essence, see reflections gleaned from the subject’s life. Better yet, a dying man could project images of his killer and we could save them. Better than any mugshot. It stands to turn the justice system as we know it on its ear.”
Wade felt the restraints biting into his wrists. There was a way out of these zip-ties. Someone had told him how to do it once upon a time, but the method eluded him now.
“But like any great discovery, “nanoreality” had its problems, and some pretty significant ones at that. Once access was gained, we found it difficult to isolate the memories we wanted. The mind doesn’t have an index, you see. It’s like a library full of books with no titles. We ended up selecting them at random.” He shook his head. “Which had unfortunate consequences for some of the subjects, otherwise good people who had seen terrible things and had managed to forget them. Essentially we made them relive those nightmares, and of course, when memories are recreated in front of you, they cease to be memories anymore. They become the present, the now. So those who had witnessed or endured tragedies were forced to witness them again. And once the present became the past again, the memory was duplicated, intensifying the level of emotional turmoil. It proved counterproductive, exacerbating the very symptoms were were trying to cure.”
Wade smiled. “So you fucked them up even more, in other words.”
“Yes,” Cochran conceded. “And I’ll spare you the speech about every great advance needing sacrifice. It was my fault. We weren’t ready.”
“But now you are?”
Cochran sat back again and appraised Wade for a long moment. Then he offered him a tight smile. “Yes. Many lives have been lost trying to perfect this thing. The initial project was deemed a failure and shut down until I decided to fund a new version of it. As you might imagine, the old concerns were revived right along with it, but I had done my homework this time. We had planned to go public until someone in my staff leaked word of the project to the press. It was not received well. They accused us of trying to steal the last of mankind’s secrets, invading the only place left the government hadn’t already probed. During this wave of negativity, the government men showed up, stirred from their nest by the media and on the warpath. After an admittedly impressive demonstration, I was able to keep them from shutting us down, but only if I agreed to sign the whole thing over to them when complete, with my role reduced to advisor.”
“That had to suck,” Wade said, grinning.
“Not nearly as much as I thought. You see, the advances we made in that three year period were phenomenal. We broke barriers we never imagined we’d break, and extended the realm of possibility almost infinitely. There is very little we can’t do with this technology, but of course claims are nothing without proof.” He smiled and joined his hands. “Which is where you come in.”
Wade nodded his understanding. “I’m the guinea pig.”
“Yes.”
CHAPTER SEVEN
Wade was sweating again, but this time he was glad of it. Enough lubrication and he stood a better chance of slipping free of his restraints. Not a much better chance, but anything was better than nothing. And if he got free, the first order of business would be to strangle the boring old bastard with his own tie. He could think about what to do with the cops upstairs—assuming they were still there—later.
“So what’s next?” he asked Cochran.
“We’ve already run through the first stage. Exposure to select memories to gauge your reaction.”
“Which was disappointing if the reviews are to be believed.”
“Yes, but as I said, hardly surprising.”
A thought occurred to him then. “You said you weren’t able to isolate individual memories, didn’t you?”
Cochran seemed pleased. “So you were listening after all?”
“Can’t help it,” Wade said. “My ears don’t listen to reason.”
“Well, you’re correct. We
“What does that mean?”
“It means,” Cochran told him. “That the memories you experienced upstairs didn’t significantly affect you for a good reason.”
“Which is?”
“Not all of them were yours.”
“Hardly a shock,” Wade said. “I wasn’t there to see the kid die. I’ve never even seen the old w…your wife before. And…”
“Correct, but the last one, the hooker, couldn’t have come from anybody’s brain but yours.”
For the first time since meeting the old man, Wade felt a pinch of anger in his belly. There was no denying that Gail, a girl he had loved, if only for a short time, had been a prostitute. God knows she’d turned him away enough times or asked him to wait in the diner downstairs because she was “entertaining” but then as now, he hated hearing her called a ‘hooker’. It was, he knew, the typical reaction of the blind, those people who judged her based on how she looked and what she did rather than who she was. And if they’d known, they might have been surprised to find that she had a college degree (though in what, he no longer recalled), and a six-year old child she’d adored (but who lived with her mother for obvious reasons), and that she’d played piano like a virtuoso. She hooked to make enough money to buy a house for herself and her son, and she’d been pretty close to realizing that goal when she’d decided she’d had enough of Wade. A violent man by nature, he nevertheless managed to rein in his temper for her. Hurting her wasn’t the way to secure her love, to persuade her that her life would be better with him in it, even if it only served as a constant reminder of what she’d done in the years before she made a clean break. So instead of beating her, he’d introduced her to drugs, and that had worked like a charm. She’d grown to depend on him again, to appreciate him, and that had lasted until the night she threatened him with his own gun. By that time, the drugs had completely taken hold of her, leaving her delusional, unreachable. When she’d pleaded with him to let her go, he knew she was talking to the cocaine in her system, in her brain, so that when he killed her, it was a mercy.
“Did I strike a nerve at last?” Cochran asked.
“Nope.”
“Ah well,” Cochran said, sounding not at all disappointed, “There’s plenty of time.”
Wade sighed. “Okay, let’s quit fucking around. What am I doing here?” As he spoke, he tugged his arm up as much as the restraint would allow. The zip tie caught on his wrist-bone and moved no further. It would though, he was sure of it.
Cochran smiled broadly and gestured at the room around them. “It’s actually quite clever. I shifted the focus of the project as needed to keep its validity in the eyes of those who might be swayed to pull the plug.”
Wade closed his eyes, exasperated. “Good for you.”
“I proposed, instead of concentrating solely on mental patients, that we expand our scope to include violent criminals. Not that I believe there’s much of a difference, mind you. I suggested we build a fully functional neighborhood right in the middle of Harperville’s black zone, where recidivism is out of control.”
“Black zone?”
“The area worst affected by crime.”
“Careful Reverend Sharpton doesn’t get wind of that.”
“It was to be, what my workers affectionately called a ‘glue trap’. The objective would be to lure or force pre-selected criminals into the house chosen for them.”
“Where they would be visited by the ghosts of Christmas past,” Wade said with a smirk.
“In a sense, yes. Each house contains two-dozen hosts, which are units installed in the walls behind perforated plaster. When triggered—remotely, of course—they send out spores, nanobots, which are then inhaled. Once inside you, they begin to acquire your information, much like a system search on a hard drive. When they find what they want, they shoot signals against your eyes like a cathode ray will shoot electrons against a
