Memory Lane....(Part Ten)

"So, Mr. Lane..."

"Dr. Lane."

"Excuse me, Dr. Lane, when they brought you in for questioning on the California Case..."

"I wasn't brought in for questioning, Detective Green. I was consulting on a different case at the time."

"Oh? What case was that?"

Dane tried his best not to roll his eyes. He found it impossible to believe that Detective Green didn't have his full file with her, which would include all of the information from the Stolen Valor case he consulted on. "Detective, I understand you probably have some sort of reason for handling me this way, but honestly I'd love to cut the bullshit and you just ask what you want to know" is what he wanted to say. Instead he opted for calm.

"There was a Stolen Valor case working its way through the court system. A gentleman had claimed to have been present at multiple battles and had details that were very realistic. It turned out he was frequenting memory centers and focusing on those particular experiences. He says he started it because he wanted to see what it was like to have served. Then sharing a story about one of his purchased experiences the person he was telling mistook him for a Veteran and bought him a drink. It all snowballed from there. He would have been fine if he hadn't gone on the local news to talk about his bravery in two different battles, that took place at the same time, involving two different branches of the military.

I was called in as an expert witness to explain the memory sharing experience. While I was working with the prosecution on that case the Johnson murder hit. When they brought in McGovern and she was swearing that SHE was the real Samantha Johnson and could tell details that seemed like things only Ms. Johnson should have known they asked me to talk with her."

"So they brought you in for questioning right away?"

"Again, I wouldn't really use that phrase. I consulted. The detective working that case saw that it could be more than a simple case of stalking and wanted to see if  his hunch was right."

"So what did you find?"

Dane sighed as quietly as he could. The California Case had been big news, it had been the lead on the nightly news for months, there were documentaries and Lifetime Movies made about it and inspired by it. It is what lead to the Senate hearings going on right now. There was no way that Detective Green didn't know what he found.

"Alicia McGovern had been a customer of Experience It! a memory sharing company that had some, let's call them, very bad practices. She really did think, at that point in time, that she was Samantha Johnson. She suffered a psychotic break brought on by over use of experience sharing."

"What bad practices did they have?"

"First off they allowed too many donations from a single person. Samantha Johnson should have never been allowed to share that much of her memory. The donation process is mostly safe, but it's still a medical procedure dealing with the electrical impulses in your brain. Too many donations can cause problems for the donor. And then they should never have allowed Alicia McGovern to access all of them. Even though they are not real, they are copies of actual experiences, our brains register them as almost real. There are precautions that must be taken to ensure that they don't seem real after the experience is over. And one of those precautions is how many come from one source. You don't want like drawn to like and forming a new neural network of identity."

"Is that what happened to Alicia McGovern?"

"I believe so. I believe she had so many of Ms. Johnson's memories in her head that she didn't know who she really was. She really did believe at the time that she was killing a fake Ms. Johnson who had been sent by, I think she believed aliens or the government, maybe both, to replace her. She thought that she had been pushed out of her house and her life by an invader and if she could kill the imposter she would get her life back."

"But the jury didn't buy that?"

"It never went to a jury, as I'm sure you know."

Detective Green smiled, "Oh that's right. She got a deal didn't she?"

"I'm not sure I would call being committed to Saint Stephens a deal."

"Over a life sentence for murder? I think you got her a pretty sweet deal. And then you got yourself a pretty sweet deal by buying the entire memory catalog of Experience It! for a deep discount."

And this is where Dane knew for sure that he was in trouble. Detective Green was not looking for facts. She was looking for someone to blame, and he was a very handy target.