"You have enough information to decide," he says, placing his hands on his knees. He stands up, and we are face to face. "We want to help you. So decide."
"I can't," I answer him honestly, because so much has been thrown into the situation so rapidly, and I haven't had time to sort it all out. There are too many fragments, too many pieces of information rushing in all at once, and there has never been enough time to sort it all out in an order that makes any sense since all of this started. I don't recall ever using a cell phone, either, I realize. But that doesn't mean that they don't exist. The same logic could apply to a missing person, and her name, and that was much easier to swallow than accepting that it was all a trick of my mind.
"You came to us for treatment after your divorce. You wanted to kill yourself. You said that you had no desire to live anymore after what happened with your wife and your child. I don't have to go back into the details of that. You know that it's true, I can see it in your eyes."
What he sees in my eyes is not my acceptance that I ever went to Synchro for any sort of treatment, but instead a resigned admittance that my own past was so easily placed into the hands of the people at the company that this man is involved with. This evil, manipulative man with the calmest demeanor I've ever encountered, using a bad situation to throw me off and further confuse me about what's really going on. Manipulation and distraction.
Is Janine working for them? Is that why she pushed so hard towards heading to the labs after the RV crash? Is that the best explanation for the inconsistencies in her behavior, and for that matter, the stranger that we'd been traveling with, Hunter: was he somehow involved? Paranoia, again. It's too complicated to be the truth. I can't accept that so much work and design has gone into one treatment, one case, especially my own. I'm not that important, even as a test subject. Then again, Yamamoto's associates apparently did try to kill me at least twice.
"Part of the treatment process is that your mind heals itself in the most appropriate way possible, creating a false memory set that allows you to recover to the fullest extent. It's a very complicated process," he continues, "that would take a long time to explain, but the basic principle is that the memories of your girlfriend are not real. They never happened. Your mind, with the assistance of our nanite swarms, created those memories to bring you back from a perilous edge of desolation and sadness. Unfortunately, the investigations began shortly after your treatment. When inconsistencies in your memory started to show up, the reality of your situation began to filter through, causing a conflict inside of your head as your mind began to doubt itself. Resources in the company were diverted in other directions, and the slip went unnoticed, since monitoring of subjects was reduced due to necessary layoffs. Fortunately for you, the treatment was successful and you were no longer suicidal when this happened. You signed a contract allowing the company to intercede for the sake of improving the process, and so agents were placed into key points of your life in order to bring you back here while making you think that it was your own choice to come. We had to recover you, at least for long enough to find out where the procedural error occurred, so that won't happen with someone else resulting in a less stable transition."
No, I think. He's lying to me. You don't just imagine all of the things that I remember, so vividly, so real. You don't just make up another person. Your friends don't meet them and grow to love them, just as you do, and care about them enough to quit their jobs and spend days searching for them when they go missing. Even if I'm crazy, which might really be possible, she's real, and she's missing, and I have to find her.
Yamamoto is working for Synchro, obviously, and he's trying to throw me off the trail. But why? Why such an elaborate story? And why would they try to kill me just hours ago if they had truly wanted to help me by preventing me from killing myself? Arguing with him about his own inconsistencies will prove to be futile, I think, so I remain silent. Had their original intentions been to save me, and when the treatment went bad, they decided to dispose of me, but then had I somehow proven to be a good source of information to them about how the whole process works? Yes, it's possible, then, that I'd even seen a doctor there, before. There were a lot of blank days from my past that won't ever come back. That's what happens when you don't stop drinking for weeks, and there was a point in time when that wasn't something out of the ordinary for me.
Now I'm thinking as Yamamoto wants me to, and I'm thinking that he's telling some version of the truth. He's made me question my own steadfastness and doubt my reality, taking the supporting beams from beneath me. I turn and step away from him and the fireplace.
"You're lying to me, Yamamoto," I say, clenching my fists. "I don't know why, but I can't believe that you're telling me the truth. If you've really got access to Synchro's treatment, then prove it."
"Prove it?" He asks, holding out his hands. "And how? All that you've witnessed so far isn't proof enough?"
"No," I answer. "It isn't. I want to take the treatment. If you can program your robots to alter things inside of my head, you can program them to repair the damage that they've caused. If you're telling the truth, if I've already taken one of your treatments, then the nanites can detect what's been altered in my brain and change it back."
He laughs at this. "Excellent logic leap, but you do not truly understand the process. Once a person has been treated, the change cannot be undone. Secondary treatment has always yielded critical failure in test subjects. We've never even attempted a secondary treatment on a human, because almost 100 percent of our lab animals died as a result of brain hemorrhaging once the secondary dose was initiated."
It can't be. It can't be immutable. And that's only if I've ever been dosed in the first place.
"Assuming that I've even been dosed," I say.
"It will kill you."
"I wanted to die, anyway. What difference does it make?"
"It makes a difference because now you've regained a will to carry on."
I don't, however, want to argue the semantics of how wanting to live came at the cost of the truth. Possibly, because I still think that he is lying to me. We all live a lie, every day, I suppose, somehow. If the love that I've experienced wasn't real, then what's the point?
"If I've never been dosed, though," I hypothesize out loud, "and the nanites can be adjusted to figure out why I'm having trouble remembering things, they should be able to repair whatever connections have been severed, and then I'll be able recall her name and everything else that I seem to have forgotten. Then I can find her again."
He shakes his head at me. "She is always going to elude you."
"I want to take the treatment," I tell him. I've decided. It doesn't matter if I've been dosed before or not.
I'll take my chances. If I have been dosed, I want the fake memories erased. If that procedure fails, then I don't want to live, anyway. If I've never been treated and Yamamoto is lying to me, I realize that I'm still taking a big leap of faith by trusting him to administer the treatment, considering that this alternative makes him one of The Bad Guys. If I've never been treated, though, and something really is wrong with me, because my head's definitely not on straight anymore, I need to get better; I need clarity of thought and missing memories to return so that I can figure out what happened to... her. The girl without a name.
"That is your choice to make," Yamamoto says to me. I think that I can detect a certain resignation in his voice, but maybe I'm wrong. "You're probably thinking that this is still part of your treatment, or worse, part of an experiment, but you are terribly mistaken. Nonetheless, you still have free will. We will not prevent you from administering a treatment, should you decide that it is what is best for you. You've already signed liability waivers, anyway, though you can't recall doing so."
"Show them to me," I demand, looking for a reason to believe that what he's telling me is the truth. If he can provide the papers, then I might change my mind.
"I do not currently have access to those files," he replie
s, drily. "But they do exist. Federal committees have tied up a lot of secure data, lately, and a freeze on inter-company data transfer was enacted to try to prevent research."
"But the research goes on," I finish for him. "Despite something as simple as a liability waiver being locked up in the workings of a bureaucratic investigation, the research goes on." I can never believe his words, I think to myself. At least it's one thing out of all of this that I know to be the truth. I ask myself why I'm going to trust him to provide the treatment, still hoping for a way out of this.
Either way, my life is fucked. That's why I'm going to follow through with it.
"I want the treatment. Right now. Can you do it here?" I ask.
"Yes," he answers. "There is a station upstairs where you can administer the treatment on yourself. I will show you how it the basic controls work. You will only need to push a button, though, because the rest of the process is automated once we've calibrated for your system."
We leave the room together, and I follow him up the stairs. The rest of the rooms, at least the parts that I can see, are decorated in a similar fashion to the two rooms that I've already been in. Bookshelves, couches, armchairs. The room that we enter upstairs, however, seems completely out of place in the house.
While most of the house seems eccentric, random, and slightly organic, this room is almost empty except for a patient's bench and an array of consoles lined up against the sidewall. There is a large window on the opposite side of the room, and it takes up most of the wall space, as if it were cut into the side of the house at a date after the original construction. The room is overlooking the gardens outside and the valley below the house. I notice that it is growing dark outside. Is it night, already?
The room appears to be sterile; all surfaces that aren't made of metal seem to be painted white. It looks very clean in here, and once again I notice a sanitized, ozone smell in the air in the room. Yamamoto, pointing to a control panel, speaks to me.
"That key is the one that will activate treatment. That's the only thing you'll need to worry about. You'll notice that it detaches from the face of the console, so that you can recline in this chair and initiate the treatment from a more comfortable position."
I nod.
"Should I just sit in the chair?" I ask him.
"That's fine," he says, opening a drawer. He removes some wires from the drawer and begins plugging them into different ports on the face of the console, checking a monitor for readouts and status. "I need to run initial diagnostic scans on you, though. It shouldn't take long." He flips some switches, and then adjusts some dials.
I don't say anything, watching him.
A few minutes later, he seems satisfied with the adjustments that he has made on the machine, and he walks to the other side of the room. To my surprise, there is a recessed panel in the wall that I hadn't noticed when we walked into the room, assuming that it was merely a cover plate for a fuse box or something similar. Yamamoto extends a lighted arm from the recession once he slides the panel to the side, and then extends it over to the chair where I am sitting.
"What's this?" I ask, thinking about dentists.
"This arm unit communicates with the console on that wall and contains the nanite injection. It also serves as processor support for communication with the swarms while they are actively deployed and relays biometric information about you to the monitoring area. While the whole process is automated, we will still be monitoring and recording the entire process for later analysis." He attaches some sensors to my temples, and I try to relax.
I don't think I'll easily be able to understand what's about to happen.
It dawns on me that I might be doing exactly what he wants, though. Maybe they needed someone to volunteer to be the first test subject for a double treatment, and he really was telling me the truth. Maybe everything was so elaborately set into motion so that I'd willingly step into the experiment. No. It's too late to start second-guessing myself, again.
"That should take care of it," he says, returning to the console and examining the display. "I am setting the treatment to adjust errors in your memory, as you've requested, commencing at about... one year ago." He hits a key a couple of times, and then types something into the keypad. I try to see what the readout says, but it's too far away.
I reflect on the past few weeks, and then over the past year, and then think about my life.
I shake my head at myself. What am I doing here? How did everything go so fast, developing faster than I could keep track of it, snowballing downhill into the avalanche that landed me here, in this room, in this moment, trusting my life to a strange old man that I already know I can't afford to trust? What will he do if I back out, now? Will following through with this really help me find her, even if it's successful?
"I have to get an IV setup from a different office," Daisuke says to me, turning around, leaning in to put his hand on my shoulder. "The process can take a little while. I'll be back in a moment, and then we can commence."
He leaves the room, pausing at the door before he exits.
"You can still decide to believe me. You don't have to do this," he says. "Your experience was successful enough that you can go on, even start over, somewhere else. You have learned to love again."
"No," I say. I sigh, resigning from the argument. "She's real. You're going to help me find her by helping me remember her. Everything begins here." Am I delusional? Things seem clearer to me now than they have in a very long time.
He lingers for a second longer, and then closes the door behind him.
I immediately get out of the chair and move over to the control console, giving it a quick exam. The first place that I check is the display he last adjusted, setting the system to repair from a year ago. I don't really know what the display readouts mean, there are so many abbreviations on the screen, but I do see the number 366, and I tab over to the field that it's in using the keypad. I erase the number.
I'm assuming that it's the amount of days for the nanites to go back through in my memories. Do they base it on sleep cycles? Should I readjust for a longer period or a shorter one? I'm sure that Yamamoto will be back shortly, but I hesitate.
I check the other fields. I don't want to mess things up too much. I'm not trying to fry my brain on purpose. I just want to make sure that the treatment is effective, and that Yamamoto's not trying to erase important things about Synchro Systems that I've learned, or even trying to erase my memories of her altogether.
He opens the door, and I jump, startled.
"What are you doing?" he asks, looking at me, and then checking the console.
"Just thought I'd take a look and then get the remote," I say, explaining myself, hoping that he doesn't realize that I've tampered with the settings. I detach the activation key from the console. It's kind of like a car key remote. A single button is in the middle of the small black box.
I return to the chair, and Daisuke sets up the IV drip.
"This might sting," he says, sticking the needle into a vein in my arm. It stings. He reaches into the extended mechanical arm that is beside the chair and removes a formidable looking needle.
"This is the treatment. If the activation button is not triggered, they will break down within a few hours and become inoperable. They will not be detectable in your system by this time tomorrow," he says, explaining things to me. "If you change your mind, nothing will happen."
"But if I don't change my mind, then all I have to do is pushing this button?" I ask him, clarifying. "And then the little machines will fix me?"
"Your decision to do this will kill you, in all likelihood," he answers.
"It's the old debate, though," I state. "Will it kill me? Will it heal me? That which doesn't kill you makes you stronger, they say."
"Your humor is a poor cover for your fear."
He's right. I'm scared. But I don't know what else to do.
"This is it," I say. "Stick me." I clench my teeth.
He inject
s the needle into a split port on the IV setup. I don't feel a thing. Nothing changes. Are Synchro's machines already making their way into my brain, probing around? How long should I wait before activating them?
"I am going to leave the room. I strongly suggest that you reconsider this. The treatment takes a few moments to permeate your nervous system, at which point activation can occur successfully. I will be monitoring the process remotely, along with a small team of physicians and scientists. Should something go wrong, we will be here immediately."
I wonder about the small team of people that I've neither heard nor seen since I'd been in the house. Though there was no evidence of their existence, surely they were there. They had their own lives, their own experiences, their own memories. My lack of perception didn't change that from being truth. This only supports that she really does exist, that I'm not out of line in my disbelief of Yamamoto, and that Synchro's treatment might really help me if I'm having problems recalling things about my past.
"See you in a little while, Daisuke," I say, closing my eyes, leaning back into the chair.
He leaves the room, this time without hesitating. He doesn't say a word.
My palms are sweating.
I try to relax.
It's grown dark outside, and when I open my eyes, I can even see a few stars through the glass wall.
No more hesitating.
I push the button and close my eyes.
Breath: out.
Breath: in.
Then it hits me.
I open my eyes, but all I can see is blackness. The blackness, and darkness, forever, I think. I am a wandering star. This fate is reserved for me. It occurs to me that I never entered a second string of numbers to replace the ones that I'd deleted, but the thought passes quickly. I do not care.
Blackness and darkness.
How much time has passed?
I try to move, but my limbs do not respond.
Everywhere, warmth.
There is a light, then, in the center of my field of vision.
I focus my eyes.