Under the Knife(20)

SEBASTIAN


The man stood a discreet distance from the entrance to the women’s locker room, fiddling with the laminated hospital ID badge dangling from the left breast pocket of his scrub shirt. The badge read, ROBERT RODRIGUEZ, PERIOPERATIVE TECHNICIAN, and beside the name was a small color picture of the man in which an unabashed grin spread underneath a generous crop of black hair in a stylish pompadour.

The badge’s owner was currently not smiling. The man, who called himself Sebastian, peered, tight-mouthed, at the locker-room door.

This is the tricky part, he thought.

From what he could tell, before Finney had cut his feed, the implant had successfully activated. Now was when the subject realized what was going on and accepted the nature of the device.

Or didn’t.

Sebastian sucked his teeth.

When he’d taken this job a year ago, Finney had provided him with the dossiers and videos of the early test subjects: those unlucky enough to have been the first to receive the implants.

Poor bastards.

Although, come to think of it, the ones who’d come later hadn’t been all that much better off.

He’d studied the files and videos, had spent hours poring over them, taking detailed notes, leaving no item unexamined in gathering and processing as much information as he could. He always did that, with every job he took. He was a professional, and he always acted as one.

He had not been hired to ask where the test subjects came from, so he didn’t. But he’d traveled the world several times over, and recognized in their haggard faces a mixed bag of races representing a good swath of Southeast Asia and Indonesia. Political prisoners, probably, their participation quietly arranged through confidential, and no doubt lucrative, contracts with governments for which human rights weren’t high on the agenda. Men, mostly. But also some women.

And, much to his distaste, even a few children.

The device’s designers had, he knew, implanted the original models in monkeys. The monkeys were nothing special: run-of-the-mill, lower-order primates that liked nothing more than to eat, shit, and screw. From a technical standpoint, the implants had seemed to work fine, and the monkeys took to them okay. After a brief recovery period, they continued to eat, shit, and screw as if nothing had ever happened to them, except to occasionally paw at their left ears.

But the monkeys couldn’t describe how they were feeling. Hence the need for people, who could tell you exactly what was going on inside their heads and hopefully respond to the device in the manner in which its designers had intended.

And most of them did. The device worked well, and it worked the way it was supposed to.

But there was a wrinkle no one had anticipated: A certain proportion of the subjects went completely ape-shit once the device was activated, a descent into insanity that was as irrevocable as it was unpleasant, and a psychosis that persisted even after the designers had deactivated the device. Some had practically torn their own ears off, and one guy had gazed tranquilly into the wall-mounted camera in his cell as he sank an eight-inch-long wooden shank into his left ear canal.

Christ, what a mess that had been.

Another had smashed her head with rhythmic and inhuman force onto the concrete floor next to her bunk. She hadn’t lasted long, either.

Then there was the teenager.

Pretty, in a melancholy way. Within ten minutes of her device’s activation, she’d collapsed into a corner of her cell in the fetal position, her lips opening and closing every so often without making any sound, as if she were mouthing a silent prayer.

She’d otherwise never moved again.

Watching the video of her, curled up on the floor, had reminded him of an experiment he’d once read about: rats in boxes subjected to random electric shocks wired through the boxes’ metallic floors. There was no way for them to escape the shocks because there was no way to escape the floors.

There were levers in the boxes, and the rats could push them, but it didn’t matter because the levers weren’t connected to anything, they were useless; and the shocks came fast and furious no matter what the rats did: push the lever, didn’t push the lever—the little fuckers got their asses electrocuted regardless. Eventually, they just gave up, lay down, and died.

Learned helplessness. That’s what they called it.

Fucking spooky was what it was.

The girl made him think of the rats.

The device’s designers had been nonplussed. After all, the monkeys had never gone crazy. So they’d observed, and pondered, and redid their calculations. They’d made some design modifications before slapping the new, improved models in more subjects’ ears, turning them on, and talking into their brains. Then they’d observed some more.

Some subjects still continued to go ape-shit.

Which had pissed the designers off to no end. After all, going ape-shit defeated the whole purpose. It hadn’t mattered to them that it happened in only a minority of cases. They were engineers. The inexactitude, the uncertainty of it, had irritated them. They’d wanted to strip everything down and start over. But they had deadlines to meet, and since the device took hold safely most of the time, they threw up their hands and decided to move forward.

Another glitch, in addition to the ape-shit thing: electronic interference from outside sources. One of the subjects had sworn he’d heard late-night sermons in Tagalog from a Baptist minister transmitting out of Manila (enough, Sebastian thought, to drive anyone insane). Another’s device had stopped responding entirely after the instillation of a nearby cell-phone tower. But interference wasn’t a big deal: more a rare inconvenience that the designers would engineer out of the next version.