by K S Augustin
“You operated on him.” Her voice was hoarse with dread.
Savic laughed, a short humourless bark. “How uncouth do you think we are, Doctor? Surgery? Physically invasive techniques? We’re not barbarians.”
Not surgery? She blinked. “I don’t understand.”
“Have you heard of benzodiazepine?”
Moon repeated the word slowly. “Benzodiazepine.” She shook her head. It sounded only vaguely familiar, reminiscent of some of her undergraduate courses in biochemistry.
Pharmaceutical solutions.
Her grip on the chair back tightened.
“It’s a class of very useful drugs. They’re used as—” he waved his right hand in the air, “—tranquilisers, sedatives and muscle relaxants. A variant I was researching also had specific effects in terms of short-term memory loss, while maintaining basic cognitive functions.”
“So he’s on a drug you developed,” she said after a short pause. “A drug that keeps his mind clear while wiping his short-term memory.” She repressed a shiver, only the pale knuckles of her hand against the night dark upholstery of the chair betraying her distaste for what she was hearing and saying.
He nodded, a small congratulatory smile on his face. “Very good, Dr. Thadin. Yes, you’re correct. In fact, Srin even helped me in the final stages of the drug’s development. The memory effects were erratic at first but, through extensive experimentation over the years, I’ve managed to calibrate the dosage so it has an approximate two-day cycle. We’ve found that that’s the most optimum for the kind of work he’s doing. In fact, I was even able to add a cognitive enhancer to the mix, to maximise his abilities during that slice of time. Srin can retain information for two days, operating at peak efficiency for almost the entirety of that period, then almost all of it’s wiped and he begins life anew, as it were. In this way, we can test and double-test hypotheses in a very short amount of time, effectively trying out new scenarios every other day. The researchers who’ve used Srin’s talents have found the arrangement very useful.”
“And how long has he been living this two-day life?” Moon was compelled to ask.
“Eighteen years.”
Eighteen years. She almost buckled at the thought and it was only her death-grip on the chair that kept her upright.
Thousands of days with no memory beyond fleeting forty-eight hour snatches. Moon could barely comprehend what it meant to live such a life. There was no ability to establish long-term relationships, not friendships and certainly not romantic entanglements. There was no sense of one’s progress through life.
Eighteen years. Did he never look in a mirror and wonder why a young man should look the way he did? Srin’s face so obviously belonged to someone older, more mature, past the bravado of youth and more into the calmness of maturity.
She eased her grip, shoving the chair aside and leant forward, resting both hands, fingers outstretched, on the smooth table surface.
“How can he not know something’s wrong?” she asked, her voice vibrating with anger yet quiet, like a leashed jungle cat. “Hasn’t he noticed how he’s aged? How you’ve aged in the past two decades? If he lives the same two days over and over again, how can he not notice the difference between today and eighteen years ago?”
Savic sobered. He looked away, but there were no distractions beyond the bland furniture around them and the featureless panelled wall. When he met her gaze again, Moon could see the reluctant honesty in his eyes.
“I’ve told him that he suffers from a rare, mutated form of progeria—premature ageing. That’s why he looks older than he remembers. As for how I look…I don’t know. He’s never asked.”
“You don’t know,” she repeated, letting contempt creep into her voice. “You’ve been drugging a rational being for almost two decades, using an experimental drug that you developed, and you don’t know why he hasn’t figured out something’s wrong?”
Savic cleared his throat. “There may be some other side-effects I’m unaware of,” he rasped. “An interference with perception of another’s image perhaps. Or a previously unknown disconnect with long-term memories associated with facial recognition.”
She said nothing, letting her gaze burn into his.
“He’s been the only subject under such a drug regime for such an extended period of time,” he finished defensively. “I have no one to compare against.”
Moon was so livid she could hardly talk for a moment. When she did, her voice was icy and shaking with repressed emotion.
“You dare call yourself a scientist. A medical doctor. It’s supposed to be your duty to preserve life, not bend it according to some distorted vision of your own. It disgusts me that you think it’s ethical to treat another human being like this.”
The jibe made him straighten in the chair. With Moon leaning over the table, they were almost face to face.
“I’m also a member of the Republic, Dr. Thadin,” he responded coldly. “I know where my duty lies. And, despite what you may think of me, at least my own loyalty has never been questioned.”
Moon reared back as if she’d been slapped. With one sentence, Savic had turned the tables on her, and he’d done so very effectively. Once more, she was thrown back to the days just after Kad escaped the Phyllis Science Centre—back to the endless sessions of brutal questioning and the ruthless exposure of every facet of her life. Looking into his eyes, Moon knew Savic was privy to every detail of that period in her life.
“We’re both after the same thing, Doctor,” he said, after a pause. His voice was conciliatory, soothing. Moon hated it. “I can understand your womanly sensibilities may reach out and feel compassion for someone like Srin but, in the end, even you have to understand that he is just a tool.”
“One you’ve been assigned to fine tune,” Moon ground out through bloodless lips.
“One I continue to fine tune,” he corrected, but his voice was still kind, injected with a thread of superiority. “Whether you want to believe it or not, we both think alike, doing what’s necessary in order to carve out comfortable lives for ourselves. For me, that means making sure that Srin always performs to the maximum of his abilities. And, for you, that means detonating a successful stellar missile within the next four months. We need each other for both our goals to succeed.”
He gestured to her. “You need Srin. I need success. I am willing to overlook this outburst of emotionalism. After all, I realise you’ve been through a lot in the past few years, but—” he paused, “—I would hate to include any further outbursts of your temper in my regular reports to the Science Directorate.”
He smiled at her as if to a mischievous but repentant child. Moon curled her fingers into two tight fists.
“In that case,” she ground out through gritted teeth, “I thank you for your understanding, Dr. Savic. It won’t happen again.”
Moon walked stiffly out of the room. Initially she headed in the direction of her lab, then she changed her mind and wandered through the ship. Despite the number of people on board, she found the lack of surrounding conversation strange and unsettling. She was relieved when she found a small, enclosed observation deck. Thankfully, it was empty.
She padded silently to the viewport and gazed out into the all-encompassing blackness, letting out a pent-up breath in one huge rush.
So much for her naivety in thinking all was forgiven. She recognised Savic’s words for the veiled threat they were. As much as he was observing and reporting on Srin, it was now obvious that he was directed to do exactly the same thing to her. She wondered if she would ever be free of the crushing and mistrustful scrutiny of the Republic.
Still, as bad as that problem was, it was nothing compared to what they had subjected Srin Flerovs to for almost two decades. Moon didn’t know that much about the specific properties of benzodiazepine, but she was broadly familiar with the class of antidepressant drugs. Her mother had taken some briefly after the sudden death of her father, and she had spoken with the medical doctor a
bout them. While the details of all their side-effects eluded her, she knew that they were highly addictive even when taken for only short periods of time. If a dependence on them could be established after usage of only a few weeks, what happened to a human subjected to such a regime for years?
Beyond the clinical issues were the consequences for Srin himself. It was highly immoral to subject a person to such a life. It left his younger memories intact—that much was certain from the anecdotes he’d related the night before. But he was forced to relive two days of a subsequent, truncated life over and over again. Moon was surprised he appeared as lucid as he did.
She thought back on Savic’s last words, and a few things clicked in her brain. His comment about her “womanly sensibilities” implied that there were others without such “sensibilities.” Perhaps other scientists who had been loaned Srin for their own research? Moon wondered now whether some of the sudden breakthroughs she had read about in journals over the past fifteen years were due, not to inspiration, but to Srin’s abilities to out-compute any machine that existed in Republic space. She found it hard to believe that fellow scientists, her peers, had made themselves so blind to the torture of one man that they were willing to give up their ethics in return for greater funding and recognition. Was any advance in science worth this price?
But, then again, wasn’t that what she herself was doing? Even without Srin’s presence, wasn’t she using her research, feverishly spending every waking moment poring over esoteric equations, in order to vindicate herself? To prove she was worthy of living in the Republic? When viewed objectively, was there really any difference between the scientists who had used Srin without a word of protest, and herself?
Moon stared blindly at the velvet blackness outside.
What should she do now? An idealist would immediately stop research and refuse to participate in the exploitation of another being, but Moon knew she was not that strong a person. The past three years had been difficult enough. But she had not suffered greatly, compared to some. If she protested now, refused to do further work on her research, the Republic would throw her into detention and discard the key with a careless flick. She knew she would end up in a tighter security prison, maybe even on the notorious prison planet of Bliss itself. All her work, all her lofty goals of bringing dead stars back to life, would be wasted. And the potential for providing new, sun-kissed planets to millions of people would be destroyed.
“This is not my fight,” she murmured to herself, resting her forehead against the cold transparent pane.
She had already suffered once for something that was not of her making and had tasted the muted wrath of the Republic. She wouldn’t—she couldn’t—put herself in that situation again. Even if that meant abandoning a man who didn’t have any power left to defend himself.
Her soul would pay for this. Moon knew that. But at least her body and her reputation wouldn’t.
Chapter Five
How his head hurt. There didn’t seem to be a time when it didn’t. The dull throbbing was an intrinsic part of his existence and usually he was able to ignore it, to function with its uncomfortable rhythm pounding in the background, but this morning it seemed worse than usual.
Srin opened his eyes and flicked a gaze at the chrono on the opposite wall of his cabin. Ten minutes past three in the morning, ship time.
Hen told him yesterday that they were aboard a Republic ship called the Differential. He hadn’t heard of the ship before, but something nagged at the back of his head, telling him he should have. With a groan, he sat up, knowing it was useless trying to get to sleep when errant thoughts prodded him.
Should.
Should know.
He shook his head slowly. Trying to capture memories was like reaching into a thick fog, the white mist hiding recollection besides delivering hidden pinpricks of agony whenever he tried to grope towards anything meaningful. Exercising his mind in intellectual questions was much more relaxing. In comparison to his groping for memory, the thinking required was clean and soothing. But he felt like such a coward, preferring the cool satisfaction of a brain puzzle to the suffocating weight and pain of his memories.
Rising to his feet, he walked to the small bathroom and splashed water on his face. The recessed lighting slowly brightened to a comfortable level for his eyes as it registered his form. He stood motionless, hands clenched against the basin’s smooth curve, staring down at the drops that fell into the sink, watching them as they streaked down the steel, ran silently to ‘the plughole and disappeared into blackness.
He hated what he somehow knew came next. Nine times out of ten, he was able to avoid it, adroitly moving from the sink to towel without a betraying glance. But this morning was not going to be one of those times.
With agony spearing behind his eyes, Srin lifted his head and stared at the reflection in the mirror, crushed anew by what he saw.
What had happened to him?
The face that looked back at him was surreal, a distortion of his reality. Where had those lines, those wrinkles, come from? He relaxed one set of clenched fingers, lifting them and running them across his cheek, feeling the difference in texture, the decrease in youthful elasticity, as he rubbed against his skin, creasing it. His fingertips moved upwards, tracing the lines that feathered from his eyes, skimming his wiry eyebrows and following the creases in his forehead.
This was not the face he remembered from only three days ago. That face was unlined, supple, energetic. That face was bright and hopeful.
This face—
This face was beaten down, twisted by hurt, the eyes wary and guarded. He knew he should ask Hen about it, about what happened to him, but something stopped him. And he got the feeling that something always stopped him. There was unease when he thought of his therapist friend, as if, like him, Hen Savic was hiding something deep and terrible.
Srin frowned. He automatically reached for a towel and dried his face and hands.
He looked older, so much older. Maybe even fifteen years past his last remembrance. Was that assumption true or false? He threw the towel back onto the countertop.
Let’s say it’s true.
He walked back to the bedroom and sat on the edge of the mattress and the cabin plunged into darkness again. What could have happened in fifteen years? Did he marry Yalona, as they planned? Did they have children? What had happened to his proposal to the Republic Science Directorate? Did they give him the extra funding required? Why was he on this ship?
It was only the last question he could answer easily. Hen told him he was helping with an experiment in stellar-forming. But, was he really on a ship? Srin stilled his breathing. The ever-present hum of running machinery, the slight vibration beneath his bare feet, the configuration of his cabin with its curved section of hull wall, seemed to indicate that this was correct. There was nothing to be gained by lying to him about that. But he got the distinct feeling he was being lied to about something.
That thought was as comfortable as an old glove. He knew that Hen and the people who surrounded him were lying. He had always known they were lying.
“How?” he whispered harshly. How could he know he was constantly being lied to when he didn’t even know what happened to the woman who was to be his wife? He knew Hen would give him an answer if he asked. But would the answer be correct?
Srin almost doubled over, resting his head against two clenched fists, squeezing his eyes shut until he saw flashes of red light bursting in his mind, his hands pushing against the hard bone of his forehead.
This was so familiar. He knew he had been here before. Maybe not on the Differential, but certainly in this same pose, thinking the same thoughts. If so, there must have been something he had done about it, some way to reassure himself that he wasn’t losing his mind. Had that thought occurred to him before as well?
With a renewed sense of purpose, Srin got to his feet and started silently searching his room. His computer was functional, but useless, containing only basic
information on the Differential. Being read-only, there was no way he was able to modify its information. There were no pads or notebooks, not even an errant cushion that could be stained in a particular way. Srin knew Hen was somehow responsible for this and grimaced. No, he must have thought of a way around this, around the scrutiny of his handler. He wasn’t an idiot! He requested some lighting and sighted down the shelves in his quarters, but saw no revealing variations in furniture texture. Maybe that was too obvious. He turned his attention to the wall panelling.
The only memories that were crystal clear to him were ones from almost two decades ago. And yesterday. Why? Trying to capture intervening images and emotions made the throbbing in his head worse, but Srin gritted his teeth and tried, even as his fingers explored every rare nook and cranny of his smooth-walled cell. There were ghostly images of other people, a slowly ageing Hen Savic and the insides of more laboratories than Srin thought he could ever have seen in his life. And then, nothing. Nothing more. Just tantalising glimpses showing him that there had been events, actions in past years, just none that he could clearly recall.
What was going on? What had they done to him?
His fingers trembled. Was this uncomfortable realisation that he was alone, in a conspiracy he couldn’t even begin to fathom, the first time he had such a thought? Or the six hundredth? There were so many images of different places—indistinct, fading to transparency the moment he tried to capture one—that at least he knew he was moved around a lot. They didn’t want him making friends, forming attachments, except to people like Hen. Why? If he couldn’t remember more than a handful of recent days at a time, why would they worry about friendships?
Why couldn’t he remember?
Driven to desperation, Srin crawled back to the bathroom. Turning his head away to heighten his sense of touch, he ran his fingers up and down each visible panel, using the sensitive tips to find any unevenness, any clue that he had been through this cycle of thought and action before.
