“Hey, Doc,” Amos said, and pointed to the leads glued to his skull and chest. “Can I take these things off now?”
Instead of answering, Elvi touched Naomi’s arm and said, “I’m going to need a couple hours. Meet me in my office after that?”
Naomi nodded once, then pulled herself back out of the way as the science team uncoupled Amos and Cara from the devices. Jim followed her. Elvi drifted back, watching everything in the lab and nothing in particular. Getting a sense of gestalt. Her people were moving with precision and purpose. If there was any fear, it was covered over by professionalism and practice. That was good. It was what she needed to know. More than that, it was what she needed to cultivate in herself. She crossed her arms, took a few deep breaths, and tried to be patient until her mind found a little calm. Just as she thought she was doing well, she remembered that Winston Duarte had just popped into existence in her lab, and she had to start over.
Cara came off her medical couch with a drifting grace like a plume of smoke rising from an incense burner or a strip of cloth catching an underwater current. Her smile was soft and lazy, and her cheeks were flushed and dark.
“Are you all right?” Elvi asked.
“I’m perfect,” the girl said. Across the lab, Amos was watching them with a pleasant, empty smile as the last of the contact sensors was removed from his suit.
“I’m going to need to do a little work before we debrief this time,” Elvi said.
“Whatever you need to do,” Cara said, half lost in her bliss.
Elvi opened a connection to the catalyst’s chamber. “What’s the status down there?”
“Catalyst in the box,” Fayez said, “Xan back out of the box. Everything seems very normal except that everyone we talk to from the lab sounds like they’re trying to signal that they’re being held hostage without saying it. What happened up there? Are you being held hostage?”
“Meet me in my office,” she said.
The information gathered by Tanaka hadn’t seemed strange the first time Elvi looked at it. Weird cognitive effects were where the alien technology had started back on Ilus. Before that, with the protomolecule version of Jim’s friend getting remade in his sensory cortices. Human consciousness was simple enough that the repair drones on Laconia were able to make working approximations of what some people wanted to have fixed. Xan. Amos. A sampling drone Cara had accidentally shattered once.
Only now, going back over it, did she start to see the holes.
Did you have any experiences associated with the event? Tanaka had said.
There wasn’t even a gap to think about it before the subject said, Oh yeah. Oh, hell yeah.
And there the interview ended. Instead of the primary data or the direct conversation, Tanaka had put in a short data summary: Reports dreamlike hallucinations of being another person and/or being connected to a large number of other people. Claims memory of hallucinatory experiences remains clear over time.
Over and over, all through the data, the same language came up. Instead of actual experiential reports, Tanaka and her team gave versions of their own. Elvi had been in academics long enough to recognize when someone was glossing over data and skipping straight to interpretation. It almost always meant they were avoiding something they found unpalatable.
Naomi, Jim, and Fayez floated in her private office. It didn’t leave a lot of spare room. Or maybe it was fine, but she was so accustomed to having it be just her and Cara talking after a dive that the extra bodies felt unfamiliar. Or that she was frustrated and anything would have annoyed her at the moment.
“What we know for sure,” Elvi said, “is that he wasn’t here. No images on the security cameras, even while I was talking with him. No evidence of him interacting with anything physical beyond, of course, each of our individual brains.”
“We have evidence that he did that?” Jim asked.
“We saw him,” Elvi said, and regretted her tone as Jim recoiled a little. It wasn’t his fault that he hadn’t thought all this through. She made an effort to soften her tone. “The fact that we had those experiences is evidence. If we’d been doing control imaging on someone who wasn’t altered, we’d probably be able to map it, but even absent that, we have a correlation of experience that seems pretty conclusive.”
“You all saw the same thing,” Fayez said, “so there was probably some objective reality to it, even if it’s just that you all got fucked with the same way at the same time.”