“I could call Gregg Caldwell through VISAR to check,” Hunt said. “In fact, we will. But I’ll lay you a thousand bucks to a penny
right now that General Shaw doesn’t exist either.” The look of horror on her face told him that he was getting through. He drew a long breath, then went on. “They’re fake memories that were written into your head at another JEVEX outlet somewhere. We’re pretty certain that somebody got to you somewhere after you and Baumer left PAC. So we have to assume that they know everything you did up to that point. Then they overwrote what happened with the fabricated sequence that you remember, and just for good measure added in the business about Shaw to get you working for them. Fayne was their first try to collect—at least, I hope it was the first?” Gina nodded. Hunt sighed. “It was neat. If you and Sandy hadn’t gone tripping on the Vishnu, we might never have cottoned onto it.”
Gina went through some of the pictures in her mind, searching for possible flaws or inaccuracies. There were none. She shivered, drawing her sweater tighter around her. “I can’t tell. I don’t know what’s real and what isn’t about what I remember.” A fearful look came over her suddenly. “This couldn’t be anything like what happened to Baumer, is it?’’
Hunt shook his head firmly. “Don’t worry about that. You’ve just lost a few memories, that’s all. A good binge could have done the same thing. You’re still very much you.”
“I’m not sure I feel it. When you know there’s part of your mind that doesn’t belong there . . . It’s not exactly comforting.”
“People probably used to think the same about cardiac valves and synthetic kidneys.” His manner was sympathetic and reassuring now. She had accepted it and would cooperate once she’d had a chance to get used to it. That was the main thing.
There was a long silence while Gina thought it through. Hunt mopped up the spilled drink for her while he waited. “Is there anything we can do to unscramble it?” she asked finally.
“I don’t know. We’d like you to let VISAR analyze those patterns anyway, to see if there’s any way of recovering what was overwritten. Would you mind?”
Gina shook her head. “I’m kind of curious, too. That’s me, remember?”
“Terrific. You’ll survive. I’ll be getting along for now. I’ve got a few things to do.”
“Oh . . . Vic,” Gina said as he moved toward the door.
He stopped and looked back. “What?”
“Thanks.”
He grinned. “Glad you can see it that way. I’m sorry I had to get personal.”
“That’s okay.” Gina managed to muster a smile back. “Did Sandy tell you that she thought I was pretty dumb, too?”
“No. Why?”
“For chickening out of VISAR’s porno trip. She says if it was her she’d have gone for it.”
Hunt laughed and began moving to the door again. “You see?” he said. “Scientists are more curious.”
“There was something else, too.”
“What now?”
Gina’s smile widened and became impish. “The fantasy that VISAR put together out of my head.”
“What about it?”
“You were ii1 it, too.”
CHAPTER FORTY-TWO
The Ganymeans were dubious that anything could be done to reconstruct the memories of Gina’s that had been overwritten. Nevertheless, she allowed VISAR to go over the recollections that now existed in her mind to see if it could find any seams. It processed, correlated, reinterpolated, and analyzed the data in every way that offered a shred of hope that some vestige of what she had actually experienced during the missing hours might be extracted, but the results were uniformly negative. Essentially, the elements of a pattern had been rearranged. The information carried in the previous arrangement was gone, and no amount of juggling could re-create it. As Hunt observed, it was like asking a position in a chess game to say something about the previous game played by the pieces.
All that could be said for sure was that from some time after leaving PAC with Baumer—which couldn’t be pinpointed since it was no longer possible to compare Gina’s story with his to establish where they diverged—to some time before she walked back into PAC, something had happened that was different from what she remembered. And that was probably all that would ever be known. But if a conclusive pointer existed anywhere to the organization that Cullen was looking for, that was where it lay concealed.