The LSD sugar cube dosage of homeless and poor creates a psychotic break that lasts for approximately two months during which that person is highly susceptible to SUBLIMINAL MESSAGING. All US 99% WE THE PEOPLE are dosed with subliminal messaging from TV advertisements----but barber surgeons these few decades have dosed our US citizens to create PREDISPOSITION of mind to subliminal queues-----sensual ---smell, taste, temperature, sound, visual queues.
If our US citizens dosed with LSD sugar cubes are not dosed again----after a few months that psychotic break mends---global banking 1% CLINTON/BUSH/OBAMA want to create medical devices that allow for continuous dosage keeping US citizens black, white, and brown citizens in constant states of fear and confusion.
This is done with microchip implants our US citizens are being sold will deliver needed PHARMA as insulin-----but will deliver continuous LSD sugar cube dosage to any person global banking sees as a target.
How does this differ from THE WHISPERING ROOM? Today's victims of US city public health department experimentation are FEARFUL, ANGRY, UNRELIABLE IN BEHAVIOR-----because their central neural chemistry making all people individual thinkers is still in place----fighting artificial means of control. THE WHISPERING ROOM people had no fear, no anger, no ability to be unreliable-------their central neural chemistry had been altered-----something that cannot be done today.
BALTIMORE HAS A HIGH INCIDENCE OF MENTAL ILLNESS ACROSS ALL SPECTRUM BECAUSE BALTIMORE PUBLIC HEALTH HAS CONDUCTED THESE SUGAR-CUBES LACED IN LSD EXPERIMENTS FOR DECADES.
The goal of MOVING FORWARD DEEP, REALLY DEEP STATE is to advance from today's reactions to dosage of fear, anger, no ability to be reliable---to being that IRON FURNACE LAKE town of PODS. Of course people can be genetically predisposed to these mental disorders as well------the percentage of US citizens fitting one category or another of mental illness is STAGGERING.
What is Psychosis? Symptoms of Psychosis
Psychosis includes a range of symptoms that affect an individual's thoughts, feelings, and behaviours. Symptoms of psychosis are typically divided into two categories: "positive" and "negative" symptoms. "Positive' symptoms are changes in thoughts and feelings that are "added on" to a person's experiences (e.g., paranoia or hearing voices). "Negative" symptoms are things that are "taken away" or reduced (e.g., reduced motivation or reduced intensity of emotion).
Positive Symptoms
Some of the positive symptoms include:
Delusions
Delusions are very firmly held, false beliefs that are not consistent with one's culture. These beliefs cannot be shaken despite reason or proof to the contrary. They are often very unique to the person. It is often very difficult for other people to understand why the person holds this belief.
Examples of delusions include:
I thought I had invented several things already. I thought people from the States stole my ideas when I was six years old. I thought they were paying my grandpa off for my inventions. I thought he was a millionaire from my inventions.
- Garnet, youth
Hallucinations
Just then, surprisingly, there were voices bouncing off the wall, they were in different language that Ajax couldn't understand. "Go away!" Ajax thought, but they didn't go away, they just got louder and weirder.
- Ajax, youth
Hallucinations involve seeing, hearing, feeling, smelling or tasting something that is not actually there. These experiences appear entirely real to the person who is experiencing them. The most common type of hallucination involves hearing things - such as voices or particular sounds - such as music.
A person hearing voices may respond out loud to what they are hearing. The content of the voices can range from friendly to critical, cruel and upsetting and may even tell the person what to do.
It is often the person's behaviour in response to the hallucination that gets noticed by others. At times the person might be observed talking out loud when no one else is there or making gestures as if someone is in their presence.
Disorganized Speech or Behaviour
Examples of disorganized speech include:
Examples of disorganized behaviours includes:
Negative symptoms
Negative symptoms reflect a decrease in, or loss of, normal functions. These symptoms are often less evident than positive symptoms and require careful assessment.
Some examples of negative symptoms include:
Other symptoms
It is also common for other symptoms or problems to occur along with the psychotic symptoms.
Some examples of other problems that may occur include:
Once treatment is initiated, acute, the psychotic symptoms should lessen and will usually fade away, often completely. However, some symptoms, especially negative symptoms may linger as they are less responsive to medication. Even with a good response to treatment, problems such as depression, decreased self esteem, social problems and difficulties with work or school may require further support and treatment to help enable a full recovery.
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This is what OBAMA'S billions of dollars targeting BRAIN RESEARCH tied to addictions all advancing DEEP STATE mind control using only subliminal queues and LSD-dosage for predisposition to these messages.
At the same time global banking 5% players are doing these treatments they are recording brain chemistry patterns identifying neural pathways while working hard to develop that NANOTECHNOLOGY needed to further MAP THE BRAIN.
CLINTON/BUSH/OBAMA cannot get to IRON FURNACE LAKE mind-control -----without nanotechnology and mapping of BRAIN where all the real neural chemical transactions occur. They are not even close to building these nanotechnology tools ----not even close to mapping small regions of the BRAIN at nano level -----so there is no ability to control people en masse beyond their ability to resist with computer programming cues.
Alcohol Addiction Recovery Subliminal
Stop letting your alcohol addiction ruin your life and start enjoying a happier sober lifestyle with the help of subliminal messages!
Subliminal messages could be the missing link that can take you from where are today to a happier brighter future where you are in control of your drinking. This is a unique process that uses carefully created messages that are played over and over again directly to your subconscious mind.
The messages are designed to help you change the current thought patterns and behaviors that end up leading you to take a drink. They transform the way you think to help you to get over your cravings, to get over the habit and the sheer need to drink.
Now as powerful as subliminal messages are you also have to be ready to change. Once you give yourself permission to move forward in your life, the subliminal message will be even more effective.
These messages are designed to reprogram your current thoughts about alcohol addiction. In some form or fashion you've told yourself that you will never be sober, that you enjoy alcohol, that you need alcohol so many times that you actually believe it.
The subliminal messages will replace those beliefs with new beliefs of strength and the confidence to control your impulses and focus on a more positive future without alcohol.
You will see your mindset transform as you stop feeling cravings and a need to drink and start to actually see the logical side; the pain and destruction that alcohol can cause. It is these thoughts which will replace the good things you currently feel about alcohol and this will help you to naturally overcome your alcohol addiction.
In a few days, you'll begin to notice subtle changes in your attitude towards alcohol. In a few weeks, you will find yourself in much better control of your impulses to drink. Just listen for 30 minutes each day. Eventually those old thoughts that are keeping you from being what you know you can be will begin to fade.
Life Can Be Better!
Imagine how great you'll feel waking up each day being able to say "no" to urges to take a drink and the new level of confidence you'll have to ignore those old urges and move forward in your life.
Imagine yourself in full control of your thoughts and drinking habits, feel how strong and healthy your body feels because you’re leading a healthier sober lifestyle.
Imagine how happy you will feel, knowing how proud your family and friends are of you, living your life alcohol free and happier than you've been in a very long time.
Imagine in the long term future when you no longer even think about alcohol, when being sober is just normal for you and you can lead a completely different, normal, and active lifestyle.
You don't have to imagine those things in your life, instead they can become a reality in your life. Our subliminal albums can help you change your life starting right now.
Subliminal Addictions Fix - Smoking, Drugs, Sex, Alcohol,
...www.youtube.com/watch?v=aGeCxmAHnOk
Mar 3, 2014 ... Subliminal Addictions Fix - Smoking, Drugs, Sex, Alcohol, Gambling, Food, Porn ..... been dealing with a masturbation addiction for a while now this would ... I had found this whole subliminal messaging thing and the whole ...
Subliminal Guru - Stop Substance Abuse
subliminalguru.com/addictions/stop-substance-abuse
Become addiction-free, with subliminal messages! ... You'll start to treat your body with care and respect, avoiding putting anything in it that might cause harm.
Subliminal Guru - Stop Chocolate Addiction
subliminalguru.com/addictions/stop-chocolate-addiction
Become addiction-free, with subliminal messages! ... to maintain your overall health and well-being, enjoying chocolate only occasionally as a special treat.
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Here we see the next stage towards DEEP, DEEP, REALLY DEEP STATE control of people-----when the brain is preconditioned to believe it has implanted machines controlling that person's behavior ---then like a PLACEBO pill that person will respond to just that kind of PHYSICAL MESSAGING. How do global banking 5% freemason/Greek barber surgeons take that conditioned brain to doing what it is told? NOT BY NANOTECHNOLOGY----NO NANOBOTS HAVE BEEN DEVELOPED.
We are hearing in US national media public policy controversies over COCHLEAR IMPLANTS coming mostly from families or citizens disabled with hearing loss. What we are not hearing from US national media are the REAL LEFT SOCIAL PROGRESSIVE PHYSICIANS and academics shouting against what WILL BE USED as PHYSICAL MESSAGING to people captured by sugar-cube LSD dosing having undergone lots of subliminal treatments leaving that brain confused as to operate independently.
Cochlear implants are supposed to be ONE WAY ACCESS TO SOUND. Meaning, they are transmitters of NATURAL sound coming to that person helping to transmit to brain. What is MOVING FORWARD are Cochlear implants as TRANSMITTERS OF ARTIFICIAL SOUNDS ------broadcast messages travelling through 5G digital transmission. The TIN FOIL HAT people thinking those antennae are implanted in their heads----will soon be actually correct.
Cochlear implants targeting today's hearing impaired citizens can easily morph to being implants to any 99% of WE THE PEOPLE having only the capability of incoming artificial messaging. Subliminal sound tied to weakened preconditioned brain-------creates conditions of mind-control. This is worse than having our strong US public schools teaching only COMMONER CORE myth-making and corporate propaganda.
When Deafness Is Medicalized: Inside the Culture Clash Over Cochlear Implants
Some fear that, by offering deaf people access to sound, so-called bionic ears could spell the end of the culture built around ASL.
James McWilliams
Jan 5, 2018
Years ago, the university where I teach made budget cuts to the program that provides in-class American Sign Language interpretation. I recall this instance well, if only because the reaction among the university's deaf population was as swift and fierce as any other form of campus protest I'd seen.
There was a reason for the unusual intensity: Cutting ASL interpretation was understood as a cultural insult. Advocates of deaf culture see themselves as a community not unlike an ethnic group. Endowed with a distinct language and set of traditions, they conceptualize deafness not as a physical condition but rather as a social distinction.
More than any other factor, ASL fluency offers the most direct conduit into deaf culture. For this reason, supporters of deaf culture have become particularly concerned about what many see as the most common medical intervention into their way of life: cochlear implants.
A cochlear implant (CI)—sometimes called a "bionic ear"—is a surgically implanted device that offers deaf people access to sound. In some cases, an implant can help a user make out spoken language. The Food and Drug Administration approved CIs for adults in 1985 and for children in 1990. As of 2016 around 96,000 people had received a cochlear implant—36,000 of them children, some as young as 12 months old.
In light of this technology, it's now routine to screen babies for hearing loss shortly after birth. If a child "fails" the test, a complete medical and technological apparatus—comprised of surgeons, audiologists, social workers, and speech therapists—lurches into motion to provide an implant as soon as possible. More often than not it is hearing parents of deaf children—usually mothers—who are asked to negotiate this daunting apparatus. They do so with minimal, if any, knowledge of deaf culture.
In this respect, the story of CIs seems to be yet another instance of technological determinism. If you build it, they'll implant it—cultural concerns be damned. But what if we didn't automatically assume that CIs meant the death of ASL? In her new book, Made to Hear: Cochlear Implants and Raising Deaf Children, Laura Mauldin seeks common ground between the medical and deaf communities. Rather than castigate or glorify the technology, she explores how the process of incorporating CIs plays out in real life. Refreshingly free of jargon, Made to Hear demonstrates the emotionally complicated ways that laypeople interact with prevailing medical paradigms.
Made to Hear: Cochlear Implants and Raising Deaf Children.
(Photo: University of Minnesota Press)
Mauldin, a University of Connecticut sociologist who grew up around deaf people and whose work centers on the interaction between medicine and "disability," finds that the lived experiences of parents who choose CIs for their young children (some as early as a year old) do not necessarily follow the common technological mandate dictated by the medical profession. "Social factors," she writes, "play a greater role in outcomes than technological prowess."
This claim holds especially true when it comes to sign language acquisition. Despite clear evidence to the contrary, the medical community generally advises against teaching children ASL while they are in the process of getting a CI, insisting that doing so will diminish their ability to acquire spoken language. Accordingly, most mothers of CI children—middle-class rule followers who want to be considered "good parents" and are in no way inclined to question the medical definition of "disability"—do exactly as they are told.
But others, including some subjects in Mauldin's study, tack around the advice on their own terms and for their own sensible reasons. These parents are of particular interest to Mauldin. One mother of a CI child explained why she chose to challenge the medical advice about ignoring sign language:
Ok, yeah, you fixed her hearing. And? What about when she loses the equipment? How about when the batteries are dead, and it's gone for four hours? How are you talking to her? I am still very proud of myself for maintaining the sign language. We are still using it at home. There are times when I absolutely am not, but when I need to clarify something with her, I go back and, yes, I pair [speech and sign] ... I have to worry about safety. I still have to raise a child. I understand that she has to learn to speak. But I still need to be able to sign "stop."
In an email exchange with Mauldin, I asked her to elaborate on the hidden potential of this resistance-within-acceptance mode of negotiating the CI process. She wrote: "Having a CI does not mean you can't learn both spoken language and sign language. Bilingualism is not only possible, but the norm across the globe, except in the US."
Mauldin laments that this form of bilingualism is inhibited by "strict adherence to English only protocols." These protocols, she regrets, continue to be the conventional wisdom. In a more hopeful vein, though, she notes how "ASL is rather popular at the college level because hearing people are opting to learn it as their foreign language."
The ethical implications of this debate should not be downplayed. Teresa Blankmeyer Burke, a deaf bioethicist and associate professor of philosophy at Gallaudet University, tells me that "the critical issue ... is that language deprivation is a serious moral harm." By language deprivation—in this case denial of ASL to CI members of the deaf community—she means not only "the inability to have any access to language—that is something I think we all would agree on is unethical." She also believes "that a life of partial access to language is harmful as well."
This point is easily over looked until one considers in more specific terms what Burke is talking about. She elaborates:
Children (and adults) with cochlear implants can achieve very high functioning (not all of them), but they will still function in some situations as hard of hearing individuals. There will be some instances where their access to language is incomplete, and this will occur in certain kinds of settings—for example, in rapid-fire repartee, or the recounting of a joke, where the vocalization of the punchline includes a lowered volume as a technique for getting the attention of listeners. These kinds of experiences are very much the thing that bonds humans to one another.
No matter where one stands on this issue, Mauldin, who has worked with Burke, is wise to present CIs as neither miracle devices nor destroyers of culture. But when it comes time to level a measure of blame, she is not afraid to do so. She explained in our email exchange:
The number of pediatric CI recipients is only going to increase. And it's my impression that Deaf communities are coming to terms with the prevalence of CIs and the possibility of identifying both as culturally Deaf and a CI user. Unfortunately, I don't see reciprocity from the CI world; there is no equivalent infiltration of the Deaf community into powerful health-care institutions or State intervention services. So while the CI world is able to largely keep a firm boundary between themselves and Deaf communities, the opposite is not true.
Medical professionals already have a lot on their plate. But if Mauldin is right, then it's time for them to take a more sociological approach to medical solutions. As Burke reminds us, what's at stake for children who suffer language deprivation is nothing less than "the considerable harm of not having the deeply human experience of full and easy access to language." And that's something that touches "all aspects of well-being."
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THE WHISPERING ROOM flaming terrorist from small town USA was plagued with brain images of spider webs planting EGGS---nanobots in her brain----her life interrupted at any time with messages from whatever was controlling her brain. All these plot themes are MOVING FORWARD today as mental health rehabilitation----addiction therapy------the medical devices tied to 5G transmission of artificial sound messages.
NO NANOBOTS NEEDED----BUT NO ABILITY TO CAPTURE A PERSON'S FREE WILL ----NO ABILITY TO CAPTURE EN MASSE A GROUP OF CONTROLLED POD-----PEOPLE.
Below we see the advancement of medical devices moving from people totally deaf ------to our 99% of US citizens merely suffering hearing loss. So, subliminal messaging therapies attached to addictions are mainstream products people pre-conditioning their brains for receiving artificial messaging from what are now broadly used cochlear implants-------are these implants capable of not only amplifying natural sounds----but also receiving artificial digital messaging? YOU BETCHA.
BARBER SURGEONS at Johns Hopkins starting sugar-cube LSD dosing of our Baltimore homeless and poor before any other city MOVING FORWARD COCHLEAR IMPLANTS FOR ALL.
'Dr. JOHN NIPARKO (Johns Hopkins Hospital): ...surprisingly well. What we found was that age, per se, was a very poor predictor of how someone would perform with a Cochlear implant'.
All this cochlear technology from Bush-era was not duel use as regards receiving artificial sound messaging vs natural sounds but today it is. Think of how GPS tracking is installed in all products we buy tracking our every movement and we see to where cochlear implant artificial messaging will be able to capture a larger then larger then larger population of people.
Elderly with Hearing Loss Turning to Cochlear Implant
December 20, 200512:00 AM ET
Joseph Shapiro
Cochlear implants have proven an effective but controversial means of restoring hearing in children. NPR science correspondent Joseph Shapiro reports that the implants are now gaining popularity among elderly people who suffer from hearing loss.
MADELEINE BRAND, host:
This is DAY TO DAY. I'm Madeleine Brand.
In a moment, an update on the US government's war on drugs in Colombia. But, first, a new report says a device called a Cochlear implant can help even the oldest people who've lost hearing. The device is best known for helping thousands of deaf children hear. And while there's sometimes been controversy over the implant in children, the use among older people is growing. NPR's Joseph Shapiro reports.
JOSEPH SHAPIRO reporting:
Beatrice Cornelius is 75 and busy. She recently moved into a just-built apartment with white rugs and white couches. On her dining room table there's a gold medal in a small, blue box. The archbishop of Washington gave it to her last week to recognize all of her volunteer work.
Ms. BEATRICE CORNELIUS: I serve communion to the parishioners and take communion to the home-bound. I also volunteer at the shrine at the information desk.
SHAPIRO: That's the Basilica of the National Shrine of the Immaculate Conception in Washington, one of the largest Catholic churches in the world.
Ms. CORNELIUS: And they want me to give tours, some of the ladies. I said, `Well, you know, people are walking with you and they're asking questions, and I cannot hear them behind me.' They say, `Well, we know that you know what to say.'
SHAPIRO: Cornelius is deaf. Part of her hearing's been restored, thanks to the small electronic device surgically implanted behind her ear. It's a Cochlear implant, a device that electrically stimulates the hearing nerve.
You have something behind the ear now?
Ms. CORNELIUS: No, it's implanted. Computerized material is implanted, and I have a processor, which processes the information as it goes in.
SHAPIRO: She shows the small computer process that's clipped to her waistband. It's about the size of a cell phone and connects to a thin, black wire that reaches to behind her left ear.
Ms. CORNELIUS: And now if I take this off, I would not hear anything, not a fire alarm, not fire trucks, anything.
SHAPIRO: With the device she can talk on the telephone. Face to face she has conversations, although she still relies on lip-reading. She can even enjoy music, although she says she hears familiar music best.
Ms. CORNELIUS: I have a tape in my car, "How Great Thou Art," "Amazing Grace," and I pretty much know the words, and so that I can manage pretty well.
SHAPIRO: There's been controversy around Cochlear implants, especially when they were first used in children born deaf. Some deaf people objected angrily that children would end up with imperfect hearing and be cut off from the unique culture in sign language of other people born deaf. There was controversy, too, over giving implants to older people, questions over whether it was worth the risk of having surgery and and whether the devices worked well enough for older people. Many doctors thought the answer was no. Sig Soli says that's changing.
Dr. SIG SOLI (House Ear Institute): The benefits of the Cochlear implant have improved as the technology has improved and as our understanding of how to rehabilitate people has improved.
SHAPIRO: Soli's a researcher at the House Ear Institute in Los Angeles.
Dr. SOLI: So that means the amount of benefit that a person can receive during the remainder of their life after a Cochlear implant is larger now than it was before.
SHAPIRO: Medicare doesn't pay for hearing aids, but it does pay for Cochlear implants. The device itself costs about $25,000; the surgery is about $10,000. Insurers have wanted to know more about whether implants for the elderly are worth the money, so Dr. John Niparko went to find out. He runs the hearing care program at Johns Hopkins Hospital. Niparko studied 258 people 65 and older to see how well they could hear with implants. Then he compared them to younger patients and found the older ones did...
Dr. JOHN NIPARKO (Johns Hopkins Hospital): ...surprisingly well. What we found was that age, per se, was a very poor predictor of how someone would perform with a Cochlear implant.
SHAPIRO: The thing that mattered most wasn't how old the patient was but how long they'd been deaf before getting the implant.
Dr. NIPARKO: The duration of deafness was a much more important predictor of how the performance level would play out over time.
SHAPIRO: Niparko's research appears in the current issue of the Archives of Otolaryngology. He says even some of the oldest old are now getting implants.
Dr. NIPARKO: I don't know what the world's record is. I know there are several patients on the East Coast who've received the implant in their early 90s. In one case, I know that a grandparent heard three generations all at the same time for the first time.
SHAPIRO: More older Americans are having trouble hearing. Cochlear implants will be an option for only about 5 percent of them. To be eligible, an older person must hear less than 40 percent of what's said, even with powerful hearing aids. Joseph Shapiro, NPR News.
BRAND: More coming up on DAY TO DAY from NPR News.
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It is very easy to manipulate through cochlear implants what frequency of sound these devices capture and send to our brain to interpret. The messaging from THE WHISPERING ROOM computer programming would be that source of sound frequency transmission heard only by those IRON FURNACE TOWN PEOPLE MADE PODS-----EASY PEASY----no nanobots needed.
Our REAL hearing disabled citizens many shouting loudly against these hearing technologies because they eliminate the structures having be developed over centuries allowing our deaf citizens independence in how they send and receive communications and they are indeed completely susceptible to MOVING FORWARD DEEP, DEEP, REALLY DEEP STATE cochlear implant artificial messaging control of all they hear.
So, let's think about IRON FURNACE LAKE people as PODS to understand the technology needed to capture not only how their brains process communications-----how the brain interprets those communications-----then the brain's ability to freely respond with independent behavior. These are the elements THE WHISPERING ROOM uses as themes and plots.
Programming cochlear implants for auditory performance
MOTIVATION
The ear, when put into competition with our other senses, is probably the most important sensory organ. Hearing is essential to man’s existence.
The handicap of being hearing impaired carves deeply
into all segments of society and all facets of man in his social context: in the elderly induced by age,
in the unfortunate and reckless by trauma, but a fortiori in innocent children struck by fate and sentenced
to not only deafness but also verbal muteness and intellectual deprivation.
The cochlear implant is the first technological development
in human kind to bring a radical change to this predicament of severe sensory disability. To effectively replace the human sensory organ of hearing with a machine is an accomplishment for which only the humble word miracle is in place. As
rudimentary and subpar to the healthy human ear as the cochlear implant may be today, so essential it is already for the social integration, the communicative abilities and basically the comfort and happiness of individual people.
To be working in the field of cochlear implants therefore is rewarding for 2 reasons:
(1) being able to
contribute to something that helps hearing impaired people to regain the ability to communicate
and
(2) the excitement of being at the forefront of an evolution towards the fusion of man and
machine.
It is amazing to see that machines no longer need to be separate entities; rather they can
be integrated into our physical bodies. This mixture of biology and technology is fascinating. The present project and its prerequisite appetite for knowledge live by these incentives.
Almost 30 years have passed since the introduction of the multichannel cochlear implant (CI).
Briefly,
it provides direct electrical stimulation of the auditory nerve, bypassing damaged parts of the ear. A series of electrodes is surgically inserted into the inner ear. An external speech processor, usually worn behind the ear, picks up sounds from the environment and converts them into a digital signal. That signal is sent to the implant and delivered to the electrodes for stimulation of auditory nerve fibres. Hardware capabilities, speech processing strategies, ease of use and aesthetic design of cochlear implants have all evolved significantly over the years. Still, it is astonishing to see that a
technology as bold and revolutionary as the cochlear implant has grown to become a routine
intervention, taken for granted as the solution to profound deafness.
Huge challenges concerning the further development and introduction of cochlear implants worldwide, however, remain even to this day. One such a challenge is the process of "fitting": the tuning of the speech processor to the individual recipient, in order to provide an optimal auditory percept and aiming at maximal speech understanding for every patient.
The many tuneable parameters available to customize the speech processor and the complexity of signal processing and
stimulation strategies of current generation cochlear implant systems make that fitting is a non-trivial task, to say the least. Also the various pathological conditions that are encountered across recipients, of which the causes are mostly unknown and of which the origin may well lie in the
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What does all these BRAIN AND MIND CONTROL medical research and development have to do with SPACE TRAVEL LSD-VIRTUAL REALITY hibernation of planetary and moon mining slave transport?
We showed earlier an image of third world drug users facing the side-effects of a new NERVE AGENT as PHARMA. Space travel hibernation goes beyond all those EARTHLY deep, deep, really deep state brain chemistry medical research to include neural biochemistry surrounding CENTRAL NERVOUS AND AUTONOMOUS NERVOUS SYSTEM. This targets the LOWER BRAIN STEM----the SPINAL CORD nervous system.
As with MOVING FORWARD brain LSD-virtual reality -----needing to be able to find the pathways that give people autonomous and free will control of behavior ------so too does the physical goals of restraining people for long term freezing of movement. While global banking 1% CLINTON/BUSH/OBAMA 5% player barber surgeons are working hard to find those pathways---manufacturing PHARMA designed to sidetrack our human capacity to free will control of physical and mental neural transmission-----IT IS NO WHERE HAPPENING AND LIKELY WILL NOT HAPPEN.
Circumventing both brain's chemical pathways of individualized self control of thinking and memory----meets circumventing our physical body's free will and individual control of body/muscular movement.
The goal of MOVING FORWARD is BOTH of these medical advances each needing REMOTE CONTROL MICROCHIP TECHNOLOGY----each needing NANOBOT technology to make all these controls manageable.
Our US MED-CHI now being eliminated replaced by CLUB MED.
This Unbelievable Research on Human Hibernation Could Get Us to Mars
By
Gemma Milne -
Jan 04, 2018
Journeying to Mars is seldom out of the news these days. From Elon Musk releasing plans for his new rocket to allow SpaceX to colonize Mars, to NASA announcing another rover as part of the Mars 2020 mission, both private and public organizations are racing to the red planet.
But human spaceflight is an exponentially bigger task than sending robots and experiments beyond Earth. Not only do you have to get the engineering of the rocket, the calculations of the launch, the plans for zero-gravity travel and the remotely operated Martian landing perfect, but you’d also have to keep a crew of humans alive for six months without any outside help.
There are questions around how to pack enough food and water to sustain the crew without making the rocket too heavy and around how much physical space would be left for the crew to live in. There are questions about what happens if someone gets dangerously ill and about what a claustrophobic half-year in these circumstances would do to the mental health of the Martian explorers.
Enter John Bradford of Atlanta-based SpaceWorks Enterprises.
Using a $500,000 grant from NASA, Bradford’s team has been working on an adaptation of a promising medical procedure that could alleviate many of the human-related limitations of space travel.
Presenting at the annual Hello Tomorrow Summit in Paris, Bradford shared his team’s concept of placing the crew in what’s called a “low-metabolic torpor state” for select phases during space travel—in other words, hibernating the crew.
The idea stems from a current medical practice called therapeutic hypothermia, or targeted temperature management. It is used in cases of cardiac arrest and neonatal encephalopathy. Patients are cooled to around 33°C for 48 hours to prevent injury to tissue following lack of blood flow. Sedatives are then administered to induce sleep. Ex Formula 1 driver Michael Schumacher was famously held in this state following his ski accident in 2013.
Adapting the procedure for spaceflight, the crew would be fed and watered directly into the stomach using what’s called a percutaneous endoscopic gastronomy tube to remove the need for eating and standard digestion, and using whole-body electrical stimulation, their muscles would be activated to avoid atrophy.
Bradford’s team found that while in this torpor state, the body needs over a third less food and water to sustain itself, greatly reducing the payload weight estimates for Mars missions.
A large part of the concept is the rotational element of who is awake and who is in stasis. Current medical procedures only last two to three days, so the plan is to extend the time each person is in torpor state to around eight days. Adding in a two-day wake period, a schedule can be drawn up so that a different member of the crew acts as the caretaker for the others, each in cycles of eight days of torpor and two days awake.
This means humans won’t be asleep for the whole journey, but with these torpor periods making up the majority of their trip, the physical and mental pressure put on the crew and the weight of resources on board would be greatly reduced. The plan for the research, however, is to get these periods up from days to weeks.
It’s not just SpaceWorks who’s looking into the idea of human hibernation for space travel. The European Space Agency has part of their Advanced Concepts team dedicated to this research as well. But their last paper was published in 2004, which suggests Bradford and his crew have the most promising progress.
Naysayers tend to question the ability of the human body to effectively and safely “wake up” from these long periods of stasis, and have concerns around whether our bodies can truly adapt to running healthily at a lower temperature. We are evolved to run at a pretty precise measure, and long-term body temperature changes in humans have not yet been studied.
But the SpaceWorks team’s research has both short and long-term prospects. The advances being made in our understanding and implementation of the torpor state can likely be adapted for use in organ transplants and critical care in extreme environments.
Of course, it’s the long term that excites Bradford. He estimates they could possibly achieve this capability for manned missions as soon as the 2030s. And with Elon Musk aiming for the first manned flights of his new rocket in 2024, it seems this pair might have the ingredients for a Martian future for Earthlings sooner than we expect.
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When we see images like these ------global banking 1% are not trying to make ZOMBIES ----that is the living dead-----they need humans as living people to be made planetary mining slaves------they simply want to capture and control all mind and body functions in doing so. Same with global corporate campuses which fund all these medical research ----they too want workers who are indeed IRON FURNACE LAKE POD PEOPLE.
This image shows simply one random kind of controlled PHARMA no doubt in development looking to control one autonomous central nervous region or another. Brush up on high school anatomy to understand what nervous system region these drugs taken here were targeting.
Nez Zie FACEBOOK VIDEO
June 22 at 4:36 PM
The new drug used by young people allows them to go into a trance... as if possessed by evil..it's already in Colombia
Sympathetic system FIGHT OR FLIGHT is missing in IRON FURNACE LAKE POD PEOPLE-------parasympathetic is body muscle control......
This PHARMA courtesy the likes of GLOBAL BIG PHARMA Bill Gates is obviously not capturing the correct neural regions to stop voluntary movement.
Generally, the sympathetic division does the following:
Prepares the body for stressful or emergency situations—fight or flight
Thus, the sympathetic division increases heart rate and the force of heart contractions and widens (dilates) the airways to make breathing easier. It causes the body to release stored energy. Muscular strength is increased. This division also causes palms to sweat, pupils to dilate, and hair to stand on end. It slows body processes that are less important in emergencies, such as digestion and urination.
Sympathetic Innervation
Sympathetic Innervation
Sympathetic Innervation
The parasympathetic division does the following:
Controls body process during ordinary situations.
Generally, the parasympathetic division conserves and restores. It slows the heart rate and decreases blood pressure. It stimulates the digestive tract to process food and eliminate wastes. Energy from the processed food is used to restore and build tissues.
Parasympathetic Innervation
Parasympathetic Innervation
Parasympathetic Innervation
Both the sympathetic and parasympathetic divisions are involved in sexual activity, as are the parts of the nervous system that control voluntary actions and transmit sensation from the skin (somatic nervous system).
_____________________________________________
We want to remind our US 99% WE THE PEOPLE black, white, and brown citizens----just what far-right wing, authoritarian, militaristic, extreme wealth extreme poverty LIBERTARIAN MARXIST societies have done with disabled, mentally ill for thousands of years. They do not spend money rehabilitating them to productive freedom, liberty, free will lives. They have and are now throwing these SOCIAL DARWIN lower PODS into slave labor camps where they will work until they die.
As hard as global banking 1% tries to paint a CHINA which is reforming to Western moral and ethics-----they are not. Our US is being taken to colonial status to operate like third world DARK AGES CHINA.
So, absolutely NONE of these US MOVING FORWARD telemedicine, addiction THE BRAIN research has goals of actually helping those pods at the lower end of SOCIAL DARWINISM.
Lifestyle
December 2, 2013 / 7:20 AM / 5 years ago
A jail by another name: China labor camps now drug detox centers
John Ruwitch
KUNMING, China (Reuters) -
Li Zhongying was freed from a Chinese labor camp ahead of schedule in September because, guards told her, the government was scrapping ‘re-education through labor’, a heavily criticized penal system created in the 1950s.
Several hundred other inmates were not so lucky, she said. Like Li, they were held without trial and forced to do factory work under what she called “cruel” conditions. They remained because they were drug offenders, she told Reuters.
Many of China’s re-education through labor camps, instead of being abolished in line with a ruling Communist Party announcement this month, are being turned into compulsory drug rehabilitation centers where inmates can be incarcerated for two years or more without trial.
Human rights activists and freed inmates said drug offenders were still being forced to do factory work, as has been the practice under the re-education through labor system, colloquially known as ‘laojiao’.
New York-based Human Rights Watch estimates more than 60 percent of the 160,000 people in labor camps at the start of the year were there for drug offenses. Those people were unlikely to see any change in their treatment, it said.
“The drug detox people are doing exactly the same work,” said Li, who spent 19 months in a labor camp in Kunming, the capital of southern Yunnan province.
Police caught Li in Beijing early last year trying to petition the government over a grievance that dated back to the mid-1990s. They sent her home to Yunnan, where she was sentenced without trial to 21 months.
Li, speaking from Beijing, said she worked at a biscuit factory inside the camp for up to 15 hours a day.
A production line manager, speaking to Reuters outside the facility on a dusty road near Kunming airport late last week, said the inmates left inside were undergoing drug rehab. Among the items they made were handicrafts, including embroidered items, said the manager, declining to be identified.
SURPRISE ANNOUNCEMENT
China’s re-education through labor law, in place since 1957, empowered police to detain petty criminals for up to four years without trial.
Many of the camps have housed drug rehab centers since mid-2008, when a new Anti-Drug Law came into force. Police can sentence drug offenders without trial to two years or more of compulsory rehabilitation, which can include forced labor, according to the law.
Labor camps across China began changing their names to drug centers earlier this year, after a surprise announcement in January from Public Security Minister Meng Jianzhu that the network of 350 camps would be scrapped.
They also took it as a cue to start releasing some people who were there for non-drug offences. The camps also hold petty criminals, prostitutes, petitioners and members of the banned spiritual group Falun Gong, rights activists say.
Government websites and state media have reported steps to change the names of camps to drug rehab centers or to re-train staff this year in provinces including Guangdong, Hainan, Henan, Jiangsu, Jilin, Liaoning, Sichuan, Yunnan and Zhejiang, as well as in Shanghai and Beijing.
The Communist Party’s policymaking Central Committee announced the formal abolition of the re-education through labor camp system this month as part of a series of sweeping societal and economic reforms.
Nicholas Bequelin, senior Asia researcher at Human Rights Watch, said he believed the “great majority” of forced labor camps would keep functioning as drug rehab centers.
The shift did not represent a change of “direction or principles” on the part of the party, added Jiang Tianyong, a human rights lawyer in Beijing.
“It’s wrong to say it has no meaning, but it’s too optimistic to think it will change a lot,” he said.
“This is how power in this country operates ... They can’t use re-education through labor camps to control people, so they just change the name and control people.”
Rights groups have said conditions in labor camps are terrible and that detainees frequently had to do hard labor with minimal health and safety precautions.
Despite long-standing international criticism of the camps, many Chinese are largely oblivious to them because many of those who are locked up are poor and on the fringes of society.
The party this month said it saw the scrapping of the re-education through labor regime as an improvement to the justice system that would help it regain credibility with the populace and better protect human rights.
Neither the Public Security Ministry nor the Justice Ministry responded to questions from Reuters about the transformation of the camps into drug rehab centers.
DRUG ADDICTS STAY BEHIND
In Shanghai, shiny metal characters saying “Shanghai No.4 Re-education Through Labor Facility” still adorn the gate, but the last inmates were released months ago and the compound is now a drug rehab centre, said a guard at the facility.
“The official documents, everything, has already been changed,” said the guard, who did not give his name.
On September 14, Su Yuhong left the Masanjia forced labor camp in northern Liaoning province.
Masanjia made international headlines last year when a woman in the U.S. state of Oregon found a note in a Halloween decoration kit from Kmart that was supposedly written by a camp inmate who claimed to have played a part in making the product.
“Only the drug addicts were left,” Su said by telephone from the city of Shenyang, where she now lives.
By mid-June, the 21st Century Business Herald newspaper quoted Justice Ministry researcher Wang Gongyi as saying there were only 50,000 labor camp inmates left in the country, compared with hundreds of thousands in compulsory drug rehab centers.
Beyond drug centers, Chinese authorities still have many ways to detain people without trial, rights activists said.
Police can detain sex workers, for example, under a mechanism known as “custody and education”.
The terminology even appears to be interchangeable.
An article in July on the Public Security Ministry website said prostitutes in Zhejiang province had been sentenced to “re-education through labor at a custody and education facility”.
Jiang, the lawyer, said police had used other means to curtail the freedom of some, including Falun Gong adherents and repeat petitioners.
The number of court convictions of such people was on the rise, as was the use of ‘rule of law study classes’, which amounted to unlawful detention, he said.
“So long as (the authorities) feel a need to maintain stability, simply abolishing laojiao will not solve the problem,” he said.
____________________________________________
'Programming cochlear implants for auditory performance'
It is very easy to manipulate through cochlear implants what frequency of sound these devices capture and send to our brain to interpret. The messaging from THE WHISPERING ROOM computer programming would be that source of sound frequency transmission heard only by those IRON FURNACE TOWN PEOPLE MADE PODS-----EASY PEASY----no nanobots needed.
Our REAL hearing disabled citizens many shouting loudly against these hearing technologies because they eliminate the structures having be developed over centuries allowing our deaf citizens independence in how they send and receive communications and they are indeed completely susceptible to MOVING FORWARD DEEP, DEEP, REALLY DEEP STATE cochlear implant artificial messaging control of all they hear.
So, let's think about IRON FURNACE LAKE people as PODS to understand the technology needed to capture not only how their brains process communications-----how the brain interprets those communications-----then the brain's ability to freely respond with independent behavior. These are the elements THE WHISPERING ROOM uses as themes and plots.
One characteristic of these 5% global banking freemason/Greek players acting as enforcers for these global 2% criminal richin THE WHISPERING ROOM-----is language describing those 99% of WE THE PEOPLE captured as PODS ----in degrading terms----you know---very far-right wing extreme wealth extreme poverty FASCIST-----very HINDI/BRAHMIN class structures. The PODS were as close to being animals as are all slaves----the 5% global banking players being sociopathic criminals acting as savages and barbarians.
The story line of WHISPERING ROOM centers on US ONE TECHNOLOGY ENERGY GRID SMART CITIES and the ability of global banking 1% to connect each of their POD PEOPLE to a medical device as the cochlear implant to generate ARTIFICIAL MESSAGES simultaneously across the nation to be received and processed in the way those global banking players want those messages interpreted.
'Or perhaps the dark, cold rooms were not what fostered this apprehension. In fact, a persistent foreboding had been with her for nearly a week, since she had learned what some of the most powerful people in this new world of technological wonders were planning for their fellow citizens'.
THIS IS THE TECHNOLOGY THAT DOES NOT EXIST TODAY----BUT GLOBAL BANKING 1% CLINTON/BUSH/OBAMA MOVING FORWARD ALL THIS AS FAST AS THEY CAN WITH THESE GOALS.
If we read THE WHISPERING ROOM we would think all these technology exist and are ready to make POD PEOPLE of all our US 99% WE THE PEOPLE black, white, and brown citizens. What population groups will be exposed to all this MOVING FORWARD---of course our homeless and poor----but as this story line shows----IRON FURNACE LAKE POD people were everyday middle-upper middle class people.
ALL US MEDICAL INSTITUTIONS HAVING BEEN FILLED WITH GLOBAL BANKING 5% FREEMASON/GREEK BARBER SURGEONS REPLACING OUR STRONG PUBLIC HEALTH PHYSICIANS HAVE THESE TELEMEDICINE MILITARY MEDICAL STRUCTURES CENTRAL IN THEIR RESEARCH AND DEVELOPMENT----ALL THE WHILE HAVING ALT RIGHT ALT LEFT 5% POLS AND PLAYERS PRETENDING SOCIAL BENEFIT CALLING IT UNIVERSAL HEALTH CARE----MEDICARE FOR ALL---SINGLE PAYER.
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The Whispering Room
by Dean KoontzJane Hawk returns in the riveting sequel to The Silent Corner.
By DEAN KOONTZ • 7 months ago
Part One: Hawk’s Way
1.
Cora Gundersun walked through seething fire without being burned, nor did her white dress burst into flames. She was not afraid, but instead exhilarated, and the many admiring people witnessing this spectacle gaped in amazement, their expressions of astonishment flickering with reflections of the flames. They called out to her not in alarm, but in wonder, with a note of veneration in their voices, so that Cora felt equally thrilled and humbled that she had been made invulnerable.
Dixie, a long-haired dappled gold dachshund, woke Cora by licking her hand. The dog had no respect for dreams, not even for this one that her mistress had enjoyed three nights in a row and about which she had told Dixie in vivid detail. Dawn had come, time for breakfast and morning toilet, which were more important to Dixie than any dream.
Cora was forty years old, birdlike and spry. As the short dog toddled down the set of portable steps that allowed her to climb in and out of bed, Cora sprang up to meet the day. She slipped into furlined ankle-high boots that served as her wintertime slippers, and in her pajamas she followed the waddling dachshund through the house.
Just before she stepped into the kitchen, she was struck by the notion that a strange man would be sitting at the dinette table and that something terrible would happen.
Of course no man awaited her. She’d never been a fearful woman. She chastised herself for being spooked by nothing, nothing at all.
As she put out fresh water and kibble for her companion, the dog’s feathery golden tail swept the floor in anticipation.
By the time Cora had prepared the coffeemaker and switched it on, Dixie had finished eating. Now standing at the back door, the dog barked politely, just once.
Cora snared a coat from a wall peg and shrugged into it. “Let’s see if you can empty yourself as quick as you filled up. It’s colder than the cellar of Hades out there, sweet thing, so don’t dawdle.”
As she left the warmth of the house for the porch, her breath smoked from her as if a covey of ghosts, long in possession of her body, were being exorcised. She stood at the head of the steps to watch over precious Dixie Belle, just in case there might be a nasty-tempered raccoon lingering from its night of foraging.
More than a foot of late-winter snow had fallen the previous morning. In the absence of wind, the pine trees still wore ermine stoles on every bough. Cora had shoveled a clearing in the backyard so that Dixie wouldn’t have to plow through deep powder.
Dachshunds had keen noses. Ignoring her mistress’s plea not to dawdle, Dixie Belle wandered back and forth in the clearing, nose to the ground, curious about what animals had visited in the night.
Wednesday. A school day. Although Cora had been off work for two weeks, she still felt as if she should hurry to prepare for school. Two years earlier, she had been named Minnesota’s Teacher of the Year. She dearly loved—and missed—the children in her sixth-grade class.
Sudden-onset migraines, five and six hours long, sometimes accompanied by foul odors that only she could detect, had disabled her. The headaches seemed to be slowly responding to medications—zolmitriptan and a muscle relaxant called Soma. Cora had never been a sickly person, and staying home bored her.
Dixie Belle finally peed and left two small logs, which Cora would pick up with a plastic bag later, after they froze solid.
When she followed the dachshund into the house, a strange man was sitting at the kitchen table, drinking coffee that he had boldly poured for himself. He wore a knitted cap. He had unzipped his fleece-lined jacket. His face was long, his features sharp, his cold, blue stare direct.
Before Cora could cry out or turn to flee, the intruder said, “Play Manchurian with me.”
“Yes, all right,” she said, because he no longer seemed to be a threat. She knew him, after all. He was a nice man. He had visited her at least twice in the past week. He was a very nice man.
“Take off your coat and hang it up.”
She did as he asked.
“Come here, Cora. Sit down.”
She pulled out a chair and sat at the table.
Although a friend of everyone, Dixie retreated to a corner and settled there to watch warily with one light-blue eye and one brown.
“Did you dream last night?” the nice man asked.
“Yes.”
“Was it the dream of fire?”
“Yes.”
“Was it a good dream, Cora?”
She smiled and nodded. “It was lovely, a lovely walk through soothing fire, no fear at all.”
“You’ll have the same dream again tonight,” he said.
She smiled and clapped her hands twice. “Oh, good. It’s such a delightful dream. Sort of like one I sometimes had as a girl—that dream of flying like a bird. Flying with no fear of falling.”
“Tomorrow is the big day, Cora.”
“Is it? What’s happening?”
“You’ll know when you get up in the morning. I won’t be back again. Even as important as this is, you need no hands-on guidance.”
He finished his coffee and slid the mug in front of her and got to his feet and pushed his chair under the table. “Auf Wiedersehen, you stupid, skinny bitch.”
“Good-bye,” she said.
A twinkling, zigzagging chain of tiny lights floated into sight, an aura preceding a migraine. She closed her eyes, dreading the pain to come. But the aura passed. The headache did not occur.
When she opened her eyes, her empty mug stood on the table before her, a residue of coffee in the bottom. She got up to pour another serving for herself.
2.
On a Sunday afternoon in March, in self-defense and with great anguish, Jane Hawk had killed a dear friend and mentor.
Three days later, on a Wednesday, when the evening was diamonded with stars that even the great upwash of lights in the San Gabriel Valley, northeast of Los Angeles, could not entirely rinse from the sky, she came on foot to a house that she had scouted earlier by car. She carried a large tote bag with incriminating contents. In a shoulder rig under her sport coat hung a stolen Colt .45 ACP pistol rebuilt by one of the country’s finest custom-handgun shops.
The residential neighborhood was calm in this age of chaos, quiet in a time characterized by clamor. California pepper trees whispered and palm fronds softly rustled in a breeze fragrant with jasmine. The breeze was also threaded through with the malodor of decomposition that issued from one gutter drain and then another, perhaps from the bodies of poisoned tree rats that earlier had fled the sunlight to die in the dark.
A for-sale sign in the front yard of the target house, grass in need of mowing, a Realtor’s key safe fixed to the front-door handle, and closed draperies suggested that the place must be vacant. The security system most likely wasn’t operational, because nothing remained in the residence to steal and because an alarm would have complicated the task of showing the property to prospective buyers.
Behind the house, the patio lacked furniture. Breathing out the faint scent of chlorine, black water rippled in the swimming pool, a mirror to the waning moon.
A stuccoed property wall and Indian laurels screened the back of the house from the neighbors. Even in daylight, she would not have been seen.
With a black-market LockAid lock-release gun legally sold only to law-enforcement agencies, Jane defeated the deadbolt on the back door. She returned the device to the tote and opened the door and stood listening to the lightless kitchen, to the rooms beyond.
Convinced that her assessment of the house must be correct, she crossed the threshold, closed the door behind her, and re-engaged the deadbolt. From the tote, she fished out an LED flashlight with two settings, clicked it to the dimmest beam, and surveyed a stylish kitchen with glossy white cabinets, black granite countertops, and stainless-steel appliances. No cooking utensils were in sight. No designer china waited to be admired on the shelves of those few upper cabinets that featured display windows.
She passed through spacious rooms as dark as closed caskets and devoid of furniture. Although draperies were drawn over the windows, she kept the flashlight on low beam, directing it only at the floor.
She stayed close to the wall, where the stair treads were less likely to creak, but they still announced her as she ascended.
Although she wanted the front of the house, she toured the entire second floor to be certain she was alone. This was an upper-middleclass home in a desirable neighborhood, each bedroom with its private bath, though the chill in its vacant chambers gave rise in Jane to a presentiment of suburban decline and societal decay.
Or perhaps the dark, cold rooms were not what fostered this apprehension. In fact, a persistent foreboding had been with her for nearly a week, since she had learned what some of the most powerful people in this new world of technological wonders were planning for their fellow citizens.
She put her tote bag down by a window in a front bedroom and clicked off the flashlight and parted the draperies. She studied not the house directly across the street but the one next door to it, a fine example of Craftsman architecture.
Lawrence Hannafin lived at that address, a widower since the previous March. He and his late wife never had children. Though only forty-eight—twenty-one years older than Jane—Hannafin was likely to be alone.
She didn’t know if he might be an ally in waiting. More likely, he would be a coward with no convictions, who would shrink from the challenge she intended to put before him. Cowardice was the default position of the times.
She hoped that Hannafin wouldn’t become an enemy.
For seven years, she had been an FBI agent with the Critical Incident Response Group, most often assigned to cases involving Behavioral Analysis Units 3 and 4, which dealt with mass murders and serial killings, among other crimes. In that capacity, she’d killed only twice, in a desperate situation on an isolated farm. In the past week, on leave from the Bureau, she’d killed three men in selfdefense. She was now a rogue agent, and she’d had enough of killing.
If Lawrence Hannafin didn’t have the courage and integrity that his reputation suggested, Jane hoped that at least he would turn her away without attempting to bring her to justice. There would be no justice for her. No defense attorney. No jury trial. Considering what she knew about certain powerful people, the best she could hope for was a bullet in the head. They had the means by which to do much worse to her, the ability to break her, to scrub her mind of memories, rob her of free will, and reduce her to docile slavery.
3.
Jane took off her sport coat and shoulder rig and slept— not well—on the floor, with the pistol near to hand. For a pillow, she used a cushion from the window seat at the end of the second-floor hall, but she had nothing to serve as a blanket.
The world of her dreams was a realm of shifting shadows and silver-blue half-light without a source, through which she fled malevolent mannequins who had once been people like her, but were now as tireless as robots programmed for a hunt, their eyes vacant of all feeling.
The wristwatch alarm woke her an hour before dawn.
Her limited toiletries included toothpaste and a brush. In the bathroom, with the dimmed flashlight in a corner on the floor, her face a hollow-eyed haunt in the dark mirror, she scrubbed away the taste of dream fear.
At the bedroom window, she parted the draperies a few inches and watched the Hannafin house through a small pair of high-powered binoculars, her peppermint breath briefly steaming the window glass.
According to his Facebook page, Lawrence Hannafin took a one-hour run every morning at dawn. A second-floor room brightened, and a few minutes later, soft light bloomed in the foyer downstairs. In headband, shorts, and running shoes, he exited the front door as the eastern sky blushed with the first rose-tinted light of day.
Through the binoculars, Jane watched him key the lock, after which he safety-pinned the key in a pocket of his shorts.
The previous day, she had observed him from her car. He had run three blocks south, then turned east into a neighborhood of horse properties, following riding trails into the undeveloped hills of brush and wild grass. He had been gone sixty-seven minutes. Jane required only a fraction of that time to do what needed to be done.
4.
Another Minnesota morning.
A slab of hard gray sky like dirty ice. Scattered snowflakes in the still air, as if escaping through the clenched teeth of a reluctant storm.
In her pajamas and fur-lined ankle boots, Cora Gundersun cooked a breakfast of buttered white toast dusted with Parmesan, scrambled eggs, and Nueske’s bacon, the best bacon in the world, which fried up thin and crisp and flavorful.
At the table, she read the newspaper while she ate. From time to time she broke off a little piece from a slice of bacon to feed to Dixie Belle, who waited patiently beside her chair and received each treat with whimpers of delight and gratitude.
Cora had dreamed again of walking unscathed through a fierce fire while onlookers marveled at her invulnerability. The dream lifted her heart, and she felt purified, as if the flames had been the loving fire of God.
She hadn’t suffered a migraine in more than forty-eight hours, which was the longest reprieve from pain that she’d enjoyed since the headaches had begun. She dared to hope that her inexplicable affliction had come to an end.
With hours to fill before she needed to shower and dress and drive into town to do what needed to be done, still at the kitchen table, she opened the journal that she had been keeping for some weeks. Her handwriting was almost as neat as that produced by a machine, and the lines of cursive flowed without interruption.
After an hour, she put down the pen and closed the journal and fried more Nueske’s bacon, just in case this was the last chance she would have to eat it. That was a peculiar thought. Nueske’s had been producing fine bacon for decades, and Cora had no reason to suppose they would go out of business. The economy was bad, yes, and many businesses had folded, but Nueske’s was forever. Nevertheless, she ate the bacon with sliced tomatoes and more buttered toast, and again she shared with Dixie Belle.
5.
Jane did not cross the street directly from the vacant house to the Hannafin place. Carrying her tote bag, she walked to the end of the block, then half a block farther, before crossing the street and approaching the residence from the north, considerably reducing the chance that anyone would be looking out a window long enough to see both from where she had come and where she had gone.
At the Craftsman-style house, cut-stone steps bordered with bricks led to a deep porch, at both ends of which crimson wisteria in early bloom cascaded from panels of lattice, providing privacy to commit illegal entry.
She rang the bell three times. No response.
She inserted the thin, flexible pick of the LockAid into the keyway of the deadbolt and pulled the trigger four times before all the pin tumblers were cast to the shear line.
Inside, before she locked the door behind her, she called into the stillness, “Hello? Anyone home?”
When only silence answered her, she committed.
The furnishings and architecture were elegantly coordinated. Slate fireplaces with inset ceramic tiles. Stickley-style furniture with printed cotton fabrics in earth tones. Arts-and-Crafts lighting fixtures. Persian rugs.
The desirable neighborhood, the large house, and the interior design argued against her hope that Hannafin might be an uncorrupted journalist. He was a newspaper guy, and in these days, when most newspapers were as thin as anorexic teenagers and steadily dying out, print reporters, even those with a major Los Angeles daily, didn’t command huge salaries. The really big money went to TV-news journalists, most of whom were no more journalists than they were astronauts.
Hannafin, however, had written half a dozen nonfiction books, three of which had spent several weeks each on the bottom third of the bestseller list. They had been serious works, well done. He might have chosen to pour his royalties into his home.
The previous day, using one of several patron computers at a library in Pasadena, Jane easily cracked Hannafin’s telecom provider and discovered that he relied on not just a cellphone but also a landline, which made what she was now about to do easier. She had been able to access the phone-company system because she knew of a back door created by a supergeek at the Bureau, Vikram Rangnekar. Vikram was sweet and funny—and he cut legal corners when he was ordered to do so either by the director or by a higher power at the Department of Justice. Before Jane had gone on leave, Vikram had an innocent crush on her, even though at the time she’d been married and so far off the playing field that it might as well have been on the moon. As a by-the-book agent, she had never resorted to illegal methods, but she’d been curious about what the corrupt inner circle at Justice might be doing, and she had allowed Vikram to show off his magic every time he wanted to impress her.
In retrospect, it seemed as if she had intuited that her good life would turn sour, that she would be desperate and on the run, and that she would need every trick that Vikram could show her.
According to phone-company records, in addition to a wallmounted unit in the kitchen, there were three desk models in the Hannafin house: one in the master bedroom, one in the living room, one in the study. She started in the kitchen and finished in the master bedroom, removing the bottom of each phone casing with a small Phillips screwdriver. She wired in a two-function chip that could be remotely triggered to serve as an infinity transmitter or a standard line tap, installed a hook-switch defeat, and closed the casing. She needed only nineteen minutes to complete that work.
If the big walk-in closet in the master bedroom had not suited her plan, she would have found another closet. But it was all right. One hinged door, not a slider. Although currently unlocked, the door featured a keyed deadbolt, perhaps because a small wall safe was concealed in there or maybe because the late Mrs. Hannafin had owned a collection of valuable jewelry. It was a blind lock from within the closet, with no operable thumbturn on that side. A step-stool allowed the higher shelves to be reached with ease.
Hannafin had a lot of clothes with stylish labels: Brunello Cucinelli suits, a collection of Charvet ties, drawers filled with St. Croix sweaters. Jane hid a hammer among some sweaters and a screwdriver in an interior coat pocket of a blue pinstriped suit.
She spent another ten minutes opening drawers in various rooms, not looking for anything specific, just backgrounding the man.
If she departed the house by the front door, the latch bolt would click into place, but the deadbolt wouldn’t. When Hannafin returned and found the deadbolt wasn’t engaged, he would know that someone had been here in his absence.
She exited instead by a laundry-room door that connected the house and garage, leaving that deadbolt disengaged, which he was more likely to think he had failed to lock.
The side door of the garage had no deadbolt. The simple latch secured it when she stepped outside and pulled it shut behind her.
6.
Once more in the deserted for-sale house, now that morning sun provided cover, Jane switched on the lights in the master bathroom.
As sometimes happened these days, the face in the mirror was not what she expected. After all that she had been through in the past four months, she felt weathered and worn by fear, by grief, by worry. Although her hair was shorter and dyed auburn, she looked much as she had before this began: a youthful twenty-seven, fresh, clear-eyed. It seemed wrong that her husband should be dead, her only child in jeopardy and in hiding, and yet no testament of loss and anxiety could be read in her face or eyes.
Among other things, the large tote bag contained a long blond wig. She fitted it to her head, secured it, brushed it, and used a blue Scünci to hold it in a ponytail. She pulled on a baseball cap that wasn’t emblazoned with any logo or slogan. In jeans, a sweater, and a sport coat cut to conceal the shoulder rig and pistol, she looked anonymous, except that during the past few days, the news media had ensured that her face was nearly as familiar to the public as that of any TV star.
She could have taken steps to disguise herself better, but she wanted Lawrence Hannafin to have no doubt as to her identity.
In the master bedroom, she waited at the window. According to her watch, the runner returned sixty-two minutes after setting out on his morning constitutional.
Because of his name recognition from the bestselling books and the audience he drew for the newspaper, he was free to work at home from time to time. Nevertheless, hot and sweaty, he would probably opt to shower sooner rather than later. Jane waited ten minutes before setting out to pay him a visit.
7.
Hannafin has been a widower for a year, but he still has not fully adjusted to being alone. Often when he comes home, as now, by habit he calls out to Sakura. In the answering silence, he stands quite still, stricken by her absence.
Irrationally, he sometimes wonders if she is in fact dead. He’d been out of state on an assignment when her medical crisis occurred. Unable to bear the sight of her in death, he allowed cremation. As a consequence, he occasionally turns with the sudden conviction that she is behind him, alive and smiling.
Sakura. In Japanese, the name means cherry blossom. It suited her delicate beauty, if not her forceful personality. . . .
He had been a different man before she came into his life. She was so intelligent, so tender. Her gentle but steady encouragement gave him the confidence to write the books that previously he only talked about writing. For a journalist, he was oddly withdrawn, but she extracted him from what she called his “unhappy-turtle shell” and opened him to new experiences. Before her, he was as indifferent to clothes as to fine wine; but she taught him style and refined his taste, until he wanted to be handsome and urbane, to make her proud to be seen with him.
After her death, he put away all the photographs of the two of them together that she had framed in silver and lovingly arranged here and there about the house. The pictures had haunted him, as she still haunts his dreams more nights than not.
“Sakura, Sakura, Sakura,” he whispers to the quiet house, and then goes upstairs to shower.
She was a runner, and she insisted that he run to stay as fit as she was, that they might remain healthy and grow old together. Running without Sakura at first seemed impossible, memories like ghosts waiting around every turn of every route they had taken. But then to stop running felt like a betrayal, as if she were indeed out there on the trails, unable to return to this house of the living, waiting for him that she might see him and know that he was well and vital and staying true to the regimen that she had established for them.
If ever Hannafin dares to speak such thoughts to people at the newspaper, they will call him sentimental to his face—maudlin and mawkish and worse behind his back—because there is no room in most contemporary journalists’ hearts for schmaltz unless it is twined with politics. Nevertheless . . .
In the master bath, he cranks the shower as hot as he can tolerate. Because of Sakura, he does not use ordinary soap, which stresses the skin, but he lathers up with You Are Amazing body wash. His egg-and-cognac shampoo is from Hair Recipes, and he uses an argan-oil conditioner. All this seemed embarrassingly girly to him when Sakura was alive. But now it is his routine. He recalls times when they showered together, and in his mind’s ear, he can hear the girlish giggle with which she engaged in that domestic intimacy.
The bathroom mirror is clouded with steam when he steps out of the shower and towels dry. His reflection is blurred and for some reason disturbing, as if the nebulous form that parallels his every move, if fully revealed, might not be him, but instead some lessthan-human denizen of a world within the glass. If he wipes the mirror, it will streak. He leaves the steam to evaporate and walks naked into the bedroom.
A most amazing-looking woman sits in one of the two armchairs. Although she’s dressed in scuffed Rockports and jeans and a nothing sweater and an off-brand sport coat, she looks as if she stepped out of the pages of Vogue. She’s as stunning as the model in the Black Opium perfume ads, except that she’s a blonde instead of a brunette.
He stands dumbstruck for a moment, half sure that something has gone wrong with his brain, that he’s hallucinating.
She points to a robe that she has taken from his closet and laid out on the bed. “Put that on and sit down. We have to talk.”
8.
When she finished the last slice of bacon, Cora Gundersun was surprised to realize that she had eaten an entire pound, minus the couple slices she had fed to the dog. She felt as though she should be embarrassed by this gluttony, if not also physically ill, but she was neither. Indeed, the indulgence seemed justified to her, though for what reason she could not say.
Usually, when finished eating, she at once washed the dishes and utensils and dried them and put them away. In this instance, however, she felt that cleaning up would be a waste of precious time. She left her plate and dirty flatware on the table, and she ignored the grease-coated frying pan on the stove.
As she licked her fingers, her attention fell on the journal in which she had earlier been writing so industriously. For the life of her, she could not remember what her latest entry had concerned. Puzzled, she slid her plate aside and replaced it with the journal—but hesitated to open the volume.
When she’d graduated college nearly twenty years earlier, she had hoped to become a successful writer, a serious novelist of some importance. In retrospect, that grand intention was only a childish fantasy. Sometimes life seemed to be a machine designed to crush dreams as effectively as a junkyard hydraulic press crumpled cars into compact cubes. She needed to earn a living, and once she began teaching, the desire to publish grew weaker year by year.
Now, although she could not recall what she had so recently written in her journal, the lapse of memory did not worry her, did not stir fears of the early onset of Alzheimer’s. Instead, she was inclined to listen to a still, small voice that suggested she would be depressed by the quality of what she had written, that this blank spot in her memory was nothing more than the work of the clear-eyed critic Cora Gundersun sparing the writer Cora Gundersun from the distress of acknowledging that her writing lacked polish and spirit.
She pushed the journal aside without perusing its contents.
She looked down at Dixie Belle, who sat beside the dinette chair. The dachshund gazed up at her mistress with those beautiful if mismatched eyes, pale-blue and dark-brown ovals in a gentle golden face.
Dogs in general, not just good Dixie, sometimes regarded their humans with an expression of loving concern colored with tender pity, as if they knew not merely people’s most private fears and hopes, but also the very truth of life and the fate of all things, as though they wished that they could speak in order to give comfort by sharing what they knew.
Such was the expression with which Dixie regarded Cora, and it deeply affected the woman. Sorrow without apparent cause overcame her, as did an existential dread that she knew too well. She reached down to stroke the dog’s head. When Dixie licked her hand, Cora’s vision blurred with tears.
She said, “What’s wrong with me, sweet girl? There’s something wrong with me.”
The still, small voice within told her to be calm, to worry not, to prepare herself for the eventful day ahead.
Her tears dried. The digital clock on the oven glowed with the time—10:31 a.m. She had an hour and a half before she must drive into town. The prospect of so much time to fill made her unaccountably nervous, as if she must keep busy in order to avoid thinking about . . . About what?
Her hands trembled as she opened the journal to a fresh page and picked up the pen, but the tremors passed when she began to write. As if in a trance, Cora rapidly scribed line after line of neatly formed prose, never looking back at the most recent word that she had set down, giving no thought as to what she would write next, filling time to steady her nerves.
Standing on her hind feet, forepaws on the seat of Cora’s chair, Dixie whimpered for attention.
“Be calm,” Cora told the dog. “Be calm. Don’t worry. Don’t worry. Prepare yourself for the eventful day ahead.”
9.
Lawrence Hannafin’s shock turned to blushing embarrassment as, naked, he snatched up the bathrobe. Wrapping it around himself and cinching the belt, he regained enough composure to be apprehensive. “Who the hell are you?”
Jane’s voice was strong but without threat. “Be cool. Sit down.” He was accustomed to asserting himself, and his confidence quickly returned. “How did you get in here? This is breaking and entering.”
“Criminal trespass,” she corrected. She pulled back her sport coat to reveal the shoulder rig and the gun. “Sit down, Hannafin.”
After a hesitation, he warily took a step toward a second armchair that was angled to face hers.
“On the bed,” she instructed, for she didn’t want him close.
She glimpsed cold calculation in his jade-green eyes, but if he considered rushing her, he thought better of the impulse. He sat on the edge of the bed. “There’s no money in the house.”
“Do I look like a burglar?”
“I don’t know what you are.”
“But you know who I am.”
He frowned. “We’ve never met.”
She took off the baseball cap and waited.
After a moment, his eyes widened. “You’re FBI. Or were. The rogue agent everyone’s hunting. Jane Hawk.”
“What do you think of all that?” she asked.
“All what?”
“All that shit about me on TV, in the papers.”
Even in these circumstances, he fell quickly into the familiar role of inquisitive reporter. “What do you want me to think of it?”
“Do you believe it?”
“If I believed everything I see in the news, I wouldn’t be a journalist, I’d be an idiot.”
“You think I really killed two men last week? That sleazy Dark Web entrepreneur and the hotshot Beverly Hills attorney?”
“If you say you didn’t, maybe you didn’t. Convince me.”
“No, I killed them both,” she said. “To put him out of his misery, I also killed a man named Nathan Silverman, my section chief at the Bureau, a good friend and mentor, but you haven’t heard that. They don’t want that reported.”
“Who doesn’t?”
“Certain people in the Bureau. In the Department of Justice. I have a story for you. A big one.”
His eyes were as unreadable as those of a jade Buddha. After a meditative silence, he said, “I’ll get a pen and a notepad, and you’ll tell me.”
“Stay put. We’ll talk awhile. Then maybe a pen and notepad.”
He hadn’t fully towel-dried his hair. Beads of water trickled down his brow, his temples. Water or sweat.
He met her stare and after another silence said, “Why me?”
“I don’t trust many journalists. The few I might have trusted in the new generation—they’re all suddenly dead. You’re not.”
“My only qualification is that I’m alive?”
“You wrote a profile of David James Michael.”
“The Silicon Valley billionaire.” David Michael had inherited billions, none made in Silicon Valley. He subsequently made billions more from data-mining, from biotech, from just about everything in which he invested.
She said, “Your profile was fair.”
“I always try to be.”
“But there was a measure of acid in it.”
He shrugged. “He’s a philanthropist, a progressive, a down-to-earth guy, bright and charming. But I didn’t like him. I couldn’t get anything on him. There was no reason to suspect he wasn’t what he seemed to be. But a good reporter has . . . intuition.”
She said, “David Michael invested in a Menlo Park research facility, Shenneck Technology. Then he and Bertold Shenneck became partners in a biotech startup called Far Horizons.”
Hannafin waited for her to continue, and when she didn’t, he said, “Shenneck and his wife, Inga, died in a house fire at their Napa Valley getaway ranch on Sunday.”
“No. They were shot to death. The fire is a cover story.”
Regardless of how self-possessed he might be, every man had fear tells, like poker tells, that revealed the emotional truth of him when he was sufficiently anxious: a tic in one eye, a sudden pulse visible in the temple, a repeated licking of the lips, one thing or another. Hannafin had no tell that she could detect.
He said, “Did you kill them, too?”
“No. But they deserved to die.”
“So you’re judge and jury?”
“I can’t be bought like a judge or fooled like a jury. Anyway, Bertold Shenneck and his wife were killed because Far Horizons—meaning the bright and charming David Michael—had no further use for them.”
For a beat, he searched her eyes, as if he could read truth in the diameter of her pupils, in the blue striations of her irises. Suddenly he stood up. “Damn it, woman, I need a pen and paper.”
Jane drew the .45 from under her sport coat. “Sit down.”
He remained standing. “I can’t trust all this to memory.”
“And I can’t trust you,” she said. “Not yet. Sit down.”
Reluctantly he sat. He didn’t seem cowed by the gun. The beads of moisture tracking down his face were more likely to be water, not sweat.
“You know about my husband,” she said.
“It’s all over the news. He was a highly decorated Marine. He committed suicide about four months ago.”
“No. They murdered him.”
“Who did?”
“Bertold Shenneck, David James Michael, every sonofabitch associated with Far Horizons. Do you know what nanomachines are?”
The change of subject puzzled Hannafin. “Nanotechnology? Microscopic machines made of only a few molecules. Some real-world applications. Mostly science fiction.”
“Science fact,” she corrected. “Bertold Shenneck developed nanomachines that are injected into the bloodstream in a serum, several thousand incredibly tiny constructs that are brain-tropic. They self-assemble into a larger network once they pass through capillary walls into the brain tissue.”
“Larger network?” Skepticism creased his brow, pleated the skin at the corners of his eyes. “What larger network?”
“A control mechanism.”
10.
If Lawrence Hannafin thought Jane was a paranoid of the tinfoil-hat variety, he gave no indication of it. He sat on the edge of the bed, managing to look dignified in his plush cotton robe, barefoot, hands relaxed on his thighs. He listened intently.
She said, “The historical rate of suicide in the U.S. is twelve per hundred thousand. The past year or so, it’s risen to fifteen.”
“Supposing you’re right and it’s higher. So what? These are hard times for a lot of people. A bad economy, social turmoil.”
“Except the increase involves successful men and women, most in happy marriages, with no history of depression. Military . . . like Nick, my husband. Journalists, scientists, doctors, lawyers, police, teachers, economists. These fanatics are eliminating people their computer model says will push civilization in the wrong direction.”
“Whose computer model?”
“Shenneck’s. David Michael’s. Far Horizons’s. Whatever bastards in the government are in league with them. Their computer model.”
“Eliminating them how?”
“Are you listening to me?” she asked, her FBI cool melting a little. “Nanomachine control mechanisms. Self-assembling brain implants. They inject them—”
He interrupted. “Why would anyone submit to such an injection?”
Agitated, Jane rose from the armchair, stepped farther away from Hannafin, stood staring at him, the pistol casually aimed at the floor near his feet. “Of course they don’t know they’ve been injected. One way or another, they’re sedated first. Then they’re injected in their sleep. At conferences they attend. When they’re traveling, away from home, alone and vulnerable. The control mechanism assembles in the brain within a few hours of injection, and after that, they forget it ever happened.”
No less inscrutable than a wall of hieroglyphics in a pharaoh’s tomb, Hannafin stared at her either as if she were a prophetess predicting the very fate of humanity that he had long expected or as if she were insane and mistaking fever dreams for fact; she could not tell which. Maybe he was processing what she said, getting his mind around it. Or maybe he was thinking about the revolver in the nearby nightstand drawer, which she had found on her first visit to the house.
At last he said, “And then these people, these injected people . . . they’re controlled?” He couldn’t repress a note of incredulity in his voice. “You mean like robots? Like zombies?”
“It’s not that obvious,” Jane said impatiently. “They don’t know they’re controlled. But weeks later, maybe months, they receive the command to kill themselves, and they can’t resist. I can provide piles of research. Weird suicide notes. Evidence that the attorneys general of at least two states are conspiring to cover this up. I’ve spoken with a medical examiner who saw the nanomachine web across all four lobes of a brain during an autopsy.”
She had so much information to convey, and she wanted to win Hannafin’s confidence. But when she talked too fast, she was less convincing. She sounded to herself as though she was on the edge of babbling. She almost holstered the gun to reassure him, but rejected that idea. He was a big man in good physical shape. She could handle him, if it came to that, but there was no reason to give him an opening if there was a one-in-a-thousand chance he would take it.
She drew a deep breath, spoke calmly. “Their computer model identifies a critical number of Americans in each generation who supposedly could steer the culture in the wrong direction, push civilization to the brink with dangerous ideas.”
“A computer model can be designed to give any result you want.”
“No shit. But a computer model gives them self-justification. This critical number of theirs is two hundred ten thousand. They say a generation is twenty-five years. So the computer says eliminate the right eighty-four hundred each year and you’ll make a perfect world, all peace and harmony.”
“That’s freaking crazy.”
“Haven’t you noticed, insanity is the new normal?”
“Wrong ideas? What wrong ideas?”
“They aren’t specific about that. They just know them when they see them.”
“They’re going to kill people to save the world?”
“They have killed people. A lot of them. Killing to save the world—why is that hard to believe? It’s as old as history.”
Maybe he needed to be moving around to absorb a big new idea, to cope with a shock to the system. He got to his feet again, not with obvious aggressive intent, making no move for the nightstand drawer that contained the revolver. Jane eased closer to the hallway door as he moved away from her and toward the nearer of two windows. He stood staring down at the suburban street, pulling at the lower half of his face with one hand, as though he had just awakened and felt a residue of sleep still clinging like a mask.
He said, “You’re a hot item on the National Crime Information Center website. Photos. A federal warrant for your arrest. They say you’re a major national-security threat, stealing defense secrets.”
“They’re liars. You want the story of the century or not?”
“Every law-enforcement agency in the country uses the NCIC.”
“You don’t have to tell me I’m in a tight spot.”
“Nobody evades the FBI for long. Or Homeland Security. Not these days, not with cameras everywhere and drones and every car transmitting its location with a GPS.”
“I know how all that works—and how it doesn’t.”
He turned from the window to look at her. “You against the world, all to avenge your husband.”
“It’s not vengeance. It’s about clearing his name.”
“Would you know the difference? And there’s a child in this. Your son. Travis, is it? What is he—five? I’m not going to be twisted up in anything that puts a little kid at risk.”
“He’s at risk now, Hannafin. When I wouldn’t stop investigating Nick’s death and these suicides, the creeps threatened to kill Travis. Rape him and kill him. So I went on the run with him.”
“He’s safe?”
“He’s safe for now. He’s in good hands. But to make him safe forever, I’ve got to break this conspiracy wide open. I have the evidence. Thumb drives of Shenneck’s files, every iteration of his design for the brain implants, the control mechanisms. Records of his experiments. Ampules containing mechanisms ready for injection. But I don’t know who to trust in the Bureau, the police, anywhere. I need you to break the story. I have proof. But I don’t dare share it with people who might take it away from me and destroy it.”
“You’re a fugitive from justice. If I work with you instead of turning you in, I’m an accessory.”
“You’ve got a journalistic exemption.”
“Not if they won’t grant it to me and not if all this you’re telling me is a lie. Not if you aren’t real.”
Exasperation brought heat to her face and a new roughness to her voice. “They don’t just use the nanoimplants to cull the population of people they don’t like. They have other uses that’ll sicken you when I lay it all out. Terrify and sicken. This is about freedom, Hannafin, yours as much as mine. It’s about a future of hope or slavery.”
He shifted his attention from her to the street beyond the window and stood in silence.
She said, “I thought I saw a pair of balls when you stepped out of the shower. Maybe they’re just decoration.”
His hands were fisted at his sides, which might have indicated that he was repressing his anger and wanted to strike her—or that he was frustrated with his inability to be the fearless journalist that he had been in his youth.
From a sleeve on her shoulder holster, she extracted a sound suppressor and screwed it onto the pistol. “Get away from the window.” When he didn’t move, she said, “Now,” and took the Colt in a two-hand grip.
Her stance and the silencer persuaded him to move.
“Get in the closet,” she said.
His flushed face paled. “What do you mean?”
“Relax. I’m just going to give you time to think.”
“You’re going to kill me.”
“Don’t be stupid. I’ll lock you in the closet and let you think about what I’ve said.”
Before he had showered, he had left his wallet and house keys on the nightstand. Now the key, on a kinky red-plastic coil, was in the closet lock.
Hannafin hesitated to cross that threshold.
“There’s really no choice,” she said. “Go to the back of the closet and sit on the floor.”
“How long will you keep me in there?”
“Find the hammer and screwdriver I hid earlier. Use them to get the pivot pins out of the hinge barrels, pry the door open. You’ll be free in maybe fifteen, twenty minutes. I’m not about to let you watch me leave the house and see what car I’m driving.”
Relieved that the closet wouldn’t be his coffin, Hannafin stepped inside, sat on the floor. “There’s really a hammer and screwdriver?”
“Really. I’m sorry I had to come at you this way. But I’m running on a tightrope these days, and damn if anyone’s going to knock me off. It’s a quarter till nine. I’ll call you at noon. I hope you’ll decide to help me. But if you’re not ready to break a story that’ll bring the demon legions down on you, tell me so and stay out of it. I don’t want to tie myself to someone who can’t go the distance.”
She gave him no chance to respond, closed the door, locked it, and left the key in the keyway.
Immediately, she could hear him rummaging through the closet in search of the hammer and screwdriver.
She holstered the pistol and the silencer separately. She picked up her tote bag and hurried downstairs. On her way out, she slammed the front door so that he would be sure to hear it.
After the glittering starfield of the previous night and the pellucid sky of dawn, the blue vault over the San Gabriel Valley was surrendering to an armada of towering thunderheads sailing in from the northwest, on course for Los Angeles. Among the densely leafed branches of nearby Indian laurels, song sparrows were already sheltering, issuing sweet trills and clear notes to reassure one another, but the crows were still chasing down the sky, raucous heralds of the storm.
11.
Over sixteen hundred air miles from Los Angeles, in Minnesota, the digital clock on Cora Gundersun’s oven read 11:02 when she closed her journal. She was no less mystified by this most recent session of furious writing than she had been by the one that had preceded it. She didn’t know what words she had set down on those pages or why she had felt compelled to write them, or why after the fact she dared not read them.
The still, small voice within her counseled serenity. All would be well. More than two days without a migraine. By this time next week, she would most likely return to her sixth-grade classroom and the children whom she loved nearly as much as if they had been her own offspring.
The time had come for Dixie Belle’s late-morning treat and second toileting of the day. In consideration of the bacon granted to her earlier, the dog received just two small coin-shaped cookies instead of the usual four. She seemed to understand the rightness of the ration, for she neither begged for more nor grumbled, but padded across the kitchen to the back door, nails clicking on the linoleum.
Shrugging into her coat, Cora said, “Good heavens, Dixie, look at me, still in my pajamas with the morning nearly gone. If I don’t get back to teaching soon, I’ll become a hopeless layabout.”
The day had not warmed much since dawn. The frozen sky hung low and constipated, providing no evidence of the predicted storm except a bare minimum of white flakes slowly spiraling down through the becalmed air.
After Dixie peed, she didn’t scamper back to the house, but stood staring at Cora on the porch. Dachshunds didn’t need much exercise, and Dixie in particular was averse to long walks and to more than an occasional experience of the outdoors. Except for her first visit to the yard in the morning, she always hurried inside after completing her business. On this occasion, she required coaxing, and she returned hesitantly, almost as though she wasn’t sure that her mistress was her mistress, as if both Cora and the house suddenly seemed strange to her.
Minutes later, after Cora showered, she vigorously toweled her hair. There was no point in using a blow-dryer and a styling brush. Her curly tresses resisted shaping. She entertained no illusions about her appearance and long ago made peace with the fact that she would never turn heads. She looked pleasant and presentable, which was more than could be said for some less fortunate people.
Although it was not suitable to the season, she put on a white rayon-crepe dress with three-quarter sleeves, a semifitted bodice with a high, round neckline, and a skirt with knife pleats stitched down to hip level. Of all the dresses she had ever owned, this one came the closest to making her feel pretty. Because high heels did nothing for her, she wore white sneakers.
Only after she had put on the shoes did she realize that this outfit was what she wore in the fire-walking dream, which she’d had the previous night again, for the fifth night in a row. In addition to feeling almost pretty, she now channeled at least a measure of the sense of invulnerability that made the dream so delightful.
Although Dixie Belle usually lay on the bed to watch her mistress dress, on this occasion she was under the bed, only her head and long ears poking out from beneath the quilted spread.
Cora said, “You’re a funny dog, Miss Dixie. Sometimes you can be so silly.”
If our US citizens dosed with LSD sugar cubes are not dosed again----after a few months that psychotic break mends---global banking 1% CLINTON/BUSH/OBAMA want to create medical devices that allow for continuous dosage keeping US citizens black, white, and brown citizens in constant states of fear and confusion.
This is done with microchip implants our US citizens are being sold will deliver needed PHARMA as insulin-----but will deliver continuous LSD sugar cube dosage to any person global banking sees as a target.
How does this differ from THE WHISPERING ROOM? Today's victims of US city public health department experimentation are FEARFUL, ANGRY, UNRELIABLE IN BEHAVIOR-----because their central neural chemistry making all people individual thinkers is still in place----fighting artificial means of control. THE WHISPERING ROOM people had no fear, no anger, no ability to be unreliable-------their central neural chemistry had been altered-----something that cannot be done today.
BALTIMORE HAS A HIGH INCIDENCE OF MENTAL ILLNESS ACROSS ALL SPECTRUM BECAUSE BALTIMORE PUBLIC HEALTH HAS CONDUCTED THESE SUGAR-CUBES LACED IN LSD EXPERIMENTS FOR DECADES.
The goal of MOVING FORWARD DEEP, REALLY DEEP STATE is to advance from today's reactions to dosage of fear, anger, no ability to be reliable---to being that IRON FURNACE LAKE town of PODS. Of course people can be genetically predisposed to these mental disorders as well------the percentage of US citizens fitting one category or another of mental illness is STAGGERING.
What is Psychosis? Symptoms of Psychosis
Psychosis includes a range of symptoms that affect an individual's thoughts, feelings, and behaviours. Symptoms of psychosis are typically divided into two categories: "positive" and "negative" symptoms. "Positive' symptoms are changes in thoughts and feelings that are "added on" to a person's experiences (e.g., paranoia or hearing voices). "Negative" symptoms are things that are "taken away" or reduced (e.g., reduced motivation or reduced intensity of emotion).
Positive Symptoms
Some of the positive symptoms include:
Delusions
Delusions are very firmly held, false beliefs that are not consistent with one's culture. These beliefs cannot be shaken despite reason or proof to the contrary. They are often very unique to the person. It is often very difficult for other people to understand why the person holds this belief.
Examples of delusions include:
I thought I had invented several things already. I thought people from the States stole my ideas when I was six years old. I thought they were paying my grandpa off for my inventions. I thought he was a millionaire from my inventions.
- Garnet, youth
- feeling they are being watched, followed or monitored in some way
- believing they are being plotted against
- believing they have special abilities or "powers"
- convinced that certain sights or sounds are specifically directed towards the young person or communicating a hidden message (e.g., the television announcer is personally criticizing them)
- believing they are being controlled by forces or other individuals
- convinced that their thoughts are being broadcasted so others can hear them
- belief that they are responsible for a negative event e.g., earthquake, plane crash)
Hallucinations
Just then, surprisingly, there were voices bouncing off the wall, they were in different language that Ajax couldn't understand. "Go away!" Ajax thought, but they didn't go away, they just got louder and weirder.
- Ajax, youth
Hallucinations involve seeing, hearing, feeling, smelling or tasting something that is not actually there. These experiences appear entirely real to the person who is experiencing them. The most common type of hallucination involves hearing things - such as voices or particular sounds - such as music.
A person hearing voices may respond out loud to what they are hearing. The content of the voices can range from friendly to critical, cruel and upsetting and may even tell the person what to do.
It is often the person's behaviour in response to the hallucination that gets noticed by others. At times the person might be observed talking out loud when no one else is there or making gestures as if someone is in their presence.
Disorganized Speech or Behaviour
Examples of disorganized speech include:
- slipping off topic
- going off on tangent
- answering a question in a way that doesn't make sense to the other person
- talking about things that seemed unrelated to the conversation
Examples of disorganized behaviours includes:
- wearing clothing that doesn't fit the weather
- displaying a inappropriate emotional response to the situation (e.g., laughing in response to hearing about a person's tragedy)
- difficulty performing activities of daily living such as cooking or self-care
- not responding or reacting to their environment
Negative symptoms
Negative symptoms reflect a decrease in, or loss of, normal functions. These symptoms are often less evident than positive symptoms and require careful assessment.
Some examples of negative symptoms include:
- inexpressive faces; little display of emotions
- monotone and one syllable or general reduction in speech
- few gestures
- difficulties in thinking or coming up with ideas
- decreased ability to start initiate tasks
- lowered levels of motivation or drive
- lack of interest in other people
- inability to feel pleasure
- lack of spontaneity
Other symptoms
It is also common for other symptoms or problems to occur along with the psychotic symptoms.
Some examples of other problems that may occur include:
- depression
- anxiety
- suicidal thoughts or behaviours
- alcohol and/or other drug use problems
- difficulties functioning
- sleep disturbance - for example staying up all night
- cognitive problems such as difficulties with memory, concentration, reasoning, etc.
Once treatment is initiated, acute, the psychotic symptoms should lessen and will usually fade away, often completely. However, some symptoms, especially negative symptoms may linger as they are less responsive to medication. Even with a good response to treatment, problems such as depression, decreased self esteem, social problems and difficulties with work or school may require further support and treatment to help enable a full recovery.
_________________________________________
This is what OBAMA'S billions of dollars targeting BRAIN RESEARCH tied to addictions all advancing DEEP STATE mind control using only subliminal queues and LSD-dosage for predisposition to these messages.
At the same time global banking 5% players are doing these treatments they are recording brain chemistry patterns identifying neural pathways while working hard to develop that NANOTECHNOLOGY needed to further MAP THE BRAIN.
CLINTON/BUSH/OBAMA cannot get to IRON FURNACE LAKE mind-control -----without nanotechnology and mapping of BRAIN where all the real neural chemical transactions occur. They are not even close to building these nanotechnology tools ----not even close to mapping small regions of the BRAIN at nano level -----so there is no ability to control people en masse beyond their ability to resist with computer programming cues.
Alcohol Addiction Recovery Subliminal
Stop letting your alcohol addiction ruin your life and start enjoying a happier sober lifestyle with the help of subliminal messages!
- Do you fight with yourself each day trying desperately not to drink alcohol?
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Subliminal messages could be the missing link that can take you from where are today to a happier brighter future where you are in control of your drinking. This is a unique process that uses carefully created messages that are played over and over again directly to your subconscious mind.
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Now as powerful as subliminal messages are you also have to be ready to change. Once you give yourself permission to move forward in your life, the subliminal message will be even more effective.
These messages are designed to reprogram your current thoughts about alcohol addiction. In some form or fashion you've told yourself that you will never be sober, that you enjoy alcohol, that you need alcohol so many times that you actually believe it.
The subliminal messages will replace those beliefs with new beliefs of strength and the confidence to control your impulses and focus on a more positive future without alcohol.
You will see your mindset transform as you stop feeling cravings and a need to drink and start to actually see the logical side; the pain and destruction that alcohol can cause. It is these thoughts which will replace the good things you currently feel about alcohol and this will help you to naturally overcome your alcohol addiction.
In a few days, you'll begin to notice subtle changes in your attitude towards alcohol. In a few weeks, you will find yourself in much better control of your impulses to drink. Just listen for 30 minutes each day. Eventually those old thoughts that are keeping you from being what you know you can be will begin to fade.
Life Can Be Better!
Imagine how great you'll feel waking up each day being able to say "no" to urges to take a drink and the new level of confidence you'll have to ignore those old urges and move forward in your life.
Imagine yourself in full control of your thoughts and drinking habits, feel how strong and healthy your body feels because you’re leading a healthier sober lifestyle.
Imagine how happy you will feel, knowing how proud your family and friends are of you, living your life alcohol free and happier than you've been in a very long time.
Imagine in the long term future when you no longer even think about alcohol, when being sober is just normal for you and you can lead a completely different, normal, and active lifestyle.
You don't have to imagine those things in your life, instead they can become a reality in your life. Our subliminal albums can help you change your life starting right now.
Subliminal Addictions Fix - Smoking, Drugs, Sex, Alcohol,
...www.youtube.com/watch?v=aGeCxmAHnOk
Mar 3, 2014 ... Subliminal Addictions Fix - Smoking, Drugs, Sex, Alcohol, Gambling, Food, Porn ..... been dealing with a masturbation addiction for a while now this would ... I had found this whole subliminal messaging thing and the whole ...
Subliminal Guru - Stop Substance Abuse
subliminalguru.com/addictions/stop-substance-abuse
Become addiction-free, with subliminal messages! ... You'll start to treat your body with care and respect, avoiding putting anything in it that might cause harm.
Subliminal Guru - Stop Chocolate Addiction
subliminalguru.com/addictions/stop-chocolate-addiction
Become addiction-free, with subliminal messages! ... to maintain your overall health and well-being, enjoying chocolate only occasionally as a special treat.
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Here we see the next stage towards DEEP, DEEP, REALLY DEEP STATE control of people-----when the brain is preconditioned to believe it has implanted machines controlling that person's behavior ---then like a PLACEBO pill that person will respond to just that kind of PHYSICAL MESSAGING. How do global banking 5% freemason/Greek barber surgeons take that conditioned brain to doing what it is told? NOT BY NANOTECHNOLOGY----NO NANOBOTS HAVE BEEN DEVELOPED.
We are hearing in US national media public policy controversies over COCHLEAR IMPLANTS coming mostly from families or citizens disabled with hearing loss. What we are not hearing from US national media are the REAL LEFT SOCIAL PROGRESSIVE PHYSICIANS and academics shouting against what WILL BE USED as PHYSICAL MESSAGING to people captured by sugar-cube LSD dosing having undergone lots of subliminal treatments leaving that brain confused as to operate independently.
Cochlear implants are supposed to be ONE WAY ACCESS TO SOUND. Meaning, they are transmitters of NATURAL sound coming to that person helping to transmit to brain. What is MOVING FORWARD are Cochlear implants as TRANSMITTERS OF ARTIFICIAL SOUNDS ------broadcast messages travelling through 5G digital transmission. The TIN FOIL HAT people thinking those antennae are implanted in their heads----will soon be actually correct.
Cochlear implants targeting today's hearing impaired citizens can easily morph to being implants to any 99% of WE THE PEOPLE having only the capability of incoming artificial messaging. Subliminal sound tied to weakened preconditioned brain-------creates conditions of mind-control. This is worse than having our strong US public schools teaching only COMMONER CORE myth-making and corporate propaganda.
When Deafness Is Medicalized: Inside the Culture Clash Over Cochlear Implants
Some fear that, by offering deaf people access to sound, so-called bionic ears could spell the end of the culture built around ASL.
James McWilliams
Jan 5, 2018
Years ago, the university where I teach made budget cuts to the program that provides in-class American Sign Language interpretation. I recall this instance well, if only because the reaction among the university's deaf population was as swift and fierce as any other form of campus protest I'd seen.
There was a reason for the unusual intensity: Cutting ASL interpretation was understood as a cultural insult. Advocates of deaf culture see themselves as a community not unlike an ethnic group. Endowed with a distinct language and set of traditions, they conceptualize deafness not as a physical condition but rather as a social distinction.
More than any other factor, ASL fluency offers the most direct conduit into deaf culture. For this reason, supporters of deaf culture have become particularly concerned about what many see as the most common medical intervention into their way of life: cochlear implants.
A cochlear implant (CI)—sometimes called a "bionic ear"—is a surgically implanted device that offers deaf people access to sound. In some cases, an implant can help a user make out spoken language. The Food and Drug Administration approved CIs for adults in 1985 and for children in 1990. As of 2016 around 96,000 people had received a cochlear implant—36,000 of them children, some as young as 12 months old.
In light of this technology, it's now routine to screen babies for hearing loss shortly after birth. If a child "fails" the test, a complete medical and technological apparatus—comprised of surgeons, audiologists, social workers, and speech therapists—lurches into motion to provide an implant as soon as possible. More often than not it is hearing parents of deaf children—usually mothers—who are asked to negotiate this daunting apparatus. They do so with minimal, if any, knowledge of deaf culture.
In this respect, the story of CIs seems to be yet another instance of technological determinism. If you build it, they'll implant it—cultural concerns be damned. But what if we didn't automatically assume that CIs meant the death of ASL? In her new book, Made to Hear: Cochlear Implants and Raising Deaf Children, Laura Mauldin seeks common ground between the medical and deaf communities. Rather than castigate or glorify the technology, she explores how the process of incorporating CIs plays out in real life. Refreshingly free of jargon, Made to Hear demonstrates the emotionally complicated ways that laypeople interact with prevailing medical paradigms.
Made to Hear: Cochlear Implants and Raising Deaf Children.
(Photo: University of Minnesota Press)
Mauldin, a University of Connecticut sociologist who grew up around deaf people and whose work centers on the interaction between medicine and "disability," finds that the lived experiences of parents who choose CIs for their young children (some as early as a year old) do not necessarily follow the common technological mandate dictated by the medical profession. "Social factors," she writes, "play a greater role in outcomes than technological prowess."
This claim holds especially true when it comes to sign language acquisition. Despite clear evidence to the contrary, the medical community generally advises against teaching children ASL while they are in the process of getting a CI, insisting that doing so will diminish their ability to acquire spoken language. Accordingly, most mothers of CI children—middle-class rule followers who want to be considered "good parents" and are in no way inclined to question the medical definition of "disability"—do exactly as they are told.
But others, including some subjects in Mauldin's study, tack around the advice on their own terms and for their own sensible reasons. These parents are of particular interest to Mauldin. One mother of a CI child explained why she chose to challenge the medical advice about ignoring sign language:
Ok, yeah, you fixed her hearing. And? What about when she loses the equipment? How about when the batteries are dead, and it's gone for four hours? How are you talking to her? I am still very proud of myself for maintaining the sign language. We are still using it at home. There are times when I absolutely am not, but when I need to clarify something with her, I go back and, yes, I pair [speech and sign] ... I have to worry about safety. I still have to raise a child. I understand that she has to learn to speak. But I still need to be able to sign "stop."
In an email exchange with Mauldin, I asked her to elaborate on the hidden potential of this resistance-within-acceptance mode of negotiating the CI process. She wrote: "Having a CI does not mean you can't learn both spoken language and sign language. Bilingualism is not only possible, but the norm across the globe, except in the US."
Mauldin laments that this form of bilingualism is inhibited by "strict adherence to English only protocols." These protocols, she regrets, continue to be the conventional wisdom. In a more hopeful vein, though, she notes how "ASL is rather popular at the college level because hearing people are opting to learn it as their foreign language."
The ethical implications of this debate should not be downplayed. Teresa Blankmeyer Burke, a deaf bioethicist and associate professor of philosophy at Gallaudet University, tells me that "the critical issue ... is that language deprivation is a serious moral harm." By language deprivation—in this case denial of ASL to CI members of the deaf community—she means not only "the inability to have any access to language—that is something I think we all would agree on is unethical." She also believes "that a life of partial access to language is harmful as well."
This point is easily over looked until one considers in more specific terms what Burke is talking about. She elaborates:
Children (and adults) with cochlear implants can achieve very high functioning (not all of them), but they will still function in some situations as hard of hearing individuals. There will be some instances where their access to language is incomplete, and this will occur in certain kinds of settings—for example, in rapid-fire repartee, or the recounting of a joke, where the vocalization of the punchline includes a lowered volume as a technique for getting the attention of listeners. These kinds of experiences are very much the thing that bonds humans to one another.
No matter where one stands on this issue, Mauldin, who has worked with Burke, is wise to present CIs as neither miracle devices nor destroyers of culture. But when it comes time to level a measure of blame, she is not afraid to do so. She explained in our email exchange:
The number of pediatric CI recipients is only going to increase. And it's my impression that Deaf communities are coming to terms with the prevalence of CIs and the possibility of identifying both as culturally Deaf and a CI user. Unfortunately, I don't see reciprocity from the CI world; there is no equivalent infiltration of the Deaf community into powerful health-care institutions or State intervention services. So while the CI world is able to largely keep a firm boundary between themselves and Deaf communities, the opposite is not true.
Medical professionals already have a lot on their plate. But if Mauldin is right, then it's time for them to take a more sociological approach to medical solutions. As Burke reminds us, what's at stake for children who suffer language deprivation is nothing less than "the considerable harm of not having the deeply human experience of full and easy access to language." And that's something that touches "all aspects of well-being."
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THE WHISPERING ROOM flaming terrorist from small town USA was plagued with brain images of spider webs planting EGGS---nanobots in her brain----her life interrupted at any time with messages from whatever was controlling her brain. All these plot themes are MOVING FORWARD today as mental health rehabilitation----addiction therapy------the medical devices tied to 5G transmission of artificial sound messages.
NO NANOBOTS NEEDED----BUT NO ABILITY TO CAPTURE A PERSON'S FREE WILL ----NO ABILITY TO CAPTURE EN MASSE A GROUP OF CONTROLLED POD-----PEOPLE.
Below we see the advancement of medical devices moving from people totally deaf ------to our 99% of US citizens merely suffering hearing loss. So, subliminal messaging therapies attached to addictions are mainstream products people pre-conditioning their brains for receiving artificial messaging from what are now broadly used cochlear implants-------are these implants capable of not only amplifying natural sounds----but also receiving artificial digital messaging? YOU BETCHA.
BARBER SURGEONS at Johns Hopkins starting sugar-cube LSD dosing of our Baltimore homeless and poor before any other city MOVING FORWARD COCHLEAR IMPLANTS FOR ALL.
'Dr. JOHN NIPARKO (Johns Hopkins Hospital): ...surprisingly well. What we found was that age, per se, was a very poor predictor of how someone would perform with a Cochlear implant'.
All this cochlear technology from Bush-era was not duel use as regards receiving artificial sound messaging vs natural sounds but today it is. Think of how GPS tracking is installed in all products we buy tracking our every movement and we see to where cochlear implant artificial messaging will be able to capture a larger then larger then larger population of people.
Elderly with Hearing Loss Turning to Cochlear Implant
December 20, 200512:00 AM ET
Joseph Shapiro
Cochlear implants have proven an effective but controversial means of restoring hearing in children. NPR science correspondent Joseph Shapiro reports that the implants are now gaining popularity among elderly people who suffer from hearing loss.
MADELEINE BRAND, host:
This is DAY TO DAY. I'm Madeleine Brand.
In a moment, an update on the US government's war on drugs in Colombia. But, first, a new report says a device called a Cochlear implant can help even the oldest people who've lost hearing. The device is best known for helping thousands of deaf children hear. And while there's sometimes been controversy over the implant in children, the use among older people is growing. NPR's Joseph Shapiro reports.
JOSEPH SHAPIRO reporting:
Beatrice Cornelius is 75 and busy. She recently moved into a just-built apartment with white rugs and white couches. On her dining room table there's a gold medal in a small, blue box. The archbishop of Washington gave it to her last week to recognize all of her volunteer work.
Ms. BEATRICE CORNELIUS: I serve communion to the parishioners and take communion to the home-bound. I also volunteer at the shrine at the information desk.
SHAPIRO: That's the Basilica of the National Shrine of the Immaculate Conception in Washington, one of the largest Catholic churches in the world.
Ms. CORNELIUS: And they want me to give tours, some of the ladies. I said, `Well, you know, people are walking with you and they're asking questions, and I cannot hear them behind me.' They say, `Well, we know that you know what to say.'
SHAPIRO: Cornelius is deaf. Part of her hearing's been restored, thanks to the small electronic device surgically implanted behind her ear. It's a Cochlear implant, a device that electrically stimulates the hearing nerve.
You have something behind the ear now?
Ms. CORNELIUS: No, it's implanted. Computerized material is implanted, and I have a processor, which processes the information as it goes in.
SHAPIRO: She shows the small computer process that's clipped to her waistband. It's about the size of a cell phone and connects to a thin, black wire that reaches to behind her left ear.
Ms. CORNELIUS: And now if I take this off, I would not hear anything, not a fire alarm, not fire trucks, anything.
SHAPIRO: With the device she can talk on the telephone. Face to face she has conversations, although she still relies on lip-reading. She can even enjoy music, although she says she hears familiar music best.
Ms. CORNELIUS: I have a tape in my car, "How Great Thou Art," "Amazing Grace," and I pretty much know the words, and so that I can manage pretty well.
SHAPIRO: There's been controversy around Cochlear implants, especially when they were first used in children born deaf. Some deaf people objected angrily that children would end up with imperfect hearing and be cut off from the unique culture in sign language of other people born deaf. There was controversy, too, over giving implants to older people, questions over whether it was worth the risk of having surgery and and whether the devices worked well enough for older people. Many doctors thought the answer was no. Sig Soli says that's changing.
Dr. SIG SOLI (House Ear Institute): The benefits of the Cochlear implant have improved as the technology has improved and as our understanding of how to rehabilitate people has improved.
SHAPIRO: Soli's a researcher at the House Ear Institute in Los Angeles.
Dr. SOLI: So that means the amount of benefit that a person can receive during the remainder of their life after a Cochlear implant is larger now than it was before.
SHAPIRO: Medicare doesn't pay for hearing aids, but it does pay for Cochlear implants. The device itself costs about $25,000; the surgery is about $10,000. Insurers have wanted to know more about whether implants for the elderly are worth the money, so Dr. John Niparko went to find out. He runs the hearing care program at Johns Hopkins Hospital. Niparko studied 258 people 65 and older to see how well they could hear with implants. Then he compared them to younger patients and found the older ones did...
Dr. JOHN NIPARKO (Johns Hopkins Hospital): ...surprisingly well. What we found was that age, per se, was a very poor predictor of how someone would perform with a Cochlear implant.
SHAPIRO: The thing that mattered most wasn't how old the patient was but how long they'd been deaf before getting the implant.
Dr. NIPARKO: The duration of deafness was a much more important predictor of how the performance level would play out over time.
SHAPIRO: Niparko's research appears in the current issue of the Archives of Otolaryngology. He says even some of the oldest old are now getting implants.
Dr. NIPARKO: I don't know what the world's record is. I know there are several patients on the East Coast who've received the implant in their early 90s. In one case, I know that a grandparent heard three generations all at the same time for the first time.
SHAPIRO: More older Americans are having trouble hearing. Cochlear implants will be an option for only about 5 percent of them. To be eligible, an older person must hear less than 40 percent of what's said, even with powerful hearing aids. Joseph Shapiro, NPR News.
BRAND: More coming up on DAY TO DAY from NPR News.
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It is very easy to manipulate through cochlear implants what frequency of sound these devices capture and send to our brain to interpret. The messaging from THE WHISPERING ROOM computer programming would be that source of sound frequency transmission heard only by those IRON FURNACE TOWN PEOPLE MADE PODS-----EASY PEASY----no nanobots needed.
Our REAL hearing disabled citizens many shouting loudly against these hearing technologies because they eliminate the structures having be developed over centuries allowing our deaf citizens independence in how they send and receive communications and they are indeed completely susceptible to MOVING FORWARD DEEP, DEEP, REALLY DEEP STATE cochlear implant artificial messaging control of all they hear.
So, let's think about IRON FURNACE LAKE people as PODS to understand the technology needed to capture not only how their brains process communications-----how the brain interprets those communications-----then the brain's ability to freely respond with independent behavior. These are the elements THE WHISPERING ROOM uses as themes and plots.
Programming cochlear implants for auditory performance
MOTIVATION
The ear, when put into competition with our other senses, is probably the most important sensory organ. Hearing is essential to man’s existence.
The handicap of being hearing impaired carves deeply
into all segments of society and all facets of man in his social context: in the elderly induced by age,
in the unfortunate and reckless by trauma, but a fortiori in innocent children struck by fate and sentenced
to not only deafness but also verbal muteness and intellectual deprivation.
The cochlear implant is the first technological development
in human kind to bring a radical change to this predicament of severe sensory disability. To effectively replace the human sensory organ of hearing with a machine is an accomplishment for which only the humble word miracle is in place. As
rudimentary and subpar to the healthy human ear as the cochlear implant may be today, so essential it is already for the social integration, the communicative abilities and basically the comfort and happiness of individual people.
To be working in the field of cochlear implants therefore is rewarding for 2 reasons:
(1) being able to
contribute to something that helps hearing impaired people to regain the ability to communicate
and
(2) the excitement of being at the forefront of an evolution towards the fusion of man and
machine.
It is amazing to see that machines no longer need to be separate entities; rather they can
be integrated into our physical bodies. This mixture of biology and technology is fascinating. The present project and its prerequisite appetite for knowledge live by these incentives.
Almost 30 years have passed since the introduction of the multichannel cochlear implant (CI).
Briefly,
it provides direct electrical stimulation of the auditory nerve, bypassing damaged parts of the ear. A series of electrodes is surgically inserted into the inner ear. An external speech processor, usually worn behind the ear, picks up sounds from the environment and converts them into a digital signal. That signal is sent to the implant and delivered to the electrodes for stimulation of auditory nerve fibres. Hardware capabilities, speech processing strategies, ease of use and aesthetic design of cochlear implants have all evolved significantly over the years. Still, it is astonishing to see that a
technology as bold and revolutionary as the cochlear implant has grown to become a routine
intervention, taken for granted as the solution to profound deafness.
Huge challenges concerning the further development and introduction of cochlear implants worldwide, however, remain even to this day. One such a challenge is the process of "fitting": the tuning of the speech processor to the individual recipient, in order to provide an optimal auditory percept and aiming at maximal speech understanding for every patient.
The many tuneable parameters available to customize the speech processor and the complexity of signal processing and
stimulation strategies of current generation cochlear implant systems make that fitting is a non-trivial task, to say the least. Also the various pathological conditions that are encountered across recipients, of which the causes are mostly unknown and of which the origin may well lie in the
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What does all these BRAIN AND MIND CONTROL medical research and development have to do with SPACE TRAVEL LSD-VIRTUAL REALITY hibernation of planetary and moon mining slave transport?
We showed earlier an image of third world drug users facing the side-effects of a new NERVE AGENT as PHARMA. Space travel hibernation goes beyond all those EARTHLY deep, deep, really deep state brain chemistry medical research to include neural biochemistry surrounding CENTRAL NERVOUS AND AUTONOMOUS NERVOUS SYSTEM. This targets the LOWER BRAIN STEM----the SPINAL CORD nervous system.
As with MOVING FORWARD brain LSD-virtual reality -----needing to be able to find the pathways that give people autonomous and free will control of behavior ------so too does the physical goals of restraining people for long term freezing of movement. While global banking 1% CLINTON/BUSH/OBAMA 5% player barber surgeons are working hard to find those pathways---manufacturing PHARMA designed to sidetrack our human capacity to free will control of physical and mental neural transmission-----IT IS NO WHERE HAPPENING AND LIKELY WILL NOT HAPPEN.
Circumventing both brain's chemical pathways of individualized self control of thinking and memory----meets circumventing our physical body's free will and individual control of body/muscular movement.
The goal of MOVING FORWARD is BOTH of these medical advances each needing REMOTE CONTROL MICROCHIP TECHNOLOGY----each needing NANOBOT technology to make all these controls manageable.
Our US MED-CHI now being eliminated replaced by CLUB MED.
This Unbelievable Research on Human Hibernation Could Get Us to Mars
By
Gemma Milne -
Jan 04, 2018
Journeying to Mars is seldom out of the news these days. From Elon Musk releasing plans for his new rocket to allow SpaceX to colonize Mars, to NASA announcing another rover as part of the Mars 2020 mission, both private and public organizations are racing to the red planet.
But human spaceflight is an exponentially bigger task than sending robots and experiments beyond Earth. Not only do you have to get the engineering of the rocket, the calculations of the launch, the plans for zero-gravity travel and the remotely operated Martian landing perfect, but you’d also have to keep a crew of humans alive for six months without any outside help.
There are questions around how to pack enough food and water to sustain the crew without making the rocket too heavy and around how much physical space would be left for the crew to live in. There are questions about what happens if someone gets dangerously ill and about what a claustrophobic half-year in these circumstances would do to the mental health of the Martian explorers.
Enter John Bradford of Atlanta-based SpaceWorks Enterprises.
Using a $500,000 grant from NASA, Bradford’s team has been working on an adaptation of a promising medical procedure that could alleviate many of the human-related limitations of space travel.
Presenting at the annual Hello Tomorrow Summit in Paris, Bradford shared his team’s concept of placing the crew in what’s called a “low-metabolic torpor state” for select phases during space travel—in other words, hibernating the crew.
The idea stems from a current medical practice called therapeutic hypothermia, or targeted temperature management. It is used in cases of cardiac arrest and neonatal encephalopathy. Patients are cooled to around 33°C for 48 hours to prevent injury to tissue following lack of blood flow. Sedatives are then administered to induce sleep. Ex Formula 1 driver Michael Schumacher was famously held in this state following his ski accident in 2013.
Adapting the procedure for spaceflight, the crew would be fed and watered directly into the stomach using what’s called a percutaneous endoscopic gastronomy tube to remove the need for eating and standard digestion, and using whole-body electrical stimulation, their muscles would be activated to avoid atrophy.
Bradford’s team found that while in this torpor state, the body needs over a third less food and water to sustain itself, greatly reducing the payload weight estimates for Mars missions.
A large part of the concept is the rotational element of who is awake and who is in stasis. Current medical procedures only last two to three days, so the plan is to extend the time each person is in torpor state to around eight days. Adding in a two-day wake period, a schedule can be drawn up so that a different member of the crew acts as the caretaker for the others, each in cycles of eight days of torpor and two days awake.
This means humans won’t be asleep for the whole journey, but with these torpor periods making up the majority of their trip, the physical and mental pressure put on the crew and the weight of resources on board would be greatly reduced. The plan for the research, however, is to get these periods up from days to weeks.
It’s not just SpaceWorks who’s looking into the idea of human hibernation for space travel. The European Space Agency has part of their Advanced Concepts team dedicated to this research as well. But their last paper was published in 2004, which suggests Bradford and his crew have the most promising progress.
Naysayers tend to question the ability of the human body to effectively and safely “wake up” from these long periods of stasis, and have concerns around whether our bodies can truly adapt to running healthily at a lower temperature. We are evolved to run at a pretty precise measure, and long-term body temperature changes in humans have not yet been studied.
But the SpaceWorks team’s research has both short and long-term prospects. The advances being made in our understanding and implementation of the torpor state can likely be adapted for use in organ transplants and critical care in extreme environments.
Of course, it’s the long term that excites Bradford. He estimates they could possibly achieve this capability for manned missions as soon as the 2030s. And with Elon Musk aiming for the first manned flights of his new rocket in 2024, it seems this pair might have the ingredients for a Martian future for Earthlings sooner than we expect.
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When we see images like these ------global banking 1% are not trying to make ZOMBIES ----that is the living dead-----they need humans as living people to be made planetary mining slaves------they simply want to capture and control all mind and body functions in doing so. Same with global corporate campuses which fund all these medical research ----they too want workers who are indeed IRON FURNACE LAKE POD PEOPLE.
This image shows simply one random kind of controlled PHARMA no doubt in development looking to control one autonomous central nervous region or another. Brush up on high school anatomy to understand what nervous system region these drugs taken here were targeting.
Nez Zie FACEBOOK VIDEO
June 22 at 4:36 PM
The new drug used by young people allows them to go into a trance... as if possessed by evil..it's already in Colombia
Sympathetic system FIGHT OR FLIGHT is missing in IRON FURNACE LAKE POD PEOPLE-------parasympathetic is body muscle control......
This PHARMA courtesy the likes of GLOBAL BIG PHARMA Bill Gates is obviously not capturing the correct neural regions to stop voluntary movement.
Generally, the sympathetic division does the following:
Prepares the body for stressful or emergency situations—fight or flight
Thus, the sympathetic division increases heart rate and the force of heart contractions and widens (dilates) the airways to make breathing easier. It causes the body to release stored energy. Muscular strength is increased. This division also causes palms to sweat, pupils to dilate, and hair to stand on end. It slows body processes that are less important in emergencies, such as digestion and urination.
Sympathetic Innervation
Sympathetic Innervation
Sympathetic Innervation
The parasympathetic division does the following:
Controls body process during ordinary situations.
Generally, the parasympathetic division conserves and restores. It slows the heart rate and decreases blood pressure. It stimulates the digestive tract to process food and eliminate wastes. Energy from the processed food is used to restore and build tissues.
Parasympathetic Innervation
Parasympathetic Innervation
Parasympathetic Innervation
Both the sympathetic and parasympathetic divisions are involved in sexual activity, as are the parts of the nervous system that control voluntary actions and transmit sensation from the skin (somatic nervous system).
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We want to remind our US 99% WE THE PEOPLE black, white, and brown citizens----just what far-right wing, authoritarian, militaristic, extreme wealth extreme poverty LIBERTARIAN MARXIST societies have done with disabled, mentally ill for thousands of years. They do not spend money rehabilitating them to productive freedom, liberty, free will lives. They have and are now throwing these SOCIAL DARWIN lower PODS into slave labor camps where they will work until they die.
As hard as global banking 1% tries to paint a CHINA which is reforming to Western moral and ethics-----they are not. Our US is being taken to colonial status to operate like third world DARK AGES CHINA.
So, absolutely NONE of these US MOVING FORWARD telemedicine, addiction THE BRAIN research has goals of actually helping those pods at the lower end of SOCIAL DARWINISM.
Lifestyle
December 2, 2013 / 7:20 AM / 5 years ago
A jail by another name: China labor camps now drug detox centers
John Ruwitch
KUNMING, China (Reuters) -
Li Zhongying was freed from a Chinese labor camp ahead of schedule in September because, guards told her, the government was scrapping ‘re-education through labor’, a heavily criticized penal system created in the 1950s.
Several hundred other inmates were not so lucky, she said. Like Li, they were held without trial and forced to do factory work under what she called “cruel” conditions. They remained because they were drug offenders, she told Reuters.
Many of China’s re-education through labor camps, instead of being abolished in line with a ruling Communist Party announcement this month, are being turned into compulsory drug rehabilitation centers where inmates can be incarcerated for two years or more without trial.
Human rights activists and freed inmates said drug offenders were still being forced to do factory work, as has been the practice under the re-education through labor system, colloquially known as ‘laojiao’.
New York-based Human Rights Watch estimates more than 60 percent of the 160,000 people in labor camps at the start of the year were there for drug offenses. Those people were unlikely to see any change in their treatment, it said.
“The drug detox people are doing exactly the same work,” said Li, who spent 19 months in a labor camp in Kunming, the capital of southern Yunnan province.
Police caught Li in Beijing early last year trying to petition the government over a grievance that dated back to the mid-1990s. They sent her home to Yunnan, where she was sentenced without trial to 21 months.
Li, speaking from Beijing, said she worked at a biscuit factory inside the camp for up to 15 hours a day.
A production line manager, speaking to Reuters outside the facility on a dusty road near Kunming airport late last week, said the inmates left inside were undergoing drug rehab. Among the items they made were handicrafts, including embroidered items, said the manager, declining to be identified.
SURPRISE ANNOUNCEMENT
China’s re-education through labor law, in place since 1957, empowered police to detain petty criminals for up to four years without trial.
Many of the camps have housed drug rehab centers since mid-2008, when a new Anti-Drug Law came into force. Police can sentence drug offenders without trial to two years or more of compulsory rehabilitation, which can include forced labor, according to the law.
Labor camps across China began changing their names to drug centers earlier this year, after a surprise announcement in January from Public Security Minister Meng Jianzhu that the network of 350 camps would be scrapped.
They also took it as a cue to start releasing some people who were there for non-drug offences. The camps also hold petty criminals, prostitutes, petitioners and members of the banned spiritual group Falun Gong, rights activists say.
Government websites and state media have reported steps to change the names of camps to drug rehab centers or to re-train staff this year in provinces including Guangdong, Hainan, Henan, Jiangsu, Jilin, Liaoning, Sichuan, Yunnan and Zhejiang, as well as in Shanghai and Beijing.
The Communist Party’s policymaking Central Committee announced the formal abolition of the re-education through labor camp system this month as part of a series of sweeping societal and economic reforms.
Nicholas Bequelin, senior Asia researcher at Human Rights Watch, said he believed the “great majority” of forced labor camps would keep functioning as drug rehab centers.
The shift did not represent a change of “direction or principles” on the part of the party, added Jiang Tianyong, a human rights lawyer in Beijing.
“It’s wrong to say it has no meaning, but it’s too optimistic to think it will change a lot,” he said.
“This is how power in this country operates ... They can’t use re-education through labor camps to control people, so they just change the name and control people.”
Rights groups have said conditions in labor camps are terrible and that detainees frequently had to do hard labor with minimal health and safety precautions.
Despite long-standing international criticism of the camps, many Chinese are largely oblivious to them because many of those who are locked up are poor and on the fringes of society.
The party this month said it saw the scrapping of the re-education through labor regime as an improvement to the justice system that would help it regain credibility with the populace and better protect human rights.
Neither the Public Security Ministry nor the Justice Ministry responded to questions from Reuters about the transformation of the camps into drug rehab centers.
DRUG ADDICTS STAY BEHIND
In Shanghai, shiny metal characters saying “Shanghai No.4 Re-education Through Labor Facility” still adorn the gate, but the last inmates were released months ago and the compound is now a drug rehab centre, said a guard at the facility.
“The official documents, everything, has already been changed,” said the guard, who did not give his name.
On September 14, Su Yuhong left the Masanjia forced labor camp in northern Liaoning province.
Masanjia made international headlines last year when a woman in the U.S. state of Oregon found a note in a Halloween decoration kit from Kmart that was supposedly written by a camp inmate who claimed to have played a part in making the product.
“Only the drug addicts were left,” Su said by telephone from the city of Shenyang, where she now lives.
By mid-June, the 21st Century Business Herald newspaper quoted Justice Ministry researcher Wang Gongyi as saying there were only 50,000 labor camp inmates left in the country, compared with hundreds of thousands in compulsory drug rehab centers.
Beyond drug centers, Chinese authorities still have many ways to detain people without trial, rights activists said.
Police can detain sex workers, for example, under a mechanism known as “custody and education”.
The terminology even appears to be interchangeable.
An article in July on the Public Security Ministry website said prostitutes in Zhejiang province had been sentenced to “re-education through labor at a custody and education facility”.
Jiang, the lawyer, said police had used other means to curtail the freedom of some, including Falun Gong adherents and repeat petitioners.
The number of court convictions of such people was on the rise, as was the use of ‘rule of law study classes’, which amounted to unlawful detention, he said.
“So long as (the authorities) feel a need to maintain stability, simply abolishing laojiao will not solve the problem,” he said.
____________________________________________
'Programming cochlear implants for auditory performance'
It is very easy to manipulate through cochlear implants what frequency of sound these devices capture and send to our brain to interpret. The messaging from THE WHISPERING ROOM computer programming would be that source of sound frequency transmission heard only by those IRON FURNACE TOWN PEOPLE MADE PODS-----EASY PEASY----no nanobots needed.
Our REAL hearing disabled citizens many shouting loudly against these hearing technologies because they eliminate the structures having be developed over centuries allowing our deaf citizens independence in how they send and receive communications and they are indeed completely susceptible to MOVING FORWARD DEEP, DEEP, REALLY DEEP STATE cochlear implant artificial messaging control of all they hear.
So, let's think about IRON FURNACE LAKE people as PODS to understand the technology needed to capture not only how their brains process communications-----how the brain interprets those communications-----then the brain's ability to freely respond with independent behavior. These are the elements THE WHISPERING ROOM uses as themes and plots.
One characteristic of these 5% global banking freemason/Greek players acting as enforcers for these global 2% criminal richin THE WHISPERING ROOM-----is language describing those 99% of WE THE PEOPLE captured as PODS ----in degrading terms----you know---very far-right wing extreme wealth extreme poverty FASCIST-----very HINDI/BRAHMIN class structures. The PODS were as close to being animals as are all slaves----the 5% global banking players being sociopathic criminals acting as savages and barbarians.
The story line of WHISPERING ROOM centers on US ONE TECHNOLOGY ENERGY GRID SMART CITIES and the ability of global banking 1% to connect each of their POD PEOPLE to a medical device as the cochlear implant to generate ARTIFICIAL MESSAGES simultaneously across the nation to be received and processed in the way those global banking players want those messages interpreted.
'Or perhaps the dark, cold rooms were not what fostered this apprehension. In fact, a persistent foreboding had been with her for nearly a week, since she had learned what some of the most powerful people in this new world of technological wonders were planning for their fellow citizens'.
THIS IS THE TECHNOLOGY THAT DOES NOT EXIST TODAY----BUT GLOBAL BANKING 1% CLINTON/BUSH/OBAMA MOVING FORWARD ALL THIS AS FAST AS THEY CAN WITH THESE GOALS.
If we read THE WHISPERING ROOM we would think all these technology exist and are ready to make POD PEOPLE of all our US 99% WE THE PEOPLE black, white, and brown citizens. What population groups will be exposed to all this MOVING FORWARD---of course our homeless and poor----but as this story line shows----IRON FURNACE LAKE POD people were everyday middle-upper middle class people.
ALL US MEDICAL INSTITUTIONS HAVING BEEN FILLED WITH GLOBAL BANKING 5% FREEMASON/GREEK BARBER SURGEONS REPLACING OUR STRONG PUBLIC HEALTH PHYSICIANS HAVE THESE TELEMEDICINE MILITARY MEDICAL STRUCTURES CENTRAL IN THEIR RESEARCH AND DEVELOPMENT----ALL THE WHILE HAVING ALT RIGHT ALT LEFT 5% POLS AND PLAYERS PRETENDING SOCIAL BENEFIT CALLING IT UNIVERSAL HEALTH CARE----MEDICARE FOR ALL---SINGLE PAYER.
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The Whispering Room
by Dean KoontzJane Hawk returns in the riveting sequel to The Silent Corner.
By DEAN KOONTZ • 7 months ago
Part One: Hawk’s Way
1.
Cora Gundersun walked through seething fire without being burned, nor did her white dress burst into flames. She was not afraid, but instead exhilarated, and the many admiring people witnessing this spectacle gaped in amazement, their expressions of astonishment flickering with reflections of the flames. They called out to her not in alarm, but in wonder, with a note of veneration in their voices, so that Cora felt equally thrilled and humbled that she had been made invulnerable.
Dixie, a long-haired dappled gold dachshund, woke Cora by licking her hand. The dog had no respect for dreams, not even for this one that her mistress had enjoyed three nights in a row and about which she had told Dixie in vivid detail. Dawn had come, time for breakfast and morning toilet, which were more important to Dixie than any dream.
Cora was forty years old, birdlike and spry. As the short dog toddled down the set of portable steps that allowed her to climb in and out of bed, Cora sprang up to meet the day. She slipped into furlined ankle-high boots that served as her wintertime slippers, and in her pajamas she followed the waddling dachshund through the house.
Just before she stepped into the kitchen, she was struck by the notion that a strange man would be sitting at the dinette table and that something terrible would happen.
Of course no man awaited her. She’d never been a fearful woman. She chastised herself for being spooked by nothing, nothing at all.
As she put out fresh water and kibble for her companion, the dog’s feathery golden tail swept the floor in anticipation.
By the time Cora had prepared the coffeemaker and switched it on, Dixie had finished eating. Now standing at the back door, the dog barked politely, just once.
Cora snared a coat from a wall peg and shrugged into it. “Let’s see if you can empty yourself as quick as you filled up. It’s colder than the cellar of Hades out there, sweet thing, so don’t dawdle.”
As she left the warmth of the house for the porch, her breath smoked from her as if a covey of ghosts, long in possession of her body, were being exorcised. She stood at the head of the steps to watch over precious Dixie Belle, just in case there might be a nasty-tempered raccoon lingering from its night of foraging.
More than a foot of late-winter snow had fallen the previous morning. In the absence of wind, the pine trees still wore ermine stoles on every bough. Cora had shoveled a clearing in the backyard so that Dixie wouldn’t have to plow through deep powder.
Dachshunds had keen noses. Ignoring her mistress’s plea not to dawdle, Dixie Belle wandered back and forth in the clearing, nose to the ground, curious about what animals had visited in the night.
Wednesday. A school day. Although Cora had been off work for two weeks, she still felt as if she should hurry to prepare for school. Two years earlier, she had been named Minnesota’s Teacher of the Year. She dearly loved—and missed—the children in her sixth-grade class.
Sudden-onset migraines, five and six hours long, sometimes accompanied by foul odors that only she could detect, had disabled her. The headaches seemed to be slowly responding to medications—zolmitriptan and a muscle relaxant called Soma. Cora had never been a sickly person, and staying home bored her.
Dixie Belle finally peed and left two small logs, which Cora would pick up with a plastic bag later, after they froze solid.
When she followed the dachshund into the house, a strange man was sitting at the kitchen table, drinking coffee that he had boldly poured for himself. He wore a knitted cap. He had unzipped his fleece-lined jacket. His face was long, his features sharp, his cold, blue stare direct.
Before Cora could cry out or turn to flee, the intruder said, “Play Manchurian with me.”
“Yes, all right,” she said, because he no longer seemed to be a threat. She knew him, after all. He was a nice man. He had visited her at least twice in the past week. He was a very nice man.
“Take off your coat and hang it up.”
She did as he asked.
“Come here, Cora. Sit down.”
She pulled out a chair and sat at the table.
Although a friend of everyone, Dixie retreated to a corner and settled there to watch warily with one light-blue eye and one brown.
“Did you dream last night?” the nice man asked.
“Yes.”
“Was it the dream of fire?”
“Yes.”
“Was it a good dream, Cora?”
She smiled and nodded. “It was lovely, a lovely walk through soothing fire, no fear at all.”
“You’ll have the same dream again tonight,” he said.
She smiled and clapped her hands twice. “Oh, good. It’s such a delightful dream. Sort of like one I sometimes had as a girl—that dream of flying like a bird. Flying with no fear of falling.”
“Tomorrow is the big day, Cora.”
“Is it? What’s happening?”
“You’ll know when you get up in the morning. I won’t be back again. Even as important as this is, you need no hands-on guidance.”
He finished his coffee and slid the mug in front of her and got to his feet and pushed his chair under the table. “Auf Wiedersehen, you stupid, skinny bitch.”
“Good-bye,” she said.
A twinkling, zigzagging chain of tiny lights floated into sight, an aura preceding a migraine. She closed her eyes, dreading the pain to come. But the aura passed. The headache did not occur.
When she opened her eyes, her empty mug stood on the table before her, a residue of coffee in the bottom. She got up to pour another serving for herself.
2.
On a Sunday afternoon in March, in self-defense and with great anguish, Jane Hawk had killed a dear friend and mentor.
Three days later, on a Wednesday, when the evening was diamonded with stars that even the great upwash of lights in the San Gabriel Valley, northeast of Los Angeles, could not entirely rinse from the sky, she came on foot to a house that she had scouted earlier by car. She carried a large tote bag with incriminating contents. In a shoulder rig under her sport coat hung a stolen Colt .45 ACP pistol rebuilt by one of the country’s finest custom-handgun shops.
The residential neighborhood was calm in this age of chaos, quiet in a time characterized by clamor. California pepper trees whispered and palm fronds softly rustled in a breeze fragrant with jasmine. The breeze was also threaded through with the malodor of decomposition that issued from one gutter drain and then another, perhaps from the bodies of poisoned tree rats that earlier had fled the sunlight to die in the dark.
A for-sale sign in the front yard of the target house, grass in need of mowing, a Realtor’s key safe fixed to the front-door handle, and closed draperies suggested that the place must be vacant. The security system most likely wasn’t operational, because nothing remained in the residence to steal and because an alarm would have complicated the task of showing the property to prospective buyers.
Behind the house, the patio lacked furniture. Breathing out the faint scent of chlorine, black water rippled in the swimming pool, a mirror to the waning moon.
A stuccoed property wall and Indian laurels screened the back of the house from the neighbors. Even in daylight, she would not have been seen.
With a black-market LockAid lock-release gun legally sold only to law-enforcement agencies, Jane defeated the deadbolt on the back door. She returned the device to the tote and opened the door and stood listening to the lightless kitchen, to the rooms beyond.
Convinced that her assessment of the house must be correct, she crossed the threshold, closed the door behind her, and re-engaged the deadbolt. From the tote, she fished out an LED flashlight with two settings, clicked it to the dimmest beam, and surveyed a stylish kitchen with glossy white cabinets, black granite countertops, and stainless-steel appliances. No cooking utensils were in sight. No designer china waited to be admired on the shelves of those few upper cabinets that featured display windows.
She passed through spacious rooms as dark as closed caskets and devoid of furniture. Although draperies were drawn over the windows, she kept the flashlight on low beam, directing it only at the floor.
She stayed close to the wall, where the stair treads were less likely to creak, but they still announced her as she ascended.
Although she wanted the front of the house, she toured the entire second floor to be certain she was alone. This was an upper-middleclass home in a desirable neighborhood, each bedroom with its private bath, though the chill in its vacant chambers gave rise in Jane to a presentiment of suburban decline and societal decay.
Or perhaps the dark, cold rooms were not what fostered this apprehension. In fact, a persistent foreboding had been with her for nearly a week, since she had learned what some of the most powerful people in this new world of technological wonders were planning for their fellow citizens.
She put her tote bag down by a window in a front bedroom and clicked off the flashlight and parted the draperies. She studied not the house directly across the street but the one next door to it, a fine example of Craftsman architecture.
Lawrence Hannafin lived at that address, a widower since the previous March. He and his late wife never had children. Though only forty-eight—twenty-one years older than Jane—Hannafin was likely to be alone.
She didn’t know if he might be an ally in waiting. More likely, he would be a coward with no convictions, who would shrink from the challenge she intended to put before him. Cowardice was the default position of the times.
She hoped that Hannafin wouldn’t become an enemy.
For seven years, she had been an FBI agent with the Critical Incident Response Group, most often assigned to cases involving Behavioral Analysis Units 3 and 4, which dealt with mass murders and serial killings, among other crimes. In that capacity, she’d killed only twice, in a desperate situation on an isolated farm. In the past week, on leave from the Bureau, she’d killed three men in selfdefense. She was now a rogue agent, and she’d had enough of killing.
If Lawrence Hannafin didn’t have the courage and integrity that his reputation suggested, Jane hoped that at least he would turn her away without attempting to bring her to justice. There would be no justice for her. No defense attorney. No jury trial. Considering what she knew about certain powerful people, the best she could hope for was a bullet in the head. They had the means by which to do much worse to her, the ability to break her, to scrub her mind of memories, rob her of free will, and reduce her to docile slavery.
3.
Jane took off her sport coat and shoulder rig and slept— not well—on the floor, with the pistol near to hand. For a pillow, she used a cushion from the window seat at the end of the second-floor hall, but she had nothing to serve as a blanket.
The world of her dreams was a realm of shifting shadows and silver-blue half-light without a source, through which she fled malevolent mannequins who had once been people like her, but were now as tireless as robots programmed for a hunt, their eyes vacant of all feeling.
The wristwatch alarm woke her an hour before dawn.
Her limited toiletries included toothpaste and a brush. In the bathroom, with the dimmed flashlight in a corner on the floor, her face a hollow-eyed haunt in the dark mirror, she scrubbed away the taste of dream fear.
At the bedroom window, she parted the draperies a few inches and watched the Hannafin house through a small pair of high-powered binoculars, her peppermint breath briefly steaming the window glass.
According to his Facebook page, Lawrence Hannafin took a one-hour run every morning at dawn. A second-floor room brightened, and a few minutes later, soft light bloomed in the foyer downstairs. In headband, shorts, and running shoes, he exited the front door as the eastern sky blushed with the first rose-tinted light of day.
Through the binoculars, Jane watched him key the lock, after which he safety-pinned the key in a pocket of his shorts.
The previous day, she had observed him from her car. He had run three blocks south, then turned east into a neighborhood of horse properties, following riding trails into the undeveloped hills of brush and wild grass. He had been gone sixty-seven minutes. Jane required only a fraction of that time to do what needed to be done.
4.
Another Minnesota morning.
A slab of hard gray sky like dirty ice. Scattered snowflakes in the still air, as if escaping through the clenched teeth of a reluctant storm.
In her pajamas and fur-lined ankle boots, Cora Gundersun cooked a breakfast of buttered white toast dusted with Parmesan, scrambled eggs, and Nueske’s bacon, the best bacon in the world, which fried up thin and crisp and flavorful.
At the table, she read the newspaper while she ate. From time to time she broke off a little piece from a slice of bacon to feed to Dixie Belle, who waited patiently beside her chair and received each treat with whimpers of delight and gratitude.
Cora had dreamed again of walking unscathed through a fierce fire while onlookers marveled at her invulnerability. The dream lifted her heart, and she felt purified, as if the flames had been the loving fire of God.
She hadn’t suffered a migraine in more than forty-eight hours, which was the longest reprieve from pain that she’d enjoyed since the headaches had begun. She dared to hope that her inexplicable affliction had come to an end.
With hours to fill before she needed to shower and dress and drive into town to do what needed to be done, still at the kitchen table, she opened the journal that she had been keeping for some weeks. Her handwriting was almost as neat as that produced by a machine, and the lines of cursive flowed without interruption.
After an hour, she put down the pen and closed the journal and fried more Nueske’s bacon, just in case this was the last chance she would have to eat it. That was a peculiar thought. Nueske’s had been producing fine bacon for decades, and Cora had no reason to suppose they would go out of business. The economy was bad, yes, and many businesses had folded, but Nueske’s was forever. Nevertheless, she ate the bacon with sliced tomatoes and more buttered toast, and again she shared with Dixie Belle.
5.
Jane did not cross the street directly from the vacant house to the Hannafin place. Carrying her tote bag, she walked to the end of the block, then half a block farther, before crossing the street and approaching the residence from the north, considerably reducing the chance that anyone would be looking out a window long enough to see both from where she had come and where she had gone.
At the Craftsman-style house, cut-stone steps bordered with bricks led to a deep porch, at both ends of which crimson wisteria in early bloom cascaded from panels of lattice, providing privacy to commit illegal entry.
She rang the bell three times. No response.
She inserted the thin, flexible pick of the LockAid into the keyway of the deadbolt and pulled the trigger four times before all the pin tumblers were cast to the shear line.
Inside, before she locked the door behind her, she called into the stillness, “Hello? Anyone home?”
When only silence answered her, she committed.
The furnishings and architecture were elegantly coordinated. Slate fireplaces with inset ceramic tiles. Stickley-style furniture with printed cotton fabrics in earth tones. Arts-and-Crafts lighting fixtures. Persian rugs.
The desirable neighborhood, the large house, and the interior design argued against her hope that Hannafin might be an uncorrupted journalist. He was a newspaper guy, and in these days, when most newspapers were as thin as anorexic teenagers and steadily dying out, print reporters, even those with a major Los Angeles daily, didn’t command huge salaries. The really big money went to TV-news journalists, most of whom were no more journalists than they were astronauts.
Hannafin, however, had written half a dozen nonfiction books, three of which had spent several weeks each on the bottom third of the bestseller list. They had been serious works, well done. He might have chosen to pour his royalties into his home.
The previous day, using one of several patron computers at a library in Pasadena, Jane easily cracked Hannafin’s telecom provider and discovered that he relied on not just a cellphone but also a landline, which made what she was now about to do easier. She had been able to access the phone-company system because she knew of a back door created by a supergeek at the Bureau, Vikram Rangnekar. Vikram was sweet and funny—and he cut legal corners when he was ordered to do so either by the director or by a higher power at the Department of Justice. Before Jane had gone on leave, Vikram had an innocent crush on her, even though at the time she’d been married and so far off the playing field that it might as well have been on the moon. As a by-the-book agent, she had never resorted to illegal methods, but she’d been curious about what the corrupt inner circle at Justice might be doing, and she had allowed Vikram to show off his magic every time he wanted to impress her.
In retrospect, it seemed as if she had intuited that her good life would turn sour, that she would be desperate and on the run, and that she would need every trick that Vikram could show her.
According to phone-company records, in addition to a wallmounted unit in the kitchen, there were three desk models in the Hannafin house: one in the master bedroom, one in the living room, one in the study. She started in the kitchen and finished in the master bedroom, removing the bottom of each phone casing with a small Phillips screwdriver. She wired in a two-function chip that could be remotely triggered to serve as an infinity transmitter or a standard line tap, installed a hook-switch defeat, and closed the casing. She needed only nineteen minutes to complete that work.
If the big walk-in closet in the master bedroom had not suited her plan, she would have found another closet. But it was all right. One hinged door, not a slider. Although currently unlocked, the door featured a keyed deadbolt, perhaps because a small wall safe was concealed in there or maybe because the late Mrs. Hannafin had owned a collection of valuable jewelry. It was a blind lock from within the closet, with no operable thumbturn on that side. A step-stool allowed the higher shelves to be reached with ease.
Hannafin had a lot of clothes with stylish labels: Brunello Cucinelli suits, a collection of Charvet ties, drawers filled with St. Croix sweaters. Jane hid a hammer among some sweaters and a screwdriver in an interior coat pocket of a blue pinstriped suit.
She spent another ten minutes opening drawers in various rooms, not looking for anything specific, just backgrounding the man.
If she departed the house by the front door, the latch bolt would click into place, but the deadbolt wouldn’t. When Hannafin returned and found the deadbolt wasn’t engaged, he would know that someone had been here in his absence.
She exited instead by a laundry-room door that connected the house and garage, leaving that deadbolt disengaged, which he was more likely to think he had failed to lock.
The side door of the garage had no deadbolt. The simple latch secured it when she stepped outside and pulled it shut behind her.
6.
Once more in the deserted for-sale house, now that morning sun provided cover, Jane switched on the lights in the master bathroom.
As sometimes happened these days, the face in the mirror was not what she expected. After all that she had been through in the past four months, she felt weathered and worn by fear, by grief, by worry. Although her hair was shorter and dyed auburn, she looked much as she had before this began: a youthful twenty-seven, fresh, clear-eyed. It seemed wrong that her husband should be dead, her only child in jeopardy and in hiding, and yet no testament of loss and anxiety could be read in her face or eyes.
Among other things, the large tote bag contained a long blond wig. She fitted it to her head, secured it, brushed it, and used a blue Scünci to hold it in a ponytail. She pulled on a baseball cap that wasn’t emblazoned with any logo or slogan. In jeans, a sweater, and a sport coat cut to conceal the shoulder rig and pistol, she looked anonymous, except that during the past few days, the news media had ensured that her face was nearly as familiar to the public as that of any TV star.
She could have taken steps to disguise herself better, but she wanted Lawrence Hannafin to have no doubt as to her identity.
In the master bedroom, she waited at the window. According to her watch, the runner returned sixty-two minutes after setting out on his morning constitutional.
Because of his name recognition from the bestselling books and the audience he drew for the newspaper, he was free to work at home from time to time. Nevertheless, hot and sweaty, he would probably opt to shower sooner rather than later. Jane waited ten minutes before setting out to pay him a visit.
7.
Hannafin has been a widower for a year, but he still has not fully adjusted to being alone. Often when he comes home, as now, by habit he calls out to Sakura. In the answering silence, he stands quite still, stricken by her absence.
Irrationally, he sometimes wonders if she is in fact dead. He’d been out of state on an assignment when her medical crisis occurred. Unable to bear the sight of her in death, he allowed cremation. As a consequence, he occasionally turns with the sudden conviction that she is behind him, alive and smiling.
Sakura. In Japanese, the name means cherry blossom. It suited her delicate beauty, if not her forceful personality. . . .
He had been a different man before she came into his life. She was so intelligent, so tender. Her gentle but steady encouragement gave him the confidence to write the books that previously he only talked about writing. For a journalist, he was oddly withdrawn, but she extracted him from what she called his “unhappy-turtle shell” and opened him to new experiences. Before her, he was as indifferent to clothes as to fine wine; but she taught him style and refined his taste, until he wanted to be handsome and urbane, to make her proud to be seen with him.
After her death, he put away all the photographs of the two of them together that she had framed in silver and lovingly arranged here and there about the house. The pictures had haunted him, as she still haunts his dreams more nights than not.
“Sakura, Sakura, Sakura,” he whispers to the quiet house, and then goes upstairs to shower.
She was a runner, and she insisted that he run to stay as fit as she was, that they might remain healthy and grow old together. Running without Sakura at first seemed impossible, memories like ghosts waiting around every turn of every route they had taken. But then to stop running felt like a betrayal, as if she were indeed out there on the trails, unable to return to this house of the living, waiting for him that she might see him and know that he was well and vital and staying true to the regimen that she had established for them.
If ever Hannafin dares to speak such thoughts to people at the newspaper, they will call him sentimental to his face—maudlin and mawkish and worse behind his back—because there is no room in most contemporary journalists’ hearts for schmaltz unless it is twined with politics. Nevertheless . . .
In the master bath, he cranks the shower as hot as he can tolerate. Because of Sakura, he does not use ordinary soap, which stresses the skin, but he lathers up with You Are Amazing body wash. His egg-and-cognac shampoo is from Hair Recipes, and he uses an argan-oil conditioner. All this seemed embarrassingly girly to him when Sakura was alive. But now it is his routine. He recalls times when they showered together, and in his mind’s ear, he can hear the girlish giggle with which she engaged in that domestic intimacy.
The bathroom mirror is clouded with steam when he steps out of the shower and towels dry. His reflection is blurred and for some reason disturbing, as if the nebulous form that parallels his every move, if fully revealed, might not be him, but instead some lessthan-human denizen of a world within the glass. If he wipes the mirror, it will streak. He leaves the steam to evaporate and walks naked into the bedroom.
A most amazing-looking woman sits in one of the two armchairs. Although she’s dressed in scuffed Rockports and jeans and a nothing sweater and an off-brand sport coat, she looks as if she stepped out of the pages of Vogue. She’s as stunning as the model in the Black Opium perfume ads, except that she’s a blonde instead of a brunette.
He stands dumbstruck for a moment, half sure that something has gone wrong with his brain, that he’s hallucinating.
She points to a robe that she has taken from his closet and laid out on the bed. “Put that on and sit down. We have to talk.”
8.
When she finished the last slice of bacon, Cora Gundersun was surprised to realize that she had eaten an entire pound, minus the couple slices she had fed to the dog. She felt as though she should be embarrassed by this gluttony, if not also physically ill, but she was neither. Indeed, the indulgence seemed justified to her, though for what reason she could not say.
Usually, when finished eating, she at once washed the dishes and utensils and dried them and put them away. In this instance, however, she felt that cleaning up would be a waste of precious time. She left her plate and dirty flatware on the table, and she ignored the grease-coated frying pan on the stove.
As she licked her fingers, her attention fell on the journal in which she had earlier been writing so industriously. For the life of her, she could not remember what her latest entry had concerned. Puzzled, she slid her plate aside and replaced it with the journal—but hesitated to open the volume.
When she’d graduated college nearly twenty years earlier, she had hoped to become a successful writer, a serious novelist of some importance. In retrospect, that grand intention was only a childish fantasy. Sometimes life seemed to be a machine designed to crush dreams as effectively as a junkyard hydraulic press crumpled cars into compact cubes. She needed to earn a living, and once she began teaching, the desire to publish grew weaker year by year.
Now, although she could not recall what she had so recently written in her journal, the lapse of memory did not worry her, did not stir fears of the early onset of Alzheimer’s. Instead, she was inclined to listen to a still, small voice that suggested she would be depressed by the quality of what she had written, that this blank spot in her memory was nothing more than the work of the clear-eyed critic Cora Gundersun sparing the writer Cora Gundersun from the distress of acknowledging that her writing lacked polish and spirit.
She pushed the journal aside without perusing its contents.
She looked down at Dixie Belle, who sat beside the dinette chair. The dachshund gazed up at her mistress with those beautiful if mismatched eyes, pale-blue and dark-brown ovals in a gentle golden face.
Dogs in general, not just good Dixie, sometimes regarded their humans with an expression of loving concern colored with tender pity, as if they knew not merely people’s most private fears and hopes, but also the very truth of life and the fate of all things, as though they wished that they could speak in order to give comfort by sharing what they knew.
Such was the expression with which Dixie regarded Cora, and it deeply affected the woman. Sorrow without apparent cause overcame her, as did an existential dread that she knew too well. She reached down to stroke the dog’s head. When Dixie licked her hand, Cora’s vision blurred with tears.
She said, “What’s wrong with me, sweet girl? There’s something wrong with me.”
The still, small voice within told her to be calm, to worry not, to prepare herself for the eventful day ahead.
Her tears dried. The digital clock on the oven glowed with the time—10:31 a.m. She had an hour and a half before she must drive into town. The prospect of so much time to fill made her unaccountably nervous, as if she must keep busy in order to avoid thinking about . . . About what?
Her hands trembled as she opened the journal to a fresh page and picked up the pen, but the tremors passed when she began to write. As if in a trance, Cora rapidly scribed line after line of neatly formed prose, never looking back at the most recent word that she had set down, giving no thought as to what she would write next, filling time to steady her nerves.
Standing on her hind feet, forepaws on the seat of Cora’s chair, Dixie whimpered for attention.
“Be calm,” Cora told the dog. “Be calm. Don’t worry. Don’t worry. Prepare yourself for the eventful day ahead.”
9.
Lawrence Hannafin’s shock turned to blushing embarrassment as, naked, he snatched up the bathrobe. Wrapping it around himself and cinching the belt, he regained enough composure to be apprehensive. “Who the hell are you?”
Jane’s voice was strong but without threat. “Be cool. Sit down.” He was accustomed to asserting himself, and his confidence quickly returned. “How did you get in here? This is breaking and entering.”
“Criminal trespass,” she corrected. She pulled back her sport coat to reveal the shoulder rig and the gun. “Sit down, Hannafin.”
After a hesitation, he warily took a step toward a second armchair that was angled to face hers.
“On the bed,” she instructed, for she didn’t want him close.
She glimpsed cold calculation in his jade-green eyes, but if he considered rushing her, he thought better of the impulse. He sat on the edge of the bed. “There’s no money in the house.”
“Do I look like a burglar?”
“I don’t know what you are.”
“But you know who I am.”
He frowned. “We’ve never met.”
She took off the baseball cap and waited.
After a moment, his eyes widened. “You’re FBI. Or were. The rogue agent everyone’s hunting. Jane Hawk.”
“What do you think of all that?” she asked.
“All what?”
“All that shit about me on TV, in the papers.”
Even in these circumstances, he fell quickly into the familiar role of inquisitive reporter. “What do you want me to think of it?”
“Do you believe it?”
“If I believed everything I see in the news, I wouldn’t be a journalist, I’d be an idiot.”
“You think I really killed two men last week? That sleazy Dark Web entrepreneur and the hotshot Beverly Hills attorney?”
“If you say you didn’t, maybe you didn’t. Convince me.”
“No, I killed them both,” she said. “To put him out of his misery, I also killed a man named Nathan Silverman, my section chief at the Bureau, a good friend and mentor, but you haven’t heard that. They don’t want that reported.”
“Who doesn’t?”
“Certain people in the Bureau. In the Department of Justice. I have a story for you. A big one.”
His eyes were as unreadable as those of a jade Buddha. After a meditative silence, he said, “I’ll get a pen and a notepad, and you’ll tell me.”
“Stay put. We’ll talk awhile. Then maybe a pen and notepad.”
He hadn’t fully towel-dried his hair. Beads of water trickled down his brow, his temples. Water or sweat.
He met her stare and after another silence said, “Why me?”
“I don’t trust many journalists. The few I might have trusted in the new generation—they’re all suddenly dead. You’re not.”
“My only qualification is that I’m alive?”
“You wrote a profile of David James Michael.”
“The Silicon Valley billionaire.” David Michael had inherited billions, none made in Silicon Valley. He subsequently made billions more from data-mining, from biotech, from just about everything in which he invested.
She said, “Your profile was fair.”
“I always try to be.”
“But there was a measure of acid in it.”
He shrugged. “He’s a philanthropist, a progressive, a down-to-earth guy, bright and charming. But I didn’t like him. I couldn’t get anything on him. There was no reason to suspect he wasn’t what he seemed to be. But a good reporter has . . . intuition.”
She said, “David Michael invested in a Menlo Park research facility, Shenneck Technology. Then he and Bertold Shenneck became partners in a biotech startup called Far Horizons.”
Hannafin waited for her to continue, and when she didn’t, he said, “Shenneck and his wife, Inga, died in a house fire at their Napa Valley getaway ranch on Sunday.”
“No. They were shot to death. The fire is a cover story.”
Regardless of how self-possessed he might be, every man had fear tells, like poker tells, that revealed the emotional truth of him when he was sufficiently anxious: a tic in one eye, a sudden pulse visible in the temple, a repeated licking of the lips, one thing or another. Hannafin had no tell that she could detect.
He said, “Did you kill them, too?”
“No. But they deserved to die.”
“So you’re judge and jury?”
“I can’t be bought like a judge or fooled like a jury. Anyway, Bertold Shenneck and his wife were killed because Far Horizons—meaning the bright and charming David Michael—had no further use for them.”
For a beat, he searched her eyes, as if he could read truth in the diameter of her pupils, in the blue striations of her irises. Suddenly he stood up. “Damn it, woman, I need a pen and paper.”
Jane drew the .45 from under her sport coat. “Sit down.”
He remained standing. “I can’t trust all this to memory.”
“And I can’t trust you,” she said. “Not yet. Sit down.”
Reluctantly he sat. He didn’t seem cowed by the gun. The beads of moisture tracking down his face were more likely to be water, not sweat.
“You know about my husband,” she said.
“It’s all over the news. He was a highly decorated Marine. He committed suicide about four months ago.”
“No. They murdered him.”
“Who did?”
“Bertold Shenneck, David James Michael, every sonofabitch associated with Far Horizons. Do you know what nanomachines are?”
The change of subject puzzled Hannafin. “Nanotechnology? Microscopic machines made of only a few molecules. Some real-world applications. Mostly science fiction.”
“Science fact,” she corrected. “Bertold Shenneck developed nanomachines that are injected into the bloodstream in a serum, several thousand incredibly tiny constructs that are brain-tropic. They self-assemble into a larger network once they pass through capillary walls into the brain tissue.”
“Larger network?” Skepticism creased his brow, pleated the skin at the corners of his eyes. “What larger network?”
“A control mechanism.”
10.
If Lawrence Hannafin thought Jane was a paranoid of the tinfoil-hat variety, he gave no indication of it. He sat on the edge of the bed, managing to look dignified in his plush cotton robe, barefoot, hands relaxed on his thighs. He listened intently.
She said, “The historical rate of suicide in the U.S. is twelve per hundred thousand. The past year or so, it’s risen to fifteen.”
“Supposing you’re right and it’s higher. So what? These are hard times for a lot of people. A bad economy, social turmoil.”
“Except the increase involves successful men and women, most in happy marriages, with no history of depression. Military . . . like Nick, my husband. Journalists, scientists, doctors, lawyers, police, teachers, economists. These fanatics are eliminating people their computer model says will push civilization in the wrong direction.”
“Whose computer model?”
“Shenneck’s. David Michael’s. Far Horizons’s. Whatever bastards in the government are in league with them. Their computer model.”
“Eliminating them how?”
“Are you listening to me?” she asked, her FBI cool melting a little. “Nanomachine control mechanisms. Self-assembling brain implants. They inject them—”
He interrupted. “Why would anyone submit to such an injection?”
Agitated, Jane rose from the armchair, stepped farther away from Hannafin, stood staring at him, the pistol casually aimed at the floor near his feet. “Of course they don’t know they’ve been injected. One way or another, they’re sedated first. Then they’re injected in their sleep. At conferences they attend. When they’re traveling, away from home, alone and vulnerable. The control mechanism assembles in the brain within a few hours of injection, and after that, they forget it ever happened.”
No less inscrutable than a wall of hieroglyphics in a pharaoh’s tomb, Hannafin stared at her either as if she were a prophetess predicting the very fate of humanity that he had long expected or as if she were insane and mistaking fever dreams for fact; she could not tell which. Maybe he was processing what she said, getting his mind around it. Or maybe he was thinking about the revolver in the nearby nightstand drawer, which she had found on her first visit to the house.
At last he said, “And then these people, these injected people . . . they’re controlled?” He couldn’t repress a note of incredulity in his voice. “You mean like robots? Like zombies?”
“It’s not that obvious,” Jane said impatiently. “They don’t know they’re controlled. But weeks later, maybe months, they receive the command to kill themselves, and they can’t resist. I can provide piles of research. Weird suicide notes. Evidence that the attorneys general of at least two states are conspiring to cover this up. I’ve spoken with a medical examiner who saw the nanomachine web across all four lobes of a brain during an autopsy.”
She had so much information to convey, and she wanted to win Hannafin’s confidence. But when she talked too fast, she was less convincing. She sounded to herself as though she was on the edge of babbling. She almost holstered the gun to reassure him, but rejected that idea. He was a big man in good physical shape. She could handle him, if it came to that, but there was no reason to give him an opening if there was a one-in-a-thousand chance he would take it.
She drew a deep breath, spoke calmly. “Their computer model identifies a critical number of Americans in each generation who supposedly could steer the culture in the wrong direction, push civilization to the brink with dangerous ideas.”
“A computer model can be designed to give any result you want.”
“No shit. But a computer model gives them self-justification. This critical number of theirs is two hundred ten thousand. They say a generation is twenty-five years. So the computer says eliminate the right eighty-four hundred each year and you’ll make a perfect world, all peace and harmony.”
“That’s freaking crazy.”
“Haven’t you noticed, insanity is the new normal?”
“Wrong ideas? What wrong ideas?”
“They aren’t specific about that. They just know them when they see them.”
“They’re going to kill people to save the world?”
“They have killed people. A lot of them. Killing to save the world—why is that hard to believe? It’s as old as history.”
Maybe he needed to be moving around to absorb a big new idea, to cope with a shock to the system. He got to his feet again, not with obvious aggressive intent, making no move for the nightstand drawer that contained the revolver. Jane eased closer to the hallway door as he moved away from her and toward the nearer of two windows. He stood staring down at the suburban street, pulling at the lower half of his face with one hand, as though he had just awakened and felt a residue of sleep still clinging like a mask.
He said, “You’re a hot item on the National Crime Information Center website. Photos. A federal warrant for your arrest. They say you’re a major national-security threat, stealing defense secrets.”
“They’re liars. You want the story of the century or not?”
“Every law-enforcement agency in the country uses the NCIC.”
“You don’t have to tell me I’m in a tight spot.”
“Nobody evades the FBI for long. Or Homeland Security. Not these days, not with cameras everywhere and drones and every car transmitting its location with a GPS.”
“I know how all that works—and how it doesn’t.”
He turned from the window to look at her. “You against the world, all to avenge your husband.”
“It’s not vengeance. It’s about clearing his name.”
“Would you know the difference? And there’s a child in this. Your son. Travis, is it? What is he—five? I’m not going to be twisted up in anything that puts a little kid at risk.”
“He’s at risk now, Hannafin. When I wouldn’t stop investigating Nick’s death and these suicides, the creeps threatened to kill Travis. Rape him and kill him. So I went on the run with him.”
“He’s safe?”
“He’s safe for now. He’s in good hands. But to make him safe forever, I’ve got to break this conspiracy wide open. I have the evidence. Thumb drives of Shenneck’s files, every iteration of his design for the brain implants, the control mechanisms. Records of his experiments. Ampules containing mechanisms ready for injection. But I don’t know who to trust in the Bureau, the police, anywhere. I need you to break the story. I have proof. But I don’t dare share it with people who might take it away from me and destroy it.”
“You’re a fugitive from justice. If I work with you instead of turning you in, I’m an accessory.”
“You’ve got a journalistic exemption.”
“Not if they won’t grant it to me and not if all this you’re telling me is a lie. Not if you aren’t real.”
Exasperation brought heat to her face and a new roughness to her voice. “They don’t just use the nanoimplants to cull the population of people they don’t like. They have other uses that’ll sicken you when I lay it all out. Terrify and sicken. This is about freedom, Hannafin, yours as much as mine. It’s about a future of hope or slavery.”
He shifted his attention from her to the street beyond the window and stood in silence.
She said, “I thought I saw a pair of balls when you stepped out of the shower. Maybe they’re just decoration.”
His hands were fisted at his sides, which might have indicated that he was repressing his anger and wanted to strike her—or that he was frustrated with his inability to be the fearless journalist that he had been in his youth.
From a sleeve on her shoulder holster, she extracted a sound suppressor and screwed it onto the pistol. “Get away from the window.” When he didn’t move, she said, “Now,” and took the Colt in a two-hand grip.
Her stance and the silencer persuaded him to move.
“Get in the closet,” she said.
His flushed face paled. “What do you mean?”
“Relax. I’m just going to give you time to think.”
“You’re going to kill me.”
“Don’t be stupid. I’ll lock you in the closet and let you think about what I’ve said.”
Before he had showered, he had left his wallet and house keys on the nightstand. Now the key, on a kinky red-plastic coil, was in the closet lock.
Hannafin hesitated to cross that threshold.
“There’s really no choice,” she said. “Go to the back of the closet and sit on the floor.”
“How long will you keep me in there?”
“Find the hammer and screwdriver I hid earlier. Use them to get the pivot pins out of the hinge barrels, pry the door open. You’ll be free in maybe fifteen, twenty minutes. I’m not about to let you watch me leave the house and see what car I’m driving.”
Relieved that the closet wouldn’t be his coffin, Hannafin stepped inside, sat on the floor. “There’s really a hammer and screwdriver?”
“Really. I’m sorry I had to come at you this way. But I’m running on a tightrope these days, and damn if anyone’s going to knock me off. It’s a quarter till nine. I’ll call you at noon. I hope you’ll decide to help me. But if you’re not ready to break a story that’ll bring the demon legions down on you, tell me so and stay out of it. I don’t want to tie myself to someone who can’t go the distance.”
She gave him no chance to respond, closed the door, locked it, and left the key in the keyway.
Immediately, she could hear him rummaging through the closet in search of the hammer and screwdriver.
She holstered the pistol and the silencer separately. She picked up her tote bag and hurried downstairs. On her way out, she slammed the front door so that he would be sure to hear it.
After the glittering starfield of the previous night and the pellucid sky of dawn, the blue vault over the San Gabriel Valley was surrendering to an armada of towering thunderheads sailing in from the northwest, on course for Los Angeles. Among the densely leafed branches of nearby Indian laurels, song sparrows were already sheltering, issuing sweet trills and clear notes to reassure one another, but the crows were still chasing down the sky, raucous heralds of the storm.
11.
Over sixteen hundred air miles from Los Angeles, in Minnesota, the digital clock on Cora Gundersun’s oven read 11:02 when she closed her journal. She was no less mystified by this most recent session of furious writing than she had been by the one that had preceded it. She didn’t know what words she had set down on those pages or why she had felt compelled to write them, or why after the fact she dared not read them.
The still, small voice within her counseled serenity. All would be well. More than two days without a migraine. By this time next week, she would most likely return to her sixth-grade classroom and the children whom she loved nearly as much as if they had been her own offspring.
The time had come for Dixie Belle’s late-morning treat and second toileting of the day. In consideration of the bacon granted to her earlier, the dog received just two small coin-shaped cookies instead of the usual four. She seemed to understand the rightness of the ration, for she neither begged for more nor grumbled, but padded across the kitchen to the back door, nails clicking on the linoleum.
Shrugging into her coat, Cora said, “Good heavens, Dixie, look at me, still in my pajamas with the morning nearly gone. If I don’t get back to teaching soon, I’ll become a hopeless layabout.”
The day had not warmed much since dawn. The frozen sky hung low and constipated, providing no evidence of the predicted storm except a bare minimum of white flakes slowly spiraling down through the becalmed air.
After Dixie peed, she didn’t scamper back to the house, but stood staring at Cora on the porch. Dachshunds didn’t need much exercise, and Dixie in particular was averse to long walks and to more than an occasional experience of the outdoors. Except for her first visit to the yard in the morning, she always hurried inside after completing her business. On this occasion, she required coaxing, and she returned hesitantly, almost as though she wasn’t sure that her mistress was her mistress, as if both Cora and the house suddenly seemed strange to her.
Minutes later, after Cora showered, she vigorously toweled her hair. There was no point in using a blow-dryer and a styling brush. Her curly tresses resisted shaping. She entertained no illusions about her appearance and long ago made peace with the fact that she would never turn heads. She looked pleasant and presentable, which was more than could be said for some less fortunate people.
Although it was not suitable to the season, she put on a white rayon-crepe dress with three-quarter sleeves, a semifitted bodice with a high, round neckline, and a skirt with knife pleats stitched down to hip level. Of all the dresses she had ever owned, this one came the closest to making her feel pretty. Because high heels did nothing for her, she wore white sneakers.
Only after she had put on the shoes did she realize that this outfit was what she wore in the fire-walking dream, which she’d had the previous night again, for the fifth night in a row. In addition to feeling almost pretty, she now channeled at least a measure of the sense of invulnerability that made the dream so delightful.
Although Dixie Belle usually lay on the bed to watch her mistress dress, on this occasion she was under the bed, only her head and long ears poking out from beneath the quilted spread.
Cora said, “You’re a funny dog, Miss Dixie. Sometimes you can be so silly.”
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