The Mammoth Book of Best New Science Fiction: 23rd Annual Collection (79 page)

VP. She grinned hard and for a minute she felt almost normal. VP. Top dog.

Friday morning she had just got out of the shower when the doorbell rang. She was so surprised she barely remembered to pull on a robe before she opened the door.

“Well, that’s a sight for sore eyes.”

“Richard!”

“Not that I don’t appreciate the gesture but could you please tighten that belt, at least until we’ve had coffee? Here you go, quad grande, two per cent.”

She went to get dressed. When she emerged, drying her hair with a towel, he was sitting comfortably on the couch, ankle crossed at the knee, just like Susana in the park.

“I envy you that dyke rub-and-go convenience.”

She draped the towel round her neck, sat, and sipped the latte. “To paraphrase you, it’s not that I don’t appreciate the coffee, but . . . why the fuck are you here?”

He put his phone on the table next to her latte. “Remember this?”

“It’s your phone?”

He took a thumbdrive from his laptop case and gave it, then her, a significant look.

“Richard, I’ve had a real weird few days and I’m on a plane in four hours. Maybe.” Maybe she was crazy, maybe she should cancel . . . “Anyhow, could you please just get to the point?”

“Drink your coffee. You’re going to need it. And tell me what happened on Tuesday night.” He held up his hand. “Just tell me. Because my guess is you had a hell of a night with a lovely young thing called Cookie.”

She didn’t say anything for a long, long time. “Susana,” she said finally.

“Ah. You got that far? Susana Herrera, aged twenty-four—”

“Twenty-six.”

“Twenty-four. Trust me. Mother Antonia Herrera, father unknown. Dunwoody community college, degree in business administration – oh, the look on your face – and one previous arrest for possession of a controlled substance. Healthy as an ox. Not currently taking any medication except contraceptive pills.”

“The pill?”

“What’s the matter?”

“Nothing. Go on.”

“No known allergies to pharmaceuticals, though a surprising tolerance to certain compounds, for example sodium thiopental and terpazine hydrochloride.”

Cody seized on something that made sense. “Wait. I know that drug. It’s— ”

“RU486 for the mind. That’s the one.”

“Oh, Jesus, Richard, you didn’t give her that! You didn’t make her forget what happened!”

“Not what happened Tuesday.”

Cody, confused, said nothing.

He plugged the thumbdrive into his laptop and turned the screen so she could see the sound file icons. “It will all make sense when you’ve listened to these.”

“But I don’t have time. I have a plane—”

“You’ll want to cancel that, if it’s to Atlanta. Just listen. Then I’ll answer questions.”

He tapped play.

“. . . ever happens, I promise no one will ever hear what goes on this tape except you.”

“Cue ominous music.”

She jumped at the sound of her own voice. “What—”

“Shh.”

“ – more an, um, an ethics thing.”

“Jesus, Richard. You’re such a drama queen.” Pause. Clink.

“I’ve done my research, too. Like you, I’m pretty sure what will happen after you’ve made your presentations to Boone.”

“The Golden Key.”

“ – but what I need to know from you is whether or not you can authorize out-of-pocket expenses in the high five figures to win this contract.”

He touched pause. “Ring any bells?”

“No.” Cody’s esophagus had clamped shut. She could hardly swallow her own spit, never mind the latte. But the cardboard was warm and smooth in her hand, comforting, and behind Richard her fish swam serenely back and forth.

“Terpazine is a good drug. We managed to calculate your dosage beautifully. Susana’s was a bit more of a challenge. Incredible metabolism.”

“You said you didn’t give her—”

“Not in the last couple of weeks. But you’ve had it six times, and she seven. Now keep listening.”

Six times?

“– the exploration of memory and its retrieval. So exciting. A perfect dovetail with the work I’ve been doing on how people form attachments. It’s all about familiarity. You let someone in deep enough, or enough times, then your brain actually rewires to recognize that person as friend, or family.”

Pause.

“There are ways to make it easier for someone to let you in.”

Clink of bottle on glass.

“I’ve told you about those studies that show it’s as simple as having Person A anticipate Person B’s needs and fulfill them.”

“So don’t tell me again.”

She sounded so sure of herself, bored even. A woman who had never thought to use the world love.

“ – jumpstart the familiarization process. For example, person A works in a bookshop and is lonely, and when she’s lonely chocolate makes her feel better. And one day person B arrives mid-afternoon with some chocolate, says Hey, you look sorta miserable, when I’m miserable chocolate makes me feel better, would you like one? and A eats a chocolate and thinks, Wow, this B person is very thoughtful and empathic and must be just like me, and therefore gets slotted immediately into the almost-friend category. It’s easy to set something like that up. You just have to know enough about person A.”

Know enough.

Cody pushed the laptop from her. “I don’t believe this.”

“No?”

Cody didn’t say anything.

“You sat in that Seattle bar, and you listened, and then you signed a temporary waiver.” He placed a piece of paper on the table by her hand. It was her signature at the bottom – a little sloppy, but hers. “Then you took some terpazine and forgot all about it.”

“I wouldn’t forget something like this.”

He held up his hand. Reached with his other and nudged the sound file slider to the right.

“Take the pill.”

“Alright, alright.” Pause. Tinkle of ice cubes. “Jesus. That tastes vile.”

“Next time we’ll put it in a capsule. Just be grateful it’s not the vasopressin. It would make you gag. I speak from experience.”

He tapped the file to silence. “It really does. Anyhow, a week after Seattle I came here and you signed a more robust set of papers.” He handed her a thick, bound document. “Believe me, they’re bombproof.”

“Wait.” She dropped the document on her lap without looking. “You came here? To my apartment?”

“I did. I played the recording you’ve just heard, showed you the initial waiver. Gave you that.” He nodded at her lap. “You signed. I gave you the sodium thiopental, we had our first session. You took another terpazine.”

“I don’t remember.”

He shrugged. “It happened.” He tapped the paper in her lap. “There’s a signed waiver for every session.”

“How many did you say?”

“Six. Four here, twice in North Carolina.”

“But I don’t remember!”

The fish in her tank swam back and forth, back and forth. She closed her eyes. Opened them. The fish were still there. Richard was still there. She could still remember the weight of Susana’s breasts in her hands.

“You’d better listen to the rest. And read everything over.”

He tapped play.

“Okay. Think about what it would be like if you knew enough about someone and then you met: you’d know things about her and she’d know things about you, but all you’d know is that you recognize and trust this person and you feel connected. Now imagine what might happen if you add sex to the equation.”

“Good sex, I hope.”

“The best. There are hundreds of studies that show how powerful sex bonding can be, especially for women. If a woman has an orgasm in the presence of another person, her hormonal output for the next few days is sensitized to her lover: every time they walk in the room, her system floods with chemical messengers like oxytocin saying Friend! Friend! This is even with people you know, consciously, aren’t good for you. You put that together with someone compatible, who fits – whether they really fit or just seem to fit – and it’s a chemical bond with the potential to be human superglue. That’s what love is: a bond that’s renewed every few days until the brain is utterly rewired. So I wanted to know what would happen if you put together two sexually compatible people who magically knew exactly – exactly! – what the other wanted in bed but had no memory of how they’d acquired that knowledge . . .”

It took Cody a moment to pause the sound. “Love,” she said. “Love? What the fuck have you done to me?”

“You did it to yourself Keep listening.

And she did. After she had listened for an hour, she accepted the sheaf of transcripts Richard handed her from his case.

She looked at the clock.

“Still thinking about that plane?”

Cody didn’t know what she was thinking.

“Is it refundable?” he said. “The flight?”

Cody nodded.

“Give me the ticket. I’ll cancel for you. You can always rebook for tomorrow. But you need to read.”

She watched, paralyzed, as Richard picked up the phone and dialed. He turned to her while he was on hold, mouthed Read, and turned away again.

So she began to read, only vaguely aware of Richard arguing his way up the airline hierarchy.

After the first hundred pages of Subject C and Subject S, he brought her fresh coffee. She paused at one section, appalled.

“What?”

“I can’t believe I told you that.”

He peered over her shoulder. “Oh, that’s a juicy one. Stop blushing. I’ve heard it all before. Several times now. Sodium thiopental will make you say anything. Besides, you don’t remember telling me, so why bother being embarrassed?”

She watched her fish. It didn’t matter. Didn’t matter. She picked up the paper again and ploughed on. May as well get it over with.

Somewhere around page three hundred, he went into the kitchen to make lunch. She didn’t remember eating it, but when she set aside the final page at seven o’clock that evening, she saw that the plate by her elbow was empty, and heard the end of Richard’s order to the Chinese takeout place on the corner. It was clearly something he’d done before. From her phone, in her apartment. And she didn’t remember.

She wished there was a way to feed him terpazine so he would forget all those things she’d never said to another soul before.

She tried to organize her thoughts.

He had asked for her permission to use her in an experiment. It would mean she would feel comfortable at the club in Atlanta, that she might even have a good couple of hours, and it would further his work while being paid for to some extent by her expense account. He had traveled to the Golden Key and picked Susana as the most likely dancer to fit her fantasies – and he knew a little about her preferences from that stupid, stupid night in Dallas – and made the same pitch to her. Only Susana got paid.

Twice, Cody thought. I paid her too.

And so Richard had flown to Cody’s apartment in San Francisco and given her sodium thiopental, and she had talked a bluestreak about her sexual fantasies, every nuance and variation and degree of pleasure. In North Carolina, she had talked about her fantasies again, even more explicitly, encouraged to imagine in great detail, pretend it was happening, while they had her hooked up to both a functional MRI and several blood-gas sensors.

Richard put down the phone. “Food in thirty minutes.”

Cody forced herself to stay focused, to think past her embarrassment. “What were the fMRIs for, the fMRIs and – ” she glanced at the paper, “ – TMS during the, the fantasy interludes?”

“We built a kind of mind and hormone map of how you’d feel if someone was actually doing those things to you. A sort of super-empathy direction finder. And one from Susana, of course. We played your words to each other, along with transcranial magnetic stimulation to encourage brain plasticity – the rewiring.”

“And,” she hunted through the pages for the section labeled Theoretical Underpinnings. “You gave me, us, oxytocin?”

“No. We wanted to separate out the varying factors. You supplied the oxytocin on your own, later.” He beamed. “That’s the beautiful part. It was all your own doing. Your hopes, your hormones, your needs. Yours. We made a couple of suggestions to each of you that you might not have come up with on your own: that expensive watch and the loose clothes, Cookie’s hat and spurs. But the rest was just you and Cookie, I mean Susana. But you two were primed for each other, so if that wasn’t the best sex of your life, I’ll eat this table.” He rapped the table top in satisfaction.

All her own doing.

“You can’t publish,” she said.

“Not this, no.” He picked up one of the fMRIs and admired it. “It’s enough for now to know that it works.”

She waited for anger to well up but nothing happened. “Is this real?”

“The project? Quite real.”

Project. She watched him gather all the documents, tap them into a neat pile.

“Not the project,” she said. “Not the TMS, the fMRIs, the terpazine. This.” She tapped her chest. “Is it real?”

He tilted his head. “Is love real? A lot of people seem to think so. But if you mean, is that what you’re feeling, the answer is, I don’t know. I don’t think a scan could give you that answer. But it could tell us if you’ve changed: your data have been remarkably clear. Not like Cookie’s. Susana’s.” He held the fMRI image up again, admired it some more, then put it back in the pile.

“What do you mean?”

“The data. Yours were perfectly consistent. Hers were . . . erratic.”

“Erratic.” Her mind seemed to be working in another dimension. It took an age for the thought to form. “Like lying?”

“She’s lied about a lot of things.”

“But she could have been lying to me? About how she feels?”

He shrugged. “How can we ever know?”

She stared at him. “The literature,” she said, trying to force her slippery brain to remember what she’d just read. “Its says love’s a feedback loop, right?”

“In terms of individual brain plasticity, yes.”

“So it’s mutual. I can’t love someone if she doesn’t love me.” If it was love.

He gave her a look she couldn’t interpret. “The data don’t support interdependence.” He paused, said more gently, “We don’t know.”

Pity, she realized. He pities me. She felt the first flex and coil of something so far down she couldn’t identify it. “What have you done to me? What else have you done to me?”