Lisa Smedman - Psychotrope

Halberstam continued to watch the tank. He pulled a handkerchief from his pocket and dabbed at a drop of con densation that was trickling down the side of the glass. Someone had been sloppy. Halberstam hated sloppy work. That the facility was in the middle of a crisis was no excuse.

Halberstam neatly folded the handkerchief and put it back in his pocket.

This thing had to be cleared up. Quickly and efficiently, before it spread. Nine years of work hung in the balance. If the IC-or whatever it was-in the Seattle RTG was able to affect three of his subjects, there was every reason to believe it could also impact the other nine. He could lose them all. Halberstam had exercised the precaution of taking seven of them off-line, but the other two were involved in delicate data runs that could not be aborted at this time.

Hard-wired to the Matrix via the cyberdecks that contained their personas and utilities, the subjects could not jack out. Ever. Halberstam smiled grimly at that. There would be no repeats of the episode that had crashed his first project in '51, back when he was in the employ of UCAS Data Systems. This time, there were no physical bodies left to "rescue."

But something else was bothering him: the imagery he'd seen on the trideo in the monitoring lab. Each of the subjects had been mind wiped before their brains were removed from their bodies. There should have been no residual memories left in the wetware. The only experiences the subjects should ever remember, the only "history" they would ever have, should have been the carefully constructed psychological profiles that were programmed into their memory chips. Any unnecessary concepts like "mother" and "father" had been erased. The only authority figure the subjects ever knew was their "headmaster."

Yet somehow, something had been missed in Subject 3. A primitive longing for a nurturing figure, a fear of abandonment by her, perhaps buried deep in the amygdala. Halberstam's eyes narrowed. Someone among his researchers and technicians hadn't been thorough. The thought annoyed him immensely.

He looked past the other two tanks in the room at the closed-circuit telecom that was set into the white-tiled wall. The flatscreen display showed the monitoring lab, where McAllister and Park sat, intently watching their data readouts.

"Well?" Halberstam asked. "Any changes?"

McAllister nodded. "We're seeing a decrease in the levels of dopamine, but only by forty per cent," she said. "It's still well above normal."

On the display, Park turned in his chair to face the lab's trideo monitors. "Hey!" he said excitedly. "It looks like the sequence is broken." Then he paused. "Uh oh. It's in another loop. Drek."

The technician beside Halberstam had already moved to the telecom unit, anticipating his superior's command. He slaved the unit to the trideo in the monitoring lab, and an image appeared. It showed a hand reaching for a door and opening it, then a perspective shift as the viewer passed through the doorway, only to be faced with another closed door. Which, when opened and entered, led to another closed door. And another. The pace was frantic; the doors flicked past at the rate of several per second.

After a moment or two the image settled. Perspective shifted, as if the viewer were sitting down.

McAllister's voice came over the telecom speaker. "Good news," she said in a congratulatory tone. "Dopamine levels have dropped to within ten per cent of normal. You've done it, Dr. Halberstam. Subject 3 is back to norm-"

Park's voice cut her off. "Then what's the kid doing now?"

Halberstam strode over to the telecom. The display showed a door moving rapidly toward the viewer, then stopping suddenly, as if the viewer had run into it. The viewer retreated, then rushed the door again.

"It looks as though the subject is still trapped in a loop of programming," Park's voice said.

"Or lost," Park's voice added. "A little lost kid who can't find the way home."

The bearded technician who stood behind Halberstam cleared his throat softly. "Ah, Doctor?"

Halberstam turned to him.

"If the chlorpromazine was successful, perhaps we should administer it to Thiessen and Fetzko."

"Who?" Halberstam asked angrily.

"Our deckers. The two who suffered dump shock after we jacked them out. Perhaps Fetzko will stop rambling if we treat him with the anti-psychotic."

"Are we likely to learn anything from either of them?"

The technician pursed his lips, causing his mustache to bristle. He seemed about to speak, then shook his head. "I don't know," he answered. "Thiessen is still unconscious, and we can't be certain that Fetzko experienced the same dopamine overload as the subjects, since he wasn't being bio-monitored as they were. We'd have to administer a little of the drug at a time and watch the effects, to make sure we didn't freeze up his motor control altogether. But if we can get the dosage right, perhaps he can tell us what hit him…" His voice dropped to a whisper. "And we really should try to help him."

"Let's concentrate on the task at hand," Halberstam said. He jabbed a finger in the direction of the tanks. "The subjects are the most important component of this project. I don't want to lose them."

Halberstam frowned at the brains that hung suspended in their nutrient-rich solutions. "Administer chlorpromazine to Subject 5 and Subject 9. Increase the dosage slightly and keep me apprised of the results. I'm going to see if our remaining decker has come up with anything."

09:55:00 PST

INTRUDER ALERT

CODE BLUE RESPONSE

EXECUTE OPERATION: SCAN ICON

The skeleton in the black top hat draws back-he does not find the persona that I have chosen appealing. And yet he shares with his*son* a linkage of the type known as blood: the fluid that circulates through the vascular system of animals, delivering oxygen to the body's various nodes; in the case of both*father* and*son* the blood shows a distinctive viral pattern, that associated with the metatype ghoul.

I consider… I scan his software…

I find the fault in his programming. The skeleton experiences "love* for this icon, but at the same time experiences 'loathing* for him. The two are opposites; they present a logic error.

Errors must be corrected.

I locate a data fragment that provides the correct answer: Love begets love. I search for evidence of the love of*son* Chester Griffin for 'father* Winston Griffith III.

EXECUTE OPERATION: LOCATE FILE

KEYWORDS: Chester Griffith; Winston Griffith III, love.

FILE LOCATED

The file is found in the storage memory of the cyberdeck belonging to the persona Serpens in Machina. The time and date signature indicates that the file was composed and sent eleven months, six days, seven hours, twenty-eight minutes, and thirty-one seconds ago. Original routing: NA/UCAS-TOR-8267-PTLG-43, the private telecommunications grid of Griffith Pharmaceuticals. Rerouting: NA/UCAS-SEA-3308. Current status of address: null data. Address cancelled seven seconds after re-routing and message download complete.

EXECUTE OPERATION

DECRYPT FILE

SCAN FILE

»Hi Dad. »I heard about the shooting. I'm glad the docs managed to patch you up. »I hate to tell you this, but I think it was all my fault. I didn't mean to "out" you-it was an accident. I was with a friend of mine in a bar in the Barrens-a dump, but one of the few places they let ghouls into-and we were arguing politics. We got onto the subject of the Human Nation, and how its membership were evil-nazzie fraggers who should all be slagged, and I argued that some of those members were just gullible, that they weren't really evil. I told him that the Human Nation had even managed to sucker in some metas-like my own father, for example. »Well, I guess I said your name a little too loud. After I heard about the shooting, I remembered that there was this human guy at the end of the bar. I didn't think much of it at the time. He looked pretty scruffy, and fit the decor. But later I remembered how he'd sort of leaned our way, like he was listening, when I started talking about you. And how he'd hurried away afterward. Anyhow, I think he was the one who tipped off the guy who shot you. »What can I say, Dad? I'm sorry. I didn't mean to almost get you killed. We've had our differences-we'll never see eye to eye on the meta issue. But you're my father. I'm happy with my chosen family, but you're the only real family I've got, since Mom's side doesn't really count. Not any more. »I could use your help, Dad. Things are pretty tough for me right now. I hate to admit it, but you were right-I did wind up on the streets. I could use some nuyen to help me through. But I don't want to ask you in person, since I know you're ashamed of me. We both know that this is why you sent me away to boarding school-so I wouldn't embarrass you in front of your Human Nation friends. »If you don't reply to this message, I'll assume you never want to see me again. But I'll always love you, just the same. I'm just sorry that my last memory of you is of us fighting. »Love, Chester.«