‘You found us,’ he said, putting a hand on my shoulder. ‘Well done you.’
Time plays tricks.
No, it isn’t time; it is the tyrant brain.
There was a clock on the wall of the flat and there were times when the minute hand refused to move. A temporal illusion, a dopamine funk…There are a lot of things said about time—that it is merciful, that it heals. The opposite is also true. The brain is your timekeeper, and it can be a vicious fucker.
Now it was playing a different trick. Tod was looking at me and smiling. He was asking me questions about myself like an old and dear friend. That slightly high-pitched voice. But something else was replaying, synced over his words. It was me. Asking the question I had asked in the kitchen that first morning, talking to the guy who could break eggs with one hand.
Why are you here? What was his crime? What happened in the courtroom—that is what I had been asking.
And his answer: Same as you, same for all of us.
But was it? Had he been part of this even then—not one of us? Standing in the office now, I was the boy in the kitchen needing someone to explain; I was the boy wanting to tear the room apart. In another stopped clock, I was still that boy, the moments linked in time to form a single unfolding event. Maybe that isn’t the trick; maybe that is truth and the trick is putting things behind us in the first place.
Now as the first moments of the reunion passed into something less tingly, more stupefied, my questions took shape. The first one:
Who are you?
Tod invited me to sit down at the centre computer. When he signed in, little green lighthouses appeared across the 3D globe. He reached over my shoulder and clicked on the single lighthouse in Australia, the middle of New South Wales. When the page came up it read: Archived. He clicked again.
‘There you go.’
The School, the pear trees in the courtyard. At the first sight of it I felt a pang of something lost.
‘The other sites were existing facilities,’ he said. ‘Detention centres mainly, a few reform schools. Ours’—he gave me a glance of pride—‘ours was built specially.’
Then he nodded. ‘Click anywhere on the screen. Go ahead.’ And up came the search function.
He said he was going to explain something to me now and I said that would be a good idea. At this point he told Jordan he didn’t need him anymore and the boy and his underpants headed into the adjoining office.
‘They called us monitors,’ Tod began, his voice fading, becoming a background noise as I moved through first response. On the other side of it, he was still talking.
‘…part of our diploma…trainee youth workers—like a prac placement. The job description was to support kids and report back. I was eighteen, still a kid myself, and it wasn’t much of a stretch. People can never tell how old fat people are.’
I had to think about that. And I had to slow it down in my head, process what he was saying.
‘The brief made sense to me,’ he continued. ‘Kids like you guys were more likely to accept help from one of their own kind. The other centres had cameras, too. The Doctor wouldn’t have them, though. He won on that, but us monitors—we were non-negotiable.’
As he went on he fell back into catch-up mode, embarking on career high points. The centre usually only ever kept the other monitors for a single ‘cycle of students’; he was the exception, he said. ‘It was because I got so close, you know…’ What that meant for Tod was that they kept him on after we left, put him through his diploma together with an on-the-ground training program plus five years’ field work in the Asia Pacific—a guaranteed minimum of six sites over four continents.
‘Subsidised backpacking,’ he said. ‘Who wouldn’t?’ It was the old Tod: clumsy, over-eager, unable to shut up. ‘I got into trekking—extreme stuff: long distance, high altitude…’
I didn’t want to hear about his treks or his travels. What was flashing in my mind: our meeting that first morning and the midnight sessions. All the times he lay there next to us, listening.
‘From then—from before I met you—until now,’ I said. ‘You’ve worked for them?’
He smiled, nodded. ‘They don’t have a lot of problems with staff retention.’
There was a note of bragging in it; I noticed he was wearing a very expensive watch. My chief thought—you lying piece of shit—I decided to hold on to. Not that it mattered now, but I found I was waiting for an explanation. Some clue to why he had thought it might be okay, the pretence, day after day.
This was the best I got: ‘You have to know one thing, Daniel: I just played myself.’ He leaned in like it was the part of the story that mattered the most. ‘I mean, I really liked you guys.’
I must have gone into a zone for a moment. I heard him saying my name. ‘…niel? This would be weird to hear.’
I looked around at the computers. Fluctuating images on the screens. ‘All this.’ I gestured broadly. ‘What is it?’
I got my guided tour.
First the baseline data—our vital statistics and juvenile justice records—then our treatment and progress. Tod moved aside to let me scroll through the student overviews, the grids and graphs. It was engrossing stuff; for a while I almost forgot he was there.
The final tab was labelled Life-course. When I clicked on it, a red box appeared: Disbanded. I recalled that from the study—the disbanding of the control group—and from the transcripts—the repurposing of the School into a research centre.
I turned to Tod and told him someone had sent me the annual report. ‘Was that you?’
He looked perplexed, then annoyed. Shook his head.
‘I know there’s more,’ I said.
Now he was shaking his head with a different look—the one that says: you have no idea.
There were eleven initial sites in the US. That grew to twenty-six worldwide—twenty-seven including us. The trial consisted of drug treatment for a number of mental disorders; it took place over a six-month period; the cohort were juveniles in detention facilities.
‘The end-goal, as far as I could tell, was to make good citizens.’
Crime prevention in a pill.
He was hazy on how the School came into being. ‘There was bad blood…In the end, the Doctor parted ways with head office and moved across the world. Got the School built, this office; established his program…’
‘The control group. That meant no drugs?’
‘Pretty much.’
‘But we weren’t in detention.’
‘Depends on what you mean by detention.’ He gave me that look again and shrugged. ‘All that talk about contracts: Take personal choice out of the equation and you end up with zero, that’s what he said. The guy was good, Daniel. Look at you. Look at all of you!’
He started the spiel: my career in science, how Fergus cornered a market and made his millions, the music mogul sister (just one; the partnership ended in tears—artistic differences).
‘And Rachel, I mean she’s like this special advisor on whatever it is…’
I rattled it off: Social Affairs and the Human Settlements Program.
‘Yeah, I keep seeing her on TV.’
He fell silent on the obvious omission, our absent friend. Then he turned back to the screen and clicked on a nameless icon. There were our names and another set of indicators. This was the life-course data.
‘But they disbanded it—didn’t they?’
He paused. ‘When we sought clarification we were told to continue monitoring you. They still wanted the data on the initial cohort; they just gave it a new title.’ He clicked on another icon, top right of the screen. ‘This is you.’
Here we were. Our biographical history data: all collected, so Tod explained, through adaptive multimethod fieldwork. It didn’t take me long to tally the numbers. Out of 97 students:
• 94 completed high school
• 72 completed tertiary-level education, 24 to doctoral level
• 64 in the top tax bracket
• 58 had children
• 24 were married
• 11 had been prescribed medication for mental-health-related conditions; 2 admitted to hospital
• 3 were deceased
• 1 took his own life.
Impressive. But safe to say it wasn’t the story they wanted to tell.
‘None of the cohorts who took part in the actual drug trials ever came close to you lot at the School. Pick another lighthouse,’ he said. ‘See for yourself: income levels, education…’
I clicked on the globe and started searching. When I began to understand the scale of it, I suddenly felt very small. The first twenty-six sites were just the beginning. Every five-year period saw the addition of new trials. And it wasn’t just detention centres. They were conducting the trial in youth shelters, hospitals, schools…
I interjected here—the schools and hospitals—‘All of it, what is it for?’
He looked at me for a second like I was a simpleton. ‘Drugs, of course. Drugs and data: what works, what doesn’t. What sells.’
‘There are governments overseeing this?’
He shrugged: not really. Private schools, private hospitals. ‘All of the sites, all privatised.’
Three hundred and seventy sites with around ten thousand currently in trials. ‘We’re going back thirty years now. The tally for life-course participants is about to hit a quarter million.’
He nodded towards the glass door. ‘Jordan in there,’ the boy was now sitting outside the door swiping at his phone, ‘his job is to conduct a meta-analysis of related clinical studies and link it all up. He is a very smart boy, you have no idea. “Brain the size of a small planet,” Dr J used to say that. Jordan was the boy wonder; they’d sit in there for hours…’
He was going off-track. I tried, but it had never been easy to stop Tod mid-stream. ‘I mean, he wasn’t like that with me; I guess I didn’t have the brains you guys did. He used to demand updates on you—the subjects you studied, the fellowships, every new position you held; any little thing you did was always a big deal in here. Rachel too. They were in contact—’
‘She saw this?’
He shook his head. ‘He brought her into the odd project, but she never came here. He didn’t want her interrupted, the work she was doing.’
‘And what about him? What was the Doctor’s role in all this?’
‘He ran his own ship. Or, I don’t know, maybe they were the ship and he was the iceberg…’ His voice trailed off. He looked a little glassy-eyed. ‘He got sick a few years ago and went back to the States. To see his son, he said. You know, I didn’t even know he had one, he never told me. He never told me any of it, what was happening with him and the company. It was a very toxic situation for a while. There were threats being thrown around; he got paranoid…’
I listened and I asked questions he couldn’t answer, because he didn’t know, because the Doctor didn’t tell him.
What I was realising was that from those few snippets of conversation in our sessions all those years ago, I knew more about the Doctor than this man who had worked with him for thirty years: a photograph on a shelf, a proud moment, a discovery and a prize. I was wrong, he had said.
And the transcripts. He had seen the results. I am still seeing them, and I warn you, we are yet to see them all.
Tod slid over into a seat at the next computer. Nodding in a last-laugh kind of way, he proudly pulled out a business card: Senior Data Strategist, Asia-Pacific Region.
‘There are seven data hubs,’ he said. It felt to me like he wanted to brag again but thought better of it. He held the silence for a minute then leaned in. ‘Can I show you something, Daniel?’
Tod tapped a drumroll on the desk and brought up a set of graphs and tables.
‘This is our latest.’
Our latest.
Some of the fields had been emptied, and some were identified by code instead of name. But the common characteristics of the participants were clear. Age: 10–11. Younger than the other trials. And all of the children with early signs of attention deficit.
I scrolled down into the details of the trial and the monitoring. The focus here was the malleability of the pre-pubescent brain. The abstract listed a variety of drugs and drug combinations—mood stabilisers, antipsychotics, anticonvulsants—as well as what appeared to be an algorithm for medication decisions. With all the acronyms on the main table, it was hard to make head or tail of it.
‘CANDI—what does that mean?’
‘Childhood and Adolescent New Drug Investigation,’ he replied. ‘These are pre-market…Before, they were limited to testing them on pigtail monkeys; this way they move straight into phase-three testing. The potential is massive.’ He was falling into hard-sell mode. ‘Within ten years we could be able to treat kids before the condition even develops. I mean, who doesn’t want that?’
Tiny beads of sweat had sprouted on his forehead and into his hairline. I could feel my own breath becoming rapid, irregular. While he kept talking about the limitations of testing on monkeys—the challenge of matching cognitive development with the human brain—I drew my focus back to the screen, to the end columns. The first was headed AEI.
‘Tod?’ I interrupted him to point it out.
‘Adverse Effect or Interaction.’
‘And this?’
The column, in green highlight, was headed: Fiscal Impact.
Even to me, sitting at the screen with my old School friend Tod spruiking the wonders of human drug testing on ten-year-old children, the words appeared incongruous. In each of the spaces under the heading there appeared a coded hyperlink. I clicked on one.
The new page showed a set of calculations: a predictor algorithm involving length of treatment, cost and projected earnings. The big prize seemed to be drug treatment over a lifetime. The determinant was the age of first prescription. There didn’t seem to be any ambiguity: the younger they started, the more chance you could drug them for life.
For a moment it felt as though I was staring at one of Alex’s whiteboards—a new patch of lines and dot points, themes and subsets—and like Alex I was applying my own logic, desperately trying to make sense of it. My starting point was that there is a place where big ideas go bad, and that the amount of damage is generally dependent on two factors: the level of brain dysregulation of the people in control; and market forces.
Sometimes you get a perfect storm.
At the bottom left of the screen sat a cluster of lighthouses with a camera icon at the centre. When I clicked on the icon, each of the three computer screens around us suddenly came to life with a moving montage of video images. Surveillance videos like the ones I had seen all those years ago across twenty-six sites. Now there were more: thousands, not hundreds of kids…More dark-skinned than white; more third-world than first. Children of all ages in different places across the globe. Hospital wards and dorm rooms, classrooms and schoolyards. Children running and sleeping and playing, reading, eating, laughing, crying. Children doing what children do and taking what pills they are told to take.
When the screensaver returned, the little green lighthouses stared back at me, making funny faces.
‘How can they run them all?’ I asked. ‘The cost…’
Tod smiled. ‘That isn’t the right question, Daniel. The question you want to ask is what are the earnings? I can tell you that: for the CANDI drugs that hit the market, somewhere around the GDP of a not-so-small country.’
The monster was emerging. A continuation of an earlier narrative, a single unfolding story: The boy grows into a man of action. He infiltrates the mind of the beast and blows its brains into a million bloody pieces…It is a process, a form of mental retaliation. I am not suggesting it is as good as the real thing, far from it, but at the moment you stand at the precipice of rage, about to freefall into vast valleys of destruction, it offers a subtle, critical release. He picks up the monitors, holds them Hulk-like above his head and, with blood vessels bursting, smash
es them through the glass wall and sends shards of shrapnel into every far-flung corner…
Or something to that effect. It can take a couple of drafts.
‘Daniel?’
I looked back at Tod and wondered what should happen to him in my story.
‘Tell me about the woman,’ I said. ‘The global manager. Why was she there?’
‘Madelaine. Hard work. That’s where Greg is, by the way. He’s her number two. Head office. Big role.’ He shook his head. Shook it again when I asked what her visit had been about.
‘There was some kind of blow up—you’ll enjoy this—it was about growth rates. Across the primary sites they were pretty much zero, but you guys went through this group growth spurt. For some reason that was very bad news to them. She checked the numbers a hundred times, accused Greg of buggering up the monitoring. I was idiot enough to chime in about the importance of diet and she blasted me out of the office. For the life of me I couldn’t work out why all the fuss about a few centimetres.’
‘I can explain that if you want me to.’
The voice came from behind. The boy wonder had come back in and was standing in the centre of the room, arms folded.
Tod swung around, put his hand up. ‘Thanks Jordan, I think I’ve got it.’
Jordan didn’t move. I watched the crimson rise into his cheeks.
‘I’d like to hear it,’ I said. ‘If that’s okay with you, Tod.’
Tod looked at me, then back at Jordan. I had the sense now they were on different sides. The boy sat down cross-legged on the floor and rested his chin on his clasped hands. Somehow in just a few seconds he had claimed the room—sunlight streaming through the window and illuminating his backdrop, the wall with the logo, the giant capsules with their shiny green leaves.
‘The reason Madelaine was there was that they couldn’t keep you guys in the study with the sort of progress reports that were coming through. She was there to find a way to take you out of the comparison—out of the equation. The death of your friend Alex gave them that. The methods were disregarded on the basis of unacceptable risk.’
The Subjects Page 25