Read Online The Theta Patient by Chris Dietzel - Free Book Online

1

     
    There was never enough time in the
day. Dr. Bradburn knew this better than anyone.
    Being in charge of the largest
mental hospital in the state, there was simply too much work for
one person to do. Each morning, he had the daily staff meetings.
These were supposed to be routine. No longer than thirty minutes.
But after discussing issues from the previous night, patients who
were having problems, and any missing staff members—assumed to have
done something the Tyranny didn’t agree with and likely never to be
seen or heard from again—they lasted at least an hour or two every
day.
    Just three days prior, his head
nurse hadn’t shown up for work. Calls to the man’s home went
unanswered. Most likely, he was in a secret prison or else dead in
a ditch, a single blast in the back of his head. Bradburn didn’t
agree with the harshness of the penalties brought down by the
Tyranny, but he went along with it for two reasons. The first was
that the Tyranny’s leaders were adamant that everything they did
was to keep the public safe. Each time they took someone away, it
turned out that individual had been some kind of a threat. The
second reason Bradburn accepted missing friends and coworkers was
because he knew that if you didn’t give the Tyranny a reason to
take issue with you, you could live your life in peace and quiet.
The people who were being tortured or were already dead, no matter
how nice they had seemed, were partially to blame for what happened
to them because if they hadn’t said or done something the Tyranny
didn’t like, they would have been left alone.
    Of course, none of this was
discussed during the daily staff meetings that took so long because
neither he nor anyone on his staff wanted to make it sound like
they were complaining about another disappearance—that could be
construed as disagreeing with the Tyranny.
    If the morning meetings and the
vanishing staff members were the only inconvenience each day, he
would have at least had a chance of getting his work done. But
there were also the rounds and all the peculiarities that came with
them. Many of his patients became unsettled when the Tyranny’s
AeroCams came hovering over the facility grounds. These were men
and women who needed to be sedated just to get through ordinary
days. When they saw little flying cameras inspecting what they were
doing, some patients began scratching at their arms or faces.
Others began to yell.
    The Tyranny’s cameras saw
everything, but they understood nothing. Each time the tiny remote
controlled robots captured one of his patients panicking at the
sight of an AeroCam, Bradburn’s hospital was promptly visited by
men in suits who, even after having it explained to them that the
patient was mentally ill, demanded to question the individual
themselves before accepting Bradburn’s story.
    As if the visits from the Tyranny
and the intrusion of their AeroCams wasn’t enough, Bradburn also
had to deal with the family members of each patient who wanted to
see their relative. Each person’s name had to be entered into two
databases. One for his facility’s records. Another maintained by
the Tyranny as part of their database to track everywhere people
went and everything they did.
    Nothing was simple. Everything
took much more time than he remembered it taking when he first
became a doctor.
    “ Dr. Bradburn,” his secretary
said, moving alongside him, matching his brisk pace down the
hallway.
    The bottom of her shoes clacked
against the linoleum floor, each clack echoing amongst the
otherwise empty and sterile hallway.
    He waved his hand toward her as if
deflecting her words. “No time right now, Cindy. Sorry.”
    Then there was the paperwork.
Paperwork for every imaginable and unimaginable aspect of running a
psychiatric hospital. His running joke—a joke he only told to his
wife out of respect for the establishment he ran—was that the load
of papers he had to sign each day was as crazy as some of the
people