"Levinson, Paul - Dr Phil D'Amato 02 - The Consciousness Plague 1.0" - читать интересную книгу автора (Levinson Paul)

"What did you say?"
"What? About the special unit? You seemed to think it was a good idea "
"You remember that now?"
"Why shouldn't I?" Dugan looked at me like I was the one who was crazy.
"Because you haven't for more than a month."
Dugan continued to stare. "Look, Phil, whatever's going on in your head about the special task force, we can deal with it later. Let's get back to the murders "
I held up a placating hand. "Just humor me for a few more minutes. What exactly do you remember about our conversation about the special task force, and its aftermath?"
Dugan made a disgruntled sound. "For God's sake, we talked about it right here in my office. You said you wanted to think about it. Then..."
I waited a few long seconds. "Yes?"
"Then ... Well, with all this focus on the Riverside killings, I guess the special unit got lost in the shuffle." He cleared his throat. "That's why I brought it up again just now I still think it's a good idea...."
"You don't remember the aftermath, do you?" I said.
Dugan's cheeks flushed. "Goddamn it Phil, I'm not one of your witnesses on trial here!"
"I'm not a lawyer, I'm just trying to get to the bottom of this," I replied. "We're on all on the same side."
Dugan calmed down a bit, and reflected. "I guess I don't remember too clearly what happened right after I made the proposal," he admitted. "I was sick as a dog."
I nodded.
"So what exactly do you recall happening then?" he asked.
"I tried to tell you that I'd thought it over, and wanted to head up the special task force "
Dugan looked at me, quizzically now.
" and you had no recollection of making that offer in the first place."

I WENT BACK to my office. There was a peace in coming into your office on a Sunday, when most of the usual people with their usual problems weren't around.
This memory craziness was mutating into some kind of memory swapping, at least for Dugan, who now recalled what he had at first forgotten, and could not remember that he had forgotten it in the first place.
I called Jenna. She still had no recollection of my marriage proposal, but her piece of memory had been lost after Dugan's. Presumably it still had a few days to return, if that's what was going on here.
We got off the phone.
I tried to put some of the parts together or, at least, identify them.
The key no doubt resided in the nature of memory. If I could know more about that, I would have a better chance of understanding what was disrupting it. I spent a few hours on the Internet.
From the reading I had been doing since all of this had begun and from what I already had acquired on the subject over the years it was clear that no one had much knowledge of exactly how memory worked.
Engrams and all kinds of markers were proposed as the units of memory, and theories abounded as to how such units behaved and interacted. They were thought to be not additive but synergistic, so that a new memory transformed earlier memories, in the way that a pinch of orange powder dropped into a glass of water gave you not orange powder plus water, but water transformed into an orange liquid.
Most psychologists also agreed that the markers of memory were chained or linked together not only in before-and-after patterns, but in a densely packed web that radiated in all directions an arrangement which would account not only for straightforward memory but creative leaps of imagination. Some researchers contended that memories of specific events were redundantly stored in several or lots of places in the network, or in a primary place with what amounted to backup.
That could explain what had happened to Dugan: His primary memory of talking to me about the task force had been short-circuited. Eventually his backup had kicked in rebooted and replaced the damaged part of his system so his lost memory returned. But the replacement also took out some of his newer memories, those that had accrued sometime between the initial damage and the rebooting.... There were indeed some reported cases of amnesia in which a series of memories rippled out and in, like so many markers going back and forth and back again in a game of mental poker.
Okay, so that at least offered an explanation for one aspect of Dugan's little odyssey.
But what caused it?
No one seemed to know what was responsible for the memory markers in the first place. All I could find were generalities about neurochemical networks I guess this lack of specific knowledge was not surprising, since we didn't have much in the way of precise explanation of how the mind itself performed in the human brain. Some psychologists even denied that there was a mind, or anything beyond the sheer physical brain.
But what could the source of memory be, that it could be injured in the way it had been with Jenna and Claudia and me and Dugan, and now Dugan again with this memory swapping?
What kind of network gets knocked out by a flu or whatever, and then, in the case of Dugan, regenerates, recharges, but loses something in the process? If that's how some amnesias worked, what was it that those amnesias were attacking?
The shape of this problem and its possible solution came right from the realm of classic forensic science: You needed detailed knowledge of the victim, memory, in order to more specifically identify the assailant, amnesia.
Damn it, I still had a feeling that the assailant in this case wasn't the cough or the flu per se. I kept coming back to the Omnin. Dugan had taken it. And as of now, he had had the strangest memory symptoms.
Antibiotics. What were they? Anti-life, literally they destroyed living organisms. They killed bacteria. But they had no effect on human brains, or memory, as far I knew. Still, Omnin was something new available this year for the first time. Maybe it had some sort of new effect after all one that the FDA had missed. Wouldn't be the first time, especially given something as slippery as memory. Everyone realized that the FDA wasn't omniscient.
But other people had lost pieces of their memory Steinbuck, my doctor; Carol Michosky and they hadn't taken Omnin. Or, at least, in Michosky's case, she had told me she never took antibiotics. And I really had no knowledge one way or the other about Steinbuck.
I pulled out some index cards. I still liked working with them, even though I also liked computers. Maybe I should start approaching this problem the old-fashioned way; investigate the network of memory not only with the network of computers, but with something more tangible than fleeting, invisible electricity bring into play the paper perspective. I'd make a card for each person I knew who had any connection at all to the memory loss, and write down all pertinent information about them. Maybe the problem was that someone deliberately or not was leaving out some important detail. Maybe that's why this still didn't seem to add up. Maybe someone was lying.
But who?
It occurred to me that, in a case involving memory loss, there was no need to look for liars. Innocent loss of memory could account for information withheld. And the withholders were all the more difficult to identify, because they had no idea they were withholding....
I shook my head. I'd find out more when other people's memories started coming back including my own.... Assuming they did. And assuming that their recovery didn't erase another piece of the picture, as it had with Dugan.
Andy had suggested consulting history. That was a good place to start, too.
Yeah, history was also riddled with missing pieces, transformed recollections, winking in and out like a constellation of faulty neon lights across the ages....


FIVE

Jenna's memory returned eight nights later. "I love you," she said to me, about one o'clock in the morning. I was leaning over to turn out the light, my back to her, just as we were about to go to sleep. And I knew immediately from the tone of her voice that she remembered.