God have mercy on his soul, Lindstrom thought as he nodded good morning to his assistants. Ben and Jerry were already busy in Green, prepping the first official human subjects for the Mobius implants. Ben and Jerry had had nothing to do with the male subject St. Vincent had provided Lindstrom, who had remained anonymous, referred to by St. Vincent, and now thought of by Lindstrom, simply as Alpha. “For your own protection, Doctor,” St. Vincent had said, though Lindstrom was disinclined to believe him. This had less to do with any sixth sense toward humans—Lindstrom’s condition made it nearly impossible for him to read human emotions—than his habit of believing all people he disliked were liars. Valerie would have recognized this as another facet of Lindstrom’s childish behavior, and she would have been right. However, in this instance it served him in good stead. St. Vincent had nothing positive in mind for Mobius. Such was the nature of Lindstrom’s brain that it never occurred to him that nothing good could ever have come from a project like Mobius to begin with.

The idea behind Mobius was, at its root, simple enough, and had more to do with the psychology of the brain than it did with any scientific breakthrough. In fact, it had come to Lindstrom, like a bolt out of the blue, when he was reading an account of a deeply charismatic homicidal maniac who somehow persuaded a woman and her ten-year-old daughter to come home with him. Again, inexplicably, he had persuaded the mother to allow him to sexually assault the daughter. All of this, though terribly sordid, was, sadly, not so very uncommon. What struck him, however, was the fact that the maniac had stood before a full-length mirror and watched himself and his victim as he penetrated her from behind.

This set in motion a thread of thought in Lindstrom’s mind. One of his college professors had posited that the human brain sees the world in two ways: real and unreal. When, for whatever reason, this dichotomy is interrupted, the brain veers off course. Fantasy becomes as real as reality. What the maniac was doing during his assault was trying to reassure himself that his actions were real and not a fantasy his mind had concocted. In other words, his connection with reality somehow had become disabled. He could no longer distinguish between cause and effect. His mind occupied a space outside that of his actions.