Mind's Eye (43 page)

Fyfe calmly and methodically explained why these people had been kidnapped and killed, and showed evidence of who was responsible, and why. Gray had actually made some video entries, discussing the progress of the experimentation, and Fyfe showed a few minutes of these, just to be certain everyone recognized that Gray was behind this, and seriously deranged.

Fyfe explained that even as he spoke, hundreds of gigabytes of video and text taken from Gray’s computer, giving clear evidence of his heinous crimes, were being made available to the press, public, and criminal authorities. The evidence would make it clear that Gray was responsible, along with a mysterious man named John Delamater, and that the hundreds of Theia employees and consultants working on projects based on these barbaric experiments had no knowledge of them.

As planned, Fyfe eloquently expressed, on behalf of the company, his remorse and outrage, and made it clear the families of the victims would be well-compensated for their tragic losses, although he was well aware that nothing could compensate for what had been so ruthlessly taken away from them. He then expressed the intent of Theia’s management to move forward and put this behind the company through philanthropy and improving human lives.

While he made it clear that nothing could erase the horrific nature of the crime, Theia believed they were now on the verge of a cure for blindness and deafness. He showed a video presentation with a complex, 3-D animation of how implants, connected to electronic retinas and ear drums, could provide a sensory experience indistinguishable from the real thing. 

He played another video demonstrating how thought-powered web surfing could be done in conjunction with the auditory and visual capabilities, and that this too had been perfected, although at a tragic cost in human lives. Society would have to judge if these inventions, paid for with the blood of innocents, would be used, but Fyfe said he hoped that, ultimately, society would not turn its back on such breathtaking advances because of the way they were obtained. That if they were used to benefit society, at least the men and women of the
Explorer
would not have given their lives for nothing. His oration on these points was nothing short of brilliant.

Fyfe went on to explain that a single member of the
Explorer
expedition was still alive, heaping yet another impossible, shocking revelation on top of the others, and serving it to the small audience whose faces had never lost their stunned expressions since the first minutes of his presentation. He then played the video Nick Hall had made, the cherry on top of his sundae of revelations.

Fyfe explained that there had been recent threats to Hall’s life, so he had gone off the grid, and that no one, including Fyfe himself, knew where he was. When these threats were resolved, he assured his audience, Nick Hall would spend as much time with authorities as they would like, and would demonstrate the functioning of his implants as he had promised on his video.

Fyfe finished by cautioning that the future of this technology would depend on world opinion and on the regulatory authorities of each sovereign nation, so that even if the technologies had progressed to this point through legitimate means, it could still take several years of testing before they were released to patients or the general public.

In the hands of someone less skilled, the information Fyfe disclosed might have taken much longer to reveal. But Fyfe knew that he needed to convey it in an hour or less for it to go viral around the world. In an age of ever-shortening attention spans, Fyfe managed to pack a punch the size of an asteroid into every last minute of his presentation.

He ended the conference at exactly eleven a.m., said he would not be taking any questions, and left before anyone knew what was happening.

Even so, had he not thought ahead and made sure two Cowan-hired men were present to run interference, he would have been swarmed by the small group of journalists before he could get
near
an exit. As it was, he slid safely into a car waiting for him outside of the hotel, was driven to a nearby helipad, and in less than an hour was boarding the private jet he had chartered to fly him to California.

52

The fallout from the conference was everything the civilians in the Sacramento safe house thought it would be. Within five hours, over four hundred million people around the world had viewed all or part of it. The initial speculation was that it was a hoax, especially since Nick Hall was conveniently unavailable for corroboration.

But as investigators, journalists, and citizens poured over the hundreds of hours of video and thousands of pages of additional evidence Fyfe had downloaded to public sites, many were now convinced it was all true, and the world was abuzz with visions of a technological and medical revolution beyond all others.

There were debates, both on television and online, about the ethics of using the results of illegal experimentation, but the sentiment was hugely in favor of doing so, as had been obvious since Fyfe had asked Altschuler if he would suppress the absolute cure for cancer just because Hitler had discovered it. Of course the answer was no.

Debates raged on, centering principally on the addictive potential of the technology, and asking the question, at what point do we stop being human? Many had also seized upon other key controversies: porn, lack of privacy, anything said near someone else potentially recorded for all eternity, and so on.

Hall’s photo was downloaded millions of times, and Hall sightings were reported in dozens of countries, with citizens of each hoping to spot him with all the fervor of kids trying to find the golden ticket in a Willy Wonka contest.

And this was just the tip of the iceberg, since many had yet to learn of the story and many still believed it to be a hoax. When the story was absolutely proven out, things would really start popping.

Every last Theia Labs employee was visited by the media and hounded for interviews. The press breathlessly reported that the one man they most wanted to interview, Alex Altschuler, Gray’s second-in-command, was nowhere to be found, despite their best efforts.

But the employees they did reach reported that they hadn’t been aware Kelvin Gray was dead, and that while Theia was working in this general technological realm, they didn’t know anything about these breakthroughs, and were just as shocked as everyone else.

Most Theia employees confessed they had thought Kelvin Gray to be a model CEO; handsome, brilliant, a great orator, and a kind and generous man. But as difficult as it was to believe he had committed such atrocities, the evidence was compelling.

Almost six hours after the press conference had ended, Fyfe called Altschuler to let him know that he had landed in California and should arrive at the safe house within an hour or two with Ed Cowan. He said he was looking forward to seeing them all, but especially to meeting the man of the hour, the newly famous Nick Hall.

Hall still wasn’t himself. And Megan’s absence was deeply felt by Altschuler and Heather as well, who had both gained quite an affection for her in the short time they had known her. But they were so high from their newfound relationship that even if their mood were dampened by half, they would still be euphoric.

Right after Fyfe’s call, the group of three civilians returned to the TV vigil they had been maintaining since the press conference many hours earlier, surfing news channels and Internet reaction to the conference. Hall and Altschuler were both using their internal Internet connections as well, and if they found something truly noteworthy they would throw it up on the television for all to see.

They were watching a news program, which was reporting that a pentagon source had confirmed the authenticity of the
Explorer
footage Fyfe had shown, when Alex Altschuler gasped.

“Holy shit!” he said to his two companions. “You need to see this.”

Moments later it was up on the main TV. It was an online teaser for an article scheduled to run on the front page of the
Iowa Gazette
the next morning. It was entitled, “ESP: Did Theia Labs Leave Something Out?”

Hall’s mouth fell open. “But how could they possibly suspect?” he said.

“You’re not going to love the answer,” said Altschuler, gesturing to the screen.

Hall and Heather read the short article in silence.

The writer, Janet Hollinger, described how she had received an e-mail addressed to her and over forty other journalists the previous Thursday. The message had indicated it was from someone named Nick Hall, who had no memory, could surf the web with this thoughts, and was desperately reaching out to anyone he could, believing his life was in imminent danger. Oh, and it had also contained one other minor detail.

Hall had claimed to be able to read minds!

The teaser displayed Hall’s entire message, in full, and was basically identical to the one he had sent to the police and government types, the contents of which he had read from the mind of Justin Girdler. But Girdler had not been aware Hall had also sent the message to a second batch of addressees.

Janet Hollinger went on to explain how she got hundreds of hoax e-mails each year, but happened to read this one since it was even more creative and farfetched than most. She suspected spam filters had prevented it from being seen by many of her colleagues, and any others who did read it had certainly also thought it was a hoax. How else could it have been seen at the time? Alerted by her, a number of other journalists were confirming that they had now found the message in their spam folders or deleted message archives as well.

When Janet Hollinger had seen a video of the recent press conference, she had remembered the e-mail. Her paper had then conducted a quick investigation, which the expanded story the next morning would describe in greater detail.

But the gist of the investigations was this: the warehouse mentioned in the e-mail was the same one recently disclosed by Theia Labs in the mountain of evidence they had released. The same one videoed several times by Kelvin Gray. And it had been the site of a devastating fire very soon after Hall’s e-mail had been sent. They had also learned that several people had been questioned about the warehouse by members of a mysterious government agency.

The e-mail message could still be a hoax, but given it had correctly disclosed the nature of Hall’s implants, and the location of the warehouse, days before Fyfe’s revelations, it looked for all the world to be legitimate.

So could it be that Hall’s implants also gave him ESP? The ability not only to surf the
web
, but to surf the
thoughts
of other people?

Hall hadn’t lied about anything else in his desperation e-mail message, the reporter pointed out, so why lie about this? And how else could he have escaped from Kelvin Gray?

The story ended by suggesting that if the message was completely accurate, Cameron Fyfe had quite a bit more explaining to do, and finally, that the expanded report would be available the next morning for anyone who purchased the print or online version of the newspaper. There was little doubt that for one day, the
Iowa Gazette
would have more readers than the
New York Times
,
USA Today
, and the
Wall Street Journal
combined.

“Wow, Nick,” said Heather. “You don’t remember writing any of that, do you?”

Hall shook his head no.

“You sure kept yourself busy in that warehouse,” said Altschuler. “I’ll bet it took some major effort for you to find the e-mail addresses of that many journalists.”

Heather turned toward Hall. “How big of a problem is this?” she asked. “I mean, you can’t read minds anymore. You could for a while and now you can’t. End of story.”

“I wish it were that easy,” said Altschuler.

“It’ll be okay,” said Hall, but Altschuler wondered if he was trying to convince
himself
of this as much as he was trying to convince his companions. “We can walk this back,” he continued. “It adds to our headaches, but it isn’t the end of the world. I’ll just say my mind had undergone repeated traumas, and I must have hallucinated the ESP thing. That this part wasn’t true. And that when others get the implants, they’ll see that they don’t magically get any voodoo ESP.”

“
Voodoo
ESP?” said Heather, raising her eyebrows.

“Well, you know, I’m just trying to make it sound ridiculous. Anyway, there will always be those who believe the ESP I mentioned in the e-mail is real. But when people start getting implants and see they can’t read minds, this report will become an unimportant and discredited footnote of the history of this era.”

They continued to discuss this and other topics, and to monitor the never-ending barrage of coverage generated by the press conference. It would all be wild enough if they weren’t involved, but since they were at the very epicenter of the quake, it was
crazy
. The word
surreal
didn’t even begin to do it justice. Especially for Nick Hall, whose photo was prominently displayed in the corner of every major television channel, and who was being talked about, and dissected, on each one.