next few weeks
trying to settle into his new life, beginning the process of trying to make himself normal again. He reached out to Allie and told her he was finally going to stop taking new memories. More than that, he told her, he was going to try to purge himself of all the other people’s memories that he already had. She wished him luck but nothing more. She had plenty of reason not to believe him even though, for maybe the first time, he honestly believed himself. Cole was disappointed in Allie’s reaction but told himself that maybe, once he’d proven himself to her, proven that he was going to follow through this time, she might come back to him.
More weeks went by, during which Cole was certain that he was being watched. He knew that it was the company. The moments when he didn’t feel somebody’s eyes on him were far fewer than the moments when he did. He eyed every stranger he passed suspiciously. Without even realizing it at first, he changed how he breathed, afraid that any deep breath might cause him to inhale an aroma that would trigger something in his brain. So he took shorter breaths, especially when entering a new room or meeting somebody new, careful to make sure that he felt no hints of madness before returning to his normal breathing.
Cole asked Ed if he would stay on as his partner and teach him how to be a regular cop again. Ed agreed, though he was confused, partly because he knew enough about Cole’s addiction to know how hard abandoning memory transfers would be for him. When Ed asked Cole why he was giving up memory transfers, Cole simply told him that he was ready to live a normal life again. He didn’t tell Ed about the stranger or about Carter Green or anything else that he’d learned in Costa Rica. The company had too much power for him to divulge any of that.
The Memory Detective Page 29