strangle this person who had destroyed his friend.
“Yes. He’s really doing well.” Hendricks sounded indecently happy with herself. “Last week he couldn’t do what he’s doing now.”
Doing well. Sitting there copying block patterns was not Tom’s definition of doing well. Not when he remembered Lou’s startling abilities. “But… but pattern analysis and pattern generation was his special gift-”
“There have been profound changes in the structure of his brain,” Dr. Hendricks said. “Changes are still going on. It’s as if his brain reversed in age, became an infant brain again in some ways. Great plasticity, great adaptive ability.”
Her smug tone grated on him; she clearly had no doubts about what she had done. “How long is this going to take?” he asked.
Hendricks did not shrug, but the pause might have been one. “We do not know. We thought—we hoped, perhaps I should say—that with the combination of genetic and nanotechnology, with accelerated neural growth, the recovery phase would be shorter, more like that seen in the animal model. The human brain is, however, immeasurably more complex—”
“You should have known that going in,” Tom said. He didn’t care that his tone was accusatory. He wondered how the others were doing, tried to remember how many there’d been. Only two other men had been in the room, working with other therapists. Were the others all right or not? He didn’t even know their names.
“Yes.” Her mild acceptance irritated him even more.
“What were you thinking—”
“To help. Only to help. Look—” She pointed at the window and Tom looked.
The man with Lou’s face— but not his expression—set aside the completed pattern and looked up with a smile to the therapist across the table. She spoke—Tom could not hear the words through the glass, but he could see Lou’s reaction, a relaxed laugh and a slight shake of the head. It was so unlike Lou, so strangely normal, that Tom felt his breath come short.
“His social interactions are already more normal. He’s easily motivated by social cues; he enjoys being with people. A very pleasant personality, even though still infantile at this point. His sensory processing seems to have normalized; his preferred range of temperatures, textures, flavors, and so on is now within normal limits. His language use improves daily. We’ve been lowering the doses of anxiolytics as function improves.”
“But his memories—”
“No way to tell yet. Our experience with restoring lost memories in the psychotic population suggests that both the techniques we’ll be using work to a degree. We made multisensory recordings, you know, and those will be reinserted. For the present we’ve blocked access with a specific biochemical agent—proprietary, so don’t even ask—which we’ll be filtering out in the next few weeks. We want to be sure we have a completely stable substrate of sensory processing and integration before we do that.”
“So you don’t know if you’ll be able to give him back his previous life?”
“No, but we’re certainly hopeful. And he won’t be worse off than someone who loses memory through trauma.” What they’d done to Lou could be called trauma, Tom thought. Hendricks went on. “After all, people can adapt and live independently without any memory of their past, as long as they can relearn necessary daily living and community living skills.”
“What about cognitive?”Tom managed to say in a level voice. “He seems pretty impaired right now, and he was near genius level before.”
“Hardly that, I think,” Dr. Hendricks said. “According to our tests, he was safely above average, so even if he lost ten or twenty points, it wasn’t going to put his ability to live independently in jeopardy. But he wasn’t a genius, by any means.” The prim certainty in her voice, the cool dismissal of the Lou he had known, seemed worse than deliberate cruelty.
“Did you know him—or any of them—before?” Tom asked.
“No, of course not. I met them once, but it would have been inappropriate for me to know them personally. I have their test results, and the interviews and memory recordings are all held by the rehab team psychologists.”
“He was an extraordinary man,” Tom said. He looked at her face and saw nothing but pride in what she was doing and impatience at having been interrupted. “I hope he will be again.”
“He will, at least, not be autistic,” she said, as if that justified everything else.
Tom opened his mouth to say autistic wasn’t that bad and shut it again. No use arguing with someone like her, at least not here and now, and it was too late for