Day 55: Cafeteria

[mustbethesuit]

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[quarter_english]

He thought of the nurses, who were conspicuous by their absence. If the information about them was correct, they transformed into vicious monsters at night--except for Lydia, who either wasn't one of them in some intrinsic way, or had found a method of halting the transformation. He remembered the night when her guttural responses to Landel's questions had made him think that she and Jill couldn't be the same person, and then his initial suspicions that the two were one seemed to have been confirmed. Had she been unable to keep herself from changing that night, or had he misinterpreted what he heard? (That possibility was one reason why he tried to combine cameras with microphones whenever possible: just one kind of surveillance, without the other, could create a situation in which it would be impossible to accurately discern what was happening.)

So the dismissal of the vast majority of the nurses meant--what? To begin with, there was at least some chance that they were being held somewhere on the premises. His guess, from seeing them work during the day, was that they had no awareness or memory of their nocturnal exploits. He thought of the prettiest of the nurses who had been assigned to him, and the odd rapport that had formed between them the day after his sleep study; her care and concern had been genuine, and he'd felt a reluctant gratitude. It all led him to the conclusion that the nurses were also victims, if not to the degree that the patients were. Mulling it over gave him the same sense of uneasiness and mild disgust that he'd felt about the Sphinx's apparent captivity.

What has Aguilar done to them?

The officer stepped forward, then, and spoke. Her words weren't logical: the patients were to be forced to clean in retribution for the riot, yet the people responsible for the riot itself, those who had behaved the worst, those who had "used their food as weapons," had to stand aside and watch. The explanation was therefore negligible; it was the resentment and division and social pressure that would follow that mattered. Those who had kept their noses clean knew who to blame for the forced labor, and those who hadn't might feel guilty. The latter wasn't a sure thing; some of them might be sociopathic enough to simply be amused that they'd managed to escape further punishment.

Meanwhile, a number of the patients would find this humiliating, more than almost anything else at the Institute had been up to this point. That could serve to chip away at their real identities, erasing them until the point where they would give anything to make it stop. Aguilar might be far more effective at coercive thought reform than Landel had ever been. However, his mind games, so far, were more open and obvious; perhaps easier to predict. What's Aguilar's definition of 'a good soldier'? That's the first question to ask on that score. This woman-she's an example, although given our ignorance of the purpose of what they're doing to us, it's hard to say for sure that that's what he wants any of us to become. It was a working theory, at best, but it was better than nothing.

L glanced around the room as he approached the pile of cleaning supplies. He was unsurprised to see Jones's young friend, one of the two who had been so enthusiastic about fighting the woman in the Sun Room Sunday night, standing aside. But the other, the one L had encountered on his own first night in the Institute, was working with everyone else, looking miserable. His good intentions hadn't been rewarded. Were anyone's, here?