Project BTB Page 7

  After awhile, the light sharpened into an overhead lamp. I studied the fixture, but it didn't register. I knew it was a light, but I didn't know why it was there. Next, the humming sound gained edges: a hiss, a regular ping, a slight roar. Finally, floating up out of unconsciousness, everything clicked into conceptual focus.

  I was in a small room, lit overhead by a fluorescent lamp. The noise came from an air conditioner duct set high on the right wall. I was in a bed. I was strapped tight around my arms, torso, and legs. The straps were white with large chrome buckles. My head was free. I could raise it slightly and move from side to side. I could feel my body again. I could move everything.

  I couldn't remember much. Squeezing through the entrance gate of Darkhorse was my last, cogent memory.

  Except for a headache, nothing seem to hurt. Okay, I thought. Guess I haven't been injured. At least not badly.

  About ten feet beyond the foot of my bed was a door. There were no windows to the room, but I couldn't be sure because I couldn't see behind me.

  After awhile, I began to feel thirsty. I tried to yell, but produced only a squawk. My throat was as dry as a parched leaf. I worked my tongue around my mouth and finally got enough saliva to swallow once.

  "Hey!" I yelled, my voice rough and raspy. "Anyone? What's going on? Anybody hear me?"

  A young female voice came from a speaker grill I hadn't noticed next to the door.

  "Please stay calm. Someone will be with you in a minute."

  "Who-? Hey! Where the frack am I?"

  "In a minute, please."

  The voice sounded familiar, but not entirely comforting.

  I rested my head. That slight effort had been extraordinarily draining. My temples began to throb. I felt like I was developing a bad hangover.

  I must have said it aloud, because the next thing I heard was, "You are!"

  It was Dan. He walked into view from behind me. Apparently there was another entrance to the room. I looked him over. It was him all right. He was gray-haired and balding. However, it was his grin, his voice, his build-only slightly heavier than I remembered. He'd always been bigger than me by several inches and thirty pounds. His mom and dad had both been heavy boned and strong. He stood the way he used to, with his head slightly cocked and one dark eyebrow raised.

  "How ya doing, ol' bud?" he asked.

  "Uh, okay, I guess." I felt myself responding to his grin. "Good to see you."

  "Yeah, me too. Let me unfasten these straps so I can shake your hand."

  He did. His grip was strong, but I noticed that his palm was damp, like he was nervous.

  He helped me sit up and steadied me as several waves of dizziness came and went.

  After a minute or two, he propped me up in bed with a couple pillows and pulled over a chair. He rested his hands on his knees. He was smiling slightly, but seemed fidgety. I remembered the look well. He'd been like that as a kid whenever he felt guilty about something.

  "What gives, Dan?" I asked. "You look like the dog that just got caught with the Thanksgiving turkey."

  He looked away for a moment and muttered, "Well, something like that."

  "Any water around here?"

  "Huh? Oh, sure!"

  He seemed grateful for something to do. He jumped to the door's intercom and said, "Lois, get a pitcher of water in here on the double, okay? The subject is as parched as a pony in the Mojave. A couple of Anacins, too. He's got a pounder."

  "The subject? I'm asubject ? Dan, what the frack's going on? Was I in an accident or something."

  Dan shook his head, glanced at me, then looked away. Yeah, he looked guilty about something.

  Lois, a pert, dark-haired young woman in a nurse's uniform, came in. She set the water and the Anacin on the stainless steel hospital table beside me, nodded at Dan, then turned to leave. As she moved away from Dan, she winked at me and smiled briefly.

  "When are you going to ask me out again, Joe?" she prodded mischievously.

  "Not now, Lois, for Pete's sake!" Dan said.

  Lois left, still smiling.

  What was that about?

  Dan poured water and helped me drink. I choked twice. Eventually, I got a half a glass inside me along with two of the Anacins.

  "Crap," I said, "you'd think I'd never done this before." I wiped some water off my chin with the back of my hand. My arm felt heavy and week. "Might as well be an invalid."

  Dan set the glass down, then sat back in his chair, twisting his hands in his lap.

  "Well, you kind of are an invalid," he said. "Just not the usual type."

  "Huh?"

  "Oh, man," he said, closing his eyes. "Well, I guess it's time."

  "Time for what? Dan, you're not making sense."

  "Yeah, I guess not." He met my eyes. "It's time for you to know what's going on."

  "Be kinda nice," I agree. "This is pretty weird."

  "Weirder than you ever imagined."

  "Well, we never had secrets, did we?"

  Guilt flashed across his face again.

  "Oh, we had a few. Anyway, I had a few," he said. "In fact, that's as good a place as any to start explaining. With the secrets, I mean. You see, your -" He stopped abruptly, like he was choking down a sob.

  "Dan? Jeez, are you okay?" The Dan I remembered was neverthis emotional. But then, people change in 30 years.

  He nodded, swallowed, and continued. "Your whole life's been a secret, ol' Bud. One, big, ugly, monster of a secret. Even from you."

  I looked at him blankly.

  "What the frack does that mean?"

  Dan rubbed his eyes and said, "Aw, crap. I've dreaded this day for decades. Guess there's no way to deal with it except up and at 'em."

  He pulled a small recorder out of his pocket and turned it on. I heard my voice. It was a copy of the recording I'd started to make a few weeks earlier. In it, I'd started trying to explain how we'd found the caves, got lost in them, lost each other. The whole ball of wax. I hadn't finished it and had made it more for my own relief than anything. Therapy, I guess the psychologists would call it. Self-help, highly improvised. But somewhere in the back of my mind, I'd also had a vague notion of getting the tape out to someone. The truth - the little bit I knew of it - seemed to have a will of its own. It wanted out of the jail cell I'd jammed it into so many years ago.

  "How'd you get that?" I asked, both surprised and irritated.

  I hadn't given the recording to anyone. As far as I'd known, it was still in my room, tucked in the back of my sock drawer.

  "I, uh, that is - the Army got it."

  "The Army," I said.

  Maybe this was just a whopper of another nightmare. If it was, I appeared to be in too deep to get out of it. Besides, it was getting interesting. I wanted to know what happened next. I reached down and pinched myself. It hurt.

  Dan smiled, catching the action.

  "Oh, it's real," he said. "You're real. This is real." He waved at the room. "It's all so frackin' real I'd like to - well, never mind what I'd like to do. That's all irrelevant."

  I closed my eyes a moment, then said, "I take it the Army was spying on me? Why? There's no reason for-"

  "There'salways a reason!" Dan snapped. "Damn it, didn't I teach you that?"

  His face was red.

  "Sure, sure. Yeah, right, Dan. You did."

  This was not the calm, always-in-control Dan I remembered. Stress oozed from his pours like rancid sweat.

  He rubbed his face twice with both hands.

  "Sorry. Okay, let me start again. The cave stuff? Most of it didn't happen. We only went in there once. Not dozens of times before I got lost. You didn't go in there a thousand times like you think. We went in once." He held up an index finger to emphasize the point.

  "But, Dan, I distinctly remember that -"

  "No!" he shouted. Almost instantly, he softened his voice, holding a hand up, palm out, as though stopping traffic. "No, ol' Bud, you don't remember. You think you do, but you don't. False memories. The Ar
my implanted them with a device called an mnemonic imprinter, an MI. It's pronounced 'me,' like the musical note. They've had crude versions of the darn things for almost 40 years. As the telecosm revolution combined with the genetic engineering revolution, they got better and better. Using the breakthroughs of DNA-based encryption, it became possible to code artificial digital information directly onto memory cells. Actually, onto new cells created from the brain's own basic stem cell supply."

  "Dan, I'm latching onto only about half of what you're saying."

  "Huh? Oh, sorry. I assumed that maybe you were farther along."

  "Why would I be? I was never interested in science the way you were."

  Dan laughed, almost bitterly. "Yeah, right. Well, never mind. Suffice it to say that the MIs have gotten so good in recent years that you can't tell the implanted memories from the real ones. No one can. In fact, they can use the MI to totally suppress real memories, which makes the false ones stand out even sharper. The MIs were first developed during the middle Cold War in order to turn Soviet spies and send them back with phony information. Even under truth serums, the MI implants held up. Hell, they're so good now that they can create what are called virtual personalities. You've got one. It's replaced your original. You aren't who you think you are. You didn't do what you think you did."

  He sunk his face back into his hands and groaned and said softly, "How'd I ever get into this? Surely there was a better way."

  Then he looked back up, tears streaming down his normally stolid face and said, "I'm so sorry. But I had no other choice. You see, you had something in your brain that we couldn't let out. You knew too much and we couldn't risk letting you run around free. We enslaved you in the name of preserving liberty. Your loss was the country's gain. Or at least it was, until the Russians stole it."

  I laughed. It started as a chuckle and just kept getting bigger. I couldn't help it. It was all too much. It was absurd, and I'd suddenly seen an explanation that made sense. This was a gigantic hoax. It had to be. It was the only thing that made sense. It was coming back to me now. Dan had been famous for his practical jokes. And he'd always been a good actor.

  "Wipe the thespian tears away, Dan," I said. "This takes the prize pizza. This is one of your best performances. I gotta hand it to you, you had me going, you really did."

  He was shaking his head in apparent frustration.

  "No! You've got to believe me!" he protested.

  "Aw, come on, Dan," I said, my amusement turning into annoyance. "Enough's enough. Drop the act. You've had your fun long. How'd I get here?Really ."

  "It's no damned joke!" He slammed his right palm on the arm of the chair as he said it, half rising and glaring at me.

  I looked back at him for a long moment. Well, maybe it wasn't an act after all. At least I was willing to accept that Danbelieved what he was saying, as cockamamie as it sounded.

  "Uh, well, sure. Don't bust a brain vein, Dan. Let's take it one thing at a time. You say this MI device replaced my memories with false ones. Effectively an entire falselife since I was 15 - is that what you're claiming?"

  "Yes!" he cried, leaping up and pacing the room. "Yes, exactly!"

  I frowned in confusion.

  "But Dan, I'mnobody . You're the guy that got the mental steroids, not me. I've always been an ordinary Joe."

  "Yeah, that's what you're calling yourself now, isn't it? Joe?"

  "Good as any."

  "Well, your real name is Eddie Jones. And you've got everything backwards."

  "Huh?"

  "You know how you've always thought I was the one with the I.Q. that soared out past Saturn?"

  "Yeah," I said carefully. "It's pretty obvious which of us had it and which of us didn't."

  "It's obvious to your false memories, Eddie. But it's not true."

  "What the frack are you talking about?"

  "Ol' Bud,you are the one with the high-test brain pan, not me."

  I felt like I needed a forklift to pick up my jaw.

  All I could come up with was, "Bull. I know smart when I see it. You got it. I don't."

  Dan leaned up against the wall by the door and smiled, shaking his head slowly. He said, "No, it was always you. Never me. I was always the follower, you were always the leader. All those books and magazines you thought I read. All those fancy grades you thought I got in school. All the scrambling by universities around the country to court me into their programs. None of that was me. It was you. The MI machine turn it around. Had to."

  I gazed around the room, "I don't feel that smart. If I am, what am I doing here? If I'm that smart, how'd you catch me? And how come I can't think my way out of a tissue box?"

  "It's the drugs. It's just the drugs. You haven't shaken 'em off yet. As you do, you'll feel your intelligence return. When it does, it's going to crash into you like 40-foot wave. But it'll take a few hours. Right now, I figure you're functioning at about - oh, roughly one-quarter of your normal speed. About equal to me. Know what my normal I.Q. is, Eddie?"

  I just looked at him.

  "135. Not quite a genius, but no damned dummy, either. Think about it. You're in this hospital bed, all drugged up, and your brain is already working as well as mine. I know it is, because there's an artificial intelligence program monitoring our conversation and it's very, very good at estimating this stuff."

  He stepped closer and held up the face of a wristwatch so I could see. It wasn't actually a wristwatch, but a miniature video screen. Dan said it was linked by ultraviolet beam to a computer outside the room. The screen read, "E. Jones I.Q running index.: 142." As I watched, the number jumped to 148, then to 153."

  I snorted. "Big deal. Anyone can jury-rig a number cruncher like that. It's a friggin' toy! Hell, I could do it myself with a safety pin, spit, and a calculator watch."

  Dan smiled and said, "I couldn't. Could you really?"

  "Sure, it's just a matter of altering a few parameters by blocking the quantum tunneling of an ion through the -"

  I stopped. I felt myself go white. "Dan, what did I just start to say?" I asked

  "You got me, Eddie. But you sounded serious."

  "I was. But I don't have any right to be! I'm me, plain old Joe Smith. The gray man. The average, anonymous guy who lives in an out-of-the-way apartment in a small town and damned well likes it!"

  "No, you're not," Dan said softly. "You're about as average as Einstein - except less so. You're also one stubborn, bull-headed maverick. Which is why we eventually had to put you into the MI."

  Just then, Lois the nurse walked in and said sternly to Dan, "General Davis, you have to let him rest now or you'll risk his recovery. He's in a delicate state."

  "General Davis?" I asked weakly, feeling suddenly incomprehensibly tired. I felt the prick of something on my right arm and was woozily aware of a needle being extracted from me and Lois smiling sympathetically.

  * * *

  CHAPTER 12

  When I came up out of the brain fog, it happened faster. This time I wasn't strapped in. When Lois came in, I was trying to stand up, but feeling wobbly.

  "I supposed you're going to tell me I shouldn't try this," I said accusingly.

  "Not at all," she said. "The sooner you get up and get the blood moving, the better off you'll be. And the sooner you can take me to dinner."

  I looked her over. "I know you?"

  "You better. We were getting pretty serious before this MI garbage interrupted everything. Need any help getting dressed? You've got an appointment in about 10 minutes."

  I looked down at myself. I was stark naked, but Lois didn't seem to notice. Or maybe she'd seen it many times before. She helped me into shorts and socks and a crisp, beige coverall. She dropped a couple pairs of slippers on the floor and I stepped into them. Everything fit. I ran a hand over my jaw. I felt clean and my face was shaved.

  "I took care of all that before you woke up," she said perkily.

  "How do I look?" I asked.

  "For a recovering lug, n
ot bad. C'mon. Let's go for a tour."

  She took my arm and led me out. Her grip was not particularly nurse-like and her hip periodically brushed mine. I could smell a light perfume. It seemed familiar.

  The door to my room opened into a plain hallway painted industrial gray. We took a right and then a left and entered a huge cavern. The floor was a maze of partitioned rooms and small buildings, interspersed with various kinds of machinery. A bank of bright halide lamps on the cavern ceiling lit everything to daylight intensity.

  "The Army base," I said under my breath. "The real one."

  Lois merely nodded. Dan approached from around a corner, accompanied by another man. Both wore Army uniforms. Dan's had two stars, while the other fellow's had three.

  "Feeling better?" Dan asked, shaking my hand.

  "Yeah, as a matter of fact, I am."

  I took the other general's hand and asked, "And you might be?"

  "General Ned Jefferson. I run this show. Good to have you with us again, Dr. Jones."

  I looked at Dan. "DoctorJones?"

  Dan nodded.

  General Jefferson smiled. "Afraid so. Doctorates in eight fields, isn't that right, Dan?"

  "Nine, actually," Dan said.

  "I don't recollect anything of the kind," I said mulishly.

  Jefferson chuckled and clapped me on the back, "Oh, you will. Believe me, you will. Just takes a little time. Meanwhile, let's see if you recognize anything in this joint. You used to work here."

  He and Dan led me down into the warren, pointing out various features. Oddly, not much surprised me. When they pointed to something, I usually knew what they were talking about. I spotted a compact structure off to one side.

  "Hmmm," I said. "A miniaturized fusion reactor based on the Vasili Armanov design from around 1980. I thought they'd abandoned that when the new-"

  I stopped cold, hearing my words from their point of view.

  "How do I know that?" I asked. "I don't remember learning it."

  Jefferson laughed and said, "You know it and a thousand times more than youknow you know right now."