The Dream Machine: Book 6, The Eddie McCloskey Paranormal Mystery Series (The Unearthed) (8 page)

Manetti left and one of the nurses took me to the third floor, where Dr. Zane was meeting with three other Ph.D.-looking types. The Indian woman from earlier, still in her lab coat. Another woman with short salt-and-pepper hair. And a twenty-something guy trying to look cool at work, sporting weather-inappropriate garb: shorts, Hawaiian shirt, and sandals.

Zane stopped mid-sentence when I barreled into the room. “We’re having a meeting.”

“And I’ve got clearance.” I winked. “Don’t worry. Most of what you’ll say will go right over my head.”

Zane studied me skeptically for a moment. “Anyway, the results so far have been promising but only across a handful of subjects. Let’s increase their subliminal exposure.”

The other doctors were all taking notes on tablets. Hawaiian Shirt Guy looked up.

“I had an idea.”

Zane didn’t sigh, but he almost did. “Yes?”

The doctors spoke in jargon for a few minutes. I lost interest in the conversation quickly, unable to follow the technical terms. Suddenly, Zane’s head snapped around like he’d just remembered I was there.

I shrugged. “No idea what you’re talking about.”

“Let’s take this up later.” Zane looked back at his colleagues. “This afternoon. Block out an hour. Tell nobody.”

The other researchers got up and left, giving me a wide berth as they passed. When they were gone, I eased the conference room door shut behind me.

“Exciting research,” I said.

“Yes.” I had a feeling if I pried too much, Zane’s answers would be shorter than tweets.

I tried to put him at ease. “Look, doc, I’m just an ordinary guy. Whatever I learn here, I won’t be able to make a damned bit of use of.”

“Mr. McCloskey—”

“Call me Eddie.”

“Eddie.” There was nothing friendly about his smile. “I’m not worried about you, but about whom you might share our research with.”

“Nobody.”

Zane spoke as if he hadn’t heard me. “I have spent my entire career, twenty-five plus years of education and research, building up to this moment. We are close to unlocking the biggest secrets of the human brain and, at this pace, unleashing its fullest potential in possibly my lifetime.
Our
lifetime. Do you have any idea how much that is worth?”

“Nope.” I shrugged. “I’m not here about that. Do you trust Manetti?”

“I trust her because there are very real consequences to her actions if she decides to divulge anything. A security breach like this by a federal agent means a lengthy jail sentence. You aren’t a federal agent—it’s my understanding you’re just a
contractor.
” He spat out the word like it was bile. “And, if you’ll forgive me for judging a book by its cover, but from the look of you, I don’t get the sense you have much to lose.”

Enough Mr. Sort of Nice Guy. “Listen, Zane, I’m here to do a job. You saw those videos or dreams or whatever they actually are, so you know people are going to get hurt. Some of them, probably dead. I don’t give a shit about your legacy, or the patents you’re chasing, and I don’t want to be cut in on whatever you’re eventually going to sell. All I know is there might be a devastating car accident on a local interstate and some asshole is going to violate a woman. Now I’m going to ask you what I need to know, and you’re going to tell me.”

Zane just stared at me. “It is quite depressing that the federal government has to resort to hiring someone like you. They must be desperate.”

“Everybody’s desperate when there’s an emergency,” I said. “Because there aren’t enough people willing to step up going around.”

I sat where Hawaiian Shirt Guy had been.

“Fine.” Zane folded his arms. “What do you want to know?”

“How are you...” I searched for the right word. “…
recording
dreams?”

Zane said, “We call it the dream machine.”

***

The dream machine.

It sounded like a sixteen-year-old boy’s description of his favorite car. As soon as some corporation bought the patent or licensed the tech or did whatever they could do legally, their marketers would be the first ones in, changing the name to make twenty-first century, trending and trendable.

“The dream machine?”

“You know what an MRI is.”

“I do.”

“Magnetic resonance imaging,” Zane explained anyway, going classic doctor on me. “We utilize what is known as
functional
magnetic resonance imaging—”

“An MRI is a snapshot in time. A functional MRI is more like a video.”

“Right…” Zane didn’t want to be impressed by my passing knowledge.

“A couple paranormal scientists have been trying to get funding for an fMRI. They wanted to measure brain activity of patients in environments conducive to paranormal activities.”

Zane grew skeptical.

I said, “The idea is to measure brain activity and see if it
precedes
what someone believes is a paranormal event. In other words, was the person in such a state that their brain created what they thought they saw? It would explain a lot, especially the observer’s unshakeable belief that they’d experienced something.”

“Right…well, the fMRI is attached every night, or every time our patients go to sleep. The fMRI data is passed through the dream machine, which interprets and recodes the information into visuals.”

So three links in the chain, the first from the person to the fMRI, the second from the fMRI to the dream machine, the third from the dream machine into the research facility’s systems.

“How does the fMRI work?” I asked.

Zane went full-blown doctor on me. Scratching absently behind his ear, he turned to the white board behind him, erased what looked like hieroglyphics to me, and drew a bird’s eye view of a human brain.

“Blood flow.” Uncapping a red marker, he inked in one spot on the brain. “Blood contains iron, hence we use
magnetic
resonance. When brain cells use energy, there is a change in blood flow. That change is our clue. It tells us what area of the brain has activated.”

I nodded, sort of getting it. In high school I’d gotten an A in bio. Not because I was good at science, but because I’d gotten the answers to the exam ahead of time from Stan of all people, which was bizarre because Stan had that rare combination of book smarts and work ethic. He didn’t need to study, but he did, religiously. To this day, he still refused to divulge his source for the answers. I made a mental note to bother him about it later.

“Makes sense. But how does the dream machine know what the brain activity data it’s receiving from the fMRI means?” I asked.

Zane nodded, like I’d asked a good question. I wasn’t sure I had.

“The Japanese got a jumpstart on us with this initiative. Ten years ago they were recording dreams, if you can believe it.”

“So how’d they do it?”

“Cheating, in a sense.” Zane drew a picture of a cross on the whiteboard, an arrow to the brain, and above them both, a box with wires. “
Before
the patients fell asleep, the Japanese scientists showed the patients images while the fMRI measured their brain activity. So when they dreamed
later
and the same areas of the brain lit up, they knew what the patients were dreaming about.”

“You’ve improved on the process.”

Zane gave me one of those slow-nods.

“How?”

“It’s very technical.”

“Put it in laymen’s terms.”

“I can’t.”

“Can’t or won’t?”

“Both.” Zane inflated his cheeks like a puffer fish. “I don’t care if you have clearance. I have a legitimate proprietary concern here, McCloskey.”

I love it when people call me by my last name. Takes me right back to the playground during recess.

“Come on, you know what Manetti and I are up against.”

“
Might
be up against.”

I rolled my head back. “According to Manetti, Alison is eight for eight this hurricane season.”

Zane shook his head. “Most of those are unconfirmed. She kept a dream journal before she came here and only recorded some of those. For the rest, the only proof we have is her parents remembering her mentioning them in passing.”

Interesting. “Well, she predicted the mall shootout last week. So I’m going to assume these dreams are legit until proven otherwise.”

“That’s wonderful for you. As a scientist, I can’t assume anything.”

I gave him that slow-burn stare. “Fine, Zane. You want to hold out? That’s your call. But let me be abundantly clear: if this horrible shit goes down, people die, a woman gets raped, and I find out you were holding back on me, there is going to be an accounting.”

Zane said nothing. His round, soft, jowly face tried to stiffen but the effect was about as intimidating as a word search puzzle.

“If that will be all, I have to get back to w—”

“Glad we have an understanding,” I said. “So first things first: how can somebody tamper with the dream machine?”

He shook his head. Once to the right, once to the left. “Impossible.”

“As a scientist, you should know better than to say that.”

“Highly improbable,” he corrected.

“Why?”

“No one can fool a functional MRI. That diagnostic test measures real, live brain activity—”

“But the test subjects know that. So couldn’t they—”

“The patients don’t see the MRI results, nor are they permitted to see their recorded dreams.”

Great. Just one more thing to butt heads with Zane about. I needed to show the recordings to Alison.

Zane was still talking. “Even if the patient saw the MRI results, the recording, or even both, there is no way for them to
fake dream
.”

“It’s called day dreaming.” I smirked. “How can your equipment tell the difference?”

He smirked right back, like I was an idiot. “You don’t think we thought of that?”

“I don’t know what you thought of and didn’t think of. I’m just trying to solve two big fucking problems here.”

“Their brain activity is monitored. We know when they’re dreaming versus awake. When a patient approaches within ten percent of wakeful brain activity, we mark and exclude any subsequent results.”

“But someone could beat that.”

“Impossible.”

I decided to throw the next pitch at his head. “Why is White here?”

He expertly dodged the proverbial bean. “I don’t see why that’s relevant.”

“Neither do I. Yet.” I folded my arms. “So tell me about him.”

“We are studying him for a variety of reasons. First, his memory is excellent. Photographic, in fact. That is valuable…to many people. Second, neuroimaging studies have shown that criminals with low activity in the anterior cingulate cortex are twice as likely as their peers to commit another crime. We’re trying to predict future criminal, or rather, antisocial behavior by seeing how dreams connect.”

“What’s the anterior cing…whatever?”

“The ACC partly controls behavior and impulsivity. People with damage to the ACC exhibit apathy, disinhibition, and aggressiveness significantly more frequently than the norm.”

I imagined my ACC. Definitely underdeveloped in my teens and twenties, when I made a habit of raising hell and wreaking havoc.

“What does White’s ACC look like?”

“He breaks every rule he can and if we left him alone in a room with someone, it wouldn’t be long till White tried to injure the other person.”

“Any other reason he’s here?”

Zane nodded. “He claims to be a lucid dreamer.”

I knew what that was, but I liked pretending not to know things. I liked being underestimated sometimes. “What’s that?”

“Lucid dreamers theoretically can control their own dreams.”

“Theoretically?”

“Yes.” He gave me a look like I’d just told him I couldn’t spell cat. “Up until now, we haven’t been able to test it.”

“Of course,” I said, smiling easily to let him know I was just testing him. “So theoretically, what can lucid dreamers do?”

“There is a spectrum, like everything else. At the low end, the person realizes they’re dreaming and can exert a modicum of control over the dream, influencing the setting and plot and maybe the characters. At the high end of the spectrum, the lucid dreamer can plan out
while awake
what they wish to dream about and theoretically exercise total control over their dream.”

“So you’re testing White?”

“Yes.”

“How?”

“Pretty simply. We give him a scenario beforehand and then observe his dreams to see if he can reproduce it.”

“How’s he doing?”

Zane shifted in his chair. It was so obvious he was buying himself time to prepare his answer. “The results are inconclusive so far.”