Chapter 2: Treatment, Testament and Taxidermy?

Months later, wet autumn gripped hard in Cloistergrad. Chilly air swirled defeated leaves into mottled brown drifts, around and about the otherwise tidy grounds of the Aprofchik Mental Institution. Skulking on the wall, inside the east wing day room, was an old-style television. On-screen, static flickers.

Deeply nestled within a day-room chair slumped drastically different Peter Elworth. He was all but recovered from his physical wounds, transfixed upon the white noise beaming from the TV, neutrinos performing the static dance of space before his unseeing eyes. Trapped, deep in thought, he noticed neither Dr. Shipwater’s arrival nor his quick chat with the nurse at the reception desk, not the fluttering eyelashes as she smiled, or the controlled grin as he responded to her. And Peter didn’t see her point him out in the overcrowded day room. All he saw were messages from space, glittering grey and white before his dreamer’s eyes. With a self-satisfied smile, Dr. Harold Shipwater thanked the nurse, assured of her adoration, and walked towards his perfect patient.

'So how are we today eh...?’ A brief consultation with his clipboard, '...Peter?’ Peter Elworth swam in a murky sea of phantoms, trying desperately to break the surface. 'The nurse tells me your coming along just fine.’ he continued, lying smoothly, fully aware that the nurse had in fact said…

'Peter, over the last two weeks, has shown a steady decline in his communication skills. I think his amnesia is progressing I …I really am at a loss here Doctor! Poor thing thought Dr. Shipwater. He had expected as much, he had been secretly and steadily doping the patient for a month, with a mixture of DMT, delta9 Tetrahydrocannabinol, and THV7. All of the plant extracts combined to form a powerful psychoactive and sedative drug that the observation unit would be unable to detect.

'Anyway, Peter, getting down to business…’ Dr. Shipwater intoned professionally to his semi-focused eyes. 'It has been agreed by the hospital board, and so the Party you understand…’ A pregnant pause hung in the air. '…that I should take you into private care. You see, you require special attention.’ Peter blinked at the light flickering and glinting off the top of Dr. Shipwater’s chrome pen, while Dr. Shipwater pointlessly furnished him with a list of details for treatments, facilities, dosages, and therapies. Peter wondered if this chattering white coat and star points would make any sense of the thought that now possessed his mind. It was like some tune he had heard on the radio that bounced around inside his head, morphing into random images. And the beat went on.

Peter mumbled a response, of sorts, from the foggy depths of his dream. 'There is more to life than even the imagination can conjure, there are possibilities that we haven’t even considered impossible.’*

'Pardon?’ Dr. Shipwater, startled out of his well-practiced show of medical caring by this sudden and wholly unexpected interruption, studied Peter apprehensively down the length of his aquiline nose. Peter stared back like a trapped animal, as the wave receded and he was once again washed onto the shores of chemical confusion. 'Anyway...Peter,’ began Shipwater, eyeing his patient closely. '...I’ve had the nurse collect your things and the transport will be along in no time at all.’ At that, the nurse arrived with Peter’s effects and a wheelchair. She wheeled Peter to the exit, leaving a thoughtful-looking doctor to follow behind.

'There is more to life than the imagination,’ Peter told the nurse. She smiled warmly and patted his arm.

Peter had been securely fastened in, Harold Shipwater thanked the driver, took the keys, and reached for the onboard com-link to open a line. 'Yes,’ he said, on connection, his call expected, ‘...Yes, of course…’ he agreed, smiling down the line. 'He’s as active as a corpse...what…no...no it’s just an expression, he’ll be fine, it wears off easily within a few days... yes, without withdrawals and then We should be able to begin the observation...’ He paused, nodded a few times, and then continued. '…Yes, I’ll have him over to you for implantation within the hour!’ After an attentive minute or two, he nodded again and smiled a goodbye. Then, with a flip of a switch and a little pressure on the toggle they moved off, dappled in leaf-patterned shade, between the ancient yellowing trees lining the hospital’s grand driveway. Peter stared confused and near blank, out of the transport window. The leaves above flickered, light and shade, like some ancient black and white movie across his face, unnoticed, as they passed out the giant iron gates and into the city proper.

* (This piece was located on a scrap of paper in the apartment occupied by Father Peter, Ajare library v1.)

That same afternoon, in a private clinic in the city of Cloistergrad, anonymous staff quickly shuttled Peter’s sedated, limp body from the back of the clinic’s transport vehicle to a private surgery, as Dr. Shipwater looked on. Beside him stood another doctor, dressed head to foot in a fine silk suit, the green-blue fabric iridescent in the late autumn light. Dr. R.V. Anthony, one of the most renowned and influential surgeons in Permia. He had the hazelnut skin of his forefathers and the near-yellow whites of the eyes. He emulated the mode of dress and manners of the eastern kings, whilst wearing ceremonial braids twisted into his rich black mustache. He stood with his feet planted stoutly, pointing outwards, straight-backed, and holding his barrel-like girth with dignified power. He was over-seeings the transportation of his latest “little bit of tinkering” with a series of elegant waves.

Drugged, and lugged onto an operating table the base of Peter’s dreamer’s skull was exposed. Skilled hands deftly manipulated a gleaming syringe-like device, loaded with a ZXS Nano-core, pre-built from Peter’s own cloned cells. The hands twitched and turned, in their manipulation of the thin filament as it snaked from the tip of the syringe, penetrating under Peter Elworth’s skin, through the muscles protecting his seventh axis vertebra, and finally, into the base of his brain.

'The ZXS deploys viral phages that seek out the neural canals, all the while proliferating stem cells loaded with reprogrammed DNA, to build the Nano-engine and up-link to his neural pathways…’ Dr. Anthony informed the room in general, head down and busy, gesticulating with his eyebrows as he spoke. The syringe glinted sharply as it glided in gentle arcs beneath the brilliant white light. '… Once the connection is made a simple self-stimulating process commences, initiating the growth of thin crystalline sheets between key synaptic nerves, serving as relays for high-frequency sonic programming…’ Dr. Anthony was now activating various automatic syringes which were connected to the entry point. '…The tiny crystal sheets vibrate between the synaptic connections, loading the program like Morse code… you have heard of Morse code… Haven’t you?’ Anthony popped his head up, eye-locking Harold Shipwater with furrowed brows. He slowly blinked and went about peeling off his gloves. 'The crystals control the growth of even more complex systems, overriding this chap’s neural network…’ Dr. Anthony raised a slim silver-grey pen-like device for inspection; Harold Shipwater chewed his lip in response. '…With this sonic beam projector and this transfer node...’ he raised his other hand to reveal a stiff linen collar, with an ugly surgical-green lump on it. '…I can continue to program the subject as the weeks go by, or rather you will, during your evaluation sessions. Clever, eh?’ He chuckled. Harold Shipwater tried not to let his unease show as he thought about what they were doing. Programming the subject using the sonic projector and the programming node during his sessions wouldn’t in itself be difficult. He need only set the program, and the projector would upload directly onto the node; which in turn would send the digital sonic signals into the cluster of cells beneath Peter’s flesh. No, Harold had a problem with the amount of work he was now responsible for, and the almost hands-off nature of Dr. Anthony’s side of the deal. What if the MSS finds me, what could I possibly say to them? Dr. Anthony for his part jawed on, regardless.

'Four weeks or so from now we will have created the first remote-controlled human being, and from this, we shall reap glory and fame!’ Harold Shipwater smiled at him weakly and nodded his head, while the self-satisfied surgeon chuckled away to himself as he attached the collar about Peter’s neck, ensuring that he positioned the little green node, just so, over his seventh vertebra.

Deep inside Peter Elworth’s skull, the tiny machine began its work, ticking off tasks as it went.

SYSTEM LOCKED.1.

AUXILIARY POWER ONLINE.42;

COMMENCING INTEGRATION OF EXTERNAL LINES.47,

BIO-POWER SOURCE LOCATED AND CONNECTED.78,

POWERING UP MAIN DRIVE: 124,

STABILIZED.194;

AUXILIARY POWER DISABLED.195;

COMMENCING MATERIAL ALOCATION .200.

Awake,

Numb,

Peter looked up at Harold Shipwater, who smiled at him from behind a surgical mask.

Harold began with lies, 'I’m afraid you’re seriously ill…’ Peter wondered at the words, “I’m afraid…” '...The state will be taking good care of you; I have here your M-records and certificate of installation…’

“I’m afraid…”

’…As your doctor, I advise you to write a note to yourself…’ Paper, clipboard, and pen are pushed into unresisting hands. The nurses had spoken of Peter’s morning ravings. Upon waking each morning, he required regular comforting and had to be apprised of his situation, to prevent deeper psychological upset from occurring. Harold was a doctor and she only a nurse, he figured a letter would do.

'…I’ll help you, start with “Dear Peter”…’*

*The Dear Peter letter is reproduced in full at the back of this volume.

November first, Peter woke. Now living in a comfortable apartment on the east side of Jeffers St, completely oblivious to the cameras and pickups tracing him from room to room. They watched him wake, startled and confused, before finding and reading the letter at his bedside. They watched him as the tears came, and he started laughing, a broken ragged laugh of incredulity, shuddering bodily on the edge of his bed. The longer he sat there, the more he realized that he had no memory of the day before, the room, or anything in his surroundings. He is forever cast adrift on the sea of time, bereft of a root system, or an anchor in history. In this, his fractured reality. He is overwhelmed by the loss of all the years that the face in the mirror tells him he has lived. This unyielding fact raised dark implications, that streamed out and about him like filaments of spider’s silk. Every morning food was delivered and eaten. The same for days on end, an autonomous man ensnared in his own personal time loop. His only sense of the progression of time was his writing and drawing. Stacks of papers, rising in drifts and yellowing in tandem with the autumn leaves that drifted on the breeze outside the window. The floor, his desk, and all other available space were slowly succumbing to the fevered fruits of his mind. Rising against the forest-green wall, which lent a semblance of landscape to the scene, drifts of paper faded and aged at the edges, shearing shadows off each other in the dim light, tricking the eye into glimpsing rough valleys and lonely mountains under an amber moon.

Lost inside and without, all alone, he struggled to find the truth of his memories. How much was imagination? How much was fact? Did he really, as a child, sleep between the bed and the wall, trapped and wrapped in his duvet? Or was it no more than the fevered imaginings of his damaged mind? Were the people of his mind family or friends? Workmates or enemies? He had no clue. He could not remember and the frustration of it all burned him deep to his core. Want as he might, he could not feel safe to lay any love or caring, any intimacies or emotions, other than those dark weighted feelings of suspicion and loss, upon those many faces in his drawings. He asked himself these questions over and over until he was sick in both spirit and mind. Were the faces and places of his crude drawings real? Was anything real? Even when one or another face returned, re-occurred from picture to picture, he had no faith in his memory's ability to tell him he was free to love them as family lost, or fear them as the dark strangers of his mind’s imaginings Every day he drew, and wrote, and read what he had written. Not always understanding the words of the man who wrote them the day before. Yet he continued to write in abundance as if it were his only salvation. He became a man locked in self-observation, addicted to his own musings, reading and rereading each letter and note as if it contained some secret to his existence. But he was made aware, by the very things he reads, that the questions have all been asked before, and the answers continue to flitter through his fingers like so much windblown ash; briefly grasped only to take flight once more into the abyss of memories lost. And so, as time passed and as the fogginess of the drugs lifted daily from his mind, he was left ever more alert to the fact that his amnesia held him trapped in this hellish loop of repetition, riding on waves of resentful despair.

…only a whisper of a dream remains; I stand in a large pulsating room that glows, much like the light through my eyelids when I close them to the morning. There is someone trying to talk to me but I’m busy counting seconds, each second is wrapped, like a gift, by a tiny machine and placed precisely, each after the last. On the side of the tiny second-wrapping machine is a sign that reads, “Without time there is no progress.” Thinking on this dream gives me an ill feeling as if I should still be there or something is not finished. (Taken from Father Peters's “Morning testaments”, Ajare library)

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