Doctor Who: Virgin New Adventures - Bernice Summerfield [066] - Down by Lawrence Miles

Author:Lawrence Miles
Language: eng
Format: mobi
Tags: Science-Fiction - Doctor Who
Publisher: Virgin
Published: 1997-09-27T22:00:00+00:00

REALITY

Interoffice Memo, dispatch 22:13:13,15/01/94.

From: Dr W. Bicknel, Behavioural Analysis desk, floor 6/1.

To: Chief Officer Q. Pupp, floor 1/2.

Quinton –

God, you really know how to pick ’em. You had us on ‘sea monster duty’ all last week, and now this. The boys down here are laying 4-1 odds you’re trying to wind us up. Only reason I haven’t put money on it is that I’ve already bet 2-1 you don’t have a sense of humour any more. Hurry up and have your annual personality check-up, I want to collect.

The serious stuff, though. We’ve finished going through the first batch of monitor records you sent us. Voice analysis, poise analysis, the works. Yeah, you know the drill, here’s the usual disclaimer. The following information is a speculative profile, and has no value as evidence in a criminal prosecution, etc. etc. etc., although there’s enough here for an indefinite suspension under the Convention. The usual spiel.

OK. First, the body language. (By the way, can we get a better monitoring system fitted in the cells up there? The V-footage of the prisoner we’ve got is covered in scratchy bits.) Looks like you were right when you said she isn’t your typical Imperial stooge. Most of the body language comes across as Earth Normal, but our interpreter loops can’t cope with some of die quirks. My best guess is she’s a traveller, and she’s been picking up nasty habits all over the place. God knows where she’s been, though.

Having established that her body language is way out of whack, and therefore that any conclusions we might draw aren’t exactly 100 per cent reliable, here’s my guess at her mental state. I don’t think she’s a nut. She’s deluded, sure, but she’s not a nut. If her blood tests hadn’t come up neg for narcotics, I’d say she was suffering a drug-induced hallucination. If you take a look at the nervegram readings (enclosed), you can see most of what she’s telling us isn’t a lie, as such. A lot of the time, the patterns we’re getting say she’s exaggerating, but not lying. So, for example, if she tells you she was attacked by a three-metre-high sabre-toothed tiger, she probably believes she was attacked by a row-metre-high sabre-toothed tiger. Figure it out.

What convinces me she’s not crazy, though, is the way she tells bits of the story from other people’s points of view. Yeah, she talks about events she admits she didn’t witness (a couple of times, she even says things like ‘meanwhile, a few kilometres away’), but apart from that, she keeps describing the way people felt when they did things. In all the psycho cases I’ve seen, the crazies think they’re the only ones who matter, and everyone else is a piece of meat with a face. This one makes up private lives for her characters, and a lot of the time their private lives are a damn sight more convincing than hers is.

By the way, have you noticed how often people in her story end up getting captured? The bit where she’s tied up by Nazis says it all.

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