Exodus 2022 by Kenneth G. Bennett Read Free Book Online Page A

toward the ghostlike images of the little girls. “I said these aren’t real kids.” He looked at his companions. Saw the confusion on their faces. “It didn’t make sense to us either, at first.”
    “And now it does?” asked Kate.
    Beck shrugged and glanced involuntarily toward a sprawling workstation on the far side of the War Room. “We have a theory,” he replied.
    Kate caught the glance and understood. By “We have a theory,” her brother meant “Orondo Ring has a theory.”
    Orondo Ring was her brother’s secret weapon. Ring was a genius, and Erebus’s lead scientist. A math prodigy, with PhDs in artificial intelligence, physics, and IT infrastructure design, Ring’s innovations had generated numerous patents for the company, and Sheldon Beck had gone out of his way to pull Ring into his sphere of control. Had, in fact, designed the room they were standing in with Ring in mind. To Ring’s specifications.
    “What’s the theory?” Kate asked.
    Beck looked at the group. Took his time. 
    “Thought capture,” he said at last, “takes an enormous amount of processing power. Even for the new quantum computers, the requirements are staggering. It’s one of the reasons the Feds didn’t start using TC for interrogation until 2018. Took too long. Downloads too unwieldy.” He tapped the side of his head. “Human thought is complex. Data-rich.”
    Kate sighed, impatient. “So?”
    “So these particular captures—the images of the little girls—are all wrong. Way too light.”
    “What do you mean, ‘light’?” Edelstein asked.
    “I mean the downloads are small,” said Beck. “Far too small to represent actual people.”
    He pointed at the picture of John Galbreth. “Take Galbreth. The guy was on his deathbed. Experiencing seizure after seizure. Nothing we could do. We hooked him up to the feed and started asking him questions. ‘Who’s Lorna Gwin? What happened to her? What happened to you?’ And so on. And as we’re asking these questions we’re also watching the monitors, expecting a big jump in the fMRI patterns and a torrent of data to start roaring in.”
    Beck looked at his companions. “That’s what happens in interrogation. You ask a terrorist where he planted the bomb, and the thought-capture hardware practically catches on fire, there’s so much data. All those raw memories and emotions: Streets. Buildings. Faces. Thoughts. Fears. Colors. Smells. Sounds. It all comes flooding in at once. A deluge of information straight from the neurons in the visual cortex to the hardware and software that untangles it all. Sorts it. Catalogs it.
    “Real memories, especially recent, vivid memories, take up an enormous amount of space. Galbreth’s memories of his little girl—or at least of her physical presence— weren’t like that. The images were hollow. Insubstantial.”
    Kate nodded at the screens. “So these kids are…what? Made up?”
    “Right,” said Beck. “They’re constructions. Like characters your brain might generate to populate a dream. The emotions underlying the images are real. But the pictures are fake.
    “For whatever reason, the men couldn’t conjure an image of the actual dead child they were grieving. The true Lorna Gwin. So they fabricated a little girl to accompany the raw anguish flooding their minds. These images are…placeholders. We think so anyway.”
    The group fell silent again, digesting Beck’s information.
    After a while, Kate spoke, exasperated. “What could cause something like this?”
    “We don’t know,” said Beck. “We’re working on it.”
    Kate nodded toward Phelps. “He’s part of your team now. What does the high-priced neuroscientist have to say?”
    Phelps laughed. “This is a new one on me.”
    He stepped toward the screens. “If it were just a psychosomatic response to stimuli, I’d suspect a drug. A toxin. But the same—or virtually the same—hallucination across four individuals? I’ve never heard of anything like