by Marcus Bryan
adult, she broke off all contact with her family, because of the shame she felt at having wished for such a terrible thing. Before the famine, the pair had been as close as two sisters could be, give or take, but at that moment, in her hunger, her desperation, she had not just ignored, but forgotten all of her old memories, her old love. All she saw her sister as was an obstacle to her own survival.’
Carrington seemed to understand; either that or he didn’t want to know any more. He looked back at the pale, deathly thin child who stood behind the viewing window, gazing out into nothing.
‘What’s his name?’ he asked.
‘He doesn’t have one; at least as far as he knows.’ Landsmann paused for a moment. ‘As far as I know, either, now I come to think of it. I just call him Subject 53M.’
‘I’d like to know his name.’ Carrington’s words came out with icy, deliberate restraint.
‘I’m afraid you’ll have to ask Barney; he’s the one who tends to get attached to the subjects.’
As if on cue, the pair heard Barney’s heavy footsteps clunking down the corridor which led to the isolation room. They stood silently as he approached. Landsmann tapped her foot.
‘Doctor!’ Carrington called, as Barney squeezed through the door. Barney eyed him warily, but chose not to reply. ‘I’d like to know a few things about this patient’s history, if you would be so kind.’ The heavy-set man glared at Carrington, but obliged all the same. Loping over, he took the briefest of glances through the observation window, and then, nervously turning to face the obviously important man who stood before him, began to recite a series of facts about Subject 53M:
‘His name was Danny Arlington. His birthday’s July the eighteenth, so that would make him…twenty-seven, almost twenty-eight now.’
‘He’s twenty-eight?’
‘Almost twenty-eight,’ Barney corrected. ‘And I suppose that would mean he’s been in isolation for…three months, three-and-a-half?’ He asked the question to no-one in particular. ‘Sorry I can’t be more specific; I seem to have left my chart in the break-room.’
‘Just because we’re scientists doesn’t mean our memories are much good, Mr Carrington. I can’t even remember what I was doing last week without having my notes beside me,’ Landsmann chuckled, but it was now her turn to be ignored by Carrington.
‘What did he do?’ he asked, staring intently at Barney.
‘I think he was unemployed,’ Barney replied thoughtfully.
‘Not his job; what did he do?’ Carrington retorted, his calm starting to fade. ‘What was his crime?’
‘Oh - er - that. Well, Danny Arlington tried to blow up this facility.’
‘Really?’ Landsmann said, raising her eyebrows. ‘Wow; I should’ve known that.’
‘It was before you came to work here,’ said Barney, really beginning to sweat under the inspector’s gaze now. ‘They killed three people.’
‘They?’
‘Him and his wife. Poppy. Poppy, I think her name was.’
‘Doesn’t ring any bells,’ said Landsmann airily. ‘I must not have paid much attention when it happened. I suppose it was all covered up, though, wasn’t it; what with this place being involved?’
‘How did they even know about this project?’ asked Carrington.
‘They wouldn’t have had much more than rumour and hearsay to go on.’
Barney nodded in agreement. ‘For all they knew, they might’ve been bombing a children’s hospital.’
‘Such is the nature of religious conviction,’ his colleague lamented.
‘What made you think they were religious?’ Carrington asked.
‘We can discuss it on the way to the rehabilitation centre,’ Landsmann replied, turning on her heel and leaving the other two behind. ‘I’d quite like to get some work done this afternoon, if that’s quite alright with you.’
Wheezing slightly as he went, Carrington hurried to catch up with the doctor. She, however, had already launched into a monologue about the second part of the rehabilitation process, and he was unable to pursue his line of enquiry any further.
‘With the huge quantity of theory and experiment we had behind us, we were reasonably confident that a sustained period of total sensory deprivation would have the envisaged effect; disassociation of the subject’s basic bodily and cognitive faculties from its identity. It was, after all, on the basis of that research that this facility received its funding, and - as you of all people should know, Mr Carrington - our government does not finance the wilful mistreatment of its citizens, even prisoners, unless it is sure there will be some profit to come out of it. However:’ Here, Dr Landmann’s pace slowed somewhat. ‘Since the length of isolation we needed to inflict on our subjects had never been attempted before, the later stages of the deconstruction process were very much a case of the blind leading the blind. Quite literally, I’m sorry to say. ’ She stopped, and turned to face Carrington, who until that point had been trailing behind, watching her ponytail whip to and fro as she pressed forward. ‘Do, you have any children, Mr Carrington?’ she asked, her nose no more than two inches from his face.
He was taken aback.
‘Err… Yes. Yes I do; two girls,’ he stammered. ‘Why do you ask?’
‘Three weeks in that isolation chamber, and you wouldn’t remember either of their faces. Six, and you wouldn’t remember either of their names. Two months, and you would barely recall their existence.’
Carrington’s brow furrowed at the insinuation, but Landsmann still pressed on:
‘Don’t think that you could withstand this process by mere force of will, Mr Carrington. Don’t think that your English stiff-upper-lip or your Oxbridge education would allow you to overcome the laws of physics. You’re no stronger than that man we saw back in the isolation chamber.’ Her own lip curled, mockingly, as she said it. ‘If we left you in there for too long, you would no longer comprehend language enough to hear your daughters’ names as anything more than the howling of an animal, and if they stood in front of you, you would no longer recognise them as members of your own species, let alone your own family.’ The lip fell into a grimace as she added: ‘Sadly, these claims are not just idle speculation, but the recorded observations from our earliest attempts to empty out the vessel. As it turns out, we vastly overestimated the resilience of the human mind.’
‘What happened to them? The first ones?’ Carrington demanded.
‘We pushed them too far,’ Landsmann replied solemnly. ‘They were put beyond the point of recovery.’
‘They died?’
‘No. Worse, I’m afraid. Try to imagine a human being, stripped of everything that makes them human, and you’ll still not even be half way there.’
Carrington gave a look that said he didn’t want to imagine. Instead, he asked:
‘Where are they now?’
‘Mental institutions. Their relationship with this facility has been obscured, of course.’
‘I’d like to meet some of them, before I submit my report.’
For the first time, a crack appeared in Landsmann’s sheen of scholarly detachment.
‘Meet?’ she snapped. ‘Have you not been listening to a word I just said? There’s no-one left in there to meet!’
Carrington was silent. When Landsmann had regained some of her lofty composure, she continued:
‘The second part of the process, refilling the vessel, required the same use of trial and error. No-one had ever broken down the human mind to the degree that we had before; no practical experiments had ever been possible, so all we had to guide us was mere conjecture, along with a willingness to fail. It was like trying to perform brain surgery armed only with a copy of Freud’s Interpretation of Dreams. And, like I say, we had to be prepared to fail; because we did. Many times.’ Landsmann stared at her shoes; all of a sudden, she had the look of a sheepish child. ‘We lost a lot of subjects,’ she said, turning away from Carrington. ‘We lost a lot of people.’
‘Then why didn’t you s
top, for God’s sake!’ Carrington barked.
‘For God’s sake? We don’t get a lot that, here.’
‘I’m not surprised!’
‘Are you a religious man, Mr Carrington?’
‘Why does that matter?’
‘It never seems to be the suffering that we inflict on our patients that the God-fearing people care about. It’s the fact that we’re, hem, “taking people’s souls.”’
‘I can understand why people would see it that way.’
‘And what about my soul?’
‘What about it?’ Carrington replied, contemptuously.
‘I’m under no illusions, Mr Carrington. If I’m not the devil himself, then I sold my soul to him every time I put my face to the observation window and looked through the eyes of that poor bastard back there. But I’d do it again tomorrow - I will do it again tomorrow - for the sake of the same man I’ve spent the last four months driving halfway to insanity, because if people like you had the courage to give this project the funding it deserves, he would be given a second chance, rather than being sent to rot in prison for the rest of his Goddamn life. He could go on to live a better life, a useful life, instead of being thrown back in that chamber so we can perform more tests on him, just to appease the concerns of people like you. He could be free by now.’
‘Free, to be whatever you people would turn him into,’ Carrington retorted.
‘As opposed to what he was made into, when he was too young to know what was happening? Unlike some, Carrington, we never try to program our
