The Theta Patient (2 page)

Bradburn stared at the man for a
moment, unable to think of what he should say or do next. A month
earlier, one of his nurses hadn’t shown up for work. Only a week
later had the doctor learned that men from the Tyranny had taken
her away. It turned out that her husband had spoken out against the
Tyranny passing laws that the public wasn’t allowed to know about.
Her offense had been being married to someone who would dare
question the Tyranny.

“
It wasn’t as if he thought he
could do anything about it,” his nurse had said, crying. This was
after they had taken her husband away but before they decided to
take her as well for being married to him. “He was just saying that
if the Tyranny is going to pass whatever laws it wants anyway, why
keep them secret until the last minute?”

In the Tyranny’s eyes, she would
have been defending a Thinker. Personally, Bradburn had no sympathy
for the woman. After all, the Tyranny said it was in the public’s
best interest to pass laws this way. They didn’t have to explain
why. His former nurse should have known better than to complain
about it —rules were rules.

“
Don’t you have anything you wanna
say?” the Tyranny’s agent said.

“
What makes you think one of my
new patients is a threat?”

It was the first thing that had
popped into his mind—some kind of proof that a seemingly mentally
unstable man, under his care no less, might be a risk to the
Tyranny. He could tell, though, from the way the agent sighed and
closed his eyes for a moment, that it hadn’t been the correct
response.

The agent’s eyebrows raised. “Are you doubting
the Tyranny’s ability to identify threats and keep everyone
safe?”

“
Of course not,” Bradburn said,
his palms out to show he meant nothing by the comment. “I only
thought it might help me identify which patient you’re talking
about.”

“
I’m glad to hear that. I can’t
tell you much, I’m afraid,” the agent said, a smirk to indicate he
quite liked knowing things that average people weren’t allowed to
know.

“
Well, maybe if you could tell me
why you think someone would want to pretend to be
insane?”

“
Doctor, doctor, doctor,” the man
in the black suit said.

Bradburn knew he had somehow messed up again.
“It’s just that”—

The man from the Tyranny raised a hand for
silence, then said, “You want to know an awful lot, doctor. It
makes me wonder why.”

“
No,” Bradburn said, leaning
forward, accidently knocking over a jar of pens, then scrambling to
pick them up. “I just thought—”

“
You’ll know what the Tyranny
wants you to know.”

“
I realize that. I
just—”

“
Where are the three men right
now?”

“
What?”

“
The three new patients. Where are
they?”

“
They’re—I’m sorry—what’s your
name?”

The agent leaned forward, staring hard at the
doctor. “My name?” He sighed again. “My name?”

Bradburn grimaced. He had only
wanted to get on a first name basis with the man across from him.
To become his ally in this search. He knew, though, of the
reputation that men from the Tyranny had, and he knew immediately
that he had made another mistake. The Tyranny’s agents liked their
anonymity. It had made it harder, back in the early days of the
Tyranny, to make a formal complaint against an agent who beat your
head in, touched you inappropriately, stole your belongings after
searching you, or any of the other things they got away with.
Almost no one was foolish enough to make a complaint anymore, not
after the way people tended to disappear or end up in secret
prisons. But asking for an agent’s name was a reminder that someone
might want to report them. For the Tyranny’s men this was enough to
take offense.

“
I only meant so I knew what to
call you,” Bradburn said, taking quick breaths, wiping sweat from
his brow.

Seeing the reaction he had earned, the
Tyranny’s agent smiled. “Agent Cooper.”

“
Great! It’s a pleasure to
formally meet you, Agent Cooper. Please be assured I’ll help
however I can. When I ask questions, I’m just trying to get a
better idea of what to look for. I’ve always been a supporter of
the Tyranny. Just last year I reported a staff member who I thought
might be engaging in suspicious activities. Never saw him again, so
I suppose he had been. And I always cooperate when—”

Cooper held up a hand. “You don’t
have to look for anything,” the agent said. He reached into the
briefcase that was on the chair beside him, withdrew a folder, and
slid it across the desk toward Bradburn.

“
What’s this?” the doctor
said.

“
These are the questions you’ll
ask each patient.”

“
Questions?”

“
Precisely.”

“
I don’t understand.”

Cooper was already closing his
briefcase. Standing. Getting ready to leave.

“
Lucky for you, you don’t need to
understand. You’ll ask each of your three new patients these
questions. I’ll be back tomorrow to hear their answers. There are
instructions in the folder for how to record the
sessions.”

“
And?”

Agent Cooper smiled. After putting
on a pair of sunglasses, Cooper’s eyes were no longer visible.
Instead, silver discs reflected Doctor Bradburn’s confusion back at
himself.

“
And that will tell me which of
the three men is the Thinker.”

Then Cooper was gone, leaving
Bradburn to consider everything he had just been told. As if to
ensure the doctor did what he was supposed to, or, at least, didn’t
do something he wasn’t supposed to, an AeroCam hovered outside his
window, its camera pointed right at Bradburn.

Rather than acknowledge the flying
robot he knew was still outside his window, he forced himself to
look down at the folder Agent Cooper had given him. Opening the
folder, he began to read.

That was when things that had
already made little sense began to seem utterly insane.

As much as Bradburn had wanted to
get home at a normal hour, the moment Agent Cooper left, the doctor
had immediately opened the folder and begun looking through the
questions. He knew, after a long day of work, that he must be
exhausted. But instead, as he scanned the things he was supposed to
ask his three new patients, he felt jittery as if he had gulped a
gallon of coffee. The agent’s visit had unsettled him, but the
questions were what really made him twitch and fidget in his
seat.

Do you believe in time
travel?

Is the world a better place today
than it was a hundred years ago?

If you could go back in time and
change any event, what would you change?

There were twenty questions in
total. Needless to say, they were not the types of things he
normally asked his new patients. Frowning, Bradburn looked back at
his doorway to make sure someone wasn’t waiting there to jump out
and tell him this was all a prank. Instead, a blur caught his
attention by the corner of his eye. Another AeroCam was flying past
his window.

Agent Cooper. The threat of a
Thinker in his own hospital. Questions about time travel. All of it
must be a practical joke put together by his staff.

There was no one outside his
office, though. No one snickering around the corner, ready to jump
out and tell him he had been working too many long days recently.
Except for the hum of the AeroCams outside, there was only
silence.

Letting out a long sigh, he read
through the questions again. As little sense as they made to him,
they had been handed to him by an agent of the Tyranny. For that
reason alone, they had to be legitimate. However, he had no idea
how they were supposed to identify a Thinker from a normal person—a
man pretending to be crazy from two other men who actually were.
And anyway, it wasn’t as if one of the men would be dumb enough to
say something that would identify himself as a Thinker. Not if he
were willing to go to the trouble of having himself admitted to a
mental institution.

Reading through the questions
again made Bradburn think once more about the three new patients.
They had all been processed within the last twenty-four hours. He
hadn’t said anything meaningful to any of them yet, only niceties
in passing. The real diagnoses—the formal therapy sessions—would
begin later in the week.

Reaching over to a cart beside his
desk, he found the patient folders for each of the three men who
had been admitted the previous day.

One of them, Anthony Station, had
been given over to the hospital at the request of his family. They
knew he needed serious help, knew they couldn’t provide it, and so
had done the only thing they could think of.

The second man, Logan Ford, had
been sent to the hospital more than a dozen times in the past year.
He complained of hearing voices no one else could hear. He said he
could see people no one else could see.

The third patient, Dewey Leonard,
was sent to the hospital after being found naked and covered in his
own waste. One of the Tyranny’s Security Service officers had
thought about arresting him for indecency but hadn’t wanted to get
his patrol car dirty. Instead, he had called the hospital and
requested they send an ambulance.

Three men. Each of them a newly
arrived patient at his facility. One of them a suspected
Thinker.

Trying to conceive of something in
their files that might save him the time and embarrassment of
asking ridiculous questions, he scanned their intake information.
One of the men had been admitted in the morning, another in the
afternoon, and yet another in the evening. All three had been
delivered to the facility by a non-emergency medical unit (an
ambulance without its lights or sirens on). None of this was out of
the ordinary.

What did seem odd was that all
three men had either been picked up at or within two blocks of
Burnley Park. The city spanned nearly one hundred square miles. It
had thousands of acres and just as many streets and side streets.
The chances of three men all being picked up near the exact same
area couldn’t be a coincidence.

Seeing this fact, seeing the
list of the Tyranny’s questions, a curiosity came over him. Without
knowing what he expected to find, he spun in his chair to face his
computer. After typing the name of the park and clicking
search
, millions of
results came back. Burnley Park was a popular place. He narrowed
the results by sorting out anything that hadn’t been posted the
same day the three men became his patients.

A new set of results appeared. One
of the parking garages near Burnley Park was temporarily closed for
renovations. There was an outdoor yoga session at lunch. A bake
sale was being held to support a local church. Two men, both
homeless, had been arrested by the Tyranny for annoying the
Security Services. The first two pages of results were all talking
about these same things.

Then, on the third page, he saw a
preview that caught his eye. A blog, maintained by a local
teenager, said that numerous people around Burnley Park had
reported a bright light appearing above the trees just after noon,
when most people had already eaten their lunch and gone back to
their offices. Not only had a bright light been seen, a man had
fallen out of it, into a tree. After climbing down, the man, who
had been wearing plain brown pants and a matching shirt, had looked
around briefly, then immediately darted into an alley and
disappeared.

Bradburn frowned. He knew better
than to believe the foolishness that was posted online. There
hadn’t been a bright light. He certainly didn’t believe that a man
had fallen out of it even if there had been some kind of firework
or camera flash. Whoever maintained the site was either goofing
around or needed to consider the services of a facility like the
one Bradburn managed. But then again there were people who believed
in Big Foot and the Loch Ness monster, so maybe a practical joke
about a flash of light wasn’t so serious in the grand scheme of
things.

He went back to the search results
and found another blog that mentioned the same flash of light and
the same man falling out of it, into a tree. This site was run by a
librarian who worked across the street from Burnley Park. The exact
same accounts were provided. Onlookers stated that the man, after
climbing down from the tree, had run away and hadn’t been seen
again.

A third website, this one on a
site that mainly talked about UFOs and spacemen and other nonsense,
also mentioned the bright light at the park. But seeing the rest of
the subject matter on the site, Bradburn automatically discounted
this source and went back to the other two.

“
Huh?” the doctor said.

The two other pages that had
mentioned the light and the man were gone from the
results.

His finger clicked
refresh
. Then again.
Then again. Now, even the third site, with lizard men and
conspiracy theories, was gone. Biting the corner of his lip,
Bradburn put in a new search, this one specifically for the flash
of light and the falling man.