On the other side of the large glass screen, the patient was wheeled into the white-walled scan room by a porter. A moment later a team of staff entered and transferred the man’s limp body to the platform that would feed him into the cylinder at the center of the MRI. One nurse remained in the room and began to place straps on the patient. Through the speakers they could hear her talking to him as she worked.

“I’m just getting you ready for the scanner, Greg, okay? It’ll be almost the same routine as last time with the CT. Don’t try to move while you’re in there; it can distort the results.”

Joanna found it touching that the nurse talked to the patient as if he could hear. She wasn’t writing him off as brain-dead, then.

The technician in the control room started adjusting the equipment, switching on every screen on the bank of monitors in front of them. She pointed out the microphone Jo would need to speak into so that Gregor would hear her questions.

“What should I be looking out for on the scan?”

The radiologist brought up a recorded scan of another patient.

“This area here”—he pointed with a pen—“is the hippocampus, associated with emotions and memory. That’s the bit you need to keep an eye on. I’d expect it to light up at anything personally meaningful.”

The scan video showed splashes of red and yellow appearing and dissipating on the screen.

“We’re obviously presenting the patient with stimuli here. The darker colors represent increased activity.”

“And was this patient as outwardly unresponsive as Mr. Franks is now?”

He nodded. “Every patient in this trial has been selected because they have been diagnosed with persistent vegetative state due to infection or drug overdose. The head injury Mr. Franks has sustained complicates things slightly, but he’s still eligible. A bonus of the scan is that if the head injury turns out to be more significant than the CT showed, we’ll be able to consider further treatment.”

Jo was only half listening, thinking about the things she was going to ask. Do you know where Ruby is? was the first question. She could already picture the bloom of orange and purple caused by the reaction that question would get. Who does that finger we found belong to? The screen would light up like a firework display. She’d need to think carefully about how to frame the questions if this was actually going to help in any specific way beyond confirming her suspicions. All she would see would be emotional response. Perhaps she would need to take a very methodical approach, listing every major UK city Ruby might have gone to until she got a response. It could take a very long time.

“How long do I have to question him?”

“We generally scan for about ten minutes.”