John Saul - Brain Child

“I don’t think you’ll kill me,” he said. “Nor, for that matter, do I think you have killed anyone else. So why don’t you put that gun down, and let us talk about what’s happening to you.”

“There’s no need to talk,” Alex replied. “I already know what happened to me. You’ve put computers in my brain, and you’ve been programming me.”

“You found the notebook.”

“I didn’t need to find it. I knew where it was. I knew where this house was, and I knew what I’d find here.”

Torres’s smile faded into a slight frown. “I don’t think you could have known those things.”

“Of course I could,” Alex replied. “Don’t you understand what you’ve done?”

Torres closed the door, then, ignoring the gun, moved around his desk and eased himself into his chair. He regarded Alex carefully, and wondered briefly if, indeed, something had gone awry. But he rejected the idea; it was impossible. “Of course I understand,” he finally said. “But I’m not sure you do. What, exactly, do you think I’ve done?”

“Turned me into you,” Alex said softly. “Did you think I wouldn’t figure it out?”

Torres ignored the question. “And how, exactly, did I do that?”

“The testing,” Alex replied. “Only you weren’t testing me, really. You were programming me.”

“I’ll agree to that,” Torres replied, “since it happens to be absolutely true. Incidentally, I explained it all to your parents this afternoon.”

“Did you? Did you really tell them all of it?” Alex asked. “Did you tell them that it wasn’t just data you programmed in?”

Torres frowned. “But it was.”

Alex shook his head. “Then you don’t understand, do you?”

“I don’t understand what you’re talking about, no,” Torres said, though he understood perfectly. For the first time, he began to feel afraid.

“Then I’ll tell you. After the operation, my brain was a blank. I had the capacity to learn, because of the computers you put in my brain, but I didn’t have the capacity to think.”

“That’s not true—”

“It is true,” Alex insisted. “And I think you knew it, which is why you had to give me a personality as well as just enough data to look like I was … What? Suffering from amnesia? Was I supposed to remember things slowly, so it would look like I was recovering? But I couldn’t remember anything, could I? My brain — Alex Lonsdale’s brain — was dead. So you gave me things to remember, but they were the wrong things.”

“I haven’t the vaguest idea what you’re talking about, Alex, and neither have you,” Torres declared icily.

“It’s strange, really,” Alex went on, ignoring Torres’s words. “Some of the mistakes were so small, and yet they set me to wondering. If it had only been the oldest stuff—”

“The ‘oldest stuff’?” Torres echoed archly.

“The oldest memories. The memories of the stories your mother used to tell you.”

“My mother is an old woman. Sometimes she gets confused.”

“No,” Alex replied. “She’s not confused, and neither are you. The memories served their purpose, and all the people died. You used me to kill them, and I did. And, as you wished, I had no memory of what I’d done. As soon as the killings were over, they were wiped out of my memory banks. But even if I had remembered them, I wouldn’t have been able to say why I was killing. All I would have been able to do is talk about Alejandro de Meléndez y Ruiz and venganza . Revenge. I would have sounded crazy, wouldn’t I?”

“You’re sounding crazy right now,” Torres said, rising to his feet.

Alex’s hands tightened on the shotgun. “Sit down,” he said. Torres hesitated, then sank back into his chair. “But it was revenge you wanted,” Alex went on. “Only not revenge for what happened in 1848. Revenge for what happened twenty years ago.”

“Alex, what you’re saying makes no sense.”

“But it does,” Alex insisted. “The school. That was one of your mistakes, but only a small one. I remembered the dean’s office being in the wrong place. But it wasn’t the wrong place — I was just twenty years too late. When you were at La Paloma High, the dean’s office was where the nurse’s office is now.”

“Which means nothing.”

“True. I could have seen the same pictures of the school in my mother’s yearbook that I saw in yours.”

Torres’s eyes flickered over the room, first to the bookshelf where his family tree rested, then to the notebook that still lay on top of his desk where Alex had left it.

Next to it, lying open, was the annual from his senior year at La Paloma High. It was open to a picture he had studied many times over the years. As he looked at it now, he felt once more the pain the people it depicted had caused him.

All four of them: Marty and Valerie and Cynthia and Ellen.

The Four Musketeers, who had inflicted wounds on him that he had nursed over the years — never allowing them to heal — until finally they had festered.

And as the wounds festered, the planning had begun, and then, when the opportunity finally came, he had executed his plan.

The memories had been carefully constructed in Alex — the memories of things he couldn’t possibly remember — so that when he finally got caught, as Torres knew he eventually would, all he would be able to do was talk of ancient wrongs and the spirit of a long-dead man who had taken possession of him.

The truth would be carefully shielded, for Torres had programmed no memories in Alex of the hatred he felt toward the four women who had looked down on him so many years ago, ignored him as if he didn’t exist.

Even now, he could hear his mother’s voice talking about them:

“You think they even look at you, Ramón? They are gringos who would spit on you. They are no different than the ones who killed our family, and they will kill you too. You wait, Ramón. Pretend all you want, but in the end you will know the truth. They hate you, Ramón, as you will hate them.”

And in the end, she had been right, and he had hated them as much as she did.

And now it was over. Because Raymond Torres had created Alex, he knew what Alex was going to do. Oddly, he could even accept it. “How did you figure it out?”

“With the tools you gave me,” Alex replied. “I processed data. The facts were simple. From the damage done to my brain, I should have died.

“But I wasn’t dead.

“The two facts didn’t match, until I realized that there was one way I could make them match. I could still be alive, if something had been done to keep my body functioning in spite of the damage to my brain. And the only thing capable of doing that was a system of microprocessors performing the functions of my brain.

“But then I had to fit the memories in.

“Alex Lonsdale has no memories. None at all, because he’s dead. But I was remembering things, and the answer had to be the same. What I was remembering had to have been programmed into me too, along with all the rest of the data. From there, it wasn’t hard to figure out who I really am.”

“My son,” Torres said softly. “The son I never had.”

“No,” Alex replied. “I am not your son, Dr. Torres. I am you. Inside my head are all the memories you grew up with. They’re not my memories, Dr. Torres. They’re yours. Don’t you understand?”

“It’s the same thing,” Torres said, but Alex shook his head.

“No. It’s not the same thing, because if it were, I would be about to kill my father. But I’m you, Dr. Torres, so I guess you are about to kill yourself.”

His hands steady, Alex raised the shotgun, leveled it at Raymond Torres, and squeezed the trigger. Alex watched as Raymond Torres’s head was nearly torn from his body by the force of the buckshot that exploded from the gun’s barrel.