As much as Bradburn had wanted to get home at a normal hour, the moment Agent Cooper left, the doctor had immediately opened the folder and begun looking through the questions. He knew, after a long day of work, that he must be exhausted. But instead, as he scanned the things he was supposed to ask his three new patients, he felt jittery as if he had gulped a gallon of coffee. The agent’s visit had unsettled him, but the questions were what really made him twitch and fidget in his seat.
Do you believe in time travel?
Is the world a better place today than it was a hundred years ago?
If you could go back in time and change any event, what would you change?
There were twenty questions in total. Needless to say, they were not the types of things he normally asked his new patients. Frowning, Bradburn looked back at his doorway to make sure someone wasn’t waiting there to jump out and tell him this was all a prank. Instead, a blur caught his attention by the corner of his eye. Another AeroCam was flying past his window.
Agent Cooper. The threat of a Thinker in his own hospital. Questions about time travel. All of it must be a practical joke put together by his staff.
There was no one outside his office, though. No one snickering around the corner, ready to jump out and tell him he had been working too many long days recently. Except for the hum of the AeroCams outside, there was only silence.
Letting out a long sigh, he read through the questions again. As little sense as they made to him, they had been handed to him by an agent of the Tyranny. For that reason alone, they had to be legitimate. However, he had no idea how they were supposed to identify a Thinker from a normal person—a man pretending to be crazy from two other men who actually were. And anyway, it wasn’t as if one of the men would be dumb enough to say something that would identify himself as a Thinker. Not if he were willing to go to the trouble of having himself admitted to a mental institution.
Reading through the questions again made Bradburn think once more about the three new patients. They had all been processed within the last twenty-four hours. He hadn’t said anything meaningful to any of them yet, only niceties in passing. The real diagnoses—the formal therapy sessions—would begin later in the week.
Reaching over to a cart beside his desk, he found the patient folders for each of the three men who had been admitted the previous day.
One of them, Anthony Station, had been given over to the hospital at the request of his family. They knew he needed serious help, knew they couldn’t provide it, and so had done the only thing they could think of.
The second man, Logan Ford, had been sent to the hospital more than a dozen times in the past year. He complained of hearing voices no one else could hear. He said he could see people no one else could see.
The third patient, Dewey Leonard, was sent to the hospital after being found naked and covered in his own waste. One of the Tyranny’s Security Service officers had thought about arresting him for indecency but hadn’t wanted to get his patrol car dirty. Instead, he had called the hospital and requested they send an ambulance.
Three men. Each of them a newly arrived patient at his facility. One of them a suspected Thinker.
Trying to conceive of something in their files that might save him the time and embarrassment of asking ridiculous questions, he scanned their intake information. One of the men had been admitted in the morning, another in the afternoon, and yet another in the evening. All three had been delivered to the facility by a non-emergency medical unit (an ambulance without its lights or sirens on). None of this was out of the ordinary.
What did seem odd was that all three men had either been picked up at or within two blocks of Burnley Park. The city spanned nearly one hundred square miles. It had thousands of acres and just as many streets and side streets. The chances of three men all being picked up near the exact same area couldn’t be a coincidence.
Seeing this fact, seeing the list of the Tyranny’s questions, a curiosity came over him. Without knowing what he expected to find, he spun in his chair to face his computer. After typing the name of the park and clicking search, millions of results came back. Burnley Park was a popular place. He narrowed the results by sorting out anything that hadn’t been posted the same day the three men became his patients.
A new set of results appeared. One of the parking garages near Burnley Park was temporarily closed for renovations. There was an outdoor yoga session at lunch. A bake sale was being held to support a local church. Two men, both homeless, had been arrested by the Tyranny for annoying the Security Services. The first two pages of results were all talking about these same things.
Then, on the third page, he saw a preview that caught his eye. A blog, maintained by a local teenager, said that numerous people around Burnley Park had reported a bright light appearing above the trees just after noon, when most people had already eaten their lunch and gone back to their offices. Not only had a bright light been seen, a man had fallen out of it, into a tree. After climbing down, the man, who had been wearing plain brown pants and a matching shirt, had looked around briefly, then immediately darted into an alley and disappeared.
Bradburn frowned. He knew better than to believe the foolishness that was posted online. There hadn’t been a bright light. He certainly didn’t believe that a man had fallen out of it even if there had been some kind of firework or camera flash. Whoever maintained the site was either goofing around or needed to consider the services of a facility like the one Bradburn managed. But then again there were people who believed in Big Foot and the Loch Ness monster, so maybe a practical joke about a flash of light wasn’t so serious in the grand scheme of things.
He went back to the search results and found another blog that mentioned the same flash of light and the same man falling out of it, into a tree. This site was run by a librarian who worked across the street from Burnley Park. The exact same accounts were provided. Onlookers stated that the man, after climbing down from the tree, had run away and hadn’t been seen again.
A third website, this one on a site that mainly talked about UFOs and spacemen and other nonsense, also mentioned the bright light at the park. But seeing the rest of the subject matter on the site, Bradburn automatically discounted this source and went back to the other two.
“Huh?” the doctor said.
The two other pages that had mentioned the light and the man were gone from the results.
His finger clicked refresh. Then again. Then again. Now, even the third site, with lizard men and conspiracy theories, was gone. Biting the corner of his lip, Bradburn put in a new search, this one specifically for the flash of light and the falling man.
There were no results. Not a single one. Not even misinterpreted results. Not even a result for a man falling over drunk during a festival at Burnley Park. Not even something about fireworks being set off there during a holiday. Absolutely nothing.
Outside his window, an AeroCam hovered by.
Pain began throbbing behind Bradburn’s temples. He checked the history of his internet browser, then clicked on the line that would take him back to the kid’s blog. The site didn’t appear. Instead, a gateway error popped up on his screen, telling him that the webpage he was trying to access was unavailable. He tried the librarian’s page. The same error message appeared. The third page, belonging to the guy who went on and on about The Da Vinci Code, was also gone.
Do you believe in time travel?
Is the world a better place today than it was a hundred years ago?
If you could go back in time and change any event, what would you change?
Closing his eyes and leaning back in his chair, he knew all of this could only mean one thing: the tyranny had seen something it hadn’t liked. And now, because of that, all evidence of whatever had happened was gone. The only remaining proof, as the Tyranny would think of it, was one of his three new patients.
5
The Theta Patient Page 4