Shane Tourtellotte - Trial by Fire.pdf - Shane Tourtellotte - widez2

TRIAL BY FIRE

by Shane Tourtellotte

Extraordinary shocks lead to extraordinary temptations....

* * * *

The lab was in a quiet, controlled tumult. Subjects had been flowing in and out

of the scanning room all day, and Lucinda Peale hadn’t been out of the monitoring

booth for a good five hours. She was going on inertia today, the inertia of years of

doing work she had believed in.

They were scanning the last of the violent criminals on their volunteer list,

filling in gaps of their knowledge of the structure and function of such brains. The

team had been doing such scans for seven years, and for the last five had been

treating violent pathologies and other conditions with neural overlays. Knowing the

patterns of nerve connections and chemical signals in an unhealthy brain allowed one

to impress those unhealthy areas electromagnetically with a pattern known to be

healthy.

As much as they knew, and as practical as their knowledge proved, the brain

was still profoundly complex, with more subtleties the deeper one looked. Their lab,

and those at half a dozen other universities, had not charted the whole territory yet.

They certainly wouldn’t finish the job today, but they might answer a few more

questions.

Dr. Leonard Urowsky shared the booth with Lucinda, sitting at the far end of

the console. He adjusted one monitor to trace dopamine and noradrenaline release in

the orbito-frontal cortex, as Dr. Dreher in the scanning room talked a subject through

memories of a particularly grisly crime. He began to sag with fatigue.

“Just one more after this,” Lucinda whispered.

“Oh. Good, Dr. Peale.” He rubbed his lined face, getting a little energy back.

“Then we can finish this report and have it for the committee on Friday.”

The project had been politically charged from the outset. Altering minds,

constructive as it could be when the minds were diseased, still held terrors.

Politicians and ethicists feared its potential misuses, usually meaning any uses they

disapproved of. The public saw it as a version of brainwashing. “Mind-wiping,” they

called it, though “mind-cloning” was a popular alternative.

She and colleagues had spoken before state boards and legislative committees

often in the past. This time, though, it went beyond California, all the way to

Washington and the House Science Committee. The research team was sending its

full ethics sub-group to testify: Urowsky, Dreher, and Pavel Petrusky. Dr. Petrusky

had arranged the testimony, with his usual political skill.

Lucinda was not going. In her darker moments, she felt that Pavel had also

arranged that with his usual political skill.

Urowsky spoke again. “And make sure to send us the results of tomorrow’s

synesthesia work. We can show—”

Pavel Petrusky opened the door. His eyes barely touched Lucinda before

going straight to Urowsky. “Ah, Pavel,” Urowsky said, “how did the procedure

go?”

“Very well. The patient should be awake now, and Dr. LaPierre will be there

to check her cognition. I needed to get back for these last scans.”

Urowsky looked at the main monitor, where Dreher was showing in another

manacled, orange-suited man. “Last scan. Please, sit.” Petrusky put himself neatly

between Urowsky and Lucinda, never turning his eyes left to her. “I was just

reminding Dr. Peale to send the synesthesia data ahead to us in D.C.”

“Oh, absolutely.” He took the briefest look at Lucinda. Pavel had always

lobbied for study in areas away from violence and insanity, things that would taint

their work with judgmentalism. “We need to let the committee know all we’ve done,

and can do. It’s an important opportunity.”

He gave her another sidelong glance, and she could tell he didn’t mean that in

the strictest professional sense. His ideas of the social, and even political, uses of

overlay were far different from hers. Pavel treated the field as engineering, with the

human brain as a complex mechanism whose workings should be adjusted and

perfected. And he had his own definitions of perfection.

There had been a power struggle within the team, one Lucinda had lost. Pavel

had gained unspoken control over the program at Berkeley, and its agenda. The

testimony in two days would be the fruit of his labors.

Pavel and Urowsky were talking softly among themselves. “Fortunate we’re

only losing two weekdays to travel and the hearing,” Urowsky said.

“I knew it would be more convenient for us this way,” Pavel said. “It also sets

up the issue perfectly for the weekend cycle of news analysis. People will be thinking

about overlay on our terms for once.”

Lucinda wanted to bolt. She bit her tongue and concentrated on signs of

hyperactivity in the amygdala to keep herself in her seat. Soon enough, the work was

done. “I’ll organize the scan files,” she told Urowsky.

“Yes, thank you,” he said absently. His attention was still with Pavel. Urowsky

led the overlay project in title. Lucinda wondered whether he knew yet who led it in

fact.

She retreated to her office to get that work done. Moments later, there was a

knock. “Sam.”

“Come in.”

Sam Jeung slid inside. He looked down the hall both ways, then shut the door.

“It’s all set. We should have five dual-casting outlets, a couple radio, a couple print.

The news conference will be in the courtyard, or the lobby if the weather’s bad.”

Lucinda frowned. “I had hoped for more.”

“You don’t need more to make a big media splash. This is enough for full

propagation.” He paused in his headlong discourse, almost a full second. “If you

mean you hoped for more team members walking out, you could still approach

Barber. She might go.”

“And if Kate doesn’t, she’d expose us early. The whole plan’s predicated on

maximum impact, striking right after the testimony. We have to play it safe here.”

She took her own pause, holding up a hand to keep Sam from rushing onward.

“Speaking of that, you don’t really have—”

“Stop. You’re not getting rid of me, Doc.”

“Sam, you’d be walking away from your doctorate work. You have lots more

to lose.”

“So what?” Sam grimaced at how loud he had said that, and toned it down.

“I’m not going to let Petrusky and his ilk set up their orthodoxy as the standard to

which all right-thinking folk have to conform. That’s what’ll happen in the end,

unless we derail it now, get some control back.”

Lucinda nodded gently. “I know. I just wanted to give you the chance.”

Sam grinned. “You’re giving me the chance, and about time.” Had Lucinda

not reined him in, he might have tried something like this alone months ago. “And I’ll

get by. I’m going to be famous, after all, or at least notorious. Someone will take me

on, just for the publicity. It’ll be even better for you.”

Lucinda tried to mirror his smile. “I can hope.”

* * * *

“We’ve had this conversation before.” Joshua Muntz paid out some of the

leash. “I’m not gonna abandon you because the going gets rough. I owe—you

deserve better than that.”

It was a chilly evening, so Lucinda and Josh walked close, arms loosely

around each other’s waists. Ben, her Rottweiler, snuffled at the neighbors’ greenery.

“I just want you to understand, if they put me under a microscope after

tomorrow, they’ll probably put you there too. You haven’t done anything to deserve

that.”

“I’ve been under that microscope,” he said tightly. “The first time, I did

deserve it. This time around might be easier, with a clear conscience.” He ruminated.

“If you’re really saying you want me to lay low a while, for your sake—”

“No!”

It was the shortest lie she had ever told. Josh had been a patient of her team,

cured of a murderous schizophrenia that had kept him institutionalized for thirteen

years. Lucinda had seen him through the rough times after his rehabilitation, and over

time he had become her ... what?

Her lover? Not in the usual, physical sense, and she wasn’t yet sure about the

emotional sense, either. Such distinctions would probably matter little to the enemies

she would make among her colleagues the next day. They could condemn her for a

breach of ethics, and might make it stick. In a battle over ethics, it was a potent

threat.

Pavel would have a tool to destroy her, and not the only one. Even without

this, she’d likely be outmatched.

“You’ve got no reason to go into hiding,” she said as they turned up the path

to her small house. “And I can handle whatever happens.”

Josh pulled her closer. “You don’t need the false front with me, Luci. You’re

giving up your job, risking your professional reputation. You’ve got everything on

the line.”

She stopped at the front step. “Do you think I shouldn’t do this?”

Josh needed a moment to meet her eyes. “I know someone should. I know

better than most, this thing is too powerful to leave in the hands of people eager to

use it. You’re just being braver about it than I would.”

Lucinda turned away, ostensibly to open the door. She had been eager about

overlay in the beginning. Never as eager as Pavel and others, perhaps, but she had

believed in it. She still did, within bounds.

Ben stumbled going into the house. “What’s wrong, pal?” Josh said, kneeling

beside him.

“He’s starting limping on that front paw,” Lucinda said. “Just getting older, I

guess.”

“Oh, no, you’re not,” Josh told Ben, and started tickling him. Soon Ben was

lolling on his back, his coat scruffy from Josh’s attention. Josh slowed to vigorous

rubs, then firm pats, his face wilting into sadness as he slowed down.

Lucinda watched it all. “You didn’t come here tonight to exercise my dog.

You look like you’re having a rough time too. Is it your parents?”

Josh’s hand stopped, and he barely noticed Ben squirming free and trotting

away. “Dad finally left the house. He’s insisting I come with him. Mom’s insisting I

stay.”

He had returned to his parents after being released from the institution, for

family support in reintegrating into society. It had instead reopened their old wounds.

“I’m gonna make someone furious,” he said, standing up. “I could look into

finding my own place, but even custodial supervisors don’t make that much, and my

electronics course eats into that. I...”

As he searched for words, Lucinda put her arm around him, rubbing gently.

She then took a step back. “If you need a place, Josh, you can always come here.”

She watched him absorb that and begin struggling inside. She had all but

invited him into the physical intimacy he had been avoiding. The attacks his past self

had committed had been against women, which made him feel undeserving of a

woman’s trust and favor. His connection with Lucinda was slowly dissolving that

rationale.

Beyond that, though, was what the overlay had left behind: shadows of the

mind whose neural template was used to correct his. That person had had unfamiliar

ideas, including quite progressive attitudes on sex, that Josh had been disturbed to

find running through his head. He usually mastered all the stray thoughts, and if he

perhaps overcompensated in the area of sex, Lucinda let him. The last thing she

wanted to do was disregard his conscience.

“Sorry,” he stammered, “I’m just thinking. It’s a little tough to decide, not

knowing what rent I’ll be paying.”

Lucinda nearly corrected him, but held back. If these were Josh’s terms,

including what lay unspoken, she would take them. She wouldn’t tell him so, but that

extra money might be handy to her soon.

“I hadn’t thought that far ahead,” she said. “Give me a few days to figure it

out.”

“No problem,” he replied. “Not like I expect an answer tomorrow.” They

both laughed, the two strains of tension canceling each other.

“But just in case...” Lucinda went to her purse on the dining room table,

dipped in, and took out a key. “If the tug-of-war becomes too much, you can come

here for relief, however long you need.”

Josh took the key tentatively. “Even if the news trucks are staking you out?”

“I’ll trust your judgment.”

His cheeks colored. “Thank you.” He gave her a slow, gentle kiss. “You’re

Shane Tourtellotte - Trial by Fire.pdf

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