by Nick Thacker
Amanda caught her breath and took her place next to Wu. She nodded. The screen flickered, and colors began to swirl around a central area of bursting light.
“We’ve transcribed over 10,000 more locations since our last neural bridge,” Dr. Wu explained. “The map is now nearing 40% relational accuracy.”
40%.
She almost couldn’t believe it. Almost.
For the last few years — not to mention the years of schooling before that — she had been working toward this moment. Many in her field thought it couldn’t be done, but the theoretical projections she’d used as a model in her doctoral thesis were more than just whims .
She knew it could be done.
She knew she could do it. If anyone could, she could.
“Data is now being transferred.” All eyes remained on the screen. “Subject is nearing REMS, electrical impulses from the stem are now appearing in irregular rapid succession.”
Amanda watched with confident delight. This is it. She reached out for something to hold on to, her hand finding the cold steel of a thick desk protruding out from beneath the computer monitor.
The subject, a Mr. Ricardo Herrera, was asleep in the room next door. A 67-year-old man from the nearby village, he had volunteered for a week of testing in the state-of-the-art facility Amanda had built. He and his family would be paid handsomely for his time, and with no expected side effects besides feeling wonderfully refreshed and well-rested, it would likely be the easiest money he would ever make.
“Are we recording?” she asked.
A younger technician answered. “Yes, of course. Digital and analog.” He pointed to a rectangular box sitting to the side of the computer .
A VCR.
She smiled. Haven’t seen one of those in years.
After a scare from a computer virus a few months ago, she’d decided to “go old school,” as the techs called it: use analog recording technology in addition to their digital setup. The analog devices were slower, a lot bulkier, and plenty annoying to use in everyday situations, but they were almost completely hacker-proof. Someone wanting to tamper with their data would need to be physically present to do so.
“Subject is entering REM sleep.” A dialog box on a separate, smaller monitor flashed a small message: REM-S POSITIVE.
The larger monitor flashed in the center of the screen again, and the colors began swirling the opposite direction. Tiny sparks of light, like miniature shooting stars, danced around the edges of the swirling vortex.
“It looks like something from a science-fiction movie,” one of the techs whispered.
“It is something from a sci-fi movie,” another responded.
The stars began to grow, then shrink, then grow again, before they died out, replaced by blackness, then a burst of color.
“Is this a dream?” someone asked.
“No,” Dr. Wu replied, “our subject has only just entered REM sleep, but is currently dreamless. He is sleeping soundly, though, and we should see something soon enough.”
“How will we know?”
Dr. Wu just smiled.
They all watched for another minute, then the swirling vortex of color shifted and faded. The blank screen stared back at them for a full thirty seconds. Amanda gripped the side of the desk until her knuckles were white, then released it.
Did they lose the connection ?
She thought through the possibilities, trying to remember their hypothetical timeframes for these initial tests…
And the screen exploded to life again.
Blurry forms shifted around in front of her, some recognizable as people. They moved and interacted, melting into one another and changing shape.
Oh my God.
She swallowed, trying not to blink. Trying not to miss a moment.
“We’ve entered a dreamstate. Subject appears to be relatively lucid, attempting to focus on one of the bodies.”
Her excitement almost got the best of her. Amanda’s mind didn’t even need to flash back to her papers and research to know what that meant; the answer was already at the tip of her tongue. If every single person in the room around her hadn’t already been trained by her, she might have even begun a mini-lecture. Dreamstate was their term for mid-REM sleep during a subject’s dream, and bodies referred to any “physical” noun — a typical person, place, or thing — conjured up by the subject’s subconscious during a dreamstate.
It had taken two years to get here from their first attempt at viewing a subject’s dream.
And now it was working.
The subject, Mr. Herrera, was trying to focus on one of the bodies in the dream. It was smaller than the rest, but more sharply silhouetted against the backdrop of swirling colors.
A person.
“Subject appears to be focusing on the memory of a child-body.”
The narration confirmed what Amanda was watching onscreen. The image become a bit more focused still, and she could now see more of the “setting” body of this particular memory.
Herrera was in a “room” body, or at least it appeared so, as streaming rays of light glanced down diagonally from the top-right of the video. He was also moving, working around objects that were too blurry to make out.
Amanda forced her eyes out of focus, trying to break any of the involuntary paradigmatic functions they were attempting to use to make sense of the image. Forcing her eyes to make what she was seeing “blurry,” the image might make more sense.
And it did.
She could now better understand what it was Herrera was remembering. He was walking through a house; a living room, then a dining room, passed by. The colors and shadows on the walls in the background established where in the image they were, and she could tell Herrera was moving quickly.
Chasing the small shadow.
Herrera was chasing a laughing child through the house.
The child stopped and turned to Herrera, and Amanda’s eyes focused again on the image. Having now established a visual “baseline,” she could now interpret the smears and blurry lines of the images, and in the picture recreated in her mind, she could almost see the child’s face.
It was Herrera’s oldest son, now in his twenties, somewhere between the ages of three and eight in the video.
She held a hand up to her mouth. It’s really happening.
The blurriness could be fixed, as could the awkward lighting, through the use of more specific mapping techniques and — eventually — far more electrodes on the brain. After that, image manipulation and video effects rendering could sharpen it a bit more. She immediately considered the repercussions of this discovery, and tried to project how long her team might take to deliver a finished, test-worthy product.
“I — I can’t believe this,” Dr. Wu said from beside her. “The image is so… vivid. I never thought…” His voice trailed off as the first-person point-of-view Herrera again began following the child into another room .
“We’re… there . Inside his head,” one of the technicians said. “And we can improve the image quality by increasing the output of each of the electrodes, as well quadrupling the number of —“
“Go back!”
Amanda looked over to Dr. Wu, frowning.
“Sir?”
“Go back,” he repeated. “This is being recorded, yes?”
“Y — yes, but —“
“I don’t care about the current feed. Rewind the video back about three seconds.”
“Dr. Wu,” Amanda said, “we don’t want to lose the —“
“I understand, Amanda, but I saw something…”
Amanda nodded, and the technician closest to the monitor reached out and fiddled with the controls on the computer below it. The screen changed to a computer desktop for a moment, then he double-clicked a folder and then a video file inside of it.
“Just changing from the live feed to the recording…” he said as he worked.
The video started over again, from the swirling vortex of colors to the blank screen. He dragge
d the cursor over the scrubbing track, “fast-forwarding” the file to a few seconds before the end.
“What did you see, Henry?” Amanda’s voice was calm, but it hid concern. Dr. Wu was not the type of person to mess around or engage in hyperbole, especially not during a live testing period.
“I — I don’t know. I’m not quite sure yet,” he stammered, his eyes transfixed on the monitor display. “There! Stop it there, and go back a few frames at a time.”
The memory they were watching was the same one as before: Herrera chasing his oldest son through a house. But Wu seemed transfixed not on the object of Herrera’s active memory — his son — but on the background.
The video’s point-of-view swiveled to the left, trying to keep up with the child, and it seemed as though Herrera was running past a window. They watched the screen until Wu spoke again.
“Hold it. Right there, on the right, outside the window. That is a window, correct?”
Heads nodded. Amanda couldn’t see what it was that had Wu’s attention.
“Outside, just beyond the window.
She blurred her vision again, then released it. The image came into focus more, and she felt her throat constrict.
“What the…”
“Is that a person?”
It was indeed. Amanda was sure of it.
The image was small — difficult to see even when she leaned in to the monitor — but it was sharply focused.
Eerily focused.
It was a man, covered in what looked like gold paint.
“It looks like a statue to me.”
“But the detail…”
Amanda shook her head. “This is a joke, right, Dr. Wu?”
Dr. Wu just frowned at the screen.
“The man — or statue — is completely in focus.” The gold-covered man in the image, standing outside the fuzzy outline of the window, was defined perfectly in the frame. It was small, and therefore easy to miss, but Amanda knew without a doubt what she was staring at .
A man, perfectly focused, stared back at them.
“Dr. Wu,” she started again, “did you somehow layer this into the feed? Maybe there’s an artifact from a previous —“
“No, Dr. Meron,” he responded, his voice soft. “I did not interfere with this recording. What we are seeing here is part of the dreamstate created by Mr. Herrera’s subconscious. The man we are seeing is, in fact, part of Herrera’s memory.”
“But how can it be so clear ? So perfectly in focus?”
Wu shook his head. “I don’t know yet. But let’s see what happens if we jump a few frames at a time, forward and backward.”
The technician nearest the monitor and computer assembly nodded and moved some controls. The frame jumped, skipping forward. Herrera’s memory moved to the left, turning away from the window as he searched for the child.
All eyes were on the gold-covered man in the bottom-right corner of the screen.
The technician pushed forward another frame, then another.
“There!” someone shouted.
Amanda jumped, startled by the sound of the person’s voice.
Or startled by what she saw.
The gold-covered man had moved . As Herrera’s memory of the scene changed and shifted, the man in the corner, standing outside the window in the distance, turned and followed Herrera.
Amanda stared back at the man. She could see his eyes, deep black and sunken into his head, and his gold face, outlined by a shimmering light surrounding his body.
The eyes were looking directly at her.
Prologue
“But how can he be staring at me?”
Dr. Amanda Meron was following her coworker, Dr. Henry Wu, through the halls of the facility to the staff conference room.
“He wasn’t, Dr. Meron,” Wu answered. “He was staring at the camera.”
“The camera?”
“Well, you know what I mean. Our subject’s projected memory. In this case, the memory of chasing his young son through his house, is remembered in first person, just like any dream you or I have.”
“So the man was looking at Herrera? Our subject?”
“That’s what we’re going to find out,” Wu said. “But yes, I suppose that is the most logical conclusion — the memory of the gold man would likely not have appeared unless it was a significant, yet repressed, memory. We need to ask Mr. Herrera who the man is and why he was dreaming about him.”
“But why was he in focus? Once you pointed him out, it was as clear as looking at a photograph. I thought —“
“That the projections would all be distorted, blurry, out of focus? Yes, as did I. But for some reason, this memory of the man was so strong, so reinforced , that the electrodes were able to recreate it almost perfectly in the transmission.”
“Almost perfectly?” another voice asked. Amanda noticed they had been joined by the same younger technician who had helped them navigate the computer’s controls a few minutes ago. “He seemed pretty perfectly composed to me.”
“Right,” Dr. Wu said, not slowing his upbeat clip through the hallways. “But he was completely gold. The memory wasn’t firm enough in its recall to recreate the man’s proper attire, coloration, etcetera. Still, I do find it quite strange at the seeming insignificance of it.”
“What do you mean?”
“Well, why was that man, in particular, the only thing in focus during that memory? Sure, we do not have the capabilities as of yet to recreate perfect images, but we’ve hypothesized on this before. The strongest memories, or the strongest elements within those memories, will be the things that show up the clearest.”
“So that man is the most important part of that memory?”
“That’s what our research suggests, yes,” Dr. Wu said.
Amanda knew that, but it was encouraging — comforting, even — to hear it from one of her closest friends, and most trusted coworker. I’m not crazy, then, she thought.
“But why that man, and not Herrera’s son? Or his house?” she asked.
“That is exactly the question we need to answer, Dr. Meron.”
They turned and entered the conference room. Amanda had often thought the small room would be better served as a closet, but she held her tongue and pushed between the wall and the backs of chairs to get to a seat in the corner. This was her company, after all, and she was the last among them who would want to spend money on frivolous things like space and fancy conference rooms.
One technician and two other research scientists — Johnson, Guavez, and Ortega — were already there, seated across the table from Amanda. Dr. Wu and Nichols, the last technician, sat next to her.
She started immediately. “Team — as you know, our first neurological experiment using a fully-functioning, live human brain was a success. We will begin the project assessment and start assembling a response and hypothetical model as soon as this meeting is adjourned.”
She continued through the required debriefing, not stopping to take questions until the end.
Thankfully, that was only a few minutes later.
“Okay,” she said, wrapping up the session. “Any questions?”
Hands shot up around the room.
She smiled. “Let me guess — ‘who do we think the gold-covered man is?’ ‘How was he so perfectly in focus?’”
Heads nodded in unison.
“I’m wondering those same things myself.” Just then, the door opened and a small, petite woman shuffled into the few square feet of remaining space.
“Dr. Meron, the lab results,” the woman said. She slid a folder across the table toward Meron.
“Thank you, Diane.” She turned to the techs and scientists that had joined her around the table. “As you all know, I want this to be a fully open, honest forum. We’re all part of this, so this is the first time any of us are seeing these results.” Amanda opened the folder and began reading aloud.
“Upon waking the patient at 0900 hours, the following questions were asked. The
transcript and responses to follow.”
Amanda flipped a page. “1 — Were you able to engage in restful sleep? Response: ‘Yes.’ 2 — Do you remember dreaming during your most restful periods of sleep? Response: ‘Yes.’”
She stopped for a moment and looked around the room. “I’m going to skip ahead a bit.”
There were a few chuckles and nervous laughs, but she continued.
“7 — There was an object — what appeared to be a human male — in the dream. This man seemed to be covered in a gold paint. Brief pause. Who is the man? Response: ‘I am sorry? I do not remember seeing a man.’ 8 — This man seemed to be situated outside a window in the house. Do you remember the window? Response: ‘I do. This was my house, my family’s house. The window, uh, must have been the front window, looking out onto the street.’ 9 — And yet you do not remember the man outside the window? Response: ‘There was no man outside the window. I am sure of it.’”
Amanda swallowed, then closed the folder. Without speaking, she set the folder down on the table and placed her hands on it.
What the hell is happening?
Her first reaction was anger. My research — my entire company — all of it is being sabotaged.
She kept that feeling to herself. Unfortunately, the second emotion she felt — that of complete shock, of wondering what was going on, was plastered all over her face.
“Dr. Meron?” Dr. Wu’s voice. “Are you okay?”
Amanda felt her head spin. Am I shaking? She tried to steady herself on the table. She looked over at Dr. Wu, nodding.
“Dr. Meron, I am sure there is a logical explanation for this. Perhaps Mr. Herrera had temporarily forgotten —“
“No,” Dr. Wu said. “We need to run another test. Please have Diane prepare the subject for another round of REMS. He will need to expedite his regular daily schedule so we can have a test prepared for this evening.”
Around the table, heads nodded. Amanda could hear the voice of Dr. Wu, but his words weren’t registering. We’ve been sabotaged, she thought. It’s a joke. It’s all a joke .
Dr. Wu continued. “In the meantime, is there another subject prepared for a REMS analysis?”
Diane nodded. “Yes, Dr. Wu. Actually, we have a cousin of Mr. Herrera here as well. They signed up for the same examination week.”