She called David at 7 a.m.
Not from the kitchen from the bathroom, with the door closed and the fan running, because Alma was eating cereal in the next room and Maren did not want her daughter to hear what she was about to ask, partly because the question was irrational and partly because it wasn't.
David picked up on the third ring. He had the voice of a man who'd been awake for twenty minutes and had used those minutes to make coffee but not yet to drink it alert enough to answer, not yet caffeinated enough to be patient.
"Maren? Is Alma okay?"
"She's fine. She's eating. I have a question."
"Good morning to you too."
She ignored this. She had not slept. She'd spent the hours between midnight and six sitting at the kitchen table, reviewing the Phase 0 files and then not reviewing them, opening and closing her photo gallery, scrolling through text messages she'd already read. Her eyes felt like they'd been packed in sand. "Do you remember a Saturday in late March, about nineteen months ago? I would have had Alma. I'm trying to pin down what we did."
A pause. She could hear him pouring coffee. The specific sound of it liquid hitting ceramic, the trickle that means the mug is almost full. "Late March. Nineteen months ago. That's... pretty specific. What's this about?"
"I think I took Alma to the aquarium."
"Okay?"
"I need you to confirm that."
Another pause. Longer. She could feel him recalibrating not to the question, but to her. David had been married to Maren for six years and divorced from her for one, and in that time he'd developed an ear for the frequency shifts in her voice that signaled transitions from normal Maren to something is wrong Maren. He was hearing it now.
"March, nineteen months ago," he said carefully. "That would have been... hang on." She heard him moving, a chair scraping. He'd be checking his own calendar. David kept a paper planner one of the things that used to charm her and eventually drove her insane, the way he'd flip through pages and lick his thumb and find the date with the leisurely inefficiency of a man who believed time was something you inhabited rather than managed.
"That weekend Alma was with me," he said.
The floor tilted. Not physically Maren was sitting on the closed toilet lid with her back against the tile wall, perfectly stable, perfectly still. But something inside her shifted, the way a building shifts in an earthquake: invisibly, structurally, in a way you don't see until the cracks appear in the plaster.
"She was with you."
"Yeah. I have it here March twenty-fifth and twenty-sixth, my weekend. I took her to my parents' place in Hingham. She and my dad made that birdhouse, remember? The one that looked like a coffin?"
"I remember the birdhouse."
She did remember the birdhouse. She remembered it clearly a lopsided wooden box painted bright red, with a hole that was slightly too large and a roof that slanted at a drunken angle. Alma had been enormously proud. David's father had let her use the hammer, supervised, and she'd hit her thumb once and not cried, which she regarded as a significant achievement.
So on March 26, Alma had been in Hingham with David, making a birdhouse.
And Maren remembered with the same clarity, the same embodied certainty taking Alma to the aquarium. Holding her hand in front of the beluga tank. Feeling the cool, damp air. Hearing the children's voices. Seeing the whale turn.
Both memories existed in her mind simultaneously. Both felt real. Both had sensory texture the weight of Alma's hand, the blue light, the whale's skin, the birdhouse's red paint. But one of them was a lie.
"Maren? You still there?"
"Yes. Thank you. That's what I needed."
"Are you okay? You sound "
"I'm fine. I'll drop Alma at school and she'll be at your place at six on Friday."
"Maren "
"I'm fine, David."
She hung up. She sat on the bathroom floor when had she slid off the toilet? with her back against the tile and her phone in her lap and tried to think like a scientist.
Fact: on March 26, Alma was in Hingham. Maren was not at the aquarium.
Fact: Maren remembered the aquarium visit with detailed, multi-sensory clarity. She could see the whale. She could smell the salt water. She could feel the temperature.
Fact: file P0-014 contained a polysomnography recording from March 26 with a 6 Hz artificial signal embedded in the slow-wave phase.
Hypothesis: the aquarium memory was not real. It had been constructed assembled from sensory components and inserted into her autobiographical memory during a session she didn't remember, on a day she couldn't account for.
She stood up. Her reflection in the bathroom mirror looked like someone she knew but couldn't quite place familiar in general, wrong in detail. The dark circles. The dry lips. The slight asymmetry of her expression, as though one half of her face knew something the other half was still processing.
She washed her face. Brushed her teeth. Applied enough concealer to look like a person who had slept. Went into the kitchen.
"Mama, can I have more milk?"
"Of course, bug."
She poured the milk and watched Alma drink it and tried not to examine her own memory of this moment as it formed tried not to ask whether the kitchen was real, whether the cereal was real, whether Alma's face, lit by the pale November light through the window above the sink, was a thing she was experiencing or a thing someone had written and filed inside her.
She took Alma to school. The rain boots clicked on the pavement. Maren listened to the sound and held it, deliberately, the way you hold a stone in your pocket something solid, something cool, something that proves the ground exists.
• •
She did not go to Sollen.
Instead she went home and sat at the kitchen table and opened the P0-014 file again and studied the 6 Hz signal with the cold, surgical attention of a woman who was beginning to understand that she was not just the investigator in this story.
She was also the subject.
The 6 Hz signal. It pulsed during the deepest trough of slow-wave sleep the phase during which the brain was maximally receptive to external stimulation, maximally plastic, maximally open. This was the window Somniplex-R had been designed to optimize: the drug deepened and stabilized slow-wave phases precisely because that was where the therapeutic benefit lived. Better slow-wave sleep meant better memory consolidation, better emotional processing, better next-day cognition.
But the same window that made slow-wave sleep therapeutically valuable also made it neurologically vulnerable. If you had access to a tool that could keep a brain in deep slow-wave for an extended period a tool like Somniplex-R then you also had access to a window during which that brain could be written to.
The 6 Hz signal was the pen.
Maren didn't know what the signal contained. She didn't have the decoding key. But the architecture of the thing the timing, the precision, the synchronization with the REM cycle told her it was designed to interface with the hippocampus during the exact neurological conditions that her own research had identified as optimal for memory formation.
Someone had taken her research and weaponized it.
And then someone had used it on her.
• •
She spent the rest of the morning cross-referencing.
She went through her calendar for the two-week window in March, day by day. Most of the days were accounted for work at Sollen, evenings with Alma, a dentist appointment, a phone call with her mother in Portland. But two days were either blank or contained entries she couldn't independently verify.
March 22, a Wednesday. Her calendar said: Lab work, all day. She remembered this she'd been calibrating the polysomnography equipment for Phase III, which was scheduled to begin the following month. But she had no emails from that day, no badge-in records on her phone, no data files with that timestamp. She might have been in the lab. She also might not have been.
March 26, the Saturday. Alma aquarium, 10 a.m. False. Confirmed false.
Two days. Two gaps. Enough time to conduct two polysomnography sessions an initial baseline and a single overnight with the 6 Hz signal.
Enough time to be made into P0-014.
She closed the laptop and pressed her palms against her eyes until she saw phosphenes the visual static that the brain produces when the optic nerve is stimulated by pressure, not light. She watched the colors bloom and die behind her eyelids and thought: I need help.
Not from Sollen. Not from Lena. Not from the institutional structures she'd spent her career trusting because they were orderly and documented and subject to review.
She needed the man with the lanyard. The man who'd given her the USB drive with handwriting that wasn't his. The man who'd said: the things I remember now they're not mine.
She needed Subject 077.
• •
She found him through the trial database.
This was a breach of protocol a fireable offense, at minimum. Each subject's identity was sequestered behind a coded identifier, accessible only to the data safety monitoring board and, in limited circumstances, to the lead researcher with appropriate justification. Maren was the lead researcher. She had no appropriate justification. She accessed the system anyway, with the grim efficiency of a woman who had decided that the rules she was breaking were less important than the rules that had already been broken against her.
Subject 077: Henrik Cale. Age 31. Occupation: data analyst. Employer: Sollen Pharmaceuticals.
She sat back.
He worked at Sollen. He was inside the building. He'd been wearing his lanyard when he intercepted her not because he'd forgotten to take it off, but because he'd come from inside. He'd walked out of the same building where the Phase 0 data was stored and handed her a USB drive in the shadow of a loading dock twenty meters from a security camera.
She dialed the phone number in his file. It rang once.
"I was wondering when you'd call," he said.
His voice was different from what she'd expected quieter, less frantic. The man at the loading dock had been vibrating with fear. This man sounded like someone who had been afraid for a long time and had found the far side of it not calm, exactly, but emptied. The way a house sounds after the storm has moved through.
"You're a Sollen employee."
"Junior data analyst. Third floor. I'm the one who formats the reports that go on Lena Voss's desk."
Hearing Lena's name in this context in the context of the USB drive and the P0 files and the aquarium that didn't happen felt like touching a live wire with wet hands. "How did you get the Phase 0 data?"
"I found it by accident. I was migrating an old archive partition routine housekeeping and there was a folder that wasn't indexed. P0. Fourteen files. I opened one because I was curious and I recognized the data format from my own trial sessions. Then I ran a spectral analysis because look, I'm not a neuroscientist. I barely passed stats. But I know what a clean polysomnography recording looks like, and these weren't clean. There was something underneath."
"The 6 Hz signal."
"Yeah. That."
"Why did you enroll in the trial?"
"Two-thousand-dollar bonus. I'm paying off student loans."
"And now you're remembering things."
A pause. She heard him breathe uneven, controlled, the breathing of someone who has rehearsed being calm. "A funeral. A man in a grey suit. A church with a wooden door. I remember the rain on the stones. I remember the grief it's not mine, Dr. Shaw. It doesn't belong to me. It's shaped wrong. Like wearing a coat that fits but was made for someone else's body."
"How long?"
"Since week six of the trial. Four months now. It's gotten worse. The funeral was first, but now there are others. A car accident I wasn't in. A woman singing a song I don't know."
Maren's grandmother sang in Portuguese. Barquinho, a song about a little boat. She'd sung it to Maren on summer nights in Portland, her voice thin and sweet with the particular vibrato of women who learned to sing in churches where the acoustics forgave everything. Maren hadn't thought about that song in years.
Until now.
"The song," she said. "What language is it in?"
"Portuguese, I think. I don't speak Portuguese. But I can hear it a woman's voice, older, and a melody I could hum for you right now."
Maren didn't ask him to hum it. She didn't need to. She knew which song it was. And she knew, with a certainty that felt like being dropped from a great height, that the memory Henrik Cale was carrying the memory of a woman singing in Portuguese had been taken from her.
"Henrik."
"Yes."
"The file labeled P0-014. That's me."
She heard something on his end a sound that might have been a laugh or might have been the noise a person makes when the worst thing they suspected turns out to be true. "I know," he said. "I didn't want to say it in the parking lot. I wasn't sure you were ready."
"Ready for what?"
"To find out you were first."
The kitchen was quiet. The radiator had stopped clanking. Outside, a car passed on the wet street, its tires hissing on the pavement. Alma's drawings hung on the refrigerator the whale, the purple house, the stick figure standing alone in a rectangle and Maren looked at them and thought: I don't know which of my memories of drawing these with her are real.
"What do you want me to do?" she asked. Not a capitulation a triage question. The question of a woman who has looked at the X-ray and is asking the surgeon how bad.
"I want you to help me get the full Phase 0 database. Not the fragment I found the whole thing. The donor recordings, the signal templates, the consent records if there are consent records. It's on a segregated server in the sub-basement. I tried to access it on my own and the system locked me out. But you have higher-clearance credentials."
"I've never been in the sub-basement."
"I know. That's the point. The sleep lab you use is on the second sub-level. The Phase 0 server is on the third. You'd need someone to tell you it exists."
"And now you've told me."
"And now I've told you."
She looked at the clock on the microwave. 11:47 a.m. Alma would be in school for another four hours. David would pick her up at three-thirty. Maren had four hours in which she was not a mother and could be something else something angrier, something that sawed through the protocols she'd spent her career building and used the ragged edges to cut toward the truth.
"Not yet," she said. "I need to know more before I go looking for something in that building. If they see me on the wrong floor, on the wrong terminal, asking the wrong questions I lose everything. I lose Alma."
"I understand."
"Can we meet?"
"There's a diner in Dorchester. South of Ashmont station. It's far enough from Sollen that nobody on the payroll eats there. I'll text you the address."
She agreed. She hung up. She sat in the quiet kitchen and ran her thumb across the edge of her phone and thought about the beluga whale turning in the blue light of a tank she'd never visited, and about her grandmother's voice singing a song about a little boat, and about the fact that those two memories one false, one real felt exactly the same inside her skull.
There was no instrument for this. No assay, no panel, no readout that could tell a genuine memory from an implanted one. The brain didn't flag its files. It didn't mark certain memories as original and others as copies. Everything lived in the same tissue, fired through the same synapses, carried the same electrochemical signature of having happened.
The only difference was that one of them had happened to someone else first.
She stood up. Washed the coffee mug. Checked the lock on the front door. Checked it again.
Then she did something she hadn't done in years, not since the early days of the divorce when the apartment felt too large and too quiet and she'd needed to remind herself that she existed in a body, not just in a mind: she pressed her hand flat against the kitchen wall. Plaster, cool and slightly gritty. Real. Unarguable. She held it there for ten seconds and felt the wall hold her back and thought: Start here. Start with what you can touch.
She took her hand away. There was a faint handprint in the condensation on the plaster, and she watched it fade first the fingers, then the palm, then the heel until there was nothing left, just the blank wall, as if she'd never touched it at all.