The Reviver (15 page)

‘I’ll be there,’ said Jonah, knowing he’d have to show his face at least. It didn’t have to be for long, though.
Shut-in.
It carried a certain appeal.

*   *   *

‘Just stare at the cross, Jonah. Relax.’

He was encased in four tonnes of metal and plastic, being bombarded with a combination of X-rays and intense, high-frequency oscillating magnetic fields while the rapid loud thumping of the machine was hurting his ears.
Of course I’ll relax,
he thought.

He lay flat, on thinly padded metal, his skull held in place with a tight-fitting neck brace. When he’d first seen the slab he’d been asked to lie on, he thought of a mortuary table. As he’d been strapped down and pushed into the cramped heart of the medical imager, he thought of a coffin.

‘Keep staring at the middle of the cross, Jonah,’ said Dr Stephanie Graves. She was trying to reassure him. Directly above Jonah’s face was a small screen, a plus sign filling the projected image. He stared.

When Jonah had first come to Baseline, Stephanie Graves had been one of the people he had seen most of. Then, she had been studying the physiology of revivers, attempting to hunt down common biometric traits, seeking the reasons behind the mental and physical toll of revival. She and Sam had been close friends for a while; Jonah knew it had soured, and there had been rumours of an affair, but nothing he’d believed. When Baseline disbanded five years ago, Stephanie Graves had found a position at Johns Hopkins University. She still specialized in revival research, and her expertise in the longer-term health implications made her the doctor of choice for those private revivers who could afford to pay for the use of the imager.

And so here he was, staring at the cross.

‘OK, Jonah, don’t be alarmed, but the images will begin to change now. They’ll flash. Please keep staring at the middle of the cross. If you begin to feel sick, say so.’

‘OK.’

The screen began to cycle through a range of colours, the rate of change accelerating gradually. Then each quadrant of the cross began to change independently. He kept staring and began to feel disoriented. His mind became blank, whatever he tried to think about. The flashing became more rapid, and he felt like he was plummeting. His stomach lurched.

‘Feeling sick,’ he said, and shut his eyes. The sensation of tumbling was extreme. He ground his teeth until it passed. When he opened his eyes again, the screen above him was blank.

‘We’re bringing you out, Jonah,’ said Graves. A minute later he emerged from the imager, and the strapping was removed. Jonah sat up and tried to catch his breath, grateful that it was all finished. Graves came over and smiled. ‘You did well,’ she said. ‘We’ll give you a few minutes before the next run.’

Jonah grimaced.

*   *   *

After a further forty minutes of testing, their time with the imager came to an end. Jonah was led to a private room and waited while Graves completed her analysis.

When she came in at last, she smiled. ‘You’re fine,’ she said. ‘Or at least, you will be.’

‘Did you find anything?’

‘Nothing definite.’

‘What were you looking for, Stephanie?’

Her smile faltered. ‘It’s under-researched, but we have some idea. I was looking for remnant markers. Remnants are the result of overwork and half a dozen other exacerbating factors, but almost always they’re simple things – images, smells. Recognition of things you hadn’t seen personally. One theory holds that you experience them all in the surge, but that’s far from proven. The condition can get out of hand, and that’s when it becomes more serious.’

‘Serious?’

‘Yes. The delusional behaviour associated with revival burnout can hook into the remnant sensations, Jonah. It can make you feel detached, make you feel like something else is happening.’

‘Make you feel like you’re watching it happen? Watching someone else think?’

Stephanie nodded. ‘Exactly. Is that what you experienced? Like you weren’t in control of your own body?’

‘Yes. I didn’t want to tell Sam. I was worried about what it would mean.’

‘Sam thought that might have been what happened. That’s why he sent you to me. That, and the Decker revival the week before.’

‘He told you about that?’

‘Of course. Hallucination, a classic example. A minor symptom, nothing you should be concerned about. What happened with Nikki Wood was far more worrying, the dissociative illusion most of all. It’s not real, Jonah. But the illusion can be strong. The brain knows these memories are not its own. In a sense, it can reject them, isolate them. The patient can lose…’ She groped for the word.

‘Their mind?’ he joked, immediately regretting it. The bravura was a front; what Stephanie was saying scared him, and he was whistling in a graveyard.

Stephanie’s face was as solemn as he felt inside. ‘They can lose perspective. It can be a trigger for serious conditions.’

‘So you believe me? About how it felt, like I was watching Nikki think?’

‘Absolutely. But the news is good, Jonah. From the cases I’ve studied before, I’ve identified clear indicators, the markers we were looking for. You have none of them now. Whatever the problem was, it was short-lived. It’s gone.’

‘Do you mean I can get back to work now?’

Stephanie laughed. ‘Sam
told
me you’d ask that. No. This has happened because of overwork, and you need the rest. Sam wants you off for another week, and I agree. You’ll be fine to revive when you get back, with the longer tail rest periods. And when you do, you’ll have to have your revival medications adjusted. I’ll recommend you increase your BPV dosage. That always knocks it on the head.’

Jonah frowned. ‘A BPV increase?’

Graves tilted her head a little. ‘I see perhaps ten cases in a year, Jonah. All of them are private revivers who get scared but can afford to pay for the scanning. Half are just imagining it. The other half are fine with the higher dose of BPV, even to do additional revivals. The FRS just ups the BPV for all remnant cases, however minor. It works. You’re the first FRS case I’ve seen in three years. Sam wanted to be sure. There’s usually no point paying for scans if the outcome’s the same, although it’d be useful for the research I do. Your records show your current dosage is far higher than average.’

‘I had some … problems. Two years ago. A meds reappraisal followed, and they bumped up the BPV level.’

‘And they let your work rate grow back to what it had been, right?’ She shook her head. ‘They shouldn’t let it happen, and nor should you. Short tail and high skill, they’re the people I see most often.’

‘I’ll try,’ he said, even though the work rate was driven as much by himself as anyone.

‘I know the forensic side is more pressured, Jonah. One thing I’ve recommended before is a switch to private work. Even for a year. Easier cases, and you can cut right back and still have the same kind of pay you’re on now.’

Jonah smiled and shrugged. ‘So I hear. I’ve thought about it before, but I guess private work isn’t for everyone.’

‘You can have your BPV upped again, but you have to take care of yourself. Overall you need to reduce your accumulative meds intake and have sufficient breaks from it altogether. That can only come from longer tails. I’m recommending a 50 per cent BPV increase. The higher dose will be fine with the long tails and strict limits on how many revivals you should be doing. We’ll review it after six months.’

‘And I’ll be fine?’ He felt uneasy. Given how compelling the effect had been, this ‘dissociative illusion’ that had left him feeling like an onlooker in his own body, he needed more than simple reassurance.

‘You’ll be fine. I promise.’ Graves watched him, and his uncertainty must have been clear on his face. She sighed. ‘All right, Jonah. We’re all done, but before you go, come with me. I’ll show you what I’ve been up to.’

She led him to the small control room and sat him beside her in front of a trio of monitors, then took something small out of her pocket.

‘This,’ she said, holding up a memory stick, ‘contains the results of the work I’ve been doing for the last six years on remnants. I hope to publish later in the year, once I finish writing it up. Most of the interesting stuff has happened in the last three years, when we got this new imager.’ She plugged it into the USB port on the PC under the desk. ‘Much of what I have comes from functional MRI scans of revivers suffering remnants, but I’ve been able to look at other areas as well. What I find most exciting is the revival scanning – monitoring the reviver’s brain activity during an actual revival. We did that kind of thing at Baseline. You probably saw the result, but the resolution and sensitivity of this imager is vastly superior. Back then, you could resolve activity down to a matter of seconds, and you had to repeat something time and again to tease out the results. The Baseline work didn’t find anything surprising. Scanning a reviver actually
performing
a revival is awkward and expensive, so there was little incentive to keep doing it. No one is looking at this these days. Not in academia, at any rate. The kind of equipment available now to private research outstrips what I’m using just as far as this outstrips what we had ten years ago. If they’d kept going they would be far ahead of me by now. Sometimes I wish I’d taken one of the offers of private work from Andreas Biotech and the rest of the companies that participated in Baseline.’

‘Why didn’t you?’

‘I suspected they’d sit on the results of anything I did with them, for as long as they could. Keep it for themselves. And like you said, Jonah, private work isn’t for everyone. Now, watch.’ Filling a monitor screen in front of him was an imaged cross section of a brain. Every few seconds a pulse of blue flashed from a central position, crossing the scan. ‘This was one of the easier things to do. We were looking at chill. Here, a reviver is gripping and releasing the hand of my most chill-sensitive research associate. Look.’ Graves pointed towards the middle of the image. ‘Left lower amygdala. Chill starts there, flows outward. It correlates well with revival ability, but there are excellent revivers who get it mildly, and lesser ones who get it strong. No idea why. Yet.’

‘If we know what it is, can we stop it?’

‘The signals can certainly be disrupted. You know that alcohol affects it?’

Jonah nodded, smiling. ‘A
lot
of alcohol.’

‘Same problem for everything else we’ve tried. I worked with the Andreas Biotech team who developed BPV at Baseline, Jonah. Disruption is part of what BPV does, both there and in the hippocampus. It was based on treatments for post-traumatic stress that the company had been developing. We were hoping that the same kind of mechanisms were involved in remnants, and BPV is very effective. But chill is just too strong a signal. Enough drugs to counter it would render the reviver an incapacitated amnesiac.’ She smiled. ‘Just like with alcohol.’

She brought another sequence up on screen. ‘This is a full revival.’ Jonah watched, fascinated. ‘I’ve only managed to do four of these. Four in three years. This one has a very strong surge.’ An red-orange wave burst out from the same area as in the previous sequence, but it swamped the full scan, staying that way for twenty seconds.

‘Christ,’ said Jonah.

‘Again, although it’s much faster, you can just about see that it originates from the amygdala, spreading out and invoking a cascade of activity. But watch, immediately before. If we filter out the stronger signals, take them right back…’

This time, just before the burst of activity from the centre, he could see something else: a sudden, short-lived flutter of blue around the very edges of the brain, converging on the centre before the surge began.

‘It’s a
very
weak signal,’ said Graves. ‘Not even EEG can pick it out from electrical noise. We couldn’t know it was there, until now.’

‘What does it mean?’

‘Maybe nothing. But we saw it consistently for the revivals we did. We called it a GT signal, and just maybe it’s something we can follow back, work out what triggers it. Whatever it is, it’s something new. With revival research it’s been
forever
since there was anything genuinely new. At the very least it should be enough to get us better funding, and other groups would pick up the challenge again.’

‘What’s this one?’ Jonah asked. The footage had continued as she spoke, a similar sequence with a red-orange hotspot, then played again with the sensitivity turned up and the strongest signals filtered out.

‘You’re looking at the questioning phase of a revival. The activity you see in red is consistent with audio processing of the spoken words of the subject. You see the symmetry, the left and right ears, the path of the signal from ear to auditory processing areas. What’s interesting here is that this reviver is profoundly deaf in his left ear, but there is absolutely no difference in the origin of activity or in how it gets processed. We know that whether deafness affects a reviver’s ability to hear the subject depends on the position and extent of the damage in the auditory pathway. Leads us to think we can track down exactly where it originates, but even this scanner isn’t enough. Now, look…’ The sequence showed faint blue at both sides of the brain, near the ears; thin trails, tracking inwards like slow branching rivers. ‘Those GT signals again. Crucially, they happen fractionally before the subject speaks, before any sound has been made. It’s like an intentional precursor – the activity in your own brain just before you commit to an action. With this, the delay is a few hundredths of a second. Not enough to be aware of it, but enough for us to reliably measure. The reviver starts to hear the words
before they’ve even been spoken.
Exactly the same traces are seen in a non-vocal revival. It suggests that everything comes from the reviver, or at least
through
them, then to the subject’s body.’

Jonah nodded, and as he did a question occurred to him. ‘What does “GT” stand for?’

Graves looked sheepish. ‘It was the first name I came up with, so I might change it before I publish. I couldn’t resist a little melodrama. I called them ghost traces.’