The Persona Protocol - By Andy McDermott Page 0,38

Wilmar, it turned out, was a middle-aged man with large glasses and crinkled, receding red hair. ‘No, no, that’s fine,’ he said to someone off-camera. ‘Okay, so, what do you need me to do? Are you going to ask me questions, or . . . ?’

‘No,’ said Albion’s voice. ‘Just tell us about yourself and your area of expertise.’ Bianca recognised the background as the lab in which she was standing.

‘Sure, sure, no problem,’ Wilmar replied. He had squirrelly, fidgety mannerisms, as if his brain were working slightly faster than his body could handle and was dumping its excess energy straight into his nervous system. He looked directly into the lens. ‘You want me to start? Okay, my name is Conrad Wilmar, and I’m a professor of biochemistry at Carnegie Mellon. I’m currently working with DARPA, the Defense Advanced Resear— Hey, is it okay for me to be talking about this?’ He looked towards his interviewer. ‘I know we’ve all got proper clearance, but I don’t want to take any chances, y’know?’

‘It’s fine,’ said Albion.

‘Okay, right. So, what was I saying? Oh, yeah. I’m working with DARPA to develop battlefield treatments and inoculants against biological weapons. Specifically, against weaponised strains of Bacillus anthracis and Neisseria meningitidis, which if anyone is ever mad enough to employ bioweapons in warfare are likely to be among the prime threats . . .’

Wilmar kept speaking, but Bianca had already drawn some conclusions about his personality. Very smart, jittery and seeming socially inept on the surface – but with an inner confidence emerging upon moving on to his specialist subject. An alpha nerd, then; someone who could seem nervous and bumbling when out of their usual element . . . but anyone underestimating them did so at their own risk. She knew the type. She had worked with quite a few of them.

‘Okay,’ said Kiddrick. Bianca looked round to see him fitting Adam with the complex skullcap of electrodes from the slideshow, a cable running from it to the PERSONA device. ‘Tony, can you find Wilmar’s disk?’

Tony went to the cabinet and ran his finger along the cases. ‘Vulich, Wagner, Wall, Warner . . . here we are.’ He slipped the box out from its companions.

Bianca regarded it dubiously. ‘So, how big are these disks if they can supposedly record the complete memories of a human brain? You’d need more than just a blank CD.’

He opened the case to show her. Inside was a flat, dark grey slab of plastic, about an inch thick. ‘It’s not really a disk – we just call them that because it’s easier than saying . . . God, I can’t even remember the full name. High-Capacity Rapid Access Multiplexing Static Memory Module? Something like that.’

She tried to pronounce the acronym. ‘Hurk . . . huckramsumm?’

Tony grinned. ‘Yeah, that’s why we stick to “disk”. Anyway, it’s basically a very, very big and fast flash drive.’

‘I still don’t see how any kind of computer memory would be big enough to record a person’s entire memories, though. The brain has billions of neurons – trillions of synapses. Storing them all would be like trying to fit the entire Internet on an iPod.’

‘On a normal, direct transfer, it’s just a matter of having enough bandwidth to push the data through,’ Kiddrick explained patronisingly as he finished securing the skullcap. ‘Which we do. Recording takes longer, though, because it has to encode and compress everything to fit on the module. To continue your iPod analogy, it’s like shrinking a raw audio file down to an MP3. It sounds the same, but takes up far less space.’

‘I know some audiophiles who’d argue at extremely tedious length about it sounding the same,’ said Bianca. ‘And doesn’t an MP3 lose some of the data when it’s compressed?’

‘The brain interpolates the missing information and fills in the gaps.’

‘That doesn’t sound a good idea when you’re talking about memories. People already have enough holes in their recollection as it is.’

‘Well,’ said Kiddrick, stepping back, ‘you’ll see for yourself in a minute. Everything’s ready. Tony, can I have that disk?’

Tony brought it to him, Bianca and Morgan joining them at the table. Kiddrick opened the PERSONA’s screen and waited for the machine to start up, then carefully inserted the disk into the recorder’s slot. He checked some figures in another window, then returned to the cabinet. ‘The drug we use to prime the agent to accept a new persona is called Neutharsine. Roger’s name; I’m not keen on it myself.