June picked her way through to Tom Norgent's paper-strewn desk and work terminal, located amid the clutter of electrical racking, pipe mazes, and other equipment surrounding the reconstitution chamber in the R-Lab. A few other people were working in the vicinity, but the frenzy of activity that had characterized the previous couple of days had largely abated.
Tom was in his sixties, with a grizzled beard, button-nosed, Mars-tanned face, and a balding scalp merging with his forehead to leave an atoll reef of whitish hair fringing the back and sides. He greeted her in shirt sleeves and loose khaki pants, pulling a folding chair out from a gap by a table with charts and manuals on top, and having to clear some boxes and a piece of instrumentation out of the way to make room.
June had dealt with him intermittently through her time with the project, finding him genial enough, if a bit inclined toward fussiness—Santa Claus out of uniform, fresh from a beard trim. During the ride back into Quantonix, the thought had crossed her mind that Elaine might not have been the only person involved in this, and if Sarda's partial amnesia had indeed been brought about by neural manipulation, it would have needed precisely the kind of inside expertise that Norgent possessed. All the same, although she had learned to be wary of external impressions, she found it all but impossible to picture him in the role of accessory to dire conspiracy and intrigue.
"I was wondering when it would be my turn to get the treatment," he said after he had sat down and cleared space on the desk for his elbows. "Leo says you've been squeezing everyone else's brains like lemons. . . . Do you know where Leo is, by the way? Max said he went rushing off this morning with some kind of personal problem, and we haven't seen him since."
June shook her head. "I've just got back in."
"Where's that friend you had here the other day—Kieran, was it?"
"Oh, out on business. He's thinking of getting a place here. He moves around a lot—has places everywhere."
June produced a paper pad from the folder she had set by the chair, and a pen from an inside pocket. Tom seemed surprised. "What? Aren't I going to be taped or something?"
"Some things, I like to do the old-fashioned way." That seemed to put him more at ease, and he settled more comfortably. June went on, "I've never really had a chance to get into the neural dynamics: transferring the activity pattern that defines a personality from one neural system to another. I was hoping you could point me in the right direction to finding out more about it."
"Ah, yes." Tom was obviously on home ground. "That was the other big breakthrough that made TX possible, along with data-mining the DNA. I take it Leo's been through all that with you?"
"Pretty much."
"But of course, DNA can't supply the brain modifications acquired after conception—every experience from the beginning of growth can alter how neurons connect up and communicate. Indeed, they have to. That's what makes us who we are."
June nodded. "Right. I follow that."
Tom unclasped his hands to show a palm. "But it turns out that a mathematical map of the neural connection pattern is sufficient. It contains all the information you need to regenerate the personality. That means you can infer what you need from the wave functions without having to specify detail at the molecular level. That makes the problem tractable."
"In the same kind of way that the expanded DNA information lets you interpolate most of the physical structure."
"Well . . . yes, pretty close."
"Okay, that's from one brain to another. But how about the other possibility that people have been bandying about for years: uploading a mind into a totally different kind of system—holotronic or something? Do the TX processes get you any nearer to something like that?"
Tom wrinkled his nose. "In principle I guess it could work. But to upload it into another kind of system . . . ? I don't know of anything other than a biological nervous system that could be complex enough to express the code, and at the same time be sufficiently modifiable in the way it would have to. Right now, that would be a tough one."
June detected no hint of the wariness that she would have expected in somebody skirting a potentially dangerous topic. She edged closer to the subject that she had come here to learn about. "How about transferring parts of someone's psyche, then, Tom? You know, maybe some special skill or knowledge that they have? You see it in movies, where something that a person has learned is extracted and written into a machine or whatever."
This time Tom shook his head. "It makes good stories, sure. But our knowledge of memory mapping simply isn't up to it at this point in the game. We don't have any way of telling what parts of the total pattern correspond to any particular skill or piece of knowledge, like what you're talking about."
"There's no way of identifying what would need to be selected?" June checked.
"Exactly. It's not a simple one-to-one relationship, where you can say this bunch of connections defines that function or concept. Everything interacts with everything—like the way genes affect each other and turn each other on and off. It would be like having a book in Chinese. I can copy the entire thing onto another stack of paper, or into an electronic memory, photo film, magnetic image, anything you want. That's no problem. But don't ask me what any particular piece of it means."
"So would it be the same the other way around too?" June asked, as if the thought had just occurred to her. She kept her voice even. "It wouldn't be possible to delete anything selectively either? For example, so that the Leo who gets reconstituted here ends up missing memories that the original Leo possessed downstairs?"
"No . . ." Tom frowned, seeming to find it an odd and curious question. "Why would anyone want to do that?" His eyes betrayed no inkling of alarm or suspicion. He mulled over the suggestion for a second or two, and then his mouth curled in a parody of a grin, revealing uneven teeth. "Why, has Leo been forgetting things? What kind of stuff are you writing, June? This is starting to sound more like one of those thrillers with people getting brainwashed—" At that moment, his phone beeped. Ignoring his pocket unit, he reached out to activate the flatscreen on one side of his desk. A female voice that sounded like Herbert Morch's secretary upstairs answered.
"Tom, I've got Herbert for you."
He gestured toward the screen. "Excuse me for a moment, June. Rank is being pulled."
"Mind if I have another look at the machine?"
"Go right ahead."
With all the activity around it through the final days, June had never really had a chance to see the reconstitution chamber since its last details were added. Stewart Perrel had shown her and Kieran the finished object briefly, but the lab had been crowded and distracting then.
She set her note pad on the desk, got up, and sauntered over between consoles and a droning coolant pump. The inside of the chamber was cramped and close, full of sensors, scanning arrays, tubes, and cabling to the point where it seemed a human body couldn't be squeezed in among it all. Kieran had said it put him in mind of some of the early space capsules he had seen in museums. The volume where the form was reconstituted had to be enclosed because of the strict environmental controls that were needed, and the positioning requirements necessitated limb, body, and head restraints. Leo had described how his most vivid sensation on regaining consciousness had been the heat and the clamminess in there. Not for the squeamish or the claustrophobic, June decided.
The walls of the chamber were bedecked with pipe and cable clamps, boxes and gadgets—even the inside of the access door, with its collection of labels and warnings: EXTERNAL LATCH OVERRIDE ACTIVE; CHECK PRES EQ; TEMP ALARM . . . She leaned in and stared around. Whatever motives may have taken possession of the original Sarda sometime before the crucial day, the guy had guts, Kieran had declared—he'd given him that.
Something registered as odd about the inside of the door. And that was ridiculous, because this was the first time June had studied it in any detail. Yet the strange feeling persisted that something was missing. But how was she supposed to know how it should have been? It could only be from the replays of Leo's exit that she and Kieran had watched earlier that afternoon. Something was different.
She looked back across the lab. Tom was still engrossed, talking to Herbert on the screen. June took out her comset and keyed in the code to access her personal net files, obtained a directory on the unit's miniature screen, and routed the replay through. The image was too small to resolve any detail. She slid out the spectacles from their pouch at the back of the case, put them on, and brought up a high-resolution image that she was able to manipulate like the version on the mural panel in the apartment. As she stepped through the frames, she saw what had triggered something in her recollections. In a close-up of Sarda emerging from the chamber, the interior of the access door that swung open behind him showed a patch of color that was not on the inside of the door that June was looking at now. She zoomed in, and the patch expanded to become a curiously vivid design of a purple disk inside a silver outer ring containing a spiral pattern of colors. June moved the spectacles down her nose and was able to identify the place on the inside of the door that it had occupied. There was nothing like it there now. Touching it with a fingertip, she felt a faint stickiness of what could have been a remnant of adhesive. Something had been there, sure enough.
She was still staring at the spot bemusedly when Tom joined her again. "I've been shut up in there myself a few times when we were building and calibrating it," he commented, looking past June's shoulder. "Pretty daunting, if you want my opinion. Better Leo than me."
"Well, he's through it now," June said. "Time for him to be celebrating and relaxing, I'd imagine. It must have been pretty tense for him." Keeping her tone chatty, she remarked, "Too bad he doesn't have a Mrs. Sarda or current ladyfriend to share it with . . . at least, I've never heard him talk of one."
"I think he mentioned somebody once or twice several weeks back, but I guess that must have passed. He's been too busy most of the time." Tom looked curious. "Why?"
"Oh . . . just feminine nosiness, I guess." June stared at the inside of the door as if there were something mildly puzzling, and then pointed to the space she had been looking at. "Am I imagining something, Tom? Leo showed me and Kieran the chamber when he was here a couple of days ago. The place was full of people and it was all a bit hectic, so I could be mistaken. But was that space empty before? I seem to remember something being there—a kind of colored graphic design."
Tom looked at the spot and shrugged. "I can't say I remember anything." Evidently he considered it a matter of no consequence. He turned his head and nodded back in the direction of his desk. "Anyway, where were we? I'm afraid I'm going to have to wrap this up pretty soon for now, June. Something urgent has come up. But we can continue again another time."
"No problem. Let me know when you're free again. It's been interesting. Thanks."
Tom was okay, June decided as she went back to her own part of the building. Selective erasure by manipulating the neural codes wasn't feasible. Mentally, she crossed it off the list of things to be pursued further.
Kieran sometimes said that Sherlock Holmes had been wrong in his much-repeated quote that "When you have eliminated the impossible, then what is left must be the truth." When the impossible was eliminated, what was left was the possible. Only in the simple, artificial world in which Holmes existed did that always leave a single, straightforward alternative to be considered. In the real world it almost always left several, all equally plausible. The problem lay in finding which was correct. Sometimes it left nothing at all, which meant starting out again, all over. Real police work, and real science, began where Holmes left off.
She wondered how Kieran was doing in following up with Trevany. That seemed an even more slender hope. And they didn't have a lot of time.