The Omega Point

DAVID FORD’S JOURNAL: ONE

I have never been so scared in my life, so confused in my life, so apprehensive in my life. I’d take mood regulators but they’re out of supply, and anyway, I can’t afford to lose whatever pitiful edge I may have.

The clinic is full of guns, and I have been issued a weapon. It’s a compact thing, a Beretta. Can I use it? I don’t know, I’ve never shot a gun in my life.

I tell myself that I don’t know enough to matter, that I’d never need to use the gun or the cyanide, but then I look into the well of my own mind, and I know that there is amnesia there, and suspect that a skilled interrogator could break it. Psychosomatic amnesia is nothing more than a refusal to access certain memories, which remain intact beneath the surface.

How, without Mrs. Denman, do I repair my broken classmates, not to mention find them in the first place? There isn’t any literature on the induction of psychosis—at least, in the public domain. Probably reams of it in the classified world.

I am keeping up as best I can with outside events, but communications are sporadic. For example, the Internet has been intermittent for days and so far cell phone coverage has not returned since this morning. Given that they’re so entangled with the Internet, landlines are unreliable. In the past, they survived all but the most extreme catastrophes. No more.

In a world going out of control, an organization like this is highly vulnerable. We are suffering every kind of shortage, including drugs. For example, we have no atypical antipsychotics left. No clozapine, no risperidone, no nothing. Because of the youth of most of our patients, the lack of Risperdal is particularly distressing. We have Xanax, but that’s hardly adequate.

Many of the patients I have met display very structured, relentlessly typical symptoms. They’re like actors who have been captured by their roles. I suppose that this is induced psychosis.

It’s not that they all exhibit the same symptoms or should receive the same diagnosis—but there is a strange by-the-book quality about them, as if they’d stepped right out of the Diagnostic and Statistical Manual.

As conditions deteriorate, what do I do with patients who I know to be imprisoned by artificially induced mental illness? What if the death of Mrs. Denman means that we will never get the information we need to draw people out of their psychoses?

It’s late, and auroras are appearing, even this far south. The sun must be literally blazing for this to happen. They are a bizarre emerald green and flickering like a broken lightbulb. Across the room, the shadows are deep, and I dread going through them to get to my bedroom.

And why should I? I don’t sleep, how can I?

My head is on the block. I await the stroke of the axe.