The Extinction Trials(49)

Alister shook his head. “This is inane.”

“It’s fascinating,” Cara snapped. “Continue, Will, please. Ignore him.”

“As I said before, I was on a team dedicated to one client: Genesis Biosciences.” Will turned to Maya. “You said you worked there?”

“Yes.”

“Do you remember your role?”

“Not exactly. There’s only a single memory— going to work, changing clothes, and going into a clean room. I think I was a scientist working on something biological. Perhaps a pathogen. Or a dangerous chemical.” She paused. “But I also remember Parrish telling me my job was complicated.”

“Meaning?” Cara asked.

“I’m not sure. Maybe I was… well, I don’t know.”

Owen sensed she was holding back. On what, he wasn’t sure.

“What I can tell you,” Will said, “is that Genesis Bio, or as we called it, GB, was founded to solve neurological conditions. Their founder had a single belief: that the true threat to humanity begins and ends in our brains.”

The words reminded Owen of the book his mother had given him, The Birthright. Was there a connection?

“GB’s initial focus was on therapies to treat traumatic brain injuries and degenerative neurological conditions. Their approach to the project was radically different from other pharma and biotech organizations. Instead of creating a therapy in a lab and testing it, they bought data. Large amounts of data. From hospitals. From other groups that had run failed trials. Even from governments—from their prison systems and the militaries. It was all de-identified. Their goal was to do a meta-analysis of existing studies and data, none of it publicly available, and to see what it told them. The principle was that the answers were there, that solutions could be derived from the data we already had but had never been processed enough to see it. They hired ARC to do that data warehousing and processing. Our role was to design machine learning algorithms that scanned and rescanned the data until it made sense. That was what Revelation was.”

Will paused a moment, letting the others process what he had said. “There were several branches of the project dedicated to different outcomes. I know one was looking specifically at the brain activity of criminals. The premise was simple: do people who break the law think differently than those who don’t?”

“What did you find?” Cara asked.

“We found that they indeed do.”

“Nonsense,” Alister said. “It’s one of those… correlation and causation things.”

“We accounted for that,” Will said quietly. “GB had enough data to prove definitely that there are brain patterns that precede criminal activity.”

“Why did I never hear about this?” Owen asked.

“A good question. It’s one I asked myself while working on the project. I don’t know the answer. But I think the most obvious is that this information would’ve turned the world upside down. What is the solution? Clearly, if you could create a device that monitored people’s thoughts, then you could eliminate crime. What are the implications? A society whose thoughts are policed? What sort of society is that? And what might someone do if they could abuse that power? What I find most interesting is that Genesis didn’t seem to be focused on that particular revelation. They were far more interested in memories.”

“As in, erasing them?” Maya asked.

“No,” Will replied, “or at least not on the project I worked on. They were far more interested in how memories were stored. Their focus was on memory alteration. On people who had experienced traumatic events. The goal was to help them come to grips with what happened. The solution was a slight modification to the memory, so that when someone recalled those events, they didn’t create problems for them. GB’s thesis was that bad memories altered brain composition—like a malfunctioning immune system, or how cancer might wreak havoc on the physical body.”

“Fascinating,” Cara mumbled, seeming deep in thought.

“Did it work?” Alister asked.

“Yes,” Will said. “In the early trials they were successful at modifying memories. People who were essentially unable to live a happy and healthy life because of something that happened to them were able to completely overcome these traumas. There were no adverse effects either.”

“How?” Maya asked.

“I don’t know,” Will replied. “I only saw the data from the trials. But I know Genesis saw these therapies as a turning point for the human race. They believed that memory modification and maintenance was the key to a happier, more sustainable future. He glanced over at Maya. Something you said is very much like what Genesis believed, that we don’t always remember what happened, but we remember how it makes us feel. And to some extent, we are the product of how our memories have changed how we see the world and how we behave.”

Owen paced the deck. “The implication of what you’ve said—if it’s true—if Genesis could modify memories, is that our own memories, what we’ve shared here, might not even be true. We could simply be remembering what Genesis wants us to… What ARC implanted in our minds.”





Chapter Thirty-Nine





Alister shook his head. “Not me. I remember that bus hitting the server room as real as we’re standing here right now.”