Deker said, “But the only reason the Alignment tortured me in the first place was because it knew I had a state secret inside my brain. The information you’re after now was in the baron’s brain. He’s been dead for almost seventy years.”
“Not quite,” Packard said as they pulled up to the underground entrance of some vast structure that Deker guessed was the nearby Veterans Administration Hospital. “He’s inside those walls. Get ready to meet the Baron of the Black Order.”
10
SS general Ludwig von Berg turned out to be a slice of brain tissue trapped inside a glass slide and illuminated by a powerful beam of light. Walking to the lab beneath the VA Hospital, along a musty basement corridor in dire need of renovation, Deker felt like he was walking down some cosmic time tunnel to 1943.
Even the tall, trim man in the white lab coat with the brain slice seemed out of date, the way academics sometimes do. General Packard introduced him as Dr. Gordon Prestwick.
“This slice was removed from von Berg’s brain by Nazi doctors in 1942,” Prestwick said. “Von Berg had survived a bullet to the head in 1941 on Crete, where a metal plate replaced part of his shattered skull. For some reason, he had the plate replaced a year later. We found this sample, along with some other things, frozen at a secret Nazi base in Antarctica years later. Perfect for the 34th Degree Project.”
“The 34th Degree?” Deker repeated.
“Yes, right,” Prestwick said. “My grandfather Jason worked for the OSS, which was the predecessor to the CIA. He was also, like you, a 33rd Degree Freemason, the highest level in the Scottish Rite. He was my inspiration for the Pentagon’s 34th Degree Neurosimulation Program.”
Deker said, “So what is it?”
Before Prestwick could answer, the lab door burst open, and Wanda Randolph entered with several medical technicians carrying a metallic organ transplant container.
“The medevac just landed,” she announced.
Deker watched technicians unpack a complete human brain and place it like a slab of meat in a machine. To his shock and disgust, the machine began to cut the brain into paper-thin slices, which were then quickly frozen and encased in glass slides.
“What is that?” Deker asked. “ Who is that?”
“That’s Chris Andros, the Greek shipping billionaire who died minutes ago at UCLA Medical Center at the ripe old age of ninety-two,” Packard said. “We and his family have been preparing for this process for some time, as he was the last living eyewitness to the events of 1943 that we’ve been discussing. We’ve already sliced and downloaded the brain of his wife, along with other participants of the era. Time is of the essence, or we lose our ability to extract information.”
Deker understood now that the morning had been a setup. Packard must have been monitoring him for months. He couldn’t disguise his anger. “You’re not slicing my brain up,” he said flatly. “That’s not the kind of inner peace I’m looking for.”
Prestwick actually found that funny and laughed. “No, of course not,” he said as he helped the technicians slide the glass-encased brain slices into an optical drive. “At least not until you’re dead. The brain slices enable us to download data into optical computer drives. So once the transference is made, storage isn’t the issue. The problem is interpreting the data. That’s where you come in. You’re aware of Second Life and IMVU on the Web?”
Deker nodded. “Virtual communities where people connect and interact through avatars or digital representations of themselves that they create.”
“The 34th Degree program is just such a virtual community, only its avatars are real people, or were,” Prestwick said. “The idea was originally to allow U.S. authorities to interrogate terrorists they had already killed.”
Deker glanced at Packard. “A virtual Gitmo,” he observed, referring to the U.S. detention center for terrorists in Cuba’s Guantanamo Bay.
“Precisely, and with no human rights issues, as the subjects are already dead,” Packard threw in helpfully. “Better still, the 34th Degree allows us to view a terrorist attack or some other historical event from many points of view.”
Deker asked, “What if you’re missing a key participant because he blew himself up?”
Dr. Prestwick smiled and held up his finger. “The 34th Degree hypothesizes and creates that point of view based on the other information it has-the same way computers can do a 360-degree around a subject or object when surveillance cameras have captured only one side of the picture. The problem is that the 34th Degree is not quite at your level of advancement.”
Deker saw what looked like an electric chair in the corner. “You’re not strapping me into that thing. Get some other guinea pig.”
“We’ve tried that already,” Packard said. “Nobody else is as singularly talented as you are, Deker. When those Alignment interrogators pumped you with that photosynthetic algae, it changed something in your blood and neurology. You respond to light waves differently than we do. Your brain can make synaptic connections nobody else’s can, even if we send the same light waves to their brains. We are simply repeating your torture without the torture. Just a little hole in the head for the fiber-optic cable and light waves. The straps are so you don’t hurt yourself while you’re under. Trust me, you won’t feel a thing.”
There was more than one way to interpret that. “And what do I get in return?” Deker asked as he slipped into the chair, which was comfortable enough. “I forgot.”
“A clean slate with the FBI,” Wanda Randolph said, as if to remind Packard. “Maybe even a good night’s sleep.”
“Oh, yeah,” Deker said. A clean slate. A good night’s sleep. They sounded like euphemisms for a lobotomy. “What if I never wake up?”
“Well, then we can slice your brain up to see what you discovered,” Prestwick said without irony.
Seconds later, Deker was strapped in the strange metal chair, an IV pumping photosynthetic algae into his right arm. Now that the benzocaine anesthetic had taken hold, Prestwick fastened a shunt with a glowing purple fiber-optic cable to Deker’s skull. It looked like a syringe gun. Once Prestwick pushed the button, the hair-thin fiber-optic line would inject itself through his skull. That would enable the team to send flashes of light from the brain slices directly into his brain.
“Now, let me frame your 34th Degree mission for you in 1943 terms,” Prestwick said as the anesthesiologist put a mask over Deker’s mouth. “Think of these glass slides of brain slices as a slide show. We are going to load them up one at a time. First the slide from my own grandfather, then Baron Ludwig von Berg, then Chris Andros. You must ultimately identify with him.”
“Why?” Deker asked.
“Because he’s looking for the text, too,” Prestwick said. “If you become dominated by a strong presence like the Baron and identify too much with him, you will do everything you can to keep the contents and location of the Maranatha text from us. But you need him, because he can take you places nobody else has been.”
“Okay,” Deker said. “So I’ll experience all these episodes in your slide show until they’re loaded and running together.”
“Then the 34th Degree program, together with your brain, will fill in any empty spaces,” Prestwick said. “You asked me what the 34th Degree was, Deker. It’s total omniscience. You will know more than we do. You will know everything. You know what that means, don’t you?”
Deker nodded soberly. It meant that if this crazy experiment actually worked, then his trip through time to the ancient battle of Jericho in 1400 B.C. had been just a torture-induced psychosis. This lab, this chair, these people, were real. Everything else was illusion. He could finally sleep easy. If it failed, then perhaps reality was back in 1400 B.C. or 1943 A.D. or whenever, and this life was the illusion.