Schizophrenia can be a scary diagnosis. Imagine being trapped inside a box big enough to stand in with no outlets to see the setting where your box is located, but with access to the sounds of the setting. Trapped in darkness, surrounded by sounds with no context, but not permanently trapped. Time inside this box happens sporadically, randomly. One day, your life is your own, and the next, you fall through the imaginary trap door of existence into this box, maybe for an hour, maybe for a whole day, a week, and then suddenly, you’re back to “normal”, in the everyday with full faculties. It can be jarring. And it can get worse, to the point where you fall out of “normal” into the box, and you start to piece together your own explanation for the noises outside, and inside the box you regress into your explanation because it is the only way to make sense of it all, and when you finally find release, you know nothing else but your own explanations for sounds that aren’t even existent. Or you sit quietly in the box, ignoring all the sounds around you, and a return to “normal” means the same disregard and disinterest in everything moving, everything making noise.
There are ways to manage the condition, it takes steady medication to avoid the existential trap door when it falls open. It’s the mental equivalent of diabetes or HIV, a lifelong companion that must be consistently fed.
Or is it? Can a person learn to free themselves from the existential box? What kind of concentration does that take? Or is it naive to think that a person can will their brains to function in ways that it has proven itself incapable? Some mental disorders can be tolerated and those afflicted can lead relatively normal lives, but some schizophrenics can become dangers to themselves and those around them. Even Dr. Eakran, who believes that humans have a tendency to over medicate to the detriment of free thinkers, knows that the mind sometimes needs help to orient itself or a person can go mad and lose their perspective completely. But that’s where a good doctor proves essential, to ensure that a person does not lose themselves in medication, but rather, uses medication to find themselves within a drowning sea of delusion. It is a very tricky balance.
When Maria enters the front door of the IBF, Giovanni follows immediately after her and Wendy is not far behind. Inside, Wendy takes the seat at her desk and watches Maria and Giovanni enter the elevator that is a hall’s length from her desk. When they are inside, Giovanni stops a doctor from entering and apologizes sincerely; then Wendy watches him hit a series of buttons inside the elevator that is actually the only sequence that allows access to the level of the IBF where Eakran’s office is located.
“Is the doctor in?” Maria asks, somewhat sheepishly when the doors close.
“No, the doctor is busy elsewhere. I haven’t seen him in months. Top secret project, above my pay grade.” Giovanni is a very nice guy and he wants Maria to be comfortable, but even when he tries to be genial, his affectation leaves much to be desired. He speaks in a sort of monotone, though that undercuts the natural charm that he exudes. He isn’t boring, but one very good note that most people tend to tolerate easily.
But not Maria. She hates Giovanni for breaking the news that she had traveled all this way and allowed herself to be taken into some fortified government research facility for no reason at all.
“What’s the point of this?” Maria asks. “Why didn’t you just question me at the restaurant? Or better yet, if you had real complaints, why not call the police to arrest me for breaking into your office?”
The elevator door opens and Giovanni leads Maria through a dark hallway that is actually very short and rigged with motion sensor lights that surprise Maria. Giovanni touches the wall opposite the elevator door and a panel opens where he enters another secret code that causes a door to open at the seeming dead end. Inside, Maria is amazed at the laboratory stocked full of equipment and the library in one corner, visible through glass walls. It has a sleek modernity and the air of discovery in the room makes Maria realize that she has finally entered the office of Dr. Thomas Eakran.
“Dr. Cousins. He’s the reason you’re not arrested right now. You violated federal law in DC, ma’am. You accessed government personnel files, and the personnel you accessed is very, very top secret.” Giovanni talks as he leads Maria to the offices at the back of the laboratory, opposite the library. There are three offices and there is a hallway separating two of the offices from the other that is the biggest. As they walk inside, Maria sees that the only name on the door is EAKRAN, in all capital letters. The office is nice and clean and Giovanni sits on the dark, wooden desk, and indicates for Maria to take the chair in front of him.
“What does very, very top secret mean?” Maria asks as she sits.
“You don’t need to know that.” It seems that Giovanni is being intimidating, but he is just being honest and expedient. “We want to know why you wanted to know where the doctor works.”
Maria smiles. “Maybe I’m meant to assassinate your Dr. Eakran, is that what you’re implying?”
“This isn’t really the best time to joke. I’m operating on threat level 5 of 6 despite Dr. Cousin’s orders, so know that everything you say could leave you disappeared. This facility contracts security from the CIA, ma’am, we’ve been known to torture folks we perceive to be threats.” Giovanni’s tone cuts the harshness of his words but Maria gets it.
“It’s not so nefarious. And if it was, you brought me right where I wanted to be. Is that a good idea?” Maria isn’t trying to seduce Giovanni, something tells her that her wiles won’t be as effective on him. Giovanni doesn’t seem to be as easy to distract from his mission as other people she’d encountered. Something told her that the truth might work on him.
“Good point, but again, Ms. Moreno, you’re only here because your presence was requested. So, why the fascination?”
“Just a fan of the Eakran, was hoping to work beside him. Are you guys hiring? I could be a good CIA agent.”
“I’m new myself, Dr. Eakran got me the job. You want to work for him? You violated the law just for a chance to work next to him?”
“I guess so.” Maria shrugged, playing off the lie as innocently as she can manage. Some truths are an impossible sale. The truth that she hoped Eakran believed in aliens and could help her process an abduction from her youth was definitely an impossible sale.
“Oh. Well…” Giovanni looks perplexed. “Stay here. Do you need anything while you wait?”
“I’m alright.”
“Good,” Giovanni leaves the room.
When Moss and Cousins discovered the Aliarum pattern, they had no name for it, just a list of what they considered to be symptoms that were observed in a group of patients who were always in close proximity to one another. They seemed to be distracted and convinced that they could hear the thoughts of others. They often neglected food and spent hours writing gibberish in notebooks or scribbling indecipherable doodles that only they could understand. Many of the patients that would eventually be classified as Aliarum were being treated for other ailments, usually general dementia, and sometimes schizophrenia. Moss was the first to question the original diagnosis of one of her patients. Both Moss and Cousins were involved in a trial that tried to combat defeatist thinking in sufferers of schizophrenia with positive ideation. Because apathy or general pessimism is a sign of severe psychopathology, doctors determined that reinforcing positivity could contribute to the success of medications and other treatments. Moss led a group of patients in exercises to reinforce positive ideation and it allowed her to closely examine a patient named Mary who had exhibited all of the classic signs of schizophrenia, but something about her affectation was very different. It was the way her symptoms manifested, as though she drew from the delusions of others and got lost in their hallucinations. Moss wondered if it was a form of empathy until the day she had her patients draw scenes from the proudest moment of their lives, an exercise that was meant to help them savour positive memories. When she saw what Mary had drawn and asked her about it, Mary simply pointed to the patient next to her, a man with schizophrenia who had suffered significant speech disruption following an accident while he was high on drugs. It was a picture of the man with his father next to a car they had successfully restored, a story that Moss remembered from closed sessions with the male patient and his father.
“Did he tell you about that, Mary?” Moss asked.
“He didn’t have to. I saw it.” Mary said sincerely.
“It’s a crazy notion,” Cousins told Moss later that day when she asked him to help design a study to prove that a person was capable of mind reading. “It’s completely unscientific. No one would allow it. We shouldn’t even waste our time.”
“But let’s say for a second that it’s possible, that a percentage of the population, no matter how small, currently receiving medication and treatment have this ability and don’t understand it, we could be doing them harm. Isn’t it our responsibility to rule it out? If only for the peace of mind that poor Mary hasn’t been taking medication she doesn’t need for most of her adult life? Imagine the harm we’ve done to her. And if by some crazy chance she can read minds, we might be able to help her cope with it and live a normal life free of all of these trappings.”
“We’re scientist, Donna. There’s no place for science fiction here.”
“You’re absolutely right, Rick, we are scientists. So help me rule this out as a possibility so I can do my job without the doubt that we’re neglecting our duties.”
Cousins couldn’t say no.
The Aliarum protocols are simple enough. They had a different name when Moss first devised them to prove that her patient Mary had been misdiagnosed, but Eakran would eventually appropriate them after Moss and Cousins came to work for him. Moss had read previous studies involving telepathy and extrasensory perception and she did her best to eliminate the possibility that Mary was using a parlor trick to read minds. She used other doctors to help her, though they had no idea of their participation. She introduced a visual stimulation exercise for the optimism study and while a doctor showed and had patients identify positive images for 15 minutes at the start and end of their one on one sessions, Moss sat with Mary in a different room and asked her to tell her the positive images that were being viewed in the other room. The images were changed daily, Moss would print different images for each doctor to show their patients and she would have the doctor number each image as they were displayed. Mary accurately predicted the content and order of the images over the course of a week and Moss was confident that she had discovered a legitimate case of telepathy because there was no way for Mary to cheat. She had no way of seeing the patient whose mind she was reading or the doctor who showed the images, and she was unaware what images Moss had produced. In order to eliminate the possibility of suggestion, she had Cousins, who had not seen the images that would be shown to patients beforehand, record Mary’s results over the course of a week, and she was still 100 percent accurate. Moss was confident that her results were fool proof and she wrote a paper that she submitted to medical journals without vetting it through superiors who she knew would dismiss it out of hand. She wanted people to read her results and decide for themselves. Moss received a lot of criticism and people dismissed her as a fraud. She was embarrassed that she had even tried, until she received a call from Eakran.
The last woman in the Aliarum file is Alia Zephyr, a native of Zephyr, NC before she was orphaned and grew up in many different houses and institutions in NC. She would eventually settle in Columbia, SC and she chose her last name to always remember her home. Her hometown was the only thing on her birth certificate that she recognized; she never met either of her parents. Many who knew her thought she was doomed from the start, despite the quiet grace of her slender neck, her angled chin and nose, and big doe eyes all colored richly mocha in a light. She was beautiful, but she was tough to understand and many of the adults tasked with her care gave up trying just as Alia was acclimating to new environments and was warming up to the new people. Alia was tall in her youth and her face gave the impression of very close scrutiny that made others nervous. And everyone thought her very strange; it didn’t help that her favorite pastime was staring into the sun. She had many different diagnoses over the years. In adolescence she was medicated for attention deficit, and in her teens she was thought to be bipolar, before it was ultimately decided that she was schizophrenic. She had tried to explain to a doctor why she stared at the sun despite the damage to her eyes and soon she was prescribed medication to stop the voices in her head. She’d told him that from a young age she could see possible futures when she looked into the sun and even though it did not allow her to accurately predict the future, it showed her new people she would meet and the places she would go. Alia knew that what she said sounded crazy to others and there was a part of her that genuinely hoped that the doctors were right, that medication would free her from the mounting responsibilities she felt because of the knowledge she gained when she looked into the sun. But even when heavily medicated, her visions persisted and by the time she was in long term care in Columbia, SC she realized that she could hear other people’s thoughts. She was actually able to control the actions of one other patients who was usually in a stupor from the drugs they took.
When Alia met Eakran for the first time, he approached her just as she was leaving the cafeteria after dinner, and his presence hit her like a brick. She was hysterical and she looked at him like he was a monster. The women that were with her, Elia and Aile, both tried to calm her because they knew Eakran to be a nice man, but Alia would not calm down and she had to be sedated. When she came to, Eakran was smiling at her from the doorway and she cowered against a wall.
“You’re not human. Don’t come near me.”
Eakran was astonished. “How do you know that?” He asked calmly.
“I saw you, I saw your spaceship. I saw you take that little girl, but didn’t know what it was back then, but I remember.”
“What little girl?” Eakran was genuinely puzzled.
“Maria. You brought her back. She must be something special.”
“You’re not making sense right now, Alia. But I know you’re just like your friends. I can feel you in my head right now. What am I thinking?”
Alia hid her face. “Just leave. Nobody believes us.”
“I believe you. But I’m not the man you saw take Maria. I don’t know what you’re talking about and I’m not going to hurt you.”
Alia refused to speak and eventually Eakran left. He insisted on sessions with Alia after that incident and though they mostly sat quietly, Alia never making eye contact, Eakran initiated the necessary paperwork to have Alia, Elia, and Aile transferred to the institute for a top secret study.
In the basement of the Institute for Brain Function, Giovanni finds Dr. Cousins at the door of the room where a patient named Nebuchad is screaming hysterically.
“She’s in Dr. Eakran’s office. What’s wrong with him?” Giovanni asks.
Cousins is shaking his head. “I don’t know but I think we found the Maria he’s screaming about. It’s funny, everything you found on Ms. Moreno, all that information you gave me, none of it indicates a connection between the two of them. There’s no way they could have ever met each other. I’m going to talk to her. Get Moss down here quick to sedate Nebuchad.”
Cousins leaves the hallway where the patients’ rooms are located and he doesn’t notice Alia who is looking at him through the window of her door. He can’t know that she is smiling from ear to ear.
PRL Serials 