Author's note: Thanks again for the kind reviews. Once again, this is a transcript of a session between Jump City's psychiatrist conducting evaluations of the Titans and Cyborg. It begins with some notes made by that psychiatrist. And per negotiations with Robin, no Titans names were to appear in the transcripts. the names are coded as follows: Robin=Subject #1, Cyborg=Subject #2, Beast Boy=Subject #3, Raven=Subject #4, Starfire=Subject #5, Kid Flash=Subject #6, Jinx=Subject #7, Speedy=Subject #8, Aqualad=Subject #9
26 May 2008
The next Titan to evaluate is Cyborg, the Titan whose wildly disputed actions became the basis for the City Council order requiring that I perform preliminary psychological evaluations of the team members. (Subject #2), as the name would imply, appears to be a young man of african american background whose body is part man and part machine. Exactly in what proportion is a matter only speculated upon in his Jump City Police Department (JCPD) file. He stands approximately six foot five and, if not part machine, would weigh approximately 270 pounds. The only parts of his natural body that are visible are his upper arms, half his scalp and his neck and face. The rest of him might be protected flesh or it might be machine. It's impossible to say, not that that stopped various police officers and JCPD personal from doing so. His file contained comments ranging from a claim that he's just a large athlete wearing protection, to a claim that only the skin that one can see when looking at him remains of his original body.
There was also a lot of speculation about his abilities. Along with great, perhaps machine aided strength, he seemed to have all sorts of weapons, particularly in his arms, ranging from a sonic cannon, to some kind of laser cannon to all manner of projectiles. Furthermore, he is said to be capable of every sort of electronic feat, from recording things, to wireless telephone and computer communication using the machine parts of his body. There was one report alleging that he had detached one hand in the course of one fight and sent it ahead to scout on a group of villains and send back video of their lair but this could not be corroborated.
The most salient issue from my perspective is how simply being what he is affects the psychology of (Subject #2). What sorts of thoughts go through the head of a young man who is not fully human? Does he feel a strong sense of alienation? Does it depress him? These were some of the issues I wanted to touch upon in my session with (Subject #2).
The waves were bigger than usual as I rode in the usual boat launch across the bay to Titans Tower. I almost felt a bit seasick. I was gratefull to reach the island and felt almost back to normal by the time I reached the top of the stone steps and pressed the buzzer at the entrance.
This time, (Subject #5) answered the door in, not surprisingly, an utterly cheerful mood. Oh, friend Silberman! She led me to the elevators and rode with me up to the 6th floor. She asked who I was seeing that day and I said (Subject #2). She turned what was, for her, very solemn and said that I should try to imagine how (Subject #2) must feel to have been unfairly accused of endangering someone and, as a result, to have made all his teammates sit through the session evaluations. Yes, she said it backward. I felt somewhat guilty about the whole thing despite not having done anything wrong myself.
She led me to the usual room and I had barely sat down when (Subject #2) walked in, a huge imposing presence clad mostly in metal and with a red left eye. He uttered a downbeat "Hi, Doc." He sat down in the chair opposite me, towering over me so that I spent the whole session with my head tilted slightly back to make eye contact.
DS: This session takes place at 2:06 PM on May twenty sixth 2008, Doctor David Silberman and . . .
#2: (Subject #2)
(He handed me a dollar bill that had been somewhere in the palm of one hand)
#2: Here ya go, Doc. (Subject #1) said I should give you that to put this on a different doctor patient footing.
DS: Yes, um, thank you.
#2: Well, here I am, the cause of all this, because I had the audacity to grunt and groan at holding up five tons of collapsing overhead walkway while saving a little girl's life.
DS: Please, I . . I don't want to get in a debate about the merit of this process. I've been required to perform these evaluations by Jump City. What can I say? (Sighs) Look, I'm-I'm usually not supposed to tell a patient anything said by another patient in that other patient's session. But you should know that all of your teammates made a point of telling me that they thought it was ridiculous that the City Council treated you this way.
#2: . . . Well, that's nice to hear, Doc. But I'm still here just like they were, so let's get started. I gotta admit that I asked some of my teammates what the heck these sessions were like.
DS: May I ask, what sort of answers did you get?
#2: Why should you get to know what they said about you when I'm not supposed to know what they said about me?
DS: Well, um . .
#2: Never mind. (Subject #5) told me that she beat you at word association, which IIIIII didn't even think was a contest. (Subject #7) said she kicked your ass and left you crying in the fetal position.
DS: She was a bit confrontational.
#2: (Subject #6) said it was . . okay. He said I could kind of use you as a sounding board.
DS: That's right. You can treat this as a therapy session rather than seeing it as just a confrontational sort of thing. I can do my work in a number of different ways.
#2: Okay, well, look, I know you don't want to have an argument about it but I just wanted to say that I was not threatening that little girl. I'd never do anything to hurt a little kid. I never have. And, frankly, that City Councillor seems like a racist, to me, to take some bizarre thing said about me by a four year old and run with it so that we all end up doing these sessions! It's crazy.
DS: There's nothing I can say in response to that.
#2: Is there anything in my file, you must've gone over my JCPD file to prepare for this, right?
DS: Yes.
#2: Is there anything in my file that says I ever . . ever hurt any innocent person?
DS: Nope. There isn't.
#2: That's a pretty powerful argument that I'm not a danger to myself or others, isn't it?
DS: It is. Very powerful. Let's just try and cover some ground, now, so that I can get a sense of who you are and how you think so that I can say whether or not there are any factors arguing otherwise. For starters, how . . how long have you been like . . that?
#2: (Sighs) Bet you didn't ask (Subject #6) that way.
DS: Sorry.
#2: It's been 5 years since the accident.
DS: What happened?
#2: Car accident. Kind of ironic, actually. We were going to the robotics exhibit at the convention center. My father was driving . . . Our old car. I don't know why we had that stupid old car still. Dad used to like to show that he wasn't all about new things, that he could take care of something so well that it would last way longer than you'd expect. So, that car still looked new. It was the kind when airbags first came out and they only had one for the driver. Thing must've been 13 . . 14 years old, easy. No air bag for Mama. No air bag for me. But air bags don't protect you against fire, anyway, do they?
(Long pause)
#2: Mama died right away. For a long time I was pretty sure she was the lucky one. For a long time I wasn't even quite sure I was alive. We were on the way to my dad showing off his advanced neural receptive circuitry to the world. His company, (Subject #2's family name) Biotechnology was already a rising star. This was gonna make dad the Bill Gates of biotech. That's what he said, 'I'm gonna be the black Bill Gates, the black Steve Jobs all rolled into one!'. Momma was so proud. All it was was some circuits that could tell you had sent some kind of message down your nerves. It couldn't do anything, really, about translating it. No, that was still to come. I pioneered that, but you know what they say about necessity being the mother of invention.
DS: Your father must've felt horrible.
#2: . . . I guess. I was only awake intermittently for the first few months after that, just little swatches of consciousness, in a big pool of black. The black was better. When I was awake it was too painful to bear and I couldn't figure out what had happened to me. I could barely distinguish my nightmares from being awake, nightmares about being turned into one of dad's robots. By the time I was much awake, I was mostly screaming about where were my hands, where were my feet, where was half my head. And every time I woke up it seemed like there was new metal attached to me. I'd sit up in the bed and see that I had hands now, but they were metal hands, robot hands. And Dad would tell me all excitedly about all the features of the circuits and all the features of the robotics, how strong my hands would be. He'd arrange for little demonstrations so that I'd crush a baseball in one hand and things like that. He was all enthusiastic trying to pump me up and get me to see that I'd be able to do cool things. But that wasn't all that was there. And I could tell. He . . . he was happy for the opportunity to test his theories. It wasn't everything in him. But that was part of it. There was something about the way he smiled when I did something with my new hands or walked with my new legs. There was a pride . . . but it was a pride in the circuits, not me.
DS: Are you sure you weren't feeling anger at him for causing the accident and seeing him that way because of it?
#2: The assistants saw it to. I saw the way they looked at him. They looked queasy watching him sometimes, how he was more interested in the metal than me. They saw it too. He was more interested in the science of it, the science of me, in the intellectual achievement of it, than in me, his son. The assistants looked at me like a total freak and they had more feeling for me than he did.
DS: I'm sorry.
#2: Hey, Doc, it's not like I wasn't used to being a freak. I had a bit of a warmup for it. Try being the intellectual black kid in school. Try that one. The white kids were always like, what are you doing in our honors class? And the black kids accuse you of not being black enough. Not black enough? Like being stupid is black. What kind of black pride is that?! Maybe seeing Obama'll change some of that shit. I hope so. I vowed to beat 'em all at whatever their game was. There was nobody who played sports as hard as me, Doc. Nobody. The other black kids who said I was acting white because I liked school, because I liked learning all the science behind my father's company? I loved beating them. I used to go out of my way to bury them on the football field. And when we'd get our grades back in class, at the expensive private school dad was sending me to, I used to rub it in the face of those white boys. You only got a 90? Read it and weep! 100, sucka! Booya!! Oh yeah. I was gonna follow in dad's footsteps and I was gonna carry the ball further down field. Much further down field. I used to go to expos with him, you know, those trade show kinda things when I was 12 years and I would find flaws in what other companies were doing and proposing. That'll never work, dad, because they'll never get past the energy conversion issue trying to replicate the hydrolysis of photosynthesis in that polymer media! I was gonna be the head of (Subject #2's family name) Biotechnology before I was 30. Maybe before that. But instead, I turned into son two point oh, our new experimental prototype.
DS: Your bitterness seems . . fresh.
#2: I don't vent it, Doc. I just don't. You can call it bottling it up inside or whatever you want. I don't care. Tell me to share and connect and whatever the hell you want, I don't care. It's not me and it wouldn't work for me.
DS: (Sighs) Well, this may surprise you but there have been studies done that showed that after a significant strategy, the people who fared best weren't the ones who dwelt upon it and very much explored their thoughts about it but the ones who ignored it, who sort of bottled it up and just went on.
#2: That doesn't surprise me because that's who I made it. Certain frames of mind are lethal to getting anywhere when you lose your arms below the biceps, your legs below mid thigh, parts of your insides and half your skull. Wallowing and recriminations are just death. Especially when nobody even knows if every new thing being attached to you is even gonna work. I went through 17 different hands, 12 different feet prototypes, different legs, arms, and a half dozen eyes. If I'd spent time feeling sorry for myself I'd still be back there in a bed in the lab trying on my third hand . . . Okay, now rotate your wrist counter clockwise. Hmm. Nothing. Try again. Again. Again. Again. No, Doc, if it seems fresh it's because I wrapped it all up nice and neat there in the bed in the lab and put it in the mental fridge.
DS: So, you were a high achiever before the accident but became a super high achiever afterward?
#2: With only losing half my body and a year spent as a science experiment in between.
DS: Do you ever experience rage at . . at your predicament?
#2: (Sighs) You know, Doc, I actually worried about that at first. And then I found out a funny thing. Helping other people took away any impulse to feel sorry for myself. You don't moan 'why me' while pulling people out of a burning building. It feels great to help people. It's . . it's got meaning, Doc. You can give everything to it. And, hell, look at the rest of the team. We got a skinny little dude who's green. We got an alien girl with golden skin and two sorceress girls with gray skin. And one of the other guys is more obsessive about his stuff than I am about the T-Car and my circuits. I'm normal here, Doc. And I mostly built this place, Doc. This was gonna be a (Subject #2's family name) Biotech testing center. Bein' out in the bay was nice for not dealing with nitwit protesters and such. I built this place above the third floor and I re-did everything from there down. I-I couldn't bear to be seen in public as the robot boy I'd become. But I could work practically 24-7 with enough extension cord and I could do the work of 20 normal guys. So, I went to work and I built this place. I used to see, from behind the tarps, the guys dropping off steel and they'd ask each other how the hell the place was going up because nobody they knew was ever getting any work on the project and they never saw any workers stopping off here, just a few guys in lab coats. They'd leave and I'd go and pick up beams and girders and weld 'em in place with a torch out the end of one thumb or bolt 'em in place with one finger. That was my therapy, my way of getting used to what I am now, Doc. I put up a building.
DS: It's . . it's very nice. The-the black marble floors, the stainless steel and navy in the halls, it's very nice.
#2: Thanks. (Subject #1) helped at the very end. I had almost finished when the team started.
DS: How did you know to make it in the shape of a 'T' if the team hadn't started?
#2: Oh, that was just luck. The company had a permit from the City for 14 stories and we only had so much base available. So, to get the most floor space, you cantilever out at upper levels. If we'd been the Avengers or Defenders or something we'd have been shit out of luck.
DS: Do you ever feel depression?
#2: Now how the hell would I not feel depression, Doc?
DS: I mean, does it ever affect what you do?
#2: (Softly) Sometimes. Not often. I try and keep busy if I feel myself sliding that way.
DS: It's nothing to be ashamed of. I don't know if that's any part of what you feel, but there shouldn't be any shame.
#2: . . . . . . . . . . . . . I know.
DS: Do . . do your friendships with the others help?
#2: Sure. I play games with Greenie and (Subject #1). (Subject #6) likes to come by and see what I'm doing. He's more curious than the others.
DS: Does they understand what sorts of things you're going through?
(Pause)
#2: No. Nobody really understands me, Doc. I play video games and I joke back and forth but there' isn't much beyond a certain point. I have all this stuff I have to deal with just to keep going. Physical maintenance of all the pistons and engines inside me. Computer maintenance. Batteries to charge. I mean, the others can do workouts or practice martial arts and stuff. I do that too, but the way I'm gonna get better is by making me the me that I'll be tomorrow, not working on today's me. I spend most of my time in my room or in the garage. (Subject #6) comes by sometimes. Like I say, little skinny ass is curious. I get that. And he's friendly. We're cool. But mostly the others just leave me alone. It's funny how I never said anything about it but everybody just knows. They just know. (Subject #6) joined the group and visited me kind of as a part of visiting everyone and he does it as part of keeping up those visits. Otherwise, when I went to my room no one else would ever follow.
DS: Do you want someone else to be there more often?
#2: I don't know, Doc. Some things I need to figure out some things for myself.
DS: Like what?
#2: Lately? Big things.
DS: Such as?
#2: Mortality. Immortality. Things like that. And I'm not gonna bat 'em back and forth with some orange haired speedster or green changleing, even if they are nice guys. They don't understand what it is to be me.
DS: What brought on those topics? You're not . . dying, I hope.
#2: (Chuckles) No. This is embarassing to admit but it was one of little greenie's comic books.
DS: You read comic books?
#2: Yeah. Actually I do, when he leaves 'em around and I don't see anyone watching me. I know, Doc. I know. Spiderman and the Fantastic Four and Iron Man aren't real. They're just comic books. They're not real life like the things the Titans deal with. But they can be . . instructive, sometimes. Greenie was always pushing the Iron Man ones on me, thinking they'd appeal to me. And I'd tell him, look Grass Stain, it's about a guy who wears a suit. I'm the guy annnnnd the suit! It's not the same. Then, they had this six issue special, Hypervelocity. The gist of it was that Iron Man makes a backup of his mind, of his consciousness in case his body dies or is about to. And he gets shot with a special bullet and it all kicks in. His . . his mind downloads into a copy of the suit.
DS: And you started thinking about that?
#2: Yeah. The-the situation is different for me than for anyone else, Doc. It's not a true false question, alive or not. It's multiple choice. People can't even deal with two options. To be or not to be. That is the question, right?
DS: Right.
#2: And what if there was, to be less human, to be not human in body at all, to be in a cloned body etc etc etc. That Hamlet dude was going off the deep end with two ovals to fill in with his pencil, A or B. What if there were a half dozen more?
DS: More permutations of being . . . . I have to say that we've left my normal practice behind.
#2: Well try and stay with me, Doc. Cuz there's not just what I want to do as part of these questions, there's what I should do, too.
DS: How do you mean that?
#2: Well, you know what the weakest part of me is, Doc?
DS: No. I'm not sure I-
#2: Me. My muscles. My arm and leg muscles. My butt. My guts, what're left of 'em. When I first became this, the power that could be packed into the size of my legs and my arms was pretty much the same as I could get out of my muscles. But that's not true anymore, Doc. With new advances in robotics, hell, in machines of all kinds, I could be stronger if my arms were all robot. And what happens thirty . . forty years down the line when I get old? Should I stay weak when I can be stronger, when I can do more?
DS: I don't know.
#2: And what about insurance, like that Iron Man story. What happens if someone shoots me with some kind of projectile that kills me? What if I can get around that? What if I can protect against that ending it all for me?
DS: Can you?
#2: I'm already only half human physically and my brain, the way I think is already half computer. Where's the line?
DS: What makes a human being human?
#2: Right. Am I human now but if my body's 75 percent machine I'm not? Where's the line?
DS: That's a fascinating question. Bioethics and psychology are just starting to realize the possibility of these questions. What do you think the answer is?
#2: I don't know but this is the kind of thing I think about. What if I could make myself stronger, more powerful, a better hero but it meant being less human? Should I?
DS: I'm not sure what the answer is but you haven't yet, have you?
#2: Why do you say I haven't? I replaced my spleen with a mechanical substitute last month. I've still got internal organs damaged from the accident but limping along. I'm gonna become more machine even if I don't want to.
DS: Oh.
#2: But, here's the big question, Doc. What if you had a choice of death or going on as a consciousness in a machine, Doc? What would you do?
DS: I-I don't know. I've never thought of any such question. What kind of life would this be as a-a machine? How would I feel anything? Could I be happy?
#2: You could feel everything you feel now. I've got more than 2000 sensations put to computer code right now.
DS: Huh?
#2: From breeze across bare skin to the tastes of different ice creams to the smell of different perfumes to the sound of certain birds to-
DS: How?
#2: (Points to the metal portion of his head) I've got messages going back and forth from brain to computer every minute of every day, doc. Gradually I learn how to decode some of 'em. If the same sensory message is sent each time I hear a robin chirp, then that's what that sound is in the brain. I write code that makes that same sound. I send it from my circuits and my computer to me brain. If it sounds the same, then, voila, I know how to make that sound be received in a brain.
DS: So you're . . you're starting down that road.
#2: I'm seeing if the road isn't a dead end. If it's not, then the question of whether or not to go on a road trip becomes a real one.
DS: Okay . . you can replicate the message of a sound, the real trick is to replicate the receiving mechanism that interprets that sound, right.
#2: Yeah, Doc. That's the bigger trick.
DS: And how would you create a personality? A disposition to be happy or sad?
#2: I don't exactly know. There's countless things to addrsess in trying to do it. Of course, there's the other direction, too.
DS: Huh?
#2: Cloning is going to become a reality very soon if it's not already. What if a person like me could make a clone and get off the machine treadmill completely, if he could transfer his mind to that body?
DS: I . . . . again, these are questions so far beyond anything I or probably any other psychiatric professional has considered
#2: It wouldn't be forever. It woudn't be immortality but . . . . . . I wonder . . . .
DS: Yes?
#2: Sometimes . . . . . . . . . sometimes I see (Subject #6) with (Subject #7) and I . . . . . . . . . . well, before they became Titans, we were all, kind of various degrees of miserable. Greenie wanted (Subject #4) but she didn't want him. (Subject #5) desperately wanted (Subject #1) but he only wanted to fight crime annnnnnnd there was me. But everybody was sort of miserable so you didn't feel quite so bad about it somehow. But the two of them . .
DS: Yes?
#2: Sometimes when the two of them are together. I can't explain it. I can't prove it, Doc but I know. I absolutely know. They wouldn't. They wouldn't choose it.
DS: Choose what?
#2: He . . . . . . . . . . he . . loves her. And she loves him. Sometimes just standing there in the great room waiting for (Subject #1) to give some sort of instruction, he'll wrap his arms around her from behind and kiss her neck . . . I mean, this is just a little thing, a little public display of affection. This isn't the two of them alone in their room. He'll kiss her on the neck and she'll turn her head and they'll kiss and when they finally separate, they both smile this, like, couldn't be happier smile and . . and I just know! They wouldn't give up their love if you said they could live forever without each other.
(Long pause)
DS: (Softly) There's a kind of immortality in love, in the perfection of the happiness.
#2: (inaudible)
DS: (Softly) So . . you wonder if that's what you should pursue rather than immortality?
#2: (Softly) yes
DS: Take as much time as you want.
(Pause)
DS: Have there been any . . girls in your life?
#2: Doc. Look at me.
DS: In the, uh, file, your police file, there was a rumor that you and Jinx had once been an item. No?
#2: When she thought I was someone else. I was disguised with a cloaking ring to infiltrate the academy. She didn't see me as part machine. It made me look like the me I would be without any machine parts. We had a brief little romance of sorts at the HIVE academy.
DS: Does (Subject #6) know about it?
#2: Yeah. He knows. It doesn't matter. She and him, that's for good.
DS: Well, I don't know about romantic possibilities but I know your friends think the world of you and . . and you'll never meet someone and fall in love if you stay in your room or in the garage tinkering with machines.
#2: . . . . . . . . yeah.
DS: You seem like a very impressive young man. Maybe you should give it more of a chance to show outside your room and the garage.
#2: (Nods)
DS: Why don't we stop there?
***************
Author's note: Only 1 more Titan to go, his boywondership, but there'll be one more chapter even after his evaluation session and the evaluation summary.