by Ari Goelman
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CONTENTS
Title Page
Copyright Notice
Dedication
Epigraphs
Editor’s Introduction
Journal of Lauren C. Fielding – September 1, 2031
Case Notes of Dr. Finlay Brechel – December 2, 2031
Journal of Lauren C. Fielding – September 26, 2031
Case Notes of Dr. Finlay Brechel – December 3, 2031
Journal of Lauren C. Fielding – October 6, 2031
Journal of Lauren C. Fielding – October 7, 2031
Case Notes of Dr. Finlay Brechel – December 4, 2031
Journal of Lauren C. Fielding – October 14, 2031
Case Notes of Dr. Finlay Brechel – December 4, 2031
Journal of Lauren C. Fielding – October 16, 2031
Case Notes of Dr. Finlay Brechel – December 5, 2031
Journal of Lauren C. Fielding – October 20, 2031
Case Notes of Dr. Finlay Brechel – December 6, 2031
Journal of Lauren C. Fielding – October 22, 2031
Case Notes of Dr. Finlay Brechel – December 7, 2031
Case Notes of Dr. Finlay Brechel – December 7, 2031
Journal of Lauren C. Fielding – October 23, 2031
Case Notes of Dr. Finlay Brechel – December 8, 2031
Journal of Lauren C. Fielding – October 27, 2031
Journal of Lauren C. Fielding – October 28, 2031
Case Notes of Dr. Finlay Brechel – December 9, 2031
Journal of Lauren C. Fielding – October 30, 2031
Case Notes of Dr. Finlay Brechel – December 10, 2031
Journal of Lauren C. Fielding – November 1, 2031
Video Clip #1
Video Clip #5
Journal of Lauren C. Fielding – November 2, 2031
Journal of Lauren C. Fielding – November 3, 2031
Journal of Lauren C. Fielding – November 5, 2031
Case Notes of Dr. Finlay Brechel – December 11, 2031
Journal of Lauren C. Fielding – November 9, 2031
Editor’s Note: Interlude
From the Prison Journal of Lauren C. Fielding – December 9, 2031
From the Prison Journal of Lauren C. Fielding – December 12, 2031
From the Prison Journal of Lauren C. Fielding – December 13, 2031
From the Prison Journal of Lauren C. Fielding – December 16, 2031
From the Prison Journal of Lauren C. Fielding – December 17, 2031
Epilogue
Acknowledgments
About the Author
Copyright
Text copyright © 2017 by Ari Goelman
Published by Roaring Brook Press
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The Library of Congress has cataloged the print edition as follows:
Names: Goelman, Ari, author.
Title: The Innocence Treatment / Ari Goelman.
Description: First edition. | New York: Roaring Brook Press, 2017 | Summary: After sixteen-year-old Lauren Fielding undergoes a procedure to correct a unique cognitive disability, her perceptions of reality are challenged as she finds herself at the center of a conspiracy involving genetic engineering and government secrets.
Identifiers: LCCN 2016047515 (print) | LCCN 2017011056 (ebook) | ISBN 9781626728806 (hardcover) | ISBN 9781626728813 (ebook)
Subjects: | CYAC: People with mental disabilities—Fiction. | Genetic engineering—Fiction. | Conspiracies—Fiction. | Science fiction.
Classification: LCC PZ7.G5537 In 2017 (print) | LCC PZ7.G5537 (ebook) | DDC [Fic]—dc23
LC record available at https://lccn.loc.gov/2016047515
Our eBooks may be purchased in bulk for promotional, educational, or business use. Please contact the Macmillan Corporate and Premium Sales Department at (800) 221-7945 ext. 5442 or by e-mail at [email protected].
eISBN 9781626728813
First hardcover edition, 2017
eBook edition, October 2017
1 This is based on my personal recollection. For a more academic take on the inter-uprising period in the United States, please see Margaret Evans’s excellent retrospective, While Rome Burned (Cambridge, MA: MIT Press, 2035).
2 I believe Lauren means Fauna, the green fairy in the 1959 version of Sleeping Beauty. Our parents never allowed her to see the 2023 remake due to its explicit sexual references.
3 What happened, of course, is that people got hungry. Us included. A few weeks after Hurricane Josephine, my mother took nine-year-old Lauren on some made-up errand while my father and I waited in the yard with a .22 rifle. He managed to get three squirrels, still plump with the summer’s bounty. We made squirrel-and-potato stew on my parents’ old camping stove that evening, and ate well for the first time in a week. It’s funny. The first uprising is generally remembered as a national tragedy, the end of American innocence, etc. But I remember the weeks immediately after Hurricane Josephine fondly. My parents weren’t working for once. Every night, with the power dead, they told Lauren and me stories over candlelight. During the days, I’d tramp around the traffic-less roads with my father as he looked for a cell-phone signal. Or walk to the government depot with my mother, charge up our tablets, and drag home our day’s allotment of water.
We heard radio reports about riots in the District, and the terrorist attacks on the White House, but we didn’t see any violence around us. On the contrary—I never saw people so friendly. We met neighbors we’d never seen before. It wasn’t until almost a full month later that things got scary, with people getting arrested and troops everywhere.
4 The self-defense movement flourished in the U.S. for several years after the first uprising, in a kind of widespread fantasy that being a better fighter could somehow help you if there was another uprising. I think people were just desperate to believe there was something they could do. (I’d argue that it was very much the same impulse that led to the passage of the Emergency Act and the attendant restructuring of the Department, with its heightened tools of surveillance and prosecution.) In any case, the self-defense fad had run its course by 2031. When Lauren wrote this journal entry, Mr. Benitez had maybe half the number of students he’d had in the immediate aftermath of the Emergency.
5 By “District,” she means the remains of what was at the time still formally called Washington, D.C. After the first uprising in 2025, the Department enclosed and monitored the hardest-hit areas of the city (while the wealthy northwest portions were incorporated as a separate municipality). By 2031, when the events in this book took place, the political organs of the U.S. government had long since been relocated to the more easily secured Virginia suburbs, while the Department and its associated contractors (like Paxeon) had mostly set up shop in Maryland suburbs like Bethesda.
6 This is the first place in her journal where I’m sure Lauren deliberately fabricated something, in this case to protect me—futile as that effort turned out to be. I suspect I actually said something like, “The Department is scared because the Emergency Act is about to expire and the Department will finally be held accountable for its crimes.” Or something similarly hopeful. As though if only the Department didn’t exist, there would suddenly be enough food for everyone, and the richest people in the world would peacefully hand over their wealth to be distributed to the starving refugees who were already almost everyone else. To be fair to my seventeen-year-old self, I wasn’t the only one who tho
ught getting rid of the Emergency Act would solve the world’s problems. This was six years after the first uprising, remember, and the remains of the U.S. middle class were finally poking their timid heads up, like groundhogs wondering if it was safe to come out of their holes. It wasn’t, of course, but at the time we were hopeful.
7 If I remember right, around this time my father and I were having loud shouting matches about the Department pretty much every night. I’m not sure if Lauren really didn’t notice, or if she was already actively altering her journal entries to protect me. For my part, I’m embarrassed at how oblivious we all were to what was going on with Lauren. I recognized that she was changing, but I had no idea how fast. Not until it was too late.
8 In fact, this was explicit Department policy at the time, as detailed most recently in the paper “Not-Too-Secret Service: The Department’s Use of Undercover Agents in the Inter-uprising Period” (Christensen et al., Annals of American History 209 (2040): 437–459).
9 It probably goes without saying that I never said that, or anything close to that.
10 1992. Walt Disney Feature Animation.
11 Again, Lauren protecting me. I’m not sure why she didn’t just delete this whole exchange. It’s almost like she was taunting Dr. Corbin, like, “I know you’re reading this, and I want you to know this isn’t an accurate account.”
12 To be clear—all journal entries included in this book are rendered in their online version, in part because I don’t have access to the (presumably more falsified) versions that Lauren sent to Dr. Corbin.
13 My father filled me in a few days after Lauren got the story out of him. I’m not sure of the precise date, but it had to have been right around then because I remember not believing him, assuming it was just one more tactic in his ongoing campaign to make me hate the Department and Paxeon a little less. I blush to remember the way I spoke to my father back then, like he was nothing but a Department collaborator, cravenly terrified that I—his noble, truth-speaking daughter—might harm his prospects at work. In retrospect, of course, he was just being a concerned parent, trying to keep me out of trouble. And given the stigma around “designer babies” (genetically engineered humans being even more taboo then than they are now), of course he wouldn’t have wanted to tell us any sooner than he had to.
14 Clearly Lauren decided not to delete this entry, instead saving it for future dissemination. The following entry (which I presume is the one she sent to Dr. Corbin in place of this one) appears to be more or less truthful, if occasionally insincere.
15 Up until the first uprising in 2025, many Americans observed a tradition of carving jack-o’-lantern faces into pumpkins for Halloween. The idea was, you’d hollow out a pumpkin and carve a face into its surface. Then, on the night of Halloween, you’d light a candle within the pumpkin, so the jack-o’-lantern face would appear to glow from within. Following the first uprising, laws were passed requiring all farmers who grew “decorative” crops (including the sorts of pumpkins that made good jack-o’-lanterns) to switch to fuel and food crops. By 2031 only the very wealthy (and shameless) would have even one real jack-o’-lantern on their front porch, let alone the dozens of them that Riley had apparently put out.
16 I’ve been unable to conclusively identify the prisoner, despite a good deal of effort. The interviewer refers to him as “Mr. Palmer,” but there is no record of someone with that last name being held at the San Luis Obispo Detention Facility in 2031. (Given how heavily redacted the Department’s records are from that time, this by no means precludes that a Palmer was involved in an experiment at the facility—it just means I cannot substantiate his identity.)
17 A decade later, Paxeon and the Department continue to deny the existence of the Innocence Treatment, so the scientific details remain obscure, with no publicly accessible research on the topic. That said, advances in brain mapping and genome mapping in the early part of this century made this sort of project the subject of speculation as early as 2014. (See Corbin, Stein, et al., “Gene Structure and Oligodendrocyte Production,” Journal of Brain Science 304 (2014): 520–528.)
18 Around this time I remember our father telling Lauren she had to go see Dr. Corbin. It was perhaps the first time in Lauren’s life that she outright refused to do what our father told her. I remember how baffled he was. As an aside: it’s interesting how little Lauren talks about our parents in her journal entries. She was extremely close to our father, especially, and I can’t help but think his absence in her journal was a deliberate effort on her part to direct attention away from our family.
19 In fact, in December 2031, a Department spokesperson described Lauren’s just-posted journal entries as the “completely unfounded allegations of a young woman with a well-documented and tragic history of cognitive and mental disability.” (nytimes.com, Monday, December 8, 2031.)
20 E. Sofia Fielding, Gilded Brutalism: Modernist Poetry and the Communist Revolution in China (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2038), 296 pp.
