After half a minute, Kiddrick clicked his fingers above Adam’s face. The agent’s gaze instantly locked on to them. ‘Okay, Adam. Does everything feel normal?’
‘Yes.’
‘Good.’ He examined the PERSONA’s screen, seeing a ready message. ‘Okay. Here we go.’
He typed in a command. New windows appeared, one displaying a simplified graphic of a brain. Coloured patterns drifted across it — then flared into brilliant, manic life.
Adam’s whole body spasmed. Bianca jerked back in surprise, before leaning in for a closer look. His eyes were flickering rapidly from side to side. She also saw that his hands had twisted into gnarled fists. ‘Is he in pain?’ she asked, concerned.
She expected Kiddrick to answer, but Tony spoke first. ‘No. It’s not exactly pleasant, but it doesn’t hurt.’
‘Okay, the transfer is in progress,’ said Kiddrick, looking up from the machine. ‘It’ll take six or seven minutes. That’s longer than a direct transfer would take, because it has to decompress the data.’
Bianca kept watching Adam. His eye movements, she realised, mirrored the unconscious flicks of a person recalling memories — but at a far greater speed. ‘You know, I have real trouble reducing the sum total of a person’s self to just “data”.’
‘Would you prefer if I called it the “soul”?’ Kiddrick replied sarcastically.
They waited for the device to do its work. The whirlwind of colours on the graphic eventually dimmed and slowed. Kiddrick peered at some numbers on the screen, then nodded. ‘Okay, it’s done. Now, Dr Childs.’ He gestured theatrically at Adam. ‘I’d like you to meet… Conrad Wilmar.’
Adam sat up, blinking. His gaze hopped to each person around the table. ‘Okay, ah… yeah, I can do without the whole staring thing, thanks.’
Bianca was no expert in American accents, but even from those few words she could tell that Adam’s had changed. It did sound like Wilmar’s, but she wasn’t prepared to accept that alone as proof that the PERSONA process genuinely worked.
‘The memory check?’ Tony prompted.
‘Yes, yes.’ Kiddrick signalled for Adam to face him. ‘Okay. What’s your full name?’
‘Conrad Mathias Wilmar,’ said Adam, peering quizzically back at him.
‘What was your date of birth?’
‘June twelfth, 1959. At twelve minutes past six. So, six twelve on six twelve.’ A lopsided grin at the quirky coincidence.
‘Where were you born?’
‘Bridgeport, Connecticut.’
‘Your mother’s maiden name?’
‘Schumacher.’
Kiddrick nodded, then an oily little smirk crept on to his face. ‘Now… what’s your most guilty secret? The one that you’d least want anyone else to ever know?’
‘I…’ Adam’s expression suddenly turned to one of shame, even alarm. ‘I, I mean he, he… I’ve been unfaithful to my wife. There’s another woman, Meg, I’ve been seeing. We work together.’
To Bianca, it felt as though each word was being forced out of him at gunpoint, so clear was his reluctance to make the admission. She looked at the others, to find that the three men were regarding Adam with anything from mild curiosity — Tony — to Kiddrick’s outright amusement. ‘Wait a minute,’ the latter said. ‘Not Meg Garner, surely?’
Adam nodded frantically. ‘Yeah, yeah.’
Kiddrick chuckled. ‘Well, that should be fun next time I go down to Carnegie Mellon!’ Adam’s face expressed utter dismay.
‘Wait a minute,’ protested Bianca. ‘You just got Adam — Conrad — whichever, to confess his biggest secret, and you’re treating it all as a big laugh? I mean, he’s…’ She stopped, unsure exactly what to say. Did she mean Adam, or Conrad? Who was the man in front of her?
‘Everything we learn using the PERSONA process remains top secret,’ Morgan said. ‘For reasons of national security. Nothing we discover can be used in a court of law, because we don’t officially exist.’
If he had been trying to reassure her, it had almost entirely the opposite effect. ‘That implies you’re operating outside the law.’ Morgan said nothing.
‘Ah, we have a bleeding heart in our midst,’ said Kiddrick. ‘I suppose you’re going to say we should reach out to terrorists,’ an airy wave of one hand, ‘and try to empathise with their issues — rather than putting Hellfire missiles through their windows.’
‘I suppose you’re going to say we should bomb them because “they hate us for our freedoms”, or something equally idiotic,’ she shot back. Morgan was less than impressed, but Tony seemed to have a more nuanced outlook, giving her a small smile.
‘We’re not here to argue about politics,’ Morgan said impatiently. ‘Dr Childs, what do you think of PERSONA? The results, I mean — not the ethics.’
‘Damn, and I was just about to start a ten-minute rant about that,’ she replied, before turning back to Adam. ‘It’s still hard to believe. I mean, I can’t imagine why you would, but you might just be acting.’ If he was, she had to admit, he was delivering an Oscar-worthy performance. His anguish at exposing Wilmar’s affair had appeared utterly genuine and heartfelt.
‘It’s not an act,’ said Kiddrick. ‘To all intents and purposes, right now Adam Gray is Conrad Wilmar. Whatever Wilmar knows, he does. That’s one reason I picked Wilmar’s persona for this test. He doesn’t work in quite the same field as you, but there’s some crossover. Agent briefings don’t go so far as to give them a doctorate in biochemistry, so test him for yourself.’
‘If he’s now Conrad Wilmar, then where’s Adam Gray?’
‘Oh, I’m still Adam,’ said Adam, swinging himself off the table and standing up. ‘It’s not as if I’ve, y’know, disappeared? Or been subsumed, anything like that. I’m still me, I’m always in control. It’s just that now there’s this whole temporary other me in here too.’ His hands flicked excitedly in time with his words, as if trying to fan them towards her more quickly. ‘So, yeah, test me. What do you want to know?’
He certainly had Wilmar’s mannerisms and rat-a-tat speech pattern. ‘Okay,’ Bianca said hesitantly. ‘You said you were working on treatments for biological weapons?’
‘Yeah, that’s right.’
‘Specifically, meningitis?’
He nodded. ‘We’ve encountered a strain of N. meningitidis that’s a lot more virulent than normal, and resistant to the standard vaccines. Nasty little SOB! Not sure where it came from, but we’ve got our suspicions. Da, comrades!’ He tapped the side of his nose.
‘What’s the effect on the brain?’
‘What you’d expect; swelling of the meninges, particularly concentrated in the pia mater. It has a tendency to spread to the spinal pia too, but only once the initial infection is firmly established.’
‘What’s the treatment?’
‘Straight in with empirics, of course, backed up by an adjuvant course of corticosteroids. The doses need to be higher than normal, but at this stage we’re just trying to stabilise things.’ His speech quickened. ‘Then we’ve got a suite of new antibiotics that we can tailor to the exact results of the CSF test — I can’t tell you the specific compositions, though. You don’t have clearance. Sorry.’ He seemed genuinely apologetic.
‘That’s okay.’ What he had told her was accurate enough, rattled out without hesitation, but Kiddrick clearly wanted to test her as much as she was supposed to test Adam. She drew on her own memories to devise something particularly probing. ‘There was a paper that came out about two years ago, on the effects of new-generation cephalosporins on brain chemistry, particularly enzyme—’