Analog SFF, March 2012 (21 page)

Damn it.

Tony pushing into her, even though she wasn't wet.

And his inability to keep from ejaculating almost at once.

And his rolling off her, and lying on his side, his back to her, ignoring her after he was done, leaving her sad and frustrated and unfulfilled, and—

Damn it, damn it, damn it!
He didn't want
any
of this, and—

And he was passing a woman's washroom now, and—

Oh, Christ, no.

But it came to him.

Her, in there.

At night.

No one else around.

And—

And Janis was a nurse, and she had access to all sorts of drugs, including ones designed to make pain go away, and she'd been in so much pain because of Tony for so long now. He saw her tattooed arm, recalling it in much greater detail than he could have on his own, knowing the pattern of stripes on the tiger, the deployment of its claws, the glint in its eyes. He knew it like—well, yes, the cliché applied—like the back of his own hand. But that arm was holding a syringe, and Janis was injecting herself.

For once, he did try to search her memories, looking for any sign that she was a diabetic, but—

But no. He knew what he was seeing, what he was recalling. She was shooting up. To make life bearable, to get her though the day.

He was sympathetic. He knew drug addiction was common among nurses and doctors, but he did
not
wish to know her secrets, damn it. And, for God's sake, he was obligated to report this, but—

But what would he report? That he thought he remembered her shooting up? She hadn't willingly shared that with him, and he hadn't stumbled upon evidence. It was just in his head.

He continued to walk the corridors of the hospital, hating himself for invading her privacy, and wishing it would all come to an end.

Chapter 17

Orrin Gillett came out of the room Agent Dawson was using for interviews. Rachel Cohen closed the magazine and put it back on the little table next to her chair, walked the short distance to where he was, and smiled her sweetest smile. “Hi,” she said.

Orrin looked startled that she was still here. “Oh, hi,” he replied. It wasn't nearly as sunny a greeting as before. “So I'm guessing from what you said before that you're the person who's reading me, right?"

Rachel nodded. “Right. Care to go for a walk?"

"They're not letting us leave the hospital yet."

"No. But we can go down to the lobby; the cafeteria's there. Maybe get a bite to eat."

"All right,” Orrin said, but he sounded distracted.

"'Kay,” she replied. “Just a sec.” She went to a nearby drinking fountain and bent over to get some water, her jeans pulling tight as she did so. It was a bit tricky to glance at him from this posture, but—yes—Orrin was checking her out. She allowed herself a smile that he couldn't see, then walked back to him. “Shall we go?"

Peter Muilenburg and a half-dozen senior strategists were poring over weather forecasts for the target sites. The door opened and a male aide came in. “Excuse me, Mr. Secretary."

"Yes?” replied Muilenburg.

"I've just gotten off the phone with the Secret Service agent-in-charge at Lima Tango, a Susan Dawson. They're getting a better handle on what's happening there. Yes, it seems clear that someone has access to Jerrison's memories, but they're just like
any
memories. Unless something brings a specific one to mind, you're not even aware you have that memory. It takes something to trigger it."

Muilenburg looked up at the display board, and he saw the call sign CVN-74, representing the U.S.S.
John C. Stennis,
move a bit closer to its target position.

"Well,” said Muilenburg, “let's hope whoever it is doesn't read a newspaper or watch the news between now and the zero hour, because I can't see that stuff without thinking it's high time someone did
something
—and if they think that, they'll know what that something is, right?"

"Yes, Mr. Secretary,” said the aide. “I imagine they will."

Kadeem Adams knew that President Jerrison was confined to his room in the ICU. But the man was gregarious by nature; Kadeem had seen that often enough on TV. And he was doubtless lonely. It was no fun being hospitalized, as Kadeem himself well knew. But, more than that, Jerrison was a politician; he wouldn't be able to resist the photo-op. Even bedridden by an assassin's bullet the president would make time to see an Iraq War vet, to have his picture taken shaking the young man's hand, and—yes, Kadeem knew the stats—given how poorly Jerrison was doing with African Americans in the polls, to be seen congratulating a black soldier would be the best of all.

And so he went to Professor Singh's office and waited patiently outside the closed door until the man Susan Dawson had been questioning came out. Before she could bring someone else in, he entered himself.

Susan looked slightly flustered. “Hello, Kadeem."

He smiled his warmest smile. “Hey, Sue."

She didn't return the smile. “It's awkward, you knowing my memories."

He nodded. “Sorry ‘bout showing off earlier. I don't mean to pry."

She nodded. “No worse than what I've been doing with Professor Singh's mind, I guess. I just hope these linkages aren't going to last forever."

"I dunno,” said Kadeem. “It be cool, in a way. I never got to go to college. But now I got a college-level education, kinda: whatever you remember of your classes, I can remember. Don't think geography would have been my choice of major, but I know things now I'd never have known."

"I guess,” said Susan. “Anyway, what can I do for you, Kadeem?"

"Ma'am,” he said, “I got a favor to ask."

She tilted her head slightly, apparently noting that he'd dropped the overly familiar “Sue."

"Yes?"

"The president, he's just downstairs, right?"

She looked for a moment like she was going to deny it—a reflex security concern—but there was no point; it had been mentioned on newscasts that he was on the second floor. She nodded.

"I'd like to see him. Meet him. Y'know? Something to tell my grandkids about someday."

Kadeem had no doubt that Susan, or one of her associates, had already been through his service record in minute detail. They'd know it was exemplary, and that he even had a degree of security clearance, because of the weapon systems he'd worked with. There was no reason at all to think he presented a risk.

"He's still quite weak. He's in intensive care."

"I know, ma'am. And I know you've gotten to see him every day for years. But for a guy like me, I'll never get another . . .” He stopped himself; saying “shot at this” would hardly be the right phrasing just now. “. . . chance. Would mean the world to me."

Agent Dawson didn't reply at once, and so, Kadeem added, smiling as nicely as he could, “Please, ma'am."

He suspected she was weighing the new reality: that he'd
know
whether or not she actually tried to get him an audience; that she couldn't get away with just saying she'd asked but someone higher up had denied his request. Finally, she nodded. “I'll see what I can do."

Seth Jerrison had been fascinated by codes ever since he'd stumbled across Herbert S. Zim's classic
Codes and Secret Writing
in his school library when he was ten. Zim had outlined all sorts of ways to conceal written communication: everything from language tricks such as Pig Latin and Oppish to making invisible ink with lemon juice. He'd also demonstrated lots of substitution-cipher systems; the tic-tac-toe code had long been one of Seth's favorites.

Shortly after reading the book, Seth had invented his own encryption system that he called the “13 Code.” He used it to share secret messages with his fourth-grade friend Duncan Ellerslie about Brenda Jackson, who they both agreed was the cutest girl in their class. One message he remembered sending looked like this:

3-6-4

ELBHA DROQB WGBEB XXBLX NDHUI Y!

Zim had recommended clustering letters into groups of five, lest word lengths provide clues to their meaning; he also suggested using all capitals, so that proper nouns or the pronoun
I
couldn't be easily detected.

The key to the 13 Code was to pick any three numbers that added up to 13, and put them at the beginning of the message. The recipient would then write down the letters of the alphabet in three paired columns, the lengths of which corresponded to the three numbers given. For the key of 3-6-4, the recipient would produce a decryption table that looked like this:

A=D G=M S=W

B=E H=N T=X

C=F I=O U=Y

J=P V=Z

K=Q

L=R

And then he'd use that table to substitute the appropriate letters to yield the plain text of the message. Thus:

ELBHA DROQB WGBEB XXBLX NDHUI Y!

would become:

BREND ALIKE SMEBE TTERT HANYO U!

or, with word spacing corrected and normal capitalization:

Brenda likes me better than you!

Hah! A perfect “Take that!” delivered by secret code! Seth had loved sending messages that only he and Duncan could read.

But that was then. Now there were no secrets; there was no privacy. He couldn't encrypt his thoughts and—

Well, yes, he supposed they
were
encrypted, sort of, in the way he'd heard Singh talk about. Only bits and pieces were stored. In fact, it was sort of like the 13 Code: even after decoding the message, the recipient had to rebuild it by adding to it: guessing at where to put in the spaces, converting characters to lowercase except where it seemed sensible to retain the capitals. Whatever the person reading his memories would recall would be filtered through his or her own experiences, conjuring up something not quite the same as what Seth himself would—but it would be close enough to do damage.

And the damage could be considerable. Whoever was sharing his memories knew what legislation he was planning to veto, what campaign promises he intended to break, what he really thought of the Speaker of the House.

And yet those things were
small,
in so many ways. But if news about Operation Counterpunch got out early, there might be enormous American casualties. He shifted his head slightly—it was painful to do so—and looked at the large windows. The ever-present nurse was seated by them, and beyond her, through the glass—which he'd now been told had been reinforced with a bulletproof layer—he saw a plume of gray smoke. That smoke contained the ashes of his clothes, his books, all his wife's things, and priceless mementos of US history: the
Resolute
desk, centuries-old oil paintings, the artifacts in the Lincoln bedroom, and more.

He wasn't a monster; none of those who had put Counterpunch together were. They were just people—husbands and wives, fathers and mothers, sons and daughters—who had had enough. Even before today's terrorist attack, they'd had enough.

He remembered a joke that had gone around the Internet in the fall of 2001: “What's the difference between Osama bin Laden and Santa Claus?” And the answer, which had seemed so funny back then when people had been forwarding the joke endlessly: “Come Christmas, Santa Claus will still be here."

But bin Laden had survived an entire decade. Indeed, as today's events had proven, it was easier to put a bullet in the president of the United States than it was to take out a religious zealot, especially when he had powerful allies.

Seth had taught history for twenty years. The U.S. had had a chance—a brief window—during which it could have pre-emptively struck the Soviet Union, wiping it from the map. The governments of the day—JFK's regime, and then Johnson's—hadn't had the balls. And so the US had instead endured decades of living in fear of the Soviets attacking first, and had spent trillions—
trillions!
—stockpiling weapons.

And it was the same damn thing again.

San Francisco.

Philadelphia.

Chicago.

And now Washington.

A whole nation—a whole planet—living in fear.

He watched the smoke rise and swirl.

Chapter 18

Susan finished another interview, speaking with Dora Hennessey, the woman who'd come here to give her father a kidney. Sue took a bathroom break, then stopped by Singh's lab, which is where he was conducting his interviews. A squat white man was leaving just as Susan arrived. “Any thoughts about how to sever the links?” she asked Singh.

"I don't even know what
caused
them,” the Canadian replied. “I mean, memory is
chemical.
It's based on molecules squirting across the synaptic cleft from one neuron to the next. How a memory could leap many meters is beyond me.” He shook his head. “That's why most people with scientific training think claims of telepathy must be junk: there's nothing your brain puts out that can be read at a distance."

"What about brain waves?” asked Susan, sitting on the experimental chair next to the articulated stand holding up the geodesic sphere.

"There aren't any brain waves in the sense you're thinking,” Singh said. “The brain doesn't radiate electromagnetic signals the way, say, a Wi-Fi source or radio broadcaster does. And, even if it did, the signals would be weak, and get weaker, as all signals do, over distance—usually according to the inverse-square law. By the time a signal has traveled three times as far away, it's only got one-ninth the power. Before you knew it, any signal would be lost in the background noise of all the other signals."

"Then what are EEGs recording, if not brain waves?"

"Well, they
are
recording brain waves—but, like I said, the name gives the wrong idea. See, the brain contains billions of neurons. When one neuron gets a signal from a neighbor, it can respond by releasing ions—which are charged atoms, right?"

Susan nodded.

Singh went on. “Ions with like charges repel each other, and when a bunch of neighboring neurons release a bunch of similarly charged ions, they all push each other away, creating a physical wave—an undulation—in the material of the brain, which has the consistency of pudding. EEGs measure those actual waves bumping against the skull."