BDP29
A/N: Cian is the Celtic god of medicine.
"Attached to the SS main offices was a research foundation known as the
Experiments Ahnenerbe. The scientists attached to this organization are
stated to have been mainly honorary members of the SS. During the war an
institute for military scientific research became attached to the Ahnenerbe
which conducted extensive experiments involving the use of living human
beings." [Trial of the Major War Criminals, vol. I, p. 269, Nuremberg,
1947.] Like most doctors, Burke has read about the human experimentation
that happened during the Holocaust.
Want to bet Kenny had his busy little fingers in that too? Come on. I'll
give you good odds. Really.
Ok, so he was. (But that's a story for another day)
I waited in my office for twenty minutes, rereading the files. I wanted to give Casca plenty of time to say his piece and leave. The less contact I had with him, the happier I was. He reminded me of the predators who lived on the fringes of Belfast's poor section.
Not to say he looked Irish, he was actually very Germanic, he even had the slightest accent. But the eyes, the way he held himself, were very much the same. You knew he had no limits, no moral constraints. I had disliked him at first meeting, purely on principal, but was coming to hate him with the intensity of sunlight burning through glass the longer I worked with him.
Thank Cian; I did not have to do that very often. Casca mostly concerned himself with the higher echelon, cracking the whip over the actual department heads. He never was very quiet about it either. The things I had overheard made me furious. He browbeat Dr. Pym until the poor man didn't even try to make an independent decision.
Tonight's meeting was a perfect example. Instead of taking them completely off the drugs and running a series of tests to see if the effects were permanent, they were going to lower the dosage, and gradually bring it back up. The theory being that they might be able to use the training videos to instill controls. They would, theoretically, be able to channel the increased aggression into more appropriate directions.
There wasn't a moment of consideration taken for what it would do to the volunteers. No one even raised the question of whether or not to tell the Dragons what we had done to them. We all knew better than to ask, and we knew that asking would only earn us verbal abuse and increased attention in the future.
Throughout the meeting Casca never even referred to them by name, only by subject number so-and-so. I found his attitude callous, even for a scientist. We must remain objective, but that does not mean we should completely disregard the Dragons' mental well-being. We were not experimenting on little white mice; we were experimenting on people. What we were doing could have irreversible consequences, such as seizures or permanent brain damage for them.
If I added twenty years to his age, and a swastika armband, Casca would fit right in with the last surviving members of the Ahnenerbe Foundation. I wondered what kind of monster owned Vorshlag Industries, to have such a man placed so highly in their company.
Deciding I had waited long enough, I straightened the little piles of paper on my desk. I had separated the reports by area to make it easier to cross-reference data. I used to lock my notes away to keep my ideas from being stolen, but not any more. Now I wrote everything in Gaelic. Not only did it force me to keep up my native language, but it was a great deal better than coming up with some secret code that I'd just forget anyway.
Nobody in their right mind studies Gaelic, it is on it's way to becoming a dead language. Even back home, everyone used English for everyday conversations. The street signs were English and Gaelic. Even most church services were in English or Latin. The Welsh were better at keeping their language alive, but I think they did it so they could chant really rude things at the English teams during rugby games and not get it bleeped on the BBC.
Of course, I did the same thing. Some of my 'notes' were actually scathing commentary on the intelligence and possible ancestry of my superiors and/or their ideas. I'd done a lot of that form of note-taking today. I chuckled a little at that and headed out the door to tell the Dragons what was really going on.
I was halfway out the door when Weis gently pushed me back into the office saying, "We have to talk."
There was a slight crease in his forehead, so I knew he was stressing. I sat on the edge of my desk and waited, knowing he'd take a little while to get to the point.
Weis paced in front of me for several minutes. I wasn't sure which particular bee had crawled up his bonnet, after the meeting I had a few myself, but he was in a real lather. Finally he stopped in front of me, his blue eyes cloudy from his inner turmoil. "Moira, I know what you're about to do and I am here to ask you not to."
Weis called me by my first name? He never did that. I was always Burke or Bunsen, just as he was always Weis or Honeydew and Matheson was Beaker. So I bit back my first response, which was sarcastic, and asked, "What is it, exactly, that you think I'm about to do?"
"You're about to throw away your career." Weis gave me a hard look. I think he could hear the sarcastic voice that lived inside my head whether I verbalized her comments or not.
"I am not throwing away my career. We have a responsibility, not just as scientists but also as human beings. Even if we cancelled the project right now, they've only got a twenty percent chance of returning to normal brain function. If we continue to give them the serum, even in miniscule amounts, they are courting a rather daunting host of side effects. Those eleven lives we're playing with deserve to know what has been done to them. They have every chance of becoming clinically insane, suffering strokes, even having aneurisms massive enough to kill." Forget sarcasm, he was going to get a nice big serving of Catholic guilt, just like my mother used to make.
"If you tell them everything, you are never going to be trusted with a project this sensitive again. It won't matter how good you are any more, the black mark in your file will never go away. Casca is just waiting for you to fuck up. He doesn't think women have any business coming out of the kitchen any more than Ellis does, and he's in a position to make his prejudice painful for you." Weis grabbed my shoulders and leaned in, his face close to mine for emphasis.
I slid my hands up between our bodies and shoved with my forearms, knocking his hands off, I couldn't believe what I was hearing. "Are you telling me to sit quietly by on this one, knowing what it could mean to them?"
"Yes I am. I don't want to see all that brilliance and hard work go to waste because you couldn't control your conscience. I mean really, what did you think was going to happen? It's not like you didn't know coming into this project that there would be human subjects. You need to develop some detachment, stop being so friendly with them. It's like petting the lab mice." Weis growled back, and began pacing again.
"I do not pet the mice." I crossed my arms and glared. I was trying very hard not to say things I'd regret, but his attitude was really pissing me off. Being female was not a handicap, no matter what the others believed.
"I knew you'd be like this. I knew it." Weis muttered to himself as he stalked from one end of the office to the other.
"Yeah, you should have. I, unfortunately, can't say the same. I never would have expected to hear this from you. It doesn't sound like you at all." I watched him go, wondering at his uncharacteristic behavior.
I stared at him, the light slowly dawning. He was scared for me. He'd heard something he wasn't telling me, something bad. "All right, spill it."
"I overheard Casca and Pym. Well, to be more accurate, I heard Casca telling Pym and Pym making little affirmative noises. He is sure you're going to tell the Dragons the truth, especially after your attitude today in the meeting. He wants you to tell them, to be in trouble so you'll agree to his terms in order to stay on the project and keep any disciplinary remarks off your file. He's had audio and video surveillance installed in all the areas that the Dragons have access to. As soon as you reveal classified information to them, you're busted." Weis stopped in front of me.
"Agree to what?" I narrowed my eyes suspiciously.
"I'm not sure exactly, but I know that Quinn looked at you and then Casca before pushing his pet project. I can't shake the feeling that it's all linked somehow. I also suspect that Casca knew what was going to happen. He didn't seem upset or surprised in the least." Weis was off again, making another circuit of the room.
"Yeah, he had way to many answers for someone walking into the meeting cold. Too bad I can't get hold of his notes. I bet they're fascinating." I flexed my fingers avariciously. I'd love to get my hands on those pages.
"Good luck. Even if you could get them, I bet he has them triple-encrypted, backwards, and upside down." Weis rolled his eyes.
"Then I have a chance. My big fear was that he had handwriting like yours." I grinned and tried to trip him as he went by again.
"You should have asked for clarification before adding the nitric acid." Weis dodged my foot and chuckled.
It was an old joke, much worn with time, but still a humorous memory. He was right, I should never have tried to work from his instructions without using a translator. I had blown up half a lab table and set the research back a month as the explosion contaminated most of our samples.
"Now that you have weaseled everything I know out of me, I want you to promise not to tell the Dragons what is going on." Weis stopped his pacing to give me a look designed to encourage me to agree with him.
Even after everything he had said, I still though the Dragons deserved to know the truth, so I hedged, "I'll be very careful."
"I'm not leaving this room until you promise me." Weis crossed his arms and waited.
I knew that look, and I knew that he could give stubborn lessons to a mule. "I won't tell them everything, all right?"
"Don't tell them anything, period." Weis countered.
"Look, I'm not going to lie to them." I sighed. This was going to take a while.
I waited in my office for twenty minutes, rereading the files. I wanted to give Casca plenty of time to say his piece and leave. The less contact I had with him, the happier I was. He reminded me of the predators who lived on the fringes of Belfast's poor section.
Not to say he looked Irish, he was actually very Germanic, he even had the slightest accent. But the eyes, the way he held himself, were very much the same. You knew he had no limits, no moral constraints. I had disliked him at first meeting, purely on principal, but was coming to hate him with the intensity of sunlight burning through glass the longer I worked with him.
Thank Cian; I did not have to do that very often. Casca mostly concerned himself with the higher echelon, cracking the whip over the actual department heads. He never was very quiet about it either. The things I had overheard made me furious. He browbeat Dr. Pym until the poor man didn't even try to make an independent decision.
Tonight's meeting was a perfect example. Instead of taking them completely off the drugs and running a series of tests to see if the effects were permanent, they were going to lower the dosage, and gradually bring it back up. The theory being that they might be able to use the training videos to instill controls. They would, theoretically, be able to channel the increased aggression into more appropriate directions.
There wasn't a moment of consideration taken for what it would do to the volunteers. No one even raised the question of whether or not to tell the Dragons what we had done to them. We all knew better than to ask, and we knew that asking would only earn us verbal abuse and increased attention in the future.
Throughout the meeting Casca never even referred to them by name, only by subject number so-and-so. I found his attitude callous, even for a scientist. We must remain objective, but that does not mean we should completely disregard the Dragons' mental well-being. We were not experimenting on little white mice; we were experimenting on people. What we were doing could have irreversible consequences, such as seizures or permanent brain damage for them.
If I added twenty years to his age, and a swastika armband, Casca would fit right in with the last surviving members of the Ahnenerbe Foundation. I wondered what kind of monster owned Vorshlag Industries, to have such a man placed so highly in their company.
Deciding I had waited long enough, I straightened the little piles of paper on my desk. I had separated the reports by area to make it easier to cross-reference data. I used to lock my notes away to keep my ideas from being stolen, but not any more. Now I wrote everything in Gaelic. Not only did it force me to keep up my native language, but it was a great deal better than coming up with some secret code that I'd just forget anyway.
Nobody in their right mind studies Gaelic, it is on it's way to becoming a dead language. Even back home, everyone used English for everyday conversations. The street signs were English and Gaelic. Even most church services were in English or Latin. The Welsh were better at keeping their language alive, but I think they did it so they could chant really rude things at the English teams during rugby games and not get it bleeped on the BBC.
Of course, I did the same thing. Some of my 'notes' were actually scathing commentary on the intelligence and possible ancestry of my superiors and/or their ideas. I'd done a lot of that form of note-taking today. I chuckled a little at that and headed out the door to tell the Dragons what was really going on.
I was halfway out the door when Weis gently pushed me back into the office saying, "We have to talk."
There was a slight crease in his forehead, so I knew he was stressing. I sat on the edge of my desk and waited, knowing he'd take a little while to get to the point.
Weis paced in front of me for several minutes. I wasn't sure which particular bee had crawled up his bonnet, after the meeting I had a few myself, but he was in a real lather. Finally he stopped in front of me, his blue eyes cloudy from his inner turmoil. "Moira, I know what you're about to do and I am here to ask you not to."
Weis called me by my first name? He never did that. I was always Burke or Bunsen, just as he was always Weis or Honeydew and Matheson was Beaker. So I bit back my first response, which was sarcastic, and asked, "What is it, exactly, that you think I'm about to do?"
"You're about to throw away your career." Weis gave me a hard look. I think he could hear the sarcastic voice that lived inside my head whether I verbalized her comments or not.
"I am not throwing away my career. We have a responsibility, not just as scientists but also as human beings. Even if we cancelled the project right now, they've only got a twenty percent chance of returning to normal brain function. If we continue to give them the serum, even in miniscule amounts, they are courting a rather daunting host of side effects. Those eleven lives we're playing with deserve to know what has been done to them. They have every chance of becoming clinically insane, suffering strokes, even having aneurisms massive enough to kill." Forget sarcasm, he was going to get a nice big serving of Catholic guilt, just like my mother used to make.
"If you tell them everything, you are never going to be trusted with a project this sensitive again. It won't matter how good you are any more, the black mark in your file will never go away. Casca is just waiting for you to fuck up. He doesn't think women have any business coming out of the kitchen any more than Ellis does, and he's in a position to make his prejudice painful for you." Weis grabbed my shoulders and leaned in, his face close to mine for emphasis.
I slid my hands up between our bodies and shoved with my forearms, knocking his hands off, I couldn't believe what I was hearing. "Are you telling me to sit quietly by on this one, knowing what it could mean to them?"
"Yes I am. I don't want to see all that brilliance and hard work go to waste because you couldn't control your conscience. I mean really, what did you think was going to happen? It's not like you didn't know coming into this project that there would be human subjects. You need to develop some detachment, stop being so friendly with them. It's like petting the lab mice." Weis growled back, and began pacing again.
"I do not pet the mice." I crossed my arms and glared. I was trying very hard not to say things I'd regret, but his attitude was really pissing me off. Being female was not a handicap, no matter what the others believed.
"I knew you'd be like this. I knew it." Weis muttered to himself as he stalked from one end of the office to the other.
"Yeah, you should have. I, unfortunately, can't say the same. I never would have expected to hear this from you. It doesn't sound like you at all." I watched him go, wondering at his uncharacteristic behavior.
I stared at him, the light slowly dawning. He was scared for me. He'd heard something he wasn't telling me, something bad. "All right, spill it."
"I overheard Casca and Pym. Well, to be more accurate, I heard Casca telling Pym and Pym making little affirmative noises. He is sure you're going to tell the Dragons the truth, especially after your attitude today in the meeting. He wants you to tell them, to be in trouble so you'll agree to his terms in order to stay on the project and keep any disciplinary remarks off your file. He's had audio and video surveillance installed in all the areas that the Dragons have access to. As soon as you reveal classified information to them, you're busted." Weis stopped in front of me.
"Agree to what?" I narrowed my eyes suspiciously.
"I'm not sure exactly, but I know that Quinn looked at you and then Casca before pushing his pet project. I can't shake the feeling that it's all linked somehow. I also suspect that Casca knew what was going to happen. He didn't seem upset or surprised in the least." Weis was off again, making another circuit of the room.
"Yeah, he had way to many answers for someone walking into the meeting cold. Too bad I can't get hold of his notes. I bet they're fascinating." I flexed my fingers avariciously. I'd love to get my hands on those pages.
"Good luck. Even if you could get them, I bet he has them triple-encrypted, backwards, and upside down." Weis rolled his eyes.
"Then I have a chance. My big fear was that he had handwriting like yours." I grinned and tried to trip him as he went by again.
"You should have asked for clarification before adding the nitric acid." Weis dodged my foot and chuckled.
It was an old joke, much worn with time, but still a humorous memory. He was right, I should never have tried to work from his instructions without using a translator. I had blown up half a lab table and set the research back a month as the explosion contaminated most of our samples.
"Now that you have weaseled everything I know out of me, I want you to promise not to tell the Dragons what is going on." Weis stopped his pacing to give me a look designed to encourage me to agree with him.
Even after everything he had said, I still though the Dragons deserved to know the truth, so I hedged, "I'll be very careful."
"I'm not leaving this room until you promise me." Weis crossed his arms and waited.
I knew that look, and I knew that he could give stubborn lessons to a mule. "I won't tell them everything, all right?"
"Don't tell them anything, period." Weis countered.
"Look, I'm not going to lie to them." I sighed. This was going to take a while.