The Senator made a face as soon as she saw the man gagged and strapped to your laboratory table. You realized nobody had explained things to her.
“The restraints aren’t in place because he’s in any sort of pain,” you said as you gestured with the tablet on your hand to the iridescent bush of molecule-thin cables that went from his head to the optical computer rack that occupied one wall of the laboratory. “We just don’t want him to try to kill himself.”
Now it was the turn of Colonel something-something, who clearly had drawn the short straw and had to walk the Senator around the project, to make a face behind her back. As if this wasn’t all their fault. The Colonel. The Senator. The man on the table, probably.
“That’s hardly better, Doctor.” said the Senator.
You guided her to a screen. Your younger colleagues preferred VR, but you still found the resolution insufficient.
“Let me show you. This is the human brain.”
The Senator looked at you. “I’m not a neural engineer but that’s not a brain.”
You smiled. “You mean it doesn’t have the shape of brains in pictures and movies. Yes, that’s right. But a city doesn’t look like the map on your phone either.”
She seemed to think for a second. “I use the map on my phone to find good restaurants. What does this map show?”
“This area here,” you said pointing to a red blob in a subtly shifting multi-colored field you were sure you knew better than anybody else (unless you counted AIs, which you didn’t), “is a part of the space of possible activation patterns associated with the desire to speak. I can’t use an anatomical map because it’s not a part of the brain, it’s just one way in which parts of it works. One voice in the chorus.”
You had learned early on that “watch this” was a bad thing to say for an applied neural engineer no matter what happened after, so you just used the tablet interface to turn that red blob gray and took the gag off the man on the table.
The gag had clearly been chewed on — he had been desperately trying to talk, mostly obscenities if your experience was any guide — but now he was now just at you in silence.
The Senator seemed appalled. “Did you just turn off his speech?”
“Oh, no, no. That’d be…” Impossible would have been absurd. It was the easiest thing in the world. Unethical would have been taken as a bad joke, which it would have been. You settled for “… not what we do here. He truly, honestly, doesn’t want to talk.”
She looked back at the gray blob on the screen. “Because you forced him.”
You didn’t roll your eyes, but you knew she knew you had wanted to, so you showed her the gag. “He’s not being forced to do or not do anything against his wishes.”
“How does the process usually continue, Colonel?” the Senator asked without turning around to look at him.
“Safety compliance is the priority, Senator.”
“You mean you make him not want to escape.”
“Or hurt himself or anybody else,” you added, approvingly. For a politician she was quite clever, or had been briefed better than she had let on.
“And then?”
The Colonel braved on. “Asset engineering.”
“We make him want to help us,” you clarified.
The Senator stood silent for a few deliberate seconds. “I’m here because the Committee believes this department might be violating human rights in new and exciting ways. I think I agree.”
“Senator.” The Colonel sounded more tired than worried, so you guessed the project wasn’t at risk. “It’s a radically lower-impact interrogation process than anything used elsewhere, and intel quality is demonstrably better. We save lives here, ours and even theirs.”
She chose not to answer; possibly it was already the consensus at the top that the project was so useful that this justified it also being humane, and she was investigating the project simply to collect ammunition in case it became otherwise.
Before leaving your lab, though, she turned around to speak to you. “I’ve browsed some of your earlier work, Doctor. I can’t say I understand the science, but most of it was on prosthetics, learning disabilities, and psychiatric issues. Do you ever want to quit doing… this… and go back to that sort of work?”
“No,” you replied.
Later that day, when you were as usual the only scientist left working, you double-checked just in case. Everything that would have kept you from working in the lab was as gray as the day you turned it off. It was perfectly safe – it was just as easy to turn it all back on. You just didn’t want to.