David Zeman - The Pinocchio Syndrome

Then, fighting off sleep, she remembered. She closed a folder, opened another one, and found the icon she was looking for.

‘Jesus,’ she said.

She called the airline, made a reservation for tomorrow night, and made a note of it on her computer’s desktop.

She would go to Adelaide first thing tomorrow morning and see what she could learn from the pathologists there.

Then she would fly to New Hampshire.

After looking at her watch she lay down under the comforter and closed her eyes. There was time for a few hours’ sleep.

Hands and feet , she thought. Hands and feet.

Exhaustion put her under before the thoughts in her mind could produce insomnia. But the dreams that filled her sleep were cruel and frightening.

Atlanta, Georgia

November 27

Damian Lightfoot was cleaning up the trash.

Not physical trash, of course. Damian was a computer technician hired by the Corporation to assay and discard the vast amounts of unneeded and out-of-date files that collected in the company computers. It had to be done carefully. Ninety-five percent of the time the files and documents earmarked for trashing by the various research departments were useless. But once in a while a file or group of files found its way into the trash by accident and had to be double checked with the department concerned. More than once a crucial bit of research had been saved in this manner, either by Damian Lightfoot or by his predecessors.

The trash-management job was not very high paying, and was certainly not fun. It was pure drudgery. You assayed the vast quantities of trash, looking for markers that had been agreed upon in the current quarter to identify outmoded files to be trashed. When you found a file that wasn’t clearly marked you saved it in a special quadrant and queried the departments involved. Usually it took them days to answer you, for the scientists looked upon the computers as their slaves, and the computer techs as idiots. Sometimes you had to send a dozen memos before they bothered to acknowledge you.

Of course you had to clear every major decision with Security. The Corporation faced stiff competition from other companies around the country and overseas. The research files were a key target, and computer invasion was the preferred line of attack. A computer security firm revamped the entire system every three months, and their staffers were always available for advice or clarification.

Damian was drinking his ninth Coke of the day and listening to Metallica through his earphones when he found the file with the strange name. Project 4. He had never seen it before.

He held the file and tried searching through various sectors of the database for the name. A drug? A chemical? No dice. No trace of it anywhere.

He didn’t trash it. He was paid to always hold back until he got confirmation.

Out of curiosity he tried to open the file. A message appeared on the screen:

THE FILE YOU HAVE TRIED TO OPEN REQUIRES SECURITY CLEARANCE. PLEASE TYPE IN YOUR NAME AND DESIGNATION.

Shrugging, Damian did as he was told.

PLEASE WAIT FOR SECURITY ACKNOWLEDGMENT,said another message.

Damian turned up the music and waited, sipping at his Coke. It was lunchtime, and he was hungry. He had a date to go out for lunch with one of the girls from the front office, a girl who was too new to know about Damian yet. Had she had one more week she would have been warned off him, but he had gotten to her while she was new.

Personally he didn’t think he was that strange. True, he had certain tastes in food and music that made others uneasy. But he led a comparatively normal life, and he didn’t want anything sexual that was different from what anybody else wanted. He still didn’t understand why that girl Cynthia, from accounting, had taken such a dislike to him on their one date. She had bad-mouthed him to everybody within shouting distance. In a company of this size, that was quite damaging.

He waited in front of the screen, sighing, listening to his stomach grumble. This had to be an error. They had probably misnamed the file.

He finally decided to get a bag of potato chips from the machine next door. He would simply leave the computer waiting. It would only be a minute or less.

He got up, still wearing his earphones, and went to the door. It opened before he could touch the knob. A man in civilian clothes – dark suit, tie, brown shoes – stood in the doorway.

The man said something, but Damian couldn’t hear him because of the music.

‘What?’ Damian asked, pulling one of the buds from his ear.

‘Are you Damian?’ asked the man. Damian noticed now that he wasn’t wearing a company badge.

‘Yeah. What can I do for you?’

‘You found a file?’

‘Yeah.’ Damian turned to gesture at the screen. ‘Can’t open it. Never saw the name before. Are you security?’

‘Yes.’

The man had closed the door with a glance into the corridor.

‘Show me,’ he said.

‘Here.’ Damian leaned over the screen. ‘Look for yourself. It’s not in any of the directories.’

The man leaned over Damian’s shoulder. He gave off a faint scent of aftershave and tobacco. The name ‘ Project 4 ’ was in the middle of the screen.

‘Are you sure?’ the man asked. ‘Did you try QPC?’

Damian laughed. ‘What’s QPC?’

But the man’s arm had curled around Damian’s neck while he was turning to ask the question. The breath was squeezed out of Damian’s body. He felt his muscles tense, his arms and legs flailing this way and that. Then there was a sharp crack! as the arm broke his neck, and a spreading red wave swept over his vision, blinding him.

He was dead before he hit the floor.

November 28

The subject was in a traditional hospital bed set up in a special room full of monitors, not terribly different from a room for a patient on the critical list in any modern intensive care unit. Monitors for the usual vital signs – blood pressure, respiration, pulse rate, and so on – were against the walls, connected to the subject by wires. In addition, however, there were more sophisticated machines that monitored less obvious physical processes. There were also video cameras timed to keep a constant watch on the subject’s physical appearance.

Two men in white coats were standing beside the bed. Both wore stethoscopes. The younger man had surgical gloves on.

‘How are we doing?’ the older man asked.

‘Vital signs slowly decreasing,’ the other man said. ‘He’s in coma now. Respiration shallow, heart rate uneven. I suspect heart failure may be the proximate cause of death.’

‘Other vital signs?’

‘Liver and kidney function well below normal. Hematocrit reflecting cellular and other changes.’

‘What about the EEG?’

The younger man held up a printout. ‘Brain waves are our best signature,’ he said. ‘The spikes and valleys form a definite pattern that never seems to vary. It’s clearly not a healthy pattern, yet it’s quite consistent.’

The older man looked for himself. ‘Interesting,’ he said. ‘I wonder what’s going on in there. What kind of mentation, if any.’

‘There’s no evidence of any sense perception,’ the younger man said. ‘No response to sound, touch, or anything else.’

‘But there was in the early phase.’

‘Oh, yes.’ The younger man nodded. ‘Perception was virtually normal at that point. As to what kind of thinking went on, that we can’t measure, because the subject is paralyzed by the changes.’

‘How does he fit the time frame?’