The inability to gauge the consequences of one’s actions, the impact of one’s words on others, is a symptom of Asperger’s, a condition on the Autism Spectrum. Those dealing with the condition often fixate on things, they memorize lists of names, or details from TV shows or books, and most others that encounter them, assume that they are disinterested in the present reality. Have you ever met someone on the spectrum? It isn’t necessarily a strange encounter, like meeting an alien from another planet, they are just people. Some are disturbed by the Asperger’s aversion to eye contact, but I get it. My family is particularly superstitious and I grew up with notions that holding eye contact with the wrong person could result in curses or hypnosis. Not to say that Aspergers are a superstitious lot, but somethings are just superfluous. Some might think an Asperger rude for their inability to track the normal ebbs and flows of conversation, but let’s be honest, most pleasant conversation is bloated with small talk that is uninteresting and unproductive. Maybe the Aspergers are on to something that others are wise to emulate. Dr. Thomas Eakran thinks so, and that may seem counterproductive for someone working to cure the condition, but if I were an Asperger he’d be just the man I’d want to talk to.
Maria eyes the man with the gun in his waist as she slowly sits back down in the booth that she had been sharing with Wendy, and her arms are partially up. Wendy does the same, only she seems to be hyperventilating and her eyes dart around for anyone in the restaurant that can help them.
“You planning to shoot someone with that weapon?” Maria asks, hiding any nerves she may feel. Wendy is so nervous that she is noticeably shaking.
“Shoot somebody? Oh,” the man says, and looks down at his waist, “naw ma’am, that’s just part of the uniform. I didn’t mean to flash it on you like that.”
“So you’re not planning to get mean?”
“Of course not. I’m not planning on it, but sometimes I get frustrated and act outside of myself. I’m working on that. You ladies can calm down, I’m not holding anyone hostage.”
“You could’ve fooled us!” Wendy screams. “What is wrong with you, flashing a gun and insinuating threats? What were we supposed to think?”
The man who has apparently bungled his first encounter with Maria and Wendy is named Giovanni. He is in his early thirties and he has always struggled with communication. He took part in an Asperger trial at the IBF and became a favorite of Dr. Thomas Eakran, who significantly improved Giovanni’s ability to communicate with people and function in ways that appeared normal to others; though Eakran’s results with Giovanni proved to be a unique case and none of the other participants showed the same drastic improvement over the course of the trial. Giovanni’s apparent cure was induced by introducing bacteria into the colony in his stomach, a bacteria that concurrently cured his sensitivities to dairy and gluten and also improved his motor function. The bacteria helped to strengthen hormone and chemistry regulation in his brain that had been impaired, though his interpersonal skills were not always on par with others as demonstrated by his current interaction with the lovely Maria. The procedure of bacteria introduction was controversial at the time, it is sometimes comically referred to as a poop transplant because the effective bacteria is commonly found in the digestive tract of humans, and was personally performed by Eakran. The procedure would not have been permitted under close scrutiny from the board of the IBF. After reviewing the work on the trial, a few of the board members called for his immediate termination from the Institute but Eakran had been extremely successful in one case and Giovanni proved to be a very useful security guard to Eakran because he had developed sharp reflexes with a keen sense of timing as a result of the trial.
“What do you want!?” Wendy screams, the three had been sitting quietly for half a minute; Wendy and Maria waiting to hear an explanation, and Giovanni reviewing in his mind exactly the message he’d hoped to deliver.
“Yea, you’re the receptionist right?” He says to Wendy, who nods, still very much agitated. “Is this a friend of yours? She seems to have perpetrated a security breach at the DC office.”
Maria had very much breached security at the IBF DC location. Seducing that security guard for access to confidential files is what led her to GA. Maria is shocked that the truth caught up to her so fast. Wendy is looking at her with a mixture of confusion and pain.
Giovanni continues, “I work in security, assigned to the basement level, and we have to be very thorough about security breaches. Can you please explain your relationship? And ma’am,” Giovanni flips through a small note pad that he pulls from a pocket, “Ms. Moreno, we’ll need to ask you some questions as well and I’d like to take you back to the institute for that reason.”
It’s an in, Maria thinks, though she wonders if she is in real trouble. She could protest, throw salt in Giovanni’s eyes and run away from the restaurant, as far away from GA as she could get and just start a new life, but then she’d probably never meet Eakran.
“Excuse me, sir,” Wendy says, “can I see some identification.” She is learning so much about the IBF today and she wonders if he works for some other company with the same initials. But he has the same ID that she has, only, the number in the top corner is greater than hers. “What the hell is going on? Who are you really?” Wendy says to Maria.
“I’m gonna go back with Giovanni and explain everything to him, and then I’ll find you and do the same. I’m not a bad person or anything Wendy. I’m just trying to find something.” Maria follows Giovanni to his car and Wendy follows them back to the institute, more confused than she has been in a long time.
There was a time when Dr. Eakran thought that the Alirum were exclusively people with demonstrated mental disorder who happened to be in the same place at the same time. It skewed his view and at one point he believed that every person with a mental disorder was an Aliarum, but he was proven wrong by the research of Cousins and Moss in Minnesota. There was something else that made the Aliarum special, as Cousins discovered while conducting interviews with the Aliarum cluster they had been monitoring in the basement.
There are three patients in Eakran’s Aliarum folder. All three are female and had occupied Morris Village in Columbia, SC when Eakran was scouting locations for a summer home and consulting at the treatment center in his spare time. It was there that he met Aile Lang who had shown great promise in her youth as a tennis player, but the stress of realizing the expectations proved too much. By the time she was seventeen she was using drugs to direct her concentration and soon she was addicted to anything that would relieve pain from an ankle injury she suffered in the biggest match of her career at the US Open; a match she would lose but not for lack of dedication, she ignored the pain after rolling her ankle early in the second set and pushed it to three before her opponent was able to exploit her weakness. She was in treatment just before her eighteenth birthday. Elia Alvarado was married to a soldier who died in Iraq early in the war, leaving her with three sons to care for on her own. The boys were close in age and when they left home as they matured into their adulthood, Elia was left with nothing but the memory of her husband. She tried to make a happy life in her empty nest, but she wouldn’t allow herself to stop imagining the life she would have with her husband if he were still alive. She was admitted for treatment at Morris Village by her three sons who worried that she would thin away to nothing because she barely ate or slept, but sat in the living room of her home, imagining her husband sitting near her and smiling at her.
When Eakran came to know Elia and Aile, he knew that they were special just being in their presence. It was as though he could hear them both whispering inside of his mind and the feeling was pleasant, despite the obvious trauma in both their eyes from the years of anguish they had suffered. And when Eakran sat with them each individually, they seemed to know secrets about him, the way they looked at him closely, almost trying to confirm a hidden knowledge about his physical characteristics that took real inspection. Elia seemed to like him a lot and the two conversed freely. Aile seemed to only ever ask him questions and Eakran could tell that she battled her own curiosity that wanted to know more about him even though she hadn’t been communicating much at all since she her time started at the center. When Eakran discovered that the two ate meals together every day, he wandered into the cafeteria to watch them interact. And it was there that he discovered the Alia.
At the IBF, Maria and Giovanni are entering the front door, and deep in the basement, two big, brown and woeful eyes slowly open. And Nebuchad, who is in a room just down the hall, emerges from a bull spell and stands up, shouting;
“She has come to save us! She is here! Maria has come for us all!“
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