Dane was exhausted. He had spent the day trying to explain memory cloning and mapping to a group of not even pretending to listen to him as they made their political speeches Senators. And he was going to have to do it all again tomorrow. It had been supremely frustrating. He knew it was just political theater. That they all already knew what they wanted to do about the pending legislation and talking to him was only for show.
It might not have been so bad if they hadn't been so proudly ignorant. So dedicated to holding on to the wrong information. One Senator had referred to the memory cloning process as "watching the movies of someone's life." When he had tried to explain that it wasn't really like that the Senator actually yelled at him about wasting his questioning time. But wasn't the purpose of the questioning time to get answers from the expert in the field? Apparently not.
And Dane really was THE expert in the field. He was the one who had discovered how to access individual memories. He was the one who had perfected the original process. He was the co-founder of Memory Lane, the first and best memory experience company. He didn't make a big show of being the owner, he preferred to just run the lab. But it was his. From the first discovery through the first cloning and first erasures. That was all him. He had patented the process and was now a very wealthy man making money not only from his company but from every other company out there using his methods. Or methods built from his.
But none of that seemed to matter to the Senators questioning him. They weren't interested in learning how the process actually worked. They weren't interested in understanding why it was not just an invasion of privacy to open it up to law enforcement but that it wouldn't actually do what they wanted anyway. The Democrats wanted to regulate an industry they didn't understand and the Republicans wanted to hand it over to the police without limits. Which terrified Dane.
What if there were someone suspected of terrorism that the CIA wanted to question? After discovering that memory mapping was not going to work they used "enhanced interrogation" methods, then erased that memory from the suspect. You would be able to bring back torture without consequence because the victim wouldn't remember. Only the possibility of echos. Nightmares about being tortured. Dane tried to be more optimistic about what his government was capable of, but he had just spent a day in questioning with the Senate and that was definitely not working right now.
Dane paced around his hotel room. He really should be reviewing his notes for tomorrow but felt like it was a waste of time. They weren't going to be any more interested in hearing what he had to say tomorrow than they were today. The great irony to him was that if he had found what he was looking for when he discovered memory mapping none of this would matter anyway.
The original experiments had been designed to expand knowledge. Real knowledge. Like a quick way to learn a new language. Or to understand calculus. Or to know all of the works for Shakespeare without having to read all of the plays. If all thought was just electrical impulse then couldn't they just implant those impulses? He had spent years trying to perfect the capture of them. Specially designed headgear to capture the electric impulses of the brain that happened while learning. The problem was each brain was unique. He could not capture a pattern that was learning because that pattern changed within each brain.
But what he did discover is that he could capture the memory of learning. Not the knowledge itself, but the memory of sitting in the classroom. He could capture the electrical patterns that formed the memory. He could copy those into a computer program which turned them into code that allowed him to watch the memory unfold. See the world from the eyes of the person who held the memory. Then the next step was to clone that memory, to change it back from the computer code to electrical impulses that could be experienced by a different brain. An experience. Not a real life experience and not their memory, but just as real to the new brain as reliving it was to the original brain. You could experience the memory of a white water rafting trip without ever leaving Hoboken. It was amazing. And then he discovered that if you could isolate those particular memories you could overwrite them. Erase them. Clear that electrical pattern from the brain.
It was incredibly delicate work. There had been a few unfortunate accidents but they had perfected it as much as possible. And they had had years of success with the companies and with the user experiences. He should have known it was too good to last. Once law enforcement got the idea they should have access to their technology and the press grabbed hold of the California case it had all started to move very swiftly.
One more day of testimony. He wasn't sure he was going to make it out without losing his cool. At least the good news was if it was too terrible he knew a guy who could make him forget the whole thing.
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