Lizzie, her eyes still gleaming, picked up her terminal and her ugly purple backpack. She hugged the terminal tightly to her chest and walked out of link range. Vicki drew a deep breath and held it until a strange male face flashed onto the screen. In the middle of the night, the stranger looked crisp, combed, and calm. “Elizabeth Francy is with us outside, Ms. Covington. With the system. Sealing of her system to begin as soon as the Kelvin-Castner team appears, unless Kelvin-Castner prefers Dr. Seddley to examine the data.”
“Rogers?” Vicki said.
Thurmond Rogers’s hatred had not cooled. But he had himself under control. “No examination at this time. I’ll be at the east fire door immediately, accompanied by Kelvin-Castner security.”
“Certainly,” the well-groomed male face said, and Jackson thought inanely of the anonymous guest system that had turned on the newsgrids for him. “Ms. Francy, accompanied by Agent Addison, is returning into the building.” Both halves of the split screen blanked.
Jackson looked at Vicki. She was barefoot, and her hair was rumpled from sleep. Fine strands strayed across her left cheek. She looked young and defenseless. He said, “Who’s Agent Addison? And the other three people in the van?”
“Bodyguards.”
“How did you know to—”
“That’s what I do,” Vicki said. “Or what I once did. Although of course I didn’t pay for all this. You did.”
“How—”
“Lizzie dipped all your personal account numbers long ago. But she’s an ethical little creature, in her own way. I’d swear she’s never used them.” Vicki smiled. “Can’t say the same for me, clearly.”
Jackson put his hand on Vicki’s arm. Not a grip, but not a caress either. “What has Lizzie dipped?”
“I won’t know until she tells us. Or until her terminal is unsealed. But I’m more interested in why she wanted to come into the bioshielded area to speak to us in person.”
“Will the agent—bodyguard—whatever he is—stay with her through Decon?”
“Like fused atoms.” Vicki spoke to the air. “And the agent carries subcutaneous continuous transmitters. Among other augments.”
“So we wait,” Jackson said. “Until Lizzie’s through Decon.”
“We wait,” Vicki said. “System, instruct a servebot to bring coffee.”
“Certainly. And if there’s anything else Kelvin-Castner can do for you, please don’t hesitate to ask.”
Vicki just smiled.
It took an hour for Lizzie and Agent Addison to go through Decontamination. Jackson drank two cups of coffee and watched Vicki get ready to lob another grenade. By now he knew the signs. She drank her own coffee slowly, deliberately, and watched the newsgrids. Finally he said, “What specifically are you waiting to hear?”
“Anything about Brookhaven.” Vicki spoke naturally, which meant she didn’t care if they were overheard. She shifted position on the waiting-room sofa, curling her legs under her.
“Brookhaven National Laboratories? What about them?”
“I don’t know. But Lizzie’s monitor program picked up an anomaly. The program scans transmissions from selected governmental agencies to flag marked differences in volume, frequency, priority, or encoding. Information from Brookhaven to nearly everyone else showed an anomaly.” Vicki uncurled her legs and crossed her knees.
“An anomaly? Some significant changes?” Jackson said.
“A significant lack of change. The same volume, frequency, priority, and encoding every day.”
“You mean—”
“The inhibition neuropharm has penetrated an enclave shield. And not just any enclave—a government laboratory that’s supposedly biosafe.” Vicki shifted her weight again. “Of course, Kelvin-Castner already knows this, I’m sure. Damn, I just can’t get comfortable.”
She stood up from the sofa, stretched, yawned, and smiled at Jackson. For once, he saw what he was supposed to do. He said, “Come get comfortable with me.”
She crossed the room to his chair and settled onto his lap. The screen droned out routine news at a volume, Jackson suddenly realized, slightly higher than normal. Vicki’s lips nuzzled his ear. She said softly, “I want to show you something,” and unbuttoned her shirt.
Hormones surged in Jackson’s chest. But then he saw drawings on her chest.
Vicki murmured, “Fewer monitors here, probably, than in your room. Even so, turn to the left. More. There.”
Their bodies formed a closed triangle with the padded back of the chair. Vicki bent her head, and her hair screened the enclosed space from the ceiling. She unfastened more buttons.
Her breasts were smooth and pale. Smaller breasts than Cazie’s, but firmer, with a sweet high lift. On the upper curve of each was a sketch in non-smearable ink, the kind used for indelible signing and dating of off-line lab records. Such pens lay all over Kelvin-Castner. Vicki must have drawn on herself after she came through Decon. Jackson peered at the sketches; there was barely enough light to decipher the inked lines. And Vicki’s scent, the fragrance of her skin and breath, clouded Jackson’s brain.
Until he realized what he was looking at.
Two crude sketches of brain-scan printouts. The one on the left breast was Theresa’s. Even drawn upside-down and rough, Jackson recognized it. He had looked at those particular graphs daily during Theresa’s illness, and frequently throughout the years before. They were the graphs of chronic cerebral overarousal, especially in the more primitive parts of the brain that controlled emotion. The limbic, hypothalamus, amygdalae, brain stem reticular formation, rostral ventral medulla—all overaroused.
The ascending reticular-activating system—ARAS—which reacted to neural input from many other parts of the brain, showed especially frantic wave activity: low-amplitude, high-frequency, intense desynchronization. Alarm signals constantly traveled to Theresa’s cortex, which thus constantly thought of the world as an alarming place. This information in turn traveled back to the ARAS, which reacted with even more frantic electrochemical activity. Electrochemical danger signals alerting thoughts of danger that in turn alerted more electrochemical stress responses. The vicious circle, which Theresa had never let Jackson interrupt with neuropharms.
The second set of rough graphs was entirely different. In fact, it was unlike any brain scan Jackson had ever seen. The ARAS and primitive graphs showed only normal arousal, the kind associated with steady, purposeful, realistic action. But the input from the cortex to the ARAS was intense. And parts of the brain showed a veritable electrical storm. These were in the brain sections associated with intense non-somatic activity: epileptic seizures, religious visions, imaginative delusions, certain kinds of creativity. Such graphs were most often seen in visionaries in locked wards: people who believed they were Jesus Christ or Napoleon or General Manheim. But to combine that pattern with the control and clarity of high-amplitude, low-frequency alpha waves, usually a product of intense concentration or biofeedback…
“Whose is the second scan?”
Vicki said, “Theresa’s.”
“Impossible!”
“No, it’s not. They’re both Theresa. One scanned before she put herself in a mental state to do something difficult for her, and one after. I don’t know exactly how she accomplishes it.”
“I wish I could see the spinal segment readings!”
“Well,” Vicki said acidly, “there’s only so much room on my breasts. Unlike some other people’s. So I memorized only the parts of the two printouts that looked most different from each other.”
“But how could Tess—”
“Lower your voice, Jackson. And look like you’re actually nuzzling me; we’re still on monitor. I said I don’t know how Theresa does it, but I do know what she told me she thinks she does. Theresa changes her brain scan by pretending to be Cazie.”