Lin takes a look at a few pages of the notes from one of the doctors and shakes her head. She switches to the file from the next doctor and just sighs. When she picks up the pages from the third one, the one with the copious notes, she steps away from her desk and walks around in a tight circle, pulling at her short hair.
“Are all American doctors illiterate? Or was it just these three?”
“It’s kind of a thing here for doctors to have bad handwriting,” I tell her. “Are they better about it in China?”
“I can’t speak for all of them, but the ones that treated me could all write characters I could understand. This? This is just nonsense!”
To Andrea, Marc, Evan, Louise: Can you come help us with something in my office?
From Andrea: Y. 5.
From Evan: Yeah, be there in a few.
From Louise: Can it wait 20 minutes? In the middle of something.
From Marc: I’m on my way.
To Louise: Sure, come when you can.
“OK, I’m pulling out the big guns,” I tell Lin. “Siblings will be here in a few.”
Lin steps back to her desk and starts clipping small pieces of the images, breaking down the scanned version of the pages. Each segment has what looks like an individual word from the captured text. Smart. Once we start decoding what any of these actually mean, she can apply her pattern recognition software and get every instance of the word replaced with something legible.
Marc pops in.
“Noah! Hey, Lin!” He is as cheerful as ever. “What’s up?”
“Come here and take a look at this.” I hand him a page. “We’re trying to read all of these pages. Can you make out any of this handwriting?”
“Maybe. Let me take a look.”
He peers at the screen for a moment.
“‘Jeff made good progress today,’” he reads aloud. “Then some word I don’t know, ‘olanzapine’ maybe?”
Lin turns to her computer and does a quick search.
“Yeah, that’s a real drug.”
“OK, then it says ‘Olanzapine treatment is showing good results. Jeff was able to discuss his father without violent outbursts for the first time in our session today.’”
“You’re amazing, Marc,” I tell him. “How can you read that?”
“It just looks normal to me,” he says, glowing at the praise.
“Here, try this one,” Lin says, switching to the notes from one of the other doctors.
“Sure. ‘Patient refused to speak during today’s session. One full hour of complete silence. His stare is unnerving. I’m going to talk to Dr. Jeffords tomorrow about changes to patient’s group assignment. Putting him in with Alvarez may have been a mistake.’”
Lin types as Marc reads, getting a text transcript to compare to the illegible mess that only Marc can read. Evan and Andrea show up, see what we’re doing, and take seats at the table, ready to help. By the time Louise shows up, Lin has used Marc’s input to crack one of the doctors’ handwriting and is running his whole set of notes through a processor that spits out plain text to various screens around the room.
“Take a look at this,” Evan says, as Marc and Lin continue with decoding the other two doctors’ scrawls. “‘Patient is obsessed with the failure of humanity. Frequently discusses eradication of the species as an improvement for the planet.’”
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Louise leans over to see the section he’s reading. She shudders. “That’s not good.”
“Not any worse than this part,” I say, getting to a relevant passage in the notes I’m reading. “‘Jeff spent the whole session today describing what he calls the Human Hive. He believes that a direct mind link between all humans using his father’s inventions will create a single thinking entity from the whole species. I asked him what that would mean for free will and individual rights. He told me we wouldn’t care about those things once we were part of a collective. We will be like cells in a single body. Delusions are not getting better, recommend increasing dosage of antipsychotics.’”
“If that’s what he comes up with when he’s getting counseling and medication, I don’t even want to think of what he’s got in his head now that he’s unrestrained,” Evan says, shaking his head.
“But we need to get in his head,” Louise says. “We need to figure out what he’s planning or we’re going to end up with a hive mind for real. Or a wild cloud programmed to eat all humans. Or something even worse that we haven’t gotten to yet.”
“We cracked the next set!” Lin declares from her desk.
I access the new file and close my human eyes. I start screenscraping the next set of nightmares at a mind-blistering speed. Marc continues quietly reading to Lin in the background. I tune it out. I’m more interested in what I’m reading. I know I’m at least partially responsible for creating the monster that Jeff is now, but the more I dig into this, the more I feel like this was all hiding just beneath the surface anyway. I’m just the one who woke it up.
I find where he tells one of the doctors about me. It’s surprisingly low on hatred. I come off as the first one in his life that he ever felt really understood him. I not only destroyed him, but I somehow managed to convince him that I was his only real friend in the process. I haven’t found anything in the notes so far where he even blames me for pushing him to kill Father. He must have known it was all me though. Why else would he have set up that sniper at the Wallace Hospital. He had to know it would be me going there.
Another mystery of the mind of Jeff that I don’t know if we’ll ever solve.
If I’m reading between the lines right, Jeff seems to think that a lot of the conspiracy garbage that I fed to him to break his mind were his ideas in the first place. Who knows? Maybe they were. Just because I came up with them to torture him doesn’t mean that he didn’t invent them independently before I ever saw the Butler Institute campus. For all I know, my claims resonated with him because he already suspected them. Or maybe he just internalized what I told him so much that later on he thought they were his. I need a second opinion.
“Hey Evan, check page 132 of the new set, would you?”
Marc pauses his dictation for a moment. “Did you just skip to there? How did you get to that part so fast?”
I have to check my index to realize that Marc is the last one in my class who still doesn’t know the extent of my brain damage and what I have to do to compensate. I guess my workarounds are convincing enough.
“I just do a lot of reading, so I’m fast at it.”
“I wish I could do that.”
No, you really don’t, I want to tell him. You don’t have any idea what this costs.
I don’t say it. “Let’s get back to work,” I say instead. “We’ve got to be close on that third set, right Lin?”
“Yes,” she says. “Another few pages and I think I’ll have a big enough sample set to automate the rest of it. Come on Marc, read this one for me.”
Evan makes eye contact to catch my attention.
From Evan: I don’t know if he actually came up with that stuff on his own, if that’s what you’re wondering. I don’t know why he’d lie about it though. Maybe he was closer to crazy when you started on him than you thought.
To Evan: OK. I’m not sure if that makes what I did better or worse.
From Evan: I don’t think it matters at this point.
I give him a nod, then get back to work. More reading injects another batch of Jeff’s insanity into my head. Page 171 describes something almost exactly like the excruciator that was presented by one of the scientists that Lin’s father connected us up with in China. That sort of thing led me to slaughter a whole room full of respected conference attendees for just planning it. Then there’s the cyclone of death there on page 189. That’s disturbing, since it means that he’s already acting on at least some of the plans he was thinking up and talking about with his doctors. But it’s also good news, since it means we can actually use these notes to predict what he might do.
We work through the day and late into the night, only stopping for food and bathroom breaks, piecing together every possible plan that Jeff might be putting into effect. Over and over the Human Hive idea keeps resurfacing, to the point where all the doctors start just abbreviating it as HH.
Marc bails out first around one in the morning, barely dragging himself to his room in the dorms before he crashes from exhaustion. Andrea calls it quits next, projecting a parade of Z’s coming up from her head as she walks out. Valerie doesn’t last much longer, and takes Evan with her. Louise has always been more of a night person than most of the Butlers, so she’s still going strong at two in the morning.
“Come on, let’s take a snack break,” she says. “If we’re going to do a proper all-nighter we’re going to need to refuel.”