Stern and Cates looked to Luria to take the question. “It shows heightened sensory stimulation coming from the outside.”
“Like the last time,” Stern added. “The activity in the limbic area was wild.”
“I don’t remember.”
Luria’s eyebrow shot up like a polygraph needle. “You don’t remember. Well, frankly, I find that hard to believe. Your blood chemistry was teeming with cortisol and epinephrine. Your brain was in fight-or-flight response. How can you not remember anything?”
His heart was pounding so hard that his diaphragm throbbed visibly. This was like a psychic striptease. They knew he was lying.
“I’ll ask you again,” Luria said, her eyes black and intense. “Do you recall anything from suspension? Any sense of activity, of emotions—fear, anger? Of another’s presence?”
The pain in his side kept flaring at him. Again he checked it.
“Are you okay?” Sarah asked.
He nodded. The skin wasn’t broken, no bruises. But it felt as if the bullet were lodged inside.
Before Luria could launch into him again, Morris Stern cleared his throat. “Zack, a couple of weeks ago we explained how the machine can detect individual neuroelectrical signatures. Remember? Well, your brain contains one hundred billion neurons, so it’s like listening to conversations of every person on the planet fifteen times over. From all that chatter, complex algorithms help us eliminate those common to all other people from your own discrete signature. Okay?”
Zack made no response, but Stern went on as if he had.
He turned the computer monitor so Zack could see multicolored scintillations and patterns. “This may mean nothing to you, but that’s the axonal electrical activity in a region of your parietal lobe. Just before we woke you, we recorded a sudden change in patterns. We need to analyze more of the data, but preliminary results indicate an anomaly.”
The patterns flickered and changed color and meant nothing to Zack.
“These splotches flashing across your hippocampus indicate that the visual cortex and sensory centers were being flooded with data from the outside. In short, you were not manufacturing a near-death experience, you had one.”
“You said that the last time.”
“Not me, because I wasn’t convinced, but now I am. Your mind left your brain and took in an experience of its own. There’s more data to analyze, but we’ve got enough for confirmation.”
“Confirmation of what?”
Stern pushed up the glasses on his nose and looked directly at him. “That you merged with another mind.”
“What?”
“Like the last time. We finished those analyses, and found a signature that’s not yours—that belongs to another entity. Frankly, this is phenomenal.”
“In addition to that,” said Elizabeth, “your blood analysis shows spikes in adrenaline commensurate with the intense activity in the rage center of your brain. What you experienced was violence—like the last two times.”
A rat uncurled in Zack’s gut.
“You’re lying,” Luria said. “You are bloody lying. I can see it in your face. Tell me the truth, goddamn it. What did you experience?”
The others froze in place, but he could see Sarah wince in anticipation.
“I killed a man.”
“What?”
“I killed a man. I beat him to death with a tire iron while he was fixing his car.”
Sarah looked horrified. Luria’s face was a blank of itself. “You killed a man?”
“He was under his car fixing something. I waited until he crawled out, then smashed in his skull. And the last time I strangled a guy lifting weights. And before that I ran a woman down with a car.” He got up to leave.
“Wait, please,” Luria pleaded. “Do you know these people or why you attacked them?”
“No. And I don’t want to. You’ve fucked up my head something wicked.”
“Please don’t go just yet,” she begged.
“Lady, I may have permanent brain damage. You got that? I’m fucking out of here.”
“Fine, fine,” Morris Stern said. “You’ve been through enough.”
Sarah agreed. Dr. Luria glanced at the others. “Okay.” She took Zack’s arm. He could feel trembling but couldn’t determine if it was him or her. “Why didn’t you tell us before?”
He pulled his arm free but didn’t answer her.
“I’m very sorry. We can give you something to help you sleep peacefully. I promise. But you have made an extraordinary breakthrough. You—”
He headed for the door. Sarah caught up to him. “Sorry, Zack.”
He pulled out his wallet and laid Luria’s $10,000 check on her desk, then passed through the door.
Luria ran to him, begging him to take it. “Please, Zack. Take a week off to rest. But please let us continue. Please. We’re almost there.”
He didn’t know what she meant and didn’t care. “Leave me alone.”
“But you made contact with another sentience.”
“I made contact with hell and I’m not going back.”
60
Roman played the Warren Gladstone video for the third time.
The guy had a big cartoon happy face, and he was making claims about the Day of Jubilation as if it were the second coming itself. He carried on about a whole new way of life for the world—a way of life that would unite people of all faiths and of no faith; a day when there would be no more fear of death. No more fear of hellfires.
The guy sounded pretty convincing—so much so that Roman felt a little tickle of inspiration.
But there were dissenters—bloggers railing against him for going “soft on sin” and reducing the gospel to a lot of left-wing self-help bullshit.
What snagged Roman’s attention was what one commentator said about near-death experiences:
And at the bottom of several blogs was the name of the same organization, one he had never heard of: the Fraternity of Jesus.
