F Paul Wilson - Novel 05

by Mirage (v2. 1)

Then there was Mr. Henderson, seated on the second recliner they'd squeezed in; all in a ten-by-fourteen cubicle. The expression "cheek by jowl" took on new meaning.

  Fortunately all the computing hardware—the university's mainframe—was in the basement. All Julie needed to run the show was her terminal on its rolling cart. She could tell from Mr. Henderson's initial expression that he was ready to be unimpressed. Where was all the sci-fi gadgetry he'd been expecting? But when she pulled out the VR helmets, his eyes had lit.

  "Now the headphones," she said. "These are specially constructed to block out external noise. From now on I'll be speaking to you through my microphone. You'll have your own mike for any questions. Okay?"

  He nodded again. "By the way, are you British?"

  "No. American."

  "Your accent—"

  People always asked her about that. Funny, she didn't think she had any accent at all.

  "Born in New York State, raised in York, England."

  "Ah. That explains it."

  She flipped the oversized headphones down over his ears. A little fuzz and they'd look like earmuffs.

  She pulled her wire microphone up in front of her lips.

  "Can you hear me?"

  An abrupt nod. Mr. Henderson looked impatient to get on with it. Julie wanted to knock his socks off. She took a deep breath.

  "Great. Okay, now we're going to recline your chair until you're almost horizontal—just to make you more comfortable with the headgear."

  Dr. Siegal helped Julie ease the chair backward. For most people it conjured up images of a visit to the dentist. When they finally had him in position with his ankles crossed and his hands folded on his abdomen, Julie looked up at Dr. Siegal. She turned off her mike and spoke in a stage whisper.

  "Nice enough?"

  His eyes widened as he jammed his index finger against his lips.

  Just then a knock on the door. Dr. Siegal squeezed back and edged the door open. Cindy poked her head through the opening.

  "Dr. Gordon?"

  "Yes?"

  "I'm sorry. It's your uncle again. He's on the line. Says he must speak to you."

  Julie felt her annoyance rising. Cindy should know better than this.

  "Didn't you tell him I was busy?"

  "Of course. I told him you were running an important demonstration and couldn't be disturbed—but he won't get off the line. He says it's extremely urgent."

  Julie bit her lip. She knew how insistent her uncle Eathan could be. And maybe this was truly urgent. But whatever it was would have to wait until after the demonstration. No way could she leave the Bruchmeyer Foundation man with his head locked in that uncomfortable rig while she talked to her uncle...

  ... and watched the grant fly away.

  "Tell him you spoke to me and I said I'll call him as soon as I can but that it's impossible for me to speak to him now. Take his number, and then hang up."

  Cindy's eyes widened. "Really?"

  "Really. Otherwise you'll spend the rest of the morning on the phone with him."

  "Okay," Cindy said, but she looked uncomfortable as she ducked out.

  Dr. Siegal looked at Julie questioningly as he shut the door. "You think maybe you should—?"

  Julie shook her head. She owed Uncle Eathan—owed him big time—but he could be a real pest. Still, interrupting her in a meeting, that was a bit much, even for him. What could he possibly want?

  She shook off the uncertainty. First things first, and getting this grant came first.

  Flipping the mike back on, she donned her own headgear.

  "All right, Mr. Henderson. Sorry for the delay. We're just about ready to enter Lorraine's memory. As I told you, it can be disorienting at first, and you may even feel a little vertigo until I adjust the visuals, so hold on to the armrests of your recliner until you're comfortable."

  She watched him grab hold, then flipped down her own headphones. Julie's gear was different. Her helmet was equipped with electrodes similar to Lorraine's. She pulled the VR glove onto her right hand, then adjusted her goggles with her left.

  Inside the goggles, a thin four-button bar with ENTER— EXIT—WARNING—WINDOW ran along the top of the twin screens; a physiological readout ribbon showing Lorraine's EKG along with her EEG, pulse, and respiratory rates ran along the bottom. All the space between was a blank pale blue, like a cloudless winter sky.

  Julie checked Lorraine's EKG—a normal QRS with a rate of 72. Respirations were 8. EEG running at 10 Hertz. Good. All normal.

  She leaned back in her own recliner.

  "Ready, Mr. Henderson?"

  "More than ready."

  "I like that attitude. Here we go."

  She moved her glove and the motion was transmitted to the computer, which generated an image of a hand with a pointing index finger on the screen. She guided the fingertip icon over to the Enter button on the bar at the top of the screen and clicked it.

  Two

  We're all so cavalier about memory. No one considers the veritable flood of information that gushes from our five senses into our brains every second of the waking day, and how our brains divide up and store this endless flow of perception into banks of information that we can tap into and access in nanoseconds. —Random notes: Julia Gordon

  You e a c upl of vertic 1 rolls he goggle cree , hn the video stabilizes. Wisps of cloud appear in the blue. The breeze sighs, birds twitter below.

  As usual, it's a beautiful day in Lorraineville.

  You angle the hand icon downward. The clouds rotate out of sight. A sensation of falling—maybe too fast—and then the green horizon comes into view.

  Henderson's voice sounds in your headphones. "Wow. Just like Flight Simulator!"

  Good. Already he's enjoying this.

  "A little bit, except we don't use a joystick. And you won't find any enemy fighters out there. What I'm going to do is take you on a little tour of Lorraine's memoryscape."

  You point ahead and you begin to move forward, gliding over rolling green hills and perfectly shaped trees. Quaint villages dot the landscape. But the grassy surfaces are not flat. They appear to be crisscrossed with linear mounds, as if a tangled network of pipes has been overlaid with sod.

  "Looks like she's got a bad case of moles in her lawn down there," Henderson says.

  You smile. A good analogy. "Not mole burrows," you say, "but they are tunnels of a sort. That's the memory-link network. It forms the infrastructure of the memoryscape."

  "Is this her past? Looks like computer generated images."

  You bite back a sharp remark. What else did he expect?

  Calmly, evenly, you say, "Because that's exactly what they are. Lorraine is a bright, well-adjusted graduate student who's helping us with our research and getting paid as an experimental subject. The computer is sorting a wide array of impulses from her cortex, arranging them into images, mingling them with impulses from me, feeding the mixes back to her, rereading them, feeding them back again, and so on in a continuous loop that allows us to interact with her memoryscape."

  "Interact? You mean, change her memories?"

  "No. We seem to be able to trigger memories by our presence, but we can only move among them, view them from different angles. We cannot change the memoryscape. I've explored Lorraine's memoryscape many, many times, and it's always the same."

  "Always?"

  "Yes. This is who she is. Spread out below us is the sum total of Lorraine's available life experiences. And you are your memories. Without your memories you have no past, no family, no friends, no experiences. You haven't been anywhere or seen anything or met anyone. You are defined by the accumulation of your day-to-day experiences. With no memory of those experiences, who are you? You're a cipher."

  "Which is why our foundation finds your research so intriguing. But surely not every memoryscape looks like this."

  "Absolutely not. Lorraine had a fairly prosaic upbringing. I've been in 'scapes where it's not so sunny and there aren't any white picket f
ences—"

  "Like a ghetto?"

  "Right. But even subjects with a ghetto background have these rolling, well-organized, wide-angle landscapes. It's just that the empty areas tend to look like vacant lots and the buildings look like tenements." :

  "Might have been more interesting to visit one of those."

  You feel your jaw muscles bunch. You're taking this man on a tour that only a handful of people in the world have experienced, and already he's grousing.

  '"One of those' wasn't available—at least not one who'd allow a stranger to open the book of her life."

  "But they let you—"

  "Only after they get to know and trust me. Lorraine trusts me implicitly. And she doesn't feel she has anything to hide."

  "Everybody's got something to hide."

  You can't argue with that, so you say, "Let's go take a closer look, shall we? Pick any structure you want."

  You rotate the visual field, giving a panoramic view of the memoryscape. A gallimaufry of structures dots the terrain below: ranch-style tract homes, the brick edifices of public grammar and high schools, churches, fast-food joints, college dorms, taverns, movie houses, soccer fields, the Eiffel Tower, Big Ben, and, towering over everything, a huge white two-story colonial house.

  "Why the landmarks?"

  "Lorraine spent her junior year abroad in Europe. Don't forget, the memoryscape doesn't exist in her head; it's a symbolic virtual environment—computer generated. Lorraine's mind determines what's important, the computer simply accesses that hierarchy and fashions an environment—her personal memoryscape—-from it. Every significant person, place, and event in her life is down there."

  "And the not so significant?"

  "Down there too. Usually tucked away in and around the big ones. You just have to know where to look. The presence of adrenaline or noradrenaline in your system at the time of the event embeds those important moments more firmly in your memory."

  "Well, if big equals important here, let's have a look at that huge white house."

  "Good choice. That's where she grew up. Lots of memories there. Hang on."

  You work the glove, pointing, banking right and swooping down to ground level. After so many visits to Lorraineville, you've become Top Gun navigating the memoryscape. It's fun showing off. Sometimes you feel more at home here than in the real world.

  The white colonial looms ahead, towering above you. Yet as you approach, it seems to shrink, continuing to diminish until, by the time you reach the front steps, it's been reduced to normal size. You're used to this phenomenon, but your passenger is not.

  "What happened?" Henderson sounds alarmed.

  "Size can be whimsical in the memoryscape. As the saying goes: You ain't seen nothin' yet."

  As you approach the front door you push on it and it swings open. You step inside and look around. The foyer is huge; the ceiling towers twenty or thirty feet above you. It never fails to remind you of the Yorkshire manor that was your childhood home.

  And for a second you flash on your uncle Eathan's "urgent" call. You hope it's not that urgent.

  "Good lord.' The perspective's all wrong."

  "Not if you're a child, and we're obviously in a child's perspective. If we turned around and reentered, we'd— Here, I'll show you."

  You back onto the porch, pull the door closed, then push it open again. You move forward and the foyer seems normal size now.

  "Now we're viewing the environment from an older perspective, possibly a teenager's. This is one of the unpredictables within the memoryscape. Time is elastic here. If the subject spent many years in an environment—or decades, in the case of this house—you can never be sure from which time frame you'll be viewing it. We're not too sure what determines the hierarchy of memories. But we think it has to do with the subject's most current experiences ... and how they relate to the past."

  "Was she ever an adult in this house?"

  "Not in a real sense. She visited for weeks at a time during her college years, but didn’t really live here then."

  You glide into the living room. It's dark except for the TV! By its light you can see a couple locked in an embrace on the couch. The boy is sneaking his hand under the girl's sweater and the girl is pushing it away.

  "This looks interesting," Henderson says.

  Typical voyeuristic male, you think. You bite your tongue.

  "That's her first steady boyfriend. He lasted about four months. She never let him get much beyond what you see here."

  You move into the dining room. Seventeen-year-old Lorraine, her brother, and her parents sit around the table in stiff silence. You can almost smell the tension in the air. You remember plenty of similar scenes like this from your own teen years—although you were never the cause.

  "Uh oh. This doesn't look like a happy group."

  "Want to know why? I'll show you."

  You return to the living room, where it's night and all the lights are on. It's packed with teenagers now, many of them drunk or stoned as Bruce Springsteen shouts about how he was born in the USA. A Saturday night in the summer. Lorraine's parents are away for the weekend—you caught the parental good-byes and warnings to Lorraine in an earlier visit. The cats are away, and now it's Lorraine's time to party.

  As you weave through the crowd a fight breaks out. A lamp is knocked over and smashes on the floor. Lorraine screams for them to stop but the fight only gets worse.

  "This is fascinating," Henderson whispers. "Utterly fascinatings!”

  You pass into the kitchen, where you find Lorraine standing by the sink looking defiant while her mother sits at the kitchen table and cries. Lorraine's formerly long and glossy chestnut hair has been chopped to a two-inch length, dyed bright orange, and moussed into a dozen spikes.

  "The rebellious years. We all had them," you say, but you don't remember rebelling like this.

  That was your sister's department.

  "Where's the regular day-to-day life? Everything here seems so emotionally charged."

  "Adrenaline, remember? Strong emotions flood the bloodstream with adrenaline and noradrenaline. They activate the amygdala, which in turn makes the cortex more receptive to memory. As a result, emotionally charged events—happy, sad, frightening—are more deeply and firmly embedded in our memories than the routine incidents. If we hang around long enough we'll see some of those, too, but they're faint. Your memory edits for you. Do you really need to file away the details of the ten-thousandth time you passed through the living room on your way to the kitchen?"

  "Where's that go?" Henderson asks as you pass a closed door.

  "The basement, but you can't go there."

  "Why not?"

  "Because it's locked and we don't have the key. Lorraine doesn't go there herself and so she doesn't want us going there either."

  "Ah! Repressed memories."

  "Not repressed so much as tucked away. They're unpleasant and so she keeps them out of sight. Truly repressed memories— if such things exist—would be deeply buried; even the subject wouldn't know where they were. And once you located them you'd really have to dig to reach them."

  "So you've never been down to the basement."

  "I haven't found the key."

  A lie. You did find the key. You always were good at finding things. It's folded within the pages of the scrapbook in Lorraine's bedroom, rammed through the photo of Johnny Kozik. Because among other things in the basement is the fuzzy memory of the loss of Lorraine's virginity to good ol' Johnny. They'd call it date rape now.

  Johnny, two years older and light-years more experienced, came over with a bottle of Southern Comfort one night when her parents were out, got her drunk, began undressing her. Lorraine, feeling more sick than amorous, tried to push him away, but he became angry and began pushing her around. He frightened her and she was too groggy to put up much of a struggle. You couldn't watch. You had to turn away as she let him do what he wanted to do.

  It gives you the creeps to know that the
same date rape is playing in an endless loop below your feet. Even now ...

  You've never returned to the basement, and you sure as hell aren't taking a stranger down there.

  "What's upstairs?"

  "The usual—bedrooms and bathrooms. We can—"

  You are interrupted by the Warning button flashing red. You check the readout ribbon. The EKG retains a normal QRS pattern but the pulse rate is up to 120 and respirations are 14.

  "What's wrong?"

  "Nothing. For reasons we've yet to explain, we're limited to how long we can stay in the memoryscape without causing physiological reactions. The limit varies from subject to subject, but rising pulse and respiratory rates are the first signs. Part of it has to do with a diminution of the diazepam effect, so as that wears off, the reactions begin. But even with extra doses, once the reaction starts, it progresses."

  "What will happen if we ignore the warning and stay here?"

  "We can't. It's a failsafe in the program. If we don't exit, it will exit for us. I've no desire to find out what would happen if we push it. It may be harmful, it may not. Why risk it? We can always go back in later."

  "Then let's exit immediately. I'm not here to cause this young woman harm."

  As you move the fingertip of the hand to the Exit button and click it, the genuine concern in Henderson's voice causes a pang of guilt. You had Gomez give Lorraine a light dose to guarantee a short session.

  No matter. You've given him a tour. Dragging it out would only be repetitious. Because you have no intention of revealing any of Lorraine's secrets. You promised her.

  The screens go blank. You reach for your goggles.

  Three

  I'm often asked if the memoryscape programs could be useful in criminal cases. Sure, you could go into the head of a guy who says he was out of town when his wife was murdered. In the memoryscape you could watch him slashing his wife's throat, and have ever; detail of the crime scene right there for all to see. But what guilty accused is going to let you do that? —Random notes: Julia Gordon

  1

  Julie rubbed her eyes, then lifted her helmet. Across from her she saw Dr. Siegal helping Henderson off with his. Henderson sat up and stared at her, then at Siegal. His eyes were wide with wonder as he searched for the right words to say.