by John Grant
"Of course. I've made no comment about the fact you people are playing a Mylene Farmer CD in reception, have I?"
He shrugged, then disregarded my comment.
"I nearly wept," he said, "when I heard the bomb had taken out Alex as well. I mean, every silver cloud has a dark and ominous lining, sort of thing." He looked at me sidelong, checking that I'd really meant it when I'd said he could speak freely.
I nodded reassurance. "I know what you mean."
He stopped at a door that looked just like all the others. "In here," he said, opening it on a crowded office. Books and papers everywhere. You could tell where his desk was because one of the mountains of chaos was bigger than the others.
He cleared a chair, gestured for me to sit on it.
"Who did it?" he said, seating himself behind the desk-mountain. "Planted the bomb?"
"You've read the newspapers, seen the tv."
"They all say it was foreign terrorists. Probably al-Quaida. Plausible, I guess, but I don't buy it."
"It's safer for you that you do," I said earnestly. "Is this place bugged?"
He gave a low chuckle. "It's about the only place in the country I'm completely certain isn't," he said. "Did Alex tell you much about our work here?"
The question was a test, I sensed. I gave it a straightforward answer.
"Absolutely nothing. After his death, my personal computer received an encrypted e-mail from him. I got our best hackers onto it, but none of them could get into it – could even get started. A few days later, I remembered something he said maybe six months ago ..."
Tim Heatherton raised a hand as if to fend me off. "Don't tell me what the something was."
"I wasn't going to. You might be certain this place is clean of bugs, but I'm not. Homeland Security's sneakier than you think."
"Strange times," he said reflectively, gazing at the picture of him and his family on the wall opposite him, "when we've come to regard the CIA as the torchbearers of liberty."
~
Alex Bransvuld had been my mentor at the CIA, and my immediate predecessor as its Deputy Director of Operations. He'd been appointed under a previous Administration; the incoming President – and, more importantly, his Veep – had wanted to replace him as DDO, but Alex had decided not to go gently into that good night and had pointed out, with the evidence to back it up, that no one, not even the Prez and the Veep in their immediately preceding years, was immune from the attentions of the security services. The newcomers didn't like the situation, but there wasn't a great deal they could do about it.
In a way it was astonishing that Alex had ever been appointed at all to lead an organization whose operations were, for the vast majority, necessarily covert, for he was in personal life a great democrat, a great upholder of rights such as freedom of speech and openness. All the greater the chagrin for him that he found a significant amount of his and the CIA's efforts had to be put into safeguarding the life of the Prez, a man whom he loathed and despised – the man responsible for the creation of legally punishable thought-crimes, the construction of "education camps" all across the land, the further impoverishment and criminalization of the poorest in society, and much more besides. The man who seemed to be heading confidently towards a fourth term of office thanks to the increasingly obvious manipulation of computer-recorded votes.
But Alex had done it for one good reason.
Beside the Veep, the Prez was a moderate.
And Alex had still been doing his job right up until the moment that a bomb had exploded inside Air Force One, in which he'd been travelling with the Prez and the Secretary for Defense.
Within the CIA we knew exactly who had been responsible for that bomb: the order had issued from the man who'd started moving his desk-toys into the Oval Office almost before Air Force One had taken off for its final flight. But there was no immediate way we could imagine ever being able to prove this in a court of law, or even being permitted to bring it to such a court. In the era of independent-minded judges it might have been possible; not today.
I'd inherited Alex's mantle just days before my visit to Tim Heatherton at his Center for Neuronic Research – obviously an uninformative title, for security reasons – and, like Alex, I was talking tough and supportive in public while following my own agenda in private, and within certain high-level echelons of the CIA.
Once I'd succeeded in decrypting Alex's final communiqué, much of which concerned fairly standard stuff, I discovered at the bottom of it a final enigmatic instruction:
Cello – Center for Neuronic Research, Dr T. Heatherton. This is perhaps your most important call of all. Don't do anything of significance until you've seen him.
That was why I was here in Tim Heatherton's office. I was speaking to him with a reasonable degree of freedom because I had with me, despite the frisking, the means to terminate him permanently, should that prove necessary.
~
"I've no wish to be rude," I said, "but you said we should pitch straight in. Could we put an end to the 'social niceties', as you called them?"
He gathered himself. "Sure. Sorry – sure. I don't often get the chance just to, you know, talk."
"Understood."
He let out another of those long sighs. The office had no windows; in their place, there was on the wall behind him a picture almost large enough to be described as a mural and showing a beach that could have been somewhere in the Caribbean – certainly somewhere a long way away from rural New Jersey.
"How much did Alex tell you about our work?"
"Nothing." After a moment's hesitation I told him the story of the brief note at the end of the encrypted e-mail. "And we have nothing on file about the Center, either," I added.
"When we started working for you people we were called ScanFast," he said. "Ring a bell?"
"Yes." I knew the name, anyway. All I could remember was that it was one of many companies we'd quietly hired to explore technologies which might be of use to intelligence-gathering. Like most of the others, its researches had proved fruitless, and so after a while the contract had been cancelled. The only reason I'd recalled it at all was because of the mid-word capitalization: ScanFast. So very Spielberg, I'd thought at the time.
I explained.
"Yeah," he said, smiling like a schoolboy, "it was a dumbass name, all right. That wasn't the reason it was changed, though. What we were doing was ..."
And slowly, as he spoke, it all began to come back to me.
ScanFast had developed a technique of analysing the activities of the electrical pathways in the brain. ("Think of it as a series of very rapid CAT scans, about a thousand per second," said Tim.) After an induction period with any particular individual, rather like the induction period required when you first install new voice-recognition software on a personal puter, ScanFast could derive a fairly accurate representation of what that individual was actually thinking. ("In fact," said Tim, "very accurate, but with Alex's agreement we began to play down the level of our achievements a bit.")
The CIA had been interested, of course, because of the counter-terrorism possibilities. Most terrorists are fanatics, willing not only to die for their cause but even to suffer the extremes of pain before doing so. So, when you capture a terrorist suspect, standard interrogation techniques often produce no results; you have no way of discovering until later, if at all, whether the person who died without telling you anything useful was lying, keeping mum, or even in fact innocent of any involvement.
But if you could read their thoughts ...
"It turned out to be of almost zero value in that respect," said Tim with a shrug. "The problem is – was – that conscious thoughts, the ones at the forefront of the mind, produce a signal so very much stronger than the background thoughts that they effectively blot them out entirely. It's like trying to hear a whisper in the front row of a hard-rock concert. The whisper's there, all right – the sound doesn't just vanish – but there's no way of making it out in the midst of the cacophony
."
Another of those schoolboy grins.
"I'm a Bach man, myself," he said. "Anyway, it's not difficult for terrorists – or anyone else, for that matter – to train themselves to focus their concentration on something quite different from the objects of interest. So precise information about someone's latest lay, or whatever, would come through loud and clear, but nothing about where the hostages were being kept. We soon found ScanFast was far less effective than traditional babble-drugs – which were also a lot cheaper."
"And that's when we pulled the plug on your contract?"
"That's when you seemed to pull the plug," he corrected. "In fact what happened was that ScanFast disappeared and the grandly named Center for Neuronic Research popped up in its place."
"A blue-sky company, as they say?"
"A blue-sky name," he said firmly. "A very real company. Small, of course. We cut the staff right down to half a dozen, including the pretty dork in Reception – I mean, Charles, our esteemed receptionist."
I grimaced at him.
Tim laughed. "He's gay, anyway, in case you were feeling tempted."
"I'm a nun," I said shortly.
"A waste," he murmured. There was nothing objectionable about the comment; his tone turned it into a courtesy.
"Thank you."
"I'm not sure," he went on, "quite why Alex kept us going. The research we were doing was exciting stuff, all right, but it didn't have any obvious military or intelligence applications. Later on it was different, of course."
My ears pricked up.
"Later on," he said with a nod that was only half at me, "we were engaged to investigate the possibility of precognitive dreaming. And, later still, Alex was essentially paying us to keep our mouths shut."
~
Beneath the Center there was a very extensive basement – perhaps three times the area of the building's ground floor. Head-high screens divided it up into twenty or thirty cubicles, like a large open-plan office. Each of them, however, contained not a desk and chair but what I eventually worked out was a sleeping pallet with, perched above it, an agglomeration of machinery that looked like a cross between a beauty salon hair-dryer and a praying mantis. The room's walls and the walls of the cubicles were covered in blood-red carpeting material, the floor in a red so dark it was almost black; even though Tim had switched on banks of overhead fluorescent lighting, the illumination was strangely muted, like the uncertainty in the eyes of a timid guy who wonders if he's been invited to the party by mistake.
"What we did when we were ScanFast wasn't entirely fruitless, of course," Tim said as we rode down in the elevator. "It's thanks to our ScanFast work that there's been such a dramatic improvement in the treatment of coma patients, for example – now that we know they're still fully mentally active. And we have a far better understanding of the functionings of sociopaths. Who knows? One day we may be able to cure that ... ailment."
He grunted, his face grim. I knew what was going through his mind without having to make use of a ScanFast machine. Serial murderers are only one manifestation of sociopathy.
"I'm told great strides are being made in the therapies offered to schizophrenics, too," he continued after a few moments. "And so on."
"That must make you feel good," I said drily. "To know your work has been of humanitarian benefit."
He took the remark at face value. "It does, it does."
I was beginning to realize how much I already liked this man – I liked him far better than I liked myself, in fact. He had the looks of a benevolent reggae singer rather than an experimental psychologist, which I guessed was what he was. Or maybe an electronics engineer, a data analyst, an AI researcher; the lines between the disciplines were pretty blurred in his case.
"But that's by the way," he said.
"Precognitive dreams?" I prompted as we walked along an aisle that led between the cubicles. Our footsteps made no sound in the thick pile of the carpet.
"Yeah. If ScanFast wasn't much use for reading anything other than dominant thoughts – conscious thoughts – well, what about the unconscious thoughts? Might it be that they were of some inherent interest in themselves? Course, the trouble was we couldn't listen in on the unconscious thoughts in the normal way, because, like I said, they were getting drowned out by the blare of the conscious ones. Except, there was one way."
We'd reached the end of the room. Attached to the wall was a piece of apparatus much like those that crouched over each of the beds in the cubicles, but this one was much larger. Beneath it was what reminded me of a movie representation of a psychoanalyst's couch: overstuffed brown leather, studded into hexagonal sections, kind of expensively sweaty-looking. Tim patted one of its faux-mahogany arm-rests as he gazed expectantly at me.
"You couldn't 'read' them while people were awake," I said, taking my cue, "but during REM sleep – dreaming – the unconscious mind is allowed free rein."
"Exactly," he replied. He lightly clapped his hands. "Bravo, Cello!"
The jigsaw pieces all began to fit together in my mind. There has always been plenty of anecdotal evidence about precognitive dreaming, but – as with so much else in the para-sciences – at the same time there have always been an overwhelming number of good reasons to discount that evidence.
For a start, there's the well documented phenomenon known as "reading back". If an event in real life reminds you of something that happened to you in a dream, your memories of the dream, quite without any conscious volition on your part, alter themselves so that the dream seems more closely to parallel the reality. Quite how much this occurs has been shown through experiments using dream diaries; the experimental subject is asked, each time he or she wakes from a dream, to write down as much as possible about it. If, later, the person has an experience in real life "that was just exactly like that dream of mine", they're asked to go back and look at the description in the dream diary. And they're almost always astonished by the mismatch between the memory information that's by now lodged securely in their brain and what they themselves wrote down immediately after the dream. The general reaction is: "The diary's got it wrong. The dream wasn't like that at all ..."
Then there's the problem that supposed precognitive dream elements are always fragmentary, always ambiguous, and usually cloaked in putative symbolism that makes them difficult to interpret. In the wake of the sinking of the Titanic, for example, there was a great deal written about the claimedly precognitive dreams among those on its passenger list – a few of whom in fact cancelled their voyages. None of the dream descriptions stated flat out that "The Titanic is going to go down", or anything even approximating that. Some involved shipwrecks; others involved major disasters. Alas, major disasters happen in reality with sufficient frequency that any dream of catastrophe is sure to be followed pretty promptly by some fearful loss of life.
Further, almost as a corollary: Dreams of disaster are themselves so frequent that, even if they seem quite specific, their matching up with a real-life event doesn't have much statistical significance. Proper maths aren't possible, for obvious reasons, but to get an idea: In any given week, at least dozens of people around the world will have a dream in which the Space Shuttle explodes. If, in one of those weeks, there is a Shuttle disaster, it'll seem to the dreamers concerned as if they were given a forewarning. But this is to discount all the other "forewarnings", during other weeks, that came to nothing.
And yet ... and yet ...
The anecdotal evidence is so voluminous and so persistent that it cannot entirely be discounted.
What Alex must have thought was that, by using ScanFast on a host of experimental subjects, one would not only get far more accurate descriptions of the contents of their dreams than could ever be achieved through dream diaries, but might also be able to detect patterns in the dreams of numerous subjects that, taken together, would comprise a sort of early warning system. If a whole bunch of people suddenly started having dreams about the Empire State Building being blown up, then it
would certainly be worth increasing security at the Empire State Building, putting out feelers to all the informers in foreign intelligence organizations and the major terrorist groups themselves, and so on.
I could understand entirely how Alex might be drawn to this notion.
If, of course, there was anything to the idea of precognitive dreaming at all.
A very big if.
I summarized all this to Tim.
"That was more or less exactly the way of it," he replied. "In effect, the Center for Neuronic Research became a sleep-research establishment. Alex was able to supply us with plenty of 'volunteers' from the education camps – people who were only too happy to come stay here for a few weeks or months, enjoying better food and with the promise that strings might be pulled to have their 'education' declared 'complete' earlier than it might otherwise be."
It was my turn to grin. A typical Alex setup, achieving two things at once: he got a supply of unpaid experimental subjects while at the same time he relieved the misery of at least a few of the unfortunates who'd been slung into the education camps.
"What sort of results did you have?" I said. "Presumably not great, or I'd have heard about them."
"We discovered nothing useful ... at least, not at first." He sucked in a deep breath through his teeth. "Look, there's a much easier way for me to explain all this."
"Oh?"
"Would you like to experience someone else's dream?"
"It's possible?"
"Yeah. That's the way ScanFast works. It's almost the same apparatus, actually. The devices over there" – he gestured vaguely towards the cubicles – "detect the patterns of electrical activity in the dreamer's brain. Only a relatively simple modification of the apparatus is required to make it induce the same electrical patterns in someone else's brain. Same sort of principle as the electric generator being just an electric motor in reverse. We have all the data from our experiments stored on hard drives here; I can easily pick out a dream at random from the thousands available and replay it for your benefit."
I wasn't sure I liked the idea. There was something pretty creepy about it. As a professional spook, I'm totally accustomed to invading other people's privacy – I'd not be able to do my job otherwise – but this, the dreaming of someone else's dream, seemed somehow an invasion of privacy too far. As if I were, in a way, stealing a part of their identity. Cello Prestrantra, soul raper.
