F Paul Wilson - Novel 05 (3 page)

 
          
Great,
she thought. I say send me someone so I can demonstrate the equipment, and they
send Lurch from the Addams Family.

 
          
But
he seemed knowledgeable about her research
—
apparently
he'd read all the articles she'd sent
—
and
genuinely interested. She appreciated that. And he was bright. That made it
easier. She sensed that if she brought off this demonstration they had a good
chance of getting a meaningful grant.

 
          
If
the system didn't crash.

 
          
And
as soon as the first check cleared she wanted to find a larger space for the
lab. This place had a comfortable occupancy limit of three. Five people plus
an extra console were crammed in here now. She wanted more space, more staff, a
hot new Silicon Graphics computer just for image processing. ... She was
dreaming.

 
          
Money
—
it had become a constant chase. With funding to the
National Science Foundation being cut again, the project's primary source of
federal grants was iffy for next year. And NYU was cutting its contribution by
a third. The whole project was in danger of collapse. Desperate, they'd gone
to the private sector. So hard to get pure research dollars out of bottom-line-obsessed
bean counters. Everybody found the memoryscape fascinating, but how much would
it return on the dollar?

 
          
Couldn't
they see? This project was opening up the seat of consciousness, of
personality. It was going to change the way the world looked at the mind.

 
          
But
not without many more trials and lots more time to tweak the software. And that
took
money.

 
          
She
glanced around. Good thing she wasn't claustrophobic. Dr. S. stood near the
door, arms folded across his chest, looking anxious. The subject, Lorraine
Deering, one of their regular volunteers, lay on the bed with her head encased
in a smaller, tighter-fitting helmet lined with scalp electrodes and pickups;
she snored softly in diazepam-induced sleep. Teresa Gomez, the nurse
anesthetist, sat between the bed and Julie's recliner.

 
          
Then
there was Mr. Henderson, seated on the second recliner they'd squeezed in; all
in a ten-by-fourteen cubicle. The expression "cheek by jowl" took on
new meaning.

 
          
Fortunately
all the computing hardware
—
the university's mainframe
—
was in the basement. All Julie needed to run the show was
her terminal on its rolling cart. She could tell from Mr. Henderson's initial
expression that he was ready to be unimpressed. Where was all the sci-fi
gadgetry he'd been expecting? But when she pulled out the VR helmets, his eyes
had lit.

 
          
"Now
the headphones," she said. "These are specially constructed to block
out external noise. From now on I'll be speaking to you through my microphone.
You'll have your own mike for any questions. Okay?"

 
          
He
nodded again. "By the way, are you British?"

 
          
"No.
American."

 
          
"Your
accent
—
"

 
          
People
always asked her about that. Funny, she didn't think she had any accent at all.

 
          
"Born
in
New
York
State
, raised in
York
,
England
."

 
          
"Ah.
That explains it."

 
          
She
flipped the oversized headphones down over his ears. A little fuzz and they'd
look like earmuffs.

 
          
She
pulled her wire microphone up in front of her lips.

 
          
"Can
you hear me?"

 
          
An
abrupt nod. Mr. Henderson looked impatient to get on with it. Julie wanted to
knock his socks off. She took a deep breath.

 
          
"Great.
Okay, now we're going to recline your chair until you're almost horizontal
—
just to make you more comfortable with the headgear."

 
          
Dr.
Siegal helped Julie ease the chair backward. For most people it conjured up
images of a visit to the dentist. When they finally had him in position with
his ankles crossed and his hands folded on his abdomen, Julie looked up at Dr.
Siegal. She turned off her mike and spoke in a stage whisper.

 
          
"Nice
enough?"

           
His eyes widened as he jammed his
index finger against his lips.

 
          
Just
then a knock on the door. Dr. Siegal squeezed back and edged the door open.
Cindy poked her head through the opening.

 
          
"Dr.
Gordon?"

 
          
"Yes?"

 
          
"I'm
sorry. It's your uncle again. He's on the line. Says he
must
speak to
you."

 
          
Julie
felt her annoyance rising. Cindy should know better than this.

 
          
"Didn't
you tell him I was busy?"

 
          
"Of
course. I told him you were running an important demonstration and couldn't be
disturbed
—
but he won't get off the
line. He says it's extremely urgent."

 
          
Julie
bit her lip. She knew how insistent her uncle Eathan could be. And maybe this
was truly urgent. But whatever it was would have to wait until after the
demonstration. No way could she leave the Bruchmeyer Foundation man with his
head locked in that uncomfortable rig while she talked to her uncle...

 
          
...
and watched the grant fly away.

 
          
"Tell
him you spoke to me and I said I'll call him as soon as I can but that it's
impossible for me to speak to him now. Take his number, and then hang up."

 
          
Cindy's
eyes widened. "Really?"

 
          
"Really.
Otherwise you'll spend the rest of the morning on the phone with him."

 
          
"Okay,"
Cindy said, but she looked uncomfortable as she ducked out.

 
          
Dr.
Siegal looked at Julie questioningly as he shut the door. "You think maybe
you should
—
?"

 
          
Julie
shook her head. She owed Uncle Eathan
—
owed
him big time
—
but he could be a real pest.
Still, interrupting her in a meeting, that was a bit much, even for him. What
could he possibly want?

 
          
She
shook off the uncertainty. First things first, and getting this grant came
first.

 
          
Flipping
the mike back on, she donned her own headgear.

 
          
"All
right, Mr. Henderson. Sorry for the delay. We're just about ready to enter
Lorraine
's memory. As I told you, it
can be disorienting at first, and you may even feel a little vertigo until I
adjust the visuals, so hold on to the armrests of your recliner until you're
comfortable."

 
          
She
watched him grab hold, then flipped down her own headphones. Julie's gear was
different. Her helmet was equipped with electrodes similar to Lorraine's. She
pulled the VR glove onto her right hand, then adjusted her goggles with her
left.

 
          
Inside
the goggles, a thin four-button bar with ENTER
—
EXIT
—
WARNING
—
WINDOW ran along the top of the twin screens; a
physiological readout ribbon showing Lorraine's EKG along with her EEG, pulse,
and respiratory rates ran along the bottom. All the space between was a blank
pale blue, like a cloudless winter sky.

 
          
Julie
checked Lorraine's EKG
—
a normal QRS with a rate of
72. Respirations were 8. EEG running at 10 Hertz. Good. All normal.

 
          
She
leaned back in her own recliner.

 
          
"Ready,
Mr. Henderson?"

 
          
"More
than ready."

 
          
"I
like that attitude. Here we go."

 
          
She
moved her glove and the motion was transmitted to the computer, which generated
an image of a hand with a pointing index finger on the screen. She guided the
fingertip icon over to the Enter button on the bar at the top of the screen and
clicked it.

 
          
We're
all so cavalier about memory. No one considers the
veritable
flood
of information that gushes from our five senses into our brains every second of
the waking day, and how our brains divide up and store this endless flow of
perception into banks of information that we can tap into and access
in
nanoseconds.
—
Random notes: Julia Gordon

 
          
You
e a c upl of vertic 1 rolls he goggle cree , hn the video stabilizes. Wisps of
cloud appear in the blue. The breeze sighs, birds twitter below.

 
          
As
usual, it's a beautiful day in Lorraineville.

 
          
You
angle the hand icon downward. The clouds rotate out of sight. A sensation of
falling
—
maybe too fast
—
and then the green horizon comes into view.

 
          
Henderson's
voice sounds in your headphones.
"Wow. Just like
Flight
Simulator!"

 
          
Good.
Already he's enjoying this.

 
          
"A
little bit, except we don't use a joystick. And you won't find any enemy
fighters out there. What I'm going to do is take you on a little tour of
Lorraine's memoryscape."

 
          
You
point ahead and you begin to move forward, gliding over rolling green hills and
perfectly shaped trees. Quaint villages dot the landscape. But the grassy
surfaces are not flat. They appear to be crisscrossed with linear mounds, as if
a tangled network of pipes has been overlaid with sod.

 
          
"Looks
like
she's got a bad case of moles in her lawn down there,"
Henderson
says.

 
          
You
smile. A good analogy. "Not mole burrows," you say, "but they
are
tunnels of a sort. That's the memory-link network. It forms the
infrastructure of the memoryscape."

 
          
"Is
this her past? Looks like computer generated images."

 
          
You
bite back a sharp remark. What else did he expect?

 
          
Calmly,
evenly, you say, "Because that's exactly what they are. Lorraine is a
bright, well-adjusted graduate student who's helping us with our research and
getting paid as an experimental subject. The computer is sorting a wide array
of impulses from her cortex, arranging them into images, mingling them with
impulses from me, feeding the mixes back to her, rereading them, feeding them
back again, and so on in a continuous loop that allows us to interact with her
memoryscape."

 
          
"Interact?
You mean, change her memories?"

 
          
"No.
We seem to be able to trigger memories by our presence, but we can only move
among them, view them from different angles. We cannot change the memoryscape.
I've explored Lorraine's memoryscape many, many times, and it's always the
same."

 
          
"Always?"

 
          
"Yes.
This is who she is. Spread out below us is the sum total of Lorraine's
available life experiences. And you
are
your memories. Without your memories
you have no past, no family, no friends, no experiences. You haven't been
anywhere or seen anything or met anyone. You are defined by the accumulation of
your day-to-day experiences. With no memory of those experiences, who are you?
You're a cipher."

 
          
"Which
is why our foundation finds your research so intriguing.
But
surely not
every memoryscape looks like this."

 
          
"Absolutely
not. Lorraine had a fairly prosaic upbringing. I've been in 'scapes where it's
not so sunny and there aren't any white picket fences
—
"

 
          
"Like
a ghetto?"

           
"Right. But even subjects with
a ghetto background have these rolling, well-organized, wide-angle landscapes.
It's just that the empty areas tend to look like vacant lots and the buildings
look like
tenements."                                                      
:

 
          
"Might
have been more interesting to visit one of those."

 
          
You
feel your jaw muscles bunch. You're taking this man on a tour that only a
handful of people in the world have experienced, and already he's grousing.

 
          
'"One
of those' wasn't available
—
at least not one who'd allow
a stranger to open the book of her life."

 
          
"But
they let you
—
"

 
          
"Only
after they get to know and trust me. Lorraine trusts me implicitly. And she
doesn't feel she has anything to hide."

 
          
"Everybody's
got
something to hide."

 
          
You
can't argue with that, so you say, "Let's go take a closer look, shall we?
Pick any structure you want."

 
          
You
rotate the visual field, giving a panoramic view of the memoryscape. A
gallimaufry of structures dots the terrain below: ranch-style tract homes, the
brick edifices of public grammar and high schools, churches, fast-food joints,
college dorms, taverns, movie houses, soccer fields, the Eiffel Tower, Big Ben,
and, towering over everything, a huge white two-story colonial house.

 
          
"Why
the landmarks?"

 
          
"Lorraine
spent her junior year abroad in Europe. Don't forget, the memoryscape doesn't
exist in her head; it's a symbolic virtual environment
—
computer generated. Lorraine's mind determines what's
important, the computer simply accesses that hierarchy and fashions an
environment
—
her personal memoryscape
—
-from it. Every significant person, place, and event in her
life is down there."

 
          
"And
the not so significant?"

 
          
"Down
there too. Usually tucked away in and around the big ones. You just have to
know where to look. The presence of adrenaline or noradrenaline in your system
at the time of the event embeds those important moments more firmly in your
memory."

 
          
"Well,
if big equals important here, let's have a look at that huge white house."

           
"Good choice. That's where she
grew up. Lots of memories there. Hang on."

 
          
You
work the glove, pointing, banking right and swooping down to ground level.
After so many visits to Lorraineville, you've become Top Gun navigating the
memoryscape. It's fun showing off. Sometimes you feel more at home here than in
the real world.

 
          
The
white colonial looms ahead, towering above you. Yet as you approach, it seems
to shrink, continuing to diminish until, by the time you reach the front steps,
it's been reduced to normal size. You're used to this phenomenon, but your
passenger is not.

 
          
"What
happened?"
Henderson sounds alarmed.

 
          
"Size
can be whimsical in the memoryscape. As the saying goes: You ain't seen nothin'
yet."

 
          
As
you approach the front door you push on it and it swings open. You step inside
and look around. The foyer is huge; the ceiling towers twenty or thirty feet
above you. It never fails to remind you of the Yorkshire manor that was your
childhood home.

 
          
And
for a second you flash on your uncle Eathan's "urgent" call. You hope
it's not
that
urgent.

 
          
"Good
lord.'
The perspective's all wrong."

 
          
"Not
if you're a child, and we're obviously in a child's perspective. If we turned
around and reentered, we'd
—
Here, I'll show you."

 
          
You
back onto the porch, pull the door closed, then push it open again. You move
forward and the foyer seems normal size now.

 
          
"Now
we're viewing the environment from an older perspective, possibly a
teenager's. This is one of the unpredictables within the memoryscape. Time is
elastic here. If the subject spent many years in an environment
—
or decades, in the case of this house
—
you can never be sure from which time frame you'll be
viewing it. We're not too sure what determines the hierarchy of memories. But
we think it has to do with the subject's most current experiences ... and how
they relate to the past."

 
          
"Was
she ever an adult in this house?"

           
"Not in a real sense. She visited
for weeks at a time during her college years, but didn’t really live here
then."

 
          
You
glide into the living room. It's dark except for the TV! By its light you can
see a couple locked in an embrace on the couch. The boy is sneaking his hand
under the girl's sweater and the girl is pushing it away.

 
          
"This
looks interesting,"
Henderson says.

 
          
Typical
voyeuristic male, you think. You bite your tongue.

 
          
"That's
her first steady boyfriend. He lasted about four months. She never let him get
much beyond what you see here."

 
          
You
move into the dining room. Seventeen-year-old
Lorraine
, her brother, and her
parents sit around the table in stiff silence. You can almost smell the tension
in the air. You remember plenty of similar scenes like this from your own teen
years
—
although you were never the
cause.

 
          
"Uh
oh. This doesn't look like a happy group."

 
          
"Want
to know why? I'll show you."

 
          
You
return to the living room, where it's night and all the lights are on. It's
packed with teenagers now, many of them drunk or stoned as Bruce Springsteen
shouts about how he was born in the USA. A Saturday night in the summer.
Lorraine's parents are away for the weekend
—
you
caught the parental good-byes and warnings to Lorraine in an earlier visit. The
cats are away, and now it's Lorraine's time to party.

 
          
As
you weave through the crowd a fight breaks out. A lamp is knocked over and
smashes on the floor. Lorraine screams for them to stop but the fight only gets
worse.

 
          
"This
is fascinating,"
Henderson whispers.
"Utterly fascinatings
^!”

 
          
You
pass into the kitchen, where you find
Lorraine
standing by the sink
looking defiant while her mother sits at the kitchen table and cries.
Lorraine's formerly long and glossy chestnut hair has been chopped to a
two-inch length, dyed bright orange, and moussed into a dozen spikes.

 
          
"The
rebellious years. We all had them," you say, but you don't remember
rebelling like this.

 
          
That
was your sister's department.

 
          
"Where's
the regular day-to-day life? Everything here seems so emotionally
charged."