The Theta Patient
A Theta Timeline Short
Chris Dietzel
This is a work of fiction. Names, characters, places, and incidents are the products of the author’s imagination or are used fictitiously. Any resemblance to actual events, locales, or persons, living or dead, is coincidence.
THE THETA PATIENT, Copyright 2015 by Chris Dietzel. All rights reserved.
Published in the United States by Watch The World End Publishing.
Cover Design: Levente Szabo
Cover Text: Matt Butterweck
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Also by Chris Dietzel
Dystopian
The Theta Timeline
The Theta Prophecy
A Quiet End of the World
The Man Who Watched The World End
A Different Alchemy
The Hauntings Of Playing God
The Last Teacher
Table of Contents
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About the Author
“You have nothing to fear, if you have nothing to hide.”
Joseph Goebbels – During Nazi Germany
“No one should be against our mass surveillance unless they have something to hide.”
Various leaders – During the rise of the Tyranny
1
There was never enough time in the day. Dr. Bradburn knew this better than anyone.
Being in charge of the largest mental hospital in the state, there was simply too much work for one person to do. Each morning, he had the daily staff meetings. These were supposed to be routine. No longer than thirty minutes. But after discussing issues from the previous night, patients who were having problems, and any missing staff members—assumed to have done something the Tyranny didn’t agree with and likely never to be seen or heard from again—they lasted at least an hour or two every day.
Just three days prior, his head nurse hadn’t shown up for work. Calls to the man’s home went unanswered. Most likely, he was in a secret prison or else dead in a ditch, a single blast in the back of his head. Bradburn didn’t agree with the harshness of the penalties brought down by the Tyranny, but he went along with it for two reasons. The first was that the Tyranny’s leaders were adamant that everything they did was to keep the public safe. Each time they took someone away, it turned out that individual had been some kind of a threat. The second reason Bradburn accepted missing friends and coworkers was because he knew that if you didn’t give the Tyranny a reason to take issue with you, you could live your life in peace and quiet. The people who were being tortured or were already dead, no matter how nice they had seemed, were partially to blame for what happened to them because if they hadn’t said or done something the Tyranny didn’t like, they would have been left alone.
Of course, none of this was discussed during the daily staff meetings that took so long because neither he nor anyone on his staff wanted to make it sound like they were complaining about another disappearance—that could be construed as disagreeing with the Tyranny.
If the morning meetings and the vanishing staff members were the only inconvenience each day, he would have at least had a chance of getting his work done. But there were also the rounds and all the peculiarities that came with them. Many of his patients became unsettled when the Tyranny’s AeroCams came hovering over the facility grounds. These were men and women who needed to be sedated just to get through ordinary days. When they saw little flying cameras inspecting what they were doing, some patients began scratching at their arms or faces. Others began to yell.
The Tyranny’s cameras saw everything, but they understood nothing. Each time the tiny remote controlled robots captured one of his patients panicking at the sight of an AeroCam, Bradburn’s hospital was promptly visited by men in suits who, even after having it explained to them that the patient was mentally ill, demanded to question the individual themselves before accepting Bradburn’s story.
As if the visits from the Tyranny and the intrusion of their AeroCams wasn’t enough, Bradburn also had to deal with the family members of each patient who wanted to see their relative. Each person’s name had to be entered into two databases. One for his facility’s records. Another maintained by the Tyranny as part of their database to track everywhere people went and everything they did.
Nothing was simple. Everything took much more time than he remembered it taking when he first became a doctor.
“Dr. Bradburn,” his secretary said, moving alongside him, matching his brisk pace down the hallway.
The bottom of her shoes clacked against the linoleum floor, each clack echoing amongst the otherwise empty and sterile hallway.
He waved his hand toward her as if deflecting her words. “No time right now, Cindy. Sorry.”
Then there was the paperwork. Paperwork for every imaginable and unimaginable aspect of running a psychiatric hospital. His running joke—a joke he only told to his wife out of respect for the establishment he ran—was that the load of papers he had to sign each day was as crazy as some of the people in his care. Dietary reports. Physical fitness reports. Sanitation reports. Complaints. Certification renewals. That didn’t include all of the papers he had to submit to the Tyranny. Employees who hadn’t shown up for work (even though they most likely hadn’t shown up because they were already in one of the Tyranny’s secret prisons). Logs of anything his patients had said or done that could be construed as being anti-Tyranny.
It was never-ending. Most of the paperwork was completed by his staff. All he had to do was initial each page and provide his signature at the very end. It sounded simple enough, but he had to sign hundreds of documents each week. And, not wanting to sign something without reading at least part of it first, he found the task burdensome and a drain on his time.
“Dr. Bradburn,” his secretary said again, following him on his way back to his office.
“Sorry, Cindy. I’m busy.”
It didn’t help things that three new patients had been brought in the previous night. His facility usually had no more than three new patients each month. He didn’t have the time or the staff necessary to get them in-processed in a timely manner. He barely had enough time to sit with each man, read through their charts, get a sense of how lucid each one was, and begin thinking about how best to help them.
There was no use hoping he would be home in time to eat dinner with his family. It was already a lost cause. That was the thought that made him shake his head in frustration as he rushed into his office to drop one stack of patient folders and pick up another.
“Dr. Bradburn?” a man’s voice said.
The doctor only noticed the individual in the black suit once he looked up from the documents in his hand. The man was already sitting in a chair opposite of where Dr. Bradburn usually sat. He offered a rehearsed smile but didn’t bother to stand or extend his hand.
“Who”—the doctor started, but was immediately interrupted.
“I’m from the Tyranny, doctor. We need to have a talk.”
Moving toward his seat, Bradburn looked back at his secretary. She was standing in the doorway, her eyes squinting, an expression he recognized as her I-tried-to-tell-you face. The man’s presence, the fact that he didn’t bother giving his name, made Bradburn’s secretary all the more uneasy. An effect that rubbed off on the doctor.
The man in the black suit turned, saw the secretary still standing there, and said, “That’ll be all. Please close the door.”
She backed away and did as she was told.
With his office door closed and a man from the Tyranny sitting across from him, the air in Bradburn’s chest sank down to his gut. Suddenly, having enough time in the day was the least of his worries.
2
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