Free Vicious Grace by M. L. N. Hanover Page A

secretary might ask.
    “I’ve brought a copy of the study logs,” he said. “Everything’s there. Dates, names, times.”
    “Great,” I said, keeping the annoyance out of my voice. I’d asked him for a piece of information, not where I could go to look it up. But I let it slide.
    “At first, it wasn’t simultaneous. It was only a common set of images. I thought it was day residue.”
    “I don’t follow,” Ex said.
    Watching Oonishi shift from embarrassed client to popular scientist was like watching the playback of myself in Trevor’s dojo. He didn’t exactly move, his expression didn’t quite change, but he was suddenly more grounded than he’d been before. His nervous half-smile vanished.
    “What we’re learning about perception,” he said, “is that it’s very dependent on priming. The actual experience of vision, of seeing, is associated with activity in the V1 and V2 layers of your visual cortex. What the neuroanatomists have found is more neurons enter V1 and V2 from the deeper parts of the brain than from the optic nerve.”
    “Implying what?” Ex asked.
    “That your conceptual and emotional knowledge affects not just your interpretation of what you see, but what you actually see,” Oonishi said. “Five years ago, a man in Madison, Wisconsin, had a heart attack. Fell over in the street. An off-duty paramedic happened to be there. He started administering CPR.”
    “They shot him,” Aubrey said. “I heard about that.”
    “Yes,” Oonishi said. “The paramedic was black. One of the passersby saw a young black man straddling an older white man and shot him. When the police arrested the shooter, she swore the paramedic had been stabbing the man. She’d seen the blood. She’d seen the knife. There had been no blood. No knife. But she was adamant she’d seen it.”
    “And you say she did?” Aubrey asked.
    “I say she did. Not because it was there, but because she expected it to be. There are any number of simple experiments that prove your knowledge and emotion affect your actual perception. If you look at a sign just at the edge of your visual range, you can experience the letters becoming sharper when someone tells you what they are. This isn’t even controversial.”
    “Okay, but back to the data,” I said. “The thing in the dreams. Day residue?”
    Oonishi glanced his annoyance at me. I wasn’t doing a great job of letting Chogyi take point, but the further we veered from the issue at hand, the more impatient I got. I saw Kim nodding as if in agreement. Someone at the table behind us laughed at something, a high, masculine sound.
    “If there was something,” Oonishi said, “that all the subjects had seen—a movie or a popular commercial—I would have had an explanation of the image’s recurrence. They would all have seen it recently, and so when they lost the input from their optic nerves, they would be primed to impose that image on the visual cortex from below, as it were.”
    “Didn’t work out,” Chogyi Jake said.
    “No. It didn’t. I talked to the subjects after that session. None of them identified the images. They didn’t even remember having dreamed them. And then, when the images started coming at the same time . . .”
    “So it began two months ago,” Ex said.
    “This did,” Oonishi said. “My study did. But I wasn’t looking before then. It might be something that’s been happening for years. Decades.”
    Kim didn’t bring up the anecdotal evidence she’d heard—the walk-aways or the people coming up from anesthetic saying foreign phrases. She was paging through Oonishi’s study logs. Her mouth pressed thin, and her eyebrows drew in toward each other.
    “Do your subjects have any recollection of the dreams now?” Chogyi Jake asked.
    “I haven’t asked,” Oonishi said, and then, pronouncing each word very carefully, “I have been afraid to.”
    “We may need to explore it,” Chogyi Jake said.
    In the uncomfortable silence, our waiter