Страница 56 из 134
The decision had been made to make the Urbs zero weapons zones and in the eyes of Mosovich and plenty of other people that was just wrong. If everyone in the Urb was armed it would probably mean a higher murder rate. But compared to the one hundred percent loss in the event of an attack, even one by a random landing, a few murders would be worth it. Besides, the improved defenses if everyone was armed might keep the Posleen out.
Nonetheless, through a combination of politics and Galactic intransigence the Urbs had been disarmed.
"Stupid." Mueller shook his head.
Mosovich nodded as he turned down a brightly lit corridor. The walls had murals on them, which was unusual, and each of the doors had the nameplate of a different doctor on it. The sprite stopped in front of a door marked "Dr. Christine Richards, Psy.D."
Mosovich touched the entry pad and the door chimed.
"Yes?" a voice asked through the pad.
"Doctor Richards? It's Sergeant Major Mosovich. I'm here to talk to you about Captain Elgars?" The good doctor was supposed to have received an e-mail, but who knew what was really happening.
"Could this wait?" the box asked. "I'm preparing a report right now, but it's not complete."
"Well, you can report all you'd like, doc," Mosovich replied to the speaker. He was getting a bit ticked about talking to a closed door. "But I suspect that the Army is going to pay more attention to me than you. And I'm going from here to run down Elgars. So this is your one chance to convince me that Elgars is crazy."
The door opened and Dr. Richards sighed. "She's not crazy, she's possessed."
* * *
Dr. Richards had spread out all the case files for A
"Okay, I know my line here," Mosovich said. "I'm supposed to say 'Is this a brain map, doctor?' But Special Forces guys used to get shrunk all the time and I've seen an EEG before."
"Fine," Richards said, pulling out a textbook. "You're right, that's an EEG and it's Elgars' to be exact." She opened up the book to a marked page and pointed to the lines on the paper. "This is a normal EEG when a person is awake, or not in alpha mode. Look at it."
Mosovich did and then at Elgar's EEG. There was no comparison. "What are all these extra notches?" he asked, pointing to Elgars'.
"You tell me," Richards snapped. "And here, look at this." She riffled through the readouts until she came to another one that was marked. "When you do stuff that you've done thousands of times, the sort of stuff that they say 'He can do it in his sleep.' What's really happening is that your brain switches to alpha mode, which really is like you're asleep. It's one of the bases for zen, that 'state of nothingness.' Look, when you're shooting, do you actually think about what you're doing?"
"I know what you're talking about here," Mueller interjected. "You're talking about like when you're in a shoothouse. No, you have to turn your brain off and let go, let your training do the thinking for you. When you're really clicking we call it 'being in the Zone.' "
"Exactly," Richards said, pointing a different set of spikes. "This is alpha state. In Elgars' case, she doesn't have many specific memories, but she can perform a remarkable series of actual manual tasks. If a person is that badly injured, you expect them to have to learn to walk and eat and go to the bathroom all over again. When Elgars was wheeled into the recovery room, she was lucid and capable of performing almost all normal daily functions. Furthermore, we have since determined that she has a wide variety of basic skills, including driving and operating a variety of hand weaponry from knives to very large rifles."
She pointed to the chart, ru
Mosovich and Mueller both leaned forward and looked. Again, the transition area was completely different than the textbook version. It was somewhat longer and had numerous extraneous spikes. Mosovich pointed to the alpha rhythm on the chart.
"Her alpha looks almost textbook, though," he noted.
"Yes, it is," Richards said. "The differences are just those of being a different human. And that's the other scary part; her alpha is absolutely normal."
"So that's why she's possessed?" Mueller asked with a raised eyebrow.
"Look," Richards said with a sigh, leaning back in her chair and taking off her glasses to rub her eyes. "None of us are experts at this. I was a damned family counselor before they sent me down here. We have one, repeat, one clinical psych researcher, and he was an expert on sleep disorders. We're all out of our depth on this . . . phenomenon. But . . . yes, we have come to the conclusion that there is more than one . . . person, not just personality, person, living in Elgars' head. And that the primary personality might not be, probably is not, A
"Why not Elgars?" Mosovich asked, thinking that Mansfield was really go
"Memories mostly," Richards said, putting her glasses back on and scrabbling through her notes. "A
"Yeah," Mosovich admitted. "A few times."
"You're a rejuv though, right?"
"Yeah."
"Did you see it when it first came out?" Richards asked.
"I think so," Mosovich said with a shrug. "Probably. That was, what? '82? '84? I think I was at Bad Tölz then. If I saw it, I saw it on post."
"The movie came out in 1986," Richards said, glancing at her notes. "Elgars has distinct memories of seeing it for the first time in a movie theater then going over to a friend's house, driving herself to a friend's house to, as she put it, 'jump his bones.' "
"So?" Muller asked.
"A
"Oh," Mueller said. "What about . . . what's it called . . . 'implanted memory syndrome'?"
"Up, got me there," Mosovich said. "Whassat?"
"We considered classical implanted memory," Richards said, leaning back again. "Implanted memory used to be called 'regression analysis.' It turned out that the process for regression analysis implants a memory that is absolutelytrue to the person with the memory. I could run you through a little scenario right now and you'd end up with a memory of having been a giraffe. Or a woman. Or that you were sexually abused as a child. Guaranteed. And none of them would be real.
"It causedhuge problems for a while with child molestation cases; I was still dealing with the repercussions when I got moved down here. Still am for that matter. Women that have a distinct memory of having been molested by a parent or a family friend and it's very unlikely that it ever happened. The only way to get them to even consider that the memory is false is to go through the same process with one that is clearly impossible. And then they end up with this really impossible memory. Which has its own problems."
She shrugged and put her glasses back on. "What can I say? I've dealt with dozens of implanted memories in my time. This one doesn't show any of the classic signs. She recalls small details that are not germane to the memory. That's one sign of a 'true' memory versus implanted. Then there's the EEG." She picked up the alpha rhythm sheet and pointed to the transition. "We think that weird transition is where she is hunting for the right . . . call it 'soul' . . . to manage the action. It only happens the first time she engages a skill, so new examples are getting harder and harder to find. But it's consistent. And she goes alpha when she shouldn't. When she's writing, for example. That's not a normal alpha moment, except when typing."