CHAPTER 20

The following is an excerpt from Los Angeles Mother Ship Commander Diana's report to the Supreme Commander, John:

Regarding the local rebel leader captured twelve days ago, Prisoner LAC49C-07111993-JMP, Juliet Parrish:

The prisoner was taken to the prisoners' infirmary last night after suffering cardiac arrest during a session in the conversion chamber. She underwent treatment immediately after terminating the session because of the medical emergency. The incident occurred at 2109 hours local.

Immediate post-incident treatment consisted of cardiac defibrillation. The prisoner was taken to the infirmary for more comprehensive care as soon as heart activity was restored.

Parrish remains under close medical observation. The medical staff are certain that she will recover from the incident. Because of our quick intervention at the onset of the medical emergency, Parrish did not suffer any long-term physiological damage. Ideally, she requires corrective surgery to completely eliminate future incidences of this type of medical emergency. However, any type of significant invasive surgery would necessitate a minimum of eight days for recovery, even with our medical techniques.

This is obviously not desirable. I have therefore instructed the medical staff caring for Parrish to treat her using chemical therapy. There are certain drugs which will mitigate against critical cardiac arrhythmia, though there are presently no drugs which will completely eliminate the problem.

The medical staff advise extreme caution and recommend suspending the conversion process until she has recovered sufficiently from the cardiac emergency and her subsequent treatment.

I agree with the staff's recommendation. However, I will resume the conversion process at the earliest safe opportunity.

Meanwhile, the suspension of Parrish's conversion will allow me time to analyze her psychological profile in even more detail and assess the progress we've made n converting her. Moreover, I will also review everything we have learned about her so that we may use these discoveries to further develop and refine the strategy to convert her.

At this time, it is useful to review the progress of Parrish's conversion process.

As reported at the initiation of the conversion process it was discovered that Parrish has a minor congenital heart condition during the preliminary medical examination. Subsequent physiological scans and analysis determined that she is vulnerable to cardiac arrhythmia if subjected to extreme levels of physical and/or emotional stress. The condition is so minor that I believe it was never discovered by any of her various physicians; there is not a single mention of this congenital defect in the subject's medical records.

Additionally, my previous reports on the progress of Parrish's conversion have already noted the circumspect approach my team and I adopted. However, because of the strength of will and resilience she has demonstrated under conversion thus far, we were succeeding only in eroding Parrish's health each time we put her in the conversion chamber. Continual and increasing dosage of the serums used in the process not only risk permanent organ damage – specifically to her heart, liver, and kidneys – but they also present the very real possibility of doing irreversible physical damage to her brain.

Perhaps the following comparison might illustrate the situation more effectively: The conversion process is akin to creating a sculpture out of stone. Parrish, with her very strong will, is exactly like a hard stone. It should be obvious, even through mere intuition, that the harder the stone, the more difficult it is to work with. Complicating matters even more is the irony that the hardest of stones are also the most brittle. A single cut at the wrong angle or with an improper amount of force risks shattering the stone. Clearly one must take great care in finding the correct approach in sculpting such a hard stone.

The conversion process is exactly the same. The team performing the conversion must be mindful of the relationship between the subject's strength of will and her physical state. This relationship, in large part, dictates the approach the team must take in converting the subject.

As we've worked on converting Parrish, it has become clear my team's original cautious approach was clearly flawed. Any gains we made towards converting her were being offset by the deterioration of her physical health. To see things in terms of conversion being similar to sculpture, we were in danger of damaging, even destroying, the stone, instead of creating something from it.

I therefore made the decision to develop and adopt a more aggressive strategy to converting Parrish. This revised strategy can be described thus: In order to condition Parrish to distrust her rebel comrades and sever her loyalties to them, I decided to exploit a profound fundamental fear most, if not all, females of this culture possess :the fear of unwanted sexual objectification and exploitation by males.

It is also quite useful that Parrish experienced sexual abuse as a young child. The incident was so traumatic, she actually had repressed her memories of it. But there is absolutely no doubt that this is part of her history. Police and medical records confirm the incident, and Parrish herself revealed it – without her knowledge or consent – during interrogation under truth serum.

Moreover, it is also fortuitous, if inevitable, that the history of sexual abuse in her childhood also profoundly impacted Parrish in other ways. The prisoner's fear and loathing of a state of abandonment, isolation and loneliness were born from her that sexual abuse, so this is something I have begun to more fully explore and exploit.

It must be said that conversion subjects always respond more strongly to unaltered memories of traumatic experiences compared to purely synthetic stimuli. Parrish's responses during tonight's session is further evidence of this; we made greater gains towards converting her tonight compared to all her other previous sessions in the conversion chamber combined.

It is also fortunate that Parrish has seemingly always had a strong aversion for her leadership role over her group. She sees it as a burden she would rather not bear. While I've been exploiting this aversion from the earliest opportunity, combining this with her profound fear of sexual exploitation has proved to be extremely effective in creating doubt in and mistrust of her companions. It also has the significant impact of amplifying and reinforcing her feelings of loneliness and isolation. It is clear to me that all these elements are fundamental aspects of the prisoner's psychological identity.

There is no question that the timing of Parrish's critical medical emergency was most unfortunate. She had just registered her strongest ideal reaction to an unaltered presentation of her memories of her childhood trauma when she experienced the onset of cardiac arrest. Had she been in a less compromised physical condition at that time, I could have made even more progress towards converting her.

Without doubt, Parrish's fortitude allied to her congenital heart condition make the task of converting her a complicated and protracted operation, since the conversion process tends to make certain physiological weaknesses, particularly of this type, more acute. However, I have had numerous past successes in converting subjects with more profound physiological flaws than what Parrish has.

My confidence in converting her therefore remains absolute.