Triggers

BREND ALIKE SMEBE TTERT HANYO U!

or, with word spacing corrected and normal capitalization:

Brenda likes me better than you!

Hah! A perfect “Take that!” delivered by secret code! Seth had loved sending messages that only he and Duncan could read.

But that was then. Now there were no secrets; there was no privacy. He couldn’t encrypt his thoughts and—

Well, yes, he supposed they were encrypted, sort of, in the way he’d heard Singh talk about. Only bits and pieces were stored. In fact, it was sort of like the 13 Code: even after decoding the message, the recipient had to rebuild it by adding to it: guessing at where to put in the spaces, converting characters to lowercase except where it seemed sensible to retain the capitals. Whatever the person reading his memories would recall would be filtered through his or her own experiences, conjuring up something not quite the same as what Seth himself would—but it would be close enough to do damage.

And the damage could be considerable. Whoever was sharing his memories knew what legislation he was planning to veto, what campaign promises he intended to break, what he really thought of the Speaker of the House.

And yet those things were small, in so many ways. But if news about Operation Counterpunch got out early, there might be enormous American casualties. He shifted his head slightly—it was painful to do so—and looked at the large windows. The ever-present nurse was seated by them, and beyond her, through the glass—which he’d now been told had been reinforced with a bulletproof layer—he saw a plume of gray smoke. That smoke contained the ashes of his clothes, his books, all his wife’s things, and priceless mementos of US history: the Resolute desk, centuries-old oil paintings, the artifacts in the Lincoln bedroom, and more.

He wasn’t a monster; none of those who had put Counterpunch together were. They were just people—husbands and wives, fathers and mothers, sons and daughters—who had had enough. Even before today’s terrorist attack, they’d had enough.

He remembered a joke that had gone around the Internet in the fall of 2001: “What’s the difference between Osama bin Laden and Santa Claus?” And the answer, which had seemed so funny back then when people had been forwarding the joke endlessly: “Come Christmas, Santa Claus will still be here.”

But bin Laden had survived an entire decade. Indeed, as today’s events had proved, it was easier to put a bullet in the president of the United States than it was to take out a religious zealot, especially when he had powerful allies.

Seth had taught history for twenty years. The US had had a chance—a brief window—during which it could have pre-emptively struck the Soviet Union, wiping it from the map. The governments of the day—JFK’s regime, and then Johnson’s—hadn’t had the balls. And so the US had instead endured decades of living in fear of the Soviets’ attacking first, and had spent trillions—trillions!—stockpiling weapons.

And it was the same damn thing again.

San Francisco.

Philadelphia.

Chicago.

And now Washington.

A whole nation—a whole planet—living in fear.

He watched the smoke rise and swirl.

Chapter 18

Susan finished another interview, speaking with Dora Hennessey, the woman who’d come here to give her father a kidney. Sue took a bathroom break, then stopped by Singh’s lab, which is where he was conducting his interviews. A squat white man was leaving just as Susan arrived. “Any thoughts about how to sever the links?” she asked Singh.

“I don’t even know what caused them,” the Canadian replied. “I mean, memory is chemical. It’s based on molecules squirting across the synaptic cleft from one neuron to the next. How a memory could leap many meters is beyond me.” He shook his head. “That’s why most people with scientific training think claims of telepathy must be junk: there’s nothing your brain puts out that can be read at a distance.”

“What about brain waves?” asked Susan, sitting on the experimental chair next to the articulated stand holding up the geodesic sphere.

“There aren’t any brain waves in the sense you’re thinking,” Singh said. “The brain doesn’t radiate electromagnetic signals the way, say, a Wi-Fi source or radio broadcaster does. And, even if it did, the signals would be weak, and get weaker, as all signals do, over distance—usually according to the inverse-square law. By the time a signal has traveled three times as far away, it’s only got one-ninth the power. Before you knew it, any signal would be lost in the background noise of all the other signals.”

“Then what are EEGs recording, if not brain waves?”

“Well, they are recording brain waves—but, like I said, the name gives the wrong idea. See, the brain contains billions of neurons. When one neuron gets a signal from a neighbor, it can respond by releasing ions—which are charged atoms, right?”

Susan nodded.