“I’m sorry for keeping you waiting.”

  “No problem. It was a good chance to gather my thoughts.”

  Cochran looked at him, a faint smile on his face. “Do you know where you are, Wade? May I call you Wade?”

  Wade shrugged. “So where am I?”

  “Still in Seldom Seen.”

  Wade looked around again, noted the dirt walls around the bank of television screens, and nodded. “The basement, right?”

  Cochran smiled, exposing brilliant white teeth. “Right.”

  “Why?”

  “We’re conducting a project here.”

  “And it’s not arts and crafts.”

  “No. No it isn’t. It’s a little more elaborate than that, though I suppose there are similarities. Both require the coming together of certain elements to work.”

  “And I’m an element.”

  “You are, yes. A vital one.” Cochran seemed to be enjoying their exchange, which baffled Wade somewhat.

  “So what does the project entail?”

  “Rehabilitation.”

  “By what means?”

  Cochran raised his eyebrows. “Oh, but you’ve already seen the means.” He looked up at the ceiling, which consisted of a network of wires and rotting beams Wade didn’t think would take much to bring down. “Upstairs.”

  “The ghosts?”

  The old man shook his head. “They’re not ghosts.”

  “Holograms then.”

  “In a way, if you think of yourself as the projector.”

  “So you put on this show of things from my past in the hope that I would—what? Drop to my knees and pray for forgiveness?”

  Cochran sat back and folded his arms. “That’s the gist of it, though given your history, we’d all have been rather astounded if your reaction had been so dramatic, or so easily attained.”

  “What were you hoping for then?”

  “Gradual dawning.”

  Wade pondered this a moment, then said, “Well if by “dawning” you mean figuring out your game, then I won, didn’t I? What’s my prize? Few hookers and some Cuban cigars? One-way trip to Mexico?” He grinned, but let it fade when he realized it wasn’t being returned. Cochran suddenly looked all business.

  “Wade,” he said, leaning forward again, his palms flat on the table. “You’re a psychopath.”

  “That’s kinda strong, isn’t it?”

  “It’s fact.”

  “Well, so’s the fact that you’re an old fart, but you don’t hear me pointing it out.”

  “You killed a man three weeks shy of your fifteenth birthday. There was a boy with you. Do you remember?”

  Wade remembered the man clearly, the boy only vaguely.

  “Not the kid. Only met him that one time,” he said. “But the guy had it coming.”

  “Or so you were told. That he deserved to die. If they’d said the same about anyone, whether it was true or not, you’d have done what they asked of you, wouldn’t you?”

  “I suppose so,” Wade said. “It was the way things were.”

  “And it was the way you wanted it to be.”

  Wade frowned. “Have we entered the psychological evaluation stage of our relationship, Mr. Cochran?”

  Cochran ignored him. “The boy’s name was Eddie Scarsdale. Like you, he wanted to be a gangster, wanted some way to make a lot of money so he wouldn’t get mocked at school anymore for having holes in the soles of his shoes, but he didn’t have the chutzpah, the nerve to take the life of another human being. After you killed the old man, he was so distraught, so guilty, he went home and got his father’s straight razor…” He waved a hand in the air. “You know the rest.”

  Wade thought of the kid in the bathroom upstairs and shook his head. “So it’s my fault he took the chickenshit expressway?”

  Cochran just stared, his face unreadable.

  “Whatever,” Wade said. “So who was the old floating bitch in the bedroom?”

  “My wife,” Cochran said evenly.

  “Whoops.” Wade chuckled. “I’d put my foot in my mouth if it wasn’t tied to the chair.”

  “She was never the same after Eddie’s death.”

  Despite the lingering skeins of disorientation, Wade was able to connect the dots fairly quickly. “Your wife?”

  Cochran nodded.

  “So then, this Eddie character was your son?”

  “No.”

  “All right then, I’m lost.”

  “He was already dead by the time I met and married his mother.”

  “Gotcha.”

  “But I saw how she suffered. Saw how it ate away at her worse than any cancer.” A distant look entered his eyes. “I think she married me just so she wouldn’t be alone. Not sure there was any love there. At least, from her.”

  Wade leaned forward as much as his restraints would allow. “Can I interrupt you for a sec?”

  Cochran waited.

  “Thanks. Um… how did you get the impression from my record, which I assume you’ve read in detail, that I would give a cartwheeling fuck about anything you’ve just told me?”

  Cochran shook his head.

  “Hey, look, I am sorry about what happened to your…whatever he was to you, and your wife. Really, I am.”

  Cochran gave a feeble smile. “Perhaps you should care, Wade. It is, after all, part of the reason you’re here.”

  “Okay, so what’s the other part of the reason?”

  “Do you know what nanotechnology is?”

  “Computer classes for grandmothers?”

  “Funny,” the old man said. “But no, it refers to control of matter on the atomic and molecular scale.”

  “Sounds fascinating. And is it safe to assume that it also means we’ve moved from psychoanalysis to psychics? Because if we have I’d like to apologize in advance if I nod off during your lecture.”

  “In this case, they’re interlinked.”

  “Your losing me again.”

  “Then I’ll condense it for you,” Cochran said patiently. “In 2000, my company announced a breakthrough in psychotherapy following a fusion of two distinct but radically different departments of the University of Ca—

  “Jesus Christ, get to the point already,” Wade said around an exaggerated yawn.

  “Very well. What we developed was called “nanoreality”—a means of using nanotechnology to construct realistic visual images, or as you so rightly guessed, “mental holograms” based on the memories of a subject.”

  “Interesting,” Wade said, sounding bored. “But it makes me wonder why you felt the need to strap me to a chair when just listening to you would have been enough to bore me into a coma.”

  Cochran continued, unfazed. “It was primarily developed as a way for doctors to abandon professional speculation and actually see the trauma in the minds of their patients, as if it were a movie, to witness firsthand the core of the patient’s illness in living color, and therefore treat the patient accordingly. Of course the possibilities didn’t end there. Witnesses afraid to talk, or abuse cases with repressed memories…all of it could be found in the suconscious and projected for observation and study. We could, in essence, see reflections gleaned from the subject’s life. Better yet, a dying man could project images of his killer and we could save them. Better than any mugshot. It stands to turn the justice system as we know it on its ear.”

  Wade felt the restraints biting into his wrists. There was a way out of these zip-ties. Someone had told him how to do it once upon a time, but the method eluded him now.

  “But like any great discovery, “nanoreality” had its problems, and some pretty significant ones at that. Once access was gained, we found it difficult to isolate the memories we wanted. The mind doesn’t have an index, you see. It’s like a library full of books with no titles. We ended up selecting them at random.” He shook his head. “Which had unfortunate consequences for some of the subjects, otherwise good people who had seen terrible things and had managed to forget them. Essentially we made them relive those nightmares, and of course, when memories are recreated in front of you, they cease to be memories anymore. They become the present, the now. So those who had witnessed or endured tragedies were forced to witness them again. And once the present became the past again, the memory was duplicated, intensifying the level of emotional turmoil. It proved counterproductive, exacerbating the very symptoms were were trying to cure.”

  Wade smiled. “So you fucked them up even more, in other words.”

  “Yes,” Cochran conceded. “And I’ll spare you the speech about every great advance needing sacrifice. It was my fault. We weren’t ready.”

  “But now you are?”

  Cochran sat back again and appraised Wade for a long moment. Then he offered him a tight smile. “Yes. Many lives have been lost trying to perfect this thing. The initial project was deemed a failure and shut down until I decided to fund a new version of it. As you might imagine, the old concerns were revived right along with it, but I had done my homework this time. We had planned to go public until someone in my staff leaked word of the project to the press. It was not received well. They accused us of trying to steal the last of mankind’s secrets, invading the only place left the government hadn’t already probed. During this wave of negativity, the government men showed up, stirred from their nest by the media and on the warpath. After an admittedly impressive demonstration, I was able to keep them from shutting us down, but only if I agreed to sign the whole thing over to them when complete, with my role reduced to advisor.”

  “That had to suck,” Wade said, grinning.

  “Not nearly as much as I thought. You see, the advances we made in that three year period were phenomenal. We broke barriers we never imagined we’d break, and extended the realm of possibility almost infinitely. There is very little we can’t do with this technology, but of course claims are nothing without proof.” He smiled and joined his hands. “Which is where you come in.”

  Wade nodded his understanding. “I’m the guinea pig.”

  “Yes.”

  CHAPTER SEVEN

  Wade was sweating again, but this time he was glad of it. Enough lubrication and he stood a better chance of slipping free of his restraints. Not a much better chance, but anything was better than nothing. And if he got free, the first order of business would be to strangle the boring old bastard with his own tie. He could think about what to do with the cops upstairs—assuming they were still there—later.

  “So what’s next?” he asked Cochran.

  “We’ve already run through the first stage. Exposure to select memories to gauge your reaction.”

  “Which was disappointing if the reviews are to be believed.”

  “Yes, but as I said, hardly surprising.”

  A thought occurred to him then. “You said you weren’t able to isolate individual memories, didn’t you?”

  Cochran seemed pleased. “So you were listening after all?”

  “Can’t help it,” Wade said. “My ears don’t listen to reason.”

  “Well, you’re correct. We weren’t able to isolate individual memories. But we figured it out. Now, not only can we pick and choose the memory, we can transfer them.”

  “What does that mean?”

  “It means,” Cochran told him. “That the memories you experienced upstairs didn’t significantly affect you for a good reason.”

  “Which is?”

  “Not all of them were yours.”

  “Hardly a shock,” Wade said. “I wasn’t there to see the kid die. I’ve never even seen the old w…your wife before. And…”

  “Correct, but the last one, the hooker, couldn’t have come from anybody’s brain but yours.”

  For the first time since meeting the old man, Wade felt a pinch of anger in his belly. There was no denying that Gail, a girl he had loved, if only for a short time, had been a prostitute. God knows she’d turned him away enough times or asked him to wait in the diner downstairs because she was “entertaining” but then as now, he hated hearing her called a ‘hooker’. It was, he knew, the typical reaction of the blind, those people who judged her based on how she looked and what she did rather than who she was. And if they’d known, they might have been surprised to find that she had a college degree (though in what, he no longer recalled), and a six-year old child she’d adored (but who lived with her mother for obvious reasons), and that she’d played piano like a virtuoso. She hooked to make enough money to buy a house for herself and her son, and she’d been pretty close to realizing that goal when she’d decided she’d had enough of Wade. A violent man by nature, he nevertheless managed to rein in his temper for her. Hurting her wasn’t the way to secure her love, to persuade her that her life would be better with him in it, even if it only served as a constant reminder of what she’d done in the years before she made a clean break. So instead of beating her, he’d introduced her to drugs, and that had worked like a charm. She’d grown to depend on him again, to appreciate him, and that had lasted until the night she threatened him with his own gun. By that time, the drugs had completely taken hold of her, leaving her delusional, unreachable. When she’d pleaded with him to let her go, he knew she was talking to the cocaine in her system, in her brain, so that when he killed her, it was a mercy.

  “Did I strike a nerve at last?” Cochran asked.

  “Nope.”

  “Ah well,” Cochran said, sounding not at all disappointed, “There’s plenty of time.”

  Wade sighed. “Okay, let’s quit fucking around. What am I doing here?” As he spoke, he tugged his arm up as much as the restraint would allow. The zip tie caught on his wrist-bone and moved no further. It would though, he was sure of it.

  Cochran smiled broadly and gestured at the room around them. “It’s actually quite clever. I shifted the focus of the project as needed to keep its validity in the eyes of those who might be swayed to pull the plug.”

  Wade closed his eyes, exasperated. “Good for you.”

  “I proposed, instead of concentrating solely on mental patients, that we expand our scope to include violent criminals. Not that I believe there’s much of a difference, mind you. I suggested we build a fully functional neighborhood right in the middle of Harperville’s black zone, where recidivism is out of control.”

  “Black zone?”

  “The area worst affected by crime.”

  “Careful Reverend Sharpton doesn’t get wind of that.”

  “It was to be, what my workers affectionately called a ‘glue trap’. The objective would be to lure or force pre-selected criminals into the house chosen for them.”

  “Where they would be visited by the ghosts of Christmas past,” Wade said with a smirk.

  “In a sense, yes. Each house contains two-dozen hosts, which are units installed in the walls behind perforated plaster. When triggered—remotely, of course—they send out spores, nanobots, which are then inhaled. Once inside you, they begin to acquire your information, much like a system search on a hard drive. When they find what they want, they shoot signals against your eyes like a cathode ray will shoot electrons against a television screen. So what you’re seeing in front of you, isn’t really there.”

  “But why images that weren’t mine?”

  Cochran’s smile disappeared. “A personal touch. A signature. For that, I’m sorry. It’s not something I’m permitted to do, but I wanted you to see them. You’ve gone so long not feeling a damn thing for the lives you’ve destroyed. You killed a man. A child killed himself over it, and his mother went mad. I married her and watched it happen. And I didn’t help. Didn’t know how. Instead I buried myself in my work. Dedicated myself to finding a way to make remorseless killers regret what they did, and experience in vivid detail the pain they’d caused.”

  “Doesn’t seem to have worked though, does it?”

  “We’re not finished, Wade.” Cochran tilted his head and spoke in a low voice to someone who wasn’t there. “Monitors, please.”

  Immediately the bank of screens behind him came to life. Each one showed a different man, and in one case a woman, exploring rooms similar to those in the house above Wade’s head. Some of them had weapons, others looked as if they were the weapon.

  “Who are they?” Wade asked, but already knew the answer.

  “Criminals, just like you,” Cochran said, without looking at the screens. “Murders, rapists, drug-dealers, arsonists…”

  “And you think the glue trap is going to work on them?”

  “That’s the hope, yes.”

  “Rats in a cage,” Wade said bitterly. “To me it doesn’t look like you’ve come that far from sixth grade biology.” He watched as, on one of the screens, an enormous man riddled with tattoos, bent down to inspect something on the stairs in front of him. It looked like a jack-in-the-box.

  “Perhaps,” Cochran replied. “Or perhaps the key to our worst fears can be found in childhood games.”

  Wade thought of something and studied the television screens for a moment before he brought it up. “Where’s Cartwright?”

  “Hmm?” Cochran said, the faintest hint of a smile on his lips. “Oh, Cartwright, yes. He’s not currently active.”

  “Active? You killed him?”

  “I didn’t, no. And the intent was never to take his life, but it would appear we still have a few bugs in our system.”

  “Huh.”

  “Does that surprise you?”

  Wade nodded. “A little. You talk about this project of yours like it’s going to be the greatest gift to mankind, but don’t blink when you talk about someone dying because of it.”

  “It would be hard to defend my position without sounding like a Bond villain, Wade. Or worse, making me sound like you.”

  “Why stop now? I was enjoying the monologue.”

  “I’m sure, but I’m afraid you’re not the only subject I have to deal with today.” He half-turned and indicated the monitors with a sweep of his hand. On one of them, Wade saw that the woman was fishing through the kitchen drawer. She stopped and withdrew a long carving knife, then smiled.

  “There’s something I don’t get,” Wade said.

 

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