Robert Sawyer - Triggers

Singh’s tone was kind. “I’m sure it was. Do you see our point?”

She shook her head.

“It’s this,” said Eric. “If you were severely traumatized by the shooting, maybe the person who is linked to you got your memory—your thoughts—in real time, too.”

Ranjip Singh entered the room first, followed by Eric Redekop and Janis Falconi; Susan Dawson had been bringing up the rear, but she’d been detained by someone calling her over her earpiece.

“Hello, Kadeem,” said Ranjip.

“Hey, guru,” said Kadeem.

“This is Janis Falconi; she’s a nurse here. And this is Dr. Redekop.”

“Another memory researcher?” asked Kadeem.

“Actually, I’m a surgeon” said Eric, “but—” He stopped short as Kadeem’s eyes went wide in horror.

Ranjip wheeled around to see what Kadeem was looking at. It was Agent Dawson, who had just now entered the room. “My God, Sue,” said Kadeem. “My God. You blew that motherfucker away.”

She nodded but said nothing.

“Did you just realize that?” asked Ranjip. “Did the memory just come to you?”

“Yes,” said Kadeem. Ranjip looked at Eric; it had seemed like such an interesting idea, but—

“Again,” added Kadeem.

“Again?” said Ranjip at once, looking back to Kadeem.

“Yes.”

“When did you first recall this?”

“While ago.”

“When?”

“Don’t know.”

“What room were you in when you recalled it?”

“This one.”

“And what time did you come into this room?”

“I don’t know. Does it matter?”

“Yes,” said Ranjip. “Is there anything that can help you pin down when you accessed that memory?”

“Like what?”

“Did you look at the clock?” asked Eric.

Kadeem gestured to encompass the room; there was no clock.

“What about a phone call?” asked Janis.

“Yes!” said Kadeem. “Yes, now you mention it, it was just after I called Kristah.” He pulled out his phone, and ran his fingertip along the touch screen. “The call lasted three minutes twenty seconds and”—another touch—“it began at 12:03.”

Ranjip frowned. “And how long after that did the memory of—of what Agent Dawson did—hit you?”

“Couple of minutes.”

“It can’t be just a couple of minutes,” said Eric, looking at Janis. “Not unless we’re dealing with precognition now.”

“Could it be longer than that?” asked Ranjip. “Ten minutes, say?”

“Sure,” said Kadeem.

“Or twenty?”

“Maybe. I guess.”

“Thirty?”

“Not that long, man.”

“How did the memory begin?” asked Ranjip.

“What?”

Ranjip frowned. He knew the dangers of priming recollections, but he needed to get to the bottom of this. “What’s the first thing you remember? Was it Agent Dawson bursting into the room? Her confronting that man who was holding the hostage? Her attempts to talk him out of what he was going to do?”

Kadeem shook his head. “I don’t remember any of that—or, I didn’t at the time; I do now, now you mention it.” He looked sympathetically at Susan. “You did your best, Sue; it’s not your fault.”

“But what about the first time?” asked Ranjip. “What popped into your mind initially?”

Kadeem actually shuddered. “Agent Dawson pulling the trigger.”

Eric and Ranjip exchanged glances. “There it is,” said Ranjip. “Simultaneity—minds linked in real time during a moment of crisis.”

“But this whole thing began with a moment of crisis,” Eric said. “The electromagnetic pulse when the White House was destroyed. What will happen if there’s another crisis that affects all of us at the same time?”

Ranjip shrugged. “That’s a very good question.”

Susan Dawson and Mark Griffin enlisted three LT psychologists to brief the affected people about the dangerous possibility that they might experience direct real-time linkages during moments of crisis, perhaps with debilitating effects. The psychologists spoke face-to-face to the people still in the hospital and phoned the ones who had left.

Meanwhile, Ranjip Singh ordered an MRI scan of nurse Janis Falconi but was told there was nothing unusual about her brain; no matter how vivid the pain had been when she’d tapped into Josh Latimer’s mind at the moment of his death, there didn’t seem to have been any gross permanent change.

He then got Eric Redekop into a second MRI scanner and looked to see if there was any interesting activity in Janis’s brain while he was recalling her memories. It would have been fascinating if corresponding spots in, say, their right temporal lobes had lit up at the same time—but nothing like that happened. That just added fuel to the notion that the linkages were indeed based on quantum entanglement, a realm beyond the resolution of the brain scanners.

He also ordered an MRI of Kadeem Adams. The private had been scanned just before undergoing Ranjip’s procedure. The aborted attempt at memory-erasing shouldn’t have altered Kadeem’s brain in any way an MRI scanner could see, but Ranjip had wanted to check if there was any structural change that could be attributed to the mind linkings. Again, the results were negative; his earlier MRI and the new one showed no appreciable difference.

But, still, something had changed.

As Kadeem was pulled out of the MRI tunnel, he looked up at Ranjip and the MRI technician, and said, “Sue’s with Prospector.”

Ranjip tilted his head slightly; he’d never heard Kadeem refer to the president by his code name before. “Oh?”

“She’s with Prospector right now,” said Kadeem.

“Probably,” said Ranjip.

“I see it,” said Kadeem. “Him. His room. I see it, right now.”

“Instead of me?” asked Ranjip.

“No, I see you, too, guru. You’re more vivid, but I see…I’m seeing what she’s seeing, too. Like a faint double exposure, or an afterimage, or something.”

“Superimposed over your vision?”

“Yeah.”

“How long has this been going on?”

“I don’t know. Not long. It’s faint, like I said. Couldn’t make it out in the MRI machine, but here, lying on my back, looking up at the ceiling—it’s a plain white roof, see?” He pointed; Ranjip glanced up and confirmed it. “So, my own vision’s not showing much, and I can—damn, it’s strange—I can see what she’s seeing, faint, ghostlike, but clear.”

“Memories don’t contain a lot of visual information,” Ranjip said.

“Ain’t no memory, guru. I can jump around in her memories. What’d she have for dinner last night? Bunless hamburger, down in the cafeteria here. What’d she have for lunch? Protein bar. Where’d she go after dinner? Woman’s room, off the lobby—had something in her eye, took a bit to get it out. Memories I can get in any order, and from any time. This is playing out like a movie—I can’t skip ahead, or go back, or anything.”

“And it’s from her point of view? You’re sure?”

“Yeah. Prospector just asked, ‘Any update on the matter we were discussing earlier?’ ”

“You can hear what she’s hearing, too?”

“If it’s quiet around me. Volume’s really low—like, you know, if you left your iPod on but have taken off the earbuds. You hear that faint music, and you think, damn, where that be coming from? It’s like that. We’re talking now—you and me—so I can’t make it out, and when I look at you, or over at all that equipment over there, the background is too messy and complex for me to really see what she be seeing, but if I really concentrate, it’s there.”

The MRI technician—a petite white woman with bright red hair—spoke. “Like floaters, sort of?”