第27章 The Master Source

Riverbend Penitentiary had not changed in the year since Sarah had last stood in its visitation hall, and neither, she thought, had the woman on the other side of the glass. Dr. Mina Osei sat with her wrists cuffed to the chair, her silver hair pulled back in its severe knot, and she watched Sarah take her seat with the patient, measuring attention of a scientist examining a slide. "You look tired, Detective," Osei said. "More tired than last time. What kept you up?" Sarah set the manila folder on the metal table and slid a photograph across the shelf. It was a scan of Martin Ellery's temporal lobe, the phantom pattern circled in red ink. "Tell me what this is." Osei studied the image for a long time. Something moved behind her eyes, a flicker of the interest Sarah had learned to read in her during a year of visits. "Where did you get this?" "A man on the harbor bridge. He woke up in a hospital bed with another man's memories in his head. A wedding in 1990. A dock at night. Three men and a body." Sarah watched her. "He described the night Frank Kowalski died, Doctor. In detail. From the dock." Osei set the photograph down slowly. Her hands, cuffed to the chair, were very still. "Then it's begun," she said. "I wondered how long it would take." "Begin what?" "Open your file, Detective. The one you never wrote. You've been carrying something in your head for six months, a pattern that grows a little more with every scan. You told me about it, last spring. You said it looked like a signal being received." Osei's voice was calm, almost kind, the voice she used when she was explaining something that gave her pleasure. "What did you think it was?" "I thought you did it to me. In the chair, the night you tried to take Kowalski." "I did take pieces of you that night. I told you that. But the pattern isn't mine. I didn't put it there. I couldn't have." Osei leaned forward as far as the cuffs allowed. "The pattern is the master link. It was put in your head twenty-six years before I ever put you in that chair. And it is the reason you are still alive." Sarah was very still. "Explain." "Do you remember what Vance found? The list from the Archive. Your name, under the category architect. Transfer date, March 1990." Osei waited. "You thought it was an error. It was not. In March 1990, a young patrol officer named Sarah Chen responded to a noise call at Riverside University, in the basement of the psychology building, and walked into the middle of a procedure that was never supposed to be witnessed." Sarah felt the phantom pattern stir behind her eyes, a warmth at her temple like a struck match. "I've never been to that building. I have no memory of it." "Of course you don't. I took it." Osei said it simply, without pride, the way a woman states a fact of weather. "I took that night out of your head, along with everything it contained, and I closed the door behind it. The procedure was very clean. You woke up on a bench outside the library with a headache and a schedule to keep, and you went home, and you never knew the night had happened." "Then how do I carry a master link?" "Because you were carrying something else," Osei said. "Something that did not belong to me." She paused, and when she spoke again her voice had lost some of its calm. "Iris Solano. My student. My finest student. She built the architecture of the procedure, the resonance mapping that made extraction possible. I have told you about her. What I did not tell you is that when Iris learned what the department intended to do with her work, she refused. She hid the master records. And when she knew they were coming for her, she did the only thing she could think of: she gave them away." Osei's eyes met Sarah's. "She was in that basement in March 1990, Detective. She had the master cylinder in her hands, and the department men were at the door, and there was a young officer standing in the corridor with a badge who had no idea what she was looking at. Iris made a choice in that moment. She pressed the headset to your head and poured the whole of it in — the architecture, the records, the procedure, the names. Everything she had. And she said two words to you before my people pulled her off." "Finish it," Sarah said. The words came out of her without her willing them, and she felt the pattern flare behind her eyes, hot and bright. "Yes." Osei looked at her for a long moment. "You see, the link has always been there. It was never closed. I buried it — I made you forget the night, forget the building, forget the face of the woman who gave you everything you carry — but I could not remove the knowledge itself. It is too deep. It is part of your architecture now. And Iris, for her part, was never fully emptied. I kept her body alive, in a place where no one would find her, because a mind that had held the master records was too valuable to lose. She has been sleeping for twenty-six years, Detective, in a bed on the north edge of this city, and everything she ever harvested — the original Lattice records, the night your mentor was taken — is still inside her, waiting." Sarah's hands were flat on the table. "Where." Osei told her. Braithwaite Pavilion, a private neurological care home on the north edge of the city, a long low building behind iron gates on a road the city had forgotten. Patient Esther Lang, admitted April 2006, unresponsive, no visitors. "And someone has found her," Osei said. "Someone has built a machine that can read her — a transmitter, keyed to her engrams. The foreman on the bridge caught a fragment of the 2006 harvest because Iris's brain holds the night your mentor died, and the transmitter is playing it back the way a radio plays a station." She smiled, the small sad smile. "The broadcast is the leakage. The signal that reaches you is the master link, answering the only receiver it was ever tuned to." "So whoever built that machine," Sarah said slowly, "is harvesting the master library. From her. And when they finish with her—" "They will come for the copy," Osei finished. "For you. You are the second source, Detective. You always were. That is why I kept you alive through everything. That is why, the night I put you in the chair, I took only what you could spare. The master records were never in the surface layer. They are in the deep architecture, where the machine could not reach." She sat back. "You have been carrying the whole of Project Lattice in your head for twenty-six years, Sarah Chen. The question was never whether someone would come for it. The question was when." Sarah stood up. The phantom pattern was burning at her temple now, a steady heat, and for the first time she understood what it was for. It was not damage. It was a call. She walked to the door and stopped with her hand on it. "Why are you telling me this?" Osei looked at her across the glass, and her expression was almost gentle. "Because I am tired, Detective. Because it has been a long time since anyone asked me what I actually knew. And because," she said, "if you are going to find Iris before they drain her, you will need to know exactly what you are carrying when you stand beside her bed." Sarah walked out into the gray afternoon and stood in the parking lot with her hands in her pockets, feeling the city hum under her feet, the way it had hummed the first night she pressed her palm to the north wall of the warehouse. She pulled out her phone and called Okafor. "Braithwaite Pavilion," she said. "Find me everything on it. And find me everything on a company called Eidetic Systems." ---