Only two of the cubicles were occupied. From one of them, a man looked up. He had a scruffy goatee poking out from his hoodie. From the other cubicle stood a petite woman in a too-tight white shirt and dark pants and short-cropped hair. She looked to Jackie like a waiter—in the marines.
“These are our two Alexes,” Denny said. “Alex 1 and Alex 2, say hello to Jackie.”
“Hello, Jackie,” they simultaneously drawled but seemed mostly disinterested. Then the female Alex said: “And then there were three.”
“That’s right, three now,” Denny said. “So one of you geniuses will have to figure out how to divide the Red Bulls by thirds.”
“I only work with imaginary numbers,” cracked the male Alex.
“You’ll love it here,” Denny said and took a sharp angle to the right. Jackie followed him through the building to a staircase with metal railings and cement stairs. “Where the action happens,” Denny said in a low voice.
“They’re really both named Alex?”
“What’re the odds, but, yep.”
Denny had also explained in the Tesla what happened below. Below, testing rooms where Google sought to dial in this Lantern discovery it had made. The discovery, in essence, was that Internet users experienced sharply improved rates of memory recall depending on the speed, frame rate, and also the frequency of the delivery of information.
“Like subliminal messages?” Jackie had mused. “What Alfred Hitchcock did in Psycho.”
“Much more sophisticated and less well understood. We just know it seems to work.”
He had pulled up four images on the Tesla screen of the hippocampus, a crescent-shaped part of the brain central to memory recall. The images were taken from real-time magnetic imaging scans of a twenty-two-year-old female study subject. During the tests, the woman had been using her phone or an iPad. The tests were complex because the study subject had to look at and interact with the devices while situated in an MRI machine. The images that Denny displayed in the Tesla were similar except that some images were shaded more than others. The greater the shading, Denny explained, the more of the young woman’s hippocampus had been engaged at the time that the imaging had taken place. Where it was less shaded, less of the woman’s brain was engaged.
Jackie could see where this was all headed. “So during some of her online interactions, she remembered more than she did in some other cases.”
“That too,” Denny said. The images, he explained, didn’t necessarily mean that the subject remembered less, or more—because images can lie. But in this particular case, the images hadn’t lied at all. Far from it. After the study subject was removed from the machine, she had taken tests to see how much of her online interactions she remembered. In the same conditions in which her hippocampus had lit up most, she had the strongest recall.
“Amazing, actually,” Denny said. “Like she had eidetic memory.”
“Photographic.”
“Right.”
“So what made the difference on what she remembered?”
Denny shook his head. “We’re not sure. We were playing with placement of information, streams, also speeds and frame rates. We can’t quite get a handle on it. Enter the inimitable Jackie Badger.”
It was why they brought her here. Still, she couldn’t figure out why it was such a secret. Of course, Google would be working on getting users to remember and share more information. It was in the damn annual report, their entire raison d’être, if you knew how to read the thing.
At the bottom of the stairs, Denny used his key and did a retinal scan and a door clicked open. On the other side, a long hallway, much more nicely appointed than the upstairs, even bespoke floor runners and wood trim near the bottom. Odd, Jackie thought. A doorway marked each side every ten feet or so with keypads beside each one. The quiet rectitude of the place reminded Jackie of the psychiatrist’s offices her parents wanted her to see after she got caught hacking into the junior high school computer system to send a fake e-mail on behalf of an instructor who Jackie felt had been rude to students. It had been that confusing, interim period in Jackie’s life where she was playing with boundaries: What was the right thing to do? When should she intervene or participate in the world, and how? She thought maybe she was looking for a moral compass. But, later, she discovered a different term for what she was seeking: situational awareness. It was a term of art she read about in a psychology class that applied to how people pay attention to their surroundings. Some had terrific situational awareness, like pilots. People who had to be aware, think fast, make good decisions. She still wasn’t sure she had it but she was getting there.
“Individual lab areas,” Denny said. He stopped midway down the hall. He kept his voice low. “I wanted you to see some of the current work. It’s less focused on the imaging right now and more so on recall and behaviors. What kinds of conditions lead to more social behavior, sharing, liking, endorsing, and remembering. Basically, you’ll see people using their gadgets through a two-way mirror.”
“The study subjects?”
“Local folks. There’s actually a pretty good pool from wives and girlfriends of military personnel, along with folks we draw from surrounding communities. Low income in Nevada, sadly, leaves us with people who will do experiments for what is pretty low pay, at least by our standards.”
Jackie heard a voice behind her and the female Alex appeared with a tablet.
“Door number five, boss,” she said to Denny. “Good time. We’re just finishing up.”
Alex led them inside the fifth doorway on the left. Behind a two-way mirror a woman sat in a comfortable office chair in the middle of a room, staring at her own tablet. Jackie watched to the point of gawking and now she, at last, understood why this project was a secret one.
The woman behind the two-way mirror looked so engrossed as to be catatonic.
For a long time, Jackie and Denny stared. Suddenly, the woman bolted upright.
Part III
Steamboat
Fifteen
When the man in the orange suit shot forward, Lyle caromed backward. Two, three steps, slipped. He didn’t try to break his fall. He slammed onto the ground on his ass. Of course he didn’t feel it. Every ounce of him focused on the body, the baggage handler who had been comatose, or dead, just moments before. Now the body sat upright at the waist. A wonder, Lyle thought, fear giving way to curiosity. He put all his attention on the man’s face, trying to discern the eyes. Were they open?
No. He inched closer. Still closed.
Lyle moved closer again, mostly just by his neck craning. He scraped for his phone. He found it and fiddled for the flashlight. He had to look down to make the phone work. Shit, he thought, I’ve got to input my code. I’ve got to look down at my phone. He wouldn’t take his eyes off this man, this creature, Don, held up at the waist like a marionette.
Then, suddenly, as quickly as Don had jerked upright, he fell back again.
In the cockpit:
“Jerry! What the hell is going on?”
A muffled sound from below.
Lyle wiped his mouth on his sleeve. He spit. Had he gotten the man’s spittle on him? Saliva? Something from this… host?
That’s the word that struck Lyle. Host.
Was that what he was looking at?
The body had become inert again. Now Lyle wondered if he’d imagined it. He immediately dismissed the idea; for all of Lyle’s flaws and quirks, he was not a sufferer of PTSD and so it didn’t make sense to him that he’d had some sort of flashback or emotional break, a false memory, any of that.