Disclaimers:  Chris Carter and 1013 own the characters, but the idea, I regret to say, is mine, sparked by Joyce McKibben. No money made; no infringement intended.
Rated: PG-13.
'What is Truth?' asked Pilate, and washed his hands.  'Where is Truth?' asked I, and wrote this.

Random Access Memory

Image after image succeeded onto the gently curving screen, providing the only illumination in the room other than the dimly flashing green lights of the monitors.  A man's calm, cultured voice spoke evenly, continuously, without any appreciable accent to distract the attention, reciting details and reports that matched the photos and charts shown.  An IV dripped steadily, a muted counterpoint to the ceaseless flow of information.

In the center of the room something that might once have been a hospital bed stood on end.  The man within it was strapped into place with padded restraints at his ankles, shins, thighs, waist, lower arm and upper arm.  He wore only black briefs, oddly incongruous in the otherwise sterile arena, but the cloth didn't extend to be trapped under any of the restraints, to bunch and cut off circulation.  A leather strap and neck brace held his head in position to watch the screen, data feeding into his mind as the IV fed fluids into his arm.

A sunlit scene spilled light across the room to shimmer on dark brown hair and spark through blank hazel eyes.  But the man's face was oddly expressionless as he watched the screen, as he listened to the aloof voice describing political contingency plans, names loyal and suspect.  With each plan maps appeared; with each name a photo shone out.

The voice changed, shifted to a woman speaking, still calm, still unaccented, but not quite so soothing.  Her topic was medical and pharmaceutical research conducted, listing the resulting fatality rates and suggested variations.

-=-=-=-=-

From the next room, two men watched through the partially-silvered glass.  Florescent light spun blue accents off the black hair and black leather of the younger man as he asked, "How long has this been going on?"

The thinner man wearing the lab jacket glanced at his watch, then answered, "Two hours, eighteen minutes.  We expect to be done in another four hours and twelve minutes.  Proper timing and pacing is very important to maximum retention.  The subject's memory is extraordinary, but this isn't something we want to risk."

"Not this session," specified the young man who looked more like a hired killer than a senior member of the Consortium.  "How long ago did you start this process?"

"Well, the technology has improved," the scientist hedged.  "And the drugs we use to focus his concentration have definitely gotten better--"  He gasped as a gun he hadn't known was there appeared in the young man's hand, pointing at him.  "Years," he hastily answered.  "Longer than I've been with this project.  Almost thirty years."

Thirty-eight now, twelve when Samantha disappeared....  Alex Krycek looked at the scientist, green eyes cold as he asked, "Twenty-six to be exact?"

"No, sir," Dr. Vorthies admitted, "twenty-eight.  We began when the subject was ten; my predecessor was... startled by the results.  They had anticipated some reduction in deductive ability, possibly a problem with the memory.  Deterioration of the basal personality was a projected feasibility."

"Speak English," came the cold response.  "Or you can try it in Russian, or French, or a few other languages, but not scientific psycho-babble.  What did you do, and what were you expecting?"

"It's an exact proportion combination of environment, medication, hypnosis, and presentation of data. They originally believed that the process would make him less intelligent, that the stored, inaccessible memories might result in other memories also becoming less easily remembered.  It was feared that the stresses of holding two separate banks of information could cause a deterioration--"  The gun muzzle shifted downward minutely, deliberately aiming at the stomach instead of the heart, or maybe the target was lower still, and the scientist hastily said, "We were afraid he'd develop a multiple personality disorder."

Silence was the only answer for a long moment, then Krycek said quietly, "You were going to put information like this into a mind that you thought would shatter under it?"

"We started with innocuous records," the psychologist informed him indignantly.  "Minor data on relocation and experimentation shock, as well as basic psychology texts as controls so that we could see how he was assimilating the data."

The too-pretty man bit his lip to restrain impatient angry words, but his voice was still bitingly sarcastic as he said, "Psychology texts?  Into a ten year old?"

"Well, we are psychologists," Dr. Vorthies muttered.  "It was the easiest thing for us to test for in subsequent sessions."

"And?"  The cold word was most assuredly a question.

"No bleed-over that we could detect," the scientist reluctantly admitted.  "But his IQ went up twenty standard points."

"Twenty?" Alex asked disbelievingly.  "Over what period of time?"

"Two months," the doctor admitted.  "His memory had been exceptional; it improved to photographic within two months, and after another two months it had progressed to eidetic."

"It's not eidetic under more normal conditions."

"No, the drugs enhance it."  He paused, then asked curiously, "How did you know that?"

"If you need to know, I'll tell you," Alex told him.  "Go on."

"His skills were too useful to continue using him as a control for the mind-wipe procedures," Dr. Vorthies went on as the voice spoke steadily from the other room, softened and altered by the glass it passed through to get to them.  "Instead, we switched to this alternative."

"You're using him as a walking hard drive," Alex said bluntly.  "How many people have the access codes?"

"Five," Vorthies admitted.

"That you know of.  Meaning there are undoubtedly more."  Twenty-five by now, probably, maybe more.  Paranoia and experience combined told him that the number should probably be squared.  Secrets always seemed to come out.

"Five is too many," the scientist snapped.  "Too many hands will spoil the experiment."

"Experiment?  It's idiocy.  What moron decided that he should still be receiving updates?"

"The Smoker."  Reluctantly the psychologist added, "And I don't find it wise, either.  He's been....  I think he's been used in the mind-wipe programs as well, against our specific orders.  We don't know why.  But some of his more mundane memories seem to be gone."

Krycek fought down a disbelieving snort.  Mundane.  Mulder's memories?  You have got to be joking.  "They're gone, all right.  I'm told," he added dryly, "that it was necessary."

"They're ruining the project," came the sulky reply.  "Tampering with memories on one side might imbalance the other."

"How badly?"

"It could conceivably cause a spill-over of the confidential materials in order to equalize the..."  Light glinted briefly off the moving metal of the gun-barrel.  "His mind might decide to replace the erased memories with some of the blocked information simply to fill the empty spaces.  Or with his memory, it's entirely possible that the mind wipe won't hold."

"Why not?" Krycek asked almost pleasantly.

"The subject--"

"His name is Fox.  You might as well use it."

"The subject," and the thinner man sniffed officiously, appalled that this, this thug with a cherub's face and a killer's eyes wanted him to take such an interest in a test subject, "retains memories in a non-typical manner.  Most people assimilate information in what we refer to as a tree structure, similar to that used for computer programming.  For example, you might remember that George Washington commanded the Colonial forces during the Revolutionary War, which would remind you that the Colonies won the Revolutionary War and formed the United States, which would remind you that the Constitution was written as a result."

Krycek interrupted him in a deliberately bored tone.  "The Revolutionary War was officially concluded in 1783.  The Constitution was written four years later, in 1787."

Ignorant Russian.  What does he know about American history?  "In any case," the scientist hissed, annoyed by the hired killer's insistence on breaking into his explanations, "most people retain information in a linear manner.  Fact A leads to fact B, to fact C.  A nice, neat progression and if the fact you want isn't on that line, it takes a while to retrieve it.  You have to find the correct tree to find the data."

"And?"

"He doesn't remember things that way," was the frustrated reply.  "The subject retains memories on a holographic basis:  in his mind George Washington is linked not with one fact, but with a dozen, three dozen, a hundred.  And he seems to reference everything this way.  If you mention an apple to him, he flashes on everything from Adam and Eve in the Bible, to 'Mom, God, and apple pie', hitting love spells, cyanide poisoning, and Newton's Law along the way!"

Krycek resisted the urge to snicker, remembering conversations with his former partner.  That did sound like Mulder.  His only comment was, "What's the problem?"

"We erase memories by excising that 'limb' of the 'tree'.  To properly erase a memory from this subject, you would have to remove all connecting links, and quite bluntly, the morons doing the field work on that project probably can't find them all with him.  Which means he slowly pieces things back together.  Not concretely enough to be certain of the veracity of his memories, I suspect, but well enough."

"So erasing his memories is... unreliable, at best, and useless at worst?"

"That's what I said, yes."

Krycek studied the gun barrel calmly, apparently unconcerned by his line of questions.  "And there's a chance that erasing his memories will in fact give him access to classified data?"

The scientist blinked, pleased that someone in the upper echelons was finally giving his concerns real attention.  "Yes, sir, it could.  Very easily.  If his mind starts grasping for linkages to repair the damage, it could easily connect into that other data.  At that point, I would give it a seventy percent chance that he will eventually access all of the data, simply because of the way he remembers things."

Alex Krycek looked at the impassive man in the next room, at the displayed image of a multitude of young teenage women, all of them with the same dark, curly hair, the same prominent nose, and he shook his head.  "You'd better hope not, Doctor.  If he remembers... either he'll go mad, or he'll be the most dangerous opposition we've had yet."

Now.  Which would be more useful?
 

~ ~ ~ finis 5/99 ~ ~ ~

Comments, Commentary, & Miscellanea:

Author's note:  By the way?  Krycek was right about the Constitution....

 bytes of data have been investigated....