Altered States (15 page)

‘We all did it, some after almost every meal. Your stomach gets used to it after a while. It doesn’t even start digesting it. It just kind of packages it up. Then you can get rid of it in seconds. Even in public bathrooms, because you learn how to do it without making a noise.

‘Some of my friends got too obsessed. They vomited till their oesophagus ripped and their knuckles bled from supporting themselves on the bathroom floor. Not nice. I was never that bad. And now that I’m done with gymnastics I hardly ever do it.’

We reached the door to her apartment block. We stopped and she turned to me again.

‘Don’t get me wrong. I’m not condoning it. I don’t think people should get involved, just like with alcohol or junk food or gambling, because it can take control. But if you
do
do it, and you do it in moderation, then it doesn’t make you a freak or a nutcase.’

This was the first conversation I had had in many years where I hadn’t known where it was going, where I hadn’t been in the driving seat. It was … kind of exhilarating. That must sound odd, but it was quite a big deal to me.

‘I know I’ve had an awful lot of cocktails,’ I slurred. ‘And I know this sounds absolutely ridiculous in my head, but I’m going to say it anyway.’

‘Okay.’

‘I think you’re an incredible person.’

‘Good.’ She smiled like she’d been expecting it. ‘Well that’s a lot about my so-called problems. Do you want to know what yours is?’

The next morning I awoke, thoughts from the previous night flooding in like a wave of warmth. And I thought about what she’d said; I repeated it to myself. And then I got it. She hadn’t said, ‘a different point of view’. She’d said, ‘a different point of
you’
.

Of me.

What was the point of me? When I was with other people I always thought it was to read them, to analyse them, to help them. But that doesn’t always have to be my purpose. When I was with Gemma I didn’t need to help her. She didn’t need changing. When I was with her I could have a different purpose; I could be someone else.

Sometimes we all need to be someone else.

That was why she was The One.

Hide

A few months later the Hide project was dealt a blow. Luke Whitman announced that he was leaving the team. He was one of our chief coders and a complete genius when it came to video image processing. Guess who he was going to work for? Hollywood. I was, of course, insanely jealous, but also very excited for him – and growing evermore excited for him with every free pint I was downing at his leaving do.

I figured Monday would be the day to give the team a boost by telling them about my new idea for Hide. I’d been mulling it over for a while and I knew it could take the system to a whole new level.

The limitation with the system to-date centred on the inherent constraint of reading people ‘cold’. If you really want to know what someone’s thinking you have to see how they respond to stimuli, especially sub-conscious stimuli. I knew this better than anyone. It was my hobby.

To give you an idea of how powerful this approach can be: one study I stumbled across once asked volunteers to fill out questionnaires designed to prime some of them with words associated with the elderly, such as “grey” and “wrinkle”. Afterwards, the researchers timed how long it took participants to walk down a hallway, and found that those who had been primed with elderly words walked more slowly than those who hadn’t.

And this was just the written word. Imagine the efficacy of the oral equivalent. In fact, you don’t need to imagine. You will have experienced it: standing in a room full of people, with dozens of other conversations going on around you. You are only consciously paying attention to the conversation you are having, but there is another part of your brain that is monitoring everything else. And when somebody mentions your name, or a subject you are interested in, then you react.

Most of the target locations for Hide – airports, prisons, hospitals, shopping malls – were ideally suited to feeding sub-conscious cues. They all have public address systems that nobody really pays much attention too. My idea was to feed seemingly nonsense messages over the PA system to elicit reactions from individuals. The messages would consist of fairly non-descript sentences loaded with well-chosen emotive words or sounds.

I need to confess here that this wasn’t entirely my idea. A few weeks before I had been watching some old shows of a stage/TV performer who I was a great admirer of. This man started his career as a conjuror but got interested in hypnosis, suggestion and psychology in general, to quite brilliant results in the entertainment field. Anyway, he did this thing on one of his shows where, by looping suggestions through a public address system at a shopping mall, he got about eighty per cent of the visitors to stick their right arm in the air on cue. Pretty neat, I thought. So that’s where I stole the idea.

I rolled up to work on Monday set to brief the team on my notions and plan a way forward with this line of research. When I entered the lab, only a few guys were already in, but there was a mood in the air I didn’t much care for.

There was a fleeting twitch in my workmate’s eyebrows as I landed that last word; a combination of surprise and confusion. Then it was gone.

I went home early that day. For the first time I began to question whether I was working for the right side. When I was a kid there were only ever two sides: the goodies and the baddies: cops and robbers; cowboys and Indians. More than anything else, this binary morality was ingrained into me by the Star Wars movies my dad made me watch like they were the modern gospel. But it’s not that simple. There are more than two sides. There are
three-hundred million
sides in the US alone: every man, woman and child working to their own agenda, according to their own complex set of beliefs and motivations.

Understanding this was of critical importance and it bugged me that I hadn’t thought this through before. There were only a handful of people who had access to or even knowledge of what we were working on. Who was I to judge that the intentions of these individuals were on the right side of morality? I didn’t even know what their intentions were. I’d never met Zack Bayliss in person. Why? Because he was a busy man? Or because he had things to hide? Things to hide, from someone who could read minds...

After Luke’s death I started to study things a little more closely; do a little digging. And a few things started to make more sense, like Bayliss never making an appearance, like certain directions we were given. It quite quickly became very apparent ... I was working for the wrong side. Not America, not the Government, not necessarily the agency even. Just whoever was behind this project; whoever knew what it was really all about. Bayliss presumably and maybe a few others.

This put me in something of a dilemma. What we were trying to develop was a powerful tool – weapon even – and I didn’t want it used by the wrong people; to the wrong ends. If that was a possibility then it was better that it never existed at all. At the very least it was better that I was not involved with it anymore. But then, I quite liked being alive too.

And then there was Gemma. It was clear now that I was buried deep in some pretty dangerous shit. I didn’t want her to get messed up in it.

Apart from the specifics of what I was working on I had actually been pretty open with Gemma to date. But this time, I couldn’t tell her what I had to do. It took months to put everything in place. Then it was time.

That morning I kissed her goodbye a little longer than usual, held her a little tighter.

‘Take care,’ I said with a smile and walked away, knowing that the time till I next saw her would be at best a long time. At worst ... forever.

Hidden

Six days later a reasonably intact – if slightly charred – canine and premolar were found in a burnt-out van just the other side of the Mexican border. The teeth were identified as those of one Aaron Braunn.

Me.

Apparently, I’d built up some gambling debts and made myself some bad friends; and I’d tried to buy myself out of it with some secret government intelligence software.

The death, of course, was fake. The teeth, alas, were very real. It’s not quite as simple as it seems to fake your death by burning someone else’s body. You have to make sure none of theirs remain to give the game away. Fortunately, a forensic scientist in Florida had done a little research on the subject, for much more noble causes, I stress.

If you’re interested, here’s the detail. Providing there is sufficient wicking material, such as clothing, the human body contains enough body fat to burn for about seven hours. The skeleton however takes much longer to burn at these temperatures so there is usually always something left. Dousing in gasoline does not help. That will barely burn for more than a minute before exhausting itself. Without the aid of a crematorium, the only sure fire way – excuse the pun – to completely destroy a body is to put it in the trunk of a car on top of the spare wheel. The rubber of the tyre provides the extra fuel, whilst the body is suspended on the metal rim exposing it to the intense heat. Complete destruction can be achieved after four to five hours.

After completing this process all that remained for me was to throw in a couple of burnt up teeth amongst the rest of the unidentifiable body ash.

The complexity and attention to detail required in this single first step highlights why only someone from inside could entertain the idea of hiding from them. I knew how they operated. I knew what I had to do to avoid their detection.

To this end I had spent the previous six months setting up dozens of fake identities and accompanying bank accounts.

I also did some work at removing my identity within the service. I couldn’t actually remove my profile on the system without setting off alarm bells, but I was able to tweak it. And in many ways that was better.

The first thing I modified was the composite face image stored with my profile. Composite face images are created by combining a set of photographs taken from different angles to produce a single ‘average’ image of one’s face. It looks a bit odd to the human eye but when used by image recognition software it produces a much higher hit-rate than using a standard photo. So I switched the image in my profile for an image composed of other people; but I left the main profile image untouched – the one displayed when users look up my details. This was the best strategy because as soon as I disappeared my profile would be springing up on dozens of screens throughout the agency; and if it wasn’t my face that appeared people would know the profile had been compromised. It was much more important to replace the composite image so I didn’t set off any triggers if I ever passed in front of the wrong cameras at any point in the future.

Something else the agency wouldn’t want people to know is that they also collect people’s gait profile. The way someone walks is almost as unique as their fingerprints or face, but has one distinct advantage over them both in that it can be used to identify people from a distance. Even cooler still, gait profiles can be used to recognise people from above by the shadow they cast. It won’t be long before it is possible to recognise people from satellite surveillance cameras, as soon as the resolution is good enough. Needless to say, I tweaked my gait profile too.

There was one last thing I needed to do before I left; one which would really piss off Zack Bayliss, not to mention a number of others. But this I couldn’t do in slow time. This I had to do at the very last minute.

The day I chose to leave was the Friday night before Labor Day weekend. I wanted a long weekend of running before anyone sounded the alarm.

I went into work that day and tried to act normal, which involved attending the traditional Friday team lunch at the canteen. I was operating on autopilot with my mind very much elsewhere – all non-taxing tasks being out-sourced to lower brain functions. This was why only on leaving the canteen checkout did I look down at my tray to find a strangely righteous selection of vegetable soup, cheese-and-onion quiche and a radish salad. None of which I remember buying, but which earned me some perplexed glances from most of my team. They were all very male – and American – and didn’t really understand the concept of a meal without at least one previously-sentient constituent. I made a hand waving gesture at the jibes and attempted to keep a low profile.