Chapter 9 What Dez Printed

Dez Quenby gave her the printout the way he did everything, sideways and without a word. It was folded into the sleeve of a clean towel, which he set on the end of berth three's bed during the morning round, and Cleo did not find it until after breakfast, and by then he was gone from the floor and the next shift was on. It was twelve pages, stapled once in the corner, and the header on page one said *protocol annex, rev. 6 — internal circulation only*. Below the header, in the dry language of grant paperwork, was the machinery of the study laid out as a design. The study was not about sleep. Sleep was the medium. The study was about whether a person could be given a memory that was not theirs, and could hold it, and could report it later as their own, under conditions where the person's own account was the only evidence that mattered. The protocol called this capacity *carryover*, and it described carryover as a property of some participants and not others, like a blood type, and it described the screening for it as the first two quiet nights, which were not quiet at all but measured whether a participant would, without being asked, fill in the gaps of a missing interval with content that had been supplied to her earlier in the same night. Most participants did not. Cohort C had been selected because four of its five members did. The mechanism was in the annex, in plain language, because the annex was written for lawyers and doctors and not for participants. On a hold night, during the *practice* block at 02:15, the participant was read a scripted memory in a voice matched to her own recording, and asked a question designed to be answered. The scripted memory was rehearsed again on later hold nights, in pieces, in the same voice, until the participant's own account of the interval began to include it. By the fourteenth night, the annex said, a high-capacity participant could be relied upon to report at least two scripted memories as personal, and to defend them as hers if challenged, and to describe them with the sensory detail of experience rather than the flatness of a story heard. On page eleven there was a name for what the funder wanted the capacity for, and the name was not a monster's name. It was a procurement term. *Witness preparation*, the annex said, *for parties whose testimony requires a remembered past the subject did not live.* Cleo read page eleven twice, and then she read the back of page eleven, because page twelve was an addendum, and the addendum was a consent form, and the form had her signature on it, and the box at the top was ticked, and the box was labelled *transfer of unconsolidated material*. There was a date on it. It was four days before her intake, which meant it had been signed around the time she had been sitting in her sister's kitchen doing the arithmetic of nineteen thousand dollars, and around the time she had been telling Nita that she had finally found a way to sleep. She had no memory of signing it. She had, at that point in her life, no memory of the Institute at all. She took the pages to the drying room, because the drying room had no camera, and she read them again, and then she did the thing she had been putting off for a week, which was to stop assuming that the unreliable record in this building was the paper. The Institute's records were consistent. They agreed with each other. They agreed with the annex and the schedule and the countdown. Her own records — her notebook, her counting, her recollections — were the only ones that disagreed, and a person who keeps the only record that disagrees with every other record has to consider, at least once, the possibility that she is the anomaly and not the witness. She considered it for the length of one drying cycle. Then she turned to page twelve again, and looked at her initials in the corner of the addendum, drawn in one stroke with the small unnecessary tick, and she decided that a forger who could copy her *g* and her *t* and the tick was a forger who did not need her to have signed anything, and that the only way to find out which of them was true was to catch the Institute in a record that did not agree with itself. She asked Dez, that night, why he had given it to her. He was on the corridor with the tray cart and the answer took him the length of two doors. He said that the annex was on the shared drive, that the shared drive was supposed to be purged at the end of each phase and had not been purged in a year, and that he had found the annex eleven months ago when he was new and had read it and had said something about it to Sandoz, and that Sandoz had told him to hold on to his job and his opinions in that order. He said that he had copied the annex that week and had kept it on a personal drive and had never once used it, and that he was giving it to her now because she was the fourth participant in a year to ask him the same question he had asked Sandoz, and because three of the four had withdrawn and one had gone quiet and none of them had ever seen a page of it. She asked him what he wanted. He said he wanted the study to be on a record that was not the study's, and that he was not brave and that he was not a whistleblower and that he would deny every word of this if asked, and that a person who keeps his own copy for eleven months and then hands it to a participant over a towel is not a good man, only a man who got tired of the alternative. Then he pushed the cart past her and said the schedule, the schedule, into the middle distance, and that was the end of it. The annex had twelve pages and she read all of them on the floor of the berth with her back to the door, and the pages said things the corridors had only implied. Page one said the study was funded by contract and the contract was fixed-fee and the deliverable was *prepared witness material*. Page three said the screening for carryover capacity took the first two quiet nights and that participants were not told what the screening measured, because telling them would defeat it. Page six said the money was paid on delivery of the final account and that the account was the work product and the property of the funder and that participants waived their own interest in the recordings of their own voices. Page nine said the protocol had been run four times and that the success rate was high and that the failures were not failures of the technique but failures of the participant, by which the annex meant that the participant had refused to deliver the account. She read page nine twice more, and understood that she was not the first, and that the word *failure* in the annex was a name for the people who had left, and that three of the four withdrawals Dez had mentioned were also three of the failures in the annex, and that the study did not mind a person leaving so long as the leaving happened before the twenty-eighth night, because a person who leaves is a person who could not hold the material, and a person who cannot hold the material is not the product. On page eleven the annex described what happened to the material when a participant could not hold it, which was that the material was returned to the bank and the residual was re-extracted at the next consent, and that a residual was defined, in a footnote, as *that portion of a participant's own history which the protocol has found it useful to hold*. Cleo lay on the floor of berth three with the twelve pages beside her and did the arithmetic one more time, and the arithmetic said that somewhere in a folder with her name on it there was a piece of her own history that the protocol had found it useful to hold, and that the piece had been extracted at a consent, and that the only consent she could find in the whole of the study was a signature in a box she did not remember initialling, on a form dated eleven months ago, in a year she had spent almost entirely at her mother's bedside, doing the one thing she had ever been good at, which was to sign what had to be signed and keep the numbers straight. She folded the annex into the lining of her bag, beside the notebook, and sat with the door closed and the fans running, and she began to plan the thing that she would regret planning, which was to steal the Gallery. ---