Hayford Peirce: Innocent Until Scanned Guilty

“Painluster victims? There haven’t been any pain—”

“They still get some of ’em from other parts of the world, like Brazil. What Ferron has done, and what she’s writing about in the Journal, is this: she says she’s nearly perfected a technique by which memories lost because of brain damage or psychological trauma can now be automatically treated by a computer program running itself rather than having to be manually reconstructed by a whole team of trained experts such as herself.”

“Well?” said Alice into the pause that followed. “That’s it? That’s the big deal?”

Martinez sighed heavily. “Can’t you see? Isn’t it possible that Ferron designed a program to wipe her own memories clear of incriminating evidence—and then used the same computer-driven program to fill in the gaps with completely innocuous memories?”

“Wow! When you go off the deep end, you do it completely, don’t you, Bob? You’re saying that she’s found a way to beat perceptualization enhancement?”

“Exactly! You don’t think that’s worth looking into a little bit?”

“Sure—if we want to have a legal system left. So let me take it under advisement, counselor. But to revert to specifics, just what incriminating evidence do you think Ferron might have wiped away and then replaced?”

“Isn’t it clear? The memory she had of using her clinic’s trauma room to suppress the memories that her ex-husband, Roderick Bantry, had of killing his second wife. It’s simple, Alice. Bantry kills Rawlings. He comes sniveling back to his first wife, the one so-called great love of his life. She takes pity on him. She wipes out Bantry’s memories of the crime, so that when we question him under PE we get absolutely nothing out of him. Then Ferron wipes out her own memories of her own involvement. And the murder remains unsolved forever.”

“Wow and double wow!” Surprisingly, Sam heard the tinkle of gay laughter. “Unsolved by everyone except the Fighting ol’ Bobcat, is that it, Bob?”

“That’s it, Alice, and you’ll be laughing out of the other side of your mouth when I pin a conviction for murder on Mr. Know-It-All Roderick Bantry, and after that on his ex-, ever-loving wife!”

Sam returned with Emily to her home beside the clinic. “It’s like a nightmare,” she murmured drowsily as she snuggled against him with her head on his shoulder. “Everything Roderick has ever touched since the moment he first got involved with that goddamn O-CLIP computer seems to lead to nothing but disaster, even when he doesn’t intend it to. Sometimes I wish it had never been invented!”

Sam nodded in silent agreement as their car drifted along on autodrive. Even the certainty of a eventual Nobel prize didn’t seem to have lifted the curse that appeared to hang over Roderick Bantry.

It was now a year and five months since the public unveiling of the time scanner by Bantry and the University of Hawaii. And somewhere during that time, Sam reflected, Roderick Bantry had evidently finally had his fill of his present wife, Linda Rawlings. Ever since the separation and divorce, he had sworn that Emily was the only woman he had ever loved. Whether or not that was actually true was anybody’s guess; for in spite of his many superficial charms Bantry was a man driven by relentless ambition, and his ambitions centered around successfully introducing the time scanner to the world—and reaping the rewards that would go with it—no matter who stood in his way. Unfortunately for Bantry, however, Linda Rawlings was an equally hard case. Not only that, she had providentially found herself in a position from which she could easily thwart his grandiose dreams. Bantry’s hand in a reluctant marriage had been the price he had forced to pay to buy her cooperation.

But now, it seemed, with the scanner successfully revealed to a startled world, Bantry had finally decided that he might break free from Linda. Over the years he had written a number of contrite letters to Emily, begging for her forgiveness. Finally, two months before, he had appeared unannounced at the Sunny and Harmony Hallowell Trauma Center on Eagle Nest Lake to say that he intended to divorce Linda without regard for the consequences. According to Emily, he had once again pleaded with her to give him a second chance. The sharp edge of Emily’s bitterness had almost imperceptibly worn off over the years; she agreed to at least meet him for further discussion.

Jubilant, Bantry returned to his motel in nearby Taos. The next day Emily was notified that Roderick had been shot and was in serious condition in the Santa Fe hospital. He had been found in a motel room lying in a pool of blood. The blood was his own and that of his wife. Linda Rawlings, aged thirty-one, had been bludgeoned to death with a crystal statuette of a stylized owl.

Bantry was by now a world-renowned figure; his ex-father-in-law, with whom he was still on amicable terms, was a United States senator and local icon; the police were far from insistent in their questioning, especially after the doctors confirmed that he appeared to be suffering from genuine memory loss.

Emily was touched by her former husband’s plight. As soon as possible, he was moved from the Santa Fe hospital to her own clinic, which was, after all, the country’s foremost center in treating memory loss. Here he spent the next six weeks recuperating.

At the end of that time no other suspects in the killing had surfaced; Bantry was finally interrogated under perceptualization enhancement. It confirmed what he had previously admitted to the investigators: that he had hated his dead wife since the day they were married.

It also confirmed what he had steadfastly maintained: that he remembered a totally unexpected visit to his motel room by his wife, Linda, and a bitter argument between them. Linda appeared to be half-crazed by drugs or by virtual-reality fantasies. For the thousandth time she screamed that half the Nobel prize money was hers and that she would keep him in court for years unless he agreed to a settlement. Roderick was equally adamant that he would divorce her and that he would fight to the bitter end in order to keep her from getting a nickel. Eventually he was able to get rid of her. Unable to sleep, the last thing he remembered was the unexpected buzz of his wrist-phone and his decision to push the accept stud. After that his memory was blank until his awakening in the hospital.

Three days after his discharge from the clinic, Bantry was sipping coffee with Emily in the house they had once shared; it was here that he was formally arrested for the murder of his wife. Whether or not he could actually remember committing the crime, said the district attorney, was legally immaterial; the physical evidence was far too great to ignore. Roderick Bantry would be tried for murder just the way suspects had been tried before the advent of perceptualization enhancement; Roberto Martinez would present the evidence; the jury would find him guilty; he would go to prison for the rest of his life.

Emily pushed herself away from Sam’s shoulder and gripped his arm. “Sam, you’ve got to keep him from being convicted! I don’t know why, but I know he didn’t kill her!”

As Sam grew older he found, somewhat disconcertingly, that more and more of his friends and acquaintances were what he considered to be old. Where were all the young people he used to know? Intellectually he knew that he too was growing old—at least he did when he saw that bald-headed stranger staring back at him from the morning mirror—but except for occasional twinges during the winter months in Washington, DC, he still felt young.

Now he was talking with the oldest person he had ever encountered outside of those grinning centenarians he was compelled to occasionally pose with during political campaigns. Dolores de la Quinta was a long-re-tired former justice of the United States Supreme Court, who, the week before, had celebrated her ninety-fourth birthday by swimming ten vigorous laps in her indoor pool. The two of them sat in her book-lined study high in the Sangre de Cristo Mountains just to the north of Santa Fe.