Golem

5 Suspicious Minds

After a short while, the paralyzing fear of being caught knowing the dark conspiracies that Yuri told her transformed into a state of giddy excitement that she had gotten away with obtaining secret information.  It was information that could seriously hurt Satanovsky and his entire chain of command.  When she thought more about it, her analytical scientific mind began to poke holes in her balloon of elation.  She was wasting so much time thinking about this whole thing it was distracting her from the final review of her presentation.

‘First, realize that all of this deep, dark mystery was told to you by a guy that was drugged, regularly has his memory erased, and suffered a traumatic brain injury that altered his brain so much that he is a danger to society.  Not really the best witness for the prosecution, as they would say in those American legal dramas,’ she thought to herself as she realized that maybe she didn’t really hear anything, or at least anything credible.  This realization both eased her lingering fear and killed her excitement.

As she sat at her computer going over Satanovsky’s redlines of her presentation draft, she couldn’t help rethinking about what she heard.  She knew why she was so easily distracted.  It was because she did not appreciate the redlines.  They were useless.  It wasn’t that she could not take peer review or thought her work was perfect, though, she did feel she had done a good job already.  It was the reason for the redlines.  First, there was the one where his name and title were made more prominent.  Then there were the added sentences alluding to his supposed participation in the research.  To help bury those, there were many that were pure fluff or random deletions; as if just to show her that although it was her presentation, it was still his Medical Conference.

She couldn’t stop thinking about what Yuri told her, and how it did not match what Satanovsky had told her.  Satanovsky’s story, as much as she disliked him personally, at least seemed to be supported by evidence.  Whereas, Yuri’s story seemed to contradict the evidence.  Satanovsky said that he was useful in hunting down ‘The Monster’.  Often she would find him in paramilitary attire with minor injuries that looked like he had been in some battle.  Satanovsky said that the memory deletion and emotional suppression would help him maintain his cool under fire and not succumb to the ravages of PTSD.

 ‘Yuri mentioned being questioned in a dream.  A dream that he could remember.  He even recognized me.  This tells me the memory blocking is not as complete as we had thought.’  She paused to consider this when it struck her ‘What else is not what we had assumed?’  For some reason she recalled that the emotional suppression also suppressed moral response as well.  Such that one would not feel guilty for doing something that they would otherwise feel was wrong.  She knew her subconscious was trying to tell her something, but what?

Then the phone rang sounding as jarring as an alarm bell, she could see on the screen that it was Satanovsky.  ‘I better get this.  The little tsar does not like to be kept waiting.’

“Yes?” she answered into the phone.

“Dear Kat, I assume the edits are about finished?”

“Yes, just finishing them now Dr. Satanovsky.”  She replied nervously not sure where she left off.

“Now Kat, you know you can call me Boris, when we are in private.” He went on taking on a softer, conspiratorial tone, which she imagined he thought was sexy, but she felt he sounded more like a child molester.  He continued “Anyway, the demands of running the Medical Conference require that I leave early today.  I will need your printed final version on my desk no later than an hour from now.”