Doctor Who: Bad Therapy (30 page)

Julia was aware that she hadn’t yet alerted Moriah. If she was honest, she knew that she wanted to find out more about what was going on here for herself, before Moriah could exert his overbearing presence over the proceedings.

Thinking of Moriah reminded Julia Mannheim of where she had seen the aristocratic woman before. Julia turned to where ‘Tilda’ was standing. That was it, she was one of the early results of the Petruska Programme – the director’s own private research project.

‘Tilda’ had paused by one of the dormant Toys which stood like a starved and broken tree in the middle of the ward. She gently caressed the mannequin’s arm. Julia was shocked when it stirred under Tilda’s touch for a moment, before slipping back into stillness. ‘Tilda’ was quite unlike any of the therapeutic mannequins that had operated at the Institute.

‘I don’t understand,’ Julia began, trying to give voice to the many questions in her mind. ‘How can you exist like this?’ She gestured at the young West Indian man who was holding the child tightly in his arms. ‘Where is
your
171

patient? Who are you bonded with? Why do you have these personality traits and physical characteristics? Whose needs are you reflecting?’

The ‘Tilda’ Toy only returned her gaze, her face a mask, and wrapped her arms around the frozen Toy, its chest beginning to rise and fall in the embrace.

Slowly, it began to come alive. Julia was unsettled by ‘Tilda’ touching the dormant Toy. She couldn’t understand how one Toy could possibly activate another – surely that ought to be fundamentally impossible?

‘Please leave that equipment alone,’ she demanded, trying to fill her voice with authority.

For all her affectation, ‘Tilda’ looked genuinely shocked by the request.

‘Equipment?’ she said, a look of horror crossing her face as if she couldn’t quite bring herself to believe what Julia was saying. ‘Equipment!’ Now she sounded angry. ‘That’s really how you think of us, isn’t it?’ she said, beady eyes narrowing. ‘Don’t you understand? These are my people. You may have made us with your so called science,’ she said, spitting out the word, ‘but we are a race of free people.’

Julia had never heard a Toy talk like this before. ‘No. No you’re not. You can’t be. You’re an emotional mirror reflecting the needs of your patient. You don’t have a life of your own. You can’t. Wherever you go, whatever you do, you will be offering a therapeutic relationship to the patient with whom you are bonded. You’re a therapist, not a human being.’

‘Tilda’ laughed, humourlessly. ‘I could say the same about you.’

Julia shrugged off the insult. ‘Then explain how you could have become sentient?’

‘Tilda’ glared imperiously at her. ‘
I
don’t have to explain anything to you!
I
know who I am. Just because we live in relation to others does not mean that we aren’t real people.’

Julia didn’t like the way was arguing. It was too close to the ethical issues she had raised with Moriah during the planning stages of the work. Was the definition of a human being really the ability to live independently? Was the essence of being human the ability to survive in isolation? In the end, the research team had agreed that it had to be. Julia had always felt uncomfortable with the idea that what differentiated her from a Toy, what made her human, was her capacity to be alone.

The Toy called ‘Tilda’ was still talking. Julia felt embarrassed and angry that she was being made so hot under the collar by one of the therapeutic mannequins. She had a nagging suspicion that might be reacting to her own ambivalence and uncertainty with the work at the Institute. She cut across

‘Tilda’s’ words with all the authority she could muster. ‘Listen. Listen to me.

Moriah made you. I watched your body grow from a clump of cells. Not in a womb, not in a human being, but in a glass tank filled with a chemical so-172

lution. You were designed to offer empathy, positive regard and congruence: the core conditions of any therapeutic relationship. That’s all! That’s all you are!’

‘Tilda’ just stared at Julia, defiantly. Julia was aware, suddenly, that she had screamed the last sentence. She tried to compose herself. Perhaps she should call Moriah, after all? The ‘Tilda’ mannequin had hooked deeply into her emotions and personal issues and she was losing hold of her objectivity and detachment.

The Doctor coughed in the silence, walking out of the shadow of the wall.

‘Doctor Mannheim, I was just wondering to myself what you meant by the term “congruence”.’

‘What?’ Julia snapped. Feeling flustered, she turned to face him.

He tapped his chin with his umbrella handle. ‘I know what empathy and positive regard mean. What does it mean to be congruent?’

Julia sighed and began her lecture. ‘It’s been found that personal change is facilitated when the therapist allows themselves to be whoever he or she really is. To be without a front or façade. Therapeutic movement takes place when he or she is experiencing and communicating what he or she is genuinely feeling in relation to the patient.’

‘I see. Thank you,’ the Doctor said. He paused for a moment before raising his hand. ‘I’ve got another question.’

‘Yes.’

‘How can someone be genuine and not real at the same time?’

Julia went blank. ‘What do you mean?’

‘Just what I say. You say the Toys offer genuine emotional responses to their patients. How can they do that if they don’t have genuine emotions in the first place?’

Julia had opened her mouth ready to begin her rebuke before she realized that she didn’t know the answer to the Doctor’s question. ‘Because. . . because. . . ’ The explanation eluded her.

‘Could it be that the Toys have the capacity to feel?’

‘I can’t believe that, and even if it were true, it doesn’t change anything.

Without patients to bond with, the Toys just wither and die. They are nothing on their own. I’ve seen it happen a hundred times. Don’t get sentimental, Doctor. The Toys are not capable of an independent existence, or of independent thought.’

The Doctor glanced at ‘Tilda’, who had looked away, disgusted with what she was hearing.

‘I think therefore I am,’ the Doctor pondered. ‘Rather an outmoded concep-tion of existence and a rather lonely philosophy, don’t you think? Very male, very macho of course, very eurocentric.’

173

‘Euro – what?’ Julia asked, incredulous.

It was the Doctor’s turn to be impatient. ‘There are places on this world –

and on others for that matter – where people understand themselves only in relation to one another: as beings who are interlocked with one another. I am because we are. We are because I am. In parts of Africa, your individual with her firmly drawn self/other boundaries would be thought of as someone who was suffering from a sickness, out of touch with their
ubuntu
and their
botho
.

Your self-reliant, autonomous individual would be an object of pity, perhaps even contempt.’

‘Yes but that’s just Africa. . . ’ Julia started and then her voice trailed away as she realized what she was saying. Jesus. What the hell was she saying?

‘We mustn’t make ourselves alone,’ the Doctor said, and nodded to himself as if he were saying something which he knew to be very true. ‘We mustn’t try to cut ourselves off from the people around us. To isolate ourselves is such a childish thing to do.’ He paused for a moment and then added, ‘A good and wise woman taught me that.’

Julia put her hands up in front of her, wanting to bat away the Doctor’s words. She needed something to crack through his argument. ‘Remember Benjamin, Doctor? What about that poor boy? “Ned” encouraged him into danger. Encouraged him to climb on to the roof. If he hadn’t been there –’

‘Accidents happen, Julia. People die. And sometimes children do terrible things.’

‘And sometimes parents do too,’ the ‘Tilda’ mannequin added, icily. The thin woman gestured around the abandoned ward. ‘Look,
deah
. If you won’t help us, then let me take my people from this place before they are all murdered.’

Julia looked at ‘Tilda’. Really looked her. At the lines on her face and her intense dark eyes. For a long moment the two women stood in silence, and then Doctor Julia Mannheim, MD PhD came to a decision. ‘All right. Let’s get your people out of here,’ she said, and unbuttoned her white lab coat and let it fall to the floor.

Still standing amongst her army of sleeping lovers, Tilda arched an eyebrow.

‘All of them?’

‘All of them.’

The tension in the room dissolved. Julia felt an enormous weight lift from her shoulders. Having made her decision her mind filled the logistics of the task ahead. How were they going to get the remaining dormant Toys out of the building undetected? Her train of thought was interrupted by a new voice.

A gravelled whisper so low that it could have scraped the floor of the deepest ocean.

‘No.
I
think not,’ the new voice said. ‘
I
think that everyone will remain exactly where they are.’

174

Moriah’s huge frame blocked the doorway. He was accompanied by half a dozen blank-faced therapeutic mannequins, dressed in the uniforms of hospital orderlies. Julia was shocked to see that each of them carried a weapon, a kind of long, twin-headed spear.

Jesus Christ! Julia swore to herself, feeling a wave of anger rise up through her. What the hell had been going on here? What had Moriah been doing with the results of their work?

He glowered at Julia for a moment, before turning his attention to where Mikey stood holding Dennis in his arms. Moriah lifted his arm and pointed the gun in his hand at the boy.

175

Interlude

Home At Last

At exactly the moment Gilliam finally convinced herself that this journey was without end and that she was destined to fall through the metallic clouds of light for ever, the physical Universe began to tug at her body, pulling her through a multiplicity of dimensions for which she could find neither words nor concepts. She felt her body begin to slow or fall or slide, and glimpsed a tear forming in the fabric of one of the sheets of kaleidoscopic light that was rushing up to meet her.

With a little cry of alarm, she emerged into real time, sprawling on a hard, uneven surface, eyes watering and gasping for breath. The ground beneath her was cold and unyielding. Her hands and knees were stinging with pain.

She opened her eyes and discovered that she was lying on rough dark rock.

The wild, raging lights of the gateway had gone, replaced with a soft emerald glow emitted from a series of familiar green spheres around her.

She was in a huge dimly lit cavern, cathedral high and glistening with moisture. Was this where Moriah had fled all those years ago? A staircase had been cut into the rock, leading up into the shadowy roof of the cave. There must have been at least two hundred steps; there was no way she was going to be able to make the climb after her ordeal in the gateway.

Gilliam’s hands went to her waist. She was still wearing the null-gravity belt Ala’dan had given her. She adjusted the controls and felt gravity let go of its hold on her. Slowly, she drifted up into the shadows.

177

12

Hold On To Your Friends

Julia Mannheim wilted under Moriah’s gaze. She was ashamed with herself that she actually felt relieved when he turned away from her to point his gun at the boy. Why was she always so paralysed by his presence? It was as if his will filled the room, preventing her from taking any action against him at all.

The young coloured man, Mikey?, was yelling at Moriah, pleading with him not to fire. Even the Doctor looked indecisive, trying to edge forward, but fearful in case he provoked Moriah into using his weapon. ‘Oh my God,’

Julia whispered, as she realized that there was no one in a position to prevent Moriah from killing the boy. Ten minutes ago she would have conducted the operation to deactivate the Toy herself, and yet now the idea filled her with horror. A deep pit of despair opened somewhere inside her as she watched the blank-faced creatures Moriah had brought with him spread out through the room. They moved silently and gracefully, their spears poised, ready to be thrown. Natural hunters. What had she been engaged in all this time?

Moriah released the safety on the handgun.

Click.

‘Enough Moriah!’ Julia heard a woman’s voice order. ‘That is enough!’ A deep tremour of fear ran through her body when she realized that it was her own voice.
She
was shouting orders at the director.

Moriah’s gaze flickered in her direction for a moment, but he kept the gun trained on the boy in Mikey’s arms. ‘You really are a very sentimental woman, Doctor Mannheim. I suspected as much. You are no longer required here. You may leave. Do so now.’

It took a moment for Julia to realize that everyone in the room was waiting for her to respond. And she had absolutely no idea what to do. All she could feel were her legs trembling violently beneath her. She felt as if she might topple over at any moment.

‘No,’ she breathed, barely audible even to herself.

‘Pardon?’ The huge man asked, he actually sounded surprised at her disobedience.

‘I. . . I won’t,’ she said, more loudly and with greater certainty. ‘What you’re doing is wrong. What we’ve been doing is wrong.’

179

‘It’s a little late in the day to start getting qualms about research ethics.’

‘Better late than never,
deah
,’ Tilda commented, striding across the room and stepping in front of Moriah, blocking his line of fire.

For the first time since he had walked into the room Moriah looked as if he wasn’t quite in control. Julia noticed a slight tremour grip the mannequin nearest to her just as Moriah looked shaken. Somehow these warped versions of the therapeutic mannequins were connected to him, acting on his will.

‘Petruska,’ Moriah began, staring at Tilda, an expression of disbelief on his face. The gun wavered slightly in his hand. ‘How. . . ? No. For a moment I thought, but no,’ he said, recovering his composure. ‘I remember you now.