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Copyright © 2002 by Shane Tourtellotte

First published in Analog Science Fiction and Fact, May 2002


"You want to do what to my brain?"

Lucinda Peale jumped, even with the thick transparent shield between them, and the guards on each side. She turned back to the prisoner, trying to show no fear. A ghostly reflection of herself, pale and anxious, looking the other side of forty, fell across the black face glaring back.

"The therapy involves sending finely aimed electrical impulses into the brain, primarily the limbic--" She changed course, not wanting to confuse him. "--primarily deep inside, to areas controlling emotion, violence, antisocial behavior. The goal is to alter the neurochemistry, strengthen the inhibitory--" She stopped again, unsure how to reword things.

"Electricity?" the prisoner barked, a couple of beats behind. "You wanna give me shock therapy? You gonna treat me like a mental case?"

"No, no. Electroshock was crude, dreadfully crude. My team--I said my team and--"

Her faltering attempts to regain control of the meeting melted under a storm of loud, obscene language. The guard appeared by the prisoner's side, grasping the chain that linked the manacles at wrists and ankles. The prisoner wrenched free for an instant, throwing his fists against the partition before being yanked back.

Lucinda pushed her chair back with a jolt, fetching up against the leg of her own guard. She stammered an apology, waving away his offered hand to stand up herself. She had weathered such storms a dozen times now, but they never became easier.

"If you want to try again," the guard said once the other side of the room was empty, "I can take you to the warden to arrange a time."

"No. That's all right." What had become easier was recognizing futility. She had suffered it often enough.

The California Department of Corrections had given her a list of twenty-two prisoners she could approach for the project. That roster had yielded exactly one volunteer.

There was only one thing to do: ask for more candidates. That would involve going beyond Corrections.


The Assembly had recessed a few days before, but Lorenzo Gallegos was there in the atrium of the state capitol building to greet her. The creases in his dark mestizo face placed him in his fifties, while the gloss in his heavy mustache hinted at dyeing. He escorted her through the sharply echoing hallways to his door, his name and title of Assembly Speaker etched in silver on a mahogany plaque.

Gallegos sat at his broad desk, and fanned several notecards before him. He rubbed his jawline with a thick finger as he scanned them. "Now, Doctor Peale, you want us to authorize the Corrections Department to give your study wider access to our prison population. Why isn't the access you received last session enough?"

"Because the restrictions placed upon us by the first bill narrowed our candidates to the most violent and antisocial inmates, those considered beyond conventional rehabilitation."

"Your research is about rehabilitating just those people," Gallegos said. "We gave you who you wanted."

"But those same attributes make them the people least likely to participate willingly. We were asking for volunteers from a group predisposed against volunteering. That's an obvious formula for failure."

Gallegos laid one hand atop another. "I don't see how that is more our concern than yours, Doctor."

"You passed the bill. You voted for it yourself."

He glanced at a card. "Yes, ahem, as part of an omnibus measure."

"Well, it's time this matter received more exclusive attention. This therapy has the potential to make violent, recidivist criminals mild-mannered and law abiding. It can rehabilitate thousands, relieve overcrowding in your prisons, return people to productive society. To smother it with neglect masquerading as restrained support would be a travesty." Lucinda sensed a defensive stiffening, and moderated her tone. "It would make the original measure a failure, and I don't see how that serves you, or anyone, well."

Gallegos nodded. "What would you have us do? Widen your volunteer pool, or give you the worst cases whether they want to participate or not?"

"Widen the pool," she said. "Drafting participants at this stage would be highly unethical. The original legislation acted properly there," she added as a sop.

He looked over his cards for a moment, scratching his chin. "What about your other volunteers? The ones providing the, ah, improved patterns. Will you need more of those?"

Lucinda shook her head. "Our volunteers from the university will be enough. We'll pick the neural architecture most physically similar to each subject's to perform the overlay, in the relevant areas."

"Only from your university? That's a narrow sample for such intricate work."

"We have plenty of scans on file. Bringing in people from outside would produce heavy paperwork. That eats up time and money--and we are trying to economize with the state's money."

Gallegos smirked. "You certainly haven't gotten much value for it yet."

"With all respect, sir, that's not our fault. The authorization we got didn't match our need, not through malice but through lack of foresight. We can proceed with our single volunteer, but one man will scarcely prove or disprove the methodology. We deserve a proper trial. Society deserves the chance to have its penal system live up to its ideals."

He asked other, increasingly vapid, questions, all the while watching her through heavy eyelids. She gauged his attitude not as apathy but as aloofness, unwillingness to commit himself to something not affecting his interests directly. She made careful answers, taking pains not to nettle him.

They could succeed without him. It would just take more work.


Lucinda wrote the project summary at home. It would accompany her team's formal request to members of the Assembly. Pavel, with his uncanny weather sense for politics, all kinds from office to international, had told her not to bother with the State Senate. They would follow the Assembly's lead.

She tried not to soften the science too insultingly, but felt compelled to include rebuttals to anticipated questions. No, it wasn't like shock treatment: that worked at a far coarser level, more like reformatting a disk than writing data onto it. No, it didn't rewrite actual memories: it altered underlying patterns in the brain, changing the worst predilections to better ones. It could erase memories if misapplied, but she didn't write that.

She finished the last sentence, set the computer to checking her spelling and grammar, and rolled her shoulders to loosen the kinks. "Come here, Ben." Lucinda listened, heard nothing, and repeated her call, adding a whistle. Still nothing.

The computer signaled before she could try again. She checked the words and sentences it marked, correcting most of them. She pasted the edited file into an e-mail envelope and sent review copies to Pavel and Frances for their approval.

She heard padding up the stairs, and smiled. Just like Ben to come to her in his own good time.

The tall Rottweiler loped through the doorway. He stopped close enough for Lucinda to reach, sat, and cocked his head to give her easy access to the back of his ear. She obliged with a scratch, and his eyes went big with simple animal joy.

The first time she had seen Ben, she would have lost fingers trying to do that.

He still had seams in the black coat atop his head, from the surgery scars. The police had confiscated him and three others from a man now in prison for cruelty and breeding dangerous animals. With destroying them their only other option, they gave the Rottweilers to her study group, who made them their first test subjects.

One had died in surgery, inadequately sedated and restrained, thrashing and howling in throes that still haunted Lucinda. The rest received neural overlays from a tame, properly raised Rottweiler, the scope of the work narrowed and refined each time. Ben had been first, though of course he hadn't had that name at the time. Lucinda pulled Ben closer, tickling him along his ribs, setting his leg to twitching. She had promised to adopt Ben even before the experiments went forward. She had felt obliged, for all the risk and trauma.

And if the rehabilitation hadn't worked? If he had stayed as vicious at the first time she had seen them in their cages? Lucinda tried not to dwell on it. She just would have managed, somehow.

Now there were more responsibilities ahead, more than a dog or three to rescue. She gave Ben a rub on top of his head, scars and all. She was ready--if she got the chance.


"I can't say I'm favorably disposed at first glance, Doctor Peale," said Mark Farrar. The Minority Floor Leader was white haired, with a pudginess exaggerated by the droops of age and the slight distortion of the compuphone picture. "This proposal reflects the attitude I find distressingly typical in most scientists."

"What attitude is that, sir?" Lucinda asked with careful respect. Republicans held barely a third of the chamber, but by her responses so far, this vote showed no sign of following party lines.

"The denial of free will, of responsibility, in favor of chemical reactions manipulating us with the precision of textbook equations."

She almost smiled. If he thought the mess and tangle of hundreds of chemicals in the brain was precise, he had never worked in neurochemistry.

"Our project is not advancing a philosophical agenda," she said, "and neither am I personally. We are dealing with material matters, not ultimate causes."

"Exactly my point," Farrar said, with a crispness saying he had scored one.

She tried again. "Neurochemistry works in more than one direction. Recalling a memory makes the neurons holding it more responsive to each other, making it easier to recall in the future. The technical name is "long-term potentiation," and a similar process occurs with other repeated actions. They become ingrained along a path of least resistance, whether it's riding a bicycle, throwing a baseball--" She paused. "--or committing a gang hit. Accustomed actions become second nature."

Farrar nodded slowly. "Interesting." His pensive mien crumpled into a frown. "Those actions also carry consequences, which your proposed remedy appears to sidestep. Granted, it is very popular these days not to want to punish people for their crimes."

Lucinda hastened to interrupt. "You are aware, sir, that the neural impression procedure steers clear of most of the cerebrum, where memories are generally stored."

"I'm not sure I follow you, Doctor."

"Even though successful treatment would leave the subject no longer inclined to commit violent acts, the memories of the acts he committed that got him incarcerated would remain. The procedure is not sophisticated enough for us to tamper with those memories, and won't be in the near term. It seems to me those memories are likely to weigh on a newly enlightened conscience."

She watched him turn her words over. "Almost elegant, in a way," he murmured. "It might just work … that is, if the alteration works, and stays effective. I see no guarantee of that."

"There can't be, until we attempt it on humans. Theory is always incomplete without proof."

"Again, Doctor Peale, you have a point." His smile returned, half-strength. "Trouble is, a lot of us will construe this as another form of assault on capital punishment--"


"--final assault against capital punishment," said Chapiqua Norris, her dark, earnest face almost aglow. "The 'heightened burden' limit is a joke, an evasion of its inherent injustice. Healing rather than executing: that would be a tremendous benefit of your experiment--"

Lucinda let herself start smiling.

"--but it does nothing to resolve the root injustices of the system, the organized oppression of the Africans in America."

Lucinda's mouth fell into a frown mirroring the Majority Floor Leader's. "I'm not sure our procedure has any bearing on those roots. If it gets people out of the prisons and back to their homes as good citizens, though, I happen to think that's a worthwhile result."

"Maybe, but what kind of man will be coming home? What kind of thoughts--whose kind of thoughts--will he be thinking? That's why I will need a comprehensive breakdown of the people providing the brain patterns to be imposed on them."

"I--Ms. Norris, we cannot do that. Our release forms contained strong confidentiality clauses."

"You don't need to reveal their names. Only their races, genders, sexual orientation preferences, ages, religions--oh, what else?--of course, income brackets, theirs and their parents. I'll have to talk with my colleagues about other categories."

"Well, that may be--"

"But race is strictly non-negotiable. It is bad enough that white American culture works to erase African culture, but to invade Africans' brains, wipe out their thoughts and replace them with white worldviews …." She shuddered.

Lucinda realized that those teams at UCLA and Johns Hopkins were going to suffer harder scrutiny in their brain pattern surveys than they had realized. "We'll try to make every reasonable accommodation," she said.

Norris scarcely noticed. "I also want your assurance that your procedure will not erase the ability to commit civil disobedience. That's the only real measure of power Africans in America hold, and to wipe that out--"


"--wipe out the ability to dissent, to oppose the dictates of the government. That's why I am so worried," said Minority Whip Kathy Wen, her intensity obvious yet restrained.

"The procedure doesn't do that," Lucinda said. "I wouldn't be involved if it did. My goal is the rehabilitation of criminals."

"Yes, and by definition it is governments that decide what are crimes. My parents learned that back in China, and were fortunate to make it here with the knowledge. This technique has ghastly potential in the wrong hands, and power has a way of turning anybody's hands into the wrong ones."

Lucinda folded her hands self-consciously. "Ms. Wen, you overestimate our abilities. We don't have the technical ability to make and overlay new thoughts on a brain, and may never have it. I'm sure the Assembly can set any number of reasonable precautions for this trial, and any expanded use."

Wen grimaced. "Expanded use, as you say. If this succeeds, it will spread well beyond our legislative domain." She shook her head regretfully. "Don't take me wrong, Doctor Peale. I respect your efforts, and I think this could mend many lives, if kept within reason. I simply don't trust reason to hold permanent sway."

Lucinda offered a smile. "I'm a scientist. I believe the power of reason will win out."

Wen reflected the smile, with a melancholy twist. "That's where we differ. I'm a politician."


Pavel Patrusky laughed. "I'm impressed. They're almost thinking about this."

"I suppose so," said Lucinda, pacing from one cluttered side of his office to the other. "I actually welcomed some honest intellectual engagement, except that I got it in pieces. None of them ventured beyond one sliver of the spectrum, one tight view of the whole." She turned a sweet smile on Pavel. "I really wish you could handle them."

"Me, too, but that wouldn't w-w-work much in our f-f-favor." After the brief release of his laughter, the stutter had reasserted itself. "I'll work on those d-d-dossiers Norris wants. Hopefully the v-volunteers won't be too cross with all the new q-qu-questions."

"We might want to consider some assurances to other Assemblypersons. Mister Farrar seemed open to persuasion."

"The Republicans?" Pavel sneered. "F-f-f-forget 'em. They'll be all "law this" and "punishment that." They w-w-won't try to overc-come their ignorance."

Lucinda looked at the carpet. "Maybe that's our problem, too."

"What?"

"Farrar has a point," she said, finally settling into a chair. "Our work, our field is based on the presumption of deterministic causes, no ghosts in the machine. The law is founded on the concept of free will, the whole being responsible rather than the parts. It's like relativity and quantum mechanics. Each theory makes sense, but nobody knows how to make them make sense together." She lifted an eyebrow. "Not yet, anyway."

"That assumes their theory is right," Pavel snapped. "W-we've got scientific proof. Where's theirs?"

"Let's wait a while," Lucinda said dryly, "before we crow too much about our proof. Our session with Zliceski starts at one, right?" Pavel nodded. "Fine. I can get some work done before then."


She was there for the mapping session with Burt Zliceski. He was immobilized, past what was necessary to keep his head still for the magnetoencephalographic scanner. His spiky steel-gray hair was obscured, but she could see the narrow eyes and blunt chin that hid nothing of the brutality inside.

Frances sat nearby, with a deputy close but out of Zliceski's curtailed field of vision. She drew out his recollections, one by one, not leading or sensationalizing or judging, but always gently pulling out the details. They went from the teenaged beatings and muggings through to the homicides, two of them never even prosecuted, and finally the double murder that had put him in jail for life without parole.

Lucinda squirmed in the equipment booth, fighting her horror. How could such people be? She thought of the jury, punctiliously splitting that hair between "reasonable doubt" and "shadow of a doubt" so that he could remain alive. Did he deserve such scrupulous care? Was conscience wasted on him?

She wrenched her attention back to the display of Zliceski's brain, flashing with activity. With each grisly detail that Frances coaxed from him, the pathways that made cruelty so easy for him appeared in greater detail, the roots in the caudate nucleus and putamen sending filaments into the frontal cortex.

There was no frontal lobe damage, as rather many of the worst criminals shared. That would make the next step easier--though it chilled Lucinda to think that Zliceski's brain could be considered undamaged, normal, by any standard.


She was there for the surgery, ensconced in the observation bay even though there was little reason for her to be. She had done her work, refining the data into a precise three-dimensional neural map, pinpointing the neurons that Pavel would use as fulcrums, placing his levers there to move a mind.

Lucinda watched Pavel and his assistants insert the micro-electrodes, using robotics for the work too delicate to trust to human hands. Once finished, they slid Zliceski under the MEG scanner. They used weak test pulses to confirm that the electrodes were in the right places, then initiated the pre-programmed overlay sequence.

There was little to do but wait. The currents flowed along their appointed courses again and again, checking one neurotransmitter or releasing another, imposing inhibitions where there had been excitations. Long-term potentiations that would normally require months or years took shape within a few hours. Old patterns faded, and a new one charted in another man's brain began to emerge.

But did changing the cells change the soul?


She was there for Zliceski's first post-operative interview. She watched him enter the room, his head shorn and bandaged from the surgery, though with one fragment of scar showing a nasty red. He muttered a word of greeting to Frances before she and the guard strapped him in for the MEG scan.

Not until she had retired to the equipment booth did Lucinda realize that she had never heard Burt Zliceski greet anyone before without being prompted.

Frances asked some neutral questions to get a baseline, then began to probe his violent memories again. Lucinda saw the new activity patterns in his limbic system, almost a perfect match of their volunteer template. The impression had held, but did it make a difference?

Soon Frances stopped her own probing, and started an audiotape machine. On it were Zliceski's own words from several days before. Lucinda noted the added activity in the frontal lobe: he remembered saying those things. She watched closer.

"That's anomalous," she said to herself. The orbito-frontal cortex was beginning to light up. That happened when a person felt distressed. She looked at it again, and suddenly she began to suspect why.

"Doctor, can you turn that off?"

Frances obliged him directly, and started interrogating him on his emotional state. Lucinda listened closely, ignoring the scan for the moment, straining to catch his voice. Where was the menace, the challenge in every word she remembered from her interview, even when he was agreeing to volunteer for them? It couldn't be that easy.

But those doubts vanished like a lifting fog. She went back to the monitor for more esoteric signs of confirmation, as a matter of proper scientific form. Inside, she exulted in perfect confidence. They had succeeded.


The California Assembly's Human Services Committee was not as easily convinced.

Lucinda related the procedure and its results to date, summarized what could be achieved, and all but pleaded for an expanded opportunity for the team to make their case. The chairwoman asked some desultory questions, but yielded the floor early to the ranking Republican: Mark Farrar.

Farrar crossed his arms loosely. "Doctor Peale, a man can say he is reformed, without it being so. How can you objectively say that Patient One is no longer capable of criminal violence, when you have only your hopes and his claims on which to base your conclusion?"

"That isn't all the evidence we have. His frontal lobe patterns during interviews show that he's not attempting deception, and there are no indicators of pathological lying, where one believes whatever one says in the moment."

"I beg your pardon. You are saying you can tell by a brain scan whether a person is lying or telling the truth?"

"Essentially so," she said. "A research team at Penn State published a paper on that two years ago. I can give you the URL for it, if you like."

Farrar chortled. "Doctor Peale, I think you just made some people in this room very nervous."

There was scattered, apprehensive laughter in the gallery. Forced chuckles from the targets of his quip were outnumbered by bitter scowls. Farrar hadn't helped Lucinda's case at all.

Other committee members soon got their turns, with questions neither apathetic nor dispassionate.

"How many of Patient One's old memories did your experiment erase?"

"Does you inability to answer reflect indifference to the possibility of forced amnesia, or do you consider it a small price to pay?"

"Do you believe only scientists, or people hand-picked by scientists, have the emotional stability you seek to impress on, ahem, our correctional clients?" (And other people accuse scientists of using obfuscating jargon, Lucinda thought.)

"Should this procedure be performed unwillingly on violent inmates?"

"At what threshold of violence? What crimes are bad enough to warrant this treatment?"

"Do you consider this a treatment, Doctor Peale, or a punishment?"

In her personal conversations, she had been able to shade her responses to suit the listener, present the side of the whole she wanted them to see. She could not do that here, with the arc of benches looming above her, bracketing her in place. She answered with her best detached air, but she saw brows lowering, mouths tightening, eyes turning aside.

The floor came to the last of the Democrats, Hazel Tucker, a young black woman. Two members had previously echoed Chapiqua Norris's racial outlook, and Lucinda expected Tucker to be the third. She was not.

"In your experiment," Tucker said, "you removed a part of Patient One's psychological makeup, and replaced it with another person's. Is that correct?"

"Not exactly. We superimposed another pattern on some of Patient One's neurons, in a way to make the neurochemical reactions of the new pattern stronger than those of the old one."

"But in effect, a piece of his old personality is gone, replaced with someone else's." Lucinda nodded. "Could it be said that Patient One no longer exists, that he has been replaced by a new individual?"

"No," Lucinda exclaimed, then took a breath. "It's akin to genetic therapy. We can knock sequences out of a patient's DNA and replace them with new ones for therapeutic purposes. Nobody seriously asserts that this creates a new human being."

"But our consciousness, our self-identity, doesn't spring from DNA. It comes from the interconnections in our brains. Change one piece, and you have changed the whole. Is this erasure of personality not simply capital punishment in another form? Does this not imply that certain personalities have no right to exist?"

Lucinda raised her water glass to her lips. Tucker had really put some thought into this--but why did she have to bring up the death penalty again? Hadn't a few of her colleagues driven that wedge far enough?

"My purpose here is not to argue the merits or the justice of capital punishment, except to provide what I believe is a better alternative. As to changing the personalities of criminals, isn't that what prisons are supposed to do? They are called 'penitentiaries,' places where people repent of their misdeeds. We tend to forget that, because it happens so much less often than we want. We try to change their personalities from the outside in, with all the inefficiencies and failures you all know about. Our treatment does at once--or will do, we hope--what current systems cannot guarantee in any number of years."

Tucker did not yield. "The gradual rehabilitation we have today does allow for continuity. Changing someone's personality in an afternoon of surgery is like a break in a rope: it makes two ropes. Tell me," she said, leaning forward, "does Patient One feel like the same man who went into the operating room?"

Lucinda tensed. "He feels like a better man," she said, because she did not know the answer to the real question.


She called Speaker Gallegos the next day, to assess his impression of the hearing. She learned his impression all too quickly.

"I'm sorry, Doctor Peale. I cannot support placing this bill before the committee."

Lucinda flinched, but kept her eyes steady on the computer screen. "Doesn't it have a fighting chance? Pavel and I figured the split was almost dead even."

"Exactly. It's too uncertain. I won't expend valuable time in this session to offer a bill with an even chance of failure. We have many more important things to do."

"You could make it a rider," she said. "That's how the original authorization passed."

An amused Gallegos scratched his chin, looking like he was tickling himself. "That works when members are indifferent about a measure. Instead, your information campaign has polarized them. They won't let the measure slide through, no matter how it's offered. They're just too worried that this thing is out of the proper control."

Lucinda swallowed an acid retort. "And whose control is that?"

"Ours, of course. Instead, other people choose the brain templates, set the standards of success or failure, and stand to reap the credit." He gave her a lofty smile. "Perhaps you should have thought of such considerations before you started your campaign. Good day, Doctor Peale."


"That can't be it." Frances sat between her two partners, so enervated her words carried barely a rumor of outrage. "Pavel, maybe you could persuade--"

Pavel waved his hand. "It w-won't work. Gallegos is t-t-too much the pragmatist. He'll move only if the v-votes move--and we've d-done our best." He caught Lucinda's eye. "Really, you did."

Lucinda shifted the posture of her slump. "I don't know if I believe you, but thanks."

Their meeting broke up moments later. Lucinda went back to her office, and sat brooding at the monitor displaying Burt Zliceski's latest progress report. He reported no rupture in his memories now, for whatever that was worth to Hazel Tucker, or anybody else.

He still wasn't pleasant company, but Lucinda could sit in the same room with him without wanting to flee or hide behind the guard. That was a leap. They had done so much for him--and he was going to be the only one. The program wouldn't last two years in limbo, hoping for a more favorable Assembly after the next election. It was doomed.

Lucinda propped her elbows on the desk and let her head drop into her hands. "No, it isn't," she said, half-vowing, half-pleading. "No, it isn't."


Gus Moncton's bandaged head made him look diminished as he went under the MEG scanner. Nothing could help that, although someday the transcranial magnetic stimulation people might produce something precise enough to allow neural impressing without surgery. Whatever the physical damage today's methods left on him, though, the man inside was renewed. His eyes no longer darted to all corners of the room, hunting for the slightest challenge to him.

"No, no nightmares last night, Doc. I guess it was a one-time thing."

The new group of volunteers was more open to rehabilitation, less disturbing to Lucinda. She was comfortable enough around them to conduct interviews herself. With Frances gone, someone had to pull up the slack.

Lucinda had gone to Gallegos's office alone, without telling the others. The proposal she submitted stunned him. For an instant she thought he would refuse, and felt a perverse premonitory relief. She was wrong, though. The offer was too personally tempting to resist, just as she had planned.

"I haven't felt any of the violent urges--not even about my shadow Larry." Gus hooked a thumb toward the guard in the corner. Lucinda grinned, having forgotten about Larry.

Pavel had been horrified at first, but saw the pragmatic sense of it. Now the politicians could feel it was their program too, he reasoned. They could feel in control. The party-line rift her idea had created, they could deal with when the time came.

They tried to persuade Frances, but she would not stay. Her ideas of clinical perfection would bear no intrusion, even if the new brain-pattern providers didn't seriously distort the volunteer pool. Perhaps it was turf envy, the way some of the lawmakers thought.

Lucinda regretted Frances's quitting, but not her own actions that precipitated it. It hadn't been a very high price to pay--not for what they gained.

"Quit holding back, Doc. If I'm tough enough to have my skull cracked open, I can handle a few rough questions." Gus smiled affably at Lucinda, as he absent-mindedly rasped a finger along his chin.


 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

Last Updated: May 15, 2016.

 

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