Hypnagogia. The threshold state between waking and sleep the hallway, the foyer, the anteroom of unconsciousness. The place where the brain loosens its grip on the real and allows the unreal to seep in through the cracks. Maren had written her doctoral thesis on it. She'd measured its electrical signature, mapped its neural correlates, published three papers on its role in creative cognition and trauma processing. She knew it the way an architect knows a doorway: as a structure, a function, a transition between two rooms.
She had not, until this week, considered the possibility that someone might use it as an entrance.
The insight arrived on Thursday, at 4 a.m., in the way that important insights often arrive not through analysis but through the failure of analysis, through the moment when the conscious mind, exhausted by its own rigor, steps aside and lets something older and less precise take the wheel.
She was rereading her own published work. Not the trial reports her earlier research, the foundational papers she'd written at Johns Hopkins and Zürich. The work that had made her name, or what passed for a name in the narrow corridors of sleep neuroscience. She was looking for the thing she'd built that someone else had turned into a weapon.
She found it in a paper from six years ago: "Targeted Hippocampal Consolidation During Non-REM Sleep: A Framework for Memory Enhancement." Her paper. Her framework. Her data showing that the brain, during the deepest phase of slow-wave sleep, entered a state of extraordinary plasticity a window during which memory traces could be selectively strengthened by external stimulation at specific frequencies.
Six hertz.
She'd published the frequency. She'd published the timing protocol. She'd published the neural pathway the exact hippocampal circuit that was most receptive during slow-wave consolidation. She'd done this because that was what scientists did: they published, they shared, they built on each other's work. Knowledge was meant to be open. Knowledge was meant to be safe.
But she'd given someone a blueprint. And that someone had taken her framework for strengthening existing memories and reversed it building a protocol that didn't just strengthen what was already there, but wrote new material into the hippocampal circuit during the window she'd identified. Her drug kept the window open. The 6 Hz signal filled it.
She closed the laptop and sat in the kitchen and felt the particular shame of a scientist who has built something beautiful and discovered it has teeth.
• •
Friday morning, she called two subjects.
Not through the official check-in system she used her personal phone, calling the numbers she'd pulled from the trial database in her unauthorized access session. She told herself this was necessary. She told herself the breach of protocol was proportional to the breach of consent. She told herself several things and believed approximately half of them.
The first call was to Marcus Cole, the philosophy student. He answered with the distracted warmth of a graduate student who is always slightly afraid that any phone call might be his advisor. Maren asked him to describe the funeral memory again, in as much detail as possible.
He did. The grey suit. The rain. The stone church. But he added something new something he hadn't mentioned in his original report.
"There's a detail I keep coming back to," he said. "The church has a window stained glass, blue and gold. And in the window there's an image I can almost see but not quite. It's like looking at something through water. I know it's there, but the resolution isn't high enough to read."
"Resolution," Maren repeated. The word struck her as significant not poetic but technical. Resolution was a data term. The memory had resolution, which meant it had been encoded at a specific fidelity, and the fidelity wasn't high enough to render fine details. A real memory would degrade over time, losing precision gradually. But it wouldn't have a fixed resolution limit. Only a constructed memory one assembled from compressed data would have a resolution ceiling.
She thanked Marcus and hung up and stared at the wall for forty-five seconds, during which she reorganized her entire understanding of what the Phase 0 protocol was doing.
It wasn't just implanting memories. It was implanting compressed memories reduced-fidelity copies of real experiences, stripped of fine detail, retaining only the emotionally salient components. The grey suit. The rain. The grief. These were the high-priority elements the ones the hippocampus would latch onto first, the ones that made a memory feel real. The fine details the stained-glass image, the specific face of the dead man, the names of the mourners were below the compression threshold. They were there, but blurred. Present, but unreadable.
This was not crude technology. This was sophisticated. This was, Maren thought with a chill that had nothing to do with the November air leaking through her kitchen window, elegant.
• •
The second call was to Dolores Aguilar.
Dolores answered on the first ring. Her voice had the quality of a woman who had been waiting by the phone not for Maren specifically, but for someone who might explain what was happening inside her head.
"Dr. Shaw. Thank you for calling me back."
"Mrs. Aguilar, I'd like to come see you. If that's all right."
"Please. Leonard will make coffee. He's very worried about me."
Maren drove to Revere. The Aguilar home was a small, meticulous Cape Cod on a side street three blocks from the beach the kind of house that a retired teacher and her electrician husband would buy in the 1980s and maintain with the stubborn pride of people who believe that care is a form of love. The walkway was shoveled despite the fact that it hadn't snowed. The mailbox was freshly painted. The front garden, dormant now, showed the skeletal architecture of roses that would bloom in June.
Dolores met her at the door. She was sixty-three, compact, with short silver hair and the posture of a woman who had spent thirty-five years commanding the attention of teenagers upright, shoulders back, chin level, a body that communicated authority even in retirement. Her eyes were red.
"Come in, please."
The house smelled of coffee and something fainter lemon furniture polish, maybe, or the dried flowers in the vase on the hallway table. Clean. Deliberate. The house of a woman who managed her environment because it was the one thing she could still manage.
Leonard appeared from the kitchen. He was sixty-five, barrel-chested, with the thick hands of a man who'd worked with wire and conduit for forty years. He carried a tray with three mugs and a plate of shortbread that he'd clearly arranged with the care of someone who was trying to make something normal happen in the middle of something that wasn't.
"Doctor," he said. His voice was cautious. He set the tray down and sat in the armchair by the window and did not leave, and Maren understood that Leonard was not the kind of man who left when things were difficult.
Dolores sat on the couch. She placed her hands in her lap, one on top of the other, a gesture of self-containment that Maren recognized from years of clinical observation. Dolores was holding herself together. Literally.
"Tell me what's been happening," Maren said.
"I remember Leonard's funeral."
She said it flatly, the way you say a fact that you've said so many times it's worn smooth of inflection. Leonard, in the armchair, flinched. A small movement the kind of flinch that a man who's heard this before still can't get used to.
"Tell me everything."
Dolores told her.
The church was stone. Old stone grey, with lichen in the mortar joints. The door was wood, heavy, with iron hinges that creaked. It was raining. Not hard the kind of steady, cold rain that doesn't care about you, that falls the same on the living and the dead.
Leonard was in a grey suit. She'd picked it out herself the one from their daughter's wedding, the one he'd complained was too tight in the shoulders. He was in the casket with his hands folded and his eyes closed and he looked, Dolores said, "like he was listening to something I couldn't hear."
She remembered the prayers. She remembered the priest Father somebody, she couldn't see his face clearly. She remembered the mourners eight or ten, standing in the rain with umbrellas. She remembered a single bell, ringing once.
And she remembered the grief.
"It's not like regular sadness," she said. Her composure was precise but visibly maintained, like a mason wall where you could see the mortar lines. "Regular sadness has edges. You feel it, and then you feel something else. But this this grief is located. It's in my chest, right here." She placed her hand below her left collarbone. "And it doesn't move. It doesn't change. It's like a stone that someone put inside me."
Leonard reached across the space between the armchair and the couch and took his wife's hand. He was alive. He was sitting right there, sixty-five years old, strong as a bridge abutment, holding his wife's hand while she remembered his death.
"Mrs. Aguilar," Maren said, "when did this memory first appear?"
"Week seven of the trial. I woke up one morning and Leonard was snoring he always snores, you can hear it through the wall and I knew he was alive, I knew it, but I also remembered him being dead. Both things were true at the same time. That's the worst part, Doctor. It's not that I believe he's dead. It's that I remember it. Those aren't the same thing."
Maren looked at Leonard. His jaw was tight. His eyes were wet. He was not crying he was holding the space around crying, the perimeter of it, maintaining it like a man who understood that his wife needed him to be solid more than she needed him to be emotional.
"Has anyone at Sollen contacted you about this?" Maren asked.
"I called the check-in line. They said it sounded like a vivid dream and to note it in my sleep diary."
"Have you spoken to anyone else?"
"Just Leonard. And now you."
Maren reached across the coffee table and took Dolores's other hand the one that wasn't holding Leonard's. It was an unprofessional gesture, a breach of clinical distance, and Maren did it anyway because some moments required a scientist to stop being a scientist and start being a person, and this was one of them.
"I'm going to find out what's happening," she said. "I promise you that."
"Do you know what's happening?"
Maren looked at Dolores's face the red eyes, the set jaw, the silver hair that she probably styled every morning because discipline was how she survived and at Leonard, alive and terrified in his armchair, and she thought: I owe this woman the truth.
But the truth was dangerous. The truth, right now, was a thing that could get people hurt could get Sollen's legal department mobilized, could get the trial shut down before Maren had the evidence she needed, could get Dolores and Leonard caught in a corporate machine that ran on silence and settlement checks.
"I'm investigating," she said. "There are some irregularities in the trial data that I'm concerned about. I can't tell you more yet, but I want you to know this is not in your head. This is not a dream. Something is happening, and I am going to find out what."
Dolores looked at her for a long moment. Then she nodded, once, the way a woman nods who has spent thirty-five years assessing whether people mean what they say and has decided, in this instance, to trust.
"Thank you, Doctor."
Leonard walked her to the door. On the porch, out of Dolores's earshot, he said: "She doesn't sleep anymore."
"I know."
"She lies next to me and she's awake and I can feel her looking at me. Checking. Making sure I'm still breathing." His voice cracked a small, clean fracture, the sound of a man reaching the edge of what stoicism can hold. "She's checking if I'm alive."
Maren touched his arm. There was nothing to say. She walked to her car and sat behind the wheel for three full minutes before she trusted herself to drive.
She drove back to Boston with the shape of Leonard's grief in her chest not implanted, not artificial, but earned. The real kind. The kind that enters through the eyes and lives in the body and doesn't need a 6 Hz signal to install itself.
She'd made a decision. It had formed somewhere between Dolores's living room and the on-ramp to 93, in the space between the shortbread and the rain, in the moment Leonard's voice cracked.
She was going to burn Sollen to the ground.
Not figuratively. Not eventually. Not after further investigation or additional data or a well-reasoned cost-benefit analysis. She was going to gather the evidence and deliver it to someone who could use it and then she was going to watch the building fall.
She didn't know yet how. She didn't know yet when. But the decision was made, and it lived in her body now in her hands on the steering wheel, in her jaw, in the cold clarity behind her eyes and it felt, for the first time in months, like something solid. Something she could trust.