Doctor Who_ Corpse Marker - Chris Boucher [2]
‘And what exactly does this have to do with the project you were hired for?’ The speaker was a tall man in artificial homespun and he was sitting in the front row. ‘I’m not interested in the collapse of the economy. If that story gets out everything goes to hell. Where’s the profit in that? The cure will be worse than the disease.’
Carnell was a slightly built man, not particularly tall, with blonder hair and a paler complexion than most of those present.
His eyes were what really set him apart however. They were vividly blue and in the right light they could be piercing, like shards of sea ice. He stepped into the right light now and smiled coldly at the man. ‘You have to trust me,’ he said. ‘I’m very expensive precisely because I can be trusted.’ He lifted his look to take in the rest of the conference chamber. ‘I told you this story because I have to be sure that you can be trusted too. If you are going to panic I want you to do it here and now.’ He paused. ‘I like panics to be well organised.’
An elaborately coiffured woman swathed in ivory bubblesilk said, ‘This strangely dressed man and the primitive girl?’
‘Group hallucination,’ Carnell said.
‘They seemed very positive,’ she remarked.
More information you’re not supposed to have, Carnell thought, you’ve obviously seen the confidential debriefing tapes. ‘False memory,’ he said, ‘mutually induced and reinforced.’
‘They’re lying?’
‘They believe it.’
From the back, Roatson guffawed. ‘A group hallucination,’
he scoffed with aristocratic disdain. ‘In a group of two.’
Carnell smiled. ‘Three. Chief Mover Poul saw them too.’
As he had expected, Roatson could not resist pressing home his point. ‘He’d had a breakdown?’
‘They all had,’ Carnell said. ‘That’s my point.’
‘How do you know the man and the girl were not real?’ the woman in the robot-produced confection asked.
‘Because it’s impossible.’
‘Is that a good enough reason?’
‘It is to the reasonable. More importantly, they don’t matter.
They do not materially affect what happened, what is happening, what is going to happen.’
For only the second time in his career as a psycho-strategist Carnell had made a fundamental error.
Marker
‘I still don’t remember much about it,’ Poul said, a brief frown drifting across his gaunt face. ‘All right, let’s be honest, I don’t remember anything about it at all.’ He shifted on the recliner and adjusted his uniform tunic, straightening the blue silk, pulling it down so that it was smooth under his narrow back.
‘Even after all this time?’ the therapist prompted gently. She was just the front for a mechanical analyst which itself was little more than a sophisticated lie-detector modified for medical use.
She was reading her lines from a linked laptop which also gave her precise timing and voice tone cues. As charades went it was crude, and wastefully expensive, but in Ander Poul’s case it seemed it was absolutely essential. Without the buffer provided by this average-looking woman with her normally modulated human voice his rehabilitation could not even have begun. It was clear from the start that for him robot medicine was a contradiction in terms. There was a horror hidden outside the reach of his conscious memory. It was a horror which involved the mechanical humanoids on which the world depended: that much was clear. That much and very little more.
‘Even after all this time?’ she repeated with the same gentle persistence.
He sighed now and said, ‘Especially after all this time.’ His face had settled back into a stubborn, stiff blankness.
‘Time does not necessarily heal,’ the therapist said. ‘Or perhaps you feel it does?’
‘Eventually it does.’ Now there was the ghost of a smile.
‘Eventually you die and then it does.