Virtually Undead Read online

  “I’m happy to hear that. I’ll be sure to keep it in mind. Is there anything else you’d like to get off your chest? Go on. I’m listening.”

  “So…” Harold Strong sipped his coffee and squinted down into the cup. “It turns out that every one of the Remington Simulations bodysuits has a small, extra wire on the left side of the torso, right over the heart, as it turns out, through which an electric current can be delivered.”

  Michael stared. “All of them? Not just the ten?”

  “All of them. What’s even more interesting is that the schematics for the suit’s construction don’t show this wire. It’s not supposed to be there.”

  Michael paused. “So,” he finally said, “how did it get there?”

  Harold Strong grimaced. “We don’t know yet.”

  “There are no prior accidents? This is the first time it’s happened? That somebody has died wearing one?”

  “Yep.”

  “Why are you telling me? What do I have to do with all this?” It occurred to Michael that Richard Kurtz had asked him the same thing.

  Harold Strong sat back in his seat and gave Michael a gloomy look. “You are considered an expert on brain computer interface devices.”

  Michael narrowed his eyes. “It’s my main research focus. What do BCI’s have to do with ten people dropping dead?”

  “It has occurred to more than one of the investigators on this case that a lot of it makes no sense.”

  In books and movies, Michael thought, a mystery never does make sense, not until the end, when the intrepid detective finally, through some brilliant burst of insight, figures it all out. “Okay,” he said cautiously.

  “I told you about the traffic light, that kept turning green before it was supposed to, and the overflow system in the sewer that kept overflowing, even though it wasn’t raining.”

  “You did,” Michael said.

  “Well, they’ve stopped.”

  “Ah…and I imagine you don’t know why.”

  “We don’t know why they started and we don’t know why they stopped.”

  One of the things that doctors rarely talked about, and certainly not with their patients, was how mysterious so much of the human body could be, including, of course, all the things that can go wrong with it. When Michael was in his third year of medical school, he had a patient with the symptoms of aphthous stomatitis, genital ulcerations and migratory polyarthritis. Everyone was baffled, until some bright third-year resident recognized this triad as ‘Behcet’s Syndrome.’ The problem was that giving it a name told them nothing about the cause, exactly how it all worked, what was going on at a cellular and sub-cellular level, or a treatment.

  It was one of the things you came to realize, once you got into the clinical rotations—how so many people complained of aches and ailments which came, could never be diagnosed, or were at least poorly understood, and generally resolved themselves on their own. There were sometimes names applied to these conditions, names which gave the illusion that the medical community was somehow on top of the situation, but often, these names were merely descriptive—like Behcet’s Syndrome. If you have this symptom, you’re likely to have that symptom as well, and it’s likely to last for a predictable number of days and go away without any treatment.

  Or not.

  Treatments, primarily steroids (steroids were always worth trying, when you had nothing else to try), sometimes helped whatever it was to resolve itself a little quicker, or not…

  Physicians, the good ones, at least, the ones with open minds, get used to not quite knowing what was going on. Michael figured that cops did, too.

  “Life is full of little mysteries,” Michael said.

  “This, I realize,” Harold Strong said. “Big ones, too.”

  “So, what does the NYPD and the FBI make of all this?”

  “There’s more. In addition to this wire that isn’t supposed to be there, the programming contains a set of commands that allow an electrical charge to be sent down the wire.”

  By now, Michael was almost expecting this, or something like it. “Oh, well…I’ll bet that isn’t supposed to be there, either.”

  “No.” Harold Strong shook his head. “No, it most definitely is not.”

  “So, every one of these suits is a potential murder weapon. They were deliberately designed to kill people.”

  “In a word, yes.”

  “Awkward,” Michael said.

  Harold Strong morosely nodded.

  “Who else knows about this?”

  “Aside from the cops and the FBI? Nobody.”

  “So, why are you telling me?”

  “Right now, interviews are being conducted in all ten cities where the victims lived. In light of this new information, we’re re-visiting all their contacts. We were hoping that you could re-examine what you know about Mr. Guthrie. Had anybody threatened him, even obliquely? Is there anybody who had cause to resent or dislike him? Had he ever had any prior contact with Remington Simulations, or anything to do with their business, or with any of Remington’s competitors?” Harold Strong shrugged. “Stuff like that.”

  Michael leaned back in his seat and looked warily at Harold Strong. “Am I a suspect?”

  “If you were, I wouldn’t tell you. However, since you’re not, I can tell you that we have no reason to suspect you of this or any other crime.”

  “I seem to recall reading that it’s not illegal for the police to lie to people. I’m wondering if I should have a lawyer present if I ever talk to you again.”

  “Oh, for Christ’s sake. You’re not a suspect, okay?”

  Michael scratched his head. “Somebody has been planning this for a long time.”

  “No doubt.”

  “The technology had to be invented. The suits had to be designed. They had to be manufactured, with an extra wire that wasn’t included in the original specifications, and some lines of code that weren’t supposed to be there. Was it just that one wire? Any other little extras?”

  “Yeah, actually.” Harold Strong wrinkled his nose and frowned down into his empty cup. “There are electrodes inside the helmet. A lot of them. The techs knew they were there but they regarded them as a design feature. What they didn’t know until they actually looked, was that these electrodes link up to the console by Bluetooth.”

  Michael stared at him.

  “Your mouth is hanging open,” Harold Strong said.

  Michael closed his mouth. “And what does the NYPD and the FBI make of these electrodes?”

  Harold Strong frowned. “They’re not certain.”

  “And if I hadn’t asked, were you going to tell me about them?”

  “I was. I hadn’t gotten to it, yet.”

  Michael glanced at the clock. “I want to see this,” he said.

  Harold Strong shrugged. “Sure.” He smiled. “We were hoping you would.”

  “My last patient is due in a couple of minutes. It’s a quick post-op. It shouldn’t take very long. Can you wait?”

  Harold Strong pulled a paperback book out of a back pocket. “Sure,” he said.

  An hour later, Michael, Harold Strong, Al Horowitz, Senior Special Agent, FBI and Peter Johnson, the Commanding Officer of the Property Division of the NYPD, were standing in a very large, rather depressing room, filled with gray metal shelving. The shelves were packed with what appeared to be random items, but Michael could see that each item had a tag attached and each shelf was clearly labelled. Within ten feet of where he was standing were swords, axes, rifles, handguns, baseball bats, golf clubs, a stack of bicycles lined up against one wall, and innumerable boxes.

  “What is this place?” Michael asked.

  “This is the Property Warehouse.” Peter Johnson was a burly guy with dark skin and a brush moustache. “It’s where evidence is kept.”

  “A lot of evidence,” Michael said.

  “A lot of crimes,” Harold Strong said. “Some of this stuff has been here for thirty years.”

  “Wh
at happens once the place gets filled?”

  “Most of it gets auctioned. We keep the stuff associated with crimes that haven’t been solved.” He shrugged. “You never know.” He pointed to a metal door with a small window near the top. “That room there is the freezer: blood samples, hair samples, random bits of flesh, DNA in general.”

  Al Horowitz, a big, white guy, with thinning, dark blonde hair, looked around the room and frowned.

  Michael shuddered.

  “This way,” Peter Johnson said.

  They walked down a corridor and came to a clear space in the middle of the shelving, with what looked like a disassembled plastic spacesuit sitting on a metal folding table. Harold Strong handed Michael a pair of latex gloves, which Michael put on. “Take a look,” Harold Strong said.

  The breastplate was plastic, painted to look like metal. The inside was smooth, except for ten Velcro tabs. “Where are the electronics?”

  “Here.” Peter Johnson handed him a light, double layer polyester vest, lined with wires and small, metallic disks. “The vest sits inside the plastic shell. They attach to the Velcro.” He pointed to a small metal disk. “The wire I told you about leads to this.”

  Michael inspected it briefly. “The helmet?”

  Like the breastplate, the helmet was made of smooth, cheap plastic. “This is what you’re looking for,” Harold Strong said. “It fits inside.” He handed Michael a leather balaclava, set with multiple small, round electrodes.

  Michael recognized the pattern immediately. “You know what these are?”

  Harold Strong and Peter Johnson exchanged looks. “We have an idea. Why don’t you tell us?”

  “This is a high-density EEG array. Whoever did this presumably wanted to record brainwaves from the gameplayers, and the murder victims, of course.”

  Harold Strong glanced again at Peter Johnson and shrugged.

  Al Horowitz, who hadn’t said a word up to this point, silently nodded. “That’s what we figured.”

  “There are a few case reports in the literature of dying patients who happened to have at least some minimal EEG recording done at the time of death. There aren’t any large-scale human studies, none that have been published, at least.”

  They were sitting in a conference room on the third floor, with a minikitchen in the back corner and windows looking down on a a small, wooded park. They all had cups of coffee sitting in front of them.

  “There were a couple of animal studies,” Michael went on, “where they decapitated rats and recorded their brain waves. There was a spike of activity once their heads were cut off.”

  “Ouch,” Harold Strong said.

  Al Horowitz frowned. “That sounds inhumane.”

  “Yeah, well, nobody likes rats.” Michael shrugged. “I sort of doubt you could get a study like this past an IRB in the US, not with conscious rats, at least. One study was from New Zealand. Their rats were anesthetized. The other was from Europe someplace, I think the Netherlands. This study compared two different groups of rats, one anesthetized and one awake. Both had similar bursts of activity after their heads were cut off.”

  “Sucks to be them,” Peter Johnson said.

  Michael nodded. “Obviously, there have been no studies on EEG’s taken from awake patients who were then killed, none that we know of, at least. Maybe the Nazis did. It sounds like their sort of research. The allied forces decided at the end of World War II that the data from research done on concentration camp victims would never be revealed. I don’t know if it was destroyed or just hidden away somewhere. Anyway…”

  Peter Johnson walked over to the minikitchen and returned with a cardboard box, which he placed on the table. “Danish, anyone?”

  “No, thanks,” Michael said. The others shook their heads. Peter Johnson removed a cheese and cherry Danish from the box, took a small bite and stolidly chewed.

  “The case reports on humans were all from terminally ill patients. Most were heavily sedated or even comatose prior to death. Most of these patients showed a progressive slowing and then cessation of brainwave activity, which generally began ten minutes or more before their hearts stopped. One showed a spike of activity at about ten minutes after his heart stopped and his blood pressure had already dropped to zero.”

  “What was the point of this?” Harold Strong asked. “What were they trying to discover?”

  Michael peered at him. “They were trying to discover what happens to brain activity at the time of death.”

  Al Horowitz raised an eyebrow. Peter Johnson shrugged.

  “Obviously,” Harold Strong said, “but what did they expect to happen to brain activity at the time of death? And how did they interpret the results?”

  “I’m not sure they had any expectations, and frankly, I’m a little surprised that the journal even published it. These patients were sedated and they already had reduced brain activity. The results are essentially meaningless. Except for the one patient who showed post-mortem spikes, they’re different from the results of the rat studies, but nobody knows what any of it means.” Michael shrugged. “Everybody has heard of near-death experiences. Supposedly, the awareness hovers in space, dissociated from the body. A bright light approaches. A feeling of peace and well-being suffuses the psyche.” Michael shrugged. “If anything like that was going on, the EEG’s did not detect it.”

  “So, you can’t see the soul trundle off to heaven,” Al Horowitz said.

  “Not on the available data, no.”

  “Too bad,” Harold Strong said.

  “This is a very weird case,” Peter Johnson said.

  Harold Strong rolled his eyes.

  “So,” Michael said. “We now have a lot of questions to answer: first, how did these suits get manufactured with nobody noticing all the little extras? Second, who knew about it? Anybody? Where did the data go? Where is it now? What are they planning to do with it? Who stands to gain?”

  Harold Strong sighed. “Oh, boy,” he muttered.

  Al Horowitz frowned at Michael. “Before we go any further, I would like you to understand that there is no ‘we’ here. At best, you are a consultant. You are not a part of this investigation. Is that clear?”

  “Perfectly,” Michael said. “Wouldn’t have it any other way.”

  Harold Strong shook his head. All of them sipped their coffee. Finally, Al Horowitz said, “The plant where the suits were manufactured is in a small town in Tennessee. It’s almost entirely automated. Remington was very proud of that. The townsfolk, not so much, since the place offers very few jobs and doesn’t do much for the local economy.”

  “Who programmed the automation?” Michael asked, “and who designed the suits?”

  “Their design team is headed up by a guy named Gary Little. He has a PhD in computer science from RPI. He’s bewildered.”

  “The rest of the team?”

  “There are five of them. Offhand, their background and records look reasonable. All of them were recruited from other companies making similar products. Two of them have degrees in mechanical engineering. One has a Masters in computer science, with a second Masters in visual arts. One has a PhD in cognitive science and the fifth has a background in both electronic engineering and musical instrument design.”

  “Musical instrument design?”

  “It seems that the hardware, those little disks on the inside of the liner? They were first used to translate music into the sensation of touch, as an aid to deaf people, and later, for game playing. They vibrate at different frequencies.”

  “How about former members of the team?”

  Harold Strong gazed at Michael with what might have been reluctant approval. “Two of them: one was an electrical engineer, the other a PhD in computer science.”

  “Did they leave on good terms?”

  Al Horowitz pursed his lips. “Not exactly. They’re both dead.”

  Chapter 9

  The thing about mysteries, Michael thought, and he had never considered this before the events of
the last couple of days, is how seductive they could be. They entice, because they’re mysterious. Michael, on and off, had dabbled in game playing, but games, ultimately, are just playing. Games are not real. An actual, real-life mystery, however, was a game with actual, real-life consequences.

  Michael had never for an instant considered a career in law enforcement. The sons and daughters of the upper-middle class rarely did. There wasn’t enough money in law enforcement, and sometimes you got shot at, a definite negative. For the first time in his life, he wondered what it was like to solve mysteries for a living.

  The fictional Sherlock Holmes was a gentleman. Conan Doyle depicted him as a ‘consulting detective,’ and at one point described him as in need of money—which was why he first took in Dr. Watson as a boarder. How much Holmes charged for his services was never mentioned. There were other gentleman sleuths in mysteries, none of whom needed to work for a living. It gave them a lot of time to devote to their hobbies, like fighting crime.

  Probably not very realistic, though. Hercule Poirot, Nero Wolfe, Wendell Urth, C. Auguste Dupin, Lord Peter Wimsey and all the rest were fantasies, entertaining fantasies, but fantasies, nonetheless.

  For a moment, Michael considered the real-life case of Richard Kurtz, whose exploits and career were certainly unlikely. Kurtz, he supposed, was the exception that proved the rule.

  No, Michael had no intention of hitting the mean streets of the city, going undercover in disguise or fighting criminals. These things were not among his skill set. There were, however, other things he could do.

  Two hours later, Michael sat back with a groan. He had stared at his computer screen, absorbed in what he was doing for so long that his neck had gotten stiff.

  Remington Simulations’ plant in Dearborn, Tennessee was small, but had been opened five years before with at least some local publicity. In addition to the vaunted suits, it also manufactured the vests, headgear and gloves. Their games were not made in-house, but were purchased from older, established corporations under license, and were not too different from other games already on the market.

  The vests had a similar makeup to the chest piece on the larger exosuits, but the fatal wire was missing. Michael had asked and Al Horowitz had confirmed this. It was only the larger suits that were compromised to kill.