Thought Crimes (15 page)

Dana:
Some doctors said you should let the boys watch subtitled films at five times the normal speed, but Philip didn't need to, so long as the images were powerful, or poetic.

Ed:
The photographs he liked best had bridges and staircases in them.

Dana:
Any space designed to be moved through.

AM:
You worked at Axcel International as a doctor and administrator?

Michele:
That's correct. I was there for ten years and four months.

AM:
Starting after the main acceleration program had already commenced?

Michele:
Well, Axcel's always starting new programs. The official position, that there's been one program, is a lie.

AM:
Under what circumstances did you leave the organisation?

Michele:
I couldn't accept the secretiveness … So they sacked me, then tried to have me illegally detained.

AM:
In a mental institution?

Michele:
Yes.

AM:
Axcel say that using your testimony would damage the integrity of this film.

Michele:
What else could they say? It wouldn't be hard to find doctors who'll say that I'm mad. Not when there are billions of dollars at stake.

AM:
Do you suffer from a mental illness?

Michele:
So it's mad to want the truth told? Is that what you're getting at?

AM:
Can you ever remember meeting a medical administrator named Michele Wilkinson?

Ed:
No.

AM:
A doctor with that name?

Ed:
No.

AM:
Would it be possible for a doctor to have a long-term involvement with the acceleration program and for you not to have met them?

Dana:
Possible. But not likely.

AM:
None of the people we've spoken to – parents of boys in the acceleration program – remember dealing with a Dr Michele Wilkinson …

Michele:
They're parents supplied by Axcel, to serve their interests. If Axcel doesn't want people to speak, they don't speak. If Axcel needs to invent parents for the sake of clouding the picture, it does that. This company's defending a massive investment.

AM:
Some of these parents have been explicit in their criticism.

Michele:
Critical of the acceleration program.
The acceleration program is just one of many parallel research programs … Look at the pattern. Axcel leaks reports that they've been conducting hot-house experiments. The public is horrified. Then new rumours begin to circulate that the purpose of this research is military rather than scientific. More public outrage. Terrible stories of jittery boys living a shocking existence. Mental breakdowns, premature deaths, suicide and murder. A madhouse. Then rumours start up that the whole thing is about organ farming … Next, Axcel starts questioning the integrity of the informants. When none of the stories hold, the program's opponents are said to be extravagant fantasists. Everyone breathes again. But then another rumour emerges that Axcel has sold a technology to the US military that allows a moderate,
humane
acceleration … Something closer to a horse's life than a dog's … And even as the company starts leaking these stories, they begin new waves of controlled subversion … Two-thirds of what Axcel leaks to the public is absolutely true, but it's only a tiny portion of the total truth.

AM:
To your knowledge, were the acceleration programs inhumane?

Michele:
Never by design … But Axcel scientists will try anything. Open slather means side-effects and malformations. The suicide rate among parents and boys was huge. Even parents I would have called greedy and heartless struggled with what their boys went through.

AM:
So why would a decent doctor agree to become involved in something like that?

Michele:
Assisting the generation of military fodder?

AM:
Yes.

Michele:
None of the scientists who worked at Axcel were doing research for the military. Of course, we understood that you can't limit the applications of the knowledge you generate, but the acceleration project was peripheral to what most of us took to be the main game.

AM:
Being?

Michele:
Deep space exploration … NASA pays the big bucks, not the US military … Axcel's about developing a new kind of human being to travel into the furthest reaches of space.

The Dogs were just a blind. The Dogs enabled us to anticipate parallel issues that might arise from slo-mo development of humans in a zero-gravity environment … The real aim was to create
tortoises
. Low-energy human beings with slow heart-rates and slow metabolisms. We expect them to be able to live for 250 years in atmospherically modified environments.

AM:
Atmospherically modified?

Michele:
They're raised under gravitational control.

AM:
So they never leave the control chamber?

Michele:
No. The boys thrive in that environment, but they'd die the instant they left it … They're not aliens. They breathe oxygen. They eat food … Remember the albino cave goddesses in the old Saturday matinees? Take them out into the sunlight, and they're doomed. Tortoises are like that.

AM:
How old are these subjects now?

Michele:
The project's in its twenty-third year, so these kids would be four or five … We expect them to have artistic sensibilities, to have a very different sense of what's important and what's trivial. It might be another seventy years till they're ready to go into advanced mission training …

AM:
You're still sympathetic to this work?

Michele:
I am … I didn't leave because I disagreed with the objectives. I hated the secrecy. All the commercial confidences and tricks and subterfuges. Why couldn't we be proud of what we were doing? Things go wrong. They have to. That's the nature of high-risk enterprises … But it's time for the broader populace to face up to the things done on their behalf behind closed doors. These kids, they're time-capsules … Imagine what it would be like if we could speak to someone who knew Thomas Jefferson, someone who had direct, personal experience of life in 1790.

AM:
But the Tortoises won't have that. They won't have direct experience of anything but an artificial environment till they're shot into space … They're more like high-tech chimney sweeps than ambassadors for humanity.

Michele:
We had qualms. What sort of people would we be if we hadn't? … But if the public can be made to appreciate the shortcomings of artificial intelligence, and the absolute necessity to send real human beings into space, it can be educated to a level of acceptance about how crucial these programs are … Axcel's ruses are unnecessary.

AM:
How can we know that you and everything you've said today isn't disinformation generated by Axcel?

Michele:
You can't.

AM:
And while we doubt the other versions, we should believe yours?

Michele:
What I'm saying is the absolute truth so far as I know it. If it's not the truth, I've been deceived.

AM:
That's the thing. These clarifications keep taking us further into the labyrinth.

Michele:
You're right. People will choose what they want to believe … But let me tell you this, I've seen the resources Axcel and NASA have pumped into the deep space program … If all that's a blind for something else, then we should really worry.

AM:
Was your work with Axcel the reason you never had children?

Michele:
Children? Implying what? … You're sitting there trying to paint me as a lunatic, someone who could know nothing about empathy … Every time you pull on a coat, or a pair of shoes, the child in you … I mean … What are you getting at? Never had children. Is that some sort of trick question?

SWIMMING ACROSS THE RIP

What had he learnt? He'd learnt that no matter how patient you were, your patience would be tested to the limit. He'd also learnt that information doesn't always inform. Due to ‘an incident' down the line, the train would be delayed ‘at least two hours'. What ‘at least' meant in this context, no one could say. With the shade temperature pushing forty-two, he had little choice but to follow three fellow passengers into the pub across the road.

When you've had a generation to consider the ways things might go desperately wrong, time ceases to be unambiguous, or objective. At the top of his game, Jon demolished time, but now he felt certain to be crushed by two hours that would be two hours too many.

‘Reckon you could use a beer.'

The speaker was a bear-like man with an unkempt ginger beard, an alcoholic to judge from the huge gut stretching his blue singlet. Noel was just one of several hard-drinking truckies in blue singlets and baggy shorts, and there was no avoiding the Noels when they picked you out. You shared a beer, and nodded when you were expected to nod.

‘Where ya headed?'

‘Timboolya.'

‘Fuckin' long way … Give you a lift if you buy the next round.'

Jon bought the next round while trying to explain that he had a train ticket.

‘That fuckin' train … Even if it gets here, there's no guarantee you'll make Timboolya by Christmas. I'll be there breakfast tomorrow.'

Jon had come so far, and waited longer that it was reasonable to wait. What could good sense mean any more?

Ninety minutes of relative quiet were broken only by Noel's gear shifts before the rig hit the highway, at which time the big man fumbled through a shoebox to find a cassette that was most likely
The Best of Cat Stevens
.

Thanks to the hurt Noel's machine had done to that tape, Cat's voice was faster and several tones higher than the singer Jon knew, but the truckie still managed a passable harmony. Jon couldn't imagine a sound better suited to vistas that were flat and lifeless as any you'd find in this corner of the universe.