The story broke at 6 a.m. on a Wednesday.
Rina Lacey's article went live on the Globe's website at 5:58 a.m. two minutes ahead of the coordinated release she'd arranged with the federal prosecutor's office, because journalists have a constitutional allergy to being second and Rina had been in the business long enough to know that two minutes could mean the difference between setting the narrative and chasing it.
The headline read: SOLLEN PHARMACEUTICALS ACCUSED OF UNAUTHORIZED MEMORY MODIFICATION IN CLINICAL TRIAL
Beneath it, a subhead: Whistleblower alleges company used sleep drug to implant false memories in hundreds of subjects.
Maren read the article on her phone at the kitchen table, where she'd been sitting since 2:38 a.m. She read it the way she read polysomnography data once for the surface, once for the structure, once for what was missing. Rina had written it with the controlled precision of a journalist who understood that some stories were so explosive they required understatement to be believed. No editorializing. No speculation. Just facts, sourced and attributed, laid out in a sequence that led the reader from the existence of Somniplex-R to the Phase 0 trial to the 6 Hz protocol to the testimony of affected subjects.
Maren was identified by name. She'd agreed to this. She'd agreed because anonymity was a luxury for people whose fingerprints weren't on the research, and hers were on every page.
The article included a quote from her: "I designed a drug to help people sleep. Someone inside my company used it to rewrite their minds. I am one of the people whose mind was rewritten."
She read it and thought it sounded like something a person would say on a stage, in a movie, in a version of reality that was clean and dramatic and well-lit. It didn't sound like something said at 9 p.m. in a journalist's office while eating a protein bar and trying not to cry.
But it was accurate. That was what mattered.
• •
The federal investigation was announced at 7 a.m. via a press release from the U.S. Attorney's office, District of Massachusetts. Assistant U.S. Attorney Catherine Hale a woman Maren had never met and whose name she knew only through Henrik's law-school friend had reviewed the Phase 0 data overnight and concluded that there was probable cause for a criminal investigation into Sollen Pharmaceuticals for violations of federal human-research protections, the Federal Food, Drug, and Cosmetic Act, and wire fraud.
Sollen's stock began its descent at market open. The first hour was orderly a controlled decline of eight percent, the kind of drop that institutional investors manage with the practiced calm of people who lose money the way other people lose pens. By 10 a.m., the decline was no longer orderly. The stock fell 23 percent. By noon, it had fallen 40 percent, and the financial news channels were using words like freefall and catastrophic and unprecedented, which were words that Maren knew to be accurate because she had measured the thing that was falling and understood exactly how high it had been.
The Sollen board convened an emergency session at 9 a.m. Maren was not invited. She learned later, through Rina, that the session lasted four hours and resulted in the suspension of the Somniplex trial, the appointment of an independent oversight committee, and the dismissal of Lena Voss not fired, technically, but "placed on administrative leave pending the outcome of the investigation," which was corporate language for the space between the cliff and the ground.
Lena was arrested at her home at 6:14 p.m.
Maren did not see the arrest. No one she knew saw the arrest. But a neighbor a retired librarian who lived two doors down and had no idea who Lena was beyond the nice woman who brought me cookies at Christmas described it to a local news crew with the bewildered specificity of someone reporting an event they hadn't prepared to witness.
"There were two cars," the neighbor said. "Black. They parked very neatly. Four people got out. They knocked. She opened the door. She was wearing a blue sweater. She looked... calm. She looked like she'd been expecting them."
Maren heard this on the evening news while eating dinner with Alma. Alma was not watching the news she was drawing a seal, because seals, she had recently decided, were the second-friendliest animal after belugas and Maren turned the volume down and listened to the neighbor describe Lena's blue sweater and felt nothing.
Not relief. Not satisfaction. Not the dark, complex pleasure that some people call justice.
Nothing.
She felt nothing because the thing she'd been carrying the fear, the anger, the violation, the moral weight of eight hundred sleeping subjects whose minds had been written to without consent had been handed off. It was Rina's now. It was Catherine Hale's. It was the federal government's and the Globe's editorial board's and the public's. Maren had been the vessel, and the vessel was empty, and emptiness, she discovered, was not peace but the place where peace might eventually grow if someone remembered to water it.
• •
Maren gave her deposition the following Thursday.
The federal prosecutor's office occupied a windowless conference room in the Moakley Courthouse, a building that smelled of coffee and copy toner and the particular institutional anxiety of spaces where truth is a technical process rather than a moral one. Catherine Hale was a Black woman in her late forties with close-cropped hair and reading glasses and the steady, unhurried demeanor of someone who had been underestimated so often she'd stopped noticing. She asked questions the way a surgeon makes incisions precisely, economically, with complete confidence in the anatomy of the case.
The deposition took nine hours. Maren answered every question. She described the Phase 0 data, the 6 Hz protocol, the template library, her designation as M-1. She described the aquarium memory how it had lived in her mind as truth for nineteen months, how she'd felt the temperature of the water and seen the whale turn and believed, completely, that she had been there.
She described the Thanksgiving dinner that didn't happen. The green cardigan that didn't exist. The conference she could quote from but couldn't find in any program.
"Dr. Shaw," Catherine Hale said, "can you identify, with certainty, which of your memories from the past two years are genuine?"
"No."
"Can you estimate?"
"I can verify approximately sixty percent through external evidence photographs, emails, witnesses. The remaining forty percent are unverifiable. Some of them are probably real. Some of them were almost certainly implanted. I have no way to distinguish between the two."
Hale made a note. She did not react visibly. The stenographer typed.
"How does that affect your daily life?"
Maren considered this. The fluorescent light buzzed. The conference table was brown. The coffee in front of her was cold.
"I carry a notebook," she said. "I write down things as they happen what I eat, what Alma says, what the weather is. Not because I'm afraid of forgetting. Because I need evidence that the present is real. I need proof that I'm living my own life, not a version someone wrote for me."
She paused.
"I don't want to be the face of this," she said. "I want to be the footnote."
Hale looked at her over the reading glasses and said, quietly: "Dr. Shaw, you're going to be more than a footnote."
• •
In the days that followed, Maren did what she could.
She called Dolores Aguilar and told her what had happened. Dolores listened in silence for forty-five seconds and then said: "Leonard is making pot roast. Would you like to come to dinner?"
Maren went. She sat at the Aguilars' kitchen table and ate pot roast and drank red wine just one glass, because she was driving and watched Dolores and Leonard interact with the comfortable, worn-in rhythm of a couple who had been married for forty years and had survived something that neither of them fully understood. Leonard reached across the table and touched Dolores's hand, and Dolores let him, and the touch was brief and unremarkable and it was the most important thing in the room.
She contacted Marcus Cole and Patricia Huang and Frank DeLuca. She told them what the trial had done to their memories. She told them that the investigation would likely require their testimony. She answered their questions the scientific ones, not the existential ones, because the existential questions didn't have answers, not yet, and maybe not ever.
She called Henrik. He was staying with his law-school friend in Brookline, sleeping on a futon and eating takeout and experiencing the particular liminal existence of a former data analyst who had become a federal witness. His voice sounded different not better, but clearer, as though the thing that had been pressing on his vocal cords for months had been partially removed.
"The Portuguese song," he said.
"What about it?"
"I can still hear it. Before I fall asleep. Your grandmother's voice. But it's it's fainter now. Like someone turned the volume down."
"The implanted memories may degrade over time without reinforcement," Maren said. "Without the drug maintaining the consolidation window, the hippocampal encoding isn't being refreshed. The traces will weaken."
"Will I lose it completely?"
"Probably."
A silence. Then: "I think I'll miss it."
Maren did not know what to say to this. So she said: "Her name was Avó Beatriz. She lived in Portland. She made fig jam."
"Thank you."
"For what?"
"For letting me know whose song it was."
She hung up and sat in the kitchen and looked at the drawings on the refrigerator and did not cry. She had been not crying with professional discipline for two weeks, and the discipline was holding, and she was grateful for it because the alternative was to feel everything she'd been deferring and she wasn't ready for that yet.
She wasn't sure she'd ever be ready. But she was beginning to suspect that readiness was not a prerequisite for most of the important things in life it was just a story you told yourself while you were already doing them.