NLI-10 by Lee Isserow Page B

uploaded as subjects sleep to remain dormant until activated by key phrases in testing sessions. Based on observations thusfar at Cultybraggan and the other facilities, this is proving to be the most stable installation method we have attempted.
     
     

Marion Whark sent off the report to her superiors and sat back in her chair, spinning it around to look at the skyline. The sun was low on the horizon, steadily crawling upwards for the day ahead, which she would spend as every day this week, with the subjects. She hated having to babysit them through the steps of the incredibly simple activation and testing of peripheral apps, but didn't trust that her nurses or doctors would be watching the subjects close enough. In the previous trials they had lost resources, subjects and personnel (in order of importance) due to previous mentors not paying enough attention to the subjects, and she wasn't going to let this experiment go the way of the others. This had been her life for the last ten years. Ten years of fighting to convince her superiors that the NLI project had merit, that it was worth the investment and time, the cover-ups and hush money. Ten years of fighting to prove that both she and the project had value.
    Whark got up from her chair and looked over the digital London skyline before her. This would once again be her view when she returned in nine weeks with documentation, and perhaps a subject in tow. She wondered who it might be. The girl who's parents she killed, the tranny whose operations and treatment she green-lit, the cousin of the little Muslim boys she wouldn't let leave Tehran, the former born-again she found in a flop house, the apparently reformed hacker she bailed out, the Chinaman she had blacklisted from comedy clubs, or the little Christian girl whose father she'd ordered injected with a toxin that was retarding his DNA. All of them were playthings, toys she had been arranging and manipulating to get them desperate enough to join the trial, each with the right genetic and psychological profiles to reap the best results from the final experiment. She was done with random subjects, prison volunteers, the mentally ill or the homeless. This was her grand finale, and she had cast it perfectly.
    Whark waited for her subjects to finish their breakfast and had the orderlies bring them to the black room, where she ran them through the object and facial recognition tests again. She needed to be certain the apps were still functioning before moving on to the new additions.
    “Now we're moving on to image recall.” she said, enunciating her words clearly, the keyphrase unlocking the app and booting it up in the back of her subjects' brains. She watched intently at their reactions, looking for involuntary movements, twitches or glitches, but there were none.
    “This test is similar to note-taking, but rather than fill a mental document with words, I want you to take a snapshot with your minds.
They looked at her with confusion. She took out a book, opened to a page at random and turned it to face them all for a few seconds before closing it.
    “Read it to me.” she said.
    There were shrugs and apologies from her playthings. She was not amused.
    “You saw the page?” she asked.
    They nodded.
    “Then play back the memory.”
    All seven of them stared into middle distance and tried to remember it. She could see they were struggling, and reluctantly took them through the process step by step.
    “See it in your mind's eye.” she said. “The image recall function will take that image and present it to you within the interface.”
They continued to stare, trying to recreate the image. Whark stifled a scoff and eye roll at how stupid they all looked, staring at the walls ahead of them as they tried to activate the app.
    “I think I've got it!” said Micah.
    “Me too.” said Alex.
The success of two of their number seemed to make it easier for the others, and soon they all managed to pluck the image from