The Persona Protocol - By Andy McDermott Page 0,56
everything work?’
‘Perfectly. At first. Some of the personas gave me specialist knowledge that helped me carry out missions. Languages, local lands and people, how to fly a chopper – all sorts of things.’
She asked the question that had been on her mind since the demonstration at STS. ‘What . . . what did it feel like? Having someone else’s memories?’
Tony considered it. ‘Odd,’ he finally said. ‘In a lot of ways it seemed totally natural – drawing on a person’s memories or skills was just like recalling my own. It’s automatic, unconscious; it just happens. It only got weird if I actively thought about how they weren’t my memories. So I tried not to do that too often.’
‘I can imagine it must have been bizarre, having someone else’s thoughts in your head. A whole different personality, even – like when Adam started behaving like Conrad Wilmar.’
‘Actually, Adam shows that a lot more strongly than I did – acting like the other person, I mean.’
‘Why?’
‘Different personality, updated procedure, I guess. But,’ he went on, with a renewed intensity that suggested he wanted to leave that line of enquiry behind, ‘the missions we ran were all successful. PERSONA worked, and provided intel that would have been impossible to get any other way. And then . . . we had the big one. The mission where we caught Mahjub Najjar.’
‘Where you caught—’ She broke off as the full implications of what he had just said hit her. ‘The al-Qaeda leader? But I thought he was killed by a drone! It was all over the news. I mean, you even had your president gloating about it.’
‘I wouldn’t call it gloating,’ Tony said sharply. ‘It was a cover-up. We’d just captured the world’s most wanted terrorist. More to the point, we had a way to find out everything that he knew. Every planned attack, the names and locations of all his cell leaders, how he was moving al-Qaeda’s money around the world . . . every single secret that was in his head, we could put into mine. We knew it all. But if we’d announced that he’d been captured, his second-in-command – Muqaddim al-Rais – would have changed all the plans on the first day he took control. So we told the world he’d been killed. Dead men can’t be interrogated.’
‘Only now they can,’ Bianca realised. ‘If you’ve made a recording of his persona . . .’
‘Yeah. Once I was imprinted, I knew everything Najjar did – and could tell it all to our people.’
‘So that’s what PERSONA is really all about? Interrogation without torture?’
‘Torture doesn’t work. Not on people like Najjar. But this way we didn’t even need to lay a finger on him. I did all the talking.’
The limitations of the PERSONA process came to her mind. ‘For twenty-four hours.’
‘Twenty-four hours at a time. Najjar’s persona disappeared every time I went to sleep. The next morning, it would be re-imprinted so the interrogation could carry on where it left off.’ His expression darkened at a painful memory. ‘Until . . .’
‘Something went wrong,’ Bianca realised.
‘Yeah.’ He stared out of the porthole at infinity. ‘Like I said, I was the guinea pig. And PERSONA was experimental. It turned out that repeating the process over and over has side effects.’
‘What kind of side effects?’
He shifted in the seat, reluctant to speak. ‘First it was headaches. They weren’t much to begin with, but they turned into full-on skull-splitters. Then I started having periods of confusion, blackouts, and finally . . .’ Another lengthy pause. ‘Finally, I had a breakdown.’
‘Oh God,’ Bianca said softly. ‘I’m sorry.’
‘I was hospitalised for a week, and was out of commission for nearly another month. When they finally tried to imprint Najjar’s persona again, it was . . . agonising, like my mind was rejecting it. Almost an immune response. They stopped the procedure, but I knew that was it. It was over.’
She leaned closer to him. ‘Did they . . . did they try again?’
‘Yeah, with a different persona. They waited a few days, but it was the same result. Still,’ he said, sitting upright with strained lightness, ‘that’s science, I guess! You learn as much from the failures as the successes.’
She knew that he counted himself as one of the former. ‘But you came back to the project.’
‘The technique worked and had incredible potential, so it was obvious they were going to try again. I decided to stay, so I could help them work out the . . .