by G. L. Baron
‘Good choice…’ the waiter repeated. Then he paused before going back into the kitchen, unsure whether to add something else. Finally he decided, ‘Compliments on your Ferrari it’s… beautiful.’
She smiled and then looked back at him. There was a second of silence, waiting for the waiter to go away. Soon after, the Sheikh’s wife touched the small device’s display and turned it on. ‘Do you have any special requests?’
‘You choose… I am at your disposal.’
‘Close your eyes, otherwise the experience will overlap with what you see now.’ The woman called up a file with the pad and hit the “Play” button.
Suddenly the room disappeared, replaced by a blue sky and the sea as smooth as a mirror.
*
File 201X-03-14 11:18:24.
The small boat rocked on the water surface.
A slight warm breeze caressed his skin and ruffled his hair.
He looked up over the canopy that protected the other tourists from the sun; he could see a glimpse of the emerald sea. He could see the low profile of an island, the white sand and green palm trees on the beach. The boat had stopped about fifty metres from the shore.
‘Hama pahuňcē,’ stammered one of the sailors in Hindi:‘We’ve arrived.’.
The other occupants of the boat stood up almost simultaneously. There were eight, all wearing fashionable costumes, flippers and diving masks.
They slipped into the water one at a time, helped by the sailors.
He did the same, climbing down the small ladder.
The sea temperature was pleasant and it was transparent and crystal clear as a sheet of glass.
He broke away from the boat and let go. Swam a few strokes. Hundreds of colourful fish surrounding them, then he looked back at the small boat that had brought them this far.
‘Apanē sira kē nīcē dāla diyā,’ suggested the sailor gesturing with his hands. He understood Hindi well enough: ‘Put your head down!’
He followed his advice and as soon as his eyes were immersed under the water the spectacle of the reef made his heart beat rapidly; it seemed like Trafalgar Square during the rush hour, only instead of cars, buses and taxis there were colourful fish of every size and colour.
He recognized trigger fish, beige and black striped sergeant fish, and blue surgeon fish with beautiful yellow fins. They seemed to be swimming without any clear destination. Crossing and overlapping in a frantic mass of bubbles, coral and algae that floated in the water. The barrier was even more impressive further down; towers of red stone rose up for several metres, and green, yellow and blue corals danced, flowing with the warm currents.
He swam a few metres under the surface of the water, keeping the mouthpiece between his teeth and the breathing tube directed upwards towards the sky, as he had been told.
He saw an Acanthurus triostegus, a streaked surgeon fish slowly retreating from the barrier. Just beyond there was a specimen of a spotted eagle ray. It was a sort of brown kite moving its wings and approaching a pyramid-shaped coral.
Then the image disappeared abruptly.
*
‘I would say that is enough to get the idea.’ Meredith touched the “Pause” button.
He opened his eyes, an expression of someone who has just seen a ghost tap dance on his face. ‘Incredible…’ was all he could stammer.
‘I told you that it was worth it,’ echoed the woman.
‘But how is it that possible?’
She smiled, unsure if her guest could understand the way the device worked. Then, given the importance of this meeting, she tried to explain it. ‘When we live an experience, the neurons of the brain interact allowing us to remember what happens. They are generated by chemical reactions that in turn create electrical pulses. In short, the device measures and records these impulses and is able to reproduce them at atomic level.’
‘But it was like being there.’
‘Not really…’ Meredith corrected. ‘It wasn’t like being there. You, according to your brain were there for all intents and purposes: you swam, you understood what the sailors were saying even though they spoke Hindi, you recognized the species of fish without having ever seen them.’
The man thought for a moment, then looked back at the girl and shook his head. He had gone to the appointment only as a favour to a friend, and now he was looking at something within the bounds of science fiction. ‘Incredible…’ was all he could repeat.
The girl smiled. ‘All your senses are involved, all the emotions. It’s an experience that’s imprinted directly onto your cerebral cortex. You are there; swimming, feeling, seeing… perceiving smells, feeling the cold, the warmth… if you were to eat, you would taste the flavours… if you were angry, you would feel rage. It’s not like being there…’ repeated Meredith. ‘You are there. To all effects, your brain does not perceive any difference.’
The man was silent for a few seconds, and then he decided. ‘Okay, I’m in.’
Meredith nodded, satisfied.
‘What do you want me to do exactly? Just look at some pictures?’
‘The experience we have just seen was recorded, by me, a few months ago. My husband was a fan of snorkelling but since he got ill he can no longer practice it.’
‘So… he relives the experience memorized by someone else…’
‘We prefer to say impressed.’
‘Excuse me…’
The woman continued. ‘When operating the device, you relive the memories of another person, as they are, whole, raw, taken directly from their neurons… It is not important who the person who has impressed the experience is. Each of us, when we interact with the world, does so in a unique way, our thoughts, our impressions, our knowledge combines and imprints the file. It generates a unique cocktail of chemical reactions that are then relived by someone else.’
‘So, as I understand it, you want me for what I know about art?’
‘Exactly. I could send anyone to imprint the memory of a painting… but my husband wants the memory of a competent person, a person with great experience and knowledge of the Renaissance… A person who can add to its simple view perceptions. In other words, someone like you.’
The man smiled. ‘It’s a bit like going to the movies… better to see a film by Steven Spielberg than the neighbour, right?’
‘That’s right… You’ve got it exactly.’ The girl pulled some papers out of the bag and handed them to him. ‘This is a preliminary contract. The experiment will be very short, even though we may have to adjust to a different medium from the hard ultrasound disc that I used a little while ago.’
He took the contract and began to examine it.
‘For the kind of experience we need, we realized that the amount of data to be stored is greater than the storage capacity of the discs. We will use a biological support, a bio support, but you will find all the details in the contract.’
The man continued to read without giving weight to Meredith’s words. Finally, he looked up and stared at her. ‘All right, I’m with you.’
The girl handed him a gold Aurora and pointed where to sign. ‘As soon as I get back to the hotel, I’ll tell my husband to send the first donation.’
Andrea Cavalli Gigli nodded and scribbled his signature on the document.
‘You will not regret it, superintendent. You do what we’ve asked you and your museums will have the funds to go on for at least another decade.’
He smiled, stood up, and for a moment his image was reflected in the mirror. Then he held out his hand. ‘It’s agreed, then. See you on December 26th.’
38
Charles de Gaulle Airport, January 2nd. 6:02 p.m.
When Aurore Bousquet entered the airport sky box with her laptop under her arm, she was uncertain. She did not know who had hired her, or exactly why. The only certain information she had was the deposit of one hundred and fifty thousand euro, already accredited to her account in the Cayman Islands.
She was a woman of fifty, with large gl
asses, and a mild and anonymous look about her. Her appearance, however, masked perfectly what she really was: a former external collaborator of the French secret service who had started up on her own.
Aurore ran a private intelligence company that counted among its customers, multinational companies such as Renault, France Telecom and Louis Vuitton. Some judges in a scandal concerning the illegal wiretapping of telephones had recently questioned her. She had come out clean, but one of her closest aides had been arrested. Prosecutors suspected that she had breached information systems on behalf of clients with whom she had worked.
The woman sat down at the sky box conference table, a private room on the second floor of the airport. The impressive glassed area overlooked the runway from where she was able to watch the take-off of a mammoth Airbus A380; it was like watching an elephant trying to take off and fly with a jump. She did not even have the time to make herself comfortable, when the glass door opened. A young blonde woman appeared pulling a small trolley. Judging by her tired face, she must have made a long journey.
‘Thank you for coming at such short notice,’ she began in grammatically correct French but with a hint of a Middle Eastern accent. She went to sit down and held out her hand. ‘My name is Julia Duskrjadcenko. It’s a pleasure.’
Aurore Bousquet smiled and shook her hand. ‘What do you want exactly?’
Julia pulled out a file with a photograph and some papers. ‘His name is Manuel Cassini,’ she said, showing them to Aurore.
Bousquet observed the photograph calmly. Then she examined the papers, one by one.
‘You have to track him down, with extreme urgency,’ she continued.
‘We don’t have a lot of time at our disposal,’ Al Husayn’s words continued to haunt her. ‘I feel that my time is running out, my days are numbered… We have to finish the quest before its too late.’
Julia vowed to herself that she would be successful. After all, it was the most important assignment she had ever been given. She would succeed; she would avenge Meredith, but she would do it especially for the Sheikh, whom she owed her life.
‘My contact told me that the subject has not returned to the hotel. Did you think to trace him down through the triangulation of cell phone signals?’ muttered Aurore.
‘We contacted you for this reason. We know that it shouldn’t be difficult for you.’
The woman nodded. In fact, she had already done it in the past and still had many contacts at France Télécom.
‘Then track him down. The triangular number is in the file,’ said Julia, staring at her with a determined look. ‘There’s something else.’
She settled in her chair and held the young woman’s gaze. ‘Tell me.’
‘Be careful; you may not be the only one looking for him.’
39
Haute Savoie, January 2nd. 7:16 p.m.
Manuel Cassini’s Mini proceeded south on the motorway. He had recently passed Geneva and now he was near Arenthon, a town along the river Arve.
The headlights illuminated a deserted roadway, with flat fields on the right and bare trees on the other side. Snowfall from the days before was accumulated at the sides of the road, and the Alps began to emerge as rocks from the sea before him.
The day had been extremely busy, but the visit to Versailles had convinced him that at least he was not crazy.
He did not understand how or especially why, but some of the flashbacks from the last two days that kept popping into his brain were not his: they were Andrea Cavalli Gigli’s.
‘It’s agreed then,’ he had said to the woman after the strange conversation. ‘See you on December 26th.’ Then he got up and Cavalli Gigli’s image was reflected in the mirror, wearing a dark cardigan, a bow tie and a tweed jacket. The face was exactly as he remembered in the other vision… the one where he shot him. An ageing face, marked by wrinkles with some moles on his red cheeks.
It was not easy to digest, but that last vision explained a lot. It was the clearest of them all, the most complete. ‘You see the memories of another person, as they are, whole, raw, taken directly from his neurons,’ the woman had said.
The words were etched in his mind and he had not stopped repeating them since he had left Le Carré aux Crêpes, five hours earlier.
He asked himself many questions, although in the end he had focused on the one that seemed most important. The only one that could have certified his sanity: how could this be happening?
As soon as his Mini had left Paris on the A6, he had pulled over in a lay-by. He reflected on two words he remembered hearing in the last vision. Then he opened the phone’s browser and wrote: actin and OCST. The results were higher than expected…
‘Keep left and follow the N205,’ the phone navigator indicated, while the Mini maintained a constant speed.
Cassini observed the illuminated motorway – which was passing under a flyover at that point – and picked up his cell phone again. He turned it on and called up the pdf file of the article that he had saved. It was written in English, and to be sure he had understood it perfectly, he had read it many times.
He slowed, stopped on the hard shoulder, and decided to read it again.
‘San Francisco Tribune’ – online edition
Monday, April 2nd, 2012
An organic microchip to communicate with neurons. In the future we will be able to record our dreams and relive our experiences.
A microchip can interact with brain cells and stimulate activity. The OCST (organic cell stimulating and sensing transistor) an organic transparent microchip, capable of interacting with neuronal activity, is now a reality thanks to a small company in Palo Alto just acquired by a multinational based in Dubai.
The potential of this new technology is enormous; starting with the opportunity for disabled patients to control objects with their minds, allowing them to operate a communicator, the wheelchair or even home automation devices for lights, doors, windows, alarms or thermostats.
But that is not all. According to Timothy Dempsey - the young researcher who patented the microchip made of actin molecules - if the right investments are made, it will be possible to expand the use of OCST to more complex neural activity. The first example that comes to mind is the recording of dreams during the REM phase of sleep but – they assure from Palo Alto - also activities carried out with open eyes: a run on the beach, swimming and, for the most transgressive, extreme sexual intercourse.
It would seem pure science fiction, but from tomorrow we may be able not only to relive somebody else’s dreams, but also to have a fun skiing experience while sitting comfortably on the sofa at home.
Cassini closed his eyes. He had stopped with the engine running, by the side of the road and saw cars and trucks roaring by, the Mini quivering with the air displacement.
The article’s last words had convinced him to abandon Paris and return to Italy.
By now, he was certain he had relived someone else’s memories. The trip to Versailles had evoked in his mind Cavalli Gigli’s experiences. So that explained, if nothing else, the reason why he had those visions.
He was not crazy, and this was already very good news.
He should have asked himself dozens of questions, but his mind had wandered elsewhere, focusing on insignificant details. He had tried to fix some images of some of the flashbacks he had in mind. In the end, he managed to focus his attention on the thought that obviously should already be there before him: if the whole thing was real, was it possible that the memories that resurfaced gradually were not only one person’s? They were not only Cavalli Gigli’s.
He tried to mentally retrace all his visions; he thought about the hands that had put the two microchips on his neck, the hands that gripped the wheel of the Ferrari driven to Versailles, and finally the hands that held a small gun.
How had he not noticed? How could he not have realized before? Hands were constant in all those memories and were always the same: dark, slender, slim. Women’s hands! For a second he thou
ght he saw, in the flashback of the bedroom, even a strange bracelet with golden triangles.
Those hands were not his, nor those of Cavalli Gigli. They were almost certainly Meredith’s, the woman who had approached him at the bar of the Ritz on New Year’s Eve.
Cassini rested his forehead on the steering wheel and for a second seemed undecided on what to do. Then he grabbed the phone and called Sforza’s number. He was not sure it was the best choice, but after all, who else could he ask for help?
He dialled the number and waited.
While he waited, he wondered if the inspector would believe him. What should he tell him exactly? That someone had forcefully inserted in his mind other peoples’ memories and someone else wanted to kidnap him for that reason?
After ten long seconds, instead of the “free” signal he heard a French voice asking to leave a voice mail message.
‘Hello, Inspector,’ he gasped, tense. ‘It’s Cassini. I need to talk to you urgently. Someone wants to kill me and I think it’s because of that microchip you asked me about. Call me back as soon as you can.’
He put the phone down on the passenger seat and sighed.
He wondered if he had done the right thing to call him; the inspector had always seemed very interested in those little chips. Whatever the reason he did not know, but it had to be the same as why Cavalli Gigli, de Beaumont, and Meredith had died. And it was the same one that had put him in danger. Yes, calling him had been the right decision.
‘And when thou writ’st them, keep in mind, Not to conceal how thou hast seen the plant, That twice hath now been spoil’d.’ He thought of Dante again, the triplet, the reason why he was there in that moment. ‘And remember, when you’ll write, do not keep silent about seeing the plant, twice stolen.’
If he wanted to understand more about what was happening to him, and to be able to explain it to Sforza, he only had one choice. He had to follow his visions, that strange map that was forming slowly in front of his eyes, and wait for the next clue to become clear.
