Manny froze, not breathing. He looked at Elsa as if he’d never seen her before. “Say that again.”
“I said, she deserves more than to put her hopes into one of your—”
He interrupted her, grinning indecently. “Elsa, I love you.”
“I’ll tell Felix,” she warned.
“Go ahead. I’ll pay him a fair price for you. How much do you suppose he wants?”
“Do you want another finger in the chest?”
But Manny was chortling. “Listen, Elsa, listen. If I had, really had, a way of beating WorldWide, would you help me?”
“Of course I’d do that.”
“No matter what it entailed?”
She folded her arms and raised an angular eyebrow. “What did you have in mind?”
Dieter Althoren watched through his window as the creepy little car drove away through the canyons of January snow, chewing his lip until he was sure it wasn’t coming back.
His parents had warned him about this. “Don’t go along with it,” Vatti had said. “You don’t know what will happen to you. What will you do if they screw you up?” But he’d needed the money so badly; this job had been his last hope. And the doctors had been so sure, so confident; they’d said that the failure rate was so low… He tried to swallow in a dry throat, felt faint, and let himself drop onto the couch.
What to do? If he told Ed Ferimond what had happened, he’d lose his job, and he didn’t believe for a damn minute that the lawyer or anybody else would help him. But you signed a release, they’d say. We told you the risks, and you agreed to accept them. “Hold harmless,” see? It says so right here. Bastards.
Well, fine. He wasn’t going to tell Ferimond or anybody else what had happened. When was he next seeing the son of a bitch? Not until April, to prepare for the stupid deposition. He’d tell the “whole truth and nothing but the truth,” sure—hell, with those damn bugs in his head he couldn’t do anything else—but he didn’t have to tell anyone what they didn’t ask.
At jury selection, Manny behaved exactly the way Edward Ferimond expected him to behave. He asked each juror what she knew about the Protection of Intellectual Property Revision Act, how it was drafted, who sponsored it, who the lobbyists were. He mentioned WorldWide’s name as often as he could. Ferimond, who had the grace, beauty, and haughtiness of an Abyssinian cat, made frequent objections, lazily accusing him of biasing the jury and turning a simple civil suit into a political trial. Judge Rackham seemed bored by both Manny’s questions and Ferimond’s objections; some objections she sustained, but most she overruled, since the jurors’ opinions about PIPRA were potentially sources of bias.
But Ferimond did not seem to find anything objectionable in Manny’s tedious repetition of the same question to each and every juror: “Can I count on you to rely on your own assessment of the evidence, rather than allowing someone else to tell you which witnesses are truthful, lying, or just crazy?” Of course they’d all said yes.
In pretrial conference, Ferimond had looked genuinely put out when Manny declined to stipulate to the reliability of testimony from a Whole Truth witness, although he never had and never would.
So here Ferimond was, his body language conveying how many better things he had to do, questioning Eleanor Moncrief, Ph.D., a plump woman in a flattering blue suit and matching eyes, qualifying her as an expert, and taking her through the familiar territory of the Whole Truth enhancement procedure.
“The nanomachines alter pathways in the parts of the brain associated with memory and volition,” said Dr. Moncrief in a surprising contralto. “The machines are injected in a saline solution, effect their changes in the appropriate neural tissue, and then decompose into trace minerals that pass out of the system. From injection to elimination, the procedure takes about 48 hours.”
“And what,” yawned Ferimond, “is the result of this procedure on the behavior of the subject?”
“There are two primary results. First, the subject has total recall of all events occurring after the procedure. Second, he becomes incapable of telling a knowing falsehood.”
“How long do these behavioral changes last?”
“They are permanent, until the procedure is reversed or some organic event takes place, such as degradation of tissue with age or illness.”
“In the case of Dieter Althoren,” said Ferimond, seeming to regain some interest in what he was doing, “when was the procedure performed?”
“June 23rd of last year,” said Dr. Moncrief.
“Did you perform the procedure yourself?”
“Well, I have an R.N. who does the actual injections. But apart from that, yes, I did.”
“So far as you are aware, has the procedure been reversed?”
“Not so far as I know.”
“So, doctor, would it be fair to say that anything said by Mr. Althoren relating to any event occurring after June 23rd of last year would be truthful and accurate?”
“Objection, Your Honor.” Although addressing the judge, Manny looked right at the jury. He rose with exaggerated difficulty. “Counsel is asking the witness to opine on a matter of credibility. The jury determines whether a witness is truthful.” He nodded approvingly to the jurors, then sat down slowly.
“Sustained.”
Ferimond gave a long-suffering sigh. “Let me rephrase, doctor. Have there been tests during the last twenty years of subjects’ accuracy and credibility following the Whole Truth procedure?”
“There have been dozens of studies.”
“What is the percentage of subjects who display, within normal tolerances, perfect truthfulness and accuracy?”
“According to the literature reviews I’ve seen, that figure is 97.5 percent, plus or minus two percent.”
Ferimond did not quite smirk, but he looked at Manny as if to say, Why waste your time? “No more questions.”
Manny rose as Ferimond sat. He addressed the witness with his friendliest face. “Doctor Moncrief, where does that two-and-a-half percent failure rate come from?”
She smiled back. “A tiny fraction of pathways do not respond as predicted. For most subjects, the incidence of such pathways is so small that the results are the same. But for just a few, the cumulative effect of unaltered pathways results in unaltered behaviors.”
“These subjects have either inaccurate memories, or are still able to lie?” asked Manny.
“Yes, but I must emphasize that you are talking about one subject out of forty.”
He nodded. “I see. Now, when you speak of the memories being accurate, you’re speaking of memories as perceived by the subject, yes? I mean to say, if the subject’s eyes or ears were not working properly, the subject would recall sights and sounds as garbled by his senses, wouldn’t he?”
She nodded too. “Yes, he would.”
Manny adopted the tone of a curious student. “And also our memories are affected by our own attitudes, aren’t they? If a person associates dogs with violence, he might remember a dog he saw as being violent when that dog wasn’t actually violent. Isn’t that so?”
“Yes,” Moncrief responded slowly. “Within limits.”
“What limits?”
“Well, if he had time to see what the dog was really doing, I don’t believe he would manufacture things that weren’t there. For example, he wouldn’t say that there was blood dripping from the fangs when there wasn’t.”
“But if the dog actually made a friendly move, the subject might interpret it and report it differently, yes?”
“Yes, I think that’s right.”