The Mandel Files, Volume 1

by Peter F. Hamilton

  ‘Have you had any success?’

  ‘Limited, but most promising given we have only been here two years. We have already succeeded in assembling some highly realistic synthetic memories. There is one, a walk through a forest.’ He closed his eyes and the eagerness and tension which had built up as he spoke drained out of his face, leaving him strangely peaceful. Almost the same expression as a synthohead, Greg thought.

  ‘I can see the trees,’ MacLennan said, his voice reduced to a placid lilt. ‘They are large, tall as well as broad, in full leaf, oaks and elms. This is pre-Warming, midsummer, with sunbeams breaking through the overhead branches. I can see a squirrel, a red one; he’s racing up an oak, round and round the trunk. I’m standing below watching him, touching the bark. It’s rough, crinkled, dusted with a powdery green algae. The grass is ankle-high, dewy, wetting my shoes. There are foxgloves everywhere, and weasel-snout; I can smell honeysuckle.’

  ‘Lasers can imprint a smell?’ Greg asked sceptically.

  ‘The memory of a smell,’ Stephanie said pedantically. ‘We adapted the paradigm from a high-definition virtual reality simulation, then added tactile and olfactory senses, as well as emotional responses.’

  ‘Emotional responses?’

  ‘Yes. Interpretation is a strong part of memory. If you see a particularly beautiful flower in the forest, you feel good about it; tread in a dog turd on the path, and you’re disgusted.’

  Greg thought about it. He couldn’t fault the logic, it was just that the whole concept seemed somewhat fanciful. But someone on the Berkeley board obviously had enough faith to invest in it. Quite heavily, judging by the facilities the Centre offered.

  ‘Have you received this memory as well?’ he asked her.

  ‘Yes. It’s very realistic. It feels like I was actually in that forest. James forgot to mention the birdsong. The thrushes are warbling the whole time.’

  Greg turned back to MacLennan, who was watching him levelly.

  ‘How does this help to cure axe murderers?’ Greg asked.

  ‘Imagine when you were young if you took that same walk through a tranquil forest for half an hour instead of having to endure your drunken father beating you. If you had that walk, or played football, every evening he came home drunk; if you could remember your mother giving him a kiss instead of crying and screaming for mercy, I think you’d find your outlook on life would be very different.’

  ‘Yeah, and is it going to be possible?’

  ‘I believe so. Once we have solved the problem of how to erase, or at the very least weaken, old memories. This is the area of research which requires the most effort in order for the project to succeed. Neurology and psychology to date have concentrated on memory recovery, helping amnesic victims, developing hypnotic recall techniques for vital witnesses, even preserving memories in the face of encroaching senility. The only comparable work in the opposing direction is with drugs which induce a form of transient amnesia, like scopolamine. These are no use to us, as they only prevent memories from being retained while the drug is in effect. What we need is something which will go into a subject’s mind and hunt down the original poisonous memories.’

  ‘Sounds like a job for a psychic,’ Greg said.

  ‘It’s an option we’ve considered. In fact it was one reason I was particularly delighted when I was informed you would be coming today. I wanted to quiz you on the parameters of psi. The Home Office said you were one of the best ESP-orientated psychics to emerge from the Mindstar project. Are you able to interpret individual memories?’

  ‘No. Sorry, I’m strictly an empath.’

  ‘I see.’ He clasped his hands together and rested his chin on the knuckles. ‘Do you know of any psychic who can do that?’

  ‘There were a couple in Mindstar who had the kind of ability you’re talking about. They used to be able to lift faces and locations out of a suspect’s thoughts.’ He almost said prisoner, but with Stephanie leaning forward in her seat, hanging on to every word, that would never do. He wanted her wholehearted co-operation. ‘I don’t think they could perform anything like the deep-ranging exploration you require.’

  ‘That’s a pity,’ MacLennan said. ‘I might apply for a licence to practise with a themed neurohormone if one could be developed along those lines.’

  ‘Are you completely stonewalled without psychic analysis?’

  ‘No. There are several avenues we can pursue. Paradigms could be structured to wipe selected memories. A sort of antimemory, if you like. The major trouble is again one of identification. We need to know a memory in order to wipe it – the nature of it, the section of the brain where it is stored.’

  ‘A real-time brain scan might just tell us,’ Stephanie said. ‘If the subject recounts a particularly traumatic incident it may be possible to locate the specific neurons which house it. The erasure paradigm could then be targeted directly at them. Magic photons, we call it, after the magic bullet; like cancer treatments which kill tumour cells without harming the ordinary cells around it.’

  ‘You would need some very sophisticated sensors to scan a brain that accurately,’ Greg pointed out. ‘Not to mention processing capacity. Part of my psi-assessment tests involved a SQUID scan, but there was no way you could get the focus fine enough to resolve individual neuron cells.’

  ‘Berkeley has allocated us considerable resources,’ MacLennan said. His chirpy everything-under-control smile had returned. ‘We have one SQUID brain scanner already installed here at the Centre. Although, admittedly, its resolution does fall some way short of the requirement Stephanie envisages for the magic photons concept to function. But it is a modest first step. And several medical equipment companies are working on models which offer a higher resolution. I have high hopes for the project.’

  ‘This paradigm research is an expensive venture,’ Greg said. ‘The Board must have a lot of faith in you.’

  ‘They do. I didn’t promise them instant results and success. They fully understand that it is a medium-term project, commercial viability will not be realized for at least another seven to ten years. But they agreed to back it because of the potential. You see, if paradigm-based treatment does work, it will revolutionize the entire penal system. We would have to rebuild our institutions from the ground up. The only people who will actually require detention are petty criminals, everyone else will be reformed in medical facilities.’

  ‘Yeah, I see.’ He showed Stephanie a sardonic grin. ‘I still say you’ll have trouble convincing people to let them out again.’

  She shrugged.

  ‘Have you actually tried implanting any of these alternative memories in an inmate?’ he asked.

  ‘Indeed we have,’ MacLennan said. ‘Nothing dramatic. It’s early days yet. We are in the process of acquiring baseline data on how well the paradigms are absorbed.’ He might have been talking about lab rats for all the emotion in his tone. ‘The older the subject, the more difficult it becomes, naturally.’

  ‘What about Liam Bursken? Has he been given any synthetic memories?’

  ‘No. He was unwilling to co-operate. At the moment it remains a purely voluntary programme, although we do reward participants with extra privileges.’

  ‘So essentially he is the same person now as he was when he arrived.’

  ‘Yes.’

  ‘Great.’ Greg stood up. ‘I’d like to see him. He should be able to offer me a few insights.’

  ‘As you wish,’ MacLennan said. ‘Stephanie will take you down.’

  ‘Do you have records of the correspondence he’s received?’ Greg asked.

  MacLennan glanced enquiringly at Stephanie.

  ‘Yes,’ she said. ‘It’s not much, mostly death threats.’

  ‘I’d like copies, please.’

  ‘I’ll assemble a data package,’ MacLennan said. ‘It’ll be ready for you when you leave.’

  ‘Thanks.’ There was always the possibility someone had admired Bursken enough to copy the murder technique. Pretty tenu
ous, though.

  ‘How has Bursken reacted to the Kitchener murder?’ Greg asked Stephanie when they had left MacLennan’s office.

  ‘He’s shown a lot of interest,’ she said. ‘He believes it is a vindication of his own crimes.’

  ‘Oh?’

  ‘According to Bursken, he is one of God’s chosen agents of vengeance in a sinful world. Therefore someone murdering in the same way is proof that God is now instructing them. Therefore, God was instructing him in the first place. QED.’

  ‘What’s he like? I mean, what sort of formative years did he have that could push him into that?’

  She hesitated as they walked into the stairwell, her companionability glitched momentarily. Greg was actually allowed to see worry and even confusion.

  ‘The honest truth, Greg, is I haven’t got a clue. We did some research into his background, for all the good it did us. He had a perfectly ordinary childhood. There was some bullying at school, nothing excessive. We could find no evidence of any sexual or mental abuse, no deprivation. Yet even by the standards of this Centre’s inmates, he is completely insane. There is no rational explanation for why he went haywire. We have studied him, naturally; his brain function shows no abnormality, there are no chemical imbalances. Currently we’re trying to determine the actual trigger mechanism of his psychosis, whether there is a single cause to send him off on his killing sprees. MacLennan thought that if we could just gain one insight into how Bursken functions we might eventually be able to understand his mentality. That’s why he’s prepared to devote time and money on such a hopeless case. By studying the real deviants, we gain more knowledge of the ordinary. But the results have been very patchy, and completely inconclusive. I doubt we ever will understand. I simply thank God that Bursken is a rogue, very rare.’

  ‘You mean, even your laser paradigm couldn’t cure him?’

  ‘I shouldn’t think so. You see, as far as we can tell, there is no evil memory sequence to replace, no trauma to eradicate. Maybe he did hear voices, who knows?’

  The Centre’s interview room was slightly more hospitable than the one at Oakham police station. Greg imagined it had been patterned from a conference room at a two-star hotel, cheap but well meaning. The table was a cream-coloured oval with five comfortable sandy-red chairs around it, almost like a dining room arrangement; certainly the confrontational element was absent. It was on the ground floor and a picture window ran the length of one wall, looking out on the patio garden which filled the building’s central well. Conifers and heathers were growing in raised brick borders, tended by a working party of inmates under the watchful eyes of warders; there were several wooden park benches with inmates sitting and reading, or just soaking up the unexpected bonus of sunlight. They all had a blue stripe on their uniform sleeve.

  Two guards brought Liam Bursken in. He wasn’t a particularly tall man, five or six centimetres shorter than Greg, but powerfully built, with broad sloping shoulders; his shaved skull had a slightly bluish sheen from the stubble, giving the impression of a long gaunt face. The neural jammer collar was tight enough to pinch his skin, Greg could see it was rubbing red around the edges. Sober, almost mournful, emerald eyes found Greg, and regarded him intently. There was a red stripe on his yellow uniform sleeve.

  He sat down slowly, his joints moving with the kind of stiffness Greg associated with the elderly. The guards remained standing behind him, one with his hand in his pocket. Fingering the collar activator, Greg guessed.

  He ordered a secretion from his gland. The four minds in the room slithered across his expanding perception boundary, their thought currents forming a constellation of surreal moire-patterns. Both guards were nervous, while Stephanie Rowe by contrast displayed a cool detached interest. Liam Bursken’s thoughts were more enigmatic. Greg had been expecting the ragged fractures of dysfunction, like a junkie who simply cannot rationalize, but instead there was only calmness, a conviction of supreme righteousness. Bursken’s self-assurance touched on megalomania. And there was no sense of humour. None. Bursken had been robbed of that most basic human trait. It was what unnerved people about him, Greg realized, they could all sense it at a subconscious level. He wondered if he should tell Stephanie, help her understand the man.

  He put his cybofax on the table, and keyed in the file of questions he’d prepared. ‘My name is Greg Mandel.’

  ‘Psychic,’ Liam Bursken said. ‘Ex of the Mindstar Brigade. Adviser to Oakham CID in the murder of Edward Kitchener. Strongly suspected to have been appointed at the insistence of Julia Evans.’

  ‘Yeah, that’s right. Though you can’t believe everything you see on the channels. So, Liam, Stephanie here tells me you’ve been following the Kitchener case with some interest.’

  ‘Yes.’

  Greg realized Bursken was neither being deliberately rude, nor trying to irritate him. Facts, that was all the man was concerned with. There would be no garrulous ingratiation here, none of the usual rapport. Stephanie had been right, Bursken was utterly insane; Greg wasn’t entirely sure he could be labelled human.

  ‘I would like to ask you some questions, do you mind?’

  ‘Any objection would be irrelevant. You would simply take your answers.’

  ‘Then I’ll ask them, shall I?’

  There was no response. Greg began to wonder if he could spot a lie in a mind as eerily distorted as the one facing him.

  ‘How old are you, Liam?’

  ‘Forty-two.’

  ‘Where did you live while you carried out your murders?’

  ‘Newark.’

  ‘How many people did you kill?’

  ‘Eleven.’

  Greg let out a tiny breath of relief. Liam Bursken wasn’t attempting to evade, giving his answers direct. That meant he would be able to spot any attempts to scramble round for fictitious answers. Even a total mental freak couldn’t escape the good old Mandel thumbscrews. He wasn’t sure whether to be pleased or not. To comprehend insanity did you have to be a little insane yourself? But then who in his right mind would have a gland implanted in the first place?

  He noticed the wave of hatred washing through Bursken’s mind, and clamped down on his errant smile.

  ‘Where were you when Edward Kitchener was killed, Liam?’

  ‘Here.’

  True.

  ‘Have you ever been out of Stocken?’

  ‘No.’

  ‘Have you ever tried to get out?’

  ‘No.’

  ‘Do you want to get out?’

  Bursken demurred for a moment. Then: ‘I would like to leave.’

  ‘Do you think you deserve to leave?’

  ‘Yes.’

  ‘Do you think you have done anything wrong?’

  ‘I have done as I was bidden, no more.’

  ‘God told you to kill?’

  ‘I was the instrument chosen by our Lord.’

  ‘To eliminate sin?’

  ‘Yes.’

  ‘What sin did Sarah Inglis commit?’ The personal profile his cybofax displayed said Sarah was eleven years old, snatched on her way home from school.

  ‘Let he who has not sinned cast the first stone.’

  ‘She was a schoolgirl.’ It was unprofessional, he knew, but for once didn’t care. Anything which could hurt Bursken, from inducing pangs of conscience to a knee in the balls, couldn’t be all bad.

  ‘Our Lord cannot be held accountable.’

  ‘Yeah, right. What do you know about Edward Kitchener?’

  ‘Physicist. Double Nobel laureate. Lived at Launde Abbey. Advances many controversial theories. Adulterer. Degenerate. Blasphemer.’

  ‘Why blasphemer?’

  ‘Physicists seek to define the universe, to eliminate uncertainty and with it spirituality. They seek to banish God. They say there is no room for God in their theories. That is the devil speaking.’

  ‘So that would qualify Kitchener as a legitimate victim for the justice you dispense?’

  ‘Yes.’

&nb
sp; ‘If you had been allowed out of Stocken would you have killed him?’

  ‘I would have redeemed him with the sacrifice of life. He would have been blessed, and thanked me as he knelt at our Lord’s feet.’

  ‘Would this redemption involve mutilating him?’

  ‘I would leave behind a sign for the Angels of the Lord to help with his ascension into heaven.’

  ‘What sign?’

  ‘Given him the shape of an angel.’

  ‘It’s the lungs,’ Stephanie said. ‘If you look down directly on the body, the lungs spread out on either side represent wings, like an angel. Liam did it to all his victims. The Vikings used to do something similar when they came over pillaging.’

  ‘I’m sure they did,’ Greg muttered. He keyed up the next series of questions on the cybofax.

  ‘OK, you know Kitchener lives at Launde Abbey, and you know there is a kitchen there. Would you take your own knife?’

  ‘The Lord always provides.’

  ‘Does he provide from Launde’s kitchen, or does he provide beforehand?’

  ‘Beforehand,’ Bursken whispered thickly.

  Stephanie leant over to him, an apologetic smile on her lips. ‘What are you getting at?’ she asked in a low voice.

  ‘Assembling a profile of the mind involved. Whoever did it has to have something in common with Bursken here. It wasn’t an ordinary tekmerc, even they would baulk at performing that atrocity. It must be someone whose normal emotional responses have been eradicated, like Bursken. What I want to know is how rationally can they function under these circumstances. If they were following a plan, could they stick to it? Sheer revulsion would cause most ordinary minds to crack under the stress, mistakes could be made. So far this investigation hasn’t uncovered a single one.’

  ‘I see.’ She flopped back in her chair again.

  ‘Which would be more important to the Lord,’ Greg asked: ‘redeeming Kitchener, or destroying the computer records of all his blasphemous work?’