Gulliver's Fugitives - Keith Sharee [55]
The practice allowed for instantaneous placement of the new citizen back into society, wherever there happened to be a need. In this way, the large number of arrests and capital punishments didn’t decimate the population or disrupt the operations of the CS or the commercial sector.
Once in a while there were problems. The Rampartians had decoded brain waves and neural memory codes, but there was much about brain physiology that they didn’t know. Sometimes the blanking and refilling didn’t work completely and the original memories and “criminal” tendencies remained. In such cases the intransigent brain was written off as a loss and the body was killed by injection.
However, when successful, the brainwashing provided ideal citizens for Rampart society. The people who were most recently brainwashed were actually the “safest” of all Rampartians, and were often employed by the CS, which constantly needed more sanitized minds.
Smith, though she didn’t know it yet, was turning out to be one of the failed attempts at mind blanking. A thread of the Dissenter spirit had persisted through her blanking, on some deeply buried stratum. She still thought she was someone named Marjorie Smith who had blanked thousands of people, but when she had tried to blank Picard, her Dissenter spirit had twitched and groaned remorsefully in its sleep.
And now, as she reflected back on her life as Marjorie Smith, a comfortable life among a lot of bland people, it seemed an unreal montage, an interminable, colorless, sleepwalk. She felt that this meant she had lived a meaningless life, having no idea the memories weren’t of her life at all, but rather sanitized memories from the minds of others.
The CS was already aware of some of her doubts. They hadn’t heard her conversation with Picard, but they had read some of her brain waves before and after, and identified her as a possible miscreant. They were simply waiting to see what she did next.
Now she checked the computer room’s bulletin board for memos, an act she thought she had performed thousands of times. She found one from her boss, Bussard.
It read: “Smith: The Picard disk should be left in the safe. I will process it tomorrow. All other disks should be processed as usual.”
She looked at a row of disk-eases on the rack in front of her. The disks were made automatically of all the material drained from each mind during the blanking process. At the end of the day, she was supposed to use a computer to cull any usable information off the disks—any facts about the Dissenter rebellion, for instance.
Once the facts were in the computer, the disks were always erased. What use did the CS have for the ravings and hallucinations of criminal minds?
Now, one by one, Smith put each disk on her rack into a disk drive and let the computer pull off the files it wanted. Finally, the computer erased the disks—the final death and disposal of each personality.
The CS administration were going to do something special with the Picard disk. They probably needed specific information from Picard’s mind, and Smith assumed her boss Bussard would search the disk manually for it. Then it would no doubt be erased like all the rest.
Late in the afternoon, Bussard, a baby-faced, double-chinned, middle-aged bureaucrat, leaned his head in the door.
“I’m leaving for the day.”
“Okay. I still have work to do.”
As she loaded another disk on the main drive, she felt his eyes still on her for a good minute.
“I’m leaving my door open,” he said finally. “Can’t seem to find my key. Have to get a new one made tomorrow. Good night.”
“Good night.”
When she had disposed of all remaining disks except for Picard’s, she opened the temporary safe. The case containing Picard’s disk felt cold and heavy as she placed it in the safe.
She began to close the safe door, but stopped. She had a sense that she had done something terribly wrong and felt