The black and white memory event replayed a pleasant wedding of Kristen and her husband. We witnessed the entire ceremony from start to finish. We saw events from her perspective. Everyone looked happy to see her marry the man she loved. Often, the events would speed up or slow down at various spots. At other points, the memory skipped ahead for some unknown reason.

Another problem that occurred was that of “memory drift.” This is where the memory we’re following jumps to another mental connection, leading to entirely different memories. For example, once during the review of her wedding, her memory “drifted” to an entirely different day, years earlier. She was a young girl fishing with her father on a tranquil lake beneath a sunny sky. It is a speculative hypothesis, but perhaps in her mind catching fish is analogous with catching a man.

By the end of the day, we learned the appropriate stimuli to apply to the correct brain areas. While not perfect, it helps keep track of the memory event we’re pursuing. This is important because, when we find the day of Dan’s death, we don’t want to “drift” from her brother’s passing to another memory.

After today, I finally feel comfortable operating the monitoring room equipment. This frees the professor for other tasks, many of which require his presence in the scanning room with Kristen. He takes his job very seriously, almost treating her like a long, lost daughter. With luck, we’ll make even more progress tomorrow.

Wednesday, October 31^st

Diary, today was the worst day of my life, an emotional roller coaster, leaving me drained and empty. After today, I’m not sure if our research has a future. Even if it does, I don’t know if I’ll go back. In any event, I’ll need time to recover – time to make sense of all that’s happened.

The day started normally enough. Medical technicians arrived bright and early to deliver Kristen for her second day of testing. Her vitals were measured and recorded. She was carefully strapped onto the bench-like table and hooked up with various nodes, most of which were positioned over key nerve points. Being catatonic, she’s an easy patient to work with.

Dr. Valken and I wasted no time getting down to business. We were ecstatic when we found Kristen’s memory of her first childbirth. I’ve never been pregnant – or even married for that matter – but I understand the significance of this event. I watched, from her point of view, as her hands stretched out from either side of the monitor to hold her child for the very first time.

In the scanning room, Dr. Valken observed an amazing thing during the emotional memory. Kristen, the woman who’d been catatonic for over a month, smiled. We compared this event with that of the wedding and charted a time line between the two memories. This chart might help predict where our target memory is located. We needed to discover what happened on the day her brother died.