Babineau was patting Brady’s shoulder in a proprietary way Brady hated. Like he was patting his pet dog. “The human brain is made up of approximately one hundred billion nerve cells. Those in the Broca’s Area of yours were gravely injured, but they have recovered. In fact, they are creating neurons unlike any I’ve ever seen. One of these days you’re going to be famous not as a person who took lives, but as one responsible for saving them.”

If so, Brady thought, it’s a day you won’t be around to see.

Count on it, dickweed.

• • •

The creative side never was my forte, Freddi told Z-Boy. True enough, but it was always Brady’s, and as 2013 became 2014, he had plenty of time to think of ways the Fishin’ Hole demo screen might be juiced up and turned into what Freddi had called an eye-trap. Yet none of them seemed quite right.

They did not talk about the Zappit effect during her visits; mostly they reminisced (with Freddi necessarily doing most of the talking) about the old days on the Cyber Patrol. All the crazy people they’d met on their outcalls. And Anthony “Tones” Frobisher, their asshole boss. Freddi went on about him constantly, turning things she should have said into things she had, and right to his face! Freddi’s visits were monotonous but comforting. They balanced his desperate nights, when he felt he might spend the rest of his life in Room 217, at the mercy of Dr. Babineau and his “vitamin shots.”

I have to stop him, Brady thought. I have to control him.

To do that, the amped-up version of the demo screen had to be just right. If he flubbed his first chance to get into Babineau’s mind, there might not be another.

• • •

The TV now played at least four hours a day in Room 217. This was per an edict from Babineau, who told Head Nurse Helmington that he was “exposing Mr. Hartsfield to external stimuli.”

Mr. Hartsfield didn’t mind the News at Noon (there was always an exciting explosion or a mass tragedy somewhere in the world), but the rest of the stuff—cooking shows, talk shows, soap operas, bogus medicine men—was drivel. Yet one day, while sitting in his chair by the window and watching Prize Surprise (staring in that direction, at least), he had a revelation. The contestant who had survived to the Bonus Round was given a chance to win a trip to Aruba on a private jet. She was shown an oversized computer screen where big colored dots were shuffling around. Her job was to touch five red ones, which would turn into numbers. If the numbers she touched added up to a total within a five-digit range of 100, she’d win.