Fin

by Larry Enright

  Fin scanned the room. “Are we under surveillance?”

  “You mean are they on to us? No. No way. The doc specifically set this room up with no cameras. He hates being watched when he’s doing your check-ins. No, this is something else. Let me try another code. This is one I used this morning on a Vom that some med-techs did some serious work on.” When the response came back, he said, “This one’s OK. Why doesn’t yours work?”

  “May I?” Fin asked, taking the Commlink.

  “Sure. Knock yourself out.”

  Fin began typing.

  “You’re a wiz with the thumbs, aren’t you?” said Francis. “Me, I’ve got fat fingers. Fat everything, pretty much.”

  “It comes of many hours practice,” Fin replied.

  “What exactly are you looking for?”

  “This.” Fin handed the device back.

  “It says access restricted to Noah Shepherd. The doc authorized this himself. How’d you do that?”

  “The question is not how I did it, the question is why Dr. Shepherd did.”

  “Who knows? But if I had to guess, I'd say the doc didn't want anyone messing with his pet project." Francis put his Commlink away. “Well, I guess that leaves you with the whorehouse option. Sorry, bud.”

  “Thank you for trying, Francis. I am sure everything will be fine. I will get through this somehow. People do every day, do they not? Loving and losing are just parts of life that I have not had the opportunity to experience until now. I will learn from this, and if there ever is a next time, things will be different.”

  “Wow,” said Francis. “That’s about the lamest, most unconvincing stupidest thing I’ve ever heard you say.”

  “I should go. I told Nova I was just going for a walk.” Fin started to leave.

  “Wait,” Francis said. “What if I told you there was another way to get your kill code without the doc’s authorization, but that I actually might get into some serious trouble if I did it?”

  “I would say, don’t. You have done enough. I should just go.”

  “No. Wait. Do you know how kill codes are uploaded into the Cy brain?”

  “The last step in the assembly process imprints a randomly generated million-digit code on our biocircuitry using a device called the neural projector, invented in the year 1 A.B. by Noah Shepherd.”

  “Did you know it could record and play back?”

  “Yes.”

  “Is there anything you don’t know?”

  Fin touched his lips where the memory of Nova’s kiss still lingered. “Many things.”

  “Well, we just happen to have a neural projector in operating theater two. The instructors use it to play back Cy memories for their students to analyze. It can show them any thought, feeling, whatever they want, including that million-digit code imprinted at birth. How do you think we got our copy of our resident Cys’ kill codes?”

  “That, I did not know.”

  “Wow. It took a year, but I finally know something you don’t.”

  “I know it now.”

  “Fine, but I knew it first.”

  “Yes, you did.”

  “Anyway, we can use the projector to retrieve the memory of the implant procedure and that will give us the code. Then it’s just a matter of a little hocus pocus and so long love life.”

  “I am not in the habit of forgetting. Why do I not remember my override?”

  “Same way we’re going to make you forget the hottie.”

  “But how can you retrieve something I was ordered to forget?”

  “Forgetting isn’t erasing, Fin. The memory is still there. It’s just suppressed. Your brain is like ours. It stores memories in an area called the hippocampus. Another area called the dorsal prefrontal cortex acts like a gatekeeper to those memories. It allows your conscious mind to fetch the ones it’s OK to and doesn’t allow it to see the ones it’s been ordered to suppress. It does all that on the subconscious level so we’re not even aware that it’s stopping us from remembering what it thinks would be harmful to us. Suppressing the memory of a trauma that we just can’t face, for example, is a pretty common thing. Think of it as your body’s way of soothing a psychological pain until enough time passes that you can deal with it. In our test subjects, we just help that along with their kill codes. No memory, no trauma. Get it?”

  “I see.”

  Francis wagged a pudgy finger at Fin. “You didn’t know that either, did you? That’s two I’ve got on you, bud.” He checked his Commlink. “Good. No one’s supposed to be in theater two today. I’m rescheduling my next diagnostic. The techs in bio-med will complain. They always do, those pains in the butt, but that’s OK. I don’t like them either.” He looked up. “We’ve got an hour. Let’s do this.”

  No one gave them a second look as they walked down the hall and entered the operating theater. A technician escorting a Cybernite subject was just business as usual in the labs. That Fin was a Blue was of no more concern to them than that he was barefoot, soaking wet, and wearing a sweatshirt with the hood pulled over his head. Francis locked the theater doors, drew the curtains, and wheeled the exam chair into position. While he was connecting Fin to the machinery, he said, “Are you sure you want to go through with this? Giving up isn’t exactly your style.”

  “I am not giving up,” Fin replied. “I am taking the only path possible. If this is meant to be, Nova and I will come to love each other in time.”

  “You really believe that?”

  “I do.”

  “Listen, I have to restrain you. Otherwise, you could hurt yourself during the session or worse, break this bazillion credit machine.” He strapped Fin’s arms and legs down. “This might feel a little strange at first, like getting a fizzy drink up your nose, but don’t worry. That’s just the nanosensors probing. And everything might seem a little weird like . . . Well, it’s hard to describe, but you’ll see what I mean.”

  Francis switched on the projector. A bluish haze crept outward from the electronics, coalescing into a shimmering cocoon of electrogel that wrapped itself around them.

  “How does this work?” Fin asked.

  “It’s an old-school version of the same tech the docs use to diagnose and treat us. It reads your thoughts, memories, experiences—everything impressed on your brain cells. After all, they’re just stored electrical impulses, right? The information is digitized and reformulated into a reproduction of your experiences that the machine projects onto the gel. You get the full five-sense extravaganza of a holographic 3D movie. The only thing missing is the popcorn.”

  Images began to appear in the gel, a confusing mix of scenes switching too rapidly to be coherent.

  “Slow it down, Fin,” said Francis.

  “How?”

  “Focus. Try to think of just one thing, a strong feeling or some intense experience. That will give us a baseline to work back from.”

  The mass of images began to untangle. The layers of scenes peeled away until only one remained.

  “Whoa, is that what I think it is?” asked Francis when a memory of Fin and Nova in bed together floated across the room.

  “Yes,” Fin replied tersely. The scene melted into the downpour of a gloomy alley. He was hiding beneath an overhang, wearing nothing but rags, shivering from the cold, despondent and alone.

  “Wow, that’s grim.” Francis checked the instrument panel. “OK, that’s our baseline. Now think back.”

  A dark image flickered in and out of the room too briefly to be discerned. “What was that?” Francis said. “Go back to that.”

  Fin knew what the image was: an instant of darkness, a lifetime of horror. He did not want to go back, but he did. Slowly it reformed, turning the sterile operating theater into the dank, disgusting Reconstitute container-packing line. He was no longer strapped to the neural projector. Francis was no longer taking readings beside him. They were standing ankle-deep in sludge, in the scene but apart from it, watching Whites shoveling slurry into containers.

  �
��What the hell is this?” said Francis.

  “The Reconstitute factory where I worked.”

  “What is that God-awful smell?”

  “You can smell that, too?”

  “That’s the point. The docs experience the whole ball of polywax.” Francis checked the panel again. “OK. It looks like the image texture is one hundred percent. Auditory, tactile, taste, and smell loopbacks all in the green. We’ve got a good link and a baseline. Now we just need to work backward to your birthday. Get us the hell out of this place before I puke.”

  Everything began to spin. Fin reached out to the White line workers around him, but his hand slipped right through them and he fell into the viscous, disgusting morass that had been his life. He couldn’t swallow, couldn’t breathe. “Help me,” he gasped.

  Francis turned off the projector. They were back in the antiseptic operating room. The laughs of the Whites, the goo that refused to come off no matter how hard Fin rubbed at it, the awful dizzying smell day in and day out that had permeated his every pore—it all retreated to memory like a dark stain made lighter by washing.

  “Are you OK?” Francis asked.

  Fin nodded. “I think so.”

  “That was pretty disgusting. Let’s skip the rest of that. This time, try to think about something less gross, something farther back in your memory, maybe something from your time at the SIA. Start anywhere. Just pick a day and I’ll coach you through backing up the clock. Once you get the hang of it, you’ll be able to fast forward, slow down, pause, and rewind the memories just like a Commlink recording. Ready?”

  Fin said he was, but he wasn’t, not for the unpleasant memories he had thankfully left on some dusty shelf in his mind. He was seeing them again with new eyes: the sideward glances of the humans he encountered after getting off the train at Lower Downtown, the stares of the people in the glass elevator as it took him up to street level, the perimeter guards’ daily resentment at the SIA security checkpoint, the anger of the junior agent Ted Bailey who had occupied the cube on the other side of the divider. It was all made real again by the neural projector.

  “Slow it down,” he heard Francis say. Francis was an incongruous part of the memory, sitting on Fin’s desk while Fin sorted through the messages on his computer. “Control it, Fin,” he was saying. “Don’t let it control you.”

  Fin wanted it to stop. It did. Ted Bailey froze just after tapping his shoulder holster and saying, “You got that right.”

  “Good,” said Francis. “What’s that weird thing on the corner of your desk?”

  “A sculpture made of polyclonic material. It was a gift from Dr. Shepherd. They confiscated it when I was fired. I haven’t had the heart to tell him.”

  “You think the world of him, don’t you?”

  “He is like a father to me.”

  “Well, you know what they say. You can pick your nose but you can’t pick your relatives. OK. I need to make a few adjustments to the settings. I want you to ease back into it slowly. Take your time. Give me a chance to recalibrate this thing. If it feels like you’re losing control, just stop the playback. OK. Go.”

  Fin let the memory continue.

  “I was referring to reassignment, promotion, or resignation,” he was saying to Bailey when his desk phone rang. He glanced at the caller ID. “Forgive me,” he said. “I must take this call.”

  Bailey returned to his cubicle, just as Fin remembered.

  Fin answered the phone. “Hello, Dr. Shepherd.” He listened for a moment then replied, “Of course. I understand. Yes. I’ll take care of it right away.”

  “Stop,” said Fin. The playback froze.

  “What’s wrong?” Francis asked.

  “Something is missing.”

  “What?”

  “The other end of the conversation, whatever Dr. Shepherd said to me. I cannot recall it.”

  “Are you sure? Play it again.”

  Fin rewound the memory and played it again. “There is only silence on the phone.”

  Francis checked the readings on the machine. “That’s strange. It doesn’t look like anything’s out of whack. Usually the signal flatlines if that happens. Yours didn’t.”

  “I am unable to recall anything about the conversation other than what we just heard.”

  “What’s the next thing you remember?”

  “Returning to my cubicle, Agent Clayborn waving me into his office.”

  “Where did you go before that?"

  “I do not know.”

  “In your memory you said you’d take care of it. What were you going to take care of?”

  “I do not know.”

  “Do you want to know?”

  “Yes.”

  Francis made a few adjustments to the machine. “When you go through it this time, the projector will override any suppression command from your brain’s gatekeeper. It’s going to hurt like a really bad headache, so buckle up.”

  He turned the machine on again. As the cocoon of electrogel enveloped them, Fin directed his mind to the exact moment. His head was throbbing. “Hello, Dr. Shepherd,” he said.

  “God be with you, son.” Gibberish followed, like a recording fast-forwarding. “Listen to me, Fin,” Dr. Shepherd continued. “Take one of the polyclonic nanosticks from your sculpture and go to Central Stores. Retrieve file 4258 for me and place it on the stick. Insert the stick into your gum behind your teeth. It will hurt, but not too much. Don’t worry. It’s just an allergic reaction. It will subside once you acclimate. I’ll pick it up later at the lab. Oh, and you won’t remember any of this after you get the data, not this conversation and not your obtaining this information for me. Do you understand, my perfect son? Take care of it right away.”

  “Of course. I understand. Yes. I’ll take care of it right away.” Fin tried to get up.

  Francis stopped the machine. The electrogel dissolved. They were in the operating theater again. “Fin what are you doing?” he said.

  Fin fought against the restraints. “Let me go.”

  “Fin stop. You’ll hurt yourself.”

  “Release me, Francis. There is something I must do right away.”

  “What?”

  “I don’t remember. Undo these restraints.”

  “Fin, you’re stuck in a memory loop. Relax. It’s OK. Let it go.”

  “I cannot. There is something I must do. I do not know what it is, but I must do it.”

  “You’re trying to do what the doc just told you to do.”

  “He told me nothing. Let me go.”

  “That’s it,” Francis realized. “You were told not to remember and you don’t because the doc used your kill code on you. That was noise we heard.”

  “What noise?”

  “Right before he told you to listen—that was your kill code. Just a sec.” Francis fiddled with the projector controls. The gibberish played again. Fin’s gaze blanked.

  Francis said, “Listen to me, Fin. You don’t have anything to do right away. You don’t have to repress your memories anymore. You can remember everything, even the things you were told to forget. Do you understand?”

  “Yes,” Fin replied. “I understand.”

  “Do you remember what you were supposed to do now?”

  “I was to go to Central Stores, retrieve file 4258, and place it on a data stick. The stick is made of the same material as I am. That is why the building security scanners could not detect it. I am the mole," he said, stunned. "This makes no sense. There has to be some mistake.”

  “I don’t see how. They’re your memories.”

  “But why would Dr. Shepherd have me do this? He cannot be a traitor.”

  Francis began pacing the room. “This is crazy. You’re the mole you’ve been searching for and Doc Shepherd is your controller? The whole thing makes no sense. They hired you to find the mole. Doesn’t that mean there was already a mole at the SIA before you got there, making it kind of impossible that it’s you?”

  “Not necessarily. There we
re allegations of data theft before I was hired, but the SIA was unable to corroborate them. It was not until immediately after I was brought on board to investigate that the first theft occurred that was confirmed by the deaths of three agents. I cannot believe Dr. Shepherd is behind this.”

  “Man, are we in trouble. We need to purge the machine. Nobody can know we were here.”

  “No. Please. Turn it on again. I have to see what happens next.”

  Francis checked his Commlink. “We’re running out of time. Make it quick.”

  Fin relaxed as the neural projector came on again. The memory picked up with him removing a tiny nanostick from the sculpture on his desk and leaving his office. It followed him to Central Stores where he downloaded the file, inserted the stick into his mouth, and then returned to his desk. They followed Fin’s actions into the next day when he went to Polyclonic Technologies for his check-in. They saw Francis hook him up to the diagnostic equipment. They watched him fall asleep as he always did during the download, but there was no memory of the data stick being removed.

  Fin let the memories continue until the day he was fired. He was standing at the entrance to his cubicle, staring at his cleared-out workspace, when he received a call from Dr. Shepherd to retrieve another file. When Shepherd played the override code and told him to forget, Fin’s mind once again went into a memory loop. Francis had to stop the machine and release the memories again. They continued the playback through Fin’s last check-in at Polyclonic.

  “I do not understand how the data sticks are being retrieved from my mouth,” said Fin.

  “He has to be doing it while you’re asleep,“ said Francis. “That’s the only thing that makes sense. Whenever you came here for a check-in, the doc would always insist on a quick exam while you were under—just a few minutes, but enough time to remove the stick. And without any cameras in the exam room, know one would ever know. I never gave it a second thought until now.”

  “I have to speak with him.”

  “If you do, you’d better bring the cops.”

  “No. No police.”

  “Fin, if he used you to commit treason and murder, what do you think he’s going to do when you confront him? Give you a big hug?”