“What…?”
“Well, that must have been it. I bet you all started taking something and you’re all so hot on your religion you start seeing the bastards and killing yourselves. Pathetic!”
“You think we were hallucinating?”
“Can you prove to us you were not?” asked Kwame.
Iokan stared back at him, then at Olivia. He seemed almost angry — but found his self-control again, and sighed. “I can see how it must look. But the Antecessors are real—”
“Prove it,” said Olivia.
“It can be proved.”
“Yeh? Go on, then.”
“There is proof on my world.”
“Hah! Don’t think I’m going there any time soon.”
“It will be found,” he insisted.
“We’ll see about that, won’t we?”
“Yes. I expect we will.”
“And what, you’re going to put your Antewotsits on us and make us all scared? We’re not as feeble as you lot!”
I’d had enough, and intervened before Iokan could reply. “Okay. This was useful for a while but I think it’s gotten out of hand.” Olivia sat back in her chair. “Olivia, I know you have strong opinions but it doesn’t help to be offensive. I think you should apologise.”
She glared at Iokan across the coffee table. “I’m so very sorry. Very, very sorry.” I’m not sure Iokan picked up her forced, insincere tone through the translation.
“I also apologise. I won’t bring up the subject again,” he said. “But I’ll still try to help you if I can.”
Olivia rolled her eyes. “Gods, that’s all I need…”
“And perhaps they agree with you,” he said with a smile. Olivia gave him a cutting look in return.
And so it went. Getting them talking was one thing. If I could get them talking without an argument breaking out, I might actually get somewhere.
2. Patient Rooms
While we held group sessions and individual therapies and tried our best to engage the group with various activities, much of their time was their own. Each had the right to a degree of privacy, although we never turned off the medical monitoring system as we needed to keep a full suicide watch on each of them. They were permitted to engage a limited privacy mode in their rooms — but leaving it on for more than a couple of hours would result in a knock on the door from a member of staff to see how they were. As much as we would have liked to give them full privacy, the necessities of therapy argued against it; nevertheless, a perceived break from outside attention has long been shown to be of therapeutic benefit, so we preserved it as much as we could.
With the right to hide away from time to time, it was no surprise to find the group making their rooms comfortable, each in their own way. Each room could be configured to virtually any form they desired, which of course provided us with useful insights. Veofol wrote notes on these along with his analysis.
NOTES: Individual Patient Rooms
HD y276.m5.w4.d2
Dr. Veofol e-leas bron Jerra
KWAME
Kwame has used the facilities of the centre to continue a hobby he has apparently pursued for decades. He uses one of the empty rooms as a workshop, where he tinkers with electrical devices, such as radio sets and amplifiers. He needs robotic assistance for the fine work but the devices he makes function quite well, though of course his radios only detect static and digital signals, as there are no analogue radio sources on Hub. Even so, he took pleasure in showing me the decametric noise coming from electrical storms between Jupiter and Io, though he claims no skill as a radio astronomer. He says it’s simply a phenomenon well known to anyone who dabbles in radio. When I asked how he found time to be an electronics engineer as well as a politician, he said he had some training in engineering when he was in the Mutapan military, and was a hobbyist before that.
His bedroom is set up to look like a hotel room from his world. He told me he could have made it look like a room in his Zimbabwe City house, but while he preferred something that reminded him of his world, he didn’t want anything that felt permanent. However, he certainly didn’t pick the design of a luxury hotel. The bed is very basic, with a thin mattress that doesn’t seem very comfortable. The walls have a simple and inelegant design on untextured wallpaper. The floor is of wooden boards rather than carpet, and he chose simple recessed closets rather than high quality furniture. It’s true he wasn’t President for very long, so perhaps did not have the time to become accustomed to luxury, but I fear it’s more likely that he denies himself physical comfort as part of his self-persecution.
As for his nightmares and screaming at night, Olivia’s irritation is understandable. The policy of leaving their rooms unsoundproofed means everyone hears his night terrors. Perhaps we should look at moving him to another floor?
LISS
Liss has created a cocoon for herself. The bed she chose (pink) is one you can almost sink inside, and the couch from which she watches screenshows (also pink) has at least half a dozen frilly cushions (again, pink). Her remote control has a habit of disappearing in the cushions — I suggested she key the screenplayer controls into a pad, but she said she didn’t want to learn to use something else. Of course, she’s learned to configure her room quite well in order to achieve the desired level of pink, so I’m not sure why she’s so adamant on the subject.
The screen dominates the room, and her spare time. Watching the screenshows she brought back from her world seems to be her main hobby, and the discs she has represent at least six months of back to back, uninterrupted viewing, or maybe a year and a half if she only watches them when she has free time. She’s unlikely to run out in the near future.
She does make an effort to be sociable, though, and often tries to get the others into her room to watch something, but her choice of viewing (ranging from the soppy to the implausible, as I discovered when I sat down with her) leaves most of them cold. Pew was the only one who visited more than once, but I think this is just because he’s easily persuaded and doesn’t have to talk while they watch the shows.
Alone among the group, she’s used her clothing allowance to its utmost limit, and acquired a small wardrobe of clothes that are often as pink as the décor, and just as difficult to look at. She also asked for a sewing kit, and happily spends some of her time in front of the screen adjusting the clothes to her taste. As much as her love for a very limited range of the spectrum hurts my eyes from time to time, it is at least a healthier outlet than watching the screen.
At some point, we may need to remove the screen if we want her to mix properly with the others, or face up to what really happened on her world. For now, I’m not sure if removing it would help or hinder her progress, given how delusional she seems to be.
KATIE
Katie hasn’t set her room to anything at all. It’s completely blank — grey walls, no window and no real furniture; just a bench to sleep on, which she does rarely and never for more than two hours at a time. Otherwise she stands in the middle of the room. She does, however, use her privacy option to the letter, for exactly two hours each day, and I haven’t yet had any reason to breach the privilege.
Her activities outside the room mainly involve physical fitness. She works out in the gym once a day, using extremely high settings on the gravity weights. I had trouble believing she could lift so much, until she gave me a brief and very technical description of the enhancements that allow such feats.