Sidney Freedman was sitting up in Frank's bunk, looking over the two comatose Swamp Rats and Sparky, who was dozing lightly in the spare bunk, having found some rope to tie his regnant's gratefully-recovered medical supplies to himself, fearful of misplacing them again.

Frank had never come back to the tent the previous night, so Sidney took the liberty of making himself feel at home. Now, as the day wore on towards noon, he was awake, and thoughtful.

He was thinking, specifically, about whether or not he had been completely duped.

Sure, he knew that the human race as a whole were being duped out of a kind of knowledge that they probably had the right to know, and Sidney felt all the normal shock to his system of any everyday mortal who finds himself on the receiving end of a massive Masq breach. For this particular mortal, however, so used to seeing all the shocks a human mind can suffer, the blow seemed to roll off of him like water off a duck's back. Sure, he realized that he'd been living in ignorant bliss of a lot of things up until this point, and, quite reasonably, he assumed that there were many still more surprises out there waiting for his paradigm to expand and encompass them, distasteful as they may be.

He was never too concerned about that. He always made it his practice to take with the least bit of stress whatever comes along. Better for the psyche that way. Only one thought plagued that clear, straightforward mind.

Guilt Actualization Syndrome. A recent addition to the psychology books, briefly mocked by most young students of the trade for its acronym, before they realize its breadth and severity.

His doctoral alma mater's psychology faculty had all collaborated on the newest cutting-edge research on the topic, and he, in the middle of it all, had become rather versed in the new field.

The syndrome seemed to strike mainly in young adults whose families complained of their wild behavior even before they began to speak of monsters. When their eyes became bloodshot from lack of sleep, from dark nights staying up locked in their rooms, and when their speech became peppered with unintelligible 'they's and 'them's, young people and old people alike from all over the country as well as a few from Europe were routed through the research clinic in New York where a young Sidney Freedman spent four years working on their files.

As its name implied, the most current theories of the syndrome's provenience were having to do with the embodiment of guilt in a licentious society and fear of punishment that does not seem forthcoming from any other source in a physical entity or group of entities which the subject believes are real.

Sidney himself had postulated that the rather common image of mysterious blood loss among these patients stemmed from a need to pay a personal penalty for their misdeeds. His work had been praised from the highest offices in the institution.

~