Of One Mind by Shane Tourtellotte

Consensus makes it easier to get things done, but how much is it worth?

The truck slowed to a stop. Sign or light, it didn’t matter. Lucinda crept to the back gate and peered out. She didn’t see any pedestrians or other vehicles. This was her chance.

She clambered out of the truck bed and onto the road. With only a fast precautionary glance for side traffic, she crouched down and half ran, half crawled to the roadside ditch. She kept down until the truck drove away, peeked, then hunkered back down as a few cars passed.

Lucinda climbed out of the ditch, trying to brush mud spots off her legs. She looked back at the compound, a couple thousand feet down the road. There was no obvious activity, no sign of alert or of a search party forming. She was lucky things were still in such flux there, security still not locked back down.

She found herself at a four-way intersection. The compound was south; the truck had driven off north. The country looked empty west, while east showed habitation, the outskirts of the large town a couple miles off.

It’s easier to hide in a multitude, Lucinda told herself, and started walking east in the gathering twilight.

A car came driving toward her. She felt exposed before its driver. Her clothes were, if anything, a little too good for walking the shoulder of a road. She ignored the twisting in her stomach, acting inconspicuous until the car was well past her.

Then she picked up her pace.

When Dr. Lucinda Peale began her work on the neurological rehabilitation of violent criminals seven years ago, she hadn’t imagined it would lead to her teaching neural overlay techniques in the depths of a government bunker. She was not so surprised to find that she was a fairly good teacher. It was more of a revelation that she could get through these classes without surrendering to the urge to run from the room.

“Neurotransmitter cascades produced by the overlay can spill beyond the areas intended to be impressed with the new neural pattern. When programming the overlay sequence, it’s wise to create a buffer area a few neurons deep. Here, you would have the stimulator actually reinforce the pre-existing pattern of neurotransmitter release and uptake within the neurons. That will block any unintended spread.”

As her scientist pupils took notes, Lucinda displayed images from magnetoencephalograms of a brain as illustration. The subject’s name was expunged, but Lucinda knew him quite well. Mohsen Abdi had been part of the nuclear terrorist plot that had destroyed Washington. When she was brought here to help uncover the terrorists, she had helped overlay the remorselessly monstrous portions of his frontal cortex with patterns from a more placid and moral brain. Thus treated, Mohsen became eager, indeed desperate, to give up his co- conspirators.

Lewis Burleigh, the treasury secretary until Washington’s incineration made him president, leaped on the practical possibilities of overlay. He began the crash program to expand drastically the number of scientists trained in the procedure. Lucinda had joined his program, though after seeing the scope of what Burleigh intended to do, it came with the greatest reluctance, and coercion.

“Of course, when altering something as complex and interconnected as the human brain, the least effect is the best. That’s why it’s so important to segregate areas of the brain unrelated to the overlay from areas being altered. It’s why, when planning your overlay, you should avoid as many redundancies as you can, the same way a computer programmer does when writing code. By concentrating your—yes, Ms. Madsen?”

The young woman lowered her hand. “Isn’t this being too fastidious, Dr. Peale? Don’t we risk being less effective if we try too hard to limit the overlay’s scope?”

Lucinda felt a prickle of affront, having a grad student talk back this way. She didn’t mind a good scholarly give and take, but this felt different. She looked at Madsen, while sensing the other eyes on her. “Any good surgeon wants to cut as little tissue as possible, especially healthy tissue. The same principle applies here. The guidance descends from the Hippocratic Oath itself: first, do no harm.”

“How is that relevant here?” Madsen said. “You have a diseased brain, just another kind of organ. The more of its diseased cognition you replace with a healthy one, the better.”

Lucinda felt like her ribcage was squeezing her. “It isn’t the whole brain that’s diseased.”

“If the brain is an interconnected whole, why not?”

As Lucinda gathered herself to reply, she grew aware of the student behind Madsen. Dr. Garritty was much closer to her age, and a very attentive student. Right now, his attention was all on her, his dark eyes peering deeply, measuring her, gauging her reactions and responses. It felt disturbing, but maybe she was being paranoid. This place bred that.

“Years of work and hundreds of cases have shown otherwise, Ms. Madsen. I can confirm that from experience both professional and personal. Now—”

“Begging your pardon,” Madsen said, “but the supplemental materials for this course are skeptical of that.”

Lucinda smiled bleakly. “I’m not involved with producing those.” She didn’t have full control over their education. She wondered whether even someone Burleigh fully trusted would.

“Anyway,” she continued, “if you need practical rationales, aside from not destroying aspects of a person’s personality that aren’t pernicious, aside from the added difficulty of integrating the new patterns, there are the simple needs of interrogation. If you expect a patient to talk once he’s treated, you don’t want to have overwritten the knowledge you were hoping to learn.”

A new hand went up, and its owner didn’t wait to be called. “That’s a valid concern within its sphere,” Dr. Page said, “but it’s only a subset of our mission. We’re looking at a bigger picture, the broader problem of extremism. People we’ll be treating won’t all have been participants in violent conspiracies. Different standards will apply.”

“We understand the work you’ve done, and are doing,” Madsen said, “but you need to see beyond that, and consider what we’ll be doing.”

Lucinda tugged at a lock of her hair, then caught herself. That nervous habit was growing on her down here. “It seems some of you have done a thorough job of considering it already.” She tried to focus on getting the class on track again, but her eyes kept drifting back toward Dr. Garritty, still gazing right at her, jotting down notes as fast as if she were still lecturing.

“When were you recruited into the terrorist cell?”

The interviewer was one of many they had cycling through the position here. Lucinda hadn’t seen one handle more than two interrogations. The detainee was shackled at wrists and ankles, and had his head and upper body obscured within the magnetoencephalographic scanner. Microphones inside amplified his answers, both for the interviewer and for Lucinda and her colleague in the monitoring booth. He gave a glib denial of any involvement, one that a casual glance at the scans of his frontal lobe exposed as falsehood.

This was the part of her existence under Mount Weather that Lucinda could bear, and even feel was worthwhile. This person, apparently a moneyman, had aided those who destroyed Washington. She felt no sympathy for him, since he felt none for others. The point of the overlay she was helping prepare was to make him someone who would care about those he had killed. That motive had started her down this road years back.

“How soon after you joined the cell did you know they meant to set off a nuclear weapon?”

As for the other prisoners being brought into the Mount, the ones not connected to Black Friday, Lucinda never saw them. She knew about them by intimation and inference, from the talk she overheard from other scientists and technicians. Insofar as doing this work freed someone for that work, she was abetting them. That took some of the satisfaction out of her endeavors.

“Once you knew what they meant to do, how many they meant to kill, were you ever tempted to stop their plans, or at least disassociate yourself from them?”

Lucinda paid closer attention to the brain scans now. The prefrontal cortex showed a classic pattern of underactivity, the dulling of moral awareness that let him shrug off the horrors he had helped to inflict. “Reading any cingulate cortex stimulation?” she asked.

Dr. Edwin O’Doul shifted one of his displays. “Slight increase in activity,” he said dully. “Nothing extraordinary.”

So reflecting on his deeds didn’t give him any particular pleasure. Maybe that feeling had faded in the eleven weeks since the attack. Whatever the cause, it meant a little less work for Lucinda, another small reason to be glad.

The feed from the scanning room skipped. The interviewer’s position jumped, and the colors in the MEG scans shifted abruptly. Lucinda knew what this meant by now: they were getting prerecorded data, edited to omit material somebody thought too sensitive for their level of security clearance, or perhaps their personal and political reliability. The latter probably reflected on her more than O’Doul. She ignored the cut, and the second one a few minutes later, and kept working on the data they did receive.

Once the session recording ended, they had a good idea of what pathways in his brain needed to be overwritten. Finding a good matching pattern in the template banks was now their goal. Those banks had expanded under Burleigh’s oversight, with plenty of new people getting scanned. Those people were all approved by Burleigh: old political allies he had brought in to reconstruct the government, members of his security forces, some of the scientists and technicians flooding in who clicked with him. Basically anyone Burleigh found harmonious with him could be part of the template cache, including Burleigh himself. Lucinda’s pattern had been in the banks once, but of course it was gone now.

It had begun this way, Lucinda recalled. The California legislature was ready to smother their research in its infancy, until she had the idea of taking the legislators’ brain patterns as templates. It gave them a sense of control, of ownership, over the program. President Burleigh had to feel the same way. Lucinda had repented of her expedient compromise years before, but the price for it kept growing.

She pulled up the standard pattern comparison routines they used and began adding elements to adjust for the particular brain of the detainee. She asked O’Doul for information and opinion a couple times and got terse answers. He never asked her for help, even though he was making his own additions.

“You’ve been very quiet today,” Lucinda said.

Not really.”

That didn’t convince her. “You know you can talk to me, Edwin,” she said. They had been thrown together here on that day, working on the very first perpetrator brought in. That counted for something to Lucinda.

“Yes, yes. Let’s get this work done, make some difference while we can.”

Lucinda turned over his words for a moment, until her heart dropped. His daughter Lauren had been a med student at Georgetown when the nuke went off. She had stayed in Washington to help the flood of injured. She had made some difference—while the radiation from the salted bomb did its work. She had been badly ill the last two months. That must have ended.

She gently laid a hand on his shoulder, but felt him stiffen at the consolation. She had tried to empathize with him before, but losing colleagues and losing family were in different universes to him. Lifting her hand, she said, “Talk with your friends, please.”

O’Doul made a soft grunt. “These three templates look like our best options.”

Lucinda looked back at the screens. “Yes, I think so.”

She let the other subject lie. If he wouldn’t confide in her, that was his right. If he wanted to bury himself in work to assuage his grief, if he made himself a cog in Burleigh’s machine, Lucinda was in the wrong position to condemn him.

The canteen was a far cry from the personal attention Lucinda had gotten under the Mount her first few days there. She had been one of a very small number then, and the scale of the work had grown to be something close to industrial. No more dinner on a trolley, and no individual room and bath. Then again, no locked door with a guard outside. The security was a bit more out of her face, though no one could misapprehend that it wasn’t there.

She served herself from a long table of dishes, bowls, and plates, backed by cooks replacing anything that ran low. Quality was somewhere between a good cafeteria and a low-end hotel buffet, and she had to avoid supplementing quality with quantity. With eating as one of the few leisure activities down there, getting fat could be easy. She had seen it happening to several people already.

The seating area was muted, quieter than one would expect for the scores of people there. Lucinda looked around for the emptiest table she could find. She hadn’t fitted in with any of the groups that came together early on, especially since she had that suspicious “escort” the first few weeks. After that, she had been accustomed to isolation.

She passed close to O’Doul, who didn’t turn to see her. He was talking softly to other members of his old Johns Hopkins research team. That gladdened her. Apparently he was getting the support he needed from them, even if she might have felt better if she could have given it.

Her students had two tables close together, and she slipped by them quickly. She got only a few glances from some of them, and that same long look from Dr. Garritty. When she found a nearly empty table, she made sure to sit facing away from him.

Lucinda ate without savoring, even though it dimly registered that the broccoli salad was quite good. She pulled out printouts of two medical papers and got to reading them, underscoring and making marginal notes when she wasn’t taking bites of dinner.

“There you are!”

Lucinda knew the voice, but was stunned when she saw the face looking down upon her. “Nancy?” she gasped. “Dr. LaPierre? When did you—”

“Just yesterday.” LaPierre took the seat opposite Lucinda. “It’s been a while, Lucinda.”

The affable tone made Lucinda squirm. They were not friends, certainly not after that last day. “But, but you refused to come here. How did they bring you in?”

“I volunteered.” A self-effacing smile shone from her dark face. “What can I say? I was wrong. I thought the government would be using overlay, using us, to justify attacks. Instead, from all I saw from the outside since January 19th, they’ve been digging to expose the roots of the evil.”

LaPierre was right, partly. America hadn’t launched military reprisals beyond its borders, even though from the early interrogations Lucinda had assisted, two countries seemed tied to the plot. And Burleigh was chasing down individuals connected to the attack, in America and in a few obliging nations. He was also going after violent, or potentially violent, extremists at home.

Burleigh’s definitions of “potentially” and “extremist,” though, were expansive. She had seen him expound on his vision of ridding the world of the personalities who would commit such atrocities, across the world, but in America first and foremost, as a grand example. He seemed to have a lot of people in mind.

“So when they came asking again,” LaPierre continued, “I was glad to agree. I probably should have sought them out before then. It would have been, well, a betrayal to the friends we lost not to join the work.”

Lucinda felt a pang. She wouldn’t have called all three colleagues who had been testifying to Congress that day friends, but that didn’t soften the pain of losing them. A fourth, Sam Jeong, had gotten killed in “disturbances” that brewed up on Berkeley’s campus after the bombing, and that had been worse, in its way. “That’s what I thought,” Lucinda said, “when I joined.”

“I remember that,” LaPierre said, briefly sour. “I’m still sad at all the time I lost. If that NSA agent who scooped us up and flew us out hadn’t been so belligerent, insisting we do everything today so we could go kill people tomorrow, I might have made a different decision. Lord, I hope he’s not running around here, giving that talk to people.”

Morris Hope hadn’t been nearly as unthinking as LaPierre recounted, but that no longer mattered. “You don’t have to worry about him anymore, Nancy. He’s been fixed.”

“Been what?”

“It’s a slang term that’s cropped up here,” Lucinda said, looking into her salad bowl. “Came from something President Burleigh said, according to my students. Someone was questioning him about whether we were breaking prisoners with torture to roll up the conspirators. ‘We’re not breaking anyone,’ he said—”

“‘We’re fixing them,’” LaPierre said. “I watched that press conference. That was when I started changing my mind about matters.” She smiled. “So what’s-his-name got overlaid.”

Lucinda just nodded. He had recoiled from her the one time she’d seen him, two weeks after the bombing. He was plainly ashamed to see her, to recall what he had said on that day, and slinked away. That tough but thoughtful man was gone. Even if they had another chance meeting, she’d never really see him again.

She probably wouldn’t ever see Kate Barber again either. Her colleague had been scooped up along with herself and Nancy by Agent Hope the day Washington died. Kate had refused to be part of Burleigh’s project, a stand Lucinda hadn’t had the courage to make, and was interned in some unnamed place. How interesting that Nancy showed no interest in her fate.

“Good,” LaPierre said. “We’ve got millions of yahoos in this country calling for blood, but now it’s one less.” She took an encompassing look at where she was. “Or maybe more.”

Lucinda had reached her limit. Luckily, her tray was almost empty, so her retreat wouldn’t look blatant. “Well, I guess we’ll be crossing paths now and again.” She started getting up.

“Oh, more than that, Lucinda. I’m going to be your supervisor, starting next week.”

Lucinda nearly dropped the tray. “After just getting here?”

“I was surprised too,” LaPierre said, her smile widening, “but someone above pulled a few strings. Of course, I’m trying to get Julio from our team here, too, but they don’t have so much need for low-level assistants here. Of course, Sam wouldn’t come even if I asked.”

This time, Lucinda slammed down her tray. “It’s vile of you to joke about the dead that way,” she hissed, and turned away.

“Dead? Didn’t you know?”

Lucinda stopped three paces from the table, dozens of eyes on her. She walked back, only so she wouldn’t have to speak up and draw more attention. “Know what?”

“Sam survived. It was touch and go, and he’s still in physical therapy. Still in a terrible mood last time I visited him, three weeks ago. So scornful, so bitter.” She tipped her head. “I think he blames you for something. Has he told you what?”

“I’ve never heard from him. I—I never knew.” So why hadn’t she heard?

The women’s dormitory was already half-filled. Lucinda crossed it, swerving around yellow partitions and through half-blocked walkways, to get to the information officer’s booth. She lifted up the ID hung around her neck so the woman could scan it. “Picking up,” Lucinda told her.

The officer checked her terminal. “You have three messages. Two internal, one external.”

Lucinda put her pocket-comp into the officer’s outstretched hand. The woman plugged a secure fiber-link into it, uploaded the messages, and handed it back. “Thank you,” Lucinda said automatically.

She weaved through the dormitory again, back to her semiprivate bunk. It had been a long time since she had had a private room here, and most of the women here had never had that equivocal privilege. She sat down on her cot, dialed up the first message on her comp, and found the rumors about things getting worse confirmed.

Emergency elections for the new Senate would happen in a few days. The new Senators would be coming to Mount Weather directly, naturally taking up prime living quarters. Those bumped would be coming down to the dorms. Things would be getting more crowded. It was bad news, but small change to Lucinda.

The second internal message urged anyone who felt traumatized or conflicted to seek confidential assistance at a certain office. This had an ominous sound to Lucinda. However she might feel, she wouldn’t be going there.

She opened the external message and sat up straighter. It was a letter from Josh.

Calling Joshua Muntz a “special friend” sounded like a mealy-mouthed euphemism, but it was the closest Lucinda could come to describing their relationship. They were more than friends, but not lovers by the common definition. Josh’s past, which he had undergone an overlay to escape, left him uncomfortable in taking that final step. Lucinda respected that, and him.

She dove into his letter, hoping it might have some news about Sam. All she found, though, were commonplaces.

Your parents have finally settled into your house. Good idea to move them up here, out of their apartment. There was a glitch with your direct deposit, but we fixed it, so their finances are set. I think they’ve come to like me, even with my past. Ben isn’t whining at night anymore. I have a neighbor, Andrea, who’s done some dog training. She knew a trick, and Ben’s feeling better now. I still wish he could have stayed over at your house, but allergies are allergies. And I know he misses you, Luci. Me too. My job’s going fine . . .

Her eyes began to skip. It was unfair to expect eloquence of him, but she couldn’t help some impatience.

I still don’t really understand what you’re doing there, Luci, and why you’ve stayed with it so long. It doesn’t seem quite like you, or at least the way I thought of you. You ought to come back here, to your university. I know one or two folks there who would be glad to see you again.

She read that section again. Was he trying to say something between the lines? Hinting about Sam? She well knew that outgoing mail was censored, and suspected that incoming material was too. Might Josh know that and be dodging around it? She couldn’t know and she couldn’t ask.

She read Josh’s last lines, but nothing there gave her any succor. She powered down the pocket-comp. She was no nearer the answers to her questions—and she felt no nearer to Josh, either. Or anyone.

She nearly turned it back on, to write to him, or to her parents. Instead, she slid it under her cot. Maybe she could write when she didn’t feel eyes looming so close over her shoulders.

Lucinda drew the translucent partition, and started changing for bed. She might read a while—or might just go straight to sleep. That was her only sure refuge these days.

A roadside diner was ahead, its parking lot half full. Lucinda scrutinized its near side and front as she walked, but didn’t find one. On the far side, though, she hit pay dirt: a single old- fashioned pay phone.

She looked through her change purse again. She hadn’t needed cash the last eight months, and a good thing too: she wasn’t carrying any when she was scooped up.

That was almost literally true. She had a dollar coin, two quarters, and a few nickels and pennies. It might be enough, though. She reached the phone and read its front plate. Local Calls: $1.50 (3 min) Long-Distance: $2.50 (2 min)

Lucinda cursed her luck. No local call could help her. She checked the change slot, then stalked away. She wandered around the lot, trying to think of a new plan, her eyes on the dirt and scattered gravel underfoot, just in case.

And her luck turned. She caught a glint of dull brass, reached down, and found a dollar coin in the dust. She started racing back to the phone, checking her momentum when she saw people walking out of the diner.

She put in the two dollars and two quarters, and heard the click interrupt the dial tone. She hoped she remembered his cell phone number correctly and punched it in.

It probably had no official name, but everyone called it the Memorial Room. Dozens of photographs hung on the oak-paneled walls, framed images of the White House, the Capitol Building, the Washington Monument, the Supreme Court Building, the Mall, all those places that had been destroyed. Even landmarks that still stood, like the Lincoln and Jefferson Memorials, had their places, though with perhaps less black crepe adorning the frames.

Lucinda didn’t see most of the images any longer. The conference room was familiar enough that everything there receded into the background. She quickly found the placard with her name and sat down, managing not to groan when she found Dr. LaPierre’s name next to hers.

Other people filed in over a few minutes. LaPierre sat down briskly, a bit surprised to find Lucinda there. O’Doul walked in with a colleague whose thin, patchy hair showed he’d been one of the Johns Hopkins doctors who rushed into Washington that day. To Lucinda’s regret, they sat far from her. So did Ms. Madsen and Dr. Garritty, two of her freshly graduated students making a foreboding appearance.

When Donna Laskey, nominal chief of the overlay program, arrived, she took a seat one down from the unoccupied head of the table. Lucinda knew what this meant and got ready to rise. A moment later, everyone stood as President Lewis Burleigh entered the room.

He looked better than the first time Lucinda had met him. His suit was perfect, his sparse gray hair well groomed, and some of the pallor had gone from his face. Ten guards, four in civilian suits, six in Army uniform, spread across the room.

Burleigh went to his seat, then past it. “Curtis,” he said, reaching for Dr. Garritty’s hand, “glad to see you.”

“Likewise, Lew—uh, Mr. President,” said Garritty, and Lucinda’s stomach went into freefall. All those looks from him finally came into focus.

“Sorry to be keeping you at the Mount for now,” said Burleigh, “but I own I’ll make it easier on you. Oh, sit down, everyone.”

They all did. Even though the president had appointed Laskey to supervise overlay matters, he still sat in on the majority of these weekly meetings. The program was his creation, his tool. Even as Laskey opened the meeting with a mass of technical items, she did it as a subordinate.

Lucinda took her minimal part in proceedings, giving the information requested of her and no more. She had made cautious proposals at the first few meetings, recommending they leave a light footprint, both in numbers of overlay patients and breadth of alterations made to their brains. Those meetings taught her not to waste her time, or to expose her dissent, however guardedly. The others obliged her by noticing her as little as possible.

New business eventually came up, and Burleigh took the reins. “Everyone probably knows by now that the special House elections are done,” he said, an unwitting smile showing he approved of the results. “They’ll be joining the Senate here in a few days, and that’s going to stretch lodgings here pretty thin. Some people are going to be doubling up on their bedding. ‘Hot-cots,’ they call them: sleeping in shifts.”

He named nobody, but Lucinda was sure she’d be getting the short end. Living under the Mount had bred pessimism, mostly because it was so often correct. She began winding a stray wisp of hair around her finger.

“Fortunately, that will be temporary,” Burleigh continued, “because in several weeks we’ll be opening up our first auxiliary location for the overlay program and transferring part of your operations over to it. It’s still a secure location, of course, but it will be more comfortable, with room to grow.”

Appreciative murmurs trickled across the room. Lucinda felt briefly better herself, until she saw the implication of how big this undertaking was becoming.

“For those who’ll be moving, the restrictions you’ve had to live with here will be noticeably loosened.” The sounds of gratitude were stronger this time. Lucinda let herself smile on their behalf. “For those remaining here, we’ll be able to ease the restrictions for some of you as well. For others, well, some issues will finally have to be resolved.”

Burleigh’s eyes were right on her. To other observers, it was a casual glance, without hostility, without plain intent. Lucinda knew better.

“From the beginning, we’ve needed every single expert we could gather here, to perform the therapies, refine techniques, and train a new cohort so we can expand our capabilities closer to what’s needed long- term. Now that those new specialists are ready—” Burleigh gave a nod toward Garritty and Madsen. “—we can undo that necessary compromise.

“In purging the evils of extremism and violence from our country, we must be vigilant not only about whose brain templates are used, but about who does the work. This undertaking is about finding and fixing people who are dangers to the survival of humankind. Letting such people have shelter here, in positions of power over the work itself, is an intolerable contradiction. I own the responsibility for letting it go this far, but that’s over.

“Every member of the overlay project will be undergoing MEG scans to check for destructive, intolerant, primitive mindsets that make them unfit for work here. There will be only a few exceptions, where the subject is known to be beyond suspicion.” Burleigh gave another of his looks to Dr. Garritty, who smiled back. “Everyone else, though, must undergo it, if only to alleviate any suspicion.”

Lucinda knew she was finished here, and it brought a strange relief. Her powerlessness here would be over. Outside, she might have a better chance to affect matters, to join with others to fight Burleigh, somehow. And she could let all the pain flow out, heedless of whether some guard or camera spied her.

O’Doul put his hand up. “Mr. President, what becomes of someone who fails this test? Is he just sent home?” he wondered, a tone of hopefulness peeking through.

“Out of the question,” Burleigh said. “We’d have to detain any such individual—or in certain cases adjust him, or her.”

Burleigh’s rough words were like a door slamming in Lucinda’s head. She barely heard someone else ask, “Could you define ‘certain,’ sir?”

“Simply a judgment call on how threatening to our safety that person is.” His eyes were right back on her, the veil cast aside from his intent. “Or if that person has enough enlightenment to own up to the truth and request a therapeutic overlay, no indefinite detention would be necessary.” The president smiled, so reasonably. “Donna, you have the schedule and question checklists, right?”

“Right here, Mr. President.” Laskey produced them from an attaché.

“Thank you,” Burleigh said, taking the schedule. “Torrance, O’Doul, Murcia. Yes, that’s good, but we need to start with you, Ms. Peale.”

Those few who hadn’t noticed his meaningful looks turned to Lucinda. She held herself steady and, matching his brashness, said, “Fine. When?”

“Oh, now. Curt, are you checked out on the Penn State lie-detection methodology?”

Dr. Garritty looked positively eager. “Yes, sir. I did some extra studying the last month. The Penn State method’s always interested me.”

“Excellent. This meeting’s all but over, so take one of Director Laskey’s checklists, get Peale to a scanning room, and do the job.” He looked almost disinterestedly back at Lucinda. “This is a formality, of course. I’m sure there’s no reason to doubt the result.”

Two of the soldiers had moved to flank Lucinda. She stood, summoning up the last of her brazenness. “I don’t see why there would be, Mr. President.”

The cart drove through narrow streets toward the medical complex. Added lamps on the cavern ceiling had alleviated Mount Weather’s permanent twilight, but Lucinda saw only darkness.

Her head had been buzzing since she left the Memorial Room, as she struggled to find some escape from her predicament. The soldiers close by, even in the cart, made flight hopeless, even if she had known how to get out of the Mount. As for fooling the brain scans, that was impossible. They detected signs of prevarication within the mind even before a subject could speak. Only pathological liars wouldn’t be caught by the Penn State method, and readings in other areas gave that condition away. Refusing to answer would only confirm the president’s conclusion by different means.

What was left? Feigning illness to avoid the session? Transparent and ignominious. Pleading to Dr. Garritty for mercy? Pointless and ignominious. She had one option remaining, and it felt better to her with every passing moment.

The cart stopped, and her escorts saw her out of the vehicle. Garritty led the way inside. A few people in the corridors stared as the procession passed them. Lucinda saw them, and kept her head high. She hoped they would remember that.

An examination room awaited them, the same one usually reserved for people connected to the Washington attack. “Help her into the bed, please,” Garritty asked the guards. As they strapped her down, he worked on the computer, presumably calling up the Penn State protocols. Lucinda winced when her keepers cinched the bonds too snugly, but said nothing. Once finished, one of the guards stepped out of the room. The other took position by the shut door at something like parade rest.

Garritty touched a button, and Lucinda began sliding into the scanning tube. “Actually,” she heard him say over the hum of the sliding bed, “could you stand watch outside, Corporal? I’ll get a cleaner scan with fewer people diverting the subject’s attention. I’ll call if I need you.”

Lucinda was inside the tube now, but she could hear the door, the footsteps, and the door. That left only Dr. Garritty’s shufflings and her own breath. She waited.

“Please state your name,” she heard over the speaker installed in the interior of the scanner. Truth scans didn’t really need this calibration, but it did provide a little useful precision.

“Lucinda Dolores Peale,” she said. Other questions came. “Forty-six. Nogales, Arizona. UCLA, undergrad through doctorate.” It didn’t shift her composure. She was ready for the real questions.

She heard more shuffling and tapping at a keyboard. “Dr. Peale, do you harbor any moral or ethical doubts about the work you, and others, are doing here?”

“No, Dr. Garritty, no doubts whatsoever.” She took a deep breath. “I am quite certain that this project is a perversion of everything I hoped neural overlay would be.”

“What—umm, wait a minute.”

Lucinda didn’t wait. This felt too good. “Not only is this the apotheosis of government power-grabbing—something I’d almost expect under the circumstances—but it’s the biggest bait-and-switch I’ve ever witnessed. Burleigh is using the cover of investigating Black Friday to conduct an assault on an entirely different group. I remember a time when you people didn’t approve of that.” “Dr. Peale, we need to stop for a moment.”

She heard his confusion and almost laughed. “No, I don’t think so. I need to voice my beliefs before I’m brainwashed out of them. Treating dissent as a mental illness has its precedents, you know. The Soviet Union comes to mind. So does Orwell: you can’t escape thinking about him here.”

The bed began sliding out of the scanner. “Then think about him quietly,” Garritty hissed.

“What, you don’t like hearing that you’re everything you’ve ever accused your political opponents of being and more?” Her voice started rising. “You mean that, in the words of the famous actor, you can’t handle the truth?”

Hands reached inside, clamping over her mouth. “I’m fine with the truth, Lucinda,” said Garritty, his face now becoming visible. “I had just expected you to lie. Now I have to start all over.”

Before she could absorb this, someone knocked at the door. “Doctor?”

Garritty turned. “No problems here, Corporal.”

“All right.”

Garritty sighed with a shudder Lucinda could feel through the hands he still had over her mouth. “I was planning on falsifying the readings,” he whispered, “letting you pass this little inquisition, so I could have someone inside here to work with. If you’ll go along, I can still do that.”

He must have taken her look of disbelief as a plea to speak, because he lifted his hands. “You mean . . . you’re not . . . ?”

“I’m not on Lew’s side, if that’s what you mean. He may trust me, but— well, it’s a long story. So, are you with me, or were you looking forward to going out in a blaze?”

Lucinda almost got mad, until she realized that she had been enjoying her Joan of Arc performance. Now she had another alternative—if she could trust Dr. Garritty. This seemed too great a stroke of luck, but on the flip side, she couldn’t see what stringing her along this way could gain Burleigh and company.

And she hadn’t had a friend within two thousand miles for a long time.

“If we’re going to do this,” Lucinda said, “we’ll need it to be plausible. Burleigh won’t believe I’m four-square on his side, no matter what your scans say. I’ve got a cover story in mind to explain away my antagonism. Just follow my lead with the questions.”

“All right.” He didn’t sound sure, but didn’t question her further. He took a step away, then turned back. “The president really mistrusts you that much?”

“Yes, and I almost consider it an honor.”

His mouth slowly turned upward, and his face seemed to shed years. “My kind of gal.” He was still smiling as he slid Lucinda back inside the scanner.

She heard nothing the rest of the day. She couldn’t read anything into that, but it made the waiting no easier. When she lay down on her cot that evening, she wondered whether somebody would arrive in the middle of the night to take her away. She fell asleep eventually, waiting.

The next day passed twice as slowly. She had a new partner in O’Doul’s place and never thought to wonder whether his absence was temporary or permanent. She worked on autopilot, worry always roiling in the back of her mind. She never gave a thought to the two men whose brains she analyzed: her mind was more on whether she should have written her parents last night, when it might have been her last chance. Eventually she comforted herself: if she was going to be fixed, they probably wouldn’t let her say anything to the outside before they came for her.

Lucinda went without lunch, and by dinnertime still had no appetite. She went to the canteen because she knew she needed food even if she didn’t want it. A couple of people seemed surprised to see her. She found this darkly humorous: had they expected her to disappear that quickly? And why shouldn’t they have?

She sat at the table next to the Johns Hopkins group and noticed that O’Doul wasn’t there. She began thinking about him, as she worked at whatever chicken dish was on her plate.

“I think he wanted it. Ed wanted them to take him away.”

Lucinda perked up, but didn’t turn. That was Dr. Rory Singer, a colleague of O’Doul she had met a few times, who sounded like he was in mourning.

“He was feeling so hopeless and couldn’t talk about it. It was grief, of course—” Singer’s voice dropped. “—but there was a strain of hatred, too. A need for vengeance he just couldn’t master.”

“That’s just intolerable,” Dr. Mara Bournazian said.

“Of course, of course. He had to know that, but he couldn’t rid himself of it. That’s why he gave himself over: so they could make him better.”

“Well. That was the right choice then. I’m glad he was that wise. So how do we adjust our schedule so—”

Lucinda didn’t listen anymore. She fought down nausea, while one hand twitched, wanted to clutch at her hair. Edwin was gone. Even if he returned to duty, it wouldn’t be the same man. It was as though he had committed suicide. In a sense, perhaps he had.

She forced down more food, until her stomach would take nothing else. She tried to look casual as she disposed of the remnants and left, but they had to see it, the horror and pity and disgust emanating in waves from her. She walked toward her dormitory as fast as she dared.

Someone swung around in his tracks, aiming for her. Lucinda seized up inside, as her feet kept carrying her. The figure came up right beside her, and she relaxed only a little to see it was Garritty.

“You’re clear, Lucinda,” he said softly. “The president accepted the result, though I can’t say he trusts you yet.”

Her viscera unwound a quarter turn. “All right.”

“He’ll still wants someone keeping an eye on you, and I think I persuaded him to make me that someone.”

“All right.”

Garritty took a quick look at her. “Okay. I’ll contact you later, when you’re feeling safer.” He began to peel away, then swerved back. “I’ll try to match your resourcefulness, Lucinda.” He turned and was gone in an instant.

She kept going a few hundred feet before she dared to sigh. A twinge of shame came upon her for driving him off, but her relief was greater. In a day or two, she could absorb this. Not now.

She resumed course for her dormitory. Maybe it was time to write Josh again, even if she hadn’t gotten a response to her most recent letter. Maybe some of her relief would show through the self- censorship and make things better between them.

Then she remembered her new bunkmate. She would still be on her first shift of sleeping for another half hour at least. Lucinda couldn’t write at her bunk without risking making a fresh enemy, the last thing she needed, and she had no illusion that the common area wasn’t watched.

Lucinda slowed, then turned away. She’d go look at that miserable little fountain running in the center of the compound and write there. For a half hour at least.

“Oh, Dr. Peale?”

Lucinda stopped halfway to her bunk space. The information officer usually didn’t call for someone. Part of her thought it might be Dr. Garritty, getting in touch after three days of nothing. The rest of her tightened up in a grimly familiar way as she walked to the booth.

“You have one internal message,” the officer said, “and a pass.” He wore a smirk he probably didn’t know he was making.

Lucinda passed him her pocket-comp to upload the message. When she got it back, there was a scan-card placed across its screen. “Um, where is this pass for?”

“I believe the message says that, ma’am. Yes, Doctor?” She stepped aside for someone else using the booth and called up the new message.

Lucinda, It was good to see you again a few nights back. It was better to find you might be interested. If you like, we could talk about that tonight, in my quarters. A map’s attached. There’s no pressure. If you don’t want to come, you don’t have to. If you just want to talk, we’ll do that. If you want to do more—we can do that too. Curt

She wasn’t looking at the information officer, but she could feel his look, his leer. She walked to her bunk, not looking back, and read the note again. Anger began to coalesce inside her like ice, before a moment of dispassion melted it. His plan had worked, after all.

Lucinda wasted a few minutes sitting on her cot, still warm from its other occupant, before gathering herself up to go. The information officer watched her pass with a vulgar satisfaction. She ignored it, telling herself it was for the best, as she scrolled up the map on her pocket-comp.

The directions led her onto familiar ground: she had been billeted here when she first arrived, when she was a needed and respected visitor. A soldier at a guard post took her card and scanned it. “Up one flight,” he said, handing it back, “and second on the left. Pass your card over the scanner by the door once you’re there.”

She reached the door and waved the card. A chime sounded inside. She waited, trying not to stare at the guard standing watch down the hall. The doorknob rattled, and then there stood Curtis Garritty, his hair mussed and his shirt looking like he had just rebuttoned it.

“Dr. Peale,” he said, smiling. “So glad to see you. Won’t you come in?” She stepped inside, recognizing the layout immediately, feeling strangely at home. She dropped herself into a chair before Garritty could close the door.

“I guess my subterfuge worked.” He read Lucinda’s eyes right away. “I know, I’m sorry. Creativity failed me, so I went for plausibility. The fiction that we’re lovers will let you come here at least every couple of days without talk.” He caught himself and turned a bit red. “Well, without suspicion.”

Lucinda found herself nodding. “I understand. I’m not skilled at subterfuge either. Except maybe the solo kind.”

His look showed understanding. “Anyway, we can talk freely now. Just keep it low, in case the walls are thin.” He had walked over to a mini-fridge before seeing Lucinda’s face. “What?”

Lucinda’s eyes darted around the room. “What if you’re bugged?” she said, barely more than mouthing it. “My information officer read your note, or acted like it. Couldn’t they—?”

Garritty glanced up at the ceiling. “In that case, we’re doomed anyway.” He took two cans out of the mini-fridge. “But Lew said I’d get VIP treatment here, and I’m guessing that includes my being spared close surveillance, even if you still get the business.”

He sat on the bed near Lucinda’s chair and offered her one of the beer cans. She took it before realizing what it was, then looked at it funny. “Oh, I’m sorry,” Garritty said. “Do you drink?”

“Not really.” She popped it open and took a long drink. “But there are exceptions.” Garritty grinned. “Such as when talking to someone who knows the President of the United States as ‘Lew.’”

Garritty blushed again. “I’ll give you the short version. Lewis Burleigh was two years ahead of me when I enrolled at Northwestern. He stayed there for business school, so we were together my full four years before I went for my M.D. We were good friends then, and if that diminished on my side, it never really did on his. When he began bringing in people he could trust for his grand project, I was on his short list. It was already becoming pretty clear that you didn’t say ‘no’ to him without paying for it, so I chickened out and said ‘yes.’”

“I know how that feels.”

Garritty took his first sip. “I guess you do. I had heard about you, how early you were part of the program, but I didn’t know the details until our pas de deux in the exam room. I am sorry about the colleagues you lost in Washington, even Dr. Petrusky.”

“Thanks.” The cover story she had concocted for the president involved her battles in office politics, and other kinds, with Pavel Petrusky. He had wanted overlay technology used in ways very similar to how Burleigh was using them now, and Burleigh had explicitly cited Pavel’s influence on his decision. Lucinda played that as her motivation for resisting the president then, and resenting him afterward. Bitterness over petty politics seemed something Burleigh would find wholly plausible, from experience. She had been right.

Thinking about Pavel got her thinking about the outside world again. “Would you be able to get messages out? Without being opened or censored? I have a couple colleagues back at Berkeley who could help us. Don’t laugh. Not everyone at Berkeley is like that. And there are things I’d want to tell my parents, my friends.” She stopped short of speaking Josh’s name.

“I think that might be impossible. Security’s looser for me, but not lax. I’ll try testing the bounds, though.”

“Please.” She took a good look at him, something she’d never done before. He was close to her age, his black hair dashed with gray, his eyes a dark, shadowed brown. He had a cleft dividing the point of his jaw, what she had called a “chin-butt” back when she was young and the future was nothing to fear.

“Dr. Garr—” She shook her head at herself. “What should I call you? Curt? Curtis?”

“The president calls me Curtis,” he said, “so why don’t you call me Curt?”

“I’ll do that. And I’m Lucinda: Luci never caught on with me.” She took another swallow of beer. “You’ve got a better connection to the outside world. Could you tell me some news?”

“Don’t you get news in here?”

“There’s the official daily digest. Might as well be Pravda. I could solicit gossip, but I’m not quite in the social mainstream here.” “I suppose you aren’t.” He took a sip, and rubbed his mouth. “Well, the country’s still in crisis mode, and the government’s taking advantage. They have the media pretty well tamed, accepting censorship over any information that might aid America’s enemies.”

“The terrorists?”

“Them, and . . . others. A few papers and stations didn’t play ball. Their licenses have been, ahem, suspended. Plenty of websites aren’t playing ball, either, and they’re tougher to suppress, especially the smaller ones. Their hosts are getting pressured, and a lot of ‘volunteers,’ a sort of hacker militia, are taking down sites that don’t toe the line.”

Lucinda shook her head. “Hard to accept that people would go along with that.”

“They’re going along with a lot of new restrictions. Commercial airline flights were only permitted again six weeks ago and you need a pass.”

“Let me guess. You have to undergo a brain screening to qualify, to show you aren’t an extremist.”

“Not everyone,” Curt said, “but most. They even did that with the new Congress, if you can believe it. Burleigh found a few members he couldn’t abide and told the rest to refuse to seat them.”

“I’d heard that. The Congresspeople are down here: I couldn’t avoid picking up that gossip.” Lucinda sloshed her beer can. There wasn’t much left. “Curt, what does the public know about the attack, the people behind it?”

“Oh, a few names, but Burleigh tries to keep them secret, now that they’ve been made responsible members of society again. As for anyone behind them—” Curt gave Lucinda a pointed look. “Do you know something about them?”

“Well, yes.” She laid out what she had heard those first couple of days after the attack, from the perpetrators she had scanned and overlaid. She named the countries: Iran and China. “I wouldn’t call it ironclad, and China wasn’t as clear, but it was pretty persuasive.”

“And Lew knew about this.”

Lucinda nodded. “I can’t imagine he wouldn’t.”

Garritty looked ill for a moment, and set his beer aside. “Because the government has been laying out a lot of insinuations. Nothing outright, but enough to let people draw conclusions. They’ve been implying things about a band of hard right-wingers—”

“Oh, God.”

“—who would’ve been glad to see the seat of evil government destroyed, and to exploit it to start a great purge, in America and abroad, fueled by the hate.”

“Are people believing that?”

Curt’s smile was pained. “I’m sure at least some people do. And contrary points of view have had a tough time getting through. Of course, those who don’t believe it are getting really outraged—which makes it easier to go after them as hate-mongers and discredit anyone connected to them.”

Lucinda’s head bowed. The worst of it was how little surprise she felt at Burleigh’s doings. “I guess the candidates have to tread a fine line.”

“The ones that are left. Burleigh’s got his nomination bagged. He all but ordered his two challengers to drop out, as a show of national unity and of respect to the late President Davis.”

“The one they were running against in the first place. No doubt, they obeyed.”

“No doubt. A few of the Republicans did too, but they didn’t have a chance in the first place. That race isn’t settled. Three are still running, and it could easily go to the convention.”

He gave a summary of their half of the race, but Lucinda began tuning it out. It didn’t seem to matter. Curt soon picked up on her mood.

“Lucinda, the president’s going to be defeated. The American people won’t stomach all of this forever. When they turn, when the facts get through to them, Burleigh’s going to be blown away.”

Lucinda tried to feel cheered, but it was like the wind trying to lift a leaden kite. “I used to believe that, back when I agreed to work here rather than be locked away. The last four months here, seeing things, doing things—that hope’s fled.”

“Of course!” Lucinda suddenly found him near, gripping her shoulders with strong hands. “Who wouldn’t despair here, with no connection to the outside world? But things are different from the pinhole view you get here. Will you try to believe that?” Her breath hitched, as she felt her skin tingle under his hands. He soon backed away, sensing he had crossed a boundary. “Please?”

“Yes. Yes, I’ll try.” She saw his relief. “So what can we do here to work against Burleigh?”

Curt sat back down. “We’ll have to think that over. It’s not something to decide in haste. For now, though, the best thing you can do is to keep doing what they expect of you. Don’t give anything away. As for me . . . I’ll do what I can to get us out of here. Both of us, into one of the new facilities, someplace less oppressive where we might have more room to act.”

Lucinda thought, drinking the last of her beer to give her time. “If it were only doing what I’ve been doing, I could stand it. If they start making me do worse things . . . I’ve borne a lot, but I can’t handle much more. There are lines I cannot cross—and they’re close.”

Curt reached for her again, this time gently clasping her hand. “I’ll do my best,” he said. “And I’m sure you’ll do yours.”

“Watch the orbitofrontal activity, Lucinda. We might get something there.”

“Yes.” Lucinda did as Nancy LaPierre bid. She noted the lowered activity there: it came of the subject in the scanner talking in a fast, loud stream of consciousness to drown out his interrogator.

There were no questions about the terror attack this time. The technician in the scanning room was asking the fettered man about his associates in rural Michigan: whether they were stockpiling guns or explosives; whether they maintained hate websites; who in the family was part of his plots. None of those questions had gotten an answer.

Lucinda kept up her monitoring work by rote, not letting herself think. Soon, the questioner gave up. He rolled up the subject’s trouser leg and jabbed in a syringe, drawing a scream. It was some specialized sedative they had been using here for a few months. The patient would become passive but still alert. Scans would no longer be cluttered, and they could read his innermost reactions to questions or suggestions or mere words. They would get their answers.

“Unbelievable,” Nancy said, “how scary some people are. Depressing, sometimes. But knowing our thought reforms can make a difference makes it worthwhile. Don’t you think?”

The words “thought reform” echoed in Lucinda’s head. “It’s why I got into this field,” she replied, not actually lying.

Nancy smiled. “I know, and I’m glad you’re here.”

Lucinda made herself nod. She turned back to her work, while her mind turned back to a few nights before, the end of that first evening with Curt.

“This was a tool for good once. A weapon against violence, against the fear that creates—and now it’s being used to create so much fear.”

She didn’t tell him how so much of that fear was hers, but she probably hadn’t needed to.

The subject’s shouts had faded to a fervid murmur. Lucinda strained to catch some of his words.

“. . . restoreth my soul: he leadeth me in the paths . . .”

Whoever this man was, he was terrified. Suddenly, whatever he had or hadn’t really done, there was a bond between him and Lucinda.

“. . . of the valley of death, I will . . . I will fear no . . .”

His voice gave out. The drug had taken hold.

“Good,” Nancy said. “Now we can get some work done.”

III

He picked up on the third ring. “Hello?”

“Josh? Josh, it’s Lucinda.”

“Luci! Oh, Luci, it’s great to hear your voice. Things must finally be getting straightened out, if they let you use a phone.”

“No. Josh, they’re not. It’s starting all over again. Listen, I don’t have much time. I need help. I’m out of money, and—”

“Hold on.” Josh spoke to someone off the line. Lucinda couldn’t make either one out. “Okay, that new facility you’re in, in Ohio, right, a couple miles outside—”

“I’m not in the facility. I broke out. I’m maybe a mile west of the city proper, at—” She craned her neck and read off the diner’s name. “I don’t know the street, but—”

“That’s okay, that’s great. Hang on there, say fifteen minutes. It’s gonna be all right.” The line clicked and static whispered.

“Josh? Josh!?”

Lucinda listened to Donna Laskey running down her agenda, with waning attention. It was the weekly meeting in the Memorial Room. The president had been called away by some unexpected political activity, and Laskey held the chair. Nancy LaPierre was sitting next to Lucinda, as always. Curt was several seats down, not looking his best.

Nothing noteworthy was being said, and Lucinda felt the urge to let Laskey’s drone put her to sleep. She did drift away for a second, before something in Laskey’s tone roused her.

“. . . our international students, coming in to be instructed in our overlay techniques. This is a vital part of our initiative in carrying our mental reforms across the globe. Dr. LaPierre, I’m sorry, but I’ll have to borrow your assistant part-time, for some more teaching.”

Laskey had barely referred to Lucinda by her name in two months. She was usually “Dr. LaPierre’s assistant.” Lucinda absorbed the news, keeping her face unmoved.

“I understand,” LaPierre said. “We all have to play our parts. How soon?”

“Our honored colleagues from China will arrive in a week and a half. Will that be enough time for you to adapt your lesson plan, Dr. Peale?”

“I . . .” Lucinda concentrated, searching for some way out of this. “I hope you’re aware, Ms. Laskey, that I don’t speak a word of Mandarin.”

“Our guests speak excellent English, Doctor.”

“And . . . I hate to speak against myself, but I never thought I was that good a teacher.”

“Your students have disagreed. Several of them praised you quite highly, including Dr. Garritty here.”

Lucinda shot him a shocked look, but he wasn’t facing her way.

“Dr. LaPierre is also well satisfied with your work, which I suppose she now has reason to regret reporting.” She laughed, half the room following her. “So you’re our pick, Doctor.”

Lucinda had her guard back up by now. “All right. Let me see a schedule, and I’ll get to work.”

Laskey slid a few sheets down the walnut table for others to pass down to Lucinda. “Other groups are going to our satellite facilities, but I’ll inform everyone here when new students are coming to the Mount. Now, next on the agenda . . .”

“How could you do that to me, Curt? The Chinese?”

Curt winced under Lucinda’s words, even though she was keeping her voice down to guard against eavesdroppers on his quarters. “I wasn’t trying to angle you toward any specific assignment, Lucinda, much less this one. I was telling people the truth, and maybe a bit more, to put you in good odor.”

“All right. I understand that, and I’m sorry. But the Chinese? They’re responsible—not the students coming in, at least I hope—but for Burleigh to treat them as friends, make them part of his plans? It’s—” She caught herself on the edge of a shriek. “It’s monstrous.”

“I know.” Curt sat on the edge of his bed, shoulders caving in. “I’d say he must know something exculpatory about China, but I don’t really believe that. And bringing them under the Mount? The super top- secret hideaway?” His head drooped. “But why should I be surprised?”

Lucinda regarded him, then sat by him on the bed. “Okay, enough about me. What’s got you in a funk? You’ve been looking miserable since this morning.”

“You haven’t heard? Oh, right. You ought to read the news digests, even if they are slanted.”

“I’ll do that, if you tell me what’s wrong.”

Curt huffed out a breath. “The government raided the Republican National Committee yesterday. FBI, DHS, the whole shebang.”

“On what grounds?” Lucinda said.

“All of them. Hate-mongering, sedition, treason. Same thing, really, with different names. I guess Gandy’s acceptance speech was a mite strong for Lew.”

“Oh, God.” Lucinda clutched at her hair, twisting a strand. “What did they do to her?”

“She is, last I heard, a fugitive from justice. She’s probably gone to ground in her home state.” He walked over to the mini-fridge. “Beer?”

“No. If I started, I wouldn’t want to stop.”

“I’ll cut you off before it gets bad, promise.” He held out the can, but Lucinda snubbed it. With a shrug, Curt put it back inside. “Needless to say, the president is working to strike the Party of Hate from the ballot. Even if he can’t manage that, the accusation’s enough to ruin them, for this election or longer.” He opened his hands to Lucinda. “You were right, my dear. We are stuck with President Burleigh.”

“Of all the things to be right about.” Lucinda found her way to a chair. “So there’s no point to delaying anymore. We have to settle on a plan, or maybe more than one, and start acting.”

Curt sat on the bed’s edge. “I’m not sure anything we do will help much.”

“Curt, we’ve procrastinated for two months, hoping the problem would solve itself. We don’t have the luxury of that self-delusion anymore.”

“Okay, okay,” he whispered, gesturing for her to keep her voice low. “But the problem is pretty intractable. We have to find a way to perform overlays that still preserves the personality traits we’re supposed to be effacing, and do it in a way that fools follow-up scans.”

They started reviewing the ideas they had produced over two months. A few, like hypnosis, were simply silly. Hypnosis required the will of the subject, so it couldn’t hold up in patients whose wills had verifiably been altered. Other ideas, like producing nested neural nets, sounded good only until one got past the name. They had no idea how to hide one neural network inside another, or how it could be concealed from scans and still have any effect on behavior.

Transferring the trait of pathological lying could let a subject slip through a truth scan: the Penn State method couldn’t pick up lying in a brain that thought, in the moment, it was speaking the truth. Regular MEG scans, though, could spot the new pathology. “And talk about the cure being worse than the disease,” Lucinda added, capping their rejection of that plan.

One intriguing notion was implanting subliminal suggestions or commands via overlay. Having a “fixed” patient denounce his rehabilitation once on the outside had real potential. The doctors’ problem was that programming something so precise would require using one specific template, and it would be hard to justify many uses of it. That, and the uncertainty of the work slipping past the screening scans, made them shelve the idea.

They were left with two plausible options. The first was to perform light overlays. The patterns imposed would hold up during confirmation scans, but the new neural pathways would depotentiate over time, allowing the old pattern to reemerge. This was a great idea, if it would actually work.

“All the research done on overlays,” Lucinda said, “has been with the intent of making changes permanent. Our earliest experiments on dogs gathered some data on how much re-potentiation is required for permanent changes. I can reconstruct that, and make educated guesses about where the fuzzy line would be with humans, but I can’t imagine I could gather any confirming data here until we started doing it this way. We’d be taking guesses.”

“And the fuzzy line won’t be the same for every single neuron,” Curt added. “A patient might end up with two patterns jumbled together in the overlaid areas, leaving him a mental mess.” He groaned. “But even that might suffice for our purposes. Enough of him reemerges to lead him to denounce what was done to him, while his rough mental condition brings discredit to overlaying itself. I think it’s our best option.”

“No, our best option is reoverlaying subjects on the outside with their original patterns, but you keep telling me how dangerous that is.”

“I’m sorry, Lucinda. Being the president’s friend hasn’t stopped them from monitoring my mail. I’m convinced of it. There’s no way I could upload a file high in the gigabyte range to anyone without having it looked over, and I can’t imagine they’d let me send a flash drive out of the Mount.”

“But—” But her frustration didn’t change the facts.

“Besides which, I’m not sure there’s a trans-cranial magnetic stimulator left in America that’s not under the government’s control. That means there’d be nowhere to reconstruct our subjects’ personalities. If I knew more . . . but that’s not a question I can ask anyone outside without the monitors red-flagging me.”

“All right.” Her head, hanging toward the floor, nodded. “Keep looking for a loophole, but unless we find one, the light overlays are our best option. I’ll start working on finding the right potentiation threshold.” She looked up. “You know, the pattern- smuggling idea would have a better chance if one of us could get outside the Mount.”

“I know,” Curt grumbled, “but I can’t swing it yet. The authorities are pretty stiff-necked.”

Again, frustration hit Lucinda. “I guess Lew doesn’t trust his friends that much after all. They still get their mail censored, and they can’t transfer somewhere where they can breathe.”

“I can transfer!” Curt caught himself, too late. “I’m sorry. Lucinda, forget that.”

But Lucinda was already on her feet. “Curt, don’t be some gallant knight. Leave me behind if you have to, but get out.”

“No!” He took her by the wrists. “I remember how hopeless you were here, without any kind of support. I couldn’t do that. We’re going together, or not at all. Got that?”

His eyes were intent on her, intent and yet pained. Lucinda had heard Curt talk sometimes about his two teenage children from a failed marriage, how frustrating it was not to see them, to be close by in a scary world. He was hurting, but still he was adamant.

“All right, Curt. It’s your call. For my part, I will try to—no, I will behave myself around my new students. No one will have reason to give me any black marks. I hope that’s enough.”

Curt’s grip slipped down to her hands. “I know how difficult this is for you, Lucinda, I honestly do. Just remember, you aren’t alone. You’re never alone...”