I lay propped in bed, my computer on my lap, exploring one of the as-of-yet unmapped caverns of this case.
Several of the neuroscience articles Rodale had sent me cited the Nobel-prize-winning research of Benjamin Libet, who’d done experiments in the late twentieth-century on initiation of action, intention, volitional acts, and consciousness.
Now I was scouring the Internet, reading about his work.
Apparently, Dr. Libet would record unconscious neural impulses while research participants anticipated and then performed simple tasks such as tapping a button or squeezing a ball. For example he might tell them, “As soon as you are aware of which button you wish to press, do so.”
By noting on a cathode ray oscilloscope the millisecond at which the participant was first aware of the urge to act and then measuring that against the brain’s electrical activity (and taking into account the time it took for their muscles to respond), he would compare the timing of the unconscious neural activity to that of the participant’s awareness of their intention to act.
And he found something surprising.
In almost every case, unconscious neural synapses preceded the conscious choice, or volitional act, that the person made-usually by about half a second.
Some skeptics have pointed out that the simple act of being observed or of rehearsing in your mind how you will respond during the experiment could be partially responsible for the precognitive neural responses. However, if you took the research findings at face value, you’d be forced to conclude that the unconscious mind determined the action or, to put it bluntly, a decision was made, and then five hundred milliseconds later, the test subject believed that she was making it.
The conscious mind took credit for a course of action that the unconscious had already determined.
And that’s where things got interesting.
Scientists have long known that some spinal reflexes, such as pulling your hand away from a flame, happen without a decision or any rational thought processes. But now, in the wake of Dr. Libet’s experiments and the recent discoveries in neuroscience, many scientists were apparently becoming convinced that complex decision-making also happens unconsciously, as a result of genetic coding being influenced by an individual’s environment and the context of a person’s experience and conditioning.
An uneasy thought began to squirm around inside of me.
This line of thinking-that our response to stimuli is shaped solely by natural processes: genetic makeup, brain chemistry, and neural synapses that are triggered by certain environmental cues-would mean that in all practicality, we are not free to consciously choose our actions. And if we are not free to choose, we are not at liberty to chart the course of our lives.
The inevitable conclusion, of course, was that “free will” would be an illusion.
And consequently, people would not be morally responsible for their behavior, because, in a sense, they would simply be acting out of instinct. After all, it would be unjust to hold someone accountable for something over which he had no control.
A few online searches confirmed what I feared: some killers had already called on neuroscientists to testify that their behavior was, in essence, hard-wired into their brains and that, given the environmental cues to which they were exposed, they had no choice but to act in the manner that they had. Thus, they could not be held responsible for the crime.
Because they were acting out of instinct…
An instinct for evil.
And astonishingly, this defense had been successful in at least half a dozen capital murder cases since October of last year; and now that the precedent had been set, it would undoubtedly become a more and more popular defense.
Science meets justice.
And justice loses.
But of course it wasn’t science itself that was battling justice, but rather the interpretation of one specific set of scientific experiments.
Yet it appeared that in this case, that was all it took.
The implications that this could have on criminal investigation and justice systems throughout the world was staggering.
Rapists, pedophiles, human rights violators could argue that they weren’t able to refrain from their actions because they were genetically determined to act the way they had, given the environmental cues present at the time of the crime. Therefore they should not be held accountable for their natural, instinctual response.
Cavern after cavern appeared before me… the Gunderson Foundation’s metacognition research… Dr. Libet’s intentionality experiments… the Project Rukh neurological findings… Congressman Fischer’s commitment to “a more progressive approach to curbing criminal behavior…”
For nearly an hour I considered the relationships between all of the dark tunnels of the case, and saw a number of possible directions they might be leading, but I ended up mired in conjecture rather than leaning on conclusions buttressed by solid evidence.
In time, the emotional toll of the day began to wear on me. I felt my concentration ebbing and exhaustion taking over.
At last, I set the computer aside and closed my eyes, but sleep did not come easily as I found myself drifting into and out of dreams of dead chimps and bloody luggage and black rain slanting around me and splashing like bleeding shadows on the ground.
While nearby, gorillas smashed mirrors into angular shards that reflected a splintered, skewed reality.
That I had become an intimate part of.
76 She woke up slowly. Back to the world. Back to herself. She was lying on the ground. She could tell that much, lying on her back. Her eyes were closed and her eyelids felt oppressively heavy, too heavy to open. She tried to move, but her body didn’t respond. Everything within her, around her, was a thick, vague dream. She smelled the moist, piney scent of a forest, laced with the harsh stench of death. The body farm. She heard a damp, crunching sound nearby, in a small rhythm with itself. Grating, pausing. Grating again. But all the smells, all the sounds were contained in a warm, liquid darkness that curled around, slowly, inside her head. And though her eyes were still closed, worms of color skirted in front of her, floated through the strange visions we all have while passing from sleep into the waking world. Time passed. With every moment the foul smell of decay grew worse. More of the rough scraping sound beside her. Scrape and crunch. Until finally, and with much effort, she opened her eyes and managed to tilt her head toward the sound. And in the diaphanous, mist-drenched moonlight, she saw a man nearby. Digging.
Brad must have noticed the movement as she turned her head toward him because he stopped what he was doing, drove the shovel’s blade into the ground, and rested one arm against the handle.
“It’s good to see you awake,” he said. “I was concerned I might have used too much Propotol, that your heart might have stopped. I’m really glad it didn’t. If you would have died, it would have completely ruined my surprise.”
“What?” she mumbled. “No…” Not because she didn’t understand, but because she was just beginning to.
“I’ll explain everything in a few minutes.” He raised the shovel again. “Let me just finish up here first.”
He scooped out a few more shovelfuls of dirt, and a sharp, rancid smell crawled across the ground.
The stench of rotten flesh was overwhelming, and Astrid felt like throwing up, but for some reason her body did not let her. Her throat clenched, but she didn’t vomit. And Brad didn’t appear bothered at all by the smell.
She had no idea how that could be.
He knelt and began alternating using a small brush and a gardening trowel to remove dirt from the hole.
Astrid’s eyes were starting to adjust to the night now, and she could tell by his movements that the hole wasn’t deep.
And she believed she knew what lay inside. The passage of time began to erase the weakness that had been pinning her to the ground. She could move her head more easily now, and she felt her strength gradually returning to her legs, her arms. She could wiggle her fingers and tip her feet to the side. Misty moonlight soaked the forest all around her.
Though she wasn’t strong enough to sit up, or fight, or run, at least she was finally able to think more clearly.
“What are you doing?” Her voice sounded weak. Distant. As if someone else were saying the words for her.
“I’m finishing what I started when I first found you on DuaLife.” He was still digging with the garden tools. “When I first chose you.”
“No,” she muttered. “I chose you.”
“Yes,” he said ambiguously, but she could tell he wasn’t actually agreeing with her. “For a while I was concerned that you might catch on, guess my intentions, predict the ending.” He was troweling out dirt as he spoke. “But it looks like you must have been too distracted by your little power trip to notice.”
He finished his work in the hole, set the trowel and brush aside.
She tried to make her voice sound steady, controlled, authoritative. “Take me back home. We’ll talk about this at the house.”
He walked around her so that he was no longer between her and the hole. Then he knelt beside her. “Do you know what causes fear?”
She was trying to gather her strength to sit up. “Brad, take me home.”
“When a person feels threatened in that place-that physical, emotional, or psychological place-”
“Brad-”
He put a finger to her lips. “Threatened in that place where she feels the most secure, there, in that moment, fear is born. And the more profound her sense of safety, the more acute the fear.”
“No,” she said. “It’s… you don’t understand-”
Softly, he brushed aside a fleck of dirt that must have dropped onto her cheek while he was shoveling. “That power, that sense of absolute mastery over life and death that you’ve become so addicted to, let’s see how you handle the opposite.”
He slid one hand beneath her back, the other beneath her legs, and lifted her.
She tried to squirm free but hadn’t yet regained enough strength. “I don’t…” Her words faded away. “I have to tell you something. ..”
He carried her toward the hole. “Yes?”
“I’m pregnant, Brad. Stop this. Now.”
He set her down beside the hole, but he did not reply, simply straightened out her arms and legs.
“I’m going to have your baby.”
The smell was terrible, overpowering.
She saw him reach to the side, into the darkness, retrieve a gag.
“I said I’m pregnant!”
He was leaning over her. “Astrid, you know how this goes. The victim begs, grovels, tells the oppressor whatever she can think of to get him to change his mind, but it’s not going to work. We both know it doesn’t-”
“I’ll prove it.” Desperation shot through her words. “Take me home!”
He paused and seemed to consider her request.
“It’s true,” she said. Despite herself, her voice cracked. “Please, please.”
“If you are telling the truth, if you really are pregnant, then this night will be even more special to me.” He bent over her and stretched out the gag. “Two for the price of one.” And before she could cry out or yell for help, he forced the gag into her mouth and secured it in place.
“Welcome to the fishbowl.”
Then he rolled her face-first into the hole.
On top of the rotting corpse.
77 She would have screamed if she were not gagged. She tried to push herself up, struggled to, but was still too weak, and he was pressing her down firmly, a knee bent against the small of her back. “Astrid, I’d like you to meet Riah Everson,” he said. “She was a thirty-eight-year-old mother of three. Died from a head injury two days ago after she slipped on a doll that her youngest daughter left at the top of the stairs.” Her cheek was resting against the moist skin of the corpse’s face. Desperately, desperately, she struggled to get away, but the lingering sedative and his weight pinned her down. Two fat grubs wriggled across the dead woman’s putrid skin, and she felt them squirm momentarily against her own cheek before dropping out of sight. Again she felt like retching, again she did not. He was positioning her right arm, laying something across her wrist, but he must have seen her throat clench. “It was a little hard to figure that part out. With the smell, I knew you’d instinctively regurgitate, and with that cloth in your mouth, you’d choke on your vomit and die. And that’s really not what we’re looking for here.” She felt a strap tighten around her wrist. She tried, tried, tried to pull free, but he’d buckled it securely in place. Fastening her wrist to something beneath her. The arm of the dead woman. Another scream erupted from her throat but went nowhere. “There aren’t many drugs that paralyze the gag reflex. I’m not sure the Dotracaine I gave you will work. It’s supposed to last sixteen hours. Let’s hope so.” She frantically twisted her head to the side to try and work the gag loose, but it did not come free, and from seeing the proficiency of his work in the past, she doubted she would ever be able to get the gag off without the use of her hands. He was holding down her other arm now, binding it to Riah Everson’s. “I wish I could take credit for this idea, but actually the Romans came up with it. They would strap a corpse to the back of a guilty man and make him carry it around until he was dead as well. They didn’t understand infection back then, but they did understand death. The Romans were also fans of crucifixion. They did not let the guilty get off lightly.” He was almost done with her left arm. She tried to yank it free from his grip. Useless. “Remember Saint Paul? We spoke about this on Wednesday. He referred to this technique: ‘The evil I do not wish, this I do. I am a wretched man! Who will rescue me from this body of death?’ You see how he does that? The body of death? It’s a play on words-sin metonymically becomes the dead body he’s carrying around.” He tugged the second strap tight. Buckled it. Then went to work on her legs.