Gulliver's Fugitives by Keith Sharee

Author:Keith Sharee [SHAREE, KEITH]
Language: eng
Format: epub
Tags: Space Opera, General, Science Fiction, Science Fiction/Fantasy, Fiction, Media Tie-In
ISBN: 9780671741433
Publisher: Star Trek
Published: 1990-01-02T08:00:00+00:00

Later, Smith stopped at the doors to a computer room, dialed a personal code into a combination lock, and entered.

She took off her helmet and clipped her red hair in a tight whorl.

If you asked her right now if her name had always been Smith, she would say that it had. However, she would be wrong; it had been Smith only for the last two days. For many years before that, it had been Amoret.

When she had been captured along with Riker and Data at the ore factory, she had been taken to this building, put in a cell, and her mind had been wiped completely blank. On this planet, such blanking satisfied the legal demand for capital punishment, for the original person was indeed dead and gone. The body became a new citizen with a new identity.

This new citizen’s memory was filled, by computer, with real-life incidents from other people’s lives, all verified as true, and sanctioned by the CS. Only the names and faces in the incidents were changed to make them fit the new citizen’s new personal history.

Though the new memories weren’t really true for the new citizen, they had been true for someone, and the Rampartians had declared that these re-used memories were not fictional. They did not carry the Allpox of imagination. A lot of tortured logic was used to justify this practice, but the real reason for it was pure necessity. Without it there wouldn’t be enough sanitized new minds.

The practice allowed for instantaneous placement of the new citizen back into society, wherever there happened to be a need. In this way, the large number of arrests and capital punishments didn’t decimate the population or disrupt the operations of the CS or the commercial sector.

Once in a while there were problems. The Rampartians had decoded brain waves and neural memory codes, but there was much about brain physiology that they didn’t know. Sometimes the blanking and refilling didn’t work completely and the original memories and “criminal” tendencies remained. In such cases the intransigent brain was written off as a loss and the body was killed by injection.

However, when successful, the brainwashing provided ideal citizens for Rampart society. The people who were most recently brainwashed were actually the “safest” of all Rampartians, and were often employed by the CS, which constantly needed more sanitized minds.

Smith, though she didn’t know it yet, was turning out to be one of the failed attempts at mind blanking. A thread of the Dissenter spirit had persisted through her blanking, on some deeply buried stratum. She still thought she was someone named Marjorie Smith who had blanked thousands of people, but when she had tried to blank Picard, her Dissenter spirit had twitched and groaned remorsefully in its sleep.

And now, as she reflected back on her life as Marjorie Smith, a comfortable life among a lot of bland people, it seemed an unreal montage, an interminable, colorless, sleepwalk. She felt that this meant she had lived a meaningless life, having

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