Paul Hardy - The Last Man on Earth Club

After half an hour perusing such tedious information, I stopped avoiding what I really needed to do, and called Bell. But all I got was a message telling anyone who rang that he’d gone back to his homeworld for a meeting and would be gone for several weeks. I wasn’t sure which was worse: him not having the decency to tell me he was going, or my own relief at not having to have an argument.

With everyone in their beds, I retired to my own room but couldn’t sleep; I lay there and wondered whether Bell would come back to me when he returned.

At three in the morning, Kwame awoke screaming from a nightmare.

The duty nurse got there first, and was helping him up from the floor where he’d fallen, still hyperventilating and covered in sweat. His hands shuddered, uncontrollably; the symptoms of neural damage only got worse with distress. It made me appreciate exactly how much self-control he had to exercise on a daily basis.

“Was it the same?” I asked.

“The… same,” he said, between heavy gasps.

“Okay, let’s get you downstairs and we’ll have a cup of tea.”

He nodded as best he could through the shakes. With the help of the duty nurse, we got him into a dressing gown and a chair and took him down to the common room. “Would you like to talk about it?” I asked.

“No,” he said, clutching his non-spill cup with all the self-control he could manage.

“Do you mind discussing it tomorrow?”

“You should… not concern… yourself.”

“I’d like to help,” I said. “You can’t keep going through this every night.”

“Not… now. Please. Not now.”

It was a poor time to start a therapy session, so I left it at that. And anyway, I had little choice; a chime in my ear called me elsewhere. I left Kwame with the nurse and paid a visit to the security manager, Lomeva Sisse, in her room of screens and monitors haunted by the scent of triple strength coffee, from where she could see every little bit of nothing happening across the centre in the middle of the night. She was grimly concerned, as she usually was.

“Somebody broke in,” she said.

“What?”

“About an hour ago. Look.” Lomeva pulled up monitor video for the perimeter, backgrounding everything else, and showed me something I couldn’t even see until she enhanced the image. High among the trees, at the edge of the picture, a shadow leapt among the branches, avoiding every barrier.

“Is that a monkey? Or an ape or something?”

“Only apes on this planet are human. So’s that.”

“Haven’t we got alarms out there? And the energy barrier?”

“Went over them. And knew exactly where to do it as well. That sector’s a pain to cover. No rivers, no clearings, no actual damn perimeter of any kind.”

“So, whoever that is, is still here?”

“That’s the sum of it.”

“Shouldn’t we be in lockdown?”

“Nuh-uh. Take a look at four hours earlier.” Lomeva wound the footage back, and showed the same place earlier in the night: another human figure darted through the treetops, in the opposite direction. “Automatic systems didn’t pick it up that time. I said we were underbudget for security. And this is what we get.”

“Okay. Hang on. So someone left. And then someone came in. Would that be the same person?”

“I’d bet on it. And I’m thinking we won’t find full coverage on all the patients for the evening.”

“You think that or you know that?”

“I know that. The crybaby, the cyborg, the wacko and the old woman were all in their rooms, and they all had privacy on. Somebody hacked the shit out of our systems because it stayed on for four hours and nobody noticed. The same four hours this person was missing. What are you going to do about it?”

“Okay, okay, let me think for a moment…” If Hub Security found out about this, they’d move us all to a secure facility somewhere underground in a heartbeat, and that wouldn’t help therapy in the least. “So let’s say one of the patients is getting out. How far can they get?”

“Depends on whether or not anyone was helping.”

“Okay. Let’s say there wasn’t. What’s inside two hour’s foot travel?”

“There’s the weather station on Yayne Peak. But it’s unmanned.”

“So they don’t have any transport there?”

She closed her eyes in frustration. “Yeah. Dammit. They’ve got a one-person sled for emergencies.” She took a pad and pulled records for the Yayne Peak weather station up on a screen. “Yeah. Same thing. No records for about three hours. Except…” She homed in on the details for the one-person sled. “The sled doesn’t think it’s gone anywhere but it’s recharging as if it had. And that much power loss…” She ran a calculation. “Hundred and twenty kilometres travel, give or take. Whoever it was went to Hub Metro.”

“How long would they have been there?”

“Not long. The sled’s not fast. Couldn’t have been there more than ten, fifteen minutes at most before they came back.”

“Not much time to do anything.”

“Depends on what they wanted to do. I’ll have to search their rooms.”

“No. Not yet.”

“What…?”

“If they can get out this easily, they can escape any time they like. I don’t want to scare them off. Let me see… they’ve all got individual therapy over the next couple of days. I’ll see if anything comes up in the sessions.”

“Then what?”

“Then I’ll decide.”

Kwame was the first in my office the next day. I could have scheduled him later, but I wanted the nightmare fresh in his mind. He’d refused sedatives and hadn’t slept, so he was in a bad way: red-eyed and trembling, hunched over his coffee, speaking even more slowly and hesitantly than he usually did.

“How are you feeling?” I asked.

“I have… been better,” he said.

“Do you remember anything from last night?”

“No. Please… do not ask me…”

“If we don’t look into it, Kwame, it’ll always be like this. I know you’re strong enough to face up to this but I know it’s difficult as well. We’ll take it one step at a time.”

He sat there, exhausted, too tense to relax. He wasn’t himself; but since he refused all attempts at therapy when he was, this was the best time to talk to him. After a few moments of thinking about it, he nodded. “What do you… want me to do?”

“I know you can’t remember anything concrete,” I said, “but do you remember how it felt?”

He closed his eyes to control a shudder. “I remember.”

“Can you tell me?”

His eyes started open, and he tried to speak but couldn’t get the words out. “I… I… I cannot.”

Well, I had a few more techniques at hand. “Let me try something else. I’m going to turn the lights down, okay?”

“Very… well.”

I dialled the lights down on a pad until the room was comfortably dim, and switched off the outdoor scene so the wall became black and indistinct.

“I’m going to put some lights on the wall. I’d like you to look at them.”

“Is this… hypnosis?”

“No, not at all. It’s just a distraction. It keeps part of the visual cortex busy, and since that’s where a lot of the problems are coming from, it makes it easier to talk about it. Shall we give it a try?”

“Yes.”

I activated the program, and coloured lights pulsed in slow, gentle patterns on the wall. As hypnotic and calming as it felt, there was no danger of a trance resulting.

“So you had another bad dream last night.”

“Yes.”

“Can you tell me what you felt?”

He stared into the lights. “I… guilt. I felt… guilty…”

“Why did you feel guilty?”