---Therapy---
---Alchyinad’s perspective---
“Come in…” I say, to the knocking sound at the door.
It’s waved open and in comes a brightly shining Terran.
He falters a moment before saying “Lights: On.”
One of the switches, on the panel by the door, *thock*s from up to down but nothing changes about the room, at least as far as I can discern visually.
Now having the ability to determine where I am in space, he directs his face toward me.
“Apologies, Mr Taylor, I didn’t realise the lights were off.” I say, doing my best to convey with my tone that it was a genuine mistake.
He waves his hand and answers “It’s nothin’… no problem… Good to see you, Dr Fischer…”
I smile, careful not to show to much of what my husband calls my ‘shark teeth’, and reply “You can call me Alchyinad… if you like… Please; come in, sit wherever you want… or stand, if you’d prefer.”
Mercifully, he chooses to sit in the chair I’ve arranged around my own height away from (and facing) mine.
It’s important to put clients at ease, of course, but accommodating those Terrans who felt most comfortable standing and pacing was one of the trickier talents to learn, during my training.
“So, I know we’ve met already but… I think it would be best if I start by introducing myself and just telling you a little of how this will, ideally, work…” I pause for him to interject but he just smiles and gives an attentive nod, so I continue “…I’m Dr Alchyinad ‘Dimitrescu’ Fischer and I have been hired to the Bright Plume to provide therapy for the Terran contingent… I only recently fully qualified but, please be certain, you are not my first ever client… You can rest assured that anything you tell me in this room will be kept in the strictest confidence, the only exception would be if you tell me something that leads me to believe you are a danger to yourself or others…” more nodding from the bright Terran “…I should also clarify that I won’t be telling you what to do or how to resolve any dilemmas you bring to me… that’s not what therapy is for… rather, I’m here to listen to you and ask you questions that, hopefully, will lead you to find your own answers… I may, occasionally, make notes on my holopad, please do your best to ignore when that happens… Is that all clear? Do you have anything you want to ask?”
He shakes his head “Nope… you’ve covered everythin’ quite well.”
I smile “Would you prefer the privacy field up or down, for this session?... The door locked or unlocked?”
He thinks for a moment before saying “Privacy Field: On. Door: Lock” accompanied by two more *thock*s from the room’s control panel.
I give an encouraging nod before asking “Have you ever had therapy before, Mr Taylor?”
He screws his eyes in recall “Not since uni… I needed constant psych evals to make sure I was still mentally fit for my course… Westminster’d’ve had a huge liability issue, if they’d sent me off to the Amazon, Taklamakan, Antarctic, or wherever, to survive for a week, and I didn’t… if it’d been discovered that I’d been unfit to be sent… well, it’d’ve been bad enough for ’em that they took no chances!”
I nod, fascinatedly “… And… were you ever ruled ‘unfit’, during that time?”
He holds up a finger “Once… got into a weird headspace where I was sorta hyperfixated and my therapist ordered me to take a week of R ’n’ R before he’d sign off on my next excursion.”
I smile (a little too widely but he gives no visible indication of discomfort) “Well… as I said, I don’t have the authority to order you to do anything!… If I think you would benefit from ‘R & R’… I might suggest it(!)”
He chuckles at that.
“OK then… Why don’t you tell me a little about yourself, Mr Taylor?” I smile, congenially.
“Alright… My name’s Victor ‘Cuddles’ Taylor… I’m 30 years old… I’m Chief Security Specialist aboard the Bright Plume… I identify as Sapiens… I’m in a relationship… I’m… a martial artist…?” he speaks with the questioning intonation of one who feels he has run out of things to say.
“You have quite an interesting epithet, Mr Taylor… I’d love to hear how you got it.” I prompt, hoping to make it clear, by my tone, that I’m happy for him not to tell me if he doesn’t wish to.
“Not much of a story, really… Whenever I went on field excursions, from uni, I’d hug all my dormmates goodbye… I came back, I’d greet ’em with a hug… one of ’em, eventually, said ‘You sure give a lotta cuddles!’ and it just, sorta… stuck… Think there’s, like, a kinda… ‘Little John’ like appeal to it… in that, it’s a sorta soft name and I’m… well…” he gestures vaguely at himself.
“Not(?)” I provide, with a mirthful smile… which he returns.
Sensing that he’s done talking about that, I try a different prompt “Would you expand on what you mean by ‘identifying’ as Sapiens?”
He falters, seeming a little surprised that I picked up on that phrasing “Oh… well… *hhmhhm*… I got nearly 10% Neanderthal genes in me… ’cordin’ to my genetic counsellin’, anyway… That’s about 6% more’an I could possibly have just from ancient interbreedin’, so I probably got a Neanderthal great-great granny or grampa… or, like… maybe 2 halfs?… I say ‘identify’ ’cause it’d feel a bit… dishonest to claim to be a hybrid, just ’causa an extra 6.25%… like claimin’ I’m bi, ’causa havin’ gone home with men two or three times!” He chuckles and I refrain from proffering that that would make him bi, in my opinion.
He continues “Like… I’d be suspicious of the motives of anyone trynna tell me I was a hybrid!… Oh! Before you ask: No, that’s not where my green eyes an' red hair come from!”
“…I’m afraid, those colours fall outside my visual spectrum, Mr Taylor… though I am aware that they are the eye and hair colours of the majority of Neanderthals and a minority of Sapiens.” I smile (I hope kindly) in the face of his preemptive defensiveness.
“Oh… shit!… Obviously!… Sorry!” he says, with a twisted face, as if enormously ashamed of the extremely mild faux pas!
“No need to apologise, Mr Taylor, it’s quite understandable that you would assume that I had the same visual spectrum as you… More than 99% of sapients do, afterall!”
“Yeah, but, obviously, 380-750nm only makes sense if your ecosystem’s universal solvent is water and you evolved on the surface of your planet… and, I suppose, the ability to see colours, in that range, only makes sense if there’s enough light on your cradleworld and there’re colours it matters for you to see… My girlfriend’s completely colourblind ’cause her cradleworld’s an eyeball world! You even had the lights off, when I got here! I can even see your eyes’re transparent in my visual spectrum!” he says, clearly still not having forgiven himself.
I smile and say “Truly, no harm done, Mr Taylor, I’m not upset…”
He hesitates, then nods.
“What did you mean when you said you’d be ‘suspicious of the motives of someone telling you you were a hybrid’, Mr Taylor?” I ask, curiously.
He shifts, uncomfortably, then answers “…Most people fall into one of two camps, on hybridhood… grandparent or great grandparent… some planets in the UTC record to the third generation… so… if you’re an eighth-Neanderthal, that fact’ll be on your ID and, like, other official stuff… Earth’s government only records to two generations, otherwise I could check my parents’ enlistment docs for which of ’em was the eighth (I think it was my dad, but it’s difficult to tell an eighth, just from photos and vids)… the opinion that people should count as hybrids with less than 12.5% tends, in my experience, to be correlated quite highly with antiResurectee bigotry… The kinda people who’d insist that my hair and eye colour must have come from my hybridisation, even after I tell ’em it’s not… who’d look at my physique and write it off as ‘genetics’ rather’an acknowledge the hard work I put in to buildin’ and maintainin’ it… the kind who say they ‘just don’t agree with the decision to resurrect our cousins, ’cause they had their time’… like they think Resurrectees’ right to exist is still up for debate!… The kind who use words like ‘unevolved’ and ‘primitive’… The kinda person who’d wait until a Resurrectee was just at the edge of earshot and then mutter the C word, just loud enough for ’em to hear!”
“The ‘C word’?” I query.
His lips tighten “…Yeah… the one that’s a combination, of either the word ‘man’ or ‘woman’, followin’ on from the word ‘cave’…”
“…And this word is a… slur?” I query.
“Yeah… it’s a slur…” he says, followed by seeming to again realise who he’s talking to and saying “Don’t get the wrong idea! There’s like… cultural context… history behind that word… It don’t…”
“Mr Taylor…” I interrupt (which is not ideal) “…I’m not offended by the existence of a slur, in your language, implying troglodytism to be undesirable… Though, I am curious about the cultural context behind it…”
He nods, with a relieved smile, before starting “… So… the first thing is, it’s wrong… absolutely and unequivocally(!)… NO Human lineage (as far as we can tell in modern times) has ever favoured livin’ in caves… even in regions where there’re tonnes of caves, evidence is that all paleolithic, Heidelbergensian lineages, whether that’s Sapiensoid (Sapiens, Longi, Khandwa, Danau and Irhoud), Neanderthaloid (Neanderthal, Denisova, Lisri and Dzhigda), Tshwanoid (Tshwane and Inhatzenguele) or even Bwato (the one nonHeidelbergensian lineage that we know Sapiens bred with), all of ’em preferred livin’ camped out on somewhat open ground!… Different people in different places had different relationships to their local caves… some of ’em got used as burial sites, some of ’em got used as religious sites, some of 'em as rubbish tips, some as art galleries, but basically no evidence of long term habitation… The only evidence consistent with caves’ use as shelters’s as short term shelters of necessity… It’d be like diggin’ up a site from the 20th century and callin’ ’em ‘bus shelter people’ then makin’ pictures in textbooks that always showed ’em hangin’ ’round bus shelters, like they’d nowhere else to be(!)”
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“…If there is no evidence of Humans living in caves, long term, why does this slur exist?” I ask, keeping my tone inquisitive, as if asking him to educate me, rather than accusing, as if asking him to justify his position.
“Preservation bias…” he says, with resignation “…Stuff just preserves better in caves so most of the art, artefacts and remains we have from premodern times is stuff that’s been lyin’ in caves for tens of thousands of years… I often think about how much ancient Humans must’ve painted, outside of caves, that just didn’t preserve… Like, if you put a mural on a rockface that’s open to the elements then it’ll be gone in a few years… maybe they painted their entire worlds; painted footprints on the rocks beside trails, marked out the best gatherin’ grounds by puttin’ handprints on the trees… dyed their tents, their tools, their clothes, just to have somethin’ interestin’ to look at… we’d never know because the paintin’s they left in caves are the only ones sheltered enough to survive.”
I nod, attentively, before saying “I get the sense that it isn’t only the lack of academic rigor that upsets you about this slur?”
He shakes his head “It’s not… it’s, like… the dismissiveness! Like, they think the only reason these people didn’t develop housin’, farmin’, metallurgy, wheels etc. etc. is because they was too stupid to figure it out… and not ’cause they was livin’ every day hand-to-mouth, you know?! The kinda person who thinks that they’d be able to time travel back to 40,000 years ago and wow people with modern knowledge but then, when you ask ’em what they know that would be useful to ancient people (that don’t rely on somethin’ they need to bring from the present) the only thing they can provide is farmin’… like they don’t think that a Neanderthal would know that seeds turn into plants…(!) The only thing I think I could teach ancient people, that they’d find valuable, is how to smelt bog-iron… but I ain’t so arrogant to think, if I didn’t already know how to do that, that I could work it out from first principles! ‘That’s some interestin’ lookin’ red mud! I wonder what would happen if I spent weeks makin’ charcoal, buildin’ a furnace, gettin’ it to hundreds of degrees and then dropped it in there’(!)”
I smile “I can see you’re very passionate about this, Mr Taylor…”
He nods, firmly “Yeah… well I grew up in the room opposite a Neanderthal’s… she’s the closest thing I have to a sister… first time I heard someone bring her to tears with that word… encouraged me to educate myself… after I got out of the headteacher’s office, where I got a lecture about how we solve our differences with words, that is… Don’t hurt that natural history’s the crossover of history and biology… which were always my two favourite subjects at school…after P.E.!” he hesitates before leaning forward, conspiratorially “…You wanna know the most messed up part, about that guy?”
I match his conspiratorial lean and smile “Tell me…”
“The week before he made Treg cry, he’d asked her out! She turned him down and he immediately went nasty to her! Like he thought he could fuckin’ bully her into sayin’ yes!” he says, disgustedly “A real fuckin’ Chad Johnson!… Oh, shit, sorry! D’you know who that is?”
I nod “Yes; a 24th century reextinctionist who strongly advocated for the cessation of resurrection of not only lost animal and plant biodiversity but, also, Human cousins… after he made a public threat against a resurrection lab, a search warrant was executed, during which his home computer was found to have dozens of hours of Neanderthal pornography on it… after that fact became known to the public, support for Chad Johnson’s ideas rapidly diminished and reextinctionism, as a movement, slowly died out… slightly ironically(!)”
He pulls a surprised expression before saying “Wow! Impressive!”
I smile “Studying the Johnson Phenomenon was part of my degree… Would you say, Mr Taylor, that you think it’s worse for people like Chad Johnson and this boy who made your friend/sister cry to espouse these views insincerely than it would be if they were sincere?”
He gives a firm nod, his brow knit, and answers “YES! If they truly believed what they were saying they’d be wrong and hateful but least I could respect ’em as honest! Y’know? It’s like the one they really hate is themself and, instead of comin’ to see someone like you about it, they decide to make it everyone elses' problem!”
He… subtly just implied that he hates himself… I briefly consider confronting that, right now, but decide that that’s a bit heavy for a first session. That’s the kind of thing that should wait until he’s more at ease with me… he’s likely to shut down if I ask ‘would you say you hate yourself’ so, instead, I observe “I can see that honesty is very important to you, Mr Taylor…”
He answers with a firm nod but says nothing more so, after a small pause, I ask “Would you tell me about the experience of growing up in… London? Was it London?”
He smiles “Yeah… Camden Borough…”
I smile back “A lovely place.”
“Oh, you’ve been?” he says, surprised.
“I have.” I say “My husband and I had several dates in London, early in our relationship… but we’re not here to talk about me…” reminding myself as much as him “…what was life like for a, preBright Plume, Victor Taylor, growing up in London?”
He thinks for a few moments, seeming to be getting his thoughts in order, before starting “Already said what my three favourite subjects at school were… My least favourites were maths and languages… to this day I only speak six; English, Italian, Mandarin, Japanese, Cantonese and Old English… Italian’s the only one I really learned at school… Old English I sorta got a groundin’ in, at school, but it’s one of the harder languages to stay in practice with, given how rare new Old English media works are. I did brush up a bit, recently, ’causa somethin’ I wanna do on Nova Fennoscandia… the others, I learned from my original Shīfu and Jeanne ‘Blitz’ Miyazaki… I can understand R’qali OK, but I can never get the hang of the whole front mouth ‘c’, back mouth ‘k’ and the ‘q’ that wants you to deep-throat it(!)”
He’s not counting Galactic Basic or Galactic Basic Sign Language, despite the fact that he must speak them. Not particularly surprising… with only a few thousand words and, effectively, no grammar, Terrans tend to derisively refer to those languages as ‘pidgins’.
“Most of the galaxy would consider that to be quite an impressive number of languages to speak, Mr Taylor(!)” I say, amused.
He just nods, noncommittally, in answer.
“…What about when you weren’t at school?” I prompt.
“…Oh… well… When I was little I remember Maia (the AI that ran my orphanage) rentin’ out a droid and takin’ us to the Frost Fairs when the Thames froze over.” he says with a wistful smile “When I got a bit older I took up Shaolin… I’d be at the guǎn for 3 hours on Tuesday evenin’s, 3 hours on Thursday evenin’s and 2 hours on Saturday mornin’ … when I weren’t doin’ that… I was usually chillin’ with Treg in either her room, mine or the Commonroom, at home… sometimes we’d take the monorail somewhere and just have a bit of a knock about for the day. We liked goin’ to Italy, Norway, Dogger Island, Atlantis… I liked goin’ to China and Japan but… you gotta change at Berlin, then Moscow, then Vladivostok to get to Beijing with another change in Busan to get to Tokyo… That takes all day and even longer if you wanna change to get out to the countryside, so I’d only go when I had the pocket money to get a transport capsule or to stay the night out there. Treg only came a few times.”
“Why did you need to travel to such far away places to fight?”
“Fight?! We weren’t fightin’! Treg never went in for martial arts!” he says, confused.
“There must have been a miscommunication… I thought you said you ‘knocked eachother about’?”
He thinks for a moment then bursts out laughing “I meant we went sightseein’! That’s hysterical!”
I give a mirthful sigh “You’d think I hadn’t spent the last ten years living on your planet (!)… Would you tell me how you went from ‘knocking about’ your favourite hangouts on Earth to the position you currently hold?”
He shrugs “A pinch of dumb luck, to start with… Cap came to Earth, lookin’ for someone for this role… Miyazaki and her husband hadn’t had any luck linin’ anyone up… Cap apparently stormed out in a huff… I saw her from a mile away, nearby Waterloo Station… Not too many nonTerrans on Earth, especially in those days… you notice a 131cm secretarybird dressed in a sash, like she’s off to her job as the mayor of a preUnification village(!)… She was bein’ followed by that boy I told you about earlier and two cronies he had from school… I knew if I didn’t stop ’em they was gonna do somethin’ they’d regret and, sure enough, when I caught up to ’em they was trynna mug her for her devices… I got ’em back and chased the boys off. She took one look at me and decided I fit the bill… and the rest is history.”
“What made you so sure these boys were going to try to hurt Tcakqaal?” I query.
He cocks an eyebrow “I’m sure I don’t have to tell you how much antigardenworlder vitriol there is on Earth, if you’ve lived there for ten years! Earth was one of the hardest hit planets in terms of War casualties because we were the first to institute total conscription, meaning we were hugely overrepresented in the military, in the early War, when the fightin' was deadliest 'cause we hadn't worked out what we was doin' yet, and because we had the most robust system of AI infrastructure in the UTC, meaning it was really hard for people to get exempted from service because the stuff was already in place to just hand every essential job off to an AI… Where the UTC, at large, lost 4% of its population, that figure is almost double for Earth! 'Causa that, growing up, bigotry against gardenworlders was normal… Treg tells me it’s getting better recently, as the War gets further into the past, but I’m certain it ain’t over yet!… I’m sure you had more than your fair share of slurs thrown your way…?”
I nod “One or two, yes… The ability to identify threatening behaviour ‘a mile away’ then ‘chase off’ three opponents doesn’t particularly sound like ‘dumb luck’, to me…”
Another noncommittal shrug.
I frown, slightly “Why weren’t you affected by this antigardenworlder sentiment… after all, from the sound of it, you lost to the War as well?”
His face goes hard and he says “I did.” simply.
“Victor… if you don’t want to talk about your parents then you don’t need to…”
He sighs “I feel like I talked my absent parents to death, for a second time, with my last therapist: My mum was a scarlet haired lass from Stranraer… my dad was a strapping young buck from Dogger Island… they met at bootcamp, in the shadow of the Sussex Space Elevator, soon after they both turned 18… (I’ve already lived 50% longer than either of ’em ever did!) My mum’s reproductive cycle deactivation didn’t work… I am the result… I’m sure she must’ve faced prejudice as a draft dodger, ’cause gettin’ pregnant, before you turned 18, was a well known ‘hack’ for women to, temporarily, get themselves and their babydaddy outta the draft… I don’t think I’m a draft dodge baby… even if I didn’t have her medical records confirmin’ that, yes, the contraceptive cycle pause failed to take, it’d just be… a bit weird for ’em to name me Victor after the Victory at Krwndw (as they claim to've, in the video diary they left me) if they only had me to get outta fightin’… As soon as she’d recovered from labour, I was handed off to Maia and she an’ my dad were shipped off to New Australia, where they died… The reason I never requested info on my forbears, from the government of Sol (Like who my Neanderthal great-great grandparent was, for example) is ’cause it’d make me sad for no reason… I already know there was no one left alive who was close enough to ’em that they felt any obligation to raise me on their account! I’m kinda done talkin’ about it…it’s not why I asked for therapy… Oh, and to answer your question… I guess my functional sense of empathy allowed me to see that the gardenworlders who killed my parents were, almost certainly, frightened conscripts who’d rather be anywhere but where they were, just like my parents… not evil demons(!)… It wasn’t complicated(!) None of this is why I requested a therapist.”
I appraise the clearly wounded Terran.
It could not be more obvious that he is less at peace with his parents’ death than he’s claiming… but no therapy was ever achieved by calling your client a liar, so… let’s try something else…
“Alright Mr Taylor… if that’s not the reason… then tell me… why did you ask for therapy?”
A smile twists his mouth “You can call me ‘Victor’ if you’d like…”
I smile back “Is that what you would like?”
He shrugs “I don’t care what you call me.”
I chuckle “Alright then… Victor… why did you request therapy?”
He pauses a moment, then speaks “I guess it started when I was sent to a’Teksia 3…”