Afterimage

by Roderick Geiger

  “You’re a real downer,” Thomas directed at Lomax.

  Lomax nodded slowly. “I think you’re all ready to hear about my research, started by a visionary man named Dr. Markland A. Deverson more than 40 years ago. I want you to consider being subjects in…Afterimage…”

  “One question,” Jeff blurted. “How much does this gig pay?”

  Lomax grinned. “I think we can offer something more valuable than money…perhaps more valuable than all the money on earth.”

  Day 9

  Friday

  Henrique Island,

  South Indian Ocean

  Devon hustled to catch up with Petard, who was walking briskly along the beach toward the warehouse. The wiry officer always walked annoyingly fast, always hurrying somewhere. “Lieutenant, hold up,” Devon shouted over the crashing surf. “It’s been over a week, Lieutenant. When do we get our…the faculty and students…back?”

  Asking this had become almost a daily ritual, as had Petard’s answer: “The Admiralty will make this decision, not I.”

  “There’s no terrorists out here,” Devon shouted, arms extended outward. “No spies, no suicide bombers, no secret agents.”

  “Perhaps,” the officer said, crunching determinedly through the gravelly sand. “I am certain your friends will be cleared soon.”

  Devon stuck out an arm and caught Petard by the shoulder. “At least let me talk to her. She’s up there with all those guys. You’re killing me here, Lieutenant.”

  After spending three days poking around the archipelago, Reims had steamed back to La Possession Naval Base on La Reunion Island, 1400 kilometers northwest of here. The students and faculty were stuck on La Possession, under virtual house arrest.

  “I’ll see what I can do,” Petard said, pulling free and starting off.

  “You can’t still think one of our students had anything to do with it!” Emilie’s up there with nothing better to do than soak up the summer sun in that tiny bikini of hers! With hundreds of French sailors all around! He called after the officer: “Damnit, Petard, at least lift the communications blackout!”

  His social life in ruins, Devon had spent the week tackling the tasks at hand: disassembling the hard-drives from all the U.N. International Monitoring System computers, then re-installing each disk stack into a generic drive, one-at-a-time downloading the data into new computers.

  Next came analysis of the sonar data streams from the hard-drives, listening carefully to the last 24 hours of hydrophone noise before the blackout. Except for the call of a lonely male humpback 700 km south-southwest, and verifiable shipping-lane noise 550 km due south, the analyses revealed nothing. Devon was beginning to identify with that whale.

  For their part, the NOAA scientists, Drs. Schiffer and Gleason worked at replacing the network sensors. Their first priority: raising the main hydroacoustic cable with Argyle’s trawling rig. Like the hydrophone itself, the wires had been subjected to tremendous electrical overload. The ‘snake,’ two kilometers of eight-conductor, 16-gauge sheathed cable would need to be replaced. The seismometer and its own cable – a half-kilometer long - were similarly damaged. Replacement components would have to come all the way from the U.S. of A.

  Dr. Schiffer was finally granted CIA clearance to download the 240 seconds of datastream from NOAA-7, the American sub-polar satellite that had gone black at the same time as the equipment on Henrique. Because the main hydrophone, the seismometer and the satellite all calibrated with the U.S. Naval Observatory’s cesium clock, accurate to within a tenth of a microsecond, it was possible to draw conclusions from differences between the exact time each device went black, a technique called chronologic triangulation.

  They gathered in Schiffer’s workspace, an unused table in the meteorology lab, now crowded with piles of books, electronic gear, files, discs. There was a certain finality to this meeting…having exhausted every other lead, it had become mutually accepted that this would be their last reasonable hope of unraveling the Henrique mystery.

  “I’ve never even heard of chronologic triangulation,” Devon said.

  “It doesn’t come up very often,” Schiffer said, distractedly typing commands on her keyboard, “but it might work for us here. Imagine, if you will, aliens from outer space fire their ray gun at NOAA-7, and the ray continues down here and hits your seismometer as well. Are the two destroyed at the same time?”

  “No!” Devon said, reaching for a calculator. “NOAA-7 is destroyed…six hundred - make that - forty-five hundred-thousandths of a second earlier.

  “Approximately,” Gleason chuckled. “The speed of light is affected by weather, altitude, sunspots, gravity, many things which distort the accuracy of the calculation.”

  Still typing, Schiffer continued: “What we’re looking for is which sensor failed first, which second, and which last. Even if the differences are only a few hundred microseconds, it will give us an idea of what direction the disturbance was moving, and, therefore, it’s point of origin. Did it come from space? Did it come from the depths of the ocean? Three points should allow us to hone-in on …here comes the data now.”

  Three numbers scrolled onto her screen, and when she saw them, she let out a disappointed sigh. All three were the same…exactly the same:

  HA04 - 60E-23:53.71455121

  NOAA-7 - 60E-23:53.71455121

  T-Phase H4 - 60E-23:53.71455121

  “How do we get information from the difference between numbers that aren’t different,” Devon asked.

  “We don’t,” Gleason said.

  “Oh.” Devon turned slowly to Petard, arms out, palms up. “At what point do we call it, Lieutenant?”

  “When do we go back to living our lives normally?” Dr. Galli added.

  “I am very sorry,” the intelligence officer said. “I cannot let your students return to Henrique until I can explain what happened here.”

  “You want cause?” Schiffer said impatiently. “Okay. Here’s what happened: A natural phenomenon! A freak electromagnetic storm, disturbance, event, whatever... We know it’s happened before, several times in this area. We just don’t have any data on the phenomenon because the phenomenon destroys our data-collecting equipment.”

  Gleason said: “Call your boss, Lieutenant. Tell him the mystery’s solved. The experts say it’s an electromagnetic storm. It’s - I christen it a - Robbins Electro-Magnetic Event. Yes, a REME. Send the students back. We’re done here!”

  Except for Petard and Devon, they all had a laugh and made a toast to the new discovery.

  Staring intently into Schiffer’s glistening flat-panel display, Devon Robbins said quietly: “One thing I don’t get…” He put his finger on the screen. “How can they all be exactly the same? This isn’t my field, but is that… even possible?”

  The others looked over at him, each about to explain it. The satellite, the seismometer, the hydrophone, they all went dead at the same precise moment. Simple cause-and-effect. Then, one-by-one it hit them.

  “Holy shit,” Schiffer said. “It can only mean one thing.”

  Day 8

  Saturday

  Willamette River Hilton,

  Eugene, Oregon

  Sara opened the hotel door. “Come in, gentlemen,” she said, stepping back. The three men entered briskly, Gyttings last, taking the time to offer his hand. She’d dressed for the occasion, an expensive, turquoise suit, short skirt, high heels but no stockings, low-cut, white lace top accented with a natural pearl necklace. He held onto her hand an extra moment, gazing into her light blue eyes.

  “Have a seat,” she said, gesturing toward the suite’s living room.

  Gyttings preferred to stand, enjoying the tenth-story view eastward toward the University of Oregon. It was late afternoon under a mixed sky, breaks among black clouds. In the distance an oval shaft of orange-gold sunlight, angled heavily east to west, clambered slowly across town toward the river. He stood, hands clasped behind his back, lost momentarily in the accidental beauty of it.

>   “I trust you find the accommodations adequate,” Gyttings said.

  “Quite,” Adel answered, seated in an overstuffed chair, clutching guardedly to a large manila envelope.

  “I thought you’d like to know,” Chalmais began, “our legal staff has reopened your incompetency case. Pending another hearing you’re on your own recognizance.”

  “We’ll have the Deverson trust back under your control by Monday,” Gyttings added. “And if you want, we can file suit against your daughters.”

  “That won’t be necessary,” she said, moving her head from voice to voice as a sighted person might do, studying each speaker through her black glasses. “I asked you here because I wanted to talk about…the human subject INFX.”

  Gyttings felt the silent stares of Lomax and Chalmais, waiting for his response. He’d invested substantial resources in freeing this woman from a mental institution, this mad woman who talked to her dead husband, and now he needed to evaluate whether it had been worth it.

  “You needn’t be coy, Mr. Gyttings. I know you intend to use human subjects.”

  Gyttings took a long breath and turned from the window. His eyes stopped on Sara who stood across the room, arms folded, leaning slightly against the wall. It was hard not to stare. “How is it you came by this information, Mrs. Deverson? Did your husband tell you?” He tried to say this without sarcasm.

  She laughed. “Please don’t misinterpret the grieving of a lonely, old, blind woman, Mr. Gyttings. My husband is gone.”

  “Then how?” Lomax shot.

  Adel turned to the voice. “Why, your book on terminal patient care, Dr. Lomax. It’s available in Braille.”

  Chalmais responded quickly: “Dr. Lomax has been our ergonomics consultant for many years. His book has nothing to do with why we asked him here.”

  Sara interjected: “And I suppose the intensive care unit you’re installing at your plant is for chimpanzees?”

  “It’s veterinary, yes,” Chalmais said.

  Sara smiled knowingly. “Then let me ask you this: Do you honestly hope to accomplish anything without human subjects?”

  “We plan to use lab animals,” Chalmais nodded.

  “Then, in the end, you’re going to be very disappointed. If you’d read Professor Deverson’s later notes, you’d understand the limitations of small cranial size.

  “And there’s more to it than just size,” Adel added, listening to their breathing, short and slightly agitated. “The human consciousness, creative, deductive, self-aware.” She paused dreamily, then snapped back. “I have some things here I’m sure you’ll want to see.” She gestured by placing her hand on the folder tucked beside her.

  Gyttings glanced briefly at his two lieutenants. “All right. I’m listening.”

  “Design specifications to what Mark believed will be the perfect human experiment. The perfect INFX.”

  “I thought all those documents were lost in the lab fire,” Lomax said.

  In truth, she’d seen the plans, drawings, alignment calculations in dreams - planted there, she was convinced, by the force of her husband’s will, still alive somewhere beyond her understanding. She’d felt her way through the drafting process guided by those visions, providing oral directions to a very patient Braille art coach. Years of work. In the darkness of her mind’s eye she could see the crude rendering of what Mark had called the ‘Twin Tunnel’ as it took shape through this ponderous process, made even slower by Mark’s many changes and revisions along the way.

  But how could she expect these men, these pragmatic, rational, successful business executives to believe these designs were created beyond the grave? The suggestion would only serve to distract them from this important task. No! With these men she would stop talking about Mark in the present tense. She would tell them what they needed to hear, this simple lie: “These drawings were spared. Mark left them up at the house the day of the lab fire.”

  “I’m not sure how much good it’ll do us,” Gyttings said. “The experiment killed your husband and, if I’m not mistaken, blinded you. Until we know what went wrong we how can we use that information.”

  “Except perhaps in a negative sense,” Chalmais added with a forced chuckle. “We’d know what not to do.”

  “The experimental design I have here is not the machine that Mark died in.” She paused to listen for the telltale signs that she had everyone’s attention. Then she began to unfold the carefully designed fiction: “Shortly before he died, Mark started making drawings and design calculations - on napkins, the backs of envelopes, anywhere he happened to be at the moment - for a new machine, a short-bore with a wide oval opening, one that could accommodate two humans, side-by-side, at the same time.”

  “Dr. Vrynos mentioned something about that,” Gyttings said, holding his hands together to illustrate the point. “Using two animals of course, not humans.”

  “A couple years earlier Mark had discovered that placing two animals into the tunnel in close and carefully aligned proximity tended to reduce the magnitude of the explosion. Over time he was able to minimize blast intensity to the point that some of his passengers survived.”

  “Passengers?” Gyttings asked.

  Adel turned to his sound. “That’s what he called the second animal. The first animal, the one that was intentionally terminated, Mark called the “driver.”

  Gyttings shook his head, forgetting for the moment her blindness. “I see…I understand.”

  Adel continued: “So Mark developed a theory about how the proximity of the one organism, the passenger, counterbalanced the violent disruption that occurred in the driver. He called it the ‘Muffler Effect.’ But he knew it wouldn’t be possible with big-brained mammals because the tunnels on conventional MRIs were too small to accommodate the shoulders of two subjects at once.”

  She cleared her throat. “In his last several experiments Mark used a short-bore machine modified to accept patient tables from both sides, so that he could fit two craniums in, side-by-side, but from opposite directions.” She illustrated this with her two fists. “It worked, but not very well. All but one of his primate passengers was killed. He theorized the problem lay in the fact that the two craniums were opposite one another, one scanned left-to-right, the other, right-to-left, which caused some kind of mirror image problem, a map lag, something he could not resolve.

  “The oval opening machine would have allowed both subjects in from the same side, which - theoretically mind you - would have synchronized the two samples exactly in the same landscape at exactly the same microsecond. No map lag, no explosion.

  “Mark dreamed about this machine constantly. But he never built it. We never had the money.”

  “This is a lot to absorb,” Chalmais said. “Honestly speakin’, I never heard of any of these theories.”

  “So the driver would be sacrificed but the passenger would survive?” Gyttings asked.

  “Yes. The passenger would live. I know that it works because I’ve…seen it work.” Adel decided quickly that it was not yet time to tell them about Mark’s final experiment. “Does this sound like something you might be interested in?”

  “None of us would be here if we weren’t interested,” Gyttings said. “But our goal here is to explain the Manzanita accident, and there was only one person in that machine.”

  “Yes,” she said softly. “A dilemma.” She raised her left hand, palm up. “On the one hand, you could continue with single subjects, eventually working your way up to a human. I assume you’re prepared to provide human drivers, that you’ve dealt with the ethical and moral issues?”

  “Hmm,” Gyttings stalled. He’d known from the start that without human experiments there would always be doubt about what happened in Manzanita.

  “You could continue with single subjects,” Adel repeated, “ignoring the last three years of my husband’s research, running the risk of blowing this entire city off the face of the earth…”

  “You’re exaggerating,” Chalmais scoffed.


  She turned to the voice. “Am I? What science are you using to predict the size of the explosion?” She dropped her left hand and raised her right. “Or…you can incorporate all Mark’s findings, move forward from here toward accomplishing the perfect INFX.”

  “There’s another option,” Gyttings said. “We run a couple animal tests, get Vrynos to write a paper concluding that Constance McCormack died of natural causes while undergoing an MRI and that’s why the thing exploded.”

  “Mr. Gyttings,” Sara said, trying not to condescend, “Do you really think such a paper is going to pull the MRI industry out of its tailspin?” She shook her head. “The patient has to disappear without a trace, and in a perfect INFX there’s no explosion, but the driver’s physical body will vanish without leaving behind so much as a single cell.”

  “And the passenger just gets up and walks away?”

  Sara nodded, trying hard to look fully confident. “The machine doesn’t even get singed.”

  “You can do that?” Gyttings asked.

  Adel nodded. “With a human subject, yes.”

  “Take a step back,” Sara said. “And look at what comes after a perfect INFX. What science lies beyond? What technologies? Can you resist these mysteries? Saving MRI may prove to be the least important thing we decide to do here today.” Her eyes were on Gyttings, and his on her, and the room was silent.

  Adel broke the silence. “Since my husband’s death several MRI manufacturers have been developing Open Bore machines, the horseshoe shaped coil configuration being similar enough to Marks’ oval Twin Tunnel.” She held up her folder. “With modifications, these designs…”

  Gyttings interrupted: “What does Vrynos have to say about all this?”

  Sara hadn’t talked to him about it yet. “He’s onboard 100%,” she lied, smiling coyly.

  “I expect you want something in exchange for giving us that folder,” Gyttings said.

  “Yes,” Adel said somberly. “The deal is simple: Gyttings-Lindstrom provides the modified Open Bore machine; I’m the first driver.”