Chapter 6 – Sheyda, Sophie and Jessica
With the rest of the staff working over at the hospital to get the Taubett up and running, Cassie and Julie had the department to themselves. Eve spent most days working at her apartment, and only came into the uni for meetings.
Stefan began sending Julie data from the scanner in the USA by the end of that first week.
This seemed remarkably fast to Julie, but there were many problems with the initial data sets.
The first scans were only of small regions of the body. The Taubett could only image one section of the body at a time, and a full scan would have to be stitched together from many pieces. The stitching work had not yet been done.
These first scans also did not include any images of bone, only of fat, muscle, veins and connective tissue. Images containing bone were difficult to process because bone absorbs X-rays so strongly.
There were still a few dead sensor pixels, too, and these had yet to be removed.
Julie was engrossed immediately. Despite all of the problems, the quality of these initial scans was brilliant, with individual muscle fibres and capillaries visible in each slice.
She had been given three data sets to start with, of clean women, cured women, and infected women.
Under the Taubett, the infected women stood out a mile. Their muscles were infiltrated by the worm's nerve fibres, which glowed in the 250keV radiation in fine, silvery threads. Before the Taubett came along, nobody had seen this before: neither transmission X-rays nor the TSA's back-scatter machines had the resolution to show these fine details, and the TSA's back-scatter X-rays could only image near the surface of the skin.
This was the reason that women passing through the scanners had to stand with legs akimbo; some of the radiation had to be directed directly upwards to detect worms reliably.
The cured women were not at all obvious in the scans. Julie could see some evidence of the channels where the worms' fibres had been. However, after a worm was removed, Eve had told them that the fibres were absorbed by the body, not leaving much evidence behind.
Cassie and Julie spent hours looking at those first results.
Julie was thinking about how she might be able to emphasise the evidence of a previous worm infection.
Cassie was imagining what it might feel like to have all of those nerve fibres running through one's body, subverting the nervous system, bending one's will to an alien intelligence.
Rather nice,
she thought.
Although Julie was excited to be getting good results so quickly, Cassie had been busy too, and seemed to have about a dozen chat windows on her screen.
"So what are you doing, Cassie?" asked Julie. "I thought you were supposed to be interviewing cancer patients?"
Cassie hesitated for a moment, then made a decision.
"Jules," Cassie said, "Eve told me not to discuss my work with you.
"I don't trust her. She seems to think that we might get into some kind of battle of egos if you found out I had some real work to do.
"I'm chatting to cured women in the FEMA camp in Nevada.
"I'm trying to develop a test to detect worm infection. Eve saw the results I was getting with that toxoplasmosis test, and wants me to do tests for cured and infected women, using a standardised personality test."
Cassie continued,
"I'm sorry, Julie, but, basically, Eve accused you of being an arrogant, frigid, bitch, and told me to keep my work away from you."
Julie looked surprised.
The she looked hurt.
Then she cackled.
"Ha-ha. Well, no flies on Miss Eve. She got that part right, at least. I
am
an arrogant, frigid, bitch.
"But I also know all of Cassie Grayndler's
innermost secrets.
"I bet you'd like to join them, hey Cassie? Chat to them, real close, about what it was like to be possessed by worms? What it was like to have your mind controlled by aliens? What it was like to be forced to fuck other women all of the time?"
Cassie laughed, embarrassed, and demurred, not very convincingly.
Of course, Julie was right.
Julie looked on as Cassie chatted. She was a little disappointed. It was just normal stuff between strangers on the Internet, getting to know each other, talking about their school-work, their accommodation, their room-mates.
Cassie explained.
"I have to be careful when I talk. Everything that we say is monitored, probably by the NSA."
After a while of watching them chat, Julie started to notice.
"That woman is so polite, Cassie. She's absolutely charming. That's just not normal!"
"That's Eve's kid sister, Lilli," Cassie said. "Yeah, human kindness is real spooky, I know. But she's a Yank, Julie. She's nothing like you or me. And, also, I expect she knows what's at stake here.
"She's stuck in a poxy FEMA camp, and the NSA is spying on her and listening to everything she says. I have to be careful what I say, as I don't know what they'll be looking for. Those women have no way out.
"It sucks, Jules. I don't know what we can do.
"Eve seems to think that if we can show that their brains are normal then they have a chance of getting released."
Julie contemplated this for a little while, and came to the same conclusion as Cassie.
"If they pass the test, that's no proof that their brains are normal," Julie said.
"It only proves that they're able to fake the test, or that the test isn't testing the right things.
"If Eve really wants to get her kid sister out of Nevada, she won't want you coming up with a test which shows that her brain has been altered by the worms. She'll want a test that shows her to be totally normal. Even if you come up with a good test, Cassie, it could be that Eve's just going to pass it on to her sister, or even on to all of the women.
"It would be pretty easy to cheat.
"I think you could build a bit of insurance into your test, Cassie.
"Let's add a little watermark to your data. Before you give Eve your results, let's just perturb all of the statistics for the answers, very slightly, with some random numbers. Those random numbers form a kind of watermark.
"If someone cheats by making up a set of answers using your measurements, they'll pass your test, but we can still use a correlation test to detect the watermark. If you have a lot of questions, say, a hundred or so, you don't need much of a watermark to see if they cheated. Using a correlation test to detect random numbers is amazingly sensitive."
Cassie thought the idea sounded completely impractical.
Who would go to the trouble of making up a bunch of answers to match some complicated statistics, and then memorise a hundred answers before taking the test? Every person who wants to cheat would have to make up a new set of answers, too.
However, she admired Julie's devious mind, and couldn't resist putting something over Eve, however impractical.
"Sounds great, Cassie. I'll add in the watermark. But you've got to write the cheat detector, and you can write the code for processing the test scores, too."
Julie nodded, half-heartedly,
"Ok, Cassie, no worries," but she was distracted by what was on her screen.
There was something in the Taubett scans that looked familiar to her.
She brought up the image of one of the phantoms, taken on the Taubett machine when it was next door.
This was the machine that was now at Lennox Hospital.
She compared it against one of the new images, supposedly from the new machine in the USA, and flipped between the images several times.
She had been right.
When she flipped, the dead pixels remained exactly the same.
These scans had both been taken on the same machine.
She brought Cassie over to show her the results.
"Cassie, there's no way these images were taken in Baltimore.
"These scans were taken on the machine that used to be next door.
"I think we must have a whole lot of worm-infected women right here in Canberra."
***
Julie spent the next few weeks fixing up her visualisation software to work with the Taubett scans, and had started working on the worm-trail detection.
Both Cassie and Julie had a meeting scheduled with Eve the next morning to give her a status report.
Julie was pleased with her work so far. The old worm-channels were very narrow, so finding evidence of a past worm infection was difficult, but her visualisations of infected women were looking very nice.
Cassie spent the time sending out standard personality tests to the two groups selected by Eve: one of cured women, and one of normal women selected as controls. The cured women were like troopers, answering every question, and never failing to send back a survey. The normal women were intransigent, and kept stuffing up the answers, and with each new survey, a few would always drop out altogether.
Cassie couldn't decide if the cured women were unnaturally conscientious, or if they felt they owed their lives to Eve and her institution.
The test results were pretty clear.
The cured women were very different from normal women.
There was no way that these women could possibly pass for normal.
Eve's not going to like this,
Cassie thought to herself.
She put all of the survey results into a spreadsheet, and only added Julie's watermark to the normal women's results as a kind of afterthought.
The idea of cheating sounded a little ludicrous. There would be no way that anyone could learn how to answer the questions like a normal person, as they'd need to do a lot of calculations in their head, and would need to make up random numbers to get the statistics to come out correctly.
Humans are notoriously bad at such things.
***
Eve was already in her office, apparently working hard, when Cassie and Julie knocked on her office door at 8:30 the next morning.
"Good morning girls. Welcome to our first official project meeting.
"Are there any problems? How is everything going?"
"No problems, Eve. I'm enjoying the work, it's proceeding well." Julie said.
