“And what happened?” Adrienne asked.

“Well, he stopped the bull, cold—in midcharge. Very dramatic. Then he pushed a second button, and the creature turned and sauntered away.”

“So it was like a shock collar,” Adrienne suggested. “Or an electric fence.”

“Oh, no—not at all,” Shapiro corrected. “This was nothing so simple. In fact, it was actually a dual test—the first button activated an electrode that controlled the bull’s motor cortex. The second button targeted the hippocampus, which turned the animal’s anger into indifference.”

McBride frowned. This wasn’t anything new. He’d read all about Delgado as an undergraduate. Everyone had. “What about this?” he asked, tapping the photograph with his forefinger.

For the first time, Shapiro looked uncomfortable.

“Look,” he said, “I’m a dinosaur. I’ve been out of the field for… “ He caught himself, and smiled. “… a long time. But there are things I can’t talk about. I signed a secrecy agreement. So…”

“Hypothetically,” Adrienne cajoled.

Shapiro sighed. “I suppose it could be a miniaturized version of… certain devices… that might have been used experimentally… at one time or another.”

McBride snorted at the old man’s circumlocution, which brought a frown to Shapiro’s face.

Turning his eyes to Adrienne, the old man shrugged. “There’s a lot in the open literature. I don’t suppose I’d be giving anything away if I told you what it looks like.”

“Which is what?”

“A depth electrode.”

“And what would that do?”

He shrugged again. “Depends…”

“On what?” Adrienne asked.

“The frequency to which it’s tuned,” McBride suggested.

Shapiro smiled. “Very good.”

“And if you had to guess—” McBride began.

“Four to seven megahertz might be interesting,” Shapiro told them.

“Why?” Adrienne asked.

“Because it’s the hypnoidal EEG frequency—and, hypothetically, it would enable the reception of a sinewave that… ummm, could entrain the brain.”

“‘Entrain’?” Adrienne repeated the word to make sure she had it right. It was the same word that Doctor Shaw had used when she’d told him about McBride’s behavior at Bethany Beach—when he logged onto that Web site. The program, or whatever it was called.

“It’s when the brain locks onto a particular signal,” McBride explained. “A flashing light, a repetitive sound—especially one that’s been established in a trance state. They say the brain’s ‘entrained’ to the signal.”

Shapiro was impressed. “You’ve done your homework.”

“I’m a psychologist,” McBride told him.

“But what would happen?” Adrienne asked. “What would the purpose be?”

“Well,” the old man replied, “it would allow a trance state to be continually refreshed and reinforced without the necessity of rehypnotizing the subject.”

“So if you had one of these in your head, you’d be… what? Hypnotized all the time?”

“More or less,” Shapiro said. “Though there’s no reason to believe that that’s its only function.”

“Why not?” McBride asked.

Shapiro refreshed their cups of tea, which Adrienne drank more from politeness than thirst. It tasted like burnt seaweed.

“Because everything’s changed,” Shapiro finally replied. “An implant like this would probably use nano technology. It would have computers embedded in it. And God knows what else.”

“But what for?”

“Hypothetically? I suppose one could introduce certain ‘scenarios’ that, coupled with hypnosis, would go a long way toward establishing a sort of… ‘virtual biography.’”

Adrienne and McBride chewed on the expression. “‘A virtual biography’… “ Adrienne repeated.

“A phony past—but one that felt right. Up to a point.”

“Christ,” McBride muttered.

Shapiro smiled. “Memory’s not much more than a slurry of chemicals and electrical potentials—which aren’t that difficult to manipulate, if you know what you’re doing. For instance—it’s well-known—if you raise the level of acetylcholine in the brain—and you can do that by hitting the subject with radio waves at ultrasonic frequencies—the synapses begin to fire more and more slowly until… well, until they don’t fire at all. And when that happens, remembering becomes impossible. The memories are there, but they’re inaccessible.”

“So you could impose amnesia,” Adrienne suggested.

“Exactly. More tea?”

It was all so civilized, McBride thought. This charming and matter-of-fact old man, serving tea in his ascetic little house. Under the circumstances, it was hard to hate him for the damage that he’d done, hard to conjure the horrors that he’d contrived. Hard, but not impossible. McBride could feel the anger rising, a primitive ruckus in the back of his mind. The bulls. The cats. The ochre room. The virtual Jeff Duran. He’d like to smack this syrupy son of a bitch—let him know what the sound of one-hand-clapping was really like. Instead, he said, “Let me ask you a question.”

“Shoot.”

Don’t tempt me. “Hypothetically—how would you put someone together? The whole package?”

The old man shifted uncomfortably in his seat. After a moment, he asked: “Based on what I’ve read in the open literature?”

“Of course,” McBride replied.

Shapiro thought about it for a moment. “Well,” he said, “I suppose you’d give the subject an EEG—get a record of his brainwaves under different stumuli. With that, and a PET scan, you could put together a map of the subject’s brain—its emotive and intellectual centers.”

“Then what?” Adrienne asked.

“Well, once you had that information, you could encrypt a set of audiograms that would target those centers, delivering them on the back of ELF transmissions—”

“Elf?” Adrienne asked.

“It’s an acronym for Extremely Low Frequency radio waves. That’s what I was talking about before: the four to seven megahertz band.”

“And so, if you did all that, what would happen?” Adrienne asked.

“Well,” Shapiro replied, “you’d change the landscape of the brain.”

“What does that mean?” McBride asked.

“Just what I said: you’d bring about some very specific—but temporary—changes in the physical structure of the brain.”

“And that would accomplish… what?”

“Depends on the audiograms,” Shapiro told them. “But amnesia might be one result.”

“Total amnesia?” McBride asked.

Shapiro shrugged. “You might remember how to speak Italian, but you wouldn’t remember how you’d learned it—or if you’d ever been to Italy.”

“Would you remember who you were?” McBride asked.

Shapiro looked at McBride. “That would depend.”

“On what?”

“On what the programmer was trying to achieve. Once the subject was prepped, and his memory blocked, he’d probably have a neurophonic prosthesis implanted.”

“A ‘prosthesis,’“ Adrienne repeated.

Shapiro uncurled a forefinger in the direction of the snapshot that was lying on the table. “One of those. If you were to look at the object in that photograph under a microscope, my guess is you’d find it contains insulated electrodes that receive and process audiograms on particular frequencies. The prosthesis would allow the transmissions to bypass the inner ear—the cochlea and eighth cranial nerve—delivering the messages directly to the brain.”

McBride thought about it. “So it would be like hearing voices,” he suggested.

“It would be like hearing God,” Shapiro corrected. “But the implant is just a part of the process. The programmer would have other tools…”

“Like what?”

“Hypnosis… sensory deprivation…”

“And how would that work?” Adrienne asked.

Shapiro pursed his lips, thought for a moment, and replied. “Well, the subject could be given hypnotic suggestions, preparing him for the experience he’s about to have. Then we’d lower him into a blackout tank filled with saltwater that’s been heated to the same temperature as his body—around 98 degrees. It’s a very strange experience—like floating in space.”