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Chapter or Story
My Name Is Sydney - by MMB
Chapter 2: Decisions
[Six weeks later]
Sydney sighed tiredly as he slipped the CD into the player, and the opening strains of Beethoven's Pastoral Symphony poured into the room like audio honey. It was late, and he was exhausted from not having slept well lately. In a fit of self-flagellation, he had figured that if he was going to be awake and alert at this hour, he might as well be sleepless at the Centre as anywhere else. After all, his behavior of late had proven to him beyond a shadow of a doubt that he belonged there, along with all the other monsters and horrors and things that go bump in the night and frighten little children. One terrified and homesick five and a half year-old in particular now. He planted himself behind his desk and sank his head in his hands, feeling the soothing power of the music but being unable to allow it to work its magic on him.
He didn't deserve comfort, or soothing.
He knew himself to be a damned traitor for complacently administering those intelligence tests and first exercises in stretching mental acuity to that very lost and frightened little boy. He damned himself for allowing himself, however briefly, to feel a sense of personal accomplishment in having assisted the lad's first halting steps in becoming a truly gifted Pretender of Jarod's caliber or perhaps even better. He damned himself for once more becoming a part of the theft and exploitation of another human being, his reluctance and qualms notwithstanding. And he damned himself most of all for the skill at which he was able to hide his ethical dilemmas behind a thick and almost impenetrable façade of scientific objectivity, frosted with just enough genuine humanity as it would take to elicit desired responses from the boy.
Yes, that odious façade of objectivity, painted over with minimal humanity, had finally grown very old and very heavy - transformed by revelation and guilt into an albatross that hung from Sydney's neck wafting the stench of his own betrayal at him every way he turned. As trapped as he was in the current endeavor, if he knew what was good for him AND the boy, Sydney the man wanted nothing more than to snatch the child up into his arms and hold him close when he grieved for his lost parents. It seemed a far more compassionate response than Sydney the scientist had been giving, merely standing back and calmly chiding the child into setting the grief aside and continuing with the task at hand.
Little James was spectacularly bright and talented, in so many ways reminding Sydney of Jarod during those agonized first days of his internment as prized Pretender. He was a sweet and compliant child, eager to please those around him but equally anxious to find out where those he loved had gone - why they were no longer included in his world. And he was a particularly athletic child, accustomed to spending hours in the open space and sunlight being physically active. For the last two weeks, his most poignant plea to Sydney, most often at mid-afternoon, smack dab in the middle of the more complicated mental acuity exercises and practice sims, was to be allowed outside to play for a bit before coming back and finishing.
Miss Parker knew what was happening - and he knew HER sensitivities to this kind of barbarism were the reasons he hadn't seen or spoken to her since the day James' keeping had landed in his lap. Her assigned task had been to design security systems upgrades to the Sim Lab and associated living quarters, and while she had slowly complied with the parameters of her assignment, she had carefully erected a wall between herself and what was going on in that Lab. He saw the reports of work done on his Sim Lab only. He knew this was her only way of refusing to be a part of the obscenity that was now his job.
Sydney missed her company and her friendship - however fraught with the verbal barbed wire of her own defensiveness they might be - desperately, and felt keenly her rejection of who and what this assignment had made him become again.
He sighed again, ran his fingers through his thinning hair in frustration, and punched the button to turn on his computer terminal. Very quietly, during these nights of insomnia and guilt, he had begun searching news sites on the Web for reports of missing children. He knew he was running a risk of being caught without a good excuse for his surfing, but he had to do SOMETHING to ameliorate the evil he was a reluctant part of. Tonight he focused his search on the Western US - California in particular.
He had steadfastly refused to believe any of the information that had been given him about the boy's past history - he'd been lied to before, and had no reason to believe he wasn't being lied to again. There was no date or place of birth in James' file, only the date and place of his 'discovery': Dover - only two hours' drive from Blue Cove. Considering that his first move had been to scour every local rag in Delaware for any news of a missing child, he knew James - or Jamie, as he was starting to call the lad - had to come from somewhere more remote than that. The only place more remote than California was Hawaii...
Wait...
There it was! In the San Jose Mercury, dated seven weeks ago, almost to the day - a young boy, James Milburn, had gone with some friends to the local park in Gilroy to play after school but had never come home again. His friends mentioned seeing men in dark suits in the distance, but had seen nothing truly suspicious about them. Then James had just vanished while chasing a softball.
Sydney narrowed the search until he had what he required to confirm his suspicions: a photograph of the missing boy which was of a happier, more relaxed Jamie than the one who now sat forlornly in a locked cement cubicle one level below the Sim Lab. He printed the page with the news article and associated photo and logged off the Internet and then switched off his terminal, intensely angry.
They HAD stolen another one - just as Jarod had been stolen!
The Beethoven surged majestically in his ears, but he couldn't hear the music at all. He had raised his head to stare out into the dimly lit and currently abandoned Sim Lab, his mind populating the room quite effectively with a vision of a young Jarod and young Jamie. Both of them were staring back at him with accusation and condemnation in their eyes. Then a younger Angelo, an image Sydney knew only from the DSA's he'd viewed over the years of the search for Jarod, came in to stand next to them and join in the ghostly vigil of condemnation.
He knew what he had to do, if he intended to be able to live with himself one moment longer.
He pulled his cell phone from his pocket and pushed a few buttons. His eyes sought out the digital clock on his desk, and then he knew he would most likely be waking her. Now that Jarod had pretty much vanished from their lives, chances are she actually would have been asleep.
"What?!" He HAD awakened her, but her sharpness was more habit than anger.
"Parker, its Sydney."
"Syd?" Now the voice on the other end of the line was confused. "What time... Are you... Is everything OK?"
Now, with her confusion making her defenses drop a bit, Sydney could push open the gates to those “inner” lines of communication between them that he'd so willingly allowed her to lock shut weeks ago and flood her with his mental anguish and determination. "I know it's late, and I'm sorry to wake you, but I was wondering if you could join me for a cup of coffee?"
"Do you have any idea what time it is, Freud?" she groaned back at him in frustration, accepting the broadcast of anguish and sending back her worried concern in return.
"Please, Parker. It's important."
She groaned again, and the rustling in the background told him that she was slowly pulling herself out of bed. "Pick me up in half an hour - and you're going to owe me a helluva lot more than just a cup of coffee."
Sydney smiled for the first time that evening. "I'll be there." He disconnected the call and rose. He snatched the paper from the printer, folded it into his shirt breast pocket, grabbed up his customary beret, and made a beeline for the automatic door of the Sim Lab.
It didn't take him a half-hour to get to Miss Parker's house, so he sat quietly in the car waiting and trying to organize his thoughts until she came out her front door and slipped into the seat next to him. "Where are we going?" she asked him quietly, scanning his face and seeing a turbulent toss of emotions there.
"There's a small all-night diner about twenty minutes from here," he told her in an equally quiet voice. "It isn't someplace either of us frequents, and we'd be able to see if we're being followed or staked out." He steered the car onto Highway 36 and away from the ocean.
"Am I going to like what I'm going to hear, Sydney?" she asked finally, letting her concern and worry come to the front of her consciousness at last.
"Do you remember asking me what we were going to do when we first heard that the Pretender Project was being reactivated?" he asked instead of replying.
"Yeah..."
"Well, I think I have an idea - but I need your help."
She sat silently next to him for a long time, watching the night-time scenery flow past the windows of his comfortable car and listening to her “inner sense” connection between them for the first time in weeks now. She didn't need to tell him how much she had missed their conversations, not to mention their psychic connection - no matter how necessary it had been to her own peace of mind that they both cease. She could feel the resonance of that absence in the back of Sydney's mind, along with a calm sadness that was his understanding of her need to pull back and shut off the contact. And over it all sparkled his joy at having been able to breach the wall that she'd thrown up between them and get away with it.
Twenty minutes later, she was sitting across from him in a 1950's style diner booth, steaming mugs of coffee on the table between them, the print-out of the San Jose Mercury article with Jamie's picture on it in her hand. She was staring at him in surprise and consternation at what she'd just heard him spell out to her.
"You're kidding?!"
He lifted his coffee mug and took a long sip, never taking his eyes from her face. "You have a better idea?"
"That is sheer suicide, Sydney! What..."
"I think," he contemplated and spoke slowly, "that would be a far better way for me to go than just continuing on as I have, waiting for... whatever - participating... Tell me the truth, Parker - if you were me..." He left the rest unsaid.
Her grey eyes studied him in urgent consternation. "I don't want to lose you," she admitted finally in a slightly shaky voice.
He reached across the table and put one hand on hers. "These past few weeks have been as if neither of us was alive for the other - and we chose to let things stand that way. The only difference between that situation and death is a matter of permanency." He patted her hand. "I don't want to lose you either, Parker - but I can't live this way anymore. Not again. I HAVE to do this."
Miss Parker looked down into her coffee, knowing his absolute sincerity and dedication to the path he'd set out for himself. What he intended was downright dangerous - fatally so, should he be found out ahead of time. She was frightened for him, but knew there would be no way to dissuade him. Her choices of response were limited to two.
Finally she sighed and shook her head in resignation. "OK. What is it you want me to do?"
Chapter 2: Decisions
[Six weeks later]
Sydney sighed tiredly as he slipped the CD into the player, and the opening strains of Beethoven's Pastoral Symphony poured into the room like audio honey. It was late, and he was exhausted from not having slept well lately. In a fit of self-flagellation, he had figured that if he was going to be awake and alert at this hour, he might as well be sleepless at the Centre as anywhere else. After all, his behavior of late had proven to him beyond a shadow of a doubt that he belonged there, along with all the other monsters and horrors and things that go bump in the night and frighten little children. One terrified and homesick five and a half year-old in particular now. He planted himself behind his desk and sank his head in his hands, feeling the soothing power of the music but being unable to allow it to work its magic on him.
He didn't deserve comfort, or soothing.
He knew himself to be a damned traitor for complacently administering those intelligence tests and first exercises in stretching mental acuity to that very lost and frightened little boy. He damned himself for allowing himself, however briefly, to feel a sense of personal accomplishment in having assisted the lad's first halting steps in becoming a truly gifted Pretender of Jarod's caliber or perhaps even better. He damned himself for once more becoming a part of the theft and exploitation of another human being, his reluctance and qualms notwithstanding. And he damned himself most of all for the skill at which he was able to hide his ethical dilemmas behind a thick and almost impenetrable façade of scientific objectivity, frosted with just enough genuine humanity as it would take to elicit desired responses from the boy.
Yes, that odious façade of objectivity, painted over with minimal humanity, had finally grown very old and very heavy - transformed by revelation and guilt into an albatross that hung from Sydney's neck wafting the stench of his own betrayal at him every way he turned. As trapped as he was in the current endeavor, if he knew what was good for him AND the boy, Sydney the man wanted nothing more than to snatch the child up into his arms and hold him close when he grieved for his lost parents. It seemed a far more compassionate response than Sydney the scientist had been giving, merely standing back and calmly chiding the child into setting the grief aside and continuing with the task at hand.
Little James was spectacularly bright and talented, in so many ways reminding Sydney of Jarod during those agonized first days of his internment as prized Pretender. He was a sweet and compliant child, eager to please those around him but equally anxious to find out where those he loved had gone - why they were no longer included in his world. And he was a particularly athletic child, accustomed to spending hours in the open space and sunlight being physically active. For the last two weeks, his most poignant plea to Sydney, most often at mid-afternoon, smack dab in the middle of the more complicated mental acuity exercises and practice sims, was to be allowed outside to play for a bit before coming back and finishing.
Miss Parker knew what was happening - and he knew HER sensitivities to this kind of barbarism were the reasons he hadn't seen or spoken to her since the day James' keeping had landed in his lap. Her assigned task had been to design security systems upgrades to the Sim Lab and associated living quarters, and while she had slowly complied with the parameters of her assignment, she had carefully erected a wall between herself and what was going on in that Lab. He saw the reports of work done on his Sim Lab only. He knew this was her only way of refusing to be a part of the obscenity that was now his job.
Sydney missed her company and her friendship - however fraught with the verbal barbed wire of her own defensiveness they might be - desperately, and felt keenly her rejection of who and what this assignment had made him become again.
He sighed again, ran his fingers through his thinning hair in frustration, and punched the button to turn on his computer terminal. Very quietly, during these nights of insomnia and guilt, he had begun searching news sites on the Web for reports of missing children. He knew he was running a risk of being caught without a good excuse for his surfing, but he had to do SOMETHING to ameliorate the evil he was a reluctant part of. Tonight he focused his search on the Western US - California in particular.
He had steadfastly refused to believe any of the information that had been given him about the boy's past history - he'd been lied to before, and had no reason to believe he wasn't being lied to again. There was no date or place of birth in James' file, only the date and place of his 'discovery': Dover - only two hours' drive from Blue Cove. Considering that his first move had been to scour every local rag in Delaware for any news of a missing child, he knew James - or Jamie, as he was starting to call the lad - had to come from somewhere more remote than that. The only place more remote than California was Hawaii...
Wait...
There it was! In the San Jose Mercury, dated seven weeks ago, almost to the day - a young boy, James Milburn, had gone with some friends to the local park in Gilroy to play after school but had never come home again. His friends mentioned seeing men in dark suits in the distance, but had seen nothing truly suspicious about them. Then James had just vanished while chasing a softball.
Sydney narrowed the search until he had what he required to confirm his suspicions: a photograph of the missing boy which was of a happier, more relaxed Jamie than the one who now sat forlornly in a locked cement cubicle one level below the Sim Lab. He printed the page with the news article and associated photo and logged off the Internet and then switched off his terminal, intensely angry.
They HAD stolen another one - just as Jarod had been stolen!
The Beethoven surged majestically in his ears, but he couldn't hear the music at all. He had raised his head to stare out into the dimly lit and currently abandoned Sim Lab, his mind populating the room quite effectively with a vision of a young Jarod and young Jamie. Both of them were staring back at him with accusation and condemnation in their eyes. Then a younger Angelo, an image Sydney knew only from the DSA's he'd viewed over the years of the search for Jarod, came in to stand next to them and join in the ghostly vigil of condemnation.
He knew what he had to do, if he intended to be able to live with himself one moment longer.
He pulled his cell phone from his pocket and pushed a few buttons. His eyes sought out the digital clock on his desk, and then he knew he would most likely be waking her. Now that Jarod had pretty much vanished from their lives, chances are she actually would have been asleep.
"What?!" He HAD awakened her, but her sharpness was more habit than anger.
"Parker, its Sydney."
"Syd?" Now the voice on the other end of the line was confused. "What time... Are you... Is everything OK?"
Now, with her confusion making her defenses drop a bit, Sydney could push open the gates to those “inner” lines of communication between them that he'd so willingly allowed her to lock shut weeks ago and flood her with his mental anguish and determination. "I know it's late, and I'm sorry to wake you, but I was wondering if you could join me for a cup of coffee?"
"Do you have any idea what time it is, Freud?" she groaned back at him in frustration, accepting the broadcast of anguish and sending back her worried concern in return.
"Please, Parker. It's important."
She groaned again, and the rustling in the background told him that she was slowly pulling herself out of bed. "Pick me up in half an hour - and you're going to owe me a helluva lot more than just a cup of coffee."
Sydney smiled for the first time that evening. "I'll be there." He disconnected the call and rose. He snatched the paper from the printer, folded it into his shirt breast pocket, grabbed up his customary beret, and made a beeline for the automatic door of the Sim Lab.
It didn't take him a half-hour to get to Miss Parker's house, so he sat quietly in the car waiting and trying to organize his thoughts until she came out her front door and slipped into the seat next to him. "Where are we going?" she asked him quietly, scanning his face and seeing a turbulent toss of emotions there.
"There's a small all-night diner about twenty minutes from here," he told her in an equally quiet voice. "It isn't someplace either of us frequents, and we'd be able to see if we're being followed or staked out." He steered the car onto Highway 36 and away from the ocean.
"Am I going to like what I'm going to hear, Sydney?" she asked finally, letting her concern and worry come to the front of her consciousness at last.
"Do you remember asking me what we were going to do when we first heard that the Pretender Project was being reactivated?" he asked instead of replying.
"Yeah..."
"Well, I think I have an idea - but I need your help."
She sat silently next to him for a long time, watching the night-time scenery flow past the windows of his comfortable car and listening to her “inner sense” connection between them for the first time in weeks now. She didn't need to tell him how much she had missed their conversations, not to mention their psychic connection - no matter how necessary it had been to her own peace of mind that they both cease. She could feel the resonance of that absence in the back of Sydney's mind, along with a calm sadness that was his understanding of her need to pull back and shut off the contact. And over it all sparkled his joy at having been able to breach the wall that she'd thrown up between them and get away with it.
Twenty minutes later, she was sitting across from him in a 1950's style diner booth, steaming mugs of coffee on the table between them, the print-out of the San Jose Mercury article with Jamie's picture on it in her hand. She was staring at him in surprise and consternation at what she'd just heard him spell out to her.
"You're kidding?!"
He lifted his coffee mug and took a long sip, never taking his eyes from her face. "You have a better idea?"
"That is sheer suicide, Sydney! What..."
"I think," he contemplated and spoke slowly, "that would be a far better way for me to go than just continuing on as I have, waiting for... whatever - participating... Tell me the truth, Parker - if you were me..." He left the rest unsaid.
Her grey eyes studied him in urgent consternation. "I don't want to lose you," she admitted finally in a slightly shaky voice.
He reached across the table and put one hand on hers. "These past few weeks have been as if neither of us was alive for the other - and we chose to let things stand that way. The only difference between that situation and death is a matter of permanency." He patted her hand. "I don't want to lose you either, Parker - but I can't live this way anymore. Not again. I HAVE to do this."
Miss Parker looked down into her coffee, knowing his absolute sincerity and dedication to the path he'd set out for himself. What he intended was downright dangerous - fatally so, should he be found out ahead of time. She was frightened for him, but knew there would be no way to dissuade him. Her choices of response were limited to two.
Finally she sighed and shook her head in resignation. "OK. What is it you want me to do?"
