Of Half a Mind

by Bruce M Perrin

  The Experimenter sat up and looked down the aisle. Coming toward him was the ‘familiar’ man. He ducked his head again, rubbing his forehead with his fingertips. He no longer had to feign the action; his head was starting to throb. The man stopped and sat in the booth with Price and Jordan.

  Both the man who seemed familiar and Atwood were facing toward the door. If the Experimenter simply stood and walked out, they would only see his back and he could shield his face from Jordan and Price one more time. He slid to the edge of the bench, but just as he was starting to rise, Jordan stood. She and the man traded places, so that he was now facing in his direction.

  The Experimenter slid deeper into the booth. He was trapped, Atwood facing him from one side, the man from another. He could try hiding his face again, but all the furtive glances and half-hidden peeks were adding up. Soon, his strange behavior would draw attention.

  He slipped farther into the booth, his shoulder pressing against the back wall. His mind was screaming at him, ‘run.’ Yet, if he sat quietly, they would leave. He grabbed one of his legs, squeezing hard as if trying to force this logic on the limb. He started breathing rapidly. The walls were closing in. In his mind, he could see Atwood and the man coming, their stares hard and icy.

  “Are you all right?” asked a young woman standing near his table.

  He blinked. The words from his surroundings returned some semblance of order to his thoughts. “An appetizer,” he said barely above a whisper.

  “OK, which one?”

  “Any of them.” He saw his phone was still in his other hand. “Then, I have to make a…a text. Please leave me alone.”

  “Of course.” She left.

  Noticing the pain in his leg, the Experimenter looked down. His knuckles had turned white as he crushed muscle against bone. His fingers were cramped, but slowly, they relaxed their grip. Blood returned. He straightened his leg. It hurt, but it moved.

  His waitress came back, so he returned his attention to the phone. She placed a plate of nachos on the table and left without a word. He leaned back, his heart rate and breathing coming closer to normal. He was still surrounded, but he was undetected. He relaxed further, realizing he was in an unprecedented situation to learn more about his enemies. Price, Veles, and Jordan were all within earshot.

  He concentrated on Veles and Atwood first. They were speaking quietly, and unfortunately, few others were doing the same. But occasionally, words would reach his ears. He caught ‘blocker’ and ‘coils’ and several technical terms. But he also heard ‘Worthington’ and ‘deranged,’ and he became angered.

  He forced his attention in the direction of Price and Jordan. Jordan was quiet and Price had little to say, but the familiar-looking man was hardly taking a breath. Unfortunately, the talk revolved around baseball. The Experimenter was wasting his time. He had just decided to turn his attention back to Veles and Atwood when they stood to leave. The conversation between Price, Jordan, and the man changed. They too were preparing to go.

  But just before they stood, the familiar man said something that reached the Experimenter’s ears clearly and distinctly. And it shattered his calm. The darkness came again, stronger this time, more determined. Again, his mind screamed ‘run,’ and nothing would stop his flight response this time. He pulled a bill from his wallet, threw it on the table, and waited for Price and the other man to clear the entrance. Then, he fled. He burst through the restaurant door, nearly knocking a woman to the sidewalk.

  “Hey, watch where you’re going,” yelled her companion.

  The Experimenter spun away without a word and raced down the sidewalk, his eyes darting right and left. He reached an intersection with a small, side street. In the harsh rays from the alley’s floodlights, he could see a trash dumpster. He ran there, bent behind it, and vomited.

  After a moment, he stood, trying to find enough saliva to spit the last of the acrid bile from his mouth. It was no use. He wiped his mouth on a sleeve.

  “How the hell do they know that?” he snarled under his breath. His eyes continued to probe the darkness, watching for movement, watching for danger, watching for Price, Jordan, or Veles. They were now undoubtedly the mortal enemies he had feared, because in the final words from the familiar man he had heard his name – Huntington Taylor.

  Thursday, August 27, 12:53 PM

  Arriving at the conference room, I found Sue’s and Nicole’s notes spread across the table, but no women. They were probably at lunch.

  I seated myself, thinking that we had covered the ground between skeptical curiosity and growing confidence in a very short period. We had only started looking at the study data less than 30 hours earlier, and already we were certain the Blocker worked and even how it increased short-term memory.

  But those thoughts were made ominous by the nature of what we suspected but couldn’t prove – that this technology was also an addictive corrosive to the mind. Unfortunately, no one shared our concerns. Our most recent finding, that anyone could adjust the Blocker from the user interface, was only relevant to who might be using it. And yet when I reported it to Ken and Detective Ahern, their meager interest seemed to wane further.

  And the VA? I felt certain we had accumulated enough troubling data that they would investigate, if Huston asked for additional funding. But if he didn’t, they would have no reason to look. And even if he did, it would be weeks before the VA fielded a team to do the necessary research and months before that team had findings.

  Can we wait that long?

  I heard the voices of Sue and Nicole shortly before they entered the room. Sue’s notebook was lying next to my elbow. She grabbed it, walked around the table, and sat down next to Nicole.

  “I was afraid I wouldn’t be able to resist putting my hand on your knee if I sat there,” Sue said, straight-faced. “Either that, or Nicole and I planned this meeting something like a tag-team and I wanted to face the audience.”

  A single laugh escaped my lips. “I’m buying the second.”

  “So, we’ve completed our review of the observational data,” said Sue. “And unless we intend to submit a report that says the only behavior after the first few weeks of training was to sit and stare, we’ll need to make some inferences about what was happening inside A.T.’s head.”

  “You’ve finished the reports?” I asked. “Yesterday, you were at 20%?”

  “It was a joint effort in what was nearly an all-nighter,” said Sue.

  I sat up, my forehead wrinkling as I looked at her. “Seriously? You came back here after what happened last night?”

  “OK, not really. But I did switch to Al’s regular starting time. You know, when normal people are sleeping. And because I mentioned the plan to Nicole, she joined me here at 6:00. Hey, we know it could be important if there’s anything in these reports.”

  I nodded. “That’s above and beyond, but thanks, because I agree.”

  “Sure, boss. Anyway, in his notes after each session, Worthington recorded the time A.T. spent standing, sitting, or pacing. During the first two weeks, he spent an average of 6.3 minutes standing, 14.8 minutes sitting, and 8.9 minutes pacing.”

  “OK,” I said after a moment considering the numbers. “Perhaps a bit nervous, but that doesn’t seem unusual.”

  “Same thoughts here,” said Sue. “But after those first two weeks, things changed dramatically, like I mentioned yesterday. Pacing disappeared completely and standing was down to 0.3 minutes. I was telling Nicole earlier, ‘became a sitting statue’ was about the only behavior.”

  “Whoa,” I said, staring at Sue. “That’s what…18 seconds of standing and the rest of the 30 minutes is sitting. That hardly seems possible. Any chance Worthington was, well, mistaken?”

  “It’s possible,” said Sue, as she held out a hand. “But I didn’t notice any change in his notes. His handwriting is the same. The level of detail is the same. Every report is thorough and they’re all signed.”

  “OK,” I said slowly. “Did A.T. have a cell
phone with him?”

  “He had a phone, but he had to remove all personal items before each session – watch, cell phone, any papers he might have on him. And he didn’t get them back until he went home.”

  “That limits the options,” I said. “But still, sitting motionless for that long? Strange.”

  “True,” replied Sue. “Nicole and I generated a few ideas why he might act that way – angry with Worthington, sleep deprived, and so on. But we only found evidence for one of them.”

  Sue paused, apparently for the drama. I could only respond with a ‘haven’t got a clue’ shrug. Then, Nicole said, “We think A.T. may have developed some type of extreme introversion and it’s connected to numbers.”

  Even though it was the engineer who made this assertion and not the psychologist, I was sure Nicole meant introversion in the formal, psychological sense – the tendency to be predominately interested in one’s own internal, mental life.

  “Introversion?” I said, tapping my fist against my lips. “How in the world…? Just what did you find that led you to that conclusion?”

  “It was Nicole who noticed that many of the written notes described where A.T. was looking.” Sue glanced at a sheet of paper. “In fact, 63% of the time, we could tell either what A.T. was staring at or the direction he was looking.” Sue raised a hand to her partner.

  “So, I called Dr. Huston and asked if I could see the room where A.T. would have been sitting. He had no problem with that, but when I explained what we wanted, he said looking at the room wouldn’t help.”

  “Let me guess,” I said. “It wouldn’t help because Worthington pitched everything in there when he went through his Spartan-decor phase.”

  “Correct,” said Nicole. “Dr. Huston said that everything was different, floor to ceiling. So, I asked if he could describe it. He sent an email a couple of hours later saying that he and Laverne had gotten together and listed everything they could remember.”

  As any PhD does, I had read widely in my field. For my doctoral preliminary exams alone, I had studied professional journals and texts for 10 to 12 hours a day for half a year. But nowhere, in all those hours in the library or my office or at home did I recall a single study in which the researchers had tried to reconstruct what a participant might be thinking based on the decorations in the waiting area. The women got an “A” for ingenuity in my book.

  “He answered all your questions with a straight face?” I joked.

  Nicole place a finger on her lips and looked up at the ceiling, exaggerating a thoughtful pose. “He said something about me hanging around with psychologists so much I was starting to sound comfortable inferring something I couldn’t see or directly measure.”

  “Yeah, we’ve about ruined you for engineering,” said Sue, grinning.

  Nicole pulled a piece of 11 by 17 paper from her notebook, but didn’t immediately show it to me. “Their email described a small room – about eight by ten – with beige walls, hardwood floor, and an area rug with a geometric pattern of ovals and arches in browns, blues, and black. There was a table, with a laminate top made to look like pale, brown granite and two chairs, each with brown, padded seats, backrests, and armrests. There was a clock and a calendar on the walls. There were also two pictures. We’d originally thought there was only one, because the pictures were seldom mentioned in the reports. There was a magazine rack, although he never read anything from it after the first three weeks. The last objects were a potted plant in one corner and a small trash can in another.”

  Nicole turned the paper toward me. It showed a sketch of the room she had just described. It was not the floor plan I could have made with a ruler or using a computer program, but a pencil sketch from what would have been A.T.’s perspective when seated at the table. It was detailed. Finally, I asked, “Twenty minutes?”

  Nicole smiled in a way that took over her entire face. “Actually, it’s second generation. They marked up the first, but yeah, about 20.”

  “Is that a picture of the St. Louis skyline on the one wall?”

  “We think it was the John Pils’ print, Reflections of St. Louis, but Dr. Huston wasn’t sure. The other picture was an Ansel Adams photograph from Yosemite National Park.”

  “OK, I’m impressed. But I guess the question is, what did we learn from all this?”

  “Which is my cue,” said Sue, pulling a printout from her notebook. “If we take the logs where either the direction or the object of A.T.’s gaze is known, after the first three weeks he spent 35.4% of the time looking at the calendar and 52.2% looking at the clock. And Doc, before you spend too much time on the mental math, those numbers leave 12.4% of the time looking at everything else.”

  I was too surprised to speak, my eyes wandering around the room as if in search of an explanation. “Did he have access to pencils or pens?” I asked.

  Nicole cleared her throat and I got the message. Looking at her sketch more closely, I saw a cup holding a collection of pens and pencils on the top of the magazine rack. “He never even doodled in the margins of a magazine or found a crossword puzzle?”

  “Not after the first few days,” said Sue. “There was a pad of paper in the magazine rack, and about the second or third day, he used it to make a ‘to do’ list. But Worthington made a copy. Said he needed it as part of his observations, so A.T. may have stayed away from the paper on purpose.”

  “And the connection you made to numbers?” I said. “That’s because he was looking at the clock and the calendar?”

  “Right,” said Nicole. “Of course, the magazines would have numbers in them too, but only if you look through pages with pictures and bright graphics to find them.”

  “The other thing that suggests A.T. was mesmerized by numbers was the fact that most of his time staring at the calendar was during the first few days of a month. After that, he had learned all its secrets.” Sue put air quotes around the last word. “The rest of the month, he studied the digital clock. Its display includes the date and room temperature as well as time, so it’s constantly changing.”

  “And finally, none of the missing 12.4 plus percent of A.T.’s time was spent on the pictures, the plant, the magazines, or the trash can,” said Nicole. “He didn’t even look at the floor, which had some geometric patterns. From what we can tell, he was staring at a blank wall.”

  I sat for a moment and slowly shook my head, unsure if I was more amazed at how the women had attacked this task or what their findings said about the Blocker. I finally decided. “When you said you thought introversion might be why A.T. was acting like a statue, I thought you’d never be able to prove that. But what you did is brilliant.”

  “Thanks,” said Sue, as the women nodded to each other. “There’s just one more thing we were going to do, and since it’s not finished, you can help.”

  “OK, sure. What did you have in mind?”

  “It seems likely that Worthington used the Blocker at some point,” said Nicole. “For one thing, there are several obvious similarities between his behavior and A.T.’s, like their disinterest in art. So, we thought we’d compile a list of both of their behaviors, see where we have matches and where we don’t.”

  “Sort of the full behavioral profile, assuming Worthington dabbled with the technology?” I said. Sue and Nicole nodded. “I like it. Let’s just keep the source of the information clear, so when we forward it to management, the VA, or the police, they can weigh the evidence however they see fit.”

  “Sounds like a plan,” said Sue.

  I glanced at my watch. “You two have already been here more than a full day…and again, thanks for doing that. I have status meetings with Ken tomorrow morning, so can we get together tomorrow at 1:00 for this composite?”

  Sue and Nicole agreed and left the room, reliving a bit of the previous night’s misadventure. I was still pondering their suggestion for tomorrow. I had an impression about the composite of Worthington’s and A.T.’s oddities and it was troubling. But it paled compared to our
speculation about the empathy-killing effects of the Blocker. Building the profile promised a break from the worst-case scenarios that had dominated my thoughts and I welcomed it.

  After all, worst cases never come true.

  Thursday, August 27, 1:17 PM

  Taylor paced his office, raging at the walls as his fists clenched and unclenched. It did nothing to ease his fury. He was being driven from his mental life, deprived of his progress toward immortality by a couple of wet-behind-the-ears psychologists and an engineer.

  He dropped into the chair behind his desk, exhausted from his rant. “Why can’t I shed this useless emotional baggage?” he muttered aloud. “I am the personification of calm, hard logic, and yet today, I can hardly think from the pounding in my ears.”

  Taylor leaned back, eyes staring forward as he gripped the armrests of his chair. “But my mental world is like the air I breathe. Without it, I die.” He paused and gritted his teeth. “And we know, that will never happen.”

  He stood and walked to the one-way mirror, staring at the empty chamber. “It’s time to go, isn’t it?” He released a long sigh and turned back to look at his desk. “I knew it was coming, but so quickly?” He shook his head, then returned to his seat. “Time for the diversion.”

  To complete his exit, Taylor needed a few days of confusion before the authorities focused on him. He felt he had the means to get two, perhaps more. By the time law enforcement figured out what was happening, he would be a new person in a different country. Only his agenda would remain unchanged.

  He pressed a button on his desk phone. “Yes, Mr. Taylor?” came the voice from the speaker.

  “Please schedule a flight to San Antonio for Saturday morning at 5:30 with a return on Monday at the same hour.”

  “Yes, sir. Any other arrangements?”

  “No. I have them covered. Also, please inform my direct reports that I’ll be out of the office all weekend.”