She told Henrik she needed the terminal.
They met at Sal's it was becoming a habit, and habits were dangerous, but the alternative was meeting at Sollen, which was more dangerous, or meeting at her apartment, which was where Alma lived and therefore off-limits to anything that carried the smell of danger, the way you don't bring chemicals into a nursery.
"I need to see the Phase III recordings with a deeper analysis tool," she said. "The standard spectral software isn't built to isolate a layered signal. I need raw access."
Henrik nodded. He'd brought a notebook a physical one, spiral-bound, the kind sold in drugstores for $2.99. He wrote in it with a mechanical pencil. The analog paranoia of a digital analyst who no longer trusted anything that plugged in.
"I can get you forty minutes on a secondary analytics terminal," he said. "There's a workstation in the third-floor server room that's connected to the trial database but doesn't have the same access restrictions as the lab terminals. It's meant for system maintenance firmware checks, backup verification. I can fake a maintenance request and log you in as a guest user."
"Won't that show up?"
"It'll show up as me running a diagnostic. I've done it a hundred times. The system admins don't flag routine maintenance. Their whole model is built on the assumption that the people using the tools are too bored to abuse them."
"When?"
"Tuesday. I'll set it up for the morning, when the third floor is empty there's a department meeting at ten that pulls everyone out for an hour."
Tuesday morning. Not Tuesday at 2 a.m. that was the sub-basement window, the twelve-minute keycard reset. This was different. This was the trial database, the Phase III recordings. Maren needed to confirm what she suspected: that the 6 Hz protocol was running on the current subjects, not just the Phase 0 group.
• •
Tuesday at 10:15 a.m., Maren walked into the third-floor server room with Henrik's guest credentials on a yellow sticky note in her pocket and the expression of a woman who had every right to be there.
The server room was what all server rooms were: ugly, cold, loud, lit by fluorescent tubes that buzzed at a frequency designed to make humans feel unwelcome. Racks of black hardware, cables bundled in colored conduit, the relentless white-noise roar of cooling fans. Henrik's workstation was in the far corner a desk, a monitor, a keyboard sticky with the residue of energy drinks.
She logged in. The terminal accepted the guest credentials without complaint. The trial database opened.
She had forty minutes before the department meeting ended and the third floor repopulated. She did not waste time.
She pulled the polysomnography recordings for all five anomaly subjects Henrik, Patricia, Marcus, Frank, Dolores and ran a nonstandard spectral analysis using a tool she'd built herself during the Zürich years, a signal-decomposition algorithm designed to isolate embedded frequencies beneath the primary sleep data. It was not part of Sollen's approved software suite. She'd loaded it from a USB drive she'd brought from home.
The algorithm ran for seven minutes. Maren sat in the roaring cold of the server room and watched the progress bar and thought about the fact that she was committing multiple violations of her employment contract, the trial protocol, and probably several federal regulations, and that she felt nothing about this except impatience.
The results appeared.
All five recordings showed the 6 Hz signal. In the Phase III data, it was subtler than in the Phase 0 files compressed, smoothed, woven into the surrounding neural activity with a finesse that the Phase 0 recordings lacked. If Phase 0 was a rough draft, Phase III was a finished manuscript. Someone had refined the technology in the two years between trials.
But the signal was there. Pulsing during slow-wave sleep. Writing to the hippocampus while her subjects dreamed.
She expanded the analysis to a random sample of twenty additional subjects people who hadn't reported anomalies. The signal was present in all twenty. Across the entire trial. Every subject. Every dose group. Every night.
Somniplex-R was not a sleep drug with a side effect. It was a memory-modification platform disguised as a sleep drug.
Her drug. Her research. Her framework.
She pressed her palms flat on the desk and breathed. The server room hummed. The fluorescent light buzzed. Everything was cold and loud and real in a way that the inside of her skull no longer was.
She had twenty-three minutes left.
She opened the Phase 0 database the same one Henrik had found on the unindexed partition. Fourteen files. She'd reviewed them at home on the USB drive, but the terminal had deeper search capabilities. She queried the database for metadata she hadn't been able to access on the standalone files.
The metadata unfolded.
Each Phase 0 recording had two layers she'd seen this on the USB drive. Surface layer: standard polysomnography. Deep layer: the 6 Hz signal. But on the terminal, with full database access, a third layer appeared. She hadn't seen it on the USB because the standalone viewer didn't render it.
It was a template layer.
Each subject's deep-layer signal wasn't randomly generated. It was built from a template a source recording, a donor brain pattern, from which the memory content had been extracted, compressed, and reformatted for implantation.
Maren stared at the template layer. Each Phase 0 file was tagged with a donor ID: the identifier of the brain whose memories had been sourced.
P0-001: Donor G-3.
P0-002: Donor G-3.
P0-003: Donor G-7.
She scrolled through. Multiple donors, feeding memories into multiple subjects. A distribution system. A production pipeline.
She reached P0-014.
P0-014: Donor M-1.
She queried the donor database for M-1.
The record opened. It contained a donor profile anonymized, but with session dates, recording parameters, and a field she hadn't expected: Source Category.
Source Category: Primary.
She queried the definition of Primary. The system returned a single line of documentation, written in the flat, procedural language of a protocol manual that someone had composed with the detachment of a person describing factory operations:
Primary donors provide foundational memory architecture for template generation. Primary donor material is used for calibration, baseline encoding, and high-fidelity memory construction. Primary donors undergo extended recording sessions (minimum 72 hours) to capture comprehensive hippocampal activity.
Minimum seventy-two hours. Three days of continuous recording. Three days during which the Primary donor's brain was mapped in totality every memory, every association, every emotional signature harvested and stored as raw material for the template library.
Maren queried M-1's session dates.
March 22 24. The Wednesday through Friday of the week in which P0-014 was recorded.
March 22. The day her calendar said Lab work, all day. The day she had no emails, no badge records, no evidence of where she'd been.
She'd been here. In this building. On a level below the one she knew about. Sleeping for seventy-two hours while her brain was recorded in comprehensive detail every memory she'd ever formed, from her grandmother's song to her daughter's face, extracted and catalogued and filed in a database with the designation M-1.
M-1. Maren, Primary.
She was the source.
Not just a subject. The source. The foundational donor whose memories were used to build the template library. The funeral that five strangers remembered was constructed from components of her neural architecture not her specific memories, but her patterns, her emotional signatures, her hippocampal formatting. The grey suit, the rain, the grief these were assembled from the way Maren's brain encoded loss, extracted during a seventy-two-hour session she'd attended under a chemical fog and then been given a false memory of an aquarium visit to patch over the gap.
She closed the database. She deleted the search history. She removed the USB drive with her analysis tool and put it in her pocket. She logged out.
Fifteen minutes remained before the department meeting ended. She walked out of the server room on legs that felt like they belonged to someone else not numb, but decoupled, as though the signal between her brain and her body had developed a lag, a processing delay, a gap where the information had to cross a bridge that wasn't structurally sound.
She made it to the stairwell before she sat down.
The stairwell was concrete. Institutional grey. It smelled of cleaning solution and the particular trapped air of spaces where no one lingers. She sat on the third step and put her head between her knees and breathed through the thing that was happening in her chest, which was not a heart attack and not a panic attack but something in between the cardiovascular response to discovering that the person you thought you were is a rough draft, and the final version is stored on a server you didn't know existed.
M-1. Maren, Primary.
She was the prototype.
She sat in the stairwell for four minutes. Then she stood up, straightened her sweater, pushed her glasses up the bridge of her nose, and walked to the elevator.
She had work to do. She had forty minutes of data in her head and a USB drive in her pocket and a list of facts that, arranged in the right order and delivered to the right person, could bring Sollen Pharmaceuticals to its knees.
But first she had to pick up Alma from school. Because there were some things no amount of data could compromise the click-drag rhythm of yellow boots on wet pavement, the weight of a child's hand in hers, the misspelled whale on the refrigerator and she would hold onto these things not because she could prove they were real, but because they were hers.
She walked out of the building into the November air and felt the cold on her face and thought: Tuesday. 2 a.m. Twelve minutes.
Soon.