I still hadn’t told him specifically about Zoe, and he was getting impatient. It had been hours since I’d dropped the evidence off with her, and I hadn’t heard back yet.
Things were tense out there and getting worse. Rumors of more terrorist attacks were flooding the airwaves, and the FBI circuits were jammed with false tips, confessions, and more bomb threats. The police and the Guard had their hands full trying to keep order and enforce the curfew. The first revivor soldiers were due to hit the streets in the next few hours.
After sifting through Heinlein’s data on Zhang’s Syndrome, I was able to come to two conclusions. The first was that the condition was not as much of a footnote as MacReady indicated it was. The second was that although Olav Sodder may have been the one who first became aware of it with Samuel Fawkes as his protege, it was Fawkes who had the obsession with it, far more so than his mentor ever had. Most of the data I’d received had been gathered by Fawkes.
With pages of information scattered in the background, I watched one of hundreds of archived sessions Fawkes conducted with the revivor for whom the condition was named, Ning Zhang. Zhang, in life, had been a second-tier citizen who worked in sanitation, specializing in substructure plumbing. Zhang had also been a convicted criminal.
He was a short male revivor, lean but stocky, with Asian features. His eyes were flat white and his skin, even after reanimation, leaned toward dark. In the footage he was seated at a table with a series of what looked like index cards in neat stacks in front of him. His face had no expression as Samuel Fawkes approached him.
In contrast to Zhang, Fawkes was thin and very pale. There was dense stubble on his face, and he wore his thick black hair fairly long. He’d removed his tie and rolled up his sleeves. He looked tired, but his eyes were sharp as he regarded the revivor.
“Stack zero,” he said. Zhang looked to the leftmost stack of cards. He reached over and slid them closer with one hand.
“Event series N through R,” Fawkes continued. “Each card relates information regarding documented events. Some of the events are compiled from information on record, cited by you, prior to reanimation. Some of the events are compiled from information obtained from interviews after reanimation.”
“Why?” Zhang asked, still looking down at the stack of cards.
“Each event is reduced to the salient, documented facts. Review each event and—”
“We did this.”
Fawkes ran one hand over his face, then rubbed the bridge of his prominent nose.
“Are you refusing to cooperate?”
“No. I will do whatever I’m told.”
“And if your first commander removes your ghrelin inhibitor and commands you to eat human flesh?”
“Then I will.”
“Would you have done so in life?”
“No.”
“Would you have found it repulsive?”
“I believe so.”
“The event on the card in your hand, is it accurate?”
“No. Are you trying to trick me?”
“We know the event is accurate. You were convicted of murdering that woman—this is a verifiable event. You’re claiming now that your confession was a lie?”
“I was not lying.”
“So you did, in fact, stab Noelle Hyde with a kitchen knife?”
“I did not.”
“You confessed. All the polygraph sensors and computer models validated your confession.”
“I was not lying.”
“Then you’re lying now.”
“No.”
“They can’t both be the truth. The event occurred once, in one way. Not two.”
“In both cases, I was asked to tell the truth. In both cases, I related the information without alteration.”
“So you feel now the information you believed in life was false?”
“I don’t know. I gain nothing by denying it now.”
“You either did or did not commit that crime. Events happen only in one way,” Fawkes insisted.
“Are you sure?”
“Yes,” he snapped. “Reanimation doesn’t open the mind to parallel experiences and somehow replace perceptions of events with alternate possibilities.”
“Are you sure?”
“You killed her. Something corrupted those memories.”
“If it did,” Zhang said with the certainty of one who didn’t care one way or the other, “then I will never have any way of knowing which ones. By extension, neither will you.”
“Don’t be so sure.”
I paused the footage and dug up what information there was on the Zhang trial. It looked cut-and-dried. For whatever reasons, Ning Zhang had followed Noelle Hyde one night, pulled her into an alley, and stabbed her repeatedly. Her body was never found, but Zhang’s prints were on the knife, and traces of her blood were found on his clothes. Witnesses were produced who saw him approach her that night. Eventually he confessed. Less than a month later, he was killed in a prison altercation and picked up by Heinlein. Even as a revivor, though, he could not or would not say where the body ended up.
That was true on one level, but people often had strange reasons for lying, especially to themselves. Had his mind somehow purged the information? Had he convinced himself, somehow, of his own innocence at the end, and carried it with him into death?
The problem probably existed long before, but in the early days, revivor brains were so simplistic that no one had noticed. The problem surfaced more as time went by and the records contained the same kind of experiments for almost fifty other revivors, but his obsession had started with Zhang.
It could have been a scientist’s curiosity or even an obsession, but having sat through and conducted as many interrogations as I had, it looked to me like Fawkes was digging for something. The isolation, the repetition, and just the way he held himself, the way he kept at it—it was standard stuff whether Fawkes even knew it or not. He was trying to extract information. He was pretty good at it too.
Regardless, he never figured it out. The experiment eventually ended. The revivor was shipped off across the ocean, where its ghrelin inhibitor was eventually removed, despite being in violation of international law. In the resulting state of perpetual hunger, Zhang most likely committed atrocities far worse than he ever had in life.
A red warning light flashed at the apex of my line of sight. I snapped open my eyes.
