The diner was called Sal's, though no one named Sal had worked there in eleven years, according to the laminated history on the back of the menu. It sat on a block of Dorchester Avenue where the neighborhood couldn't decide what it was becoming a laundromat, a nail salon, a bodega selling plantains and international calling cards, a yoga studio that had opened six months ago and already looked tired. Sal's occupied the corner like a man who'd been sitting in the same chair so long the chair had taken his shape.
Maren arrived at 1:15 p.m. Henrik was already there.
He sat in a booth near the back, facing the door a choice that could have been tactical or could have been anxious, and Maren suspected it was both. He'd changed since the loading dock: different jacket, no lanyard, the haunted-rabbit look in his eyes replaced by something steadier, though steadiness on Henrik seemed to require deliberate effort, the way a person with a tremor might hold a cup carefully enough to keep the coffee from sloshing.
He had a cup of coffee. He had not drunk it. The surface had developed the thin, iridescent film that coffee forms when it sits too long the visible record of neglected intentions.
"Dr. Shaw."
"Maren. If we're going to do this, we're not doing it with titles."
She slid into the booth across from him. The vinyl seat exhaled as she sat a sound like a small, tired animal. The table was formica, patterned with boomerangs, chipped at the edges. A sugar caddy. A napkin dispenser. A plastic bottle of ketchup so red it looked conceptual.
A waitress materialized fifties, efficient, the kind of woman who could carry four plates up one arm and a conversation on the other. Maren ordered black coffee. The waitress didn't write it down. This was the kind of place where the order lived in the waitress's head or it didn't get made, and both outcomes were equally likely.
"Talk," Maren said.
Henrik talked.
He was thirty-one. Born in Milwaukee. BA in information systems from UMass. He'd come to Boston for a data analyst position at a health-tech startup that folded within a year, and then Sollen had hired him not for his skills, particularly, but because he was cheap and willing to work hours that the more expensive analysts refused. Third floor. Report formatting. Chart generation. The kind of work that required enough intelligence to understand the data and not enough authority to ask questions about it.
"I'm furniture," he said. "The kind of employee who gets access to systems because nobody thinks I'm important enough to be a risk."
"But you're in the trial."
"I volunteered. They sent an internal email $2,000 for participation in a Phase III sleep study, all overnights covered, free medical screening. I've got forty thousand in student loans and my rent just went up. I'd have volunteered to test rocket fuel for that kind of money."
His hands were around the untouched coffee cup, not for warmth but for something to hold. His nails were bitten. Not chewed bitten with the precise, systematic thoroughness of someone who needed to control the one body he was sure was his.
"When did the memories start?" Maren asked.
"Week six. I was on the subway going to work and I suddenly remembered a funeral. It was look, I don't go to funerals. My grandparents are all still alive. Nobody I know has died. But I was standing on the Red Line at 8 a.m. and I could feel the rain on my face and I could see the grave and the grey suit and I could hear a bell ringing, once, like the bell was tired " He stopped. Swallowed. "I thought I was losing my mind."
"But you investigated instead."
"I'm an analyst. It's the only thing I'm good at." A pause. "No. I'm also good at being invisible. Which, as it turns out, is the same skill."
He told her about the discovery. A routine archive migration moving old data partitions to new servers, the digital equivalent of cleaning out a filing cabinet. He'd found the P0 folder on a partition that wasn't indexed in Sollen's directory structure. It had no file owner, no access log, no encryption as though someone had hidden it by making it unimportant rather than by making it secure.
"I opened it because I was bored," he said. "And then I wasn't bored."
He'd recognized the polysomnography format PSG-4, the same platform his own trial data was being recorded on before it was converted to Sollen's proprietary system. He'd opened a recording, seen the sleep data, and run a basic spectral analysis because he'd been taught to do that during his onboarding training, which had included a two-hour module on "data quality assurance" that he suspected was designed to make analysts feel like scientists.
The 6 Hz signal had shown up on the first pass. He didn't know what it was. He'd emailed a friend from his UMass cohort who'd gone into biomedical engineering and asked, hypothetically, what a 6 Hz signal embedded in a slow-wave EEG trace might mean.
The friend had replied: Hypothetically? It means someone's trying to write to the brain while it's asleep. Where did you find this?
Henrik hadn't answered.
"That's when I started looking at the file names," he said. "P0-001 through P0-014. Fourteen subjects. No names, no consent references, no institutional affiliation. But the dates March, two years ago were before your trial started. Before you were hired."
"How did you know about me?"
"Everyone on the third floor knows about you, Maren. You're the Somniplex researcher. Your face was on the internal newsletter. When I found the Phase 0 data, I started asking myself who at Sollen would know enough about sleep neuroscience to build a 6 Hz memory-transplant protocol, and the answer was either you or nobody." He paused. "But the dates didn't work. You weren't at Sollen when Phase 0 happened. So either you built the protocol before you were hired which would mean Sollen recruited you specifically because of this work or someone else built it using your published research."
"Or both."
"Or both." He looked at her. His eyes were brown, slightly reddened, the eyes of a man who had been sleeping inside a pharmaceutical experiment and was no longer sure what sleep was for. "I almost didn't give you the drive. I almost just... quit. Left Sollen, moved back to Milwaukee, got a job at a call center, and tried to forget the funeral that isn't mine."
"Why didn't you?"
"Because the memories are getting worse. And because " He stopped. Started again. "Because there's a song. A woman singing in Portuguese. I don't speak Portuguese. I've never known anyone who speaks Portuguese. But I can hear this woman's voice, and the melody is it's not sad, exactly. It's tender. It's the sound of someone singing to a child they love."
Maren's hands were flat on the table. She could feel the formica under her palms cool, synthetic, real. She held onto it.
"That's my grandmother's song," she said.
Henrik's face shifted. Not surprise something worse. Confirmation. "I thought it might be."
"It's called Barquinho. It means 'little boat.' My avó used to sing it to me in the summers in Portland. She died when I was nineteen."
"Maren, I'm sorry "
"Don't. Not yet." She breathed. "If you have that memory if it's in your head that means it was recorded from mine first. Extracted. Copied. And then implanted in you during the Phase III trial."
"That's what I think, yes."
"Which means the Phase III drug isn't clean. The signal is still active. The 6 Hz protocol is running on the current trial participants, not just the Phase 0 subjects."
Henrik nodded. He pulled a folded sheet of paper from his jacket pocket a printout, old-fashioned, the kind of analog record you make when you don't trust digital systems anymore. "I did a side-by-side comparison. The Phase III polysomnography recordings at least the ones I had access to before they revoked my terminal show the same 6 Hz signal. It's fainter. Better hidden. But it's there."
Maren took the paper. The printout showed two spectral analyses layered on transparency Phase 0 in red, Phase III in blue. The 6 Hz peak was visible in both. In Phase 0, it was bold, almost crude. In Phase III, it was refined smoothed, compressed, woven into the surrounding neural noise with an elegance that Maren might have admired if it hadn't been used to rewrite people's minds without their consent.
"This isn't just a side effect," she said. "This is the product. The insomnia cure is the delivery mechanism. The real technology is the memory transplant."
"And your research is the engine."
She sat with this. The waitress brought her coffee. Maren wrapped her hands around the cup and felt the heat through the ceramic and thought about her grandmother on a porch in Portland, singing about a little boat, and about a stranger in a diner who carried that song in his head because someone at Sollen had decided it was useful raw material.
"I need the full database," she said. "Not the fragment. The original Phase 0 server. The donor recordings, the signal templates, the subject files with full identifiers. If we're going to prove this, we need the source."
"It's in the sub-basement. Third level. Segregated network no internet connection, no wireless, no remote access. You can only reach it from a terminal inside the room."
"Have you been inside?"
"Once. During a maintenance cycle, before they locked me out. The room is behind the sleep lab you use. There's a corridor that doesn't appear on the building directory. Keycard access only and not regular keycards. Level 4 clearance."
"What level are you?"
"Two. I was Two."
"What level am I?"
"Three."
"So I can't get in."
"Not through normal channels. But the system has a flaw." He leaned forward, and for the first time his voice carried something other than fear a technician's quiet pride in understanding how things broke. "Every Tuesday at 2 a.m., the keycard system runs a firmware update. During the update, the authorization database cycles through a reset. For approximately twelve minutes, every revoked card is temporarily reactivated, and every level restriction is suspended. It's a legacy flaw from the original security contractor. I found it eight months ago and flagged it in an internal ticket. The ticket was never resolved."
"Twelve minutes."
"Twelve minutes."
She drank her coffee. It was terrible thin, slightly burnt, the coffee of a diner that understood its role was not to provide good coffee but to provide a surface on which two people could have a conversation that couldn't happen anywhere else.
"I need a few days," she said. "I need to go back to work and act normal and make sure Lena doesn't suspect I've seen the Phase 0 data. I need to find out who else at Sollen is involved. And I need to " She paused. "I need to figure out which of my memories are real."
"You can't," Henrik said gently. "I've been trying for four months. There's no test. No scanner. The brain doesn't keep receipts."
"Then I'll work with what I have."
She put money on the table too much, but she wanted to leave and the waitress was in the back and Maren was not a person who left without paying even when the building was on fire. She stood.
"Henrik."
"Yeah."
"The song. Can you still hear it?"
He looked at her with an expression that was, for a single unguarded moment, not anxious or analytical or brave, just sad. "Every night. Right before I fall asleep. Your grandmother had a beautiful voice."
Maren left the diner and walked four blocks to the T station and stood on the platform in the cold and for the first time in months did not think about data or spectral analysis or incidence reports. She thought about a porch in Portland and a woman who smelled like lemon and lavender and who sang a song about a little boat, and about the fact that this memory the most private, most tender thing she owned was living now in a stranger's hippocampus because someone at Sollen had decided it was content.