Robert Sawyer - Triggers

Susan’s next interviewee was a young woman named Rachel Cohen, who worked in accounts receivable here at Luther Terry Memorial Hospital; she’d happened to be on the fourth floor, passing directly above Singh’s lab, when the memory-linking effect occurred.

“I don’t understand,” Rachel said, sounding quite distraught. “This doesn’t make any sense.”

“We’re all still trying to get a handle on it,” Susan said. “It was an accident.”

“But it’s…God, it’s freaky. I mean, I wasn’t aware that anything was wrong until just now.”

“It seems the foreign memories don’t come to mind unless something triggers them, or unless you actually think about them. Some people knew at once that they’d been affected; others, like you, didn’t know until they were asked about it.”

Rachel shook her head in dismay. “But now that you have asked me about it, I can’t stop recalling things he knows.”

“He?” said Susan, leaning forward. “Do you know his name?”

“Sure. It’s Orrin.”

The chances of there being two Orrins around struck Susan as pretty slim, but: “Orrin what?”

“Gillett.”

Susan hoped she was keeping her face from showing distaste; Orrin Gillett was the lawyer who’d tried to run at the beginning of the lockdown. She asked Rachel a few questions about Gillett, just to be sure: the names of his law partners, which law school he’d gone to, and so on, and then she verified the answers on the law firm’s website.

“How—how long is this…this pairing…going to last?” Rachel asked, when Susan was done.

“I honestly have no idea.”

Rachel shook her head again. “This is so strange. God, it feels weird. I mean, he’s a man, you know? I’ve always wondered what it’d be like to be a man instead of a woman.”

“Maybe when this is all over, you’ll write a book about it,” Susan offered.

Rachel seemed to consider this. “Maybe I will, at that. It’s…it’s fascinating.” And then, after a moment, almost to herself, it seemed, she added, “He’s fascinating.”

“Okay,” said Susan. “Thank you for your cooperation, Miss Cohen. We’re still keeping people here at the hospital for a while, but please give me your cell number, so I can find you easily again if I need you.”

Rachel dictated it, then left Singh’s office. Just as she did so, Susan’s earpiece buzzed. “Hudkins to Dawson.”

“Go ahead, Darryl,” Susan said.

“We’ve located nineteen of the twenty people,” said the voice in her ear. “But one seems to have gotten out of the building before you initiated the lockdown.”

“Shit,” said Susan. “Who?”

“Bessie Stilwell, a woman who was visiting her son. And I’m the one reading her—which is strange, I gotta say. She’s visiting from Pascagoula, Mississippi—at least, that’s what I recall.”

“Do you know who she’s linked to?”

“No. And I’m not sure where she’s gone; I’m trying to recall it, but it hasn’t come to me yet. I just went to see her son, Michael Stilwell, but he’s pretty much out of it; he had a major heart attack. He’s got no idea where she might have gone today.”

“If you’re linked to her, why can’t you just recall it?”

“I asked Singh about that. His guess is that it’s because she’s elderly—she’s eighty-seven, her son said. Bessie has trouble recalling things herself; she’s not senile, or anything, just old. Singh thinks it may clear up for me; he suspects I might re-index her memories as time goes on, using my younger brain. But at the moment, well, let’s say I now know how my grandma feels when she’s struggling to recall something. It’s frustrating.”

“What hotel is she staying at?”

“She isn’t. She’s staying at her son’s place. I’ve got the address, and will get the DC police to stake it out.”

Susan didn’t want to become paranoid—and she’d known Darryl for four years now—but it was suspicious that he was both claiming not to be linked to Jerrison and was having trouble corroborating that he was linked to someone else. Still: “Copy,” Susan said. “But find her. Oh, and Rachel Cohen is linked to Orrin Gillett—can you tell Singh to add that to his chart? And I guess I better speak to Gillett now; might as well do this in some kind of order. Can you get him and bring him to 312? I’ve got him locked up in 424.”

“Copy,” said Darryl.

Rachel Cohen was fascinated by Orrin Gillett, the man she was linked to. A lawyer—and a rich one, at that. Certainly a good start! And he was handsome, too, if his own memories of his driver’s license and passport photos were anything to go by. Not that he thought of himself as handsome—but the photos showed a man who was: lots of light brown hair, a great face, and beautiful brown eyes behind round rimless glasses. Still, Rachel wanted to see for herself, and—

And another memory of his came to her, one of a black Secret Service agent with a shaved head coming to get him, and—yes, yes—and bringing him down here, and—

And the memory must be of only a minute or two ago, because here they came, coming down this corridor, and—

And Orrin Gillett was hot. She found herself saying an ebullient “Hi!” to him, like she was greeting an old friend—and, in a way, she supposed she was.

He looked at her, startled, but then smiled a terrific open-mouth smile at her. “Hello,” he said. “Nice day.” She had a strange feeling that his voice didn’t sound quite right—which, she suddenly realized, was the same feeling she had when she heard recordings of her own voice; he remembered his voice as he himself heard it, resonating in his sinus cavities. “Do I know you?” he added.

“No,” said Rachel. “But I know you.”

His tone was affable but baffled. “I don’t understand.”

Rachel nodded toward the door of the office Agent Dawson was using. “You will.”

Rachel knew she should get back to her desk, but work here had slowed to a crawl because most of the staff was still shell-shocked by the assassination attempt and the destruction of the White House; people were just sitting at their desks staring into space, or softly crying, or endlessly chatting to others, trying to make sense of it all.

Rather than heading down the corridor, Rachel instead took a seat in a little waiting alcove just past the room Agent Dawson was using. If her own experience was anything to judge by, Orrin Gillett would be coming out again in twenty minutes or so.

Whenever Rachel was considering doing business with a new company, she ran a simple test. She put the company name and the word “sucks” into Google. Every giant corporation had its detractors: “Microsoft sucks” yielded 285,000 hits, “FedEx sucks” produced 568,000, and “Disney sucks” served up a whopping two million pages. But for local businesses or obscure web companies, she’d found it a useful barometer.

Likewise, whenever she was interested in dating someone, she’d do a quick search on his name and the word “asshole”: “Devan Hooley asshole” had helped her dodge a major bullet!

But now, in this particular case, she had something even better than Google. There was no doubt that Orrin Gillett was attractive. And he seemed like a nice guy: he had a warm, friendly smile, and teeth that either hadn’t seen a lot of coffee, cola, or tobacco, or had been whitened, and—

And, yes, whitened. The Zoom! process, to be precise. Cost him six hundred bucks.

But he hadn’t been a smoker since high school, he didn’t like carbonated beverages, and his coffee intake was pretty average. But he had been treated with tetracycline as a kid, and it had left his teeth a pale tan, and he’d been self-conscious about it for years. And so he’d had the problem corrected.