Sikosu watched the man carefully.
"Your name?"
"Jasu Trinad." the man replied tonelessly.
"Occupation?"
"I was duty manager at a manufacturing plant."
"Your crime?"
"I spread disinformation and lies about the Nebari administration. I attempted to subvert my fellow workers and sabotage the efficiency of the factory."
Sikosu knew that last part to be a fabrication. The man had worked at a factory which mainly produced cooking utensils. There wasn't really much to subvert, even if someone had wanted to. The charges were invented by the establishment as a justification to bring Jasu in for questioning. He repeated it however, as if he believed every word.
Sikosu glanced at the subject. He didn't look like much of a dissident. Jasu was a middle aged man who had been heavily built, but a quarter cycle in detention – she corrected herself, in behavioural therapy, had robbed him of bulk. His face was gaunt, his eyes sunken into their sockets. Loose, pallid skin hung in wrinkled folds.
"And why did you do this?" she said.
"I was confused, my mind was sick." Jasu said quickly. "I believed that the Nebari were not here to help us, that they had come to control us."
Sikosu sat back, watching the broken man closely. They were in a small, white walled cell. Jasu sat strapped into a large, solid chair, several instruments were connected to his wrists and his temples. He wore the shapeless white gown common to all the patients here. Sikosu sat on a small metal stool. Her black and grey uniform was pristine, her hair was short, oiled and smoothed back – Nebari regulations were almost as clear about their interrogators appearance as they were about their actions.
"What do you think about the Nebari now?"
"I know that I was in error," Jasu spoke in a tired, hollow voice, "The Nebari protect us and help us. I was selfish and proud, I am grateful to you for showing me the truth."
There was not a flicker of hesitation, not a sign of dissemination. Sikosu glanced at her instruments, they only confirmed what she knew. He believed.
Sikosu looked back up, her gaze sweeping across the glass window in the wall which reflected the interior of the cell. They were being watched, she knew. Interrogations were always watched.
"And your wife and child?" she said, "Were they duplicitous in your crime?"
"No." An emphatic response, confirmed by the instruments.
She studied Jasu clinically. "Then you believe there to be no reason for them to also undergo behavioural-therapy?"
"I -" there for just an instant and gone before the instruments could measure it, a minute tremble in his voice, "- believe it is possible that they may have been unconsciously contaminated by my lies. I believe they should be questioned, so that the establishment can help them too."
Sikosu nodded slightly, carefully keeping her face expressionless. She rose and crossed the room. She opened the door and left, without glancing back at the prisoner.
The corridor outside the cell was just as cold, clinical and soulless as the room she had left. Bleak white tiles, yellow white painted walls and a crumbling plaster ceiling. Naked light bulbs hung from the ceiling and along the walls were row upon row of heavy metal doors, every other one numbered like the one she had just left.
She leaned against the wall and waited. After a few moments the next door along clicked open. Varan stepped out of the observation room and conscientiously closed the door behind him. Varan was Sikosu's direct superiors, and one of his duties was to observe and evaluate her performance. He was a tall, grim faced Nebari who had a habit of looking slightly to the left of people when he was speaking to them. Sikosu knew him to be brilliant, ruthless, and unceasingly ambitious. He also thoroughly despised alien races and females. She knew that one mistake would see her sitting across from him in the other side of the interrogation chamber, under his questionable attention.
"Your verdict?" Varan said, apparently to Sikosu's left earlobe.
Sikosu considered. Her words would determine a man's fate. "The subject has accepted establishment policy without question as reality. He demonstrated genuine feelings of guilt and penitence for his former beliefs. He wholeheartedly wishes to serve the federation in whatever capacity we deem him fit for."
Varan watched her intently as she spoke, then his eyes inevitably scuttled away the instant he began to talk. "You would recommend that he is ready to progress to rehabilitation, then?"
"No." Sikosu disagreed, "He also displays residual family commitments which could come into conflict with his loyalty to the federation. I would suggest a further course of electro-therapy and an increase to his medication. His case should be reviewed in thirty days, and if the subject shows no sign of progress, I would recommend termination."
Varan watched her face too intently as she spoke. He never blinked, she noticed. Suddenly, she felt sure that he had once been through behavioural therapy.
His eyes shied away. "I concur, an excellent analysis. I would however suggest one slight amendment."
Sikosu tensed.
"Termination should be considered only as a last resort, when there is no other way to prevent the spread of undesirable thought patterns." he smiled a glassy smile that made Sikosu shudder, "After all, our goal here is to cure people, not to kill them."
"I understand."
"I commend you on your understanding of what we seek to achieve here." Varan smiled, his eyes tight with irritation at her success, "The tie to family it the greatest remaining obstacle in the way to unity for the federation. For us to be one, we must strip away these illusionary bonds. We must surrender not just our will, but also our love and our trust to the federation. For our people, there can be no loyalty except to the state. Only then can we be truly, finally free."
"Yes, sir."
Sikosu made her way along the barren corridor, her boots echoing on the tiles. She passed a grey smocked intern, who nodded to her in carefully modulated greeting. Sikosu forced herself to return it in kind.
She reached her room. All interrogators lived on the facility and rarely had cause to leave. She pushed the door open and entered.
Her room was almost as Spartan as the interrogation room had been. There was a steel framed bed, with a mattress but no sheets. There was a tiny chipped sink and a dull, tarnished mirror. There was a small chest of doors which contained a few changes of underwear and her spare uniform. There was a chair and desk, on which there were a few papers and a pen. And that was it, interrogators were not encouraged to lead soft lives, or to keep personal items. Personal meant having an identity of ones own, and that meant that you were no longer the perfect establishment agent. In fact, all there was only one thing at all unusual about this room, one thing that set it apart from hundreds of others, and that was the positioning of the chest of drawers. It was placed tight against the wall in the corner of the room, just out of the field of view of the surveillance camera.
Sikosu sat down at her desk and diligently wrote her report. As always the chair seemed to have been designed with a particularly curved shape that turned it into a specialised instrument of torture. It immediately began to send throbbing pains through her calves and up her spine. She persevered, and after a little while she was finished. She picked up the sheets of paper and walked over to the chest of drawers. She slid open the top drawer and then, stretching and standing on her toes, she extended her arm down behind the draw, feeling around with her fingers in the empty space behind the drawers. She pulled out a sheet of paper, which she slipped in with her report. She closed the drawer an stepped back into view of the camera, making sure not to glance in its direction.
Sikosu left her tidy little room and made her way through the facility until she reached the medical wing. She walked up to a counter, behind which stood an officious looking man. She handed him a piece of paper.
"Requisition order." she explained shortly.
The official scanned the list .
"I see," he said. "The third time this week, i note" The man looked as if he wanted to peer at her over the top of his glasses, and was slightly irritated that he didn't havea ny glasses. "What do they do with al of this?"
Sikosu regarded him with an arrogant expression on her face. "I do not question orders from my superiors. I suggest that you learn from my example."
The mans eyes turned fearful and he bustled away hastily, into the room behind him. After a little while he returned carrying a large white paper bag, which he slid across the counter.
Sikosu took the bag. "Thank you." she said.
She made her way through more of the identical corridors. On every wall there were coloured strips of paint that identified the section. A colour-blind person could easily loose themselves and vanish without a trace in the vast, maze like complex.
Finally, she arrived at another door. Like everything here, it was uniformly identical to hundreds of others than she had been past. She was the only one who knew how unique this door really was, or more precisely what lay behind it.
Something unique.
For once, Nebari bureaucracy had worked to her advantage. People here quickly learned not to think, not to question what appeared official, no matter how bizarre or nonsensical. After a brief foray into the computer banks, every department in the facility believed this room to be associated with an unnamed project led by another department. Happily each department only communicated on those occasions it was absolutely necessary, and only then to say the very minimum, so far Sikosu's own private laboratory had remained unnoticed. It wasn't quite a case of one hand not knowing what the other was doing, it was more a matter of the eyes not noticing what wsa under their nose. If any of them had realised, Sikosu would have been killed before she had noticed.
Sikosu looked around cautiously, then keyed in the code and slipped inside. There was a dark, dusty stairway which lead down to a second doorway. She keyed another code into this door and stepped through. She examined the room and it's solitary occupant.
"Scorpius."
He didn't reply. Sikosu hadn't really expected him to. Although physically he was healed now, Scorpius had remained locked inside his own mind for the last two cycles, ever since...
Ever since she had shot him in the head. Ever since she had condemned him to this prison. She felt guilt flare up at that thought. Not at the memory of shooing him though. Scorpius had betrayed her and he had done far worse than that. No matter what she had discovered since, she believed that she had been justified in her actions, that Scorpius had deserved to die that day.
But he had not died. Sikosu marvelled at the stubborn willpower that she had no doubt had kept him alive. She had taken him with her. She hadn't known why, all she had known was that she could not leave him and she could not bring herself to shoot him again, to finish what she had started.
She felt no guilt for what she had done then, it was what she had done later, what she continued to do.
Sikosu padded across the room to where Scorpius lay, surrounded by the machines that sustained his life. Sikosu opened the bag that she carried and took out a syringe.
Scorpius lay as still as a corpse, except that his heart beat to the pulse of a machine and his lungs emptied and filled with an artificial rhythm. Sikosu injected the syringe into a tube that ran into Scorpius' arm and pushed aside her guilt.
Scorpius lived, trapped inside his own mind, locked in a dysfunctional body. But Sikosu knew him as none other. That prison could not hold him forever, sooner or later he would have recovered or he would have died, but she kept him locked in a state between life and death, prevented him from escaping to either. And for that, she felt guilt.
Sikosu tapped a spot on the side of Scorpius' skull. His cooling rods came spinning out. Delicately, Sikosu reached between them and picked out a small metal object. She held it up to the light and examined it critically.
Scorpius was alive for a purpose, she reminded herself His suffering was in service of a greater purpose. Carefully, she replaced the chip and closed the side of Scorpius' head. She wondered if he would ever understand that, and if one day, he might be able to forgive her for what she was doing.