The mindspace felt like floating in the rolling Dead Sea amongst a party of close friends. People emoted amongst themselves and across the group at the speed of sensation and comprehension; it was all knowable and all for sharing. At times it felt like his ears were moving above and below the waterline, between clear sounds at the surface and muted distant distortions and new roaring frequencies below.
The whole assault team, Centre, Scott Rheinhold, Jackie Neill and Melissa Amacher were all present for the raid debrief. The intel, expectations and plan compared well to the actual situation and real-time events, which was generally to be expected given the level of care, prep and the team’s inherent advantages. Phillipe expressed how profound the feelings of dread, despair and other sources of Overwhelm had felt through various moments and how they drove a fear that he was unsure was his, someone else’s or an artefact, perhaps a reaction? There was no definite answer, which he found somewhat disappointing. The only way to further explore that question was through continuous skill development and exposure to more mindspace in various situations, which would help him to understand what lay within him and what came from elsewhere. For this reason, Anders would involve him in victim support at the Ranch until Phillipe returned to his final year of study in Bordeaux. This would give him repeated exposure to individual instances of the kinds of emotions he had experienced in the raid, but less concentrated. He would be able to experience the end-to-end Ranch set up, familiarise with the curriculum and consider what he might be able to teach there or in another program facility. His ability to retain his aortic wave and be fully synced with the OpFrame had been difficult at times but this, he was told, was normal under physical and emotional stress. Fitness, self-control, and practise were key. There were limits. High heart rates and physical stress would break the wave that flowed from the heart to the brain ventricles eventually, requiring deliberate reconnection and stabilisation.
Overall, they were satisfied with his performance for this stage. He was expressly instructed to contact Centre every day to specifically report his feelings about his actions and commands in the raid. Although Phillipe had not killed anyone, he had issued execution commands and this was totally unnatural. The consequences would take time to surface in him. The same went for the general emotional aftermath of the raid. He could also access support at the Ranch in the TK area. The NJ test and the handling of the traffickers afterwards might be upsetting in some way as well.
Phillipe watched an array of screens displaying camera feeds from the NJ room, which had been constructed inside the training sheds using wall and ceiling panels to give the impression of a room in a building in a totally different context and surroundings to keep the traffickers completely unaware of their location.
7 victims had chosen to enter the room to face the traffickers who were rendered harmless. The youngest, an 8 year old girl, took about 15 seconds until she lashed out at one of the men. 3 of the victims then left the room, while the other three - a 12 year old and a 14 year old boy, and a 24 year old woman - remained and mirrored the 8 year old’s outpouring of vengeance. Some of the room’s contents were employed as weapons - books, a chair and ornaments. Staff intervened before a fatality occurred, which likely would have. The four NJs worked as a team and turned their attention to two traffickers, beating them severely, then moved on to two more, then another two. When they had recovered from fatigue, they started up again on the latter pair who had already been dealt head wounds. It was then that the test was interrupted by the appearance of two support staff who had handled the victims since their arrival and four of the program’s operators wearing op gear and face masks, as they had in the raid. The NJs were calmed and removed.
“Shiiiiit. There’s a lot of hate in them. Is that ever going to go away? How do you put that back in the box?” Phillipe had found the NJ test as disturbing as he had anticipated. Watching children violently attack adults was alien. Even when he tried to factor what the victims had been through at the hands of the traffickers, he still recoiled. Empathy had limits somewhere at the edge of direct experience.
“That’s the question we’re trying to answer. It’s a matter of neuroplasticity and all that involves,” was Anders’ answer. “It’s not a quick process, and now we’ve seen something inside those four… let some of it out… for better or worse.”
“What’s next for the traffickers and abusers?”
“They’re getting dumped immediately, with the intel materials, and the authorities will be tipped off. Somewhere outside the city. Then we watch their chips and see where they end up.” Anders eyed him sidelong. “Nope, we won’t give any of them medical attention. In my own words, fuck ‘em.”
“How good was the intel from the interrogation?”
“Reasonable. We’ve got a few more details about sites in the city from the punters, and some names. From the traffickers, we extracted more network structure, upcoming dates for transfers or imports, and a few locations. I don’t think we’ll be acting any time soon. We have the victims to help and if we are going to integrate them with any rehab, we have to be careful about concentrating that here. The obvious mistake is for too many of them to appear in the nearby, very nice orphanage. If we can build trust and a working relationship with them, they’ll likely go to different centres to make sure they are safe and anonymous. Some will go back to family. We’re working on all of this right now. Stabilisation, investigation and reunification are the initial priorities. After that, we look at options for them in rehab programmes. The material we recovered is subjected to automated analysis that’s mainly focused on perpetrator and network identification. We don’t collect evidence and none of us want to be exposed to this stuff. That’s the police’s job. That’s why we’re dumping it with the traffickers.” He nodded and sighed. “Yep, it’s not great, but we have limited ability to act. I wouldn’t be surprised if most of these perps ended up back in circulation or dead in holding cells, and all the material disappears.”
“As soon as the tip-off goes in, there’ll be judges getting phone calls that make them sweat and result in a few extra-judicial decisions.”
“Exactly. Just like banks are money launderers who profit directly from it, so people in all layers of society are enabling and involved with and implicated in this shit. This is part of the way the world works, according to everything we’ve seen.”
“Won’t the tip off raise questions about who did the raid?”
“No, honestly, it’s a quick burner call telling the cops there’s a bunch of people bleeding on a road. Make the call from a really dense place, dump the phone, wander off. If they never get picked up and bleed to death, that’s that. If any of them get back into circulation, we watch them, We could mask it as a cartel thing. The police informants use codewords. If we slip them one in the tip off that will move attention into those networks. When they find out their informant didn’t make the tip off, that will create confusion and suspicion across them all. It’ll drive an internal mole hunt and all that stuff. CIs will probably take heat or get capped. It doesn’t matter. When you see how all this stuff works, it’s a cycle and it all re-establishes. These bastards we grabbed are low level players. Once we decided to recover victims like this, we were faced with a problem: execute all the perps or find another way. We went for the middle ground, but we can’t get burned by our own pity. If we hadn’t done the NJ test, we wouldn’t have held on to the scum. We’d have dumped them in a few hours after some interrogation.”
“I read a book, Slave Girl, about a woman who was abducted and forced into prostitution in Holland. The police were involved at one point and gangraped her instead of getting her out. The cops were tied into the controlling criminals. Corrupt. Imagine finding out that your supposed saviours were another face of your captors and users?”
“We need to be reliable for the fireflies we recovered. That’s how the raid adds value. Get some people out, make a difference to them and don’t get caught doing it. Along the way, we learn things and try to do some good. But the truth is, we executed some people. They just happened to be bad.”
It was late and quiet at the ranch when they returned. Anders led him down into the medical center for a quick look.
“This is enough facility for a much higher standard of general health care than most Mexicans ever get. If we need it, there’s a lot more capability here for critical care and surgery. But if an employee or student gets properly sick, that goes through the formal healthcare system. If someone had been injured in the raid, that would have been dealt with here. Anyway, this isn’t the interesting bit.”
They wandered from the medical rooms, past the quiet dojo, to a plain door that lead into a service area with heating and electrical units. Anders moved to a blank section of the concrete wall, between a boiler and some electrical solar subsystem. He pulled Phillipe close to him.
“Just gimme a sec…” Anders exhaled loudly, closed his eyes and laid his palm flat on the wall, at the height of a door handle. His face relaxed into an expression that was like a moronic sleep face, then rapidly moved his hand up a few inches. The metre square of floor below them sank down rapidly, causing Phillipe to momentarily panic, thinking that he was falling into the low light below. Anders’ laughed as he reached to stabilise him and within few seconds they had come to a standstill three meters below the floor of the service area in another concrete corridor.
“Step off.” Once they were both off, the lift went straight back up, driven by a foot-wide hydraulic column that started somewhere in the floor below them. “OK, so down here,” they walked quickly while Anders talked, “this is all program clandestine… restricted. There’s equipment - op gear and loads of those kind of toys.” He opened the first sliding door. “A garage with the op vehicles and others can put cars into two of the surface garages or lead out to a track, but we try not to use that to reduce the signs of the track.” Racks of armour and gear, weapons of remarkable flavours, the evac vehicles and various boxes and crates were held in a very large rectangular room, at least 10 meters wide and 50 meters long. Anders led them past an accommodation wing, “It’s not exciting, honestly. Communal bathrooms. Then…” Another door he opened led to a barely furnished room with some office areas and a gym and training space.
“I thought there’d be some serious toys in here.”
“Nah. We don’t need it, do we? It’s all in your mind. We don’t really want to use the public dojo because of all the lessons and students so we need some space.”
The last door in the corridor opened into another 10 meter square room with four donut-shaped machines of different sizes clad in plastic and a lot of boxes on pallets. “This kit is cutting edge. We’re not sure when we’ll get to see it operating, but it could become integral to medical care one day soon. It’s potentially regenerative.”
“Really? How did we get that?”
“Resurgenesis connections. If this does work, it’s probably going public soon-ish. When that happens, the world will change. It’s our job to steer that change just enough to keep a balance. Exactly how that is done is one of those dynamic problems, but it’s got a lot to do with money.”
“Cutting edge care is always expensive. If it can regenerate people that won’t be appearing in your local hospital any time soon, will it?”
“It’s been brought to market away from the typical financial drivers that would control access through price and profit. The whole point is to launch it at relatively fuck all for a treatment, which will cap any derivative or competitor pricing, if a competitor ever springs up. If treatment is offered direct and cheaply, you’ve just cut out all the leeches from the system. If you can’t get approval inside the US or wherever because you aren’t playing their corrupt gravy train game, you just set up in other countries. Go fix Africa or South America. Of course, this will lead to all manner of attacks, literal and figurative. James Rheinhold will probably have to get serious security and be very, very careful once this launches. The cyber defence of Resurgenesis is massive.”
“What’s it do?”
“A combination of technologies that can rebuild tissue, tied into genetics. It works in vivo, so rebuilds you from the inside. That’s as much as I can say really, mainly because I don’t know the details yet, but it’ll change the world.”
Med Beds