1169. Wounded minds, 1
(Armylè)
Age was perhaps catching up with Geder. The payment for his overwork over decades was due in both body and mind. He was no longer young. His body had demanded care, and now his mind as well.
Johann himself had lost track of the doctor’s age. Because he too never cared.
The only thing that mattered was the process, their purpose in life was in the work to progress.
They were a generation apart but Johann was only looking more handsome and refined as the years came by, while Morhens had clearly long gone over his prime. Decay was a better word.
Fitting a nuclear physicist as they snickered in the hallways.
Johann ruled the ship already, unchallenged.
The enormous research campus, he had mostly built himself and organised.
Him too, that gave him some freedom to organise his responsibilities and priorities. He had been efficient enough building a strong and relatively decentralised team that he could a day off without warning, and nothing would crumble or cease functioning meanwhile.
Hence quite abruptly, he took a day off.
For a different priority. He had no one to say or request anything to. He simply warned his lieutenants and left, toward the side of the city under the sky.
His explanations were minimalistic. He threw his laboratory coat in a cleaning basket along his way, followed by a few people leaving at this time or asking him a few final questions along the way.
He went outside. A few people felt a little oddly abandoned as Johann left the ship so suddenly for a little while.
~
In a different place, Cheryl too was changing her priorities.
She had been annoyed by the lack of answers she had received. She had poked hives and bears, and got no reaction. Disappointing. But not the end of her strategy.
Some people should have refused more vehemently Prume’s odd demise.
But not even Elyne and Néphéline had taken her baits. Nor me.
I had nothing useful to say to her; and nothing to ask.
Her bet to find allies with will failed, but Cheryl continued her investigation anyway.
She was looking for something long buried.
She was looking for the health ministry darker secrets, and for Prume herself...
We never saw her dead body, so of course we thought the worse could have happened. She’d been taken from us.
But what then?
Not everyone is a natural born revolutionary.
And certainly not all of them will succeed and survive. Statistically, you tend to die.
As much as I loved Prume, my sweet child, her weird disappearance and funeral were not enough to undermine our political power. No matter what I would do.
And...
I wasn’t ready to discuss these things.
Not with Cheryl at the very least.
Elyne and Néphéline were likely feeling too broken at the time as well, to indulge in her rebellious endeavours and ideas.
Not yet.
But Cheryl never minded working on her own as an information broker. She kept digging, dangerously so.
She got one line with a bite. And she focused on that one.
She took her computer and left her home. She was going outside that day, to the hospital where Prume had died.
~
Prume’s medical data was in a corner of her mind. Her entire, buried, folder. She had already illegally obtained and reviewed everything from her childhood, and connected it to other cases. Nothing as big probably, but she had not been shy getting illegal data out of the city’s servers here or there.
Prume’s old medical files were a silver mine of fallacies and oddities. But her death certificate and final pages to her medical file, they were the gold mine of rushed mistakes and shortcuts.
There even was a counterfeit autopsy report. Someone had fucked up the date and time too grossly. And while the funeral required her forehead implant, it was reported disposed of with the rest of the body. But no recycling facility had a record of getting her body. Such negligence...
The more she scratched the varnishes, the more bits fell awkwardly off. She had been curious, now she was invested, to figure out what happened on that day when Prume died.
When something is off, one can wonder whether it’s malice or incompetence priming. It can be a varying degree of both. But one natural human bias, is to believe in purpose and meaning to anything and everything.
Everything was fated to be, and that means there is a god, and there is a conspiracy.
It’s more reassuring than accepting chaos and stupidity for what they really are. We need to believe shitty events have a meaning.
I’ve been luckily educated well enough to see and overcome these primal intuitions.
Thankfully, Cheryl too was smarter than that.
She could seek the truth without paranoid anxiety for linear causes. She would be able to differentiate the manipulations by purpose from those by sloth.
Prume’s body had really disappeared. But she had been declared dead without ambiguity by the central authority and the hospital computer. She just... disappeared.
The trail of maintenance works in the underground levels below the hospital might have been a little too discreet and tenuous for even Cheryl to realise the connection, yet.
For that day, she went for another dig at the scene of the crime.
She had come to the hospital for a very benign wound.
Her own medical file was heavy as well. Not many people had required facial reconstructive surgery after an industrial accident involving nanotechnologies.
But for the bruise and scratches from a bad fall or a self inflicted wound this day, she should be fine.
- You move well for someone blind and without prosthetics.
C - Thank you.
- No rejection symptoms from your neural implant? Tickling? Itching?
C - All is fine. Still the phantom pain when I want to cry. It’s really bad headaches then.
- Hm... We can try some specialised help there. I’ll give you the contact.
C - Thank you.
Cheryl smiled.
She then sympathised and chatted for a little while with someone in the reception of the building. Everyone got used to seeing her around, as she was waiting for someone to come and pick her up.
She played the blind person well.
Her sight was the one of the security system. She was playing her own character in a video game, moving herself around while seeing from another perspective. Her stomach was long used to the nausea of the dichotomy.
She found her way in. A door left open, for perhaps a few seconds.
The records showing something else smoothly. Just a delay as she fidgeted around on records. Her getting where she shouldn’t be just long enough in reality.
Enough to plug something inconspicuous into a computer there, and leave.
Cheryl would dig.
~
Johann had taken the elevator bringing him to a level of the screw. He reached one of the common accesses in the long inverted helix spreading accesses to the underground facilities.
From there he could walk his way up and outside along the endless ramp and stairways.
Reaching the surface, the wide circular building had a transparent dome under the sky, and the bigger sector dome we couldn’t see. It was the head of the screw. It arborescent underground roots to access every facility could have authorised other more floral nicknames, but the main ramp going down in helix and spiral really made it look like a giant screw.
Since the research centre was quite deep into a side of the sphere drawn by the sector circular domain and dome, he had a rather long waiting time in the slow elevator and then walking his way up.
He had continued thinking about the issue at hand along his way out.
Not the few people asking him questions and challenged to work without him for a day. They would manage.
His priorities were clear.
He should be looking for someone able to listen to Geder Morhens, and help him...
Easier said than done, given the character. To make him talk, about himself, and feelings.
He sighed and even whistled in anticipation at the bravery of anyone ready to try doing this. That would be courageous, or very foolish. Even if Morhens wasn’t himself currently, that was still something hazardous to attempt in most circumstances. Johann was sure there would be some anger and fury left in him, come the wrong person and question.
Johann even chuckled at the idea. Finding the right person for Morhens, that sounded amusing when considered from the wrong perspective.
He himself was not in couple, and didn’t care. And Johann didn’t mind laughing about celibacy, especially with other physicists when they shared a drink.
They had sacrificed some prospects of social life and hedonism for the pursuit of perfection and passion into their works. And they were at ease with that generally. Morhens was a clear exception, far over the usual weaknesses and personal preferences between leisure and duties.
He was so far gone, and awkward as a person, it would be challenging to find a person able to match and challenge him. Intellectually, it wasn’t so hard to match him really, and many people in the team could work with him as equals. But socially, he was so difficult to handle...
Nevertheless, Johann looked and searched.
With an open mind, he went to find the right person who would likely be able to handle Geder.
Anyone able to help him get a little better.
~
