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“Thanks.” Jess shifted to audience mode, shook hands warmly. “I love my work.”
“Oh, it shows.” Feeney sat down, made himself comfortable. “I haven’t enjoyed anything for years as much as I did taking that console apart.”
Another time, another place, it might have been comic, the way Jess’s face underwent the transformation from obliging star to blank shock to ripe fury. “You fucked with my equipment? Took it apart? You had no right laying a hand on it! You’re meat! You’re dead! You’re destroyed!”
“Let the record show the subject is overwrought,” Peabody recited blandly. “His threats against the person of Captain Feeney are accepted as emotional rather than literal.”
“Well, the first time, anyway,” Feeney said cheerfully. “You want to watch your step there, friend. Put too much of that on record, and we tend to get pissy. Now.” He leaned forward on his elbows. “Let’s talk shop. You had some great security, admirable. Took me a while to bypass. But then, I’ve been in the game as long as you’ve been breathing. Designing that personal brain scanner was some accomplishment. So compact, so delicate to the touch. I gauged its range at two yards. Now, that’s damn good for that small and
portable a unit.”
“You didn’t get into my equipment.” Jess’s voice wavered. “You’re bluffing. You couldn’t get down to the core.”
“Well, the three fail safes were tricky,” Feeney admitted. “I spent nearly an hour on the second one, but the last was really just padding. I guess you never figured you’d need anything at that level.”
“Did you run the discs, Feeney?” Eve asked him.
“Started on them. You’re on there, Dallas. We don’t have Roarke’s on file. Civilian, you know. But I found yours and Peabody’s.”
Peabody blinked. “Mine?”
“I’m running comparison checks on the names you requested, Dallas.” He smiled broadly at Jess again. “You’ve been busy, collecting specimens. That’s a fine storage option you designed, terrific data compression capabilities. It’s going to break my heart to destroy that equipment.”
“You can’t!” It was sincere pain and distress now. His eyes swam with it. “I’ve put everything I’ve got into that. Not just money, but time and thought and energy. Three years of my life, almost straight through without a break. I stepped back from my career to design it. Do you have any idea what I can accomplish with it?”
Eve picked up the ball. “Why don’t you tell us, Jess? In your own words. We’d love to hear it.”
chapter seventeen
Jess Barrow started slowly, in fits and starts, speaking of his experiments and research, his fascination with the influence of outside stimuli on the human brain; the senses, and the enhancement of the senses through technology.
“What we can do for pleasure, for punishment—we haven’t even tapped the surface. That’s what I wanted to do,” he explained. “Tap the surface and go under it. Dreams, Dallas. Needs, fears, fantasies. All my life, music’s been what’s moved me to . . . everything: hunger, passion, misery, joy. How much more intense would all that be if you could just get inside, really use the mind to exploit and explore?”
“So you worked on it,” she prompted. “Devoted yourself to it.”
“Three years. More really, but three solid on the design, experimentation, perfecting. Every penny I had went into it. I’ve got next to nothing left now. That’s why I needed backing. Why I needed you.”
“And Mavis was your link to me, and from me to Roarke.”
“Look.” He lifted his hands, rubbed them over his face, dropped them onto the table. “I like Mavis, and she’s got a real spark. Yeah, I’d have used her if she was bland as a droid, but she’s not. I didn’t do her any harm. If anything, I gave her a boost up. Her ego level was ditch low when we hooked up. Oh, she was masking it pretty good, but she’d lost confidence in herself from what happened before. I gave her confidence a jolt.”
“How?”
He hesitated, decided he’d take a bigger fall by evading. “Okay, I gave her some subliminal nudges in the right direction. She should be grateful,” he insisted. “And I worked with her, straight stuff, getting her shined up without taking away her natural edge. You heard her yourself. She’s better than she ever was.”
“You experimented on her,” Eve said, and wanted to hang him for that alone, “without her knowledge or consent.”
“It wasn’t like she was some droid rat. Christ, I’d perfected the system.” He jabbed a finger at Feeney. “You know it’s prime.”
“It’s beautiful,” Feeney agreed. “Doesn’t make it legal.”
“Shit, genetic engineering was illegal, in vitro work, prostitution. What did that get us? We’ve come a long way, but we’re still in the dark ages, man. This is a benefit, this is a way to push the mind forward into dreams and make what we dream real.”
“Not all of us want our dreams to be reality. What gives you the right to make that choice for someone else?”
“Okay.” He held up a hand. “Maybe I got overenthusiastic a few times. You get caught up. But all I did with you was expand on what was there. So I enhanced the lust bars that night in the studio. What did it hurt? Another time I gave your memory a little push, jiggled a few locks. I wanted to be able to prove what could be done, so when the time was right, I could approach you and Roarke with a business proposition. And last night . . .”
He trailed off, knowing he’d miscalculated badly there. “Okay, last night I went too far, the tone was too dark. I got carried away with it. Performing before a real audience again, it’s like a drug. It hypes you. Maybe I punched the power a little hard on him. An honest mistake.” He tried that smile again. “Look, I’ve used it on myself, dozens of times. There’s no harm, nothing permanent. Just temporary mood enhancement.”
