Cory Doctorow - Eastern Standard Tribe

One of them recited a Miranda-esque litany that ended with "Do you understand." It wasn't really a question, but I answered anyway. "No! No I don't! Who the hell are you, and what are you doing in my fucking hotel room?"

In my heart, though, I knew. I'd lived enough of my life on the hallucinatory edge of sleepdep to have anticipated this moment during a thousand freakouts. I was being led away to the sanatorium, because someone, somewhere, had figured out about the scurrying hamsters in my brain. About time.

As soon as I said the f-word, the guns came out. I tried to relax. I knew intuitively that this could either be a routine and impersonal affair, or a screaming, kicking, biting nightmare. I knew that arriving at the intake in a calm frame of mind would make the difference between a chemical straightjacket and a sleeping pill.

The guns were nonlethals, and varied: two kinds of nasty aerosol, a dart-gun, and a tazer. The tazer captured my attention, whipping horizontal lightning in the spring breeze. The Tesla enema, they called it in London. Supposedly club-kids used them recreationally, but everyone I knew who'd been hit with one described the experience as fundamentally and uniquely horrible.

I slowly raised my hands. "I would like to pack a bag, and I would like to see documentary evidence of your authority. May I?" I kept my voice as calm as I could, but it cracked on "May I?"

The reader of the litany nodded slowly. "You tell us what you want packed and we'll pack it. Once that's done, I'll show you the committal document, all right?"

"Thank you," I said.

They drove me through the Route 128 traffic in the sealed and padded compartment in the back of their van. I was strapped in at the waist, and strapped over my shoulders with a padded harness that reminded me of a rollercoaster restraint. We made slow progress, jerking and changing lanes at regular intervals. The traffic signature of 128 was unmistakable.

The intake doctor wanded me for contraband, drew fluids from my various parts, and made light chitchat with me along the way. It was the last time I saw him. Before I knew it, a beefy orderly had me by the arm and was leading me to my room. He had a thick Eastern European accent, and he ran down the house rules for me in battered English. I tried to devote my attention to it, to forget the slack-eyed ward denizens I'd passed on my way in. I succeeded enough to understand the relationship of my legcuff, the door frame and the elevators. The orderly fished in his smock and produced a hypo.

"For sleepink," he said.

Panic, suppressed since my arrival, welled up and burst over. "Wait!" I said. "What about my things? I had a bag with me."

"Talk to doctor in morning," he said, gesturing with the hypo, fitting it with a needle-and-dosage cartridge and popping the sterile wrap off with a thumbswitch. "Now, for sleepink." He advanced on me.

I'd been telling myself that this was a chance to rest, to relax and gather my wits. Soon enough, I'd sort things out with the doctors and I'd be on my way. I'd argue my way out of it. But here came Boris Badinoff with his magic needle, and all reason fled. I scrambled back over the bed and pressed against the window.

"It's barely three," I said, guessing at the time in the absence of my comm. "I'm not tired. I'll go to sleep when I am."

"For sleepink," he repeated, in a more soothing tone.

"No, that's all right. I'm tired enough. Long night last night. I'll just lie down and nap now, all right? No need for needles, OK?"

He grabbed my wrist. I tried to tug it out of his grasp, to squirm away. There's a lot of good, old-fashioned dirty fighting in Tai Chi-eye-gouging, groin punches, hold-breaks and come-alongs-and they all fled me. I thrashed like a fish on a line as he ran the hypo over the crook of my elbow until the vein-sensing LED glowed white. He jabbed down with it and I felt a prick. For a second, I thought that it hadn't taken effect-I've done enough chemical sleep in my years with the Tribe that I've developed quite a tolerance for most varieties-but then I felt that unmistakable heaviness in my eyelids, the melatonin crash that signalled the onslaught of merciless rest. I collapsed into bed.

I spent the next day in a drugged stupor. I've become quite accustomed to functioning in a stupor over the years, but this was different. No caffeine, for starters. They fed me and I had a meeting with a nice doctor who ran it down for me. I was here for observation pending a competency hearing in a week. I had seven days to prove that I wasn't a danger to myself or others, and if I could, the judge would let me go.

"It's like I'm a drug addict, huh?" I said to the doctor, who was used to non sequiturs.

"Sure, sure it is." He shifted in the hard chair opposite my bed, getting ready to go.

"No, really, I'm not just running my mouth. It's like this: I don't think I have a problem here. I think that my way of conducting my life is perfectly harmless. Like a speedfreak who thinks that she's just having a great time, being ultraproductive and coming out ahead of the game. But her friends, they're convinced she's destroying herself-they see the danger she's putting herself in, they see her health deteriorating. So they put her into rehab, kicking and screaming, where she stays until she figures it out.

"So, it's like I'm addicted to being nuts. I have a nonrational view of the world around me. An inaccurate view. You are meant to be the objective observer, to make such notes as are necessary to determine if I'm seeing things properly, or through a haze of nutziness. For as long as I go on taking my drug-shooting up my craziness-you keep me here. Once I stop, once I accept the objective truth of reality, you let me go. What then? Do I become a recovering nutcase? Do I have to stand ever-vigilant against the siren song of craziness?"

The doctor ran his hands through his long hair and bounced his knee up and down. "You could put it that way, I guess."

"So tell me, what's the next step? What is my optimum strategy for providing compelling evidence of my repudiation of my worldview?"

"Well, that's where the analogy breaks down. This isn't about anything demonstrable. There's no one thing we look for in making our diagnosis. It's a collection of things, a protocol for evaluating you. It doesn't happen overnight, either. You were committed on the basis of evidence that you had made threats to your coworkers due to a belief that they were seeking to harm you."

"Interesting. Can we try a little thought experiment, Doctor? Say that your coworkers really were seeking to harm you-this is not without historical precedent, right? They're seeking to sabotage you because you've discovered some terrible treachery on their part, and they want to hush you up. So they provoke a reaction from you and use it as the basis for an involuntary committal. How would you, as a medical professional, distinguish that scenario from one in which the patient is genuinely paranoid and delusional?"

The doctor looked away. "It's in the protocol-we find it there."

"I see," I said, moving in for the kill. "I see. Where would I get more information on the protocol? I'd like to research it before my hearing."

"I'm sorry," the doctor said, "we don't provide access to medical texts to our patients."

"Why not? How can I defend myself against a charge if I'm not made aware of the means by which my defense is judged? That hardly seems fair."

The doctor stood and smoothed his coat, turned his badge's lanyard so that his picture faced outwards. "Art, you're not here to defend yourself. You're here so that we can take a look at you and understand what's going on. If you have been set up, we'll discover it-"

"What's the ratio of real paranoids to people who've been set up, in your experience?"