After the Golden Age

She kept herself from looking at the gunmen. They weren’t going to kill her. Paulson needed her or he’d have had her killed already. One of them reached for her shoulder. She sensed him approach, timed it, and stepped forward before he could touch her. Heart racing, stomach knotting, she walked toward the lab area and the machinery.

“What are you going to do with me?” She wanted to laugh. Almost, she let herself laugh.

“Nothing special,” Paulson said. “Human shield. Keep your parents out of my way.”

The usual reason, which meant he wasn’t any different than the others. She was only ever a tool to them. Which was a good thing—no one ever expected a tool to fight back.

“Huh,” she said, like she thought this was an interesting but irrelevant conversation, and turned her attention to the tower of glass, wires, and steel. “So this is it? Sito’s machine?” she said, gazing at the device as if it were a piece of incomprehensible art in a museum. “You know what it does, right?”

Paulson said, “Do you know what it does? Exactly how much do you know?”

“I have a guess. Did you have to rebuild it, or was it intact?”

“It had been stored—wrapped in plastic and shoved in a closet. The place hadn’t been touched. It’s like someone expected to come back to it.”

But no one ever had. Sito’s depression and madness consumed him, the other techs had signed nondisclosure agreements. Had her grandfather saved the lab? Had he suspected how the device had worked?

“Hmm,” she murmured, by way of polite observation.

“Ms. West, I’m curious. What do you think this does?” He watched her, gaze sharp, smile amused. His intensity burned; she felt like a mouse to his cat.

Calm, stay calm. “You know, I could make the argument that all this really belongs to me, as Jacob West’s direct descendant.”

“I heard that your father disinherited you. Or that you disinherited yourself.”

She gave a noncommittal shrug. “People hear lots of things.”

“Be that as it may, I claim salvage rights on behalf of the city.”

“You’re not doing this for the city.”

“Oh? Really?”

She tested her range, strolling a couple more steps toward the machine, moving partway around it, looking it up and down, purely out of curiosity. The gunmen didn’t move to stop her. All three men watched her closely, but she might as well have been a bug in a jar for their lack of apparent concern.

No one was afraid of her; she didn’t have any powers. But she wouldn’t flinch. That was her talent. That, and recognizing people under their masks.

“No one ever does anything like this except for themselves.” She offered him a sad smile, full of condescension.

“You sound so sure.”

“You’ve killed people to get what you want. The good guys don’t do that.” She made it an observation of fact, not a judgment call. Like she didn’t care that he’d killed.

“Weber, hand me that folder. Yes, that’s the one.”

One of the people in a lab coat brought Paulson a thick file from the top of a filing cabinet. The brown pressboard folder looked familiar; Celia had been looking through similar folders all week. The texture of files from that era was distinct.

Paulson passed the folder to her. “Take a look at this.”

She opened the file, balancing the spine in her left hand. Stacks of pages were fastened to both sides. She flipped through, taking in random lines and data. Charts, graphs, diagrams, rows of jagged lines labeled with numbers, black-and white-photographs.

The top page of text read, “Use of Directed Radiation to Induce Neurophysiological Responses, with the Intent of Encouraging Specified Emotional Traits in Human Subjects.”

The early West Corp logo, before the last couple of redesigns—the crescent moon as the arc of a bow and an arrow tipped with a star preparing to launch—was printed on the bottom of the page.

West Corp didn’t have a medical research division. At least, it didn’t now.

“This is the original lab report,” Celia said. “I found the financial statements, but not the research notes.”

“Because I found them here months ago. One of my aides uncovered this place during a survey of the area. This is what I put the highway plan on hold for. Go on, keep reading.”

Sito, a psychologist with an interest in how the physical structures of the brain contributed to the development of personality and psyche, had been experimenting with methods of altering the brain physically to treat mental illness, as an alternative to medication or shock therapies. Other potential applications had presented themselves.

In a memo to Jacob West in which he urged secrecy, Simon Sito outlined the potential applications of his procedure. Some of the most promising involved nonlethal crowd control: draining aggression from people at the touch of a button, or pacifying prison populations to prevent riots. The process could curb the sociopathic tendencies of habitual criminals.