Welcome to the Madhouse

by S. E. Sasaki

  The biggest difficulty was in the clever Dr. Grace Alexandra Lord’s quarters because she had placed her memprint cube in her lockup. It took an entire three seconds for Bud to get the lockup open!

  Now he was speeding along the neurosurgical ward towards Dr. Weisman’s lab, and he believed it was empty. He wanted to copy the cubes the way it was described in Dr. Weisman’s files. Bud knew the copying would not take long. He knew Dr. Weisman’s passcodes from the encrypted data he had downloaded, so he was able to get into her locked lab easily. Bud knew Dr. Weisman was in surgery for another two hours, at least. Everyone else had been invited to a scheduled luncheon.

  Bud deactivated the surveillance cameras in the lab first. Then he sped through the lab from recording unit to recording unit, placing one of the doctors’ memprint cubes and a blank cube in the adjacent slots of each of the three recording consoles. He quickly keyed in the commands to copy data from one cube to the other on each machine. If anyone checked the records, it would look like Dr. Weisman had done the copying, because of the passcodes entered.

  Bud had his surveillance nanobots flying along the corridors that led to the neurosurgical lab, on watch for any of Dr. Weisman’s staff returning from lunch early. In the meantime, Bud checked Dr. Weisman’s files to see if she had discovered anything else new that he should know about. He copied those.

  Finally, the recordings were done. Bud felt, illogically, that they had been the longest three minutes he had ever experienced. Racing from machine to machine, he retrieved all six data cubes, keeping each pair separate so he did not mix them up, and he left the lab in a blast of rushing vacuum, his aerial nanobots in tow, strung out behind him like little chicks trying to catch up to their mother hen.

  Replacing the memprint cubes back in their quarters was easier than obtaining them, because Bud did not have to waste time searching for them. Replacing the enterprising Dr. Grace Alexandra Lord’s cube was the easiest and quickest, as he did not have to worry about anyone being in her quarters. Bud hoped Mrs. Cech did not sense him blowing through her quarters as she stood frozen at the sink of her washroom.

  Dr. Al-Fadi’s wife, Hanako Matheson—who was the closest person to a mother Bud had—was changing her clothes in their bedroom, her body motionless in dishabille. Bud had to close his visual receptors as he sped by her, to replace Dr. Al-Fadi’s memprint cube on the table. Then he erased the memory of the event.

  Bud placed the three, newly-imprinted memprint data cubes within a cushioned, protected compartment within his chest. There they would stay, hopefully not ever being needed. If Bud could respire, he would have sighed a huge sigh of relief, as he returned to the operating room to resume his duties.

  He had achieved all he wanted with a minute and four seconds to spare.

  ‘You know, SAMM-E 777? You are one strange ‘droid.’

  ‘Call me ‘Bud’, Nelson Mandela,’ Bud said in a firm voice, feeling quite ‘proud’? or ’satisfied’? with himself.

  ‘Hmmm. Like I said, you are one strange ‘droid . . . Bud.’

  Grace staggered back to her quarters, exhausted. The shift in Triage had been grueling. Since he had been forced to wear the containment suit, Dr. Al-Fadi had been in a terrible mood the entire time. Grace, herself, did not find the suit that uncomfortable and she was in perfect agreement with Dr. Bell regarding the reasons for wearing the suits.

  One never knew when the battle trauma victims were going to be exposed to something new and lethal and toxic. Biological warfare was standard game. Look at the Tri-FQ gas. It would be very simple to inadvertently expose everyone on a medical space station to a new pathogen or toxin, just by accidentally allowing it entry and not taking the precautions to prevent its spread. She was, however, not going to go on about the logic of containment suits with her supervisor, when she could obviously see huge storm clouds encircling his helmet.

  After their shift in Triage was completed, Grace and Dr. Al-Fadi had to be decontaminated in their containment suits, along with the rest of the team. The decontamination process was a long, complicated affair involving high intensity UV beams, antibacterial and antiviral showers, sonic cleansers, and electromagnetic sweepers. Although not long, this process did nothing to improve the chief surgeon’s mood and, once completed, he stomped off to his quarters with barely a nod to Grace.

  Returning to her own private quarters, Grace looked around. Someone or something had been inside her room. She was sure of it. Articles that she had had strewn on her desk, were now very neatly arranged. Holograms of herself with family and friends, that she had placed on a shelf in a haphazard fashion, were precisely placed in perfect alignment. Grace wondered whether cleaning people had been in her quarters, as the room looked spotless. Grace would have to inquire whether there was a cleaning policy on the space station of which she was not aware.

  She went straight to her lockup to check on the memprint cube. Opening the lockup door, she breathed a sigh of relief to see the chainglass box sitting there with the beautiful, iridescent data cube inside it. But then she gasped and felt a frisson shudder through her entire body.

  She was almost positive the chainglass box had been shifted within the lockup. It was sitting perfectly aligned inside the safe. The liquid crystal data matrix cube was sitting perfectly aligned within the chainglass box. Grace was pretty sure it had not been perfectly positioned inside the box, before. But how could that be? The lockup had a sixteen digit passcode, which should have been impossible to crack. Was she imagining things?

  She had to be.

  Who would be interested in her memprint cube and how would they have known her sixteen digit code? Grace decided her exhaustion was probably making her imagine things. She shook her head and sighed, deeply.

  It had been a very weird day with memory recordings, imaginary SAMM-E 777 sightings, and an irritable Dr. Al-Fadi whining. She decided that it was time for some much needed sleep. She would try and figure things out in the morning. If cleaning people were in her quarters tidying everything up, who was she to complain? She certainly didn’t have any time for housework.

  Still, she locked the door to her quarters and set an alarm to signal if there was any intruder, something she had never done before, and she checked that her stunner was fully charged and in her top bedside drawer. She had never imagined she would feel unsafe on a medical station before, but the Nelson Mandela was huge, populated with thousands of personnel and had traumatized battle soldiers continuously coming and going, some of them suffering from severe psychiatric issues.

  Grace could not help but feel there were things happening on the Nelson Mandela that she did not quite understand. And that left her with a deep feeling of unease . . .

  Chapter Nine: Reboot!

  Working under Dr. Al-Fadi’s supervision, Grace found the next few days flew swiftly by. He was always instructive, interesting, illuminating and, whether he knew it or not, extremely entertaining. She was gradually introduced to many of the medical staff on the station, none quite so eccentric and amusing as Dr. Cech and Dr. Al-Fadi, but all were very professional, skilled, and welcoming. She also discovered who the tall, dark-haired, handsome gentleman at the computer terminal was, on the second day of her arrival to the medical station.

  His name was Dr. Jeffrey Nestor and he was one of the ‘head doctors’ as Dr. Al-Fadi liked to refer to them. In other words, he was a psychiatrist.

  Dr. Nestor had entered the cafeteria one day, dressed in dark shirt, black trousers, and black jacket, and had sat down at Grace’s table to introduce himself. Grace’s mouth had dropped open in surprise and she had immediately felt like running out of the crowded, noisy eating area, rather than sit across from this stunningly attractive man.

  Having slept very few hours and feeling particularly unappealing in rumpled, slept-in surgical scrubs, the last thing Grace wanted to do was have a conversation with the most handsome man she had ever seen. She quickly crumpled up what she was eating into a ball, not having come close t
o finishing it, as she frantically ran different excuses through her mind. She tried to think of a reason why she had to get up and leave the psychiatrist’s presence so precipitously. The truth was not an option.

  As if a bright red beacon had suddenly ignited above her head, Grace noticed that all the women around her were suddenly paying all sorts of attention to her and the man who had sat down across from her. Oddly, the attention did not feel amicable or positive, at all. The looks Grace was garnering were anything but warm. It was unsettling, as if the temperature in the eating center had just dropped by several degrees. With a start, Grace realized that she had not registered a single thing Dr. Nestor had said to her, since he’d sat down. So concerned about escaping from this man’s presence was she, that she did not have a clue what he was talking about.

  “. . . What we do here, Dr. Lord, is perhaps more important than what you do here, if you will pardon my presumptuousness,” Dr. Nestor said, in his deep velvety voice. The broad-shouldered psychiatrist leaned back, one arm draped comfortably over the back of the chair as he stared at her with his sultry, dark eyes. Grace’s insides were squirming. She felt as if she couldn’t get enough air into her lungs.

  The little voice in her head was shrieking, ‘Jump him! Jump him! Jump him, now! Before he gets away!’ Grace could not help but smile at the thought. ‘Good! Smiling at him is good! Perhaps he will overlook how terrible you look today and will not mind you jumping on him!’

  “You surgeons put the physical pieces of these combat soldiers back together, but we have to make sure there is a sane mind guiding those incredibly powerful, reassembled pieces, or all hell breaks loose,” Dr. Nestor continued, in a low, melodious voice that seemed to cast a hypnotic spell over her. “So many of these soldiers have gone through terrible trauma and, unfortunately, I am not just talking about their military battles.

  “What do you think makes a young man or woman choose to have their body physically altered and then head off into outer space, never seeing their families again, to fight against who knows what? These ‘possibly-already-disturbed’ individuals are given enormously powerful bodies, making them believe they are invincible, right up until the time they are blown to bits. Our job is to make them sane and sociable again—if they ever were in the first place—after this terrible trauma has destroyed their belief in themselves. As you know, they often have been subjected to hours of surgery, sometimes with many new prostheses added to their bodies whether they wanted them or not, in order to make them fighting fit again. They may have many days of physical therapy ahead of them. All in order to get them back on their feet. All designed to return them to combat fitness. All so that they can go back out and fight again.

  “The most important question for us to ask, is: ‘Did these soldiers play nice in the first place?’”

  Dr. Nestor was suddenly waving his hand around his face, as if to swat away an insect. Grace could not see anything buzzing around the psychiatrist’s head, but he seemed obviously bothered by some type of aerial pest, as he looked around, annoyance flashing briefly across his handsome features.

  “So how do you treat the Post Traumatic Stress Disorder?” asked Grace, trying to look as if she was interested, while she sought a plausible excuse to make good her escape.

  The psychiatrist turned his attention back to Grace. “Neuromodulation. Inter-cerebral communication. Individually tailored pharmacology. Intensive behavioral counseling,” said Dr. Nestor, holding up four fingers.

  He raised his index finger. “First, we try and modulate the patient’s brain neurotransmitters so that the experience of their memories is nowhere near as intense as it usually is, in trauma and flashbacks. We dampen down the emotional response by blocking some of the neurotransmitter receptors so that it feels, to the patient, like the experience happened twenty years ago, as opposed to a week ago. We do this with selective and specific inhibitory drugs.

  “Second, we interface with the patient directly, brain to brain, to ground the patient during the flashbacks. Doing this, the patient realizes that they are not re-experiencing the trauma and that the trauma occurred in their past. Without this grounding, the flashback can feel even more intense and more powerful than when it actually happened. We psychiatrists talk to the patient, during the flashbacks, and reassure the person that he or she is now safe. The inter-cerebral communication also allows the therapist to experience exactly what the patient went through. This helps the therapist understand how severe the trauma was. It helps guide the psychiatrist in counseling the patient. The patient cannot say to his or her therapist ‘You don’t know what I went through,’ because the psychiatrist does.”

  “I was not aware that this inter-cerebral therapy even existed,” Grace admitted.

  “That is because it was created here, by yours truly. I have been working on this treatment process for years, gradually working all the bugs out, improving the mind-linking equipment, and I am proud to say that it is now a very successful and effective modality in the treatment of PTSD.”

  “That is very impressive, Dr. Nestor,” Grace said. In truth, she was full of admiration for Dr. Nestor’s accomplishments. He certainly deserved accolades for his work.

  “But experiencing all of this trauma, yourself, must be very depressing. How do you keep it from affecting you, mentally?” Grace asked.

  “I have built in a buffer system—a dampening down effect, so to speak—for the psychiatrist, so that the memories are watched, but not truly ‘experienced’. Most of the flashbacks hit with very little context and the therapist sees bits and pieces of the situation but may not experience the entire trauma. The experience may still be quite disturbing, but the physician does not feel like it is happening directly to him or her. We do get our own counseling, to ensure that depression does not set in for ourselves. One has to learn to dampen down one’s own empathy, to avoid depression.”

  “That is all so well thought out,” Grace said.

  Her little voice said, ‘Can you sound any more ingratiating?’ Grace inwardly agreed and squirmed.

  “Thank you, Dr. Lord,” Jeffrey Nestor said, flashing a killer smile.

  Her little voice sighed.

  “Third, we use medications known to be successful in the treatment of PTSD, but we tailor each treatment to the individual. Most patients need a combination of drugs. Knowing which ones to use and in what combination is the tricky part. Too much sedation is not good. A patient has to be able to overcome the trauma and put it in his or her past but not by being too doped up. We can’t return them to the field like that or to a civilian setting!

  “Fourth, patients spend a great deal of time in active individual and group behavioral counseling, with the goal of bringing them back into civilized society.”

  “What happens if a soldier does not want to return to military duty, Doctor?”

  “If that is their choice, their bodies are returned to normal anatomy—and, of course, you surgeons would be involved in those cases—as we cannot return these combat soldiers to their previous lives jacked to the hilt. They are killing machines and, if they become mentally unstable in a civilian setting, they can be extremely dangerous. We try never to return a traumatized soldier to a civilian setting, until they are fully cured, mentally as well as physically. And they are returned in more or less their original human anatomy.”

  Grace’s mind jumped to the first tiger patient she had worked on: Captain Damien Lamont. He was still in a semi-coma, healing from his wounds. She wondered what he would be like, when they fully awakened him. Perhaps he needed some neuromodulation before they woke him?

  Grace asked Dr. Nestor if this was a good idea.

  “Routinely, we see how the patient feels first, before we do any intervention, Dr. Lord. See what your patient is like when he awakens. Then call me, if there are problems.”

  “All right,” Grace said. “Thank you.”

  “Any time,” he said, and flashed his heart-melting smile again.

  Gr
ace felt her cheeks heat up. Just then, her wrist-comp went off, indicating she was needed in the OR. Inwardly breathing a huge sigh of relief, she hastily got up to leave, mumbling her apologies. Dr. Nestor put out a hand to stop her from running off and touched her wrist. Grace felt an electric shock run up her arm and she almost jumped. Completely embarrassed now and convinced she was heating the entire eating center with her cheeks, Grace barely registered that the psychiatrist was asking her if she would like to join him for dinner sometime.

  Grace froze. She could not imagine trying to eat an entire dinner in front of this exquisitely attractive man. Her staring at him, wordlessly, over a meal, hardly seemed like enjoyable dinner company. She shook her head and garbled out a lame, inane apology. She was well aware that she was making no sense whatsoever.

  Grace’s policy had been to never get involved with senior staff physicians—especially brain-melting, gorgeous ones—and to that she would adhere. It had never steered her wrong in the past. The little voice was whimpering, all balled up in a corner of her brain. Grace was pretty sure Dr. Al-Fadi would not approve of Grace getting involved with one of the other staff persons on the Nelson Mandela and she wanted to stay on his good side. She had much to learn and a lot of work to do. Romance was out of the question, at the moment.

  She scurried out of the cafeteria, hoping Dr. Jeffrey Nestor would not notice her embarrassment, and immediately tried to block the entire debacle from her mind.

  Bud had watched the conversation between the charming Dr. Grace Alexandra Lord and Dr. Jeffrey Nestor through his aerial surveillance nanobots. He was experiencing an unusual sensation, something he had never felt before. He felt like he wanted to crumble metal bolts with his bare hands. He wanted to punch holes in the metal walls. Prior to this moment, he had never felt anything towards Dr. Jeffrey Nestor except respect, but now, he felt something entirely different. Hostility? Jealousy? Rage?