BISENTIENT, page 1
Contents
Copyright
Dedication
Chapter One
Chapter Two
Chapter Three
Chapter Four
Chapter Five
Chapter Six
Chapter Seven
Chapter Eight
Chapter Nine
Chapter Ten
Chapter Eleven
Chapter Twelve
Chapter Thirteen
Chapter Fourteen
Chapter Fifteen
Chapter Sixteen
Chapter Seventeen
Chapter Eighteen
Chapter Nineteen
Chapter Twenty
Chapter Twenty-One
Chapter Twenty-Two
Chapter Twenty-Three
Chapter Twenty-Four
Chapter Twenty-Five
Chapter Twenty-Six
Chapter Twenty-Seven
Chapter Twenty-Eight
Chapter Twenty-Nine
Chapter Thirty
Chapter Thirty-One
Chapter Thirty-Two
Chapter Thirty-Three
Chapter Thirty-Four
Chapter Thirty-Five
Chapter Thirty-Six
Chapter Thirty-Seven
Chapter Thirty-Eight
Chapter Thirty-Nine
Chapter Forty
Chapter Forty-One
Chapter Forty-Two
Chapter Forty-Three
Chapter Forty-Four
Chapter Forty-Five
Chapter Forty-Six
Chapter Forty-Seven
Chapter Forty-Eight
Chapter Forty-Nine
Chapter Fifty
Chapter Fifty-One
Chapter Fifty-Two
Chapter Fifty-Three
Chapter Fifty-Four
Chapter Fifty-Five
Chapter Fifty-Six
Chapter Fifty-Seven
Chapter Fifty-Eight
Chapter Fifty-Nine
Chapter Sixty
Chapter Sixty-One
Chapter Sixty-Two
Chapter Sixty-Three
Chapter Sixty-Four
Chapter Sixty-Five
Chapter Sixty-Six
Chapter Sixty-Seven
Chapter Sixty-Eight
Chapter Sixty-Nine
Chapter Seventy
Chapter Seventy-One
Chapter Seventy-Two
Chapter Seventy-Three
Chapter Seventy-Four
Chapter Seventy-Five
Chapter Seventy-Six
Chapter Seventy-Seven
Chapter Seventy-Eight
Chapter Seventy-Nine
Chapter Eighty
Chapter Eighty-One
Chapter Eighty-Two
Chapter Eighty-Three
Chapter Eighty-Four
Chapter Eighty-Five
Chapter Eighty-Six
Chapter Eighty-Seven
Chapter Eighty-Eight
First Published in Great Britain by Blackbeard Independent Press 2023.
Copyright © 2023 Patrick O'Connor
All rights reserved.
No reproduction without permission.
Hardback ISBN: 978-1-3999-3158-8
Paperback ISBN: 978-1-7391136-1-2
E-book ISBN: 978-1-7391136-0-5
This book is a work of fiction. Names, characters, places and incidents are either a product of the author’s imagination or are used fictitiously. Any resemblance to actual people living or dead, events or locales are entirely coincidental.
For Vee.
CHAPTER ONE
MASON PLATER WAS an experienced cameraman who had worked on award winning documentaries and TV series. He was rubbing his hands vigorously on his jeans to get feeling back in his frozen fingers. He glanced up to see Molly James, a young production intern heading his way.
“Hey Molly!”
“Hey Mason. I’d rather follow you around than that old bat. I might learn something.”
“Beatrice isn’t so bad.” said Mason Plater, smiling. “Most producers are manic, it’s in the job description. Anyway all I do is point a camera, not much to it really. Fancy a cuppa?”
With bitter temperatures hanging on into March there was a long line at the refreshment van. Plater would rather have been filming a motion picture or a television series but work was work. He told himself a documentary on an old loony-bin would do until something better came along.
“What’s the schedule look like then?” Plater asked.
Molly looked a little surprised that someone with a decade in the business needed information from her then grinned and said “You’re in Crew-1 aren’t you?”
Plater nodded and looked over to where lighting engineers were unloading their rigs. He wanted to make sure they steered well clear of his delicate equipment.
“Well you’re going to be doing some exterior shots for atmosphere and fillers then you have an interview with Dr someone-or-other who runs the place and then something called the Dead Zone.”
Plater turned back to Molly, slightly frowning “The Dead Zone?”
“That’s what the staff call it. It’s a ward where all the patients are in comas or something. They just lie there and don’t do anything.”
“Sounds great.” said Plater, grabbing a handful of small blue packets. “Sugar?”
The buildings of Lievesham Hall were a curious amalgam of Victorian grandeur and suppressed menace but with modern insertions of sky-lit corridors, unexpected open spaces and an ever-present, if subtle, technology. In some of the older parts, with the tall arched windows and the cool heavy walls, you could almost imagine starched nurses pacing the corridors in their sturdy leather shoes, their footsteps echoing like tourists in a cathedral. Who hasn’t heard stories of people locked away in Victorian sanatoriums when they were as sane as the next person. Places where society hid away the freaks and failed humanity of generations, along with the truly sick, the simply confused and those considered too dangerous for prison.
Zeigler Ward was a slightly surreal place. Most obvious was the neatness. Six beds along each wall, all immaculate. There was a table by each bed displaying a vase of flowers and nothing else. Plater couldn’t help wondering if the flowers were there just because they were filming. It certainly wasn’t for the benefit of the patients. It was a mixed ward but then that hardly mattered as all the patients were motionless, on their backs, precisely positioned in the middle of the bed. A small touch screen device instead of the old clipboard hung on the wall and recorded aspects of treatment. The chemicals and electronics required to sustain life were discreetly placed beneath the beds and in the side cupboard. After some discussion it had been decided to film around bed number four. The patient in this bed was a very attractive blonde woman. Before filming started patient number four’s long hair was brushed and arranged to frame her striking features against the white pillow.
Twenty minutes later it was all over. Some words from Dr Granger about the special problems dealing with patients in such states and then a leading question that allowed him to describe one of his pet theories. It was about potential use of drugs and new brain scanning techniques to identify patients with what the profession termed potential for cognition. In layman’s terms some patients in apparent vegetative states might in reality be aware but just unable to communicate. This is sometimes referred to as ‘locked in syndrome’ and Plater found that idea one of the most disturbing he had ever heard.
All but Plater then left the ward. He was done for the day and took his time detaching the camera from its stand and packing it away lovingly. He began to think about patient number four. She was perhaps in her late thirties, with smooth pale skin. Plater had thought how sad it was that all these people spent their lives unmoving and probably unthinking. Growing older with the seasons but never living their life. Kept alive by a chemical cocktail delivered through a tube.
He couldn’t help spending a few moments gazing down at patient number four. As he sighed at the unfairness and turned to grab the trolley he jerked his hand away as if it had been stung. Something had touched his fingers. He looked down at patient number four once more. She was still in the same restful pose. Of course she was. He must have imagined it, or caught his hand on something. He was being ridiculous. The slight breeze from the swing doors at the end of the ward had pushed a wisp of hair across patient number four’s cheek. Plater felt an urge to restore her perfection. As he reached for the errant hair, he stopped short. Patient number four had opened her eyes. Their vibrant blue held Plater’s gaze in a grip he would later recall as both pleasant and unnerving. Her eyes closed. Plater could feel his heart beating. He glanced around but the ward was as silent and bereft of conscious humanity as when he’d first entered. Looking back down patient number four was as serene as when he’d first seen her. Had he imagined it? No. He looked around again, wondering if he should tell someone. He imagined the conversation and thought better of it. The swing doors opened, and a young nurse came in.
“Oh I thought you were done in here.” she said.
“I’m just packing up.” said Plater.
The nurse began to collect the vases of flowers from beside the beds. When she saw Plater watching her, she said “These were for your benefit, time to put them back in the common room.”
“Yeah, they wouldn’t be appreciated in here.”
As the nurse headed for the swing doors with two vases Plater said “Excuse me, you’ll think I’m mad but, well, this patient, in bed numb
The nurse put the vases down and joined Plater in looking down at the patient.
“This is Gail.” she said. “Gail Hartston. She’s been here all the time I have, so that’s more than five years and I’ve never known her to move at all.”
“It’s just.” began Plater. “Well I thought I noticed her eyes open earlier.”
“Well Mr….”
“Plater, Mason Plater, but just Mason.”
“Mason.” said the nurse. “When I was first working nights here I thought I saw her open her eyes once, but Dr Granger assures me that her condition is a very deep coma and that precludes any muscular movement of any kind I’m afraid.”
CHAPTER TWO
ZACH HAMILTON WOULD rather have been raiding with his Guild in World of Warcraft than scanning the three monitors on his desk. He checked his phone for the time, he didn’t own a watch and calculated that he could be back to his flat by 2 a.m. which would give him 30 minutes to shower and zap a microwave meal from the freezer before his Guild attempted the raid. He needed to make it. This raid had been planned for almost a week and he needed some of the gear desperately. Unfortunately the logs he was processing were not the boringly similar type he’d been expecting. Damn it. There was something different here, something he needed to log and process. For a moment he was torn. He could abort the program processing the logs and claim some sort of problem in the morning. Trouble was these results were intriguing and Zach began to imagine what they might mean. His phone juddered on the desk.
“Still on? Tank or DPS?” read the text message. It was from one of his Guild members, who lived in Manchester, which was unusual as most of the other players that belonged to Zach’s Guild were in California or Germany.
Zach quickly stabbed in “meh. Work. PITA!!!” and hit send. The raid would still be there next week. Zach fired up his own workstation console on one of the monitors and searched for a program he’d written to display the log data in a unique way. He paused the log analysis, copied the raw data then restarted the analysis job. With his newly copied data he kicked off his program. A kaleidoscope of coloured arcs appeared in a window on the screen. Zach reached for his coffee as the program juggled the results from the log. After a minute or two the coloured arcs began to settle into a nearly regular pattern. Zach tapped a button to un-mute the speaker and a noise like a herd of cattle trampling over corrugated iron filled the silent laboratory. For some patterns Zach found it easier to watch the curves on the screen but for others the audio representation made it easier to spot what he was looking for. This time he had to admit that neither made any hidden pattern easy to detect. On the third screen Zach began to make notes.
Subject: Herman Zeitmann
ID: 17490
Carrier detected. Hopkins-Huang filters used, indicative of 95% activity. Target zones 12, 18 & 77. Recommend Rattinger Analysis. Full demodulation scan against database E19.
Zach cut and pasted three screen captures from the log scan and one from his own program before emailing his report. He called up Herman Zeitmann’s data and background file. The photograph showed a man in his mid-30s. The profile said he was a fireman who had been struck by a collapsing roof beam as he’d tried to get people from a burning restaurant in Hamburg. That was seven years ago, and he had been in a coma since that night. Zach’s program was still running but had started to create small coloured buttons along the bottom of the screen. He selected one and a new window opened. Each button represented the program’s best guess at what the underlying patterns in the log data really meant.
The raw data held brainwave patterns from coma patients, seventeen of them in all, assembled for study from across Europe and the Middle East. Zach’s program was based on some pretty wild research that Zach only had a passing knowledge of. A Russian neuroscientist had written for years that he believed that many coma patients were still highly active mentally. He postulated that the trauma that had induced the coma had also induced other changes to brain activity. He claimed to have measured the effects of these changes, by their apparent effect on other comatose patients’ measured brain activity. He even claimed to have recorded this effect having moved one of the patients four miles away from the other.
No reputable science journal would touch his work. No other neuroscientist had been known to try and reproduce his results. Even entertaining the notion that telepathy might actually be a reality was sure to kill any funding for research and probably black-ball a scientist permanently. Those restrictions evidently don’t apply to Government scientists, thought Zach. His phone buzzed. “Cracker ur lame wk sux” read the text. Like you’d know, thought Zach, the closest the sender had come to work was a paper round.
Mr Braberson will want to see this, thought Zach, but it needs tidying up. He grabbed another giant coffee and swore at Meek as there was no milk left. It was an unwritten rule that you didn’t grab the last of something, coffee, milk, Jolt cola, sugar or filters without getting more. Meek was nowhere to be seen, probably in his basement flat with a soldering iron in his hand. Not happy building and fixing machines all day at work he spent his spare time building wilder creations at home.
Three hours and two more pots of coffee later Zach arched over the back of his chair and stretched. He’d run the full Rattinger Analysis and the demodulation scan against the database. The results were even better than he’d expected. Even allowing for error the correlation was indisputable. Not only had Zeitmann’s brain reacted to other patients’ episodes of activity but had also been stimulated by the department’s ultra-secret Kan transmitter. Zach filed his results both to the database and via email to Edwin Braberson, the Director of the lab. As he left the lab Zach thought he might even get a small bonus after this. He needed to upgrade his Alienware at home, the frame lag on high resolution was annoying him and he still had his eye on a 47” flat screen monitor.
Braberson didn’t particularly enjoy reporting to the Home Secretary. It involved going through his Permanent Secretary, Michael Sangster, a character Braberson felt belonged to a bygone age. Sangster’s clipped tones and agonizing attention to protocol seemed to embody the very worst remnants of the Empire. It offended Braberson’s meritocratic attitude and somehow devalued his own struggle from the foot of the educational ladder to the same Oxford College that Sangster had gone to without a second thought. As he sat in the soft leather armchair, polished by generations of expensive tailoring, Braberson ran over again in his mind what he would tell the Home Secretary. The report Zach Hamilton had filed the night before was staggering. He had him double checking the scans and analysis today but he knew Hamilton was an excellent technician. The percentage match in activity was striking and many orders of magnitude beyond chance. This had to be what they were looking for, albeit in a rough and still mysterious form. Contact between humans on this level was previously the terrain of science fiction and fantasy.
“Mr Braberson, the Home Secretary will see you now.” Michael Sangster said.
Damn, thought Braberson, it seems they even teach you to move silently at Public School.
“This way, sir.” continued Sangster.
“Thank you. I know the way.”
The Home Secretary’s office is not an impressive room bedecked with oil paintings and sumptuous red leather furniture. No huge antique desk as one would find in the Foreign and Commonwealth Office, more Ikea than Chesterfield. Braberson thought the new building looked more like a multi-national’s head office than home to one of the three great offices of the British State. James Carver, the Home Secretary motioned Braberson to a modern corner seating area surrounded by pale wooden tables.
“Edwin, good to see you.” said Carver.
“And you Home Secretary.”
“Some tea please Michael.” began Carver. “Or would you prefer coffee?”
“Tea would be fine, thank you.”
“So, Edwin, you have some news I understand?”
“Last night one of my technicians analysed data from yesterday and found an almost perfect match. I have him checking the results now, but I wanted to let you know straight away.”
“Good, you were right to do so Edwin. Congratulations.”
