Free The Dream Machine: Book 6, The Eddie McCloskey Paranormal Mystery Series (The Unearthed) by Evan Ronan Page A

He spat out the word like it was bile. “And, if you’ll forgive me for judging a book by its cover, but from the look of you, I don’t get the sense you have much to lose.”
    Enough Mr. Sort of Nice Guy. “Listen, Zane, I’m here to do a job. You saw those videos or dreams or whatever they actually are, so you know people are going to get hurt. Some of them, probably dead. I don’t give a shit about your legacy, or the patents you’re chasing, and I don’t want to be cut in on whatever you’re eventually going to sell. All I know is there might be a devastating car accident on a local interstate and some asshole is going to violate a woman. Now I’m going to ask you what I need to know, and you’re going to tell me.”
    Zane just stared at me. “It is quite depressing that the federal government has to resort to hiring someone like you. They must be desperate.”
    “Everybody’s desperate when there’s an emergency,” I said. “Because there aren’t enough people willing to step up going around.”
    I sat where Hawaiian Shirt Guy had been.
    “Fine.” Zane folded his arms. “What do you want to know?”
    “How are you...” I searched for the right word. “… recording dreams?”
    Zane said, “We call it the dream machine.”
    ***
    The dream machine.
    It sounded like a sixteen-year-old boy’s description of his favorite car. As soon as some corporation bought the patent or licensed the tech or did whatever they could do legally, their marketers would be the first ones in, changing the name to make twenty-first century, trending and trendable.
    “The dream machine?”
    “You know what an MRI is.”
    “I do.”
    “Magnetic resonance imaging,” Zane explained anyway, going classic doctor on me. “We utilize what is known as functional magnetic resonance imaging—”
    “An MRI is a snapshot in time. A functional MRI is more like a video.”
    “Right…” Zane didn’t want to be impressed by my passing knowledge.
    “A couple paranormal scientists have been trying to get funding for an fMRI. They wanted to measure brain activity of patients in environments conducive to paranormal activities.”
    Zane grew skeptical.
    I said, “The idea is to measure brain activity and see if it precedes what someone believes is a paranormal event. In other words, was the person in such a state that their brain created what they thought they saw? It would explain a lot, especially the observer’s unshakeable belief that they’d experienced something.”
    “Right…well, the fMRI is attached every night, or every time our patients go to sleep. The fMRI data is passed through the dream machine, which interprets and recodes the information into visuals.”
    So three links in the chain, the first from the person to the fMRI, the second from the fMRI to the dream machine, the third from the dream machine into the research facility’s systems.
    “How does the fMRI work?” I asked.
    Zane went full-blown doctor on me. Scratching absently behind his ear, he turned to the white board behind him, erased what looked like hieroglyphics to me, and drew a bird’s eye view of a human brain.
    “Blood flow.” Uncapping a red marker, he inked in one spot on the brain. “Blood contains iron, hence we use magnetic resonance. When brain cells use energy, there is a change in blood flow. That change is our clue. It tells us what area of the brain has activated.”
    I nodded, sort of getting it. In high school I’d gotten an A in bio. Not because I was good at science, but because I’d gotten the answers to the exam ahead of time from Stan of all people, which was bizarre because Stan had that rare combination of book smarts and work ethic. He didn’t need to study, but he did, religiously. To this day, he still refused to divulge his source for the answers. I made a mental note to bother him about it later.
    “Makes sense. But how does the dream machine know what the brain activity data it’s receiving from the fMRI