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this to him?”
    Cunningham suppressed a smile. She was listening.
    “In this particular case the transplanted memory turned out to be an unpleasant one, which is an admittedly unfortunate outcome. Believe me, that wasn’t our intent. I wish to emphasize something I touched on earlier: This was only a feasibility study to explore if memory could be transferred. It is not the endpoint of this work, not even close. But because this is exploratory, we had no control over which memories might be transferred. My collaborator and I talked long and hard about whether or not to use this particular example for this demonstration. We decided to use it precisely because of one very compelling reason: It makes a very crucial point, and does it well. The man is so convincing. And this is specifically because of being so tormented by the memory. Even the Hollywood actors couldn’t match his sincerity. This fact alone should help persuade you the results are real, that these specific memories were embedded in him.”
    Rasmussen shook her head in dismay. “Who is your collaborator?”
    “Bertram Wyse. A neurosurgeon in Seattle. Have any of you heard of him?” It’d be a surprise if they had, but it was flattering to be asked. And sucking up to the person you were trying to sell to never hurt.
    No one answered.
    “PTSD has been his field of research for years. His focus is to find an effective treatment. He’s made quite a name for himself in the field, I might add.”
    “Posttraumatic stress disorder?” Lawson seemed bewildered.
    “As you know,” which, Cunningham figured, they didn’t, “there’s no effective treatment for it. Not only that, but an increasing number of vets are suffering from it. This is the reason the VA has supported his research. Two years ago, before leaving DARPA, I heard about this work, so I visited him in Seattle. In a nutshell, he believes PTSD is triggered by memories of the traumatic event. He contends that if he can pinpoint where the memory is stored in the brain and remove that area, the PTSD will vanish. No different from removing a bad appendix.”
    He paused to let that point sink in before moving on to the next one. “I started wondering, if that little chunk of brain that’s removed still contains the memory, is it possible to somehow retrieve that memory? Like playing a DVD on a different device than it was recorded on.”
    The room remained silent, all eyes on him now.
    “You can see where this is going, can’t you?” Another dramatic pause. “Each one of you knows too well one of the biggest problems in intelligence work is evaluating the validity of information obtained during an interrogation. Especially when using stress-inducing techniques such as water boarding. How valuable would it be to have absolute faith about the validity of the information obtained from a terrorist?”
    He let that percolate a moment before dropping the bomb.
    “What if there were a way to physically pluck specific memories from a terrorist and read them with total accuracy?” He was on a roll now, his voice rising, reflecting his passion for his plan. “What a win-win that would be for us! Picture it—the insurgent no longer remembers the information because we have it. Not only that, but the validity of our newly obtained information is as good as it gets. Obtained directly from the terrorist’s mind. Think about it.”
    Lawson shook his head. “Aw, Christ. Congress shit all over us for water boarding. I can just imagine how they’d react to—” He shook his head, at a loss for words. “These volunteers,” he said, making quotation marks in the air with his fingers, “how does Wyse recruit them?”
    Cunningham said, “Keep in mind this work is still early stage, so like I said, what you see here doesn’t model the real situation as we envision it. At the moment, he obtains small bits of brain from trauma patients. The ones who, unfortunately, are not expected to survive.”
    “Such