Alice can hear voices, distant at first then gradually becoming clearer as her consciousness attempts to resolve itself.
“Okay, final checks. Transfer status?”
“Confirmed complete.”
“Non-native data integrity?”
“Confirmed at one hundred per cent.”
“Overwrite of targeted memory sectors?”
“Confirmed.”
“Roger that. Subject is coming round. Go-ahead to disengage restraints?”
“Confirmed.”
The clamps withdrawn, she pulls herself into a sitting position, taking in her surroundings. Her mind is fuzzy, a storm of information cohering in places, chaotic in others, but she recognises where she is. She is waking up where she expected to find herself.
She slides off the table and walks towards the wall, watched carefully by assistants and security personnel. Before the procedure, she didn’t know their names, didn’t know their roles. She does now. She knows so much more now.
Memories are continuing to assemble themselves as she approaches a bank of machines and accesses a console. She understands the device it controls, knows in exhaustive detail how to operate it: every parameter, every calibration, every setting.
When it was stolen, the thieves were like illiterates blindly stabbing at individual letters on a keyboard to see the pretty shapes they printed. With what has just been uploaded into her memory, Alice could use this thing to write any story she likes. And most importantly, she knows what she must do with it first.