Freedom TM

didn’t imagine it was far away.
    Mercifully, he didn’t see any place where they could waterboard him without getting some expensive equipment wet.
    The guards lifted the backboard holding their prisoner up onto a platform beneath the scanning equipment, and then lashed the board to the scanner bed.
    Here we go.
    He was suddenly sliding with the whir of electric motors, moving deeper into the scanning machine. Were they perhaps checking him for injuries? That seemed odd.
    The backboard jerked to a stop, and Ibanescu soon heard the telltale sound of MRI magnets hammering, chirping, and pinging for one or two minutes. He’d gone through this before in Switzerland after a head injury while skiing.
    As the scanning continued, a soothing female voice came to his ears, speaking English. Inbanescu knew some English, and he was able to decipher it.
    “Do you understand what I’m saying?”
    It was an oddly synthetic-sounding voice. He decided to pretend he didn’t understand and just kept staring up at the interior of the scanning machine.
    “Yes. You do understand me.”
    They were bluffing. He felt certain.
    “Is English your primary language?”
A pause.
“No. It isn’t. Let’s find your primary language.”
    This was strange. It definitely sounded like an artificial voice. Like something he might hear from a credit card or airline customer service line. Very strange. He wondered if this was some sort of automated interrogation system.
Leave it to the Americans.
    The soothing female voice spoke in a dozen different languages, waiting five or six seconds between each. Ibanescu didn’t understand any of them, although he thought he could detect French and German. Also Czech. Eventually she came to Rumanian….
    “Is your native language Rumanian?”
    He was damned if he was going to answer. He just lay there like a statue.
    Her voice responded differently this time.
“Yes. You are Rumanian, aren’t you?”
    He frowned.
How the hell …?
    The rest of her words came to him in slightly stilted, synthetic-voiced Rumanian.
“This machine is a functional magnetic resonance imaging scanner. It monitors the blood activity in your brain to identify patterns of deception, recognition, and emotion—such as fear or anger. You will be unable to evade my inquiries. So please relax and enjoy your interrogation.”
    Ibanescu just frowned at the machine around him.
    “Please speak your full name and place of birth.”
    Were they serious? He wasn’t about to tell them anything. He just lay there silently.
    “It appears you are either unable or unwilling to respond.”
    Suddenly a map of the globe was projected onto the ceiling of the scanning chamber. It looked a lot like a Web mapping program, with the globe spinning slowly in space. The map zoomed in on Rumania as the globe stopped spinning.
    “Where were you born?”
    Asking again wasn’t going to help. It did feel comforting to see the map of his homeland, however. It was a detailed, physical map, showing the mountains and lakes. He could see a dot on the map for his hometown of Piteşti, northwest of Bucureşti.
    Before he knew it, the view of the map centered on Piteşti.
    Holy shit.
Was this system tracking his eyes? Did it sense that he was focusing on Piteşti? What an idiot he was to fall for that! The map was zooming in now to a full-screen satellite view of Piteşti. He shut his eyes.
    “You are from Piteşti, aren’t you?”
There was a pause during which Ibanescu clenched his eyes tightly.
“Yes, you are. This is where you were born, isn’t it? Do you still have family there?”
A pause.
“Yes. You do.”
    He was starting to lose his mind. How was this hellish machine discovering these things? It was obviously reading his neural activity or something. This was a nightmare.
    “I have access to records from this … nation state. Let’s discover who you are. Does your last name begin with an … A?”
    Ibanescu realized that closing his eyes wasn’t going to help. He opened them again and just stared at the detailed aerial view of his hometown. This was insane. He was being processed by a machine that was sucking the information through his ears.
    “Does your name begin with B? C? D? E? …”
And on it went.
    He just stared in numb disbelief as the machine finally came to “I” and then halted. It asked again.
“I?”
A pause.
“Good. Now the second letter. Is it A? B?” Another pause. “B? Good. Now the third letter …”
    And so it