The Careys (![]() ![]() @ 2011-02-13 00:11:00 |
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Theories of Mind
“Another loss,” Gwen muttered, disgusted, as she marked through the label on another vial of damaged memories and transferred it to the disposal shelves. “Do we have a copy?”
Her partner – or assistant, or possibly even superior; the exact nature of their relationship had been ambiguous when Virgil assigned them to work together, and Julia had done nothing to clear it up – flipped through the pages of her full to bursting clipboard to find the correct list. “Two,” Ingrid said. “But the final’s too degraded to copy again, so I don’t think we should use them yet. The Colbert vials are structurally similar enough to substitute.”
“Good thinking,” Gwen said, then leaned back against the counter beneath the shelves, rubbing her fingers against her eyes and pressing the palms of her hands into her face. There were times when her work was exciting, when she could practically feel history sliding beneath her hands, but there were just as many times when it consisted of a great many hours of performing mind-numbing enchantments over the contents of an endless series of little glass bottles. “Great mothers of magic, I’m tired.”
“I saw the director last week,” Ingrid said, turning her clipboard back over to the first page. “She asked my opinion of our progress.”
Gwen’s teeth clenched in irritation at the delicacy of her tone, suggesting she knew about how well this subject was going to be received. “And what did you tell her?” she asked, folding her arms without changing her posture.
“I told her we had been having some difficulties, but that we were remaining optimistic because of our successes with preexisting skill enhancements,” Ingrid said. She leaned against the opposite counter and looked Gwen straight in the eyes – something especially significant, considering that Ingrid was officially affiliated with the Department of Mysteries, not the Obliviators. Of course, no one knew exactly what skills Unspeakables cultivated, and Ingrid must have had some proficiency with mental magic to have received this assignment, but she had always shown something like the usual respect for whatever it was others thought Gwen had been trained to do. “What I didn’t tell her is that I think we’re wasting our time.”
She hoped she didn’t flush, but she could feel the blood rising closer to her skin all over, and she had always been light complexioned. Her hands and her shoulders curled up as one, though the movements were largely disguised by her stance. “We are not wasting anyone’s time,” she said flatly. “Literally, on days when you requisition the time turners.” Days she hated, but which were necessary; they both had to fulfill their duties to their nominal departments and divisions, and sometimes, the only way to spend twelve hours differentiating components of a memory while still Obliviating some poor Muggles who wandered into something at the exact wrong time was to contribute to the general snarl of the time stream and give Ingrid’s day coworkers more to do.
“It's impossible,” Ingrid said flatly. “If there was a way to pour information and skills into someone’s head, teachers would have perfected it a long time ago.”
“No, they wouldn’t,” Gwen said. “That would put them out of their jobs.”
Ingrid ignored her. “You cannot plant purely false substantive memories in large quantities without causing insanity, and in most cases death. Even spread out over a period of time, it would put tremendous stress on the body, and every time causes further damage to the brain. Hartford proved that in 1927. And for the rest….”
“Here we go again,” Gwen, who had added about three years of false memories to her husband’s head and replaced half his real ones with mock-ups, said to no one in particular. Ingrid ignored her.
“People are what they are. Take away all memory, and a person will develop back into something not that different from what they were before. We knew that a century before we knew it drove approximately ninety-eight percent of test subjects over age thirty mad to be given memories of doing things their established personalities would never do. There’s ingrained memory, that accounts for part of it, but not for ghosts, or almost anything in Secrets of the Darkest Art or the reports London declassified in 2001.” Gwen’s expression shifted slightly in irritation as she thought about those documents. She had been trying to disprove the existence of the soul ever since she read them at the beginning of this project, but ghosts and the 2001 reports continued to foil her. “The soul is essential in defining who a person is, and you can’t modify a soul.”
“The experience of murder splits the soul, so clearly there's a correlation between its condition and what a person has done," Gwen argued back, distracted from thoughts of her potentially horrific afterlife by being secretly pleased with the drama and sarcasm of a few of Ingrid’s statements. The other woman had style, when she chose to use it. "Who's to say that the memory of murder wouldn't do the same? But souls can do all kinds of things to themselves. If they can do it, we can figure out how to replicate it. And even if that proves too difficult for standard use, we can produce paintings with a reasonable simulation of sentience already, and it’s not a great leap to assume – “
“Yes it is,” Ingrid snapped. “It is, Caroline. It’s a huge leap. You just don’t have the ability to recognize limits, which is why you’re here instead of doing something honest for a living.” She shook her head. “Is that why you want to do this? Just to see if you can?”
“It’s part of it,” Gwen admitted, then her expression hardened. “The other part is that I don’t want to go to prison.” She would actually die first, but that wasn’t a very cheerful thing to discuss with a coworker. “Julia Macaulay wants certain things, so I’m going to do everything I can to increase our success rate from fifteen percent and give her those things so I can get my record wiped in seven years and have my next contract involve more money.” Not that her current contract didn’t involve a generous supplement to her actual government salary as an Obliviator, but the more substantial her getaway accounts were, the happier she would be. And the house could use a few improvements…
“Please,” Ingrid said, a sneer in her voice. “Do you really think they’re going to make fair deals with any of us? Very few people come here if they have anywhere else to go. The only reason we get anything at all is because Achilles liked to pretend he was a civilized being. It’s too early to say for sure, but Athena seems to want to be more honest with us than he was.”
Ah. Their designations. She hadn’t been sure, once she realized what ‘Briseis’ meant, if she should laugh or torture Virgil a little before she killed him, though the practical facts of there being some, admittedly obscure, ways to detect whether Cruciatus had been used on a corpse shortly before its death and her other tricks being even easier to notice had led her to choose the former. She still hadn’t figured out how, exactly, he’d become Achilles in the first place, though, or why Julia was Athena, though both intrigued her.
Not the problem now, though. She had to find the solution before there was a problem…Did that make her proactive, or did it make her crazy? Gwen shook her head. It didn’t matter. She had to do it anyway, so it didn’t matter what it made her. So long as she and Connor were alive and didn’t have to start over again.
So she didn’t have to start over again, anyway. Connor couldn’t. He was already broken, so much that it took all she could do, sometimes, to keep him functional; if it came down to making him forget again…Ingrid wasn’t entirely wrong. He’d very nearly lost it when she took away Gwen, and added the sudden trauma of his family’s deaths, and there had been some probably permanent changes to his personality; often, she wished she’d had enough of an idea of what a car crash was at the time to have had him remember the Pierces dying that way instead. Having Gwen and Caroline both just beneath the surface, with some third persona introduced….
“As long as there’s a deal,” she said philosophically. “We should get back to work.”