She had a lot to think about after the meeting with the twins last night.
Finally, Riah decided she needed to process that discussion in light of her thoughts about who she was, what she was capable of, and what the two men whom she assumed shared her condition were working with Cyrus Arlington to do.
After a few minutes of reflection, she texted her supervisor and told him she was taking the day off for personal leave.
Dawn.
Returning to the cabin, I find Charlene awake and finishing a cup of coffee. The air smells of dark-roasted java.
She looks up, gives me a slightly concerned smile. “Hey, I was looking for you. Where were you?”
“Went for a walk.” I decide not to tell her how long I’ve been up already.
I see that she has set out a mug for me by the coffeemaker in the kitchenette, and I angle across the room toward it. “How’s your arm?”
She holds it up and stares at it as if she hadn’t noticed before that it was injured. “Hurts some, but not as bad as I thought it would. I think it’s going to be alright. How was the couch?”
“Not too bad.”
She already knows that over the last year I’ve had trouble sleeping, and it probably goes without saying that my dreams had taken their toll on me last night as well. She doesn’t ask and I don’t elaborate.
“So then, dear”—she drains her coffee and goes for her purse, confirms that she has the RF jammer and the tiny, concealable heart rate monitor—“I believe we have breakfast and then a meeting with Dr. Tanbyrn.”
I take a long draught of my coffee, finish most of it. Set down the mug. I can feel my stomach rumble. Truthfully, breakfast sounds like just what I need. “Yes, dear. I think we do.”
On my walk I hadn’t come up with any specific plan on how to debunk this research — or how I might replicate it through illusions or the tricks of mentalism. But getting video footage of this morning’s test would be a good place to start.
I put on the small button camera that Xavier provided for me, and since I’ll be needing the lap function on my stopwatch when Charlene is in the chamber, I make sure that it’s working too.
It is.
Good.
To keep up the illusion that Charlene and I are in love, we walk to the dining hall hand in hand.
Riah stepped out of the shower.
Dressed.
And thought back to the events of last night.
In the end it was probably best that Cyrus hadn’t come over because this way it gave her some time to sort through what the twins had told her.
Daniel had explained that the research being done in Oregon was meant to complement her own work here in Pennsylvania. “Dr. Tanbyrn and his team are mostly interested in studying the physiological changes in one person while another person who is emotionally or genetically close—”
“Or in our case, both,” Darren cut in.
“Is attentively focused on him—”
“—in a positive, loving way.”
“Mind-to-mind communication,” she said dubiously.
“Yes,” Darren answered.
Riah considered that. Even though she knew RixoTray was financially supporting the research, Cyrus had kept most of it under wraps and she knew surprisingly little about the nature of the research in Oregon.
She used diffusion tensor imaging, magnetoencephalography, fMRI, and EEG to measure the excitement patterns in the Wernicke’s area of the temporal lobe. By better understanding how the two men processed communication, her team had been hoping to—
Aha.
“So, are you saying that if we could learn to excite the section of the brain related to mind-to-mind communication, you could heighten the — what? The connection? Intensify it somehow?” She was thinking aloud, and by the looks on the twins’ faces, she was right on track. “Enhance the ability to… connect with each other?”
The twins exchanged glances and then nodded almost simultaneously. Cyrus’s gaze crawled toward the clock on the wall as if he were perhaps expecting someone, or maybe he was just biding his time until he could maneuver the twins out of this uncomfortable meeting.
Riah knew that the Department of Defense was funding her research in the hopes of eventually developing a brain-computer interface to help troops communicate in the field by creating a device that could detect, decode, and then transmit neural linguistic information to other troops.
It could be used to help soldiers communicate in field conditions that wouldn’t allow for normal speech, such as in the middle of a firefight when words couldn’t be heard, or when any sound would alert the enemy, such as sneaking into a terrorist compound.
Communication of neural linguistic information.
Now she wasn’t so sure that was all the study concerned.
Riah draped her necklace around her neck.
Began to brush her hair.
She might’ve felt used by Cyrus and the twins, might’ve felt that her research was part of a big picture that she’d never been told about, and that was essentially true, but to a certain degree that was true about all the research at the R&D facility.
After all, the financial implications of an information leak were so devastating that just like in any sensitive government or private-sector medical research project, nearly all the researchers at RixoTray did their work strictly on a need-to-know basis. Progress was more often than not about one person piggybacking on the work of another to answer a question neither of them fully understood.
After the discussion about the center in Oregon, the conversation had shifted away from the Lawson Center’s research, and Darren turned to Cyrus. “I was told you have the video.”
“Not yet. But I will. Tomorrow. A courier will be delivering it.”
Daniel addressed Riah: “When you see the video, you’ll know what we mean. What the research concerns.”
“Kabul?” she asked, referring back to what he’d mentioned earlier in the evening, when she and Cyrus first met up with them.
“Yes.” Darren sounded pleased that she’d made the connection.
After that they discussed her findings at length, and it was almost as if she was the one who’d been brought in to do the briefing, even though she was the only person there who hadn’t prepared for it at all.
Honestly, Riah didn’t understand why the twins’ conversation with Cyrus couldn’t have all happened over the phone, but apparently they were the ones who’d called for the meeting, and their motives were not always easy to decipher.
At last when Cyrus stood to go, Darren had asked him, “So tomorrow, the video. What time will it arrive?”
“In the afternoon. Sometime between five and six.”
“We’ll see you at six then. In your office. And we would like Riah to be present as well.”
A pause. “Alright.”
“Williamson will be there?”
“She won’t land in Philadelphia until six thirty. She’s coming in at seven.”
“Well, let’s come at seven then too, so we can watch it together, make sure we’re all on the same page. Everything happens when the president—”
“I know when it all happens.” Cyrus was looking at Riah, and she understood that he was cutting off Darren to keep something from her.
“Alright,” Daniel said. “So, seven?”
“Yes,” Cyrus said coolly. “Seven.”
So now, Riah decided to start an online search of journal articles concerning the findings of the center in Oregon. Even though she had until this evening to look into things, if the research was anywhere near as complex and detailed as hers, it might take at least that long to sift through it all.