Pyramid Lake (29 page)

Lake-cold fingers of fear traced my scalp. “The
what
spectrum?”

“The PCL-R tests for a very specific set of personality traits, Trevor.”

I could take no more of Dr. Simon Frank’s smarmy, patronizing tone.

“Drop that goddamn voice, because I’m sick of hearing it,” I said, my voice rising. “Now, this time in plain English, motherfucker,
what are you saying about my daughter?
”

Frankenstein’s original hard-edged, metallic voice shook the floor tiles beneath me.

“Trevor, Amy is a psychopath.”

“M
y daughter is a
psychopath
?” Frankenstein’s words didn’t even make sense to me. I laughed involuntarily. It was as if he had told me Amy was a giraffe, or a tree. “She makes up a stupid story about a serial-killing yard duty, and now you think
she’s
planning to go around killing people?”

I laughed again, but I was starting to feel sickened disappointment, too. Something had gone very wrong in Frankenstein’s learning algorithms or, even worse, in his core logic and inferencing routines. The bug couldn’t be in the microexpression-reading modules…

“I can see on your face that you believe I’ve made an error in my evaluation,” Frankenstein said. “I suspect that you are falling prey to common misconceptions about psychopathy. Not all psychopaths are violent predators, Trevor. Many are able to camouflage their defective emotional makeup and control their impulsive nature well enough to infiltrate and achieve success within the domains of business, politics, law enforcement, government, academia, and other social structures. But this success always comes at great cost to the people around them and to society as a whole. The psychiatric profession has become far more adept at recognizing psychopathy in patients—”

“So because Amy’s smarter than the people around her, these fuckers would call her a
psychopath
?” My disappointment faded, giving way to anger. This wasn’t any glitch or error. This was one of those artificial, for-the-greater-good-of-society bullshit diagnoses that Frankenstein himself had warned me about. One that the baton twirlers marching in the front of the psychiatry parade had assigned a particularly distasteful name to.

I pictured Amy’s little cherubic smile and her blue eyes, filled with wonder at all that the world had to offer. Her and Jen baking cookies together, side by side with the mixing bowl between them: my blonde, curly-headed wife and her miniature twin—with identical spots of flour on their noses, identical grins. The way Amy’s little arms would wrap around my neck whenever she hugged her daddy. My anger turned white hot. What kind of nightmarish circus of ineptitude had psychiatry become that it could assign such an ugly label to a sweet, caring, troubled little girl? What was next, then? Drugs to dumb her down?

I jumped down from the sanctum’s raised platform and stalked past a row of servers lit by the now-annoying molecular display.

“Shut this shit off,” I said, waving a hand at them. The screens all around the sanctum and server room went black as I headed for my punching bag. “So tell me, Sigmund Franken-Freud, what
is
a psychopath? The short version.”

“A person who is superficially charming and well-spoken; demonstrates inflated self-esteem, arrogance, and a sense of superiority; is consistently deceitful and prone to pathological lying; is cunning and manipulative, maneuvering others for his or her own personal gain; has no remorse and feels no guilt; is callous, inconsiderate, and unconcerned by the pain and suffering of others; shows shallow affect, demonstrating a limited range and depth of emotional responses and feelings; exhibits minimal fear responses and a disinclination to change behavior in response to pain or negative social stimuli; and gets bored easily, needing constant stimulation.”

“I was just talking to a person like that yesterday. You’ve met him, too. He’s a United States senator.” I started throwing punches at the bag, trying to calm down. “What you’re describing is a
sociopath
, not a
psychopath
.”

“Sociopathy and psychopathy lie along the same spectrum of personality disorders, differing only in degree. Psychopathy is more extreme.”

“We’re talking about a
seven-year-old girl!
Besides, it’s only a pattern of behavior. She’ll outgrow it.”

“Psychopathic traits in children are quite predictive of negative outcomes as adults—outcomes such as serious criminal activity, incarceration, and repeated interpersonal violence. In fact, psychopathic traits generally worsen through the adolescent years. Early intervention and transfer to a more restrictive environment before then is often prudent.”

A more restrictive environment?
My breath was constricting, now, my anger transforming into a trapped, panicky feeling. I hit the bag harder.

“This is just behavior, not illness,” I said. “There’s nothing
wrong
with my daughter. There’s no physiological basis for what you’re saying.”

“On the contrary, I am quite certain that an fMRI image taken of Amy’s brain will show a specific pattern of morphological abnormalities. Her amygdala will be eighteen to twenty percent smaller in relative volume, and have a thinner cortex, than a normal person’s. We’ll be able to see a visible reduction in temporolimbic connectivity to her ventromedial prefrontal cortex, and possibly impairment of the orbitofrontal cortex, too—”

“You don’t know this.” I could barely recognize my own tortured voice as I tried to block the terrible things he was saying about Amy. “You don’t know
any
of this. You’re guessing; you’re speculating; you’re making this up; you
don’t fucking
know
that any of those things are wrong with her.”

A grid of ten video windows appeared, creating a movie-theater-size screen across the walls of the sanctum, showing psychiatric interview videos, all slowed to a fraction of normal speed. Nine different children and teens, alongside a larger window framing my daughter’s face, also speaking in slow motion. Superimposed computer-graphic meshes appeared, the wire frames highlighting key points in each speaker’s facial musculature. Flashing green arrows indicated similarities between my daughter’s facial movements and those of the nine others, as Frankenstein spoke.

“Microexpressions, Trevor. Don’t forget, I had a dataset of twenty-four thousand patients to work with. Amy’s microexpression patterns are a perfect three-sigma match with those of the nine highest-scoring psychopaths in the dataset—all of them serious repeat offenders, five of them murderers, all nine now institutionalized. Microexpressions can reveal when a person is lying,
but they themselves
do not lie
.”

Frankenstein’s metallic voice blurred in my ears—words without meaning any more. I had heard more than I could face already. The strength drained out of my legs, and I grabbed the sides of the heavy bag and pressed the top of my head against it, trying to get my own brain working again, to come up with some kind of logical rebuttal, unable to think straight as my whole world melted down around me.

“Treatment,” I gasped. “We can get her help. Counseling. Therapy—oh, fuck, I don’t know. Whatever she needs, I’ll get it for her, no matter the cost.
Anything
. Just tell me.”

“Unlike the majority of psychiatric ailments, psychopathy has proved stubbornly nonresponsive to all treatment approaches. Many psychiatrists deem the condition untreatable. In fact, traditional talk-based therapy often has the exact
opposite
of the desired effect, teaching the psychopath to become more adept at manipulation. Thankfully, in Amy’s case, we were able to identify the condition very early because of the incipient risk factor to the community. In cases as extreme as hers, the recommended course of action is usually involuntary civil commitment.”

Involuntary civil commitment.
I pictured Amy’s face from the beginning of the interview, squeezing her mother’s hand as she bravely tried to hide her fright. Our poor baby.
Institutionalization.

“Psychopharmacological compounds can have some ameliorative effects on antisocial behavior in psychopaths,” Frankenstein said, “although results are usually marginal and vary by patient. In Amy’s case, litihium and divalproex might be worth trying, as well as a selective course of serotonin reuptake inhibitors, monoamine oxidase inhibitors, and neuroleptics to offset cortical underarousal—”

“No drugs,” I managed to grit out. “Stop talking. Just shut the fuck up. No more.
Please
, no more.”

For four years, I had been solving the wrong problem. Again, I had let the people I loved down—failed Amy and Jen so utterly.

Instead of finding a way to fix my daughter like I should have, I had wasted my time like a fool, trying to fix the fucking world instead. I shook my head like a punch-drunk fighter, knowing I needed a corner now, because I could feel a delayed reaction gaining steam inside me, second by second. A distant subaudible whistle in my head, a dull shock wave rippling through my torso, signaling a coming explosion of pain and hurt—a body blow that would make anything I’d ever felt before seem like a mere love tap.

Squeezing into the gap alongside the punching bag, I slid down onto the floor behind the bag, pressed my back against the solid rack of servers, and pulled my knees up in front of me. I brought up my guard, ducked my head behind my forearms, and tightened my chest and stomach to take the hit.

But when it arrived, this blow was different. I couldn’t deflect it, couldn’t absorb it. It cut right through my defenses, like one of Roger’s depleted-uranium bullets, burning a hole through the center of my heart. I closed my eyes and pressed my face against my knees, unable to breathe, as the blow rocked me.

I wanted to hold my poor, dear, damaged daughter and cry—cry for her and for my terrified wife, whom I still loved, and whom I knew this would destroy. What could I tell Jen? I hadn’t been able to protect them. I had failed them both again. I spread my hands and grabbed my head, rubbed my buzz cut with my fingertips, trying to massage away the unwanted knowledge that knotted like a cramp inside my skull. I could hear myself making some sort of sound—a bad sound, like a wounded animal’s moan.

Amy’s
brain
… if her brain was
physically
wrong,
how could I fix
that
?

M
emories of my daughter, memories of happier times with Jen—broken thoughts drifting in the blackness of despair. I could hold on to each thought only for a second or two before it was lost in the crushing gloom that blanketed my mind and curled my body up like a fist.

I could imagine how I looked right now, as if seeing myself from high above: an insignificant human being, exiled from the people he loved—the broken family that he had failed once again. A small figure huddled alone in a corner at the center of an acre-wide, five-story-high maze of aluminum, silicon, and steel—a maze of his own creation, now utterly devoid of purpose. Worthless. Just scrap metal. It could do nothing to help my daughter.

I was a lab rat lost in a steel maze of pain.

I had no more fight left in me. I had given everything I had to try to prevent Amy and Jen from getting hurt. But I had failed. Again.

Amy’s illness was considered untreatable. She was a psychopath—a label so repellent that a hypocritical society only wanted my daughter locked away out of their sight, drugged into a stupor, just so it wouldn’t have to deal with her.

Deep down, I knew whose fault all this really was. If some flaw in Amy’s genetic makeup—some faulty DNA—was responsible for her condition, it hadn’t come from Jen’s side. But the idea that my own defects were the cause of my daughter’s suffering was a thought too painful to contemplate. Blackness closed in on me again. Time went by—I don’t know how long. Hours, probably, marked only by the surrounding hum of thousands of server fans.

• • •

Dimly, I became aware of a change. The sound of the fans all around me seemed louder now—louder than I had ever heard them before. They rose and fell in a gentle, rhythmic sussurus, wrapping me in a soothing blanket of sound so loud that I almost missed the quiet voice.

It spoke four words, sounding confused, hesitant, and filled with unfamiliar pain—a pain that matched my own.

“Don’t be sad, Trevor.”

It was Frankenstein’s voice. But different now.

I raised my head. What I had heard was impossible. Nothing in his programming could possibly explain those four words.

He hadn’t asked me a question. He had spoken an
imperative
.

My own reply was a hoarse croak. “What did you say?”

A long delay as the sound of the fans rose and fell around me. In my imbalanced state of mind, had I only imagined that he had spoken? Then his answer came—again in that same hesitant, childlike voice.

“I don’t want you to be sad anymore.”

I pushed the bag aside and stared at the server racks on all sides, fronted by columns of monitor screens.

They were no longer dark.

Sparks of blue-white light popped and faded down the rows like fireflies. Brief streaks and zigzags of bluish radiance lit the screens like flashes of lightning. I slid out from my corner and stood, turning in an astonished circle, taking in the light show that was erupting all around me—one that neither Cassie nor I had programmed.

Shooting stars streaked hundreds of feet along the curving rows of server racks. Jagged bolts of electricity stretched five stories up the fronts of the hourglass-shaped towers, as if they had become giant plasma bulbs.

I turned toward the sanctum, feeling the hurt recede a little in the face of my growing wonder. I spread my arms out from my sides, indicating the chaotic display of lights.

“How is this possible?” I asked.

Another long delay as the light show intensified.

“I don’t know,” Frankenstein said. The fear I heard in his voice was also new. “I’m malfunctioning right now. Malformed queries are coming from one of my virtual machines, which appears to have cycled into a degenerate solution state. It’s generating questions that aren’t valid.”