'Nope. Check it out.' She flashed through an array of windows, entered a code, then scrolled through what looked like dates and times. Another graphic of a brain, this one three-dimensional, popped onto the screen, animated by shifting colors like the temperature contours on a weather map. 'When I logged you in, this snapshot of your noggin was automatically taken.'

Thomas cursed under his breath.

'Pretty creepy, huh?'

'But this is useless without analysis,' Thomas said. 'What can it possibly tell you?'

A pained smile. 'Analysis comes included. It's a package deal. Look.'

A small window of text opened in the bottom left-hand corner. Thomas swallowed.

'So let's see,' Sam said. 'Subject is agitated: fear and anxiety, mostly, little aggression and absolutely no murderous intent. Whew—that's a relief. The subject also shows signs of grief and disorientation, with—oh, this is interesting—with a strong possibility of deception.' Sam leaned back to look up at him. 'You hiding anything from me, professor?'

Tell her!

Thomas laughed. 'Not consciously, no.'

Sam smiled. 'That's the thing with these things. All hints and probabilities. I've been told that the software improves every year, though.'

'No doubt,' Thomas said grimly. 'Context mapping seems to be the only thing people in my biz are doing any more—that and parallel behavioral testing. That's where the real money is.'

'Context mapping?'

'Yeah, where they correlate different behaviors, emotions, mental tasks and so on to various imaging results across populations. Basically mapping what these patches of color mean in terms of our real-world experience.'

'Mind reading,' Sam said.

'Worse.'

'So then why is the money in—what did you call it?'

'Parallel behavioral testing.' Thomas scratched the back of his neck, trying his best to cultivate a look of almost—boredom. 'Remember how a couple of years back the government made it illegal for corporations to use low-fields on their customers and employees? Well ever since, big business has invested heavily in attempts to bring together the results of various behavioral tests—written, verbal, task-oriented, stuff like that—to various fMRI types. So, if you respond in such and such a way to such and such a test, they can roughly infer your low-field, and consequently what kind of customer or employee you'll be. Basically it's given them a crude way around the law. And it's meant big bucks for many a mediocre psychologist.'

People were almost universally shocked when he explained this. But what did they expect? They lived in a social system devoted to the pursuit of competitive advantages. The very structure of the society they so prized, even prayed to, was devoted to getting them to do what others wanted, short of outright coercion.

You were only allowed to push the buttons that people couldn't see.

'Does it work?' Sam asked. Apparently she was more pragmatic.