Monday, June 24, 2019

Memory Lane (Part Fourteen)....

Detective Marsha Green pushed the stacks of paperwork on her desk around into new pile configurations. She was sure there was a piece she was missing and was hoping something would trigger what it was.

She picked up the copy of the search warrant Dr. Lane had sent over. Dr. Dane Lane. Seriously? Who does that to a child? She didn't blame his siblings for choosing to go by nicknames.

The warrant was valid. It was for a federal agency she hadn't heard of before and couldn't get any details on except that it was under the auspices of the FBI. Which meant she was going to lose her case. Even though she was pretty sure they didn't give a damn about the dead women. This warrant was for record collection. She had a feeling those files were going to be put in to storage someplace and never seen again. There was no federal case. Not right now. There were the hearings on Capitol Hill and the calls for allowing the police access to the centers but there was no federal investigation into Samantha Johnson's murder and Jean Firestone's alleged suicide.

She stretched her neck and tried to relax her shoulders a little bit. At least Dr. Lane had contacted her about the warrant. Most people would not have done that. He also had voluntarily contacted them about Ms. Firestone's memory issues when he found out about the suicide. Maybe she had been too hard on him in questioning. Even as she thought that she felt her lips purse in disgust. It wasn't him that she hated so much as his complete obliviousness to what he had created. Not the technology. Not the process. But the system. The people involved. His technology was brilliant, but he had no clue about the people.

She took what happened to Samantha Johnson personally because she knew Samantha Johnson. Not Ms. Johnson specifically, this wasn't a conflict of interest case, but people like Ms. Johnson. The men and women, but let's face it, it's usually women, who are desperate enough to sell something so personal. That was her real issue with the company Dane Lane had created. It was a business that worked on the backs of desperate people. You were never going to go into a center like his and be able to pick an experience that showed you what it was like to be Bill Gates for a day. Bill Gates would never need to sell something as personal as his own memory. It was like plasma. Rich people donate blood, poor people sell plasma. Sex workers were the same. You wouldn't find someone on a street corner if they had other options.

Samantha Johnson was a single mother trying to make ends meet. That's why she was in Experience It! selling her memories. That's why she sold so many of them. That's why Alicia McGovern had been able to pretend to be her. Alicia McGovern. A rich kid going to college on Daddy's dime. She had gone to Experience It! as part of her research for a thesis paper. She was "living" Samantha Johnson's experiences as a field trip. To get in touch with what it was really like to be a poor single mother living from paycheck to paycheck. Well she had found out.

Samantha Johnson was dead. A victim of being too poor not to do something desperate. Alicia McGovern was in the best psychiatric ward that money could buy. And the owners of Experience It! were...well they paid an undisclosed amount of money to Ms. Johnson's family and got them to agree not to sue. They closed up shop and sold their inventory to Dane Lane. Who had sold them the licensing to the technology in the first place. And the world kept spinning.

And now there was the death of Jean Firestone. Ruled a suicide but that just didn't feel right to Marsha. It didn't from the start and the more information she got the worse it felt. There was something here. She just wasn't sure what it was.

She moved the piles of paperwork around on her desk again. Maybe this time something would make sense.


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