Exodus 2022 (6 page)

“They surfaced. Separate support ships, all good. All normal. Then, about an hour after they came up, they started wigging out.”

“Like him,” said Kate, staring at the freeze-frame of Joe Stanton and recalling the divers’ autopsy reports.

“Yeah,” said Beck, “real similar. They were screaming. Out of control. Ranting and raving about a kid. A daughter. A little girl named Lorna Gwin.”

Kate shook her head. “That wasn’t in the report. I’d remember that.”

“Some of the facts came together later,” said Beck. “After we interviewed support crew on the different ships. I was still at the South Korean sim when the divers flipped out. Details started coming in when we were on our way back. Our crews off Nunivak thought they were looking at DCS at first.”

“Decompression sickness,” said Edelstein.

“Right. Crew put ’em into hyperbaric chambers, just like they’re supposed to, and after a while, the screaming stopped. They calmed down. Recovered. Or seemed to. Couple days later, they relapsed. We were on our way back by that time and I had them moved to the
Northern Mercy
. Stahl died ten days after his dive. Galbreth made it eleven. And both went crazy again…complete mental breakdowns.”

Beck turned to the freeze-frame of Brad Whittaker, the robust young gillnetter. “Whittaker suffered a violent hallucination eight days after Galbreth died. Same symptoms. Same pathology.”

“Was he diving?” Edelstein asked.

“Fishing,” Beck replied. “But he fell out of his boat, apparently. Hauling in nets in rough seas. His brother saw it happen. Rescued him, in fact. Pulled him out of the water. A few hours later, the crazy stuff started.”

Kate looked skeptical. “Don’t tell me Whittaker yelled about a kid.”

“Matter of fact, he did. On the street in Yakutat. In the clinic where they sedated him. Where he suffered a seizure. Eyewitnesses—Whittaker’s friends—say he was completely out of his mind, screaming about a murdered daughter, a little girl. Lorna Gwin.”

Kate and the others stared at the images of the men.

“What could cause such a thing?” Edelstein asked softly. “I mean…not just mental breakdown and hallucination, but the
same
hallucination. And a
fatal
hallucination.”

“We don’t know. We’re trying to figure it out. It’s the reason you and Dr. Phelps are here.”

Kate turned to the glowing table map, and traced a line with her finger from Nunivak to Yakutat to the San Juans.

“It’s fifteen hundred miles from the TLPs down to Yakutat,” said Beck, “And another thousand to Friday Harbor in the San Juans. We set some of our computers to troll for new incidents matching the first three. Joe Stanton popped out of the woodwork this morning.”

Kate and the others studied the map in silence.

Beck said, “Four guys. Four nearly identical mental breakdowns, along a twenty-five-hundred-mile trajectory, in the course of two weeks. And these are just the cases we know about. There may be more.”

Kate turned her gaze to the YouTube freeze-frame of Joe Stanton in the Breakwater parking lot. “Mr. Stanton’s going to die,” she said.

Beck shrugged. “If he follows the pattern. Yeah. He’s got ten days. Maybe twelve. At the most.”

JOE AND ELLA MADE THEIR WAY
back to Friday Harbor in the slanting sunlight of late afternoon, to find the ferry line shorter, but not by much.

They waited in the holding area, listening to music in the car and playing gin rummy. Ella kept the conversation light, but inside she was deeply worried. She joked. Laughed. Clowned around. And prepared for the worst. 

In her mind’s eye, she measured the distance to the ferry ticket booth—the place she’d run for help if Joe had another breakdown. She kept her iPhone out in the open—in case she needed to call 911.

And she imagined the chaos that might ensue if Joe made it through the wait in the parking lot, but then had a breakdown on the ferry. How would she handle such a thing?

Ella’s overriding hope and prayer was to make it through the afternoon and evening and get Joe to a hospital—a big state-of-the-art Seattle hospital—where they could run sophisticated tests and figure out what the hell was going on.

She watched Joe now, studying him closely. She wasn’t the only one.

KATE LERNER STOOD
in the center of the War Room and considered the bizarre facts her brother had presented. “Is anyone else investigating this?” she asked. “State troopers? FBI?”

“No,” Beck replied. “We didn’t release the details about our divers, so nobody else is aware there’s a pattern. Not yet, anyway.”

Kate regarded her brother. “This is fascinating,” she said, the reproach and anger gone from her voice. “Weird. But fascinating. It really is. If your reports are right—if the data’s accurate—it’s something that needs to be explored. Thoroughly investigated.” 

“I’m glad you think so.”

“But not by us. You need to turn all of this over to law enforcement. I can see no relevance—”

“That’s because you haven’t seen everything,” said Beck. “We have scans, Kate. Of Galbreth, Stahl, and Whittaker. Scans, and more.”

Kate’s eyes widened. “Whittaker was a private citizen. How did you get scans of Whittaker?”

“Doesn’t matter now.”

“Yes it
does
, Sheldon.” Kate sounded pissed again. “How did you get him out of Yakutat?”

Beck shrugged. “I have fifteen gung-ho ex–Special Forces on board, Kate. Transporting a comatose civilian to the ship isn’t all that hard.”

“Sheldon—”

“We needed the scans, Kate. We got them. And we found something. Something similar in all three men. Something you need to see.”

Kate glanced at Phelps and Edelstein. “Not now I don’t.”

Beck dismissed her concern with a wave. “Our guests have already signed a stack of NDAs this thick.” He made a wide space with his thumb and index finger. “They’re part of the team.”

Phelps said, “I’m well aware of your firm’s developments in thought capture. If that’s your concern.”

Kate ignored him. “Sheldon—”

Beck signaled to Brandon, and before Kate could intervene, big multicolored brain scans filled the monitors. The 3D scans began turning slowly.

Phelps took a step toward the screens, donned his glasses, and stepped closer still. He studied the images for a long time, moving from screen to screen.

“What is this structure?” he asked at last, pointing to a small mass deep within Whittaker’s MRI.

Beck laughed. “We were hoping you could tell us that, Doc.”

Phelps stepped to Galbreth’s scan, then Stahl’s. A walnut-sized orange mass was visible in all three scans.

Phelps returned to Whittaker’s scan and asked Brandon to rotate and slice the images. Then, using a pen as a pointer, Phelps narrated as the brain segments came into focus. He might have been addressing a group of graduate students: 

“Temporal lobes, corpus callosum, parietal lobes, occipital lobe,” he said. “Also known as the visual cortex.”

He stepped closer to the anomaly and ticked off the structures surrounding the fluorescing mass: “Thalamus, pineal gland, hypothalamus. Down here: the amygdala, hippocampus, basal ganglia…the brain stem. And…” He paused. “This…whatever it is”—he tapped the mysterious orange mass with the tip of the pen—“wedged between the caudate nucleus and the occipital lobe.”

“Well,” said Kate, “is it a tumor or something?”

“Or something.” Phelps laughed and shook his head. “The identical tumor in three individuals? In exactly the same position?” He checked Stahl’s scans again, then Galbreth’s. “Not likely.”

Brandon presented different views of the anomaly and Phelps continued his analysis. “No sign of perifocal brain edema. Not a meningioma. Not like any I’ve seen, anyhow.” To Beck, he said, “I’d like to see the pathology reports.”

“Of course.”

“And you mentioned thought captures…” 

Beck nodded at Brandon, and fresh images populated the screens surrounding the freeze-frame of Andy Stahl.

The screens showed a little girl, age five or six. A girl with pale white skin and brown hair, standing in a field, the only person in the scene. The sky behind the girl was dark, brooding. The perimeter of each image blurred, indistinct.

“Meet Lorna Gwin,” said Beck. “As perceived by Erebus diver Andy Stahl.”

“The mystery kid,” said Kate, almost to herself.

“Yes,” said Beck. “The one they’re all screaming about. Except—“

“These are thought captures?” Edelstein sounded amazed. “I’ve read about the technology, of course. But I mean … How did you—“

“Stahl was dying,” said Beck. “In the ICU on our hospital ship. We wanted to know what was going on. So we wired him for capture, just like we do with detainees. And we asked him straight-out. ‘Who are you yelling about? Who is Lorna Gwin?’”

Beck nodded toward the screens. “These are the pictures he had in his head.”

The images had a painterly, ghostlike quality.

“The other diver,” said Kate. “He was in intensive care, too.”

“Yes,” Beck replied, as images of another girl populated the screens around the freeze-frame of John Galbreth. This girl was approximately the same age as the first child, but completely different in appearance.

The first girl was white. This girl was black, like Galbreth himself, with curly hair and a sweet, cherubic face.

“Meet Lorna Gwin number two,” said Beck, as perceived by Erebus diver John Galbreth.”

“I don’t understand,” said Kate.

“There’s more,” said Beck. He signaled to Brandon again and new images filled the screens around the freeze-frame of gillnetter Brad Whittaker.

“And
this
is Mr. Whittaker’s Lorna Gwin,” said Beck.

This girl was at a playground. Laughing. Spinning on a merry-go-round. She was about the same age as the first two girls, but this child was petite, with blonde hair, delicate features, and glasses.

They stared in silence for a long time.

“So they all screamed the same name,” Phelps said at last. “All hallucinated about a kid. A dead girl named Lorna Gwin…But when you dig into their thoughts you find that there are actually three Lorna Gwins. Unique individuals. Which makes sense if each of these guys believes he lost a daughter.” He sounded like he was trying to puzzle it out as he spoke.

“So are these real kids?” Edelstein asked.

“We don’t think so,” said Beck. “None of these guys had kids. None of their friends or family knew anything about kids that fit these descriptions.”

Edelstein said, “So…despite how freaked out these guys all were, no kids actually died?”

“I didn’t say that,” said Beck, and he nodded toward the ghostlike images of the little girls. “I said
these
aren’t real kids.” He looked at his companions. Saw the confusion on their faces. “It didn’t make sense to us either, at first.”

“And now it does?” asked Kate.

Beck shrugged and glanced involuntarily toward a sprawling workstation on the far side of the War Room. “We have a theory,” he replied.

Kate caught the glance and understood. By “We have a theory,” her brother meant “Orondo Ring has a theory.”

Orondo Ring was her brother’s secret weapon. Ring was a genius, and Erebus’s lead scientist. A math prodigy, with PhDs in artificial intelligence, physics, and IT infrastructure design, Ring’s innovations had generated numerous patents for the company, and Sheldon Beck had gone out of his way to pull Ring into his sphere of control. Had, in fact, designed the room they were standing in with Ring in mind. To Ring’s specifications.

“What’s the theory?” Kate asked.

Beck looked at the group. Took his time. 

“Thought capture,” he said at last, “takes an enormous amount of processing power. Even for the new quantum computers, the requirements are staggering. It’s one of the reasons the Feds didn’t start using TC for interrogation until 2018. Took too long. Downloads too unwieldy.” He tapped the side of his head. “Human thought is complex. Data-rich.”

Kate sighed, impatient. “So?”

“So these particular captures—the images of the little girls—are all wrong. Way too light.”

“What do you mean, ‘light’?” Edelstein asked.

“I mean the downloads are small,” said Beck. “Far too small to represent actual people.”

He pointed at the picture of John Galbreth. “Take Galbreth. The guy was on his deathbed. Experiencing seizure after seizure. Nothing we could do. We hooked him up to the feed and started asking him questions. ‘Who’s Lorna Gwin? What happened to her? What happened to you?’ And so on. And as we’re asking these questions we’re also watching the monitors, expecting a big jump in the fMRI patterns and a torrent of data to start roaring in.”

Beck looked at his companions. “That’s what happens in interrogation. You ask a terrorist where he planted the bomb, and the thought-capture hardware practically catches on fire, there’s so much data. All those raw memories and emotions: Streets. Buildings. Faces. Thoughts. Fears. Colors. Smells. Sounds. It all comes flooding in at once. A deluge of information straight from the neurons in the visual cortex to the hardware and software that untangles it all. Sorts it. Catalogs it.

“Real memories, especially recent, vivid memories, take up an enormous amount of space. Galbreth’s memories of his little girl—or at least of her physical presence— weren’t like that. The images were hollow. Insubstantial.”

Kate nodded at the screens. “So these kids are…what? Made up?”

“Right,” said Beck. “They’re constructions. Like characters your brain might generate to populate a dream. The emotions
underlying
the images are real. But the pictures are fake.

“For whatever reason, the men couldn’t conjure an image of the actual dead child they were grieving. The
true
Lorna Gwin. So they fabricated a little girl to accompany the raw anguish flooding their minds. These images are…placeholders. We think so anyway.”

The group fell silent again, digesting Beck’s information.

After a while, Kate spoke, exasperated. “What could cause something like this?”