3
ng kidnapped and their minds drained of useful information. They were then left as vegetables, their consciousnesses irretrievably submerged in the noodle soup which was all that was left of their brains. After a bit of research into related vacancies, I'd applied for a job with COSI searching the neural highways of these unfortunate victims for clues. My fake qualifications in psychology and neurolectric interfaces, plus a natural talent for verbal diarrhoea, easily landed me the post. I started immediately. It was good cover, particularly as the job meant I could pretend to be a hot-shot neuro-psychologist. Nobody understood what it was I did, including me, but everyone agreed it was important. I also hoped that whoever was doing these Invasions would approach me to become a partner. It looked like a lucrative business, and I wanted in after the Intel Fund fiasco.
My first research subject was Eric von Kühnert. Before his kidnapping, he had been a fibre-optics expert on loan from Siemens to the postal service. He was a loner, with a taste for topless-bottomless bars. During a night hopping from bar to bar he'd been caught by the mind invaders. They'd picked him up when he was concentrating on one of the artificially-structured beauties at Pee Wee's Strontium Gold, an establishment that specialised in girls just over the legal age, although many were probably under. His favourite drink, fittingly entitled a Kesey Cool-Aid Special, had been laced with that age-old perennial LSD while neither he nor his musclebound bodyguards were paying attention. As a result he'd had very little hold on reality when they came to get him. They'd easily disposed of the bodyguards. These two had been found a week afterwards, decapitated and naked in the deep freeze of a local French Restaurant.
Large traces of the LSD were still in the scientist's bloodstream when he turned up at his apartment a few days later. Nobody was really sure how he'd made it into the heavily-guarded South Kensington mansion building with