The Omega Expedition - Brian Stableford [157]
So I watched Christine Caine commit her prosaic, perfunctory, hastily improvised, motiveless murders for the second time, and felt for her as best I could.
Then, when the thirteenth corpse had slumped to the floor, leaking blood in obscene profusion, and the tape reached its end, I said: “Now I want you to wake her up and run it again.”
It was Rocambole’s voice that answered. For the first time, he seemed surprised by my reaction. “What?” he asked. “Why?”
“I don’t mean the tape,” I said. “I mean the experiment. I want you to run it again.”
“You thought running it for a second time was an appalling thing to do,” he reminded me. “There’s no need to put her through anything more. We know what we need to know — or as much of it as we could get.”
“It’s not your supposed needs I’m thinking about,” I told him. “It’s hers. I want you to run it again — but this time, I want to go with her. This time, I’ll supply the thought track.”
“That’s not possible,” Rocambole told me.
“Of course it’s possible,” I retorted. “It won’t be a real thought track any more than the voice-over in Bad Karma was a real train of thought, but it’ll work just as well in dramatic terms. It won’t be grand opera, but it’ll do. She may think she’s crazy when she starts hearing voices, but it won’t be as crazy as simply being in there, helpless to modify her own actions. She tried to cope with it afterwards by making up stories, but she did never find one that she could believe in. Maybe I can do better.”
“You might make things worse.”
“I know. But I want to try. The people who programmed Bad Karma were just making an exploitation movie, but they may have had the right idea. If she really could be persuaded that it was an external force, for which she bore no responsbility, she might be a lot better off. I know there’s a risk. Sometimes, knowing an awful truth is worse than not knowing, and sometimes it’s better to have things explained afterwards, by the cold light of day — but I want to try it this way.”
“Why?” It was a deliberately stupid question.
“For the same reason our host wanted to show me her opera. Because I’m arrogant enough to think that I might be able to make a difference if I can only get inside her. Or does la Reine des Neiges have a customized opera for Christine too?”
“Not yet,” was the reply I got to that — which was intended to let me know that this was a kind of job best left to experts. But I got my way, because my hosts were almost as keen as I was to find out exactly what I planned to do, and to measure its effect.
So Christine had to live through her crimes for a third time. I could only hope that it would be third time lucky.
I started right at the beginning, the first time she picked up a knife without knowing why or what her hand intended to do with it. I considered pretending to be an inner voice of her own and I considered telling her who I was, but neither seemed to be the best way to go. I figured that alien anonymous was the best narrative voice to assume.
“This isn’t you, Christine,” I said, as her life began to turn into a nightmare. “Someone else is doing this. It’s their motive, their plan, their purpose. They’ve infected your brain with poisonous IT, and they’ve taken over your body. It’s going to be bad, Christine. It’s going to be very bad indeed, but the worst of it will be when they let you go again, to leave you with the legacy of what they’ve done. It’ll all be cruel, but that will be the cruelest thing of all.”
The most difficult thing was coping with the cuts, because the experiment was only running slivers of real time; like any VE production it was skipping over the uneventful bits. By the time I had reached the end of my preamble Christine was watching her first victim — one of her foster mothers — gasping out her last breath, having slipped from beneath her VE hood to confront the unimaginable. Then we traveled in time to the next murder scene.
Christine’s