Starfish

I've asked each of the participants to submit to a routine sweep under the medical scanner — or rather, I've asked most of them directly, and asked them to pass the word on to Ken Lubin, whom I've seen a few times now but haven't actually spoken to yet. (I have twice attempted to engage Mr. Lubin in conversation, without success.) The participants know, of course, that medical scans do not require physical contact on my part, and they're well able to run them at their own convenience without me even being present. Still, although no one has explicitly refused my request, there has been a notable lack of enthusiasm in terms of actual compliance. It's fairly obvious (and entirely consistent with my profile) that they consider it something of an intrusion, and will avoid it if possible. To date I've managed to get rundowns on only Alice Nakata and Judy Caraco. I've appended their binaries to this entry; both show elevated production of dopamine and norepinephrine, but I can't establish whether this began before or after their present tour of duty. GABA and other inhibitor levels were slightly up, too, left over from their previous dive (less than an hour before the scan).

The others, so far, haven't been able to "find the time" for an exam. In the meantime I've resorted to going over stored scanner records of old injuries. Not surprisingly, physical injuries are common down here, although they've become much less frequent as of late. There are no cases of head trauma on record, however — at least, nothing that would warrant an NMR. This effectively limits my brain chemistry data to what the participants are willing to provide on request — not much, so far. If this doesn't change, the bulk of my analysis will have to be based on behavioral observations. As medieval as that sounds.

* * *

Who could it be? Who?

When Yves Scanlon first sank into the abyss he had two questions on his mind. He's chasing the second one now, lying in his cubby, shielded from Beebe by a pair of eyephones and the personal database in his shirt pocket. For now, he's gone mercifully blind to plumbing and condensation.

He's not deaf, though. Unfortunately. Every now and then he hears footsteps, or low voices, or — just maybe — the distant cry of something unimaginable in pain; but then he speaks a little louder into the pickup, drowns unwelcome sounds with barked commands to scroll up, link files, search for keywords. Personnel records dance across the inside of his eyes, and he can almost forget where he is.

His interest in this particular question has not been sanctioned by his employers. They know about it, though, yes sirree they know. They just don't think I do.

Rowan and her cronies are such assholes. They've been lying to him from the start. Scanlon doesn't know why. He'd have been okay with it, if they'd just leveled with him. But they kept it under wraps. As though he wouldn't be able to figure it out for himself.

It's bloody obvious. There's more than one way to make a vampire. Usually you take someone who's fucked in the head, and you train them. But why couldn't you take someone who's already trained, and then fuck them in the head? It might even be cheaper.

You can learn a lot from a witch hunt. All that repressed-memory hysteria back in the nineties, for example: so many people suddenly remembering abuse, or alien abduction, or dear old grandma stirring a cauldron of stewed babies. It didn't take much, no one had to go in and physically rewire the synapses; the brain's gullible enough to rewire itself if you coax it. Most of those poor bozos didn't even know they were doing it. These days it only takes a few weeks worth of hypnotherapy. The right suggestions, delivered just the right way, can inspire memories to build themselves out of bits and pieces. Sort of a neurological cascade effect. And once you think you've been abused, well, why wouldn't your psyche shift to match?

It's a good idea. Someone else thought so too, at least that's what Scanlon heard from Mezzich a couple of weeks ago. Nothing official, of course, but there may already be a few prototypes in the system. Someone right here in Beebe, maybe, a walking testament to Induced False Memory Syndrome. Maybe Lubin. Maybe Clarke. Could be anyone, really.

They should have told me.

They told him, all right. They told him, when he first started, that he was coming in on the ground floor. You'll have input on pretty much everything, was what Rowan had promised. The design work, the follow-ups. They even offered him automatic coauthorship on all unclassified publications. Yves Scanlon was supposed to be a fucking equal. And then they shut him off in a little room, mumbling to recruits while they made all the decisions up on the thirty-fifth fucking floor.