Analog SFF, March 2010

by Dell Magazine Authors

  "Years of work and hundreds of cases have shown otherwise, Ms. Madsen. I can confirm that from experience both professional and personal. Now—"

  "Begging your pardon,” Madsen said, “but the supplemental materials for this course are skeptical of that."

  Lucinda smiled bleakly. “I'm not involved with producing those.” She didn't have full control over their education. She wondered whether even someone Burleigh fully trusted would.

  "Anyway,” she continued, “if you need practical rationales, aside from not destroying aspects of a person's personality that aren't pernicious, aside from the added difficulty of integrating the new patterns, there are the simple needs of interrogation. If you expect a patient to talk once he's treated, you don't want to have overwritten the knowledge you were hoping to learn."

  A new hand went up, and its owner didn't wait to be called. “That's a valid concern within its sphere,” Dr. Page said, “but it's only a subset of our mission. We're looking at a bigger picture, the broader problem of extremism. People we'll be treating won't all have been participants in violent conspiracies. Different standards will apply."

  "We understand the work you've done, and are doing,” Madsen said, “but you need to see beyond that, and consider what we'll be doing."

  Lucinda tugged at a lock of her hair, then caught herself. That nervous habit was growing on her down here. “It seems some of you have done a thorough job of considering it already.” She tried to focus on getting the class on track again, but her eyes kept drifting back toward Dr. Garritty, still gazing right at her, jotting down notes as fast as if she were still lecturing.

  * * * *

  "When were you recruited into the terrorist cell?"

  The interviewer was one of many they had cycling through the position here. Lucinda hadn't seen one handle more than two interrogations. The detainee was shackled at wrists and ankles, and had his head and upper body obscured within the magnetoencephalographic scanner. Microphones inside amplified his answers, both for the interviewer and for Lucinda and her colleague in the monitoring booth. He gave a glib denial of any involvement, one that a casual glance at the scans of his frontal lobe exposed as falsehood.

  This was the part of her existence under Mount Weather that Lucinda could bear, and even feel was worthwhile. This person, apparently a moneyman, had aided those who destroyed Washington. She felt no sympathy for him, since he felt none for others. The point of the overlay she was helping prepare was to make him someone who would care about those he had killed. That motive had started her down this road years back.

  "How soon after you joined the cell did you know they meant to set off a nuclear weapon?"

  As for the other prisoners being brought into the Mount, the ones not connected to Black Friday, Lucinda never saw them. She knew about them by intimation and inference, from the talk she overheard from other scientists and technicians. Insofar as doing this work freed someone for that work, she was abetting them. That took some of the satisfaction out of her endeavors.

  "Once you knew what they meant to do, how many they meant to kill, were you ever tempted to stop their plans, or at least disassociate yourself from them?"

  Lucinda paid closer attention to the brain scans now. The prefrontal cortex showed a classic pattern of underactivity, the dulling of moral awareness that let him shrug off the horrors he had helped to inflict. “Reading any cingulate cortex stimulation?” she asked.

  Dr. Edwin O'Doul shifted one of his displays. “Slight increase in activity,” he said dully. “Nothing extraordinary."

  So reflecting on his deeds didn't give him any particular pleasure. Maybe that feeling had faded in the eleven weeks since the attack. Whatever the cause, it meant a little less work for Lucinda, another small reason to be glad.

  The feed from the scanning room skipped. The interviewer's position jumped, and the colors in the MEG scans shifted abruptly. Lucinda knew what this meant by now: they were getting prerecorded data, edited to omit material somebody thought too sensitive for their level of security clearance, or perhaps their personal and political reliability. The latter probably reflected on her more than O'Doul. She ignored the cut, and the second one a few minutes later, and kept working on the data they did receive.

  Once the session recording ended, they had a good idea of what pathways in his brain needed to be overwritten. Finding a good matching pattern in the template banks was now their goal. Those banks had expanded under Burleigh's oversight, with plenty of new people getting scanned. Those people were all approved by Burleigh: old political allies he had brought in to reconstruct the government, members of his security forces, some of the scientists and technicians flooding in who clicked with him. Basically anyone Burleigh found harmonious with him could be part of the template cache, including Burleigh himself. Lucinda's pattern had been in the banks once, but of course it was gone now.

  It had begun this way, Lucinda recalled. The California legislature was ready to smother their research in its infancy, until she had the idea of taking the legislators’ brain patterns as templates. It gave them a sense of control, of ownership, over the program. President Burleigh had to feel the same way. Lucinda had repented of her expedient compromise years before, but the price for it kept growing.

  She pulled up the standard pattern comparison routines they used and began adding elements to adjust for the particular brain of the detainee. She asked O'Doul for information and opinion a couple times and got terse answers. He never asked her for help, even though he was making his own additions.

  "You've been very quiet today,” Lucinda said.

  "Not really."

  That didn't convince her. “You know you can talk to me, Edwin,” she said. They had been thrown together here on that day, working on the very first perpetrator brought in. That counted for something to Lucinda.

  "Yes, yes. Let's get this work done, make some difference while we can."

  Lucinda turned over his words for a moment, until her heart dropped. His daughter Lauren had been a med student at Georgetown when the nuke went off. She had stayed in Washington to help the flood of injured. She had made some difference—while the radiation from the salted bomb did its work. She had been badly ill the last two months. That must have ended.

  She gently laid a hand on his shoulder, but felt him stiffen at the consolation. She had tried to empathize with him before, but losing colleagues and losing family were in different universes to him. Lifting her hand, she said, “Talk with your friends, please."

  O'Doul made a soft grunt. “These three templates look like our best options."

  Lucinda looked back at the screens. “Yes, I think so."

  She let the other subject lie. If he wouldn't confide in her, that was his right. If he wanted to bury himself in work to assuage his grief, if he made himself a cog in Burleigh's machine, Lucinda was in the wrong position to condemn him.

  * * * *

  The canteen was a far cry from the personal attention Lucinda had gotten under the Mount her first few days there. She had been one of a very small number then, and the scale of the work had grown to be something close to industrial. No more dinner on a trolley, and no individual room and bath. Then again, no locked door with a guard outside. The security was a bit more out of her face, though no one could misapprehend that it wasn't there.

  She served herself from a long table of dishes, bowls, and plates, backed by cooks replacing anything that ran low. Quality was somewhere between a good cafeteria and a low-end hotel buffet, and she had to avoid supplementing quality with quantity. With eating as one of the few leisure activities down there, getting fat could be easy. She had seen it happening to several people already.

  The seating area was muted, quieter than one would expect for the scores of people there. Lucinda looked around for the emptiest table she could find. She hadn't fitted in with any of the groups that came together early on, especially since she had that suspicious “escort” the first few weeks. After that,
she had been accustomed to isolation.

  She passed close to O'Doul, who didn't turn to see her. He was talking softly to other members of his old Johns Hopkins research team. That gladdened her. Apparently he was getting the support he needed from them, even if she might have felt better if she could have given it.

  Her students had two tables close together, and she slipped by them quickly. She got only a few glances from some of them, and that same long look from Dr. Garritty. When she found a nearly empty table, she made sure to sit facing away from him.

  Lucinda ate without savoring, even though it dimly registered that the broccoli salad was quite good. She pulled out printouts of two medical papers and got to reading them, underscoring and making marginal notes when she wasn't taking bites of dinner.

  "There you are!"

  Lucinda knew the voice, but was stunned when she saw the face looking down upon her. “Nancy?” she gasped. “Dr. LaPierre? When did you—"

  "Just yesterday.” LaPierre took the seat opposite Lucinda. “It's been a while, Lucinda."

  The affable tone made Lucinda squirm. They were not friends, certainly not after that last day. “But, but you refused to come here. How did they bring you in?"

  "I volunteered.” A self-effacing smile shone from her dark face. “What can I say? I was wrong. I thought the government would be using overlay, using us, to justify attacks. Instead, from all I saw from the outside since January 19th, they've been digging to expose the roots of the evil."

  LaPierre was right, partly. America hadn't launched military reprisals beyond its borders, even though from the early interrogations Lucinda had assisted, two countries seemed tied to the plot. And Burleigh was chasing down individuals connected to the attack, in America and in a few obliging nations. He was also going after violent, or potentially violent, extremists at home.

  Burleigh's definitions of “potentially” and “extremist,” though, were expansive. She had seen him expound on his vision of ridding the world of the personalities who would commit such atrocities, across the world, but in America first and foremost, as a grand example. He seemed to have a lot of people in mind.

  "So when they came asking again,” LaPierre continued, “I was glad to agree. I probably should have sought them out before then. It would have been, well, a betrayal to the friends we lost not to join the work."

  Lucinda felt a pang. She wouldn't have called all three colleagues who had been testifying to Congress that day friends, but that didn't soften the pain of losing them. A fourth, Sam Jeong, had gotten killed in “disturbances” that brewed up on Berkeley's campus after the bombing, and that had been worse, in its way. “That's what I thought,” Lucinda said, “when I joined."

  "I remember that,” LaPierre said, briefly sour. “I'm still sad at all the time I lost. If that NSA agent who scooped us up and flew us out hadn't been so belligerent, insisting we do everything today so we could go kill people tomorrow, I might have made a different decision. Lord, I hope he's not running around here, giving that talk to people."

  Morris Hope hadn't been nearly as unthinking as LaPierre recounted, but that no longer mattered. “You don't have to worry about him anymore, Nancy. He's been fixed."

  "Been what?"

  "It's a slang term that's cropped up here,” Lucinda said, looking into her salad bowl. “Came from something President Burleigh said, according to my students. Someone was questioning him about whether we were breaking prisoners with torture to roll up the conspirators. ‘We're not breaking anyone,’ he said—"

  "'We're fixing them,'” LaPierre said. “I watched that press conference. That was when I started changing my mind about matters.” She smiled. “So what's-his-name got overlaid."

  Lucinda just nodded. He had recoiled from her the one time she'd seen him, two weeks after the bombing. He was plainly ashamed to see her, to recall what he had said on that day, and slinked away. That tough but thoughtful man was gone. Even if they had another chance meeting, she'd never really see him again.

  She probably wouldn't ever see Kate Barber again either. Her colleague had been scooped up along with herself and Nancy by Agent Hope the day Washington died. Kate had refused to be part of Burleigh's project, a stand Lucinda hadn't had the courage to make, and was interned in some unnamed place. How interesting that Nancy showed no interest in her fate.

  "Good,” LaPierre said. “We've got millions of yahoos in this country calling for blood, but now it's one less.” She took an encompassing look at where she was. “Or maybe more."

  Lucinda had reached her limit. Luckily, her tray was almost empty, so her retreat wouldn't look blatant. “Well, I guess we'll be crossing paths now and again.” She started getting up.

  "Oh, more than that, Lucinda. I'm going to be your supervisor, starting next week."

  Lucinda nearly dropped the tray. “After just getting here?"

  "I was surprised too,” LaPierre said, her smile widening, “but someone above pulled a few strings. Of course, I'm trying to get Julio from our team here, too, but they don't have so much need for low-level assistants here. Of course, Sam wouldn't come even if I asked."

  This time, Lucinda slammed down her tray. “It's vile of you to joke about the dead that way,” she hissed, and turned away.

  "Dead? Didn't you know?"

  Lucinda stopped three paces from the table, dozens of eyes on her. She walked back, only so she wouldn't have to speak up and draw more attention. “Know what?"

  "Sam survived. It was touch and go, and he's still in physical therapy. Still in a terrible mood last time I visited him, three weeks ago. So scornful, so bitter.” She tipped her head. “I think he blames you for something. Has he told you what?"

  "I've never heard from him. I—I never knew.” So why hadn't she heard?

  * * * *

  The women's dormitory was already half-filled. Lucinda crossed it, swerving around yellow partitions and through half-blocked walkways, to get to the information officer's booth. She lifted up the ID hung around her neck so the woman could scan it. “Picking up,” Lucinda told her.

  The officer checked her terminal. “You have three messages. Two internal, one external."

  Lucinda put her pocket-comp into the officer's outstretched hand. The woman plugged a secure fiber-link into it, uploaded the messages, and handed it back. “Thank you,” Lucinda said automatically.

  She weaved through the dormitory again, back to her semiprivate bunk. It had been a long time since she had had a private room here, and most of the women here had never had that equivocal privilege. She sat down on her cot, dialed up the first message on her comp, and found the rumors about things getting worse confirmed.

  Emergency elections for the new Senate would happen in a few days. The new Senators would be coming to Mount Weather directly, naturally taking up prime living quarters. Those bumped would be coming down to the dorms. Things would be getting more crowded. It was bad news, but small change to Lucinda.

  The second internal message urged anyone who felt traumatized or conflicted to seek confidential assistance at a certain office. This had an ominous sound to Lucinda. However she might feel, she wouldn't be going there.

  She opened the external message and sat up straighter. It was a letter from Josh.

  Calling Joshua Muntz a “special friend” sounded like a mealy-mouthed euphemism, but it was the closest Lucinda could come to describing their relationship. They were more than friends, but not lovers by the common definition. Josh's past, which he had undergone an overlay to escape, left him uncomfortable in taking that final step. Lucinda respected that, and him.

  She dove into his letter, hoping it might have some news about Sam. All she found, though, were commonplaces.

  * * * *

  Your parents have finally settled into your house. Good idea to move them up here, out of their apartment. There was a glitch with your direct deposit, but we fixed it, so their finances are set. I think they've come to like me, even with my past.

>   Ben isn't whining at night anymore. I have a neighbor, Andrea, who's done some dog training. She knew a trick, and Ben's feeling better now. I still wish he could have stayed over at your house, but allergies are allergies. And I know he misses you, Luci. Me too.

  My job's going fine...

  * * * *

  Her eyes began to skip. It was unfair to expect eloquence of him, but she couldn't help some impatience.

  * * * *

  I still don't really understand what you're doing there, Luci, and why you've stayed with it so long. It doesn't seem quite like you, or at least the way I thought of you. You ought to come back here, to your university. I know one or two folks there who would be glad to see you again.

  * * * *

  She read that section again. Was he trying to say something between the lines? Hinting about Sam? She well knew that outgoing mail was censored, and suspected that incoming material was too. Might Josh know that and be dodging around it? She couldn't know and she couldn't ask.

  She read Josh's last lines, but nothing there gave her any succor. She powered down the pocket-comp. She was no nearer the answers to her questions—and she felt no nearer to Josh, either. Or anyone.

  She nearly turned it back on, to write to him, or to her parents. Instead, she slid it under her cot. Maybe she could write when she didn't feel eyes looming so close over her shoulders.

  Lucinda drew the translucent partition, and started changing for bed. She might read a while—or might just go straight to sleep. That was her only sure refuge these days.

  * * * *

  II

  A roadside diner was ahead, its parking lot half full. Lucinda scrutinized its near side and front as she walked, but didn't find one. On the far side, though, she hit pay dirt: a single old-fashioned pay phone.