Second Sight

by George D. Shuman

  Monahan’s end would be little more remarkable than his life, she thought. He would go to cold storage in the basement and then off to some medical school where students got their first experience with a scalpel. That’s where all the bodies with pink slips stapled to their jackets went.

  4

  Case and Kimble had put most everything on the line when they focused early earnings and resources on a birth control pill in 1960. Then they moved on to C&K’s antianxiety silver bullet, distributed as Sentinal throughout the last quarter century. In the nineties they released their first erectile dysfunction pill that broke records on all world pharmaceutical markets. Billion-dollar profit makers like these served to stabilize the gargantuan pharmaceutical concern from damage incurred through economic depressions and class action lawsuits. But Case and Kimble had a heavily padded safeguard against risk, even in an unstable economy. They had the United States government’s largest black-budget grant to a private company in all history, and they had maintained it exclusively and secretly for the past fifty years.

  The entity was DARPA. The Defense Advanced Research Projects Agency. The ultrasecret project was MIRA, which until 2008 was the linchpin of American weaponry. So advanced was MIRA’s artificial intelligence that MIRA could have application in nearly every aspect of war and war machines.

  Except that suddenly the newly elected president wasn’t behind the defense department administration’s spending, talking about cuts so deep they might even excise ongoing MIRA development, and that was something Edward Case had never anticipated. More than thirty-eight billion dollars’ worth of research over the last twenty years was about to be shelved.

  To an outsider it would appear that pharmaceutical companies could afford to take risks, since the profits in prescription medications alone were simply staggering. But no one stuck his neck out like Edward Case in speculation research, and no one had the nerve to question the company’s surviving founder until the board of directors learned about the White House position on defense spending. Now at risk of losing their seven-figure bonuses, they wanted to know on record why he had been pushing so much of the company’s holdings into research on MIRA. They wanted it noted that the company was already teetering on the FDA’s approval of Alixador, which had passed its own billion-dollar mark in genetic research last year. The board wanted it made clear to stockholders that they were only following the lead of their founder, and that perhaps they had been misled themselves concerning future approvals.

  No one ever knew what some jury might decide about how death or impairment was related to one of their prescription medications. Subjective though it was, major awards and ripples of consumer anxiety were enough to rock a company, even one the size of Case and Kimble. And C&K’s legal bills were anything but incidental. Edward Case had always insisted that the organization send a message that Case and Kimble wasn’t an easy target for every law school graduate who managed to add Esquire to their name.

  Now a dozen competitors had eclipsed the wonder drug Sentinal, and the U.S. Food and Drug Administration was calling for a review of its progeny, Xendoral, which had been implicated in dozens of suicides in the last two years.

  C&K’s stocks were on the decline in a deplorable economy, and CEO Ed Case was getting vibes from his board of directors that they wanted a public audit. They were worried about their own asses, of course, worried and feigning disapproval of his own sixty-two-million-dollar annual bonus in a recession with an unemployment rate rising over eight percent.

  They wouldn’t have said a word about it had the Democrats not taken over the White House. They wouldn’t have dared to raise a hand when everyone’s good fortune was riding on the wings of national security. The military’s interest had long been piqued by Case’s mind-control research, and indeed they had used it in the field with a high degree of effectiveness. But secret defense department funding would no longer escape scrutiny in a Democrat-controlled Senate, and Case’s new renderings of microwave delivery systems could be first on the list of cuts.

  Thank God for Alixador, he thought. Case knew what impact Alixador would have on Case and Kimble’s bottom line next year. Alixador was going to be the biggest thing to hit the market since aspirin, and all it required was the FDA’s approval.

  A phenomenon of cellular research, Alixador was designed to trick the brain into believing the stomach was full. Alixador, touting well-established trials of men and women under sixty, boasted a seventy percent success rate in non-narcotic weight loss trials. It was the weight-loss miracle of the twenty-first century and it was going to fly off the shelves.

  Case knew how badly he needed that FDA approval. It had been years since they’d had a mega drug on any market, and if the government pulled their defense contract, they were at the mercy of any new legal disaster that might come their way. Alixador was going to hit the market just in time to save him.

  Case had personally handled settlements in more than thirty percent of Case and Kimble’s legal cases over the past five years, doing everything in his power to keep Case and Kimble’s name clean until their new diet phenomenon hit the market.

  Just one more year, he thought, one more home run, and he would cash in options and bonuses and quietly slip away.

  The engine of a John Deere tractor was popping on a distant hill. The sweet smell of cut hay lay heavy on the morning air. Ed Case watched steam rise on the dew-covered lawn behind his Lancaster, Pennsylvania, estate. The sun was large and pink and not an hour above the horizon.

  He toggled his wheelchair in a half circle, making his way through a maze of ornate statues and urns. A servant was setting china on the patio for morning coffee. A young blond woman was doing laps in the pool.

  Case’s eyes searched fields of clover; he looked deep in thought, as if he were thinking about another time, another place.

  “What’s with this kid and the Regeral research?” Case coughed into a handkerchief balled in his left hand.

  “First-year law student at Boston College,” the young blond man walking next to him said. “He wants to get out in front of the game. Skip the hard work and get rich quick.”

  “Is he anybody?”

  “Does he have connections, do you mean?”

  “The kind of connections that matter,” the old man said emphatically. “Family, friends, mentors, anyone? Anyone that could make a stink?”

  “His father is an attorney in Boston. Corporate law. Divorced for the last ten years.”

  “How does he get his clients?”

  “Teen websites, and hundreds of them. He leaves posts on blogs to suggest kids could get money if they took Regeral as children for attention deficit disorder and suffered side effects.”

  “Side effects,” Case said flatly.

  “Self-harm, loss of memory, failure to achieve, difficulty with authority, you know. The kind of stuff every kid suffers from. You can imagine the responses he’s getting.”

  “How did we get onto him?”

  “He sent a letter to our attorneys on his father’s stationery. Quite an old partnership, State Street in Boston, you know the type. It was enough to concern one of them, but it took me all of an hour to figure out who sent it.”

  “Kids.” The doctor snorted. “So it was blackmail?” He looked up at the younger man.

  “His version, but rather pathetic.”

  “Who else knows about the letter?”

  “Charles in legal. No one else.”

  Case stopped the wheelchair short of the patio, watching the woman climb from the pool. A servant met her with a bath towel that she slowly wrapped around her bikini.

  “You’ll have no problem getting next to him.”

  “Like taking candy from a baby.”

  “I want the records first,” Case said abruptly.

  “Understood.”

  Case looked up at the man next to him. Troy Weir was thirty-two, handsome, charismatic, brilliant, sociopathic. Case’s only stepson from his marriage to Marlo We
ir, a soap opera star who managed to traverse almost five decades before dying of alcoholism at age forty-six, Troy had been a troubled youth, in and out of jails and treatment centers since he was fourteen years old.

  It had started out as fistfights at school, but then there was a sexual assault charge and then another, and soon Troy faced rape charges in the California juvenile system. Frankly, Case’s stepson had all the common traits of a sociopath; chameleon-like, manipulative, charming, inwardly hostile with a sense of entitlement. Case could see the boy’s earliest manifestation of the social disorder, as he stood before the judge, remorseful, meek, breaking down only when he mentioned his mother’s alcoholism. The judge released him to the custody of his stepfather and recommended counseling.

  A year later the girl who had accused him disappeared. Try as they might, no one could ever connect Troy to a crime. She simply vanished. And then the other girl’s parents moved to another country.

  In college there had been an accusation of date rape, but victims rarely remember the hours after they ingest Rohypnol. Rarely can they say how they had been given the drug. Prosecutors refused to present it.

  Case was sure the stories were true, but by then Marlo’s drinking was spiraling out of control and Case had been meeting with old friends about a new defense contract coming on line. Case was far too busy researching his way toward becoming a pharmaceutical magnate. He had no time for either of them.

  After graduation, Troy escaped to New York City, and Case hadn’t seen him until he showed up in Amagansett for his mother’s funeral in 2001. What the boy did or didn’t do during his time alone in the city, buffered by a substantial allowance, he didn’t want to know. But it was there, at the funeral, that Case saw a change in the boy. He was only twenty-six, undoubtedly unchanged, but he had lost all the rough edges. He had learned to present himself properly in front of others. Whatever rage he bore was suppressed, and he spoke with a degree of class and refinement. Perhaps, the old man thought, he had acquired his mother’s acting ability along with all that motherly hate.

  Troy stepped onto the patio and nodded to the blonde. Wendy had been a model in her teens, yet became more beautiful with each year that passed. Case had surprised her on her twenty-seventh birthday—last month—with a trip to Cannes and a movie contract. Troy knew what that woman and her contract had cost his stepfather. Case had been courting her since his wife’s death, and while the papers made much ado over the young woman’s intentions with a decrepit old scientist, he was indeed widowed and entitled to see whomever he wished.

  Troy knew she was loyal. Loyal like Troy’s mother was loyal, because with Ed Case, there was no other choice. Loyalty was rewarded in the Case mansion and treachery was grounds for unspeakable retribution.

  As a teenager he had only considered his mother’s self-hatred and her low self-esteem, how she projected her extreme dislike of herself onto him and caused him to act out. She had had the opportunity to protect him, but chose instead to retreat into bottles and the beds of strange men.

  Nothing had really changed over the years, only the way he reacted to her now. He still saw her in every dark bar and behind every sloppy smile and lipstick-smeared glass. He still reviled the weakness that made her vulnerable to all who’d chosen to use her. But now he understood why his father had refused to let her go. She was his first lady, and first ladies were never permitted to divorce midterm.

  Edward Case had managed to become one of the world’s most successful CEOs because he kept his house in strict order. There were no scandals for the tabloids. He was legendary for establishing a foundation that patronized the needs of America’s war veterans. He was loyal to his wife and her son no matter what their personal excesses, and who in these times could hold the father to blame for the sins of the son or even his mother? When you were as clean as Ed Case you could hold hands in every White House, be it Democratic or Republican. And you could continue a sixty-year legacy of providing American’s most secret weapons.

  Wendy brushed past Troy and leaned to kiss Case on the cheek. Her towel came open, water beads falling from her breasts, blotting the arm of his Dolce & Gabbana shirt. “Are you joining us?” she asked, looking into Troy’s eyes.

  He shook his head. “Just leaving.”

  She pulled the towel from her shoulders and tossed it on the grass and sat at the table as the servant poured coffee.

  Troy bowed courteously and left.

  5

  Attached to Sherry’s head were a profusion of colorful electrodes, each connected to tubes that snaked their way into somber-looking machines. The gurney was stainless steel and felt cold through her flimsy gown. She had the sense she was in a station, about to depart on some futuristic trip. A trip she would be taking alone.

  She remembered their last afternoon together. They had made love for an hour and then sat in the sunroom, taking in the last rays of the day. Brian had told her he was sorry that he wouldn’t be around for her tests, that he couldn’t postpone his deployment. Sherry had said she understood. That she knew it could be weeks before she heard from him again. What she didn’t say was what she feared most. That the tests would find something and that she wouldn’t be the same person when he returned.

  Sherry grieved now that he was gone, but the time apart would do them both good. She couldn’t risk becoming a burden on him. He would be hurt now, but in the end, she knew, it was what was best for him.

  The light flashes from the migraines had been getting worse, not better. She was also beginning to see colors, bright purples, reds, and orange. Ophthalmic migraines were common, Dr. Salix told her, and many people reported shapes and colors similar to what she was seeing. It was caused by blood vessel spasms behind the eye. People who suffered cortical or cerebral blindness, as Sherry did, might still be candidates for migraines, because it was whole-brain injury, not just damage to the occipital lobes, that prevented her from seeing. In other words, it takes all components of the brain to see, and whole-brain changes that might have altered the order of delicate nerve systems might also permit vision behind the cornea.

  Sherry was convinced she was reacting to the radiation she’d absorbed. The only question for her right now was whether or not she was the same person she had been before New Mexico. What effect did this radiation have on an EEG of her brain and thus her ability to read memories of the dead?

  “We want to perform some tests before we get started,” Dr. Salix said, looking down at her.

  Getting started meant bringing in the cadavers.

  “You remember the strobe? You’ve done this before. We’re going to move the machine over you and see how your brain perceives the light.”

  Sherry nodded.

  “If you sense something, if you feel anything—pain, nausea—I want you to signal me by raising a hand. Otherwise, lie still and I’ll let you know when we’re done. Are you ready?”

  She nodded and wheels squeaked as a machine was rolled into place.

  Something snapped in the hollow-sounding room—a switch, she thought. She felt a vibration and then it was as if there was pressure against her eyes, but she saw no light.

  She heard a metallic noise behind her; someone was moving to her left.

  “It’s on?” she asked, but was quickly countered with a shhhhh.

  “Just your hand, Sherry. Look, don’t listen.”

  She wanted so badly to see something, a glimmer of light, anything. She needed an answer for what was happening to her. And if she couldn’t give them an explanation by seeing lights, she just wanted to return to the state she had been in all these years. Blind.

  The switch snapped off and the machine was wheeled away.

  She could feel warm tears streaking down the sides of her cheeks. “I didn’t see anything.”

  Someone laid a hand on her shoulder. “Which is not important,” Salix said. “We’re bringing in the first of the bodies now. Once we get her alongside you, I’ll need your right hand. Are you doing okay?”
>
  Sherry nodded.

  Someone dabbed her cheeks until they were dry.

  This part was familiar. More than two decades familiar. Her very first experience with a corpse had been as a child. A roommate in the orphanage in Philadelphia had swallowed a lethal dose of rat poison. It took years to understand what she had seen in that moment holding the dead girl’s hand. Years more to accept that it was going to happen every time she touched the dead. That it was now a part of herself.

  She wasn’t the only skeptic during those early years and she certainly wouldn’t be the last. How did you accept that you are a freak of nature? Or, as Mr. Brigham, her best friend and neighbor, liked to say, a very special human being?

  Well, there was special and there was special. Could someone, much less she—a blind woman who had retrograde amnesia due to a childhood head injury—really exhibit aptitude for reading people’s minds? In time it became impossible for the medical community to ignore what she appeared to be doing. They wanted to have their own look at this freak from Philadelphia. Then came the psychologists and neurologists, and on it went until a young biologist from the University of Calgary in Alberta suggested she wasn’t clairvoyant at all. He believed instead that electrical anomalies in her damaged brain somehow enabled her to connect with the dead person’s central nervous system through the profusion of skin cell receptors in the human hand. Her brain then used the deceased person’s neurological wiring to reach their short-term memory located in the frontal cortex. She was actually seeing the last visually encoded memories of what the deceased person had been thinking about in their final seconds of life.