Free The Reborn (The Day Eight Series Part 1) by Ray Mazza

Damon think he might be a spy from another company? “No,” said Trevor.
    “Like I said, try to relax... Have you ever been diagnosed with a mental disorder?”
    “Definitely not,” said Trevor.
    “Remember,” said Damon, “as few words as possible.”
    “Sorry.”
    “If I told you confidential information, do you believe that you would be able to keep that information a secret?”
    “Yes.” But what if Damon told Trevor he murdered his daughter? Or was part of a corrupt crime ring? Or what if he—
    “I’m getting some anomalies here,” said Damon. “You don’t believe the answer you just gave me.”
    “Well, I—”
    “No need to explain. I’m glad you failed that one. Let me reword. If I told you confidential information, do you believe that you would be able to keep the information a secret, as long you believed there to be no strong moral basis for divulging said information?”
    “Yes,” said Trevor, this time without question.
    “Good. Much better. Moving on. Do you like children?”
    “Mostly.” Trevor thought about the child he saw the other day when he was eating ice cream, he added, “But I’m not sure I’ll make a good parent.”
    “And why not?”
    Trevor had never put his finger on it. “I… I don’t know.”
    “Okay, that will do,” said Damon. “Now I’m going to say a sequence of phrases. This time, do not respond. Merely listen to what I say and continue to look into the optical recorder.”
    “Okay.”
    “Here we go,”  Damon began to read phrases, pausing for a second between each one: “Alpha. Day Eight. Trevor Leighton. Computers. Clouds. Paxton. Jail. Brain. Mayor. Yogurt. Stanislaw Ulam. FBI. Artificial intelligence. Apple. CIA. Allison. Quantum Mechanics. Zygote…”
    Damon continued like this for fifteen minutes straight. Trevor thought he felt himself twitch at a few of them and wondered what that meant. Other words he didn’t even know. He tried not to let his imagination get carried away for fear of setting off some sort of alarm on Damon’s machine.
    “… Oxygen. Wiretap. Child abuse. Fruit. President. Paradigm shift. Ezra. Thalamus. Damon Winters. United Nations. Aluminum. Flavor. Up. Accelerating returns. Omega.”
    Then Damon went silent. Trevor heard him tapping at a keyboard and clicking with his mouse, but didn’t look because he was unsure whether he was allowed to break his stare with the camera lens.
    After what felt like five minutes but was probably far less, Damon said, “Okay, you can get up now.”
    Trevor stood up, stretched, and rubbed his eyes.
    “During that last examination,” said Damon, “I was monitoring areas of your brain in conjunction with other physiological responses to the phrases, such as your micro-expressions and pupil size. A micro-expression – if you’re not aware – is an unconscious and extremely quick muscular reaction in your face in response to something you see, hear, think about, et cetera. They’re so quick, in fact, that about ninety percent of the population never notices them at all. We make these micro-expressions all the time. If you’re good enough to read them, you can become a human lie-detector, though their usefulness goes much deeper than that.
    “Using your micro-expression responses to the phrases paired with your brain activity,” Damon explained, “I measured your level of recognition of each phrase as it stood alone and as related to the other phrases, as well as your feelings about each. “Some phrases were relevant to my concerns while others were not, like the word ‘yogurt.’  Yogurt was a control. It would be an extremely rare case that your brain would show a connection between yogurt and the CIA. However, if there was a meaningful relationship displayed between ‘wiretap’ and ‘Day Eight,’ then I would have reason to be concerned. If we did this long enough, we might even be able to construct a crude model of your cortex,” he said, tapping on his