“It’s basically the study of the mind and its processes. It focuses on how information is received. Processed. Transformed into language and perception. Attention. Reasoning. Emotion. And memory. Because memories are the most important thing a person can have. If you take away the memories, you are left with something uniformly blank. It’s our experiences in our lives that turn to memories that help shape us into who we’re supposed to be.”
He gives a brittle smile. “Now imagine if you’re faced with losing a lifetime of those memories. If you live every day knowing that soon, everything you know about yourself will disappear and you will become a husk, a hollowed-out core. Call it Alzheimer’s, call it dementia, it doesn’t matter. All that matters is that it takes away the fundamental part of you until you’re nothing but a drooling, shitting machine that stares out the window for hours on end.”
The only other sounds are the beeps of the machines around them.
“In this case,” Dr. Hester says, “it was FTD. Frontotemporal dementia. Remember what I told you about muscles? About the brain?”
They can. Mike and Greg both remember. “They can atrophy.”
Dr. Hester nods. “Yes. They can. If not used, the muscles of the body can atrophy. But I use my brain. I use it every day. I use it to the fullest extent that I can. I am one of the greatest minds in my field, perhaps the greatest. My understanding of the brain goes far beyond anything that you could even comprehend. It’s fascinating, just how deep the mind can go. What it’s capable of. The nervous system. Most people don’t even think about it. But do you know how miraculous it is? That it’s evolved in the way that it has, that it functions as it does. It is most likely the greatest achievement mankind has ever known, and the only thing we did to earn it is to survive. We are made of the dust from stars, and this is what we’ve become.”
He sighs. “Today is one of my good days. I don’t have them much anymore. Five years ago, I was at Johns Hopkins in Baltimore. One moment, I’m sitting in my office, trying to fill out a damn expense report for a conference I’d gone to, and the next… well. The next moment, I’d forgotten who I was.” He shakes his head. “They found me wandering in the pediatric ward, muttering to myself about horses and shadows. I was scaring the children. I came out of it a few hours later.
“I was diagnosed with a form of FTD a few months later. Pick’s disease. A rare neurodegenerative condition that progressively destroys the brain cells. There is already dementia. And aphasia, though it comes and goes. It’s fatal, though it can take anywhere from two to ten years. I’m one of the lucky ones. So far. But every day I can feel it. It gets just a little bit worse.”
“What does that have to do with me?” Mike or Greg asks. They don’t know which, though they don’t think that it matters.
“Nothing,” Dr. Hester said. “At least, at first. You were just a name on the television, your face splashed across the news as being arrested for the murder of your wife. A high-powered DC moneyman with the dutiful pretty wife. America loves that sort of thing. I don’t know why. Maybe because it’s happening to someone else and they can judge to their hearts’ content. You were found guilty by the court of public opinion before you ever stood in front of a judge and jury. A husband usually does it. And you didn’t deny it, you just told a story that the people didn’t want to believe. And then the video found on her computer. Where she claimed to live in fear of you. It was all very… pat, if you ask me, but no one did.”
“I don’t remember. Any of it.”
“No. Probably not. A side effect of the encephalitis, the beta-blockers, and being cryogenically frozen for three years. It may come. In time.”
And that’s… that’s almost too much to take. “Why?” he asks, because he doesn’t understand. He’s Mike now, he’s Mike and he doesn’t understand cryogenically frozen and encephalitis. He doesn’t understand beta-blockers, just that it sounds like They Came from Outer Space. He doesn’t know how this is going to help him get home. That’s all he wants. He just wants to go back home.
“You were found guilty. You went to jail. You got less time than her family wanted. Forty-seven days into your sentence, you were beaten quite viciously in the prison showers. Rumors were her family paid someone off. Or that you’d pissed off the wrong people inside. Or they just didn’t like your face. You were found eighteen minutes after. You were nearly unrecognizable. I’m told it was quite… bloody.”
Mike breathes.
Greg chokes.
“Both arms were broken, both legs. Your fingers. Orbital socket on the left side, same as your cheekbone. Your sternum. But the most severe injury came from your skull being cracked in four places. Your brain was swelling. There was surgery, of course, but by then you’d contracted an infection which led to viral encephalitis. Your brain was inflamed. You fell into a coma. Part of your skull is a metal plate now. It was the only way they could… no matter. That’s when I found you.”
“For what,” Greg asks in a dead voice.
Mike says nothing, because he’s thinking of Sean, of the dance they could have shared. Of the way he smiles his just-for-Mike smile, and Mike dies a little then. His heart cracks, splits, sinking in on itself.
“Project Amorea,” Dr. Hester says. He sounds exhausted. “An idea of preservation born out of my own desperation. I am living on borrowed time. I thought if I… found a way to cheat, to not stop, but to slow the process, I’d find the answers I sought.” He glances at Dr. King, who has remained silent since he’d entered the room. He studies her for a moment, then looks back at Mike and Greg. “I’m scared,” he admits, voice cracking. “I shouldn’t be. I’m a rational man who knows nothing but rational thought. I don’t believe in Heaven. I don’t believe in Hell. I don’t believe life energies return to the cosmos or other such nonsense. No, I think when we die, when that little candle that flares within us is finally snuffed out, that’s it. That’s all there is. That nothing but darkness awaits us all, and that everything we’ve done, every single part of our lives, none of it matters. We are here for however short or long we are, and that is all there is. And I couldn’t stand that thought. That my life has been leading to this, that I’ve sacrificed everything I have only to have the very thing I’ve attempted to push the boundaries of turn around and betray me. It terrified me. It still does, even though I know so much more.”
“What did you do?” Mike demands, shoving Greg to the side. “What the hell did you do to me?”
“I made Amorea,” he says, hands shaking, “out of nothing. It’s almost an exact replication of the little town I grew up in, that idealized version of Americana that everyone fondly remembers, even if they never lived in it. The 1950s were… different. The wars were over. The economy was surging. America had asserted itself as a dominant superpower. We were… different then. We were happier. And I wanted to go back to that. So I made Amorea. I made the town. The buildings. The streets and the trees and the wind that blows. The grass. The fountain in the park. The house you slept in. Your toothbrush. Your shoes. Your cat. The clothes on your back. I can’t take full credit for it, obviously, for as much as I know about the way the mind works, I’m quite embarrassingly technologically inept. But I had the ideas. And I was able to find the talent to make this a reality. Well. An unreality, maybe.”
“No,” Mike says. “You’re lying. That’s not—”
“Amorea is a construct,” Dr. Hester says. “A simulation, albeit a very good one. It exists in nothing but lines of code and in the crumbling mind of a tired old man. I built it from the ground up, but I never used a hammer or nails. I paved its roadways, but never left the scan room. Every corner you’ve seen is lovingly crafted with nothing but thought. I created Amorea as an experiment. To give those whose minds were all but gone a chance to live a life. To see if perhaps it would slow the degeneration. From trauma. Disease. Infection. Hypoxia. I made Amorea, Mr. Hughes, selfishly. Because I wanted a place where I could go and live my life in hopes that I would be free from the horrors that are certain to be in my future.”
“The people,” Mike says hoarsely. “All those people. In Amorea. My friends. My—” He can’t finish that last thought.
“Are real,” Dr. Hester says. “To an extent. That extent being that they were once like you. They lived and breathed and walked this earth. Like you, a tragedy occurred. Whether involuntary or self-inflicted, they found themselves in comas with almost no chance of ever waking up. I thought I was giving them a gift. As long as they weren’t brain-dead, I could manipulate their brainwaves into thinking whatever I wanted. Their bodies were useless, but their minds? Mr. Hughes, the mind is a powerful thing, capable of so much beauty. And so much destruction.”
He closes his eyes and tilts his head back. “I picked them myself. All one hundred and thirty-eight of you. People without family. Without ties. The scourg
e of society. The destitute. The forgotten. Those that wouldn’t have anyone miss them if they were gone. I gave them a place to go in hopes of finding my own way home when it was time.”
He shakes his head. “And then you happened.”
“What the fuck are you talking about?” Greg asks hoarsely. “What have you done?”