Bradburn plugged a cord into the side of his laptop, then reached over and turned on the television in his office. Everything he could see on his computer was also visible on the television screen for Agent Cooper to view.
“How do you want to do this?”
“One question at a time,” the Tyranny’s man said. “Play a question and answer from the first patient, then the same question and answer for the second patient, and so on.”
Bradburn clicked on all three interview files so he could alternate between them. Before starting the footage of the first interview, he looked to Cooper to make sure he should proceed.
The agent said, “One more thing.”
“Yes?”
“Before we start, do you think you know which patient is the Thinker?”
Bradburn frowned. “It never even crossed my mind.”
“I told you one of the three men is a danger to the Tyranny, a radical, and you weren’t concerned which one it might be?”
“I’m just so used to trying to treat my patients as they come in. I guess I accept their behavior for what it is.” When Cooper groaned in disbelief, Bradburn added, “Which one do you think it is?”
“Oh, I don’t think,” Cooper said. “I already know which one.”
The doctor was about to ask why they were going to waste time watching the three videos if the Tyranny already knew which man was the Thinker. Bradburn had already had to cancel three appointments that morning because of the supposed Thinker. The last thing he wanted was to miss a fourth and fifth. But he was also intrigued. As good as he thought he was at treating mental ailments, he hadn’t picked up on whatever the agent had figured out. If the Tyranny had ways to differentiate between a man pretending to be crazy and a man who really was, he wanted to see it for himself.
More importantly, though, was that this was what Agent Cooper wanted. That was all that really mattered. It was the old adage of being told to jump and responding, “How high?” If the Tyranny said they needed to know what everyone was saying and doing, you asked how you could help them monitor your calls and emails. If they said they needed to take your valuables during routine searches, you asked if they would also like to take your watch. Bradburn never complained with any of these things. After all, rules were rules.
On the television, an unshaven, dark-haired man appeared. This was Anthony Station, the first of the three patients. Following Agent Cooper’s direction, only Station was on camera, sitting at a table that showed him from the waist up. On the table was a small black box with wires protruding from it. The wires ran to a set of five pads that each patient had been told to slide onto their fingertips. The interview had been conducted in a small room without any photographs on the walls. Nothing but the table, two chairs, and the camera.
Doctor Bradburn’s voice could be heard off camera as he read the very first question: “Have you ever been to Burnley Park before?”
Station squinted in confusion. “Burnley Park?”
“Yes.”
“Burnley Park?”
“Yes.”
Station muttered, “Yeah, doc. I was abducted there one time. By aliens. Mean things. Vicious. They did experiments on me for ten years before they returned me.”
“This was at Burnley Park?”
“The abduction was. The experiments were in outer space.” Station said this last part as if Bradburn were a complete idiot for thinking the experiments might also have taken place at the park.
“Next,” Agent Cooper said.
Bradburn paused the interview, then brought up the footage of the next one.
Logan Ford appeared on the screen, behind the same chair Anthony Station had been sitting at. The man had no hair on top of his head and only faint eyebrows to show the hair he had once had was blond. Ford rubbed at his eyes as if a part of them itched that he couldn’t quite reach.
“Have you ever been to Burnley Park before?” Bradburn’s voice could be heard to ask.
Ford stopped rubbing his eyes just long enough to look up and make sure he had been asked a question.
“A million times,” the patient said. “More than that. An infinite number of times. I was there before Burnley Park was a park. I was there before these buildings and these people. And I’ll be here after all of it’s gone.”
“Next,” Agent Cooper said, rolling his eyes.
The screen changed to a middle-aged man with stubble on his head and also for a beard. This was Dewey Leonard, the man who had been found with his waste smeared all over himself.
From off camera: “Have you ever been to Burnley Park before?”
No part of Leonard’s body or face moved except for his eyes, which swiveled slowly from left to right before repeating the motion.
“I don’t know,” the third patient said.
“You don’t know?”
“No.”
Agent Cooper nodded. Bradburn clicked back to the first patient so the next question could be asked and the next three answers given.
“Do you believe in time travel?” the doctor said from off-camera.
“Do you, doc?” Anthony Station said, his eyes narrowing, his attention, previously all over the place, focused entirely on Bradburn.
It was a response Bradburn was familiar with. Paranoia, thinking everyone was out to get you.
“I don’t,” Bradburn said. “Do you?”
“Have they gotten to you,” Station said. “Did they already get to you?”
This line of questioning, accusing his interviewer, went on for three minutes before Station finally settled down.
When the screen changed and Logan Ford’s face reappeared, the patient didn’t bother to stop rubbing at his eyes when he heard the question and then answered it.
“Of course I do.”
“You do?”
“Of course. I just travelled from the past to the present. There! I just did it again. And again! I’m always travelling through time, doctor.”
The screen switched again. Dewey Leonard’s face reappeared. When he heard the question, his jaw twitched—the only movement he had offered since the session began other than the roaming back and forth of his eyes.
“I don’t know,” he said.
“You don’t know?”
“No, I don’t know.”
The next three questions were all fairly innocuous. Did the patient know where they were? Did they know what year it was? Did they know who the current Ruler was? Each man answered correctly, and Bradburn knew it was the Tyranny’s way of offering mundane questions before getting back to what they really cared about.
From behind the camera, Bradburn asked each patient, “Is the world a better place today than it was a hundred years ago?”
Station said the world would never be a better place until the aliens, who were posing as humans, were caught so they would stop conducting experiments on people. Ford said the question was illogical because time didn’t exist, then told Bradburn that surely a man who was trained in medicine also knew time was an illusion. Leonard, his eyes looking at the camera briefly, then at Bradburn, then at the door, said he didn’t know.
“If you could go back in time and change any event,” Bradburn said, moving onto the next question, “what would you change?”
Station ran his fingers through his dark hair. When his nails got to the scraggliness of his beard, he seemed to forget where he was, causing Bradburn to ask the question again.
“That’s a good question, doc,” the patient said. “I don’t know. My first response would be ‘Keep the aliens away’ but they’ve been here as long as I can think of. I guess I don’t know.”
Upon being asked the same question, Logan Ford finally stopped rubbing his eyes. Without his hands obstructing them, the camera picked up just how blue and shiny they were.
“I would murder whoever created the printing press,” he said.
“Really?”
“Yes.”
The third patient’s eyes darted down to the floor when he
was asked the question. Just as quickly, they rose to meet Bradburn, then looked to see if the questions on Bradburn’s paper were large enough to read himself.
“I don’t know.”
“You don’t know of any event you would change if you could go back in time?”
“No,” Leonard said.
Back to the first patient: “What do you think of the Tyranny?”
The first patient said the Rulers were all lizards pretending to be humans and were responsible for all the suffering on the planet. The second said he was his own Ruler and his own Tyranny. He didn’t recognize anyone else as having power over him. The third said he didn’t know.
There were three more questions, but none of them were important because Agent Cooper motioned for the videos to stop.
“Well?” Cooper said.
“Well, what?” Bradburn said.
“Now that you’ve had time to consider it, which one is the Thinker?”
“I really have no idea.”
“Come on now, doctor,” the Tyranny’s man said. “You surprise me. And not in a good way. How is the Tyranny supposed to have confidence in its institutions when our doctors can’t tell which of the three men is a Thinker?”
Bradburn opened his mouth to say something, then thought better of it. There was no right way to answer a question like this, not in the Tyranny’s eyes, and so he said nothing.
Outside, another AeroCam hovered past. A moment later, another. When the doctor looked back over at Agent Cooper, the Tyranny’s man was still expecting an answer.
“It’s easy for you. The truth detector tells you when someone is lying,” Bradburn said, referring to the pads each man had put over his fingertips.
Agent Cooper leaned back in the chair and laughed. “That doesn’t do anything. It’s just for show, just to get the people we’re questioning as nervous as possible.”
“It doesn’t work?” Bradburn said, his jaw hanging open slightly.
“Of course not. The Tyranny may listen to everything you say and watch everything you do but we aren’t mind readers!” He chuckled briefly. Then, when his amusement wore off, he added, “It certainly would help if we were, though.”
“And that helped you figure out which of the three men was the Thinker?”
“Not in this case,” the agent said. “I already knew which man was pretending. The answers only confirmed my suspicion.”
7
“I don’t understand,” Bradburn said.
The Tyranny’s agent shrugged. “You don’t need to understand.”
“Which patient is it?”