Shudder (Stitch Trilogy, Book 2) (14 page)

“
Set us free,” she
responded simply.

Free. It’d been a long time since that
had really meant anything to Nikhil – maybe not since that
ill-fated backpacking trip before all this had started.

Free.

No, his last attempt at freedom hadn’t
turned out so good. Hopefully whatever these rebels of 14’s offered
would be an improvement. Then again, he supposed it couldn’t get
much worse.

15. TURMOIL

“
Good afternoon, Phoenix.
How are you feeling today?”

Phoenix regarded the trim
silver-haired man in her doorway for a moment before responding.
Was this another of the Engineers come to call?

“
Fine, thank you.” Her
voice was hoarse, but sure. In the past day or so, she’d finally
mustered enough strength to stay awake for more than a few minutes
at a time, and bits and pieces of her past – the war, faces she
didn’t recognize, the stoning – had started coming back to her. She
was eager to take this opportunity to learn more.

He smiled tightly and shuffled into
the room. His manner was more severe, more clinical than her last
visitor. She noticed that he stood peering out the window instead
of sidling up to her in the visitor’s chair as the others had
done.

“
It’s a beautiful day out
there, you know.” His fingers pulled on the shuttered blinds as he
gazed beyond the glass.

Phoenix could see the sun streaming
around the periphery of the blinds, but bright light still sent
shooting pains through her head, so she’d asked the nurses to keep
them closed. She pulled her arms to her side and pressed herself up
into a sitting position with some effort. “So it is,” she
croaked.

He dropped his hands from the blinds
and slid them into the pockets of his long white coat as he turned
to face her. He didn’t seem much for small talk, which was just
fine by Phoenix – she was hoping for answers. “Well, let’s get down
to it, shall we? How much do you remember about the
war?”

She remembered
there
being
a
war. But not any of the specifics. “Not much,” she replied
truthfully.

“
Then let’s start at the
beginning,” he began. “You would have been young – only a child
when we were drawn into the global conflict that’d been raging
around us for decades.”

Phoenix searched her mind for memories
of her childhood, but came up empty-handed.

“
In the century leading up
to our time, world population had exploded. Competition over
resources became fierce, stronger countries invaded weaker ones,
atrocities were committed. Many nations fell into a pattern of war.
Does this sound familiar to you?”

Phoenix thought it did.

“
Our country had initially
limited our participation to economic sanctions, partnering with
our allies in the West to limit the influence of our enemies in the
East. We were still living prosperously compared to the rest of the
world, so it didn’t make sense to drag our resources into a war
that offered us few, if any, benefits. But then they dropped the
bomb – and we were left with no choice.”

Phoenix wondered if this was the same
bomb she’d remembered reports of. But he continued with his story,
and she didn’t have time to ask.

“
Things deteriorated
quickly from there. We retaliated with nuclear strikes of our own,
their allies bombed our allies, and pretty soon there was enough
debris in the air from all these explosions to partially obstruct
the sun. Global temperatures dropped – only by a few degrees – but
it was enough to seriously impact crop yields and we entered into a
worldwide famine.

“
According to your files,
you grew up in a wealthier family, so you may not have noticed any
changes at this point besides a cooler than usual summer. But many
families in our country went hungry for the first time in
generations.”

Phoenix just shook her head – she
didn’t remember having a personal experience of any of
this.

“
The phenomenon that
caused the shortage was called ‘nuclear winter.’ It was a known
possibility, but it still took the scientific community by surprise
how few bombs were really required to impact the ecosphere. It’d
all been theory up to that point, and the consensus had been that
much more firepower would be needed to really see the effects. But
as it turned out, the science was wrong.”

Phoenix noticed that he
seemed particularly dismayed by this point, his mouth set in a grim
line. It was almost like his faith had been shattered. She could
understand that – the hurt of your beliefs being torn from you. She
couldn’t remember
why
exactly, but something about that loss felt familiar to her,
something about the stoning maybe. He wasn’t the most sympathetic
character with his brusque demeanor and calculating eyes, but she
felt a pang of pity for him nonetheless.

“
Our planet was a fragile
creature,” he continued, “and it was in turmoil. We were headed
toward the total destruction of our only home, and no one seemed
able to put on the brakes. What we
needed
to do at that point was call
a ceasefire, but the leaders on both sides wouldn’t hear of it –
there was too much animosity by that time. Too much injury had been
sustained by both parties. It wasn’t about peace anymore – it was
about revenge.

“
And so the fighting
continued. More bombs were dropped, though at a lesser rate,
thankfully. But even so, within five or six years it became clear
that we were headed for catastrophe.

“
Already much of the third
world – the poor, the uneducated, the unemployed – had starved.” He
shook his head sympathetically, though for some reason the gesture
rang false to Phoenix. “Our country had sustained itself by
releasing reserves of food into the local economy through the
national service program, which helped a lot of families manage the
shortages. But it was not a long-term solution – eventually, if
bombs continued to fall and crops continued to fail, the food
supply would run out.”

This seemed like a hopeless spiral to
Phoenix – she couldn’t imagine how the cycle could have been
broken. “So what happened?” she asked.

He folded his arms authoritatively,
just a trace of a self-satisfied smile crossing his visage. “That
was when I first heard from the Developer. I was a leading
geneticist at the time, working on mapping the human genome and
understanding the intricacies of our DNA, what made one person’s
genetic makeup superior to another’s. ‘Eugene,’ he said, ‘I need
your research to set things right. I need your help to change the
destiny of the world.’”

Phoenix didn’t follow – what did
genetics have to do with stopping nuclear war? “So what was your
role?”

“
I was to become the
Doctor.”

“
Like a medical
doctor?”

“
No,” he corrected. “The
nickname is a reference to my many PhDs. You see, the Developer had
an intuition that we were headed towards… a severely reduced
population. And he knew that in order to ensure the survival of our
species, we would need the right genetic mix to create strong
future generations. So he looked to me and my knowledge of the
genetic code to provide guidance.”

Phoenix still hadn’t pieced together
what exactly the Doctor was responsible for, but he didn’t give her
long to consider.

“
And sure enough, within
the year a viral outbreak had decimated everything. The 125,000 or
so who survived convened at the quarantine zone here in Paragon,
and we got our chance to start over. Only, the people were
impatient, and they grew restless. We had to pull some –” he
searched for the right word, “– troublemakers out of the population
set, to keep the peace. That’s when we started experimenting with
the memory alteration technology, as a relatively benign means of
control.”

Memory alteration? “What did you use
it for?”

The Doctor looked surprised. “You
don’t remember your friends from the sorority?”

Phoenix shook her head.

“
Most curious,” he
muttered. “Well, we had some problems with insurgents stirring up
–” he paused, considering, “–
conflict
. We eliminated the majority
of the issue by lacing the compound’s food supply with a harmless
mild euphoriant which helped everyone to relax, but there were
still some stubborn pockets of resistance. We managed to catch
quite a few of them, but with the gene pool so small to begin with,
we couldn’t afford to execute them – no, we hoped someday to be
able to reform and reintegrate them.”

Phoenix frowned. She didn’t like the
idea of slipping drugs to people against their will, even if it was
supposedly harmless.

“
For the time being,
though, they were a danger to the rest of the colony, and
incarceration didn’t seem to be the humane solution – it only
enraged them further. And at the same time, we needed something to
placate the masses, something to occupy them while we planned for
the long-term. And that’s when it dawned on us what we’d been
missing – entertainment.”

“
How did ‘entertainment’
solve both issues?” Phoenix wondered aloud.

“
Well, working on the
television dramas was a more productive use of the prisoners than
sitting in their cells – and the dramas themselves provided
peaceful recreation for the rest of the population. The only
problem was that, of course, the prisoners refused to cooperate,
and we couldn’t afford to pull other citizens from the work that
was needed to build and maintain the settlement. So that’s where
the memory alteration came in.”

The Doctor paced to the
other side of the room, more buoyant than before. “We knew we’d
have to coerce the prisoners into participating. It seemed the most
robust way to do that would be to somehow convince them that
they
were
the
characters we wanted them to play. And my colleague, the General,
happened to know of a technology that would allow us to do just
that.”

Phoenix knew she wasn’t
thinking clearly, but using mind control still struck a dark nerve
in her. She understood that this kind of technology might be better
than jailing people, but it still seemed wrong, she thought. And
impossible. “Where did you
get
it?”

“
The General had heard
through military intelligence that one of our enemies was
experimenting with it, and our country had managed to steal a good
portion of the research shortly before the outbreak. So the
Developer hacked into the defunct military databases to retrieve
it.”

Phoenix suspected he was making this
sound a lot simpler than it must actually have been. “So how does
it work?”

“
It’s quite remarkable,
actually.” He was suddenly animated. “Believe it or not, the
patient’s
brain
does most of the work. Our brains are designed to make sense
of what we see and feel and hear around us – as human beings, our
natural impulse is to explain,” he remarked.

“
Memories are fashioned
much like striking the keys on a piano. In reality, all you’re
hearing is a bunch of vibrations at different frequencies, but what
your
brain
hears
is a particular pattern of tones which it resolves into a song. In
this case, we’re just doing this on a grander scale – choosing a
particular set of sensory inputs in a particular order which the
patient’s brain resolves as an experience.”

“
But how do you actually
get that memory into a person’s head?”

“
It’s basically a chemical
cocktail that goes to work on the patient’s neurons, plucking the
right ‘strings,’ if you will. Whoever programmed the software must
have spent
years
determining which neural pathways correspond to which sensory
inputs, and which biochemical combinations would activate them in
the right order. But now with the completed program, it’s quite
simple for us.

“
All we have to do is
describe the experience to the computer, and it automatically
converts the required inputs to an algorithm with the right
variables, which is then programmed into a set of chemical
molecular reactions that we inject into the patient’s
system.

“
That cocktail essentially
rewires the memories stored in the brain, replacing what was there
before with whatever we choose. Or,” he scowled, “as we’ve learned
more recently, perhaps it just buries those old memories under the
new ones.”

Phoenix didn’t understand how a false
memory could ever replace a real one. “But how could all these
prisoners mistake these constructed memories for
reality?”

A look of reverence
overtook the Doctor’s face. “Ah, that’s the beauty of it. The
brain
wants
the
patient to believe. Despite all its complexities, the brain is
actually a very single-minded organ – it doesn’t know how to do
anything
except
try to make sense of the world around us. So we just apply
another chemical booster to encourage the brain’s natural instinct
to resolve whatever input it’s interpreting, to only see what it
wants and expects to see.