“How so?”
“The two men met during their tour in the service, where they were exposed to some of the earliest revivor technology,” he said. “They were fascinated by it, especially Sodder, who studied the ones that came off the battlefield, looking for weaknesses to exploit, and then ultimately a way to re-create the revivor for our own use. He got pigeonholed as a tech specialist, while Ericsson, by all accounts, was more of a military man. Sodder saw the military benefit of a large, stable revivor force that could do more than blindly jump out of the bushes. When they got out of the service, the two pooled their resources and began development.”
“They formed their own company?”
“Initially,” he said. “In fact, Elise Jovanovic and Michael Zaytsev were part of that original endeavor, but Heinlein snapped the whole entity up very early on and then split it; Jovanovic and Zaytsev, whose names I’m sure you’re at least familiar with, formed the team that perfected your JZ interface, while Sodder and Ericsson developed revivor technology. They all became very rich, and under the umbrella of Heinlein Industries, they were given all the resources they would ever need. Heinlein itself became even more profitable than it already was, and the marriage resulted in our obtaining one of the largest government contracts in history. In return, we provided the United American Coalition with the most powerful military force the world has ever seen.”
“So what is Zhang’s Syndrome?” I coaxed.
“It is the wedge that eventually came between Ericsson and Sodder,” MacReady said. “Basically, it’s a corruption of the memory pathways that occurs sometimes during reanimation, named after where the condition was finally isolated, Ning Zhang. It came up only in the later part of Sodder’s life, because it wasn’t until then that revivors became sophisticated enough to retain a significant part of their memories and cognitive abilities. It didn’t affect memories that formed after reanimation, only preexisting ones.”
“Affected them how?”
“Basically, a small percentage of those who were reanimated would describe a cognitive dissonance,” he said. “Think of it like this: If a quantifiable memory event could be portrayed as an image, the same image would differ between the time of death and reanimation. They would be similar, but not equal.”
“Give me an example.”
“For example, a man comes to a fork in the road and goes right. Years later, upon reanimation, that man’s revivor believes he went left.”
“Maybe he just remembered it wrong.”
“It’s hard to say, but Sodder believed he had empirical evidence that this was not the case—and that was the crux of it. To someone like Ericsson it wasn’t a problem, but to someone like Sodder it was a puzzle he felt compelled to solve. He felt such a discrepancy had to have an explanation.”
“How did that drive a wedge between the two men?”
“Well, since only a small portion of the memories were affected and not all revivors exhibited the anomaly, Ericsson declared it a waste of resources to chase it,” he said. “He was only interested in increasing the field capacity of the revivor itself; past memories were irrelevant to him. Sodder was the opposite; he was obsessed with the problem and with finding what caused it.”
“So it was a professional disagreement, then?”
“It was more than that,” MacReady said. “It came down to their beliefs. Ericsson didn’t just think it was a waste of resources. He didn’t think the memories should be preserved. If he had his way, I think he would have had all former life memory wiped out, but it wasn’t practical. He viewed Sodder’s work as attempting to blur the line between life and reanimation, to make reanimation an extension of life. He was offended by it, I believe. The two distanced themselves from one another.”
“You said, ‘in the last part of Sodder’s life’,” I said. “He’s dead now?”
“Both men are dead now,” he said, “but their legacies still live on, as do the two camps they established, which still lock horns over that same issue, though not so much these days.”
“Why not?”
“Sodder had a protege named Samuel Fawkes,” he said, “who continued his work trying to pinpoint the cause of Zhang’s Syndrome. Some years ago, he died as well, and since then it’s almost completely lost steam. Samuel’s primary partner in that endeavor was a man named Edward Cross, but honestly, when Samuel died, Edward moved on to other areas.”
“How hard would it be to get what you have on Zhang’s Syndrome to me?”
“Not hard at all. Blocks of the data are still classified, you understand, but I can give you plenty to chew on for now. I’ll assemble them and then forward them to your office.”
“Fair enough.”
“Is there anything else I can help you with?” he asked. “I could arrange a tour of the facilities, if you like.”
“No, thanks,” I said. “I have all the information I need for now.”
“Let me show you out, then.”
I followed him back to the visitors’ lobby, where we shook hands and he gave me his card before disappearing back behind the glass security door. I headed out to the parking garage, toward the car.
Slowing down as I approached the car, I noticed something on the windshield. It looked like a business card had been slipped under the driver’s-side windshield wiper.
No one else was around. I couldn’t see any cameras but I was sure they were there, so I palmed the card and got into the car without turning it over. Once I was inside, I held it down out of sight and looked at it. The name and contact information had been scratched out.
Someone must have wanted to leave me a message without showing himself and without leaving any kind of electronic trail. Sometimes the low-tech approach was still the best way to go.
I flipped it over and looked at the back; there was a handwritten note there, printed in black ink.
SAMUELNEVER LEFT
The card wasn’t signed. There was no other information on it.
Someone else knew I was here, then. The reference had to be to the Samuel Fawkes that MacReady had mentioned to me, and that implied that someone else had managed to hear that conversation as well.
With the restrictions put down over VP Industrial, there was no way to check the information. I slipped the card in my pocket and headed back toward the railway.
Zoe Ott—Pleasantview Apartments, Apartment 713
When I first opened my eyes, I wasn’t sure where I was. I was lying on something soft, but it wasn’t my bed and it wasn’t the couch. Also, I was covered with a thick blanket that wasn’t mine. The lights were out and the room was lit by flickering candlelight.
I took a deep breath and smelled some kind of perfume smell, along with the smell of the bar soap I used. When I reached up to rub my face, it wasn’t greasy, and the blanket was crisp and clean.
Pushing my face into it, I breathed in and it smelled good, but it wasn’t mine. The oversized pink sweatshirt and sweatpants I was wearing weren’t mine either. I heard slippers shuffle across the floor nearby.
“Oh, you’re up,” a woman said, looking down at me. It was Karen, my downstairs neighbor. I was on the floor, lying across sofa cushions that had been arranged there like a bed. I was still in my apartment.
“Your lights are out, so I brought up some candles. I hope you don’t mind,” she said, sitting down next to me. Near my head there was a large ceramic bowl filled with soapy water that had a facecloth draped over the lip. Three or four candles had been arranged around the room.
“What happened?” I asked.
“You flipped,” she said, with a thin smile.
“Oh.”
“You said something terrible happened,” she said. “Then you started going on about dead people, and then needles in your head, and then I kind of lost track. Do you remember any of it?”
“No.”
