“Can we show you something?” Adrienne asked.
Shapiro turned back to her.
“Then—if you want—we’ll leave,” Adrienne promised.
“Deal,” Shapiro replied.
Adrienne dug into her purse until she found the Polaroid snapshot of the implant. Wordlessly, she handed it to Shapiro.
Who, farsighted, held it at arm’s length, squinting with skepticism. But, soon, his face went slack, and he looked up. “Where did you get this?” he asked.
“A neurosurgeon took it out of me,” McBride told him. “Less than a week ago.”
Shapiro’s eyes returned to the photograph, which he studied for a long while. Finally, he gave a little shake of his head and, handing the snapshot back to Adrienne, said, “Come on in.”
Chapter 34
At a gesture from Shapiro, they removed their shoes. The interior of his cabin was a minimalist masterpiece. Tatami mats on scrubbed pine floors, walls so white they seemed to have been whitewashed. A green enamel woodstove stood at one end of the room, which was furnished entirely by a low table made of pine and half a dozen cushions. An ikebana arrangement—consisting of a single white orchid and two arching blades of long, dried grass—rested on the table.
Shapiro placed the snapshot beside the flower arrangement. “Please,” he said, gesturing to the cushions. A few minutes later, he emerged from behind a shoji screen with a tray that held a squat, gunmetal teapot and three tiny cups. Setting the tray on the table, he subsided into a sitting position, and poured the tea. McBride realized that since he and Adrienne had entered the house, neither of them had spoken a word.
Shapiro blew vigorously across the surface of his tea, took a sip, and set the cup aside. Then he picked up the photograph of the implant, held it in the light, and examined it. Finally, he shook his head and said, “My legacy… “ His mouth spread in a grimace.
Adrienne inclined her head toward the snapshot. “What would this thing do to a person?” she asked. “Exactly.”
Shapiro shrugged. “‘Exactly’? I don’t know. I’d have to take it apart—in a lab—and even then… there’s been a lot of water under the bridge.”
“But—”
“If you want to learn what this does, or what it might do, you’re going to have to do a lot of reading. Starting with Delgado.”
“Who’s ‘Delgado’?” Adrienne asked.
“The Times ran a front-page story on him more than thirty years ago,” Shapiro replied. “I think he was at Yale.” He paused, and sipped his tea. “There was a picture of him—standing in the bull ring with a transmitter—the bull right in front of him, pawing the ground. Tremendous showmanship!”
“And what happened?” Adrienne asked.
“Well, he stopped the bull, cold—in midcharge. Very dramatic. Then he pushed a second button, and the creature turned and sauntered away.”
“So it was like a shock collar,” Adrienne suggested. “Or an electric fence.”
“Oh, no—not at all,” Shapiro corrected. “This was nothing so simple. In fact, it was actually a dual test—the first button activated an electrode that controlled the bull’s motor cortex. The second button targeted the hippocampus, which turned the animal’s anger into indifference.”
McBride frowned. This wasn’t anything new. He’d read all about Delgado as an undergraduate. Everyone had. “What about this?” he asked, tapping the photograph with his forefinger.
For the first time, Shapiro looked uncomfortable.
“Look,” he said, “I’m a dinosaur. I’ve been out of the field for… “ He caught himself, and smiled. “… a long time. But there are things I can’t talk about. I signed a secrecy agreement. So…”
“Hypothetically,” Adrienne cajoled.
Shapiro sighed. “I suppose it could be a miniaturized version of… certain devices… that might have been used experimentally… at one time or another.”
McBride snorted at the old man’s circumlocution, which brought a frown to Shapiro’s face.
Turning his eyes to Adrienne, the old man shrugged. “There’s a lot in the open literature. I don’t suppose I’d be giving anything away if I told you what it looks like.”
“Which is what?”
“A depth electrode.”
“And what would that do?”
He shrugged again. “Depends…”
“On what?” Adrienne asked.
“The frequency to which it’s tuned,” McBride suggested.
Shapiro smiled. “Very good.”
“And if you had to guess—” McBride began.
“Four to seven megahertz might be interesting,” Shapiro told them.
“Why?” Adrienne asked.
“Because it’s the hypnoidal EEG frequency—and, hypothetically, it would enable the reception of a sinewave that… ummm, could entrain the brain.”
“‘Entrain’?” Adrienne repeated the word to make sure she had it right. It was the same word that Doctor Shaw had used when she’d told him about McBride’s behavior at Bethany Beach—when he logged onto that Web site. The program, or whatever it was called.
“It’s when the brain locks onto a particular signal,” McBride explained. “A flashing light, a repetitive sound—especially one that’s been established in a trance state. They say the brain’s ‘entrained’ to the signal.”
Shapiro was impressed. “You’ve done your homework.”
“I’m a psychologist,” McBride told him.
“But what would happen?” Adrienne asked. “What would the purpose be?”
“Well,” the old man replied, “it would allow a trance state to be continually refreshed and reinforced without the necessity of rehypnotizing the subject.”
“So if you had one of these in your head, you’d be… what? Hypnotized all the time?”
“More or less,” Shapiro said. “Though there’s no reason to believe that that’s its only function.”
“Why not?” McBride asked.
Shapiro refreshed their cups of tea, which Adrienne drank more from politeness than thirst. It tasted like burnt seaweed.
“Because everything’s changed,” Shapiro finally replied. “An implant like this would probably use nano technology. It would have computers embedded in it. And God knows what else.”
“But what for?”
“Hypothetically? I suppose one could introduce certain ‘scenarios’ that, coupled with hypnosis, would go a long way toward establishing a sort of… ‘virtual biography.’”
Adrienne and McBride chewed on the expression. “‘A virtual biography’… “ Adrienne repeated.
“A phony past—but one that felt right. Up to a point.”
“Christ,” McBride muttered.
Shapiro smiled. “Memory’s not much more than a slurry of chemicals and electrical potentials—which aren’t that difficult to manipulate, if you know what you’re doing. For instance—it’s well-known—if you raise the level of acetylcholine in the brain—and you can do that by hitting the subject with radio waves at ultrasonic frequencies—the synapses begin to fire more and more slowly until… well, until they don’t fire at all. And when that happens, remembering becomes impossible. The memories are there, but they’re inaccessible.”
“So you could impose amnesia,” Adrienne suggested.
“Exactly. More tea?”
It was all so civilized, McBride thought. This charming and matter-of-fact old man, serving tea in his ascetic little house. Under the circumstances, it was hard to hate him for the damage that he’d done, hard to conjure the horrors that he’d contrived. Hard, but not impossible. McBride could feel the anger rising, a primitive ruckus in the back of his mind. The bulls. The cats. The ochre room. The virtual Jeff Duran. He’d like to smack this syrupy son of a bitch—let him know what the sound of one-hand-clapping was really like. Instead, he said, “Let me ask you a question.”