Virtual Analysis
by Philip J. Lees
Darrow tapped the screen of the monitor with his knuckle, as if that would make it update the display faster.
“Darn!” he said “This thing seems to get slower every day.”
Somerville didn’t acknowledge his bid for attention, she just stayed hunched over the control panel that sat beside the computer. From it, wires led into a circuit board that sat in the wall below the large glass window. On the other side, Forsyth was strapped into one of the virtual reality cradles and his head and limbs made small movements that were translated and amplified into his motion within the imaginary world.
Somerville was getting tired of Darrow and his tantrums. She’d been pleased and even flattered to land this position with the ink hardly dry on her Master’s degree. It would be the ideal setting for her to work on her doctorate.
But she’d reckoned without Darrow’s moods. There were days when nobody could do anything right, days when people were scared to come back after lunch. Occasionally, there were days when everything went as it should and Darrow, for once, was something approaching satisfied, if not happy. That made it just about bearable.
The monitor display cleared, showing on one half of the screen a miniaturized version of what Forsyth was seeing in the other room. The other half showed a series of projections of the human brain, taken from various angles. Flickering multicolored pixels scampered across the images, reflecting Forsyth’s mental activity.
“Give him the chess problem,” Darrow said, without turning his head. “Let’s get this calibration out of the way so we can do some real work.” He was twirling a pen between the fingers of his left hand. Darrow was never still, always fiddling with something, or doodling, or drumming his fingers on a desktop as if time was passing too slowly for him. This nervous energy perhaps explained his lean figure. Darrow was tall and spare. His face always seemed to be screwed up in a frown and was topped by a clump of reddish blond hair that might have been trimmed with garden shears.
For once Somerville shared Darrow’s impatience, even though she knew that without the careful preliminary recordings of Forsyth’s responses under controlled conditions, any results they might obtain later would be meaningless. She pulled a memory stick from the rack in front of her, checked the label and stuck it into the slot. A menu appeared on the small LCD screen and she tracked the cursor down and pressed ‘Enter’.
“Rolling.”
On the big monitor the two of them watched the brain activity alter as Forsyth was presented with a complex chess position in his virtual world. Behind the window his arm and leg movements ceased as he pondered the problem. The flowing patterns of color on the brain images had settled into a regular, pulsing rhythm, blue and yellow and green currents flowing back and forth through his cerebral cortex. The colors indicated the depth from which the activity was being recorded, with red representing the deepest, most primitive areas and blue the more intellectual human thoughts. Since Forsyth had become aware of the chess problem the red had almost disappeared.
It couldn’t have been much more than a minute before the display filled with an explosion of red that faded to orange, then out.
“He’s solved it,” Darrow said. “I told you he was smart.”
The brain activity display had settled back into the same pattern as earlier, as Forsyth, in his own mind, left the chessboard and continued strolling down a peaceful path in the park.
“We’ll give him another minute,” Darrow said, “then we’ll try him on the yapping poodle.”
Somerville replaced the memory stick with another, wondering why the stimuli subroutines hadn’t been stored all together for convenience. Or perhaps it was just Darrow being perverse and making choices that would involve the maximum amount of work on her part.
On Darrow’s grunted signal she set the new program running. The activity monitor didn’t provide audio, but on the VR display she could see a tiny representation of a dog, jumping up and down as Forsyth approached. Through the window Somerville could see Forsyth’s knees flex, sending signals to the machine. In the view screen the angle changed as Forsyth hunkered down. This close, the dog’s head and jaw movements made the yapping easy to imagine.
A hand appeared, reaching out towards the small poodle, fingers straight. That was one of the hands that Forsyth was controlling and perceiving as his own. The other was visible lower and to the left. The dog snapped at Forsyth’s outstretched right hand.
What happened next was so fast Somerville almost missed it. Then she felt cold sweat on her forehead and a wave of nausea swept over her. Even while another part of her mind noted the color shifts on Forsyth’s brain scans she rose from her chair and turned away, trying to take deep breaths, trying not to think about what she had just witnessed. But the image wouldn’t go away.
“My god!” Somerville said, not caring what Darrow might think. “He ripped its head off.”
§
“Interesting,” Darrow said. He was replaying the sequence of brain images recorded at the time when Forsyth dispatched the virtual poodle.
“Is that all you can say? The guy’s a monster,” Somerville said.
“Of course he is,” Darrow murmured. “That’s why here’s here. Look at this.”
He had frozen one frame that showed a top view of the brain. Superimposed over it was a rosette of orange with a darker russet at the center, like a marigold. Below it was a spray of green, showing activity in the visual cortex. There was hardly a trace of blue.
“Vision,” Darrow said, pointing. “Feeling, strong feeling. No cognition. He’s just acting. He’s not thinking about it at all.”
After the calibration sequences were completed Forsyth had been taken away to wherever they were keeping him. The security protocol called for an escort of four armed guards. During the tests two of them were in the VR room with Forsyth. Darrow had insisted they stay to either side of the window, where he couldn’t see them. The other two guards waited outside the control room. Both intervening doors were locked. In order to escape, Forsyth would have to extricate himself from the VR cradle, to which he had been shackled at the waist, overcome the two guards in there with him, break out into the control room, deal with Somerville and Darrow, then break through another locked door and face two more armed men. It seemed excessively cautious to Somerville, but given Forsyth’s past history, it wasn’t, they had been assured. Darrow had needed to recruit all his obnoxiousness to avoid having two guards in the control room with them.
Darrow called up the brain images from when Forsyth was thinking about the chess problem. In contrast to the previous set, here the blue shadows predominated until the moment when the red and orange demonstrated Forsyth’s pleasure at finding the solution.
“Surely that’s not normal,” Somerville said. “Such a strong emotional response to solving a chess problem.”
“Nothing about this guy’s normal,” Darrow said. “But you’re right. It’s like he’d beaten the world champion or something.”
Darrow was very placid, Somerville thought. He’d usually be sneering at her in that way of his. He must have been more affected by Forsyth’s performance than he was letting on. She’d better take advantage of it while she could.
“Can we see them together?” she asked. “The chess solution and the ? dog.”
“Go ahead,” Darrow said. He pushed his chair back while she used the trackball to resize the image they were looking at. She recalled the other set, selected one and moved the two windows around the screen until they were adjacent. Each showed a similar marigold pattern, but the chess image had more activity in the blue.
“That’s it,” Somerville said. “That sudden satisfaction. The dog was just another problem for him. He was solving a problem, nothing more.”
“Could be,” Darrow said. “But we need more data. Are you going to be ready to go in there with him tomorrow?”
Say what? At first Somerville thought she’d misheard, but then the question sunk in and with it the realization why Darrow was being so nice to her. He wanted her to act as Forsyth’s foil in the VR world. The next phase required it, but she’d been expecting a student volunteer, or ? she didn’t really know what she’d been expecting, she realized. She hadn’t given it much thought.
“It’ll make a great paper,” Darrow said.
The study protocol called for ‘somebody’ to be strapped into the second VR cradle so they could enter Forsyth’s imaginary world and interact with him in predetermined ways. Some of those ways might include being murdered. Somerville knew that. It hadn’t crossed her mind that the ‘somebody’ might be her.
“It’s not as if he can really hurt you.” Darrow was actually smiling at her, or trying to. “The cradle’s failsafe will kick in if things turn nasty. Just try and keep calm as long as you can. You’ll be able to observe him up close. It’ll be invaluable data.”
It occurred to Somerville that Darrow was enjoying this. He was waiting for her to refuse, so he could jeer at her, maybe even take her off the project. To hell with him!
“Sure,” she said, trying to sound offhand. “It might even be fun. After all, how many people have gone one on one with a psycho like Forsyth and lived. It’ll look good on my rsum.”
She stood up and stretched.
“I need a break,” she said. “Been sitting in this damn chair in this damn cubicle for too damn long.”
The guards had left the doors open so she walked straight out, feeling pleased with her exit. It was only later, when she looked back on it, that it dawned on her how easily Darrow had manipulated her. And now it was too late to back out.
§
One of the guards unlocked the door and escorted Somerville to the second cradle, which was close to the wall with a good distance between it and the one Forsyth occupied. Forsyth had already been strapped in and restrained and all Somerville could see of him were exposed bits of the yellow coverall he wore. She had never seen Forsyth outside the VR cradle and never wanted to, at least not until all this was over, though she couldn’t explain why, not even to herself. To her he was just a faceless laboratory subject—perhaps it was easier for her to deal with him on those terms, without having any image of him as a real human being.
Another thing she couldn’t explain—and indeed she tried to avoid thinking about it altogether—was why she had taken so much trouble with her hair and makeup that morning, as if she was getting ready for a date. As a rule Somerville didn’t bother with that kind of thing when she was going to work, not even lipstick, yet today she had taken trouble to part her hair just right and had even applied a little mascara. She was afraid that Darrow would say something snide when he saw her, but he didn’t seem to notice.
She sat in the cradle’s seat and slipped her arms and legs into the sleeves, working her knees and elbows until the servos adapted the cradle to her dimensions. Then she slid her hands into the gloves, flexing her fingers until they fit snugly. There was a curious absence of sensation. The inside surface of the gloves was set to human body temperature and would stay there unless the program required it to change.
She nodded to the guard and reached up to pull down the VR helmet that would enclose her head and allow the computer to feed sensations to her eyes, ears, nose and mouth.
“Ready to go,” she called for Darrow’s benefit, hearing the tremor in her own voice and hoping that nobody else did.
The door to the outer room would remain unlocked as long as she was in there, Somerville had insisted on that, and one guard would be in there with her, one outside with Darrow.
The helmet enveloped her and the outside world disappeared. Somerville tried to relax. The next moment she was there in the park, standing on the path that ran through a grove of poplars. It was remarkably realistic. She could feel the sun on her forehead, hear a blackbird singing some way off. The air bore a smell of new-mown grass.
“Take a walk,” Darrow’s voice said out of nowhere. “Get used to it for a while. There’s no need to rush it.”
“Okay,” Somerville said. She had tried to speak aloud and it came out muffled. She tried again, remembering to subvocalize this time, just letting the syllables die in her throat, and now it came out strong and clear, the faint sounds captured by the transducer that sat just below her Adam’s apple and amplified through a voice synthesizer.
“Okay,” she said again. Then she giggled in spite of herself. This time at least she had insisted on keeping her own voice and she had spent twenty minutes pronouncing phonemes into the microphone until the computer had learned it. However, now it didn’t sound like her talking—more like somebody imitating her. Or maybe she just needed more practice.
The path reached a crossroads and on a whim Somerville decided to turn left. She skirted a burgeoning rhododendron bush and all at once there he was, standing facing her. Forsyth.
“Hello, Julie,” he said. He was only a little taller than she was, close-cropped gray hair receding from the temples, blue-gray eyes, clean-shaven, soft pink cheeks and chin, petulant mouth below a straight nose.
She stopped dead. Was she ready for this? And how did he know her first name?
“In case you’re wondering,” he said, “whichever path you chose, I’d be there.”
He vanished, and then the same soft, whimsical voice came from behind her.
“Here I am.”
Somerville turned and indeed, there he was, smiling at her.
“You see,” Forsyth said, “I’ve been exploring the possibilities of this VR interface. All quite fascinating.” He reached a hand towards her.
Darrow, Somerville thought. Darrow had set this up. He was throwing her in the deep end and was probably sitting in his chair outside, cackling at her discomfiture.
“Don’t worry,” Forsyth said. “I won’t pull your head off.”
He chuckled, exposing even, white teeth. If it hadn’t been for the ice in those eyes he could have been attractive. Somerville hadn’t said a word since the start of the encounter and she knew she should be contributing more. Still uncomfortable with the subvocal transducer she decided to keep it simple.
“This is just a test,” she said. “A calibration.”
Forsyth laughed again. He had adapted to the VR environment much better than she had.
“Of course it is, Julie,” he said. “The interesting part comes later.”
He leaned towards her and frowned.
“Doesn’t it?” he inquired.
He was teasing her, Somerville knew, and she suppressed a sarcastic retort. At this stage she wasn’t supposed to do anything to provoke him.
“Let’s just see how it goes,” she murmured. Her synthetic voice sounded quite calm and she allowed herself to relax.
“Well,” Forsyth said, studying her as if she was something unexpected he had found under a fingernail, “I’m bored with this. In fact, I don’t think I want to play any more right now.”
He vanished again. Somerville felt at a loss. What was she supposed to do now?
Then Forsyth’s voice blasted in her right ear.
“Bye!”
It was as if his lips were close enough to touch her. Somerville whirled around, but there was nobody there. A shadow of a ghostly laugh echoed in her head. She felt her heart pounding, was conscious of pressure at her temples, then the VR world faded and she was aware of being encased in the cradle, back in the lab. Damn! The safety had responded to her metabolic alarm signals and disconnected her.
She began to extricate herself from the contraption, working slowly to give her heart rate time to return to normal. Not that it made any difference—her reactions would have been monitored and Darrow was probably gloating in the outer room.
Round one to Forsyth, Somerville thought grimly.
§
“It’s a pity you couldn’t have kept him interacting with you for longer,” Darrow said. He had disassembled a ballpoint pen and was now putting it back together, fitting the cylindrical spring over the ink stem, sliding it into the barrel, rebuilding the clicker mechanism before screwing the top half over the bottom. All this was done with a mechanical precision that Somerville found maddening.
“I didn’t have much choice,” she complained. “He’s in control in there. You must have noticed. I’m not Superwoman.”
“No need to get snippy.” Darrow put the pen down on the desk and sighed. “Anyway, we got some interesting readings, even in that short time.”
“Really?” Somerville let curiosity overcome her irritation. “Let me see.”
Even though the entire sequence only lasted a couple of minutes the red and yellow flower deep in Forsyth’s brain images showed signs of blooming several times, but on each occasion it was suppressed as the blue-green cortical activity regained supremacy.
“He’s holding it back,” Somerville said. “Controlling it.”
“Right.” Darrow’s head jerked forward, flinging his hair over his eyes. He pushed it back, combing it with his fingers. “Next time, we’ll see if we can make him lose that control.”
By ‘we’, Somerville knew, Darrow meant her. She would have to try and push Forsyth over the line, so they could monitor and analyze the whole process, the whole progression from reason to psychopathic violence.
“Do you really think this is worth it?” It was the first time she had questioned the value of the work they were doing, even to herself.
Darrow shrugged.
“If we can understand it,” he said, “maybe we can learn to fix it. It’s a start.”
“I suppose so.” Though after her brief encounter with Forsyth the chances of ever ‘fixing’ him seemed to Somerville to be very remote indeed.
“Imagine,” Darrow said. “Imagine how it feels to be him. Such power. Such ? freedom.”
His face was slack, his eyes unfocused, his attention miles away. Somerville stared at him. Darrow pulled himself back from wherever he’d been and scowled.
“Anyway,” he said, “that’s what we’re trying to find out.”
Was that it? Somerville wondered. Was that it, really? She nodded, careful to keep her expression blank.
“You can take a break,” Darrow said, swiveling his chair away from her. He gestured towards the dividing window. “I’ll keep him busy with some more puzzles.”
“I could use a walk,” Somerville admitted. She realized her whole body was tense, muscles strained by the limits of the VR confinement. Physical stress, she told herself. Nothing to do with being in the company of a serial killer. Nothing to do with Darrow’s weirdness.
Darrow glanced at his watch.
“You can go back in at one o’clock.”
It wasn’t a suggestion, but Somerville nodded.
“Okay,” she said. She picked up her purse and turned to knock on the outer door so the guards would unlock it and let her leave.
“Next time,” she heard Darrow musing as she left. “Next time I think we should let him kill you.”
§
Somerville sat on a bench in a quiet corner of the park—the real park—trying to recover a meditation technique she hadn’t used for years. It involved centering one’s attention on a particular image that represented safety and reassurance. The mental image could then be used as a barrier against alarm caused by external stimuli. It was a means to stay calm under stress.
She focused on the face of her father, as it appeared in a small photograph she carried in her purse. He had been an arbitrary victim of a terrorist attack almost ten years before and it was that, more than anything else, that had triggered her interest in the psychology and brain physiology of aberrant behavior.
Her father had always been a symbol of security and stability. His sudden disappearance from her life and her mother’s subsequent breakdown had forced Somerville to grow up in weeks and months, rather than years. She found she was tougher than she had thought, but it was her father’s memory that helped her keep it all together.
With that comforting reflection, she tucked the photograph back in its sleeve, holding his smiling face in her mind. Time to go back.
§
Forsyth was waiting for her, sitting at a marble-topped, wrought iron caf table on which a china tea set was laid out. Was that just coincidence? Somerville had found Darrow drinking coffee with the guards in the monitor room on her return. Was this Forsyth’s way of telling her he knew what was going on “outside”?
Opposite Forsyth was a director’s chair with back and seat of white canvas, the twin of the one he occupied. He motioned her to sit down.
“I thought we might share a pot of tea,” he said with that soft smile. “So civilized, dontcha think?” This last was uttered in an exaggerated British accent.
Somerville was amused in spite of herself, but checked that her father’s image was ready in the back of her mind should she need it.
“I don’t mind if I do,” she replied, with a playful cadence that matched Forsyth’s own. She sat down as Forsyth poured tea through a silver strainer into delicate porcelain cups.
“One lump or two,” he asked, reaching for a sugar bowl.
Somerville was about to decline and reach for sweetener, when she reflected that virtual sugar lumps in whatever quantity were not going to compromise her diet.
“Two, please,” she said, feeling reckless.
Forsyth dropped two lumps into her tea cup, one after the other, using a miniature pair of silver tongs. He stirred it with a tiny spoon.
“Milk or lemon?”
Somerville shook her head. Enough was enough. She hardly ever drank tea, anyway. She picked up the cup and saucer but made no attempt to drink.
“Beating or strangulation?” Forsyth asked, in the same light tone as before.
“What?” Her cup rattled and some tea slopped over into the saucer.
“How would you like me to kill you?” Forsyth smiled a diffident smile. “That’s what you’re here for, isn’t it? So you can make your measurements, find out what makes me tick.”
His voice grew stronger as he spoke, and more rhythmic in the spacing of the words, in a way that was almost hypnotic. Forsyth gestured at the virtual world around them, but his ice-blue eyes never left Somerville’s face.
“The options are limited, as you can see,” he said. “But in any case I always preferred the hands on approach.”
Somerville felt the first flutter of panic and reached back in her mind for her father’s face. She had to stay with him, she told herself, see it through.
Oddly enough, once she had her father’s image in her head she could see similarities in Forsyth’s smiling countenance. Why hadn’t she noticed that before? As she watched, Forsyth’s features seemed to rearrange themselves a little at a time, until it was her father looking at her over the tea table. She felt a cold calm descend upon her, a relaxation so deep she could not even consider moving.
“That’s right, my dear,” Forsyth whispered.
The table disappeared, as did the tea cup and saucer she had been holding. Now it was just her and Forsyth, Forsyth with her father’s face, reaching for her, his hands encircling her neck, pressing at her throat until she couldn’t breathe.
Enough! A voice spoke within her mind. Time to get out of here. Then the fear took over and she tried to struggle, but it was like struggling in a dream, where one’s arms and legs refuse to obey the signals from the brain and just lie there like dead weight.
She forced herself harder and the VR scene began to fade until she knew she was back in the real world, strapped in the harness. But the constricting pressure around her throat was still there, increasing until she could feel the cartilage about to crack. What was happening?
The panic threatened to escalate into terror, but at least she could move now. She yanked her arms out of the VR gloves, reached up to push back the helmet, and found herself looking into the last face she would have expected. Not her father’s face, not even Forsyth’s, it was Darrow. Darrow, wearing a scowl that twisted his face into ugliness, his green eyes wide and glittering with madness.
The hands at her throat, Darrow’s hands, shifted their grip and squeezed harder.
“Bye!” Darrow’s mouth said, hissing through thin lips and bubbles of saliva.
Somerville tried to grasp his wrists, push them away, but she was too weak. Her brain was starting to shut down for lack of oxygen.
Then the face jerked aside and the pressure on her neck eased. Impossibly, it was Forsyth, swinging the fire extinguisher for another blow, bludgeoning a dazed Darrow with careful precision—belly, shoulder, nape of neck. Darrow was down.
“No poaching,” Forsyth said, like a teacher reprimanding a child. “Bad boy!”
Somerville looked around her, trying to piece it together. One guard was sprawled on the floor next to her, unconscious or dead. Through the open doorway she could see the polished leather shoes and gray trouser cuffs of the second guard.
Forsyth was standing over Darrow’s supine body. He raised the extinguisher once more and smashed it down into Darrow’s upturned face as if he was splitting a log with an ax. Then he placed it on the coarse brown carpeting and turned to Somerville. He smiled.
“Well, that was fun,” he said. The gentle smile was back and his breathing was calm and steady. He came towards Somerville, who was trying to extricate her legs from the VR cradle without showing the fear she still felt. Forsyth ignored her, though, and crouched down to feel for a pulse on the guard’s neck.
“You colleague must have drugged them,” Forsyth said. “Now that’s no fun at all.”
He straightened up again.
“Are you all right?” he asked, his eyes crinkling with concern.
“I guess so,” Somerville croaked, trying to sound matter of fact and failing. She had one leg out and the other nearly free. Her hands were shaking and she was finding it hard to control her muscles.
“Don’t worry,” Forsyth said. “I’m done for today.” He tilted his head and eyebrows in the direction of Darrow’s still motionless body.
“Takes one to know one,” he said. “You’ll be sure and tell them what happened, won’t you?”
She tried to speak again, but it hurt. It also made her cough, which hurt worse, so she just nodded and tried to swallow. That wasn’t so bad.
Forsyth went into the monitor room, stepping over the other guard, and she heard him rap on the outer door. Then there was the click as it was unlocked and Forsyth led the other two guards back into the VR cubicle. He stood while the guards cuffed his hands behind his back. Then one held a gun to the side of his head while the other fitted shackles to his ankles, keeping as far away from Forsyth as possible as he did so.
“What happened here?” the taller guard asked, looking at the bodies on the floor.
Somerville felt exhausted. Even thinking seemed to require an extraordinary amount of effort.
“Darrow,” she said. Her voice was still hoarse but she was relieved to find it was getting stronger and the pain was fading. “He must have drugged your partners. Check the coffee cups.” She pointed to Forsyth. “He saved my life.”
The guard looked at Forsyth, then back at her as if she was the crazy one. Perhaps he was right, Somerville thought. Perhaps everybody here was a lunatic. Maybe in a little while she’d wake up in the mental ward and find it had all been a delusion.
She had both legs free now and she swung them around to the side and onto the floor, transferring her weight to them a little at a time.
“You’d better see a doctor,” the guard said.
“I’m okay,” Somerville said, still leaning on the VR machine. She looked at Forsyth, whose calm, ice-blue eyes now contained no expression she could fathom.
“Thank you,” she heard herself say.
“You’re welcome,” Forsyth said. “You know, you’re a remarkable person, Dr. Somerville.” He smiled and turned towards the door, flanked by the guards. Just before he exited he turned his head back towards her.
“Julie, my dear,” he said, “we must do this again some time.”
The crazy thing was, he sounded as if he meant it.
- End -
© Copyright Philip J. Lees 2005