Placebo by Steven James Page B

for the bedroom and I drop onto the couch. It’s a little short, but I usually sleep kind of scrunched up anyway and I figure I’ll be alright.
    As I lie down, I can’t help but think of the attacker in the chamber, and I realize that what bothers me most is the fact that I wasn’t able to stop him from hurting Charlene.
    I promise myself that if we run into each other again, I won’t make the same mistake, then I close my eyes, hoping to sleep, to clear my head, hoping that the dreams I’ve had so often over the course of the last year won’t return.
    But I’m anticipating, of course, that they will. After all, the nightmares of my children drowning while my wife sits just a few feet away and waits for them to die have been plaguing me for months.
    It wouldn’t be so bad if it was just a dream. But it’s not. It’s history.
    For a while I’m caught in the time-between-times world of waking and sleeping where you wander into and out of awareness, then I’m vaguely aware of the fact that scientists don’t really understand sleep, why we do it, what biological purpose it actually serves. We’renever more vulnerable than when we’re asleep, and if the most vulnerable members of a species die out, then natural selection should have weeded us out. From an evolutionary point of view, it makes no sense.
    Never more vulnerable . . .
    And then I drop away from where I am and tip into the world of my dreams.

    The twins stepped into the conference room.
    Gentle-looking, both of them, with an easy, measured confidence. No swagger. No posturing. Medium build. Wiry. Clean-cut. Soft-spoken.
    If it wasn’t for the scar snaking across Darren’s left cheek, Riah wouldn’t have been able to tell them apart.
    She noticed that Cyrus was keeping his distance from them, and though it didn’t entirely surprise her, she did find it informative.
    She greeted each twin with a half-hug. Their friendship allowed for this, made it seem like the natural greeting. After all, when you’ve inserted nanowire electrodes up someone’s artery and into his brain, it tends to engender a certain degree of trust.
    Deep-brain stimulation used to be highly invasive and involved dozens or even hundreds of electrodes implanted in the brain through small burr holes drilled in the skull.
    Not anymore.
    Now, tiny polymer nanowire electrodes less than six hundred nanometers wide are used. Since their width is far less than that of a red blood cell, they can be inserted through an artery in the arm and guided through the vasculature up and into the brain, where they’re used to deliver electric signals to stimulate the neurons in the hardest-to-reach parts of the brain.
    The process had been around since 2006, but Riah had made advances that allowed for electric stimulation of the Wernicke’s area, the temporal lobe’s language-recognition center. She’d implanted the electrodes in the brains of the twins three weeks ago.
    After a brief “How are you doing?” conversation back and forth, Cyrus cleared his throat slightly and offered Riah a smile that wasn’t really a smile. “Riah, really. I think it would be best if you waited outside the room, gave us just a few minutes alone.”
    The words were condescending, but her feelings weren’t hurt, though she had the sense that given the social context, they should have been.
    Daniel and Darren watched Cyrus quietly. Before Riah could reply to him, Darren spoke up: “We trust Riah. She can stay. It’s time we brought her in on the broader nature of the project.”
    â€œNo.” Cyrus shook his head. “I’m afraid that’s—”
    â€œNonnegotiable,” Daniel said firmly. He gestured toward his brother, who was still staring steadily at Cyrus. “We’ve been talking about it, my brother and I, and we were going to tell you tonight. That’s one of the