Soulminder (2 page)

Sommer held his gaze. “Any particular side discoveries you had in mind?”

“Little things, mostly,” Westmont said with another shrug. “Any relationships or correlations you might have picked up between the shape of this soul-image of yours with, say, personality or intellect or whatever.”

Somewhere in the back of Sommer’s mind, the name belatedly clicked. Thomas Westmont, chief legal bulldog of flamboyant Congressman Mula Barnswell. The architect of the Congressman’s latest attempt to slip one of his blatantly ethnically-slanted bills under the legal barriers that had been set up to catch such things. “I see. You’re
that
Thomas Westmont, are you?”

Westmont smiled, without even a trace of embarrassment or guilt. “I’m flattered that you recognize me.”

“The bill you’re pushing for Congressman Barnswell is hardly back-page news at the moment.”

“Yes, but most of the media fascination is with the chanting idiots out in front of the Capital,” Westmont said, lip twisting with contempt. “Anyway, that’s beside the point.”

“Is it?” Sommer demanded. “Do you really expect us to believe that our data wouldn’t show up in your documentation the day after tomorrow if we handed it over to you?”

Westmont cocked an eyebrow. “Are you saying your data
does
support the Congressman’s views?”

“I’m saying nothing of the kind,” Sommer said. “But I know that a collection of raw data can be twisted to support nearly any preconceived notion if you use a big enough wrench on it.”

Westmont shrugged. “Perhaps. But, really, that’s not the Congressman’s interest in your project. In fact, if you’d like, I’d be happy to stipulate that Congressman Barnswell wouldn’t release any of your data without discussing it with you first.”

“In one of these jousting-field contracts of yours?” Sommer asked pointedly. “You’ll forgive me if I say the Congressman and his associates don’t inspire that kind of confidence in me. Don’t forget, Mr. Westmont, that any misuse of our work is ultimately our responsibility.”

Westmont’s eyes narrowed. “Let’s not bleed quite so much, Doctor. A renewed sense of ethics may be all the rage among scientists these days, but the simple fact is that none of you is qualified to even
see
the long-term implications of your work, much less make any decisions concerning it. In a democracy that’s the job of the elected officials, the men in tune with the country’s needs and wishes.”

“Like Barnswell?” Sands put in, heavily sardonic.

Westmont glanced at her, turned back to Sommer. “The bottom line, Doctor, is that you need money. You know it and I know it, so let’s table the ethical posturing.” Across the desk, Sands snarled something under her breath. “I can have five million dollars in your account by this afternoon,” Westmont continued, ignoring her. “You would then have three days to collect your data into reasonably readable form and send it to Congressman Barnswell’s office.”

“You’d be wasting the taxpayers’ money,” Sommer told him firmly. “The data is limited and raw, and any conclusions you tried to draw from it would be completely useless.”

“Indeed?” Westmont cocked an eyebrow. “Are you saying there
are
indications there that you’d rather not be made public?”

“I’m saying nothing of the kind,” Sommer growled, backpedaling from the edge of the verbal trap. “I’m saying that at the moment there’s nothing solid anyone can draw from the data. On
any
topic.”

“Of course,” Westmont said, almost soothingly. His hand slipped beneath his suit coat, withdrawing a slender wallet. Selecting a card, he flicked it onto the desk. “Think about it, Dr. Sommer, Dr. Sands. And consider the fact that you’re down to your last shoestring on this. Without our money, Soulminder is finished.” He nodded toward the card as he put the wallet away and gathered his topcoat from the back of a nearby chair. “Call me when you’ve made your decision.”

The door closed behind him, and Sands spat a curse. “
Damn
him,” she snarled. “Damn him, damn Barnswell—
double
damn the idiot who let this leak.”

“Try to ignore him,” Sommer said. The confrontation-induced adrenaline was draining away, leaving behind a growing depression. Pulling over the chair Westmont had been sitting in, he sank into it, wincing at the residual warmth.

“Ignore him how?” Sands retorted. “In case you missed it, Adrian, Congressman Bigot-Lunatic Barnswell and his brain-dead fringe know about us. How long do you suppose it’ll be before they break the wonderful news that there are distinct and measurable differences between the souls of different races and genders?”

“The differences are between individuals, not races or whatever.”

“
I
know that,” she snapped. “You think such subtleties aren’t going to be lost once people like Barnswell get their grubby hands on it?”

“So what do you suggest we do?”

Some of the steel went out of Sands’s back. “I don’t know,” she admitted. “We could release it ourselves, but Barnswell and everyone else with an axe to grind would jump on it and the final result would be the same. Not to mention that the publicity would probably scare off any potential renewals by our underwriters.”

Something in her voice … “You aren’t seriously considering Westmont’s offer, are you?” Sommer asked, frowning.

She took a deep breath, her eyes meeting his with visible effort. “He was right, Adrian,” she said softly. “Soulminder
is
on its last shoestring here. Besides, we’d have three days to run the data through some more analysis—maybe decorrelate it beyond even Barnswell’s ability to distort it.”

Sommer stared at her. “Jessica, maybe to you this is just another job—”

“You know better than that,” she snapped. “Soulminder is just as important to me as it is to you. But all the sentiment in the world isn’t going to change the facts. A, that we’re broke, and B, that Barnswell has money.”

Sommer locked eyes with her. “I am not,” he said, biting out each word, “going to let people like Barnswell get their filthy hands on Soulminder. Period; end of discussion.”

For a long moment they glared at each other in silence. Sands blinked first. “I don’t much like it, either,” she sighed. “Look. That stuff about moving to LA last night wasn’t all froth. I’ve got some feelers out to the police department there, trying to get them interested in the possible forensic applications of our Mullner-trace work. Why don’t I fly out there and see if I can squeeze some money out of them? It would at least postpone any decision on Barnswell’s offer.”

“The decision’s already been made,” Sommer told her stubbornly.

Her standard patient expression began to look a little strained. “Sure,” she said. “All the more reason for me to shoot over to LA.”

Sommer got back to his feet. “Yeah, go ahead,” he told her tiredly. “Has last night’s data been chewed over yet?”

“I got it running before Westmont arrived,” she told him, reaching for her terminal. “It’ll be done soon if it isn’t already.”

“Thanks,” he nodded.

She was studying one of the consolidated airline websites as he stepped through the back door of the office into the lab.

Keying off the last page of the correlation analysis, Sommer leaned back in his chair, reaching wearily for his coffee cup. Sands’s gut-feeling statement the night before had been correct: the basic kernel of the old man’s soul-image was indeed the same as all the other hundred-odd Mullner traces they’d collected over the last three years. Just the same, without any new correlations the analysis could detect.

In other words, the deathwatch had been a total waste of time and effort.

As had been the one before, and the one before that, and the one before that. The last five samplings combined, in fact, had yielded only a single new correlation factor; even with a hundred samples to do comparisons of, they still didn’t have the slightest clue as to how the incredible tangle of embellishments could be interpreted, read, or otherwise made use of.

Soulminder wasn’t just running out of money. It was also running out of steam.

“Nothing, huh?” Sands said from over at her own terminal.

Sommer shook his head. “Not a drop. I think we’ve finally hit the wall, Jessica.”

She grunted deep in her throat. “Well, no one ever said this was going to be easy. Have you tried doing a similarity analysis on the embellishments yet?”

“The program’s still running, but I’m not expecting anything. If the computer can’t even distinguish Alzheimer’s patients from normal people, it’s sure not going to be able to find anything more subtle.”

Sands swiveled her chair around to frown at him. “Last night must have hit you pretty hard. You usually bounce back from blind alleys better than this.”

“Maybe I’ve bounced off one blind alley too many. Maybe the whole concept of Soulminder is just one massive blind alley.”

“No,” Sands said firmly. “It’s going to work—we’re going to
make
it work. We just haven’t got the right handle on it yet. And we’re not going to find it sitting around feeling sorry for ourselves.”

Sommer took a deep breath, exhaled it between tightly clenched teeth. She was right, as usual. “All right,” he growled. “Let’s run it by again. We’ve proven the existence of the soul—or at least that there’s
something
that leaves the body at death,” he corrected himself before she could do it for him. “We can make a trace/map of this thing, show it consists of a common kernel plus embellishments, the complexity of the latter correlating slightly with age. We can even trap the soul for—how long did you have hold of it last night?”

“Two point three seconds. Up two-tenths of a second from the last time.”

He nodded. “And
that
gain represents three generations of trap upgrades, to the tune of eight hundred thousand dollars,
and
setting the trap directly beneath the patient’s bed.” He waved his hands helplessly. “So where do we go from here?”

Sands’s lips compressed briefly. “We stall for time,” she said. “We find something else of commercial or scientific value in the Mullner traces and peddle it to interested customers in exchange for fresh money.”

He eyed her suspiciously. “Like Congressman Barnswell, for instance?”

“I didn’t say that,” she said. But there was a distinctly defensive set to her mouth. “I don’t especially want his hands on our data either, you know. Do bear in mind, though, that there’s absolutely no evidence in our Mullner traces to support his small-minded opinions. All he’d do would be to make a fool of himself if he tried it.”

“A fool, or a martyr,” Sommer said sourly. “He may be smart enough to play the one into the other. And don’t forget that there are a lot of people out there whose brains shut down when they’re faced by loud people waving scientific data.”

Sands’s eyes slipped from Sommer’s gaze and came to rest on the trace printer—a highly sophisticated piece of equipment that they still owed nearly ten thousand on. “All right, Adrian,” she said. “There’s no point in discussing it anyway until I get back from LA. Which reminds me”—she glanced at her watch—“I really ought to get home and pack.”

“Will you need a ride to the airport?” Sommer asked as she keyed off her terminal and got to her feet.

“No, thanks—I’ve got an airport shuttle coming to get me. Oh, here”—she scooped up a folder and handed it to him—“If you get a chance, you might want to file this into the database.”

Sommer accepted the folder and glanced at the first page. The psychological profile and history of the man they’d watched die last night. “Sure,” he sighed, tossing it onto his desk.

“Okay. Be good, and I’ll see you tomorrow evening.”

For several minutes after she left he just sat in the quiet room, staring at the display before him. So close … and yet so very, very far.

Sands didn’t understand. How could she? She was an electrical engineer, unschooled in the formalized ethical training that physicians like him had been run through in school and often needed to call upon. For all her enthusiasm she still saw Soulminder as little more than an intriguing challenge, and perhaps the road to future wealth and fame. A scientific and technological breakthrough, to be treated on a scientific and technological level.

Not as a way of saving lives. Certainly not as a memorial.

For a minute Sommer teetered on the brink of self-pity. But there was work to do … and anyway, he’d traveled that road all too often in the last eleven years. Taking a deep breath, he picked up the folder Sands had left him and opened it up.

It wasn’t as depressing as he’d feared it would be. There was the heavy sense of a wake about it, certainly, leafing through the facts and figures of a man now dead. But on the other hand, the man
had
been old, and had lived a full and rich life before the effects of aging and Alzheimer’s had sapped his strength and memory. Sommer turned the pages, scanning the records of the man’s childhood and youth, a copy of his marriage certificate, the beginnings of his family—

A hand seemed to close over Sommer’s heart.
First-born son, Harold
, the line read.
Died 8/16/51, five years old
.

The page dissolved into a blur as fresh tears rose to Sommer’s eyes. The same age as David had been.

Except that, in this man’s case, life had continued on afterwards. He’d pulled himself back together, kept his wife, had had more sons and daughters. He hadn’t let his son’s death become an obsession …

Angrily, Sommer rubbed the moisture and self-pity from his eyes. “It’s not like that,” he snarled aloud to the empty room. He
wasn’t
just doing it for David, but for every child who’d ever had to die unnecessarily. For every parent who’d ever had to face such a crushing trauma—

Abruptly, his train of thought froze on its rails.
Trauma
: an injury or shock to a person’s body or psyche. And, perhaps, to the pattern of embellishments making up his soul-trace?

And if so, would similar events cause similar changes?

He looked up, glancing around the room. Their main Mullner setup was still back at the hospital, but they had a secondary one that Sands was forever tinkering with. The recording itself would be no problem—he could skip the data pack and just run it directly into the computer’s memory. If Sands wanted something of commercial value, this might just do it.