you were asking me; how to get you free

[slightlyoffchilt]

WHO: Theodore Flood and Frederick Chilton
WHERE: the Maurtia Falls Psychiatric Hospital for Abnormal Conditions
WHEN: After this but before this.
WHAT: Chilton will test who the maze is meant for. Teddy is his patient prime.
WARNINGS: Westworld spoilers, shady psychiatric practices.


This was a different room than what Chilton had used to exhibit Teddy. The lighting dimmed comparatively to the searing illumination of the inpatient holding rooms, with only calm blues and soft yellows flooding their limited space. Chilton had Teddy in a chair, much like that of a dentist’s chair, strapped in at the wrists and ankles -- for his own safety. Behind Teddy were MRI-fashioned machines, smaller and more convenient, the sort of medical advancement this universe had to offer. Chilton looked at his arrangement, thoughtfully, considering the best method of measurement.

Theodore Flood was a machine. An artificial intelligence. And while he looked human, while he felt human, there were boundaries to what Chilton could do without direct access to his code. So he needed to map the extent of Teddy’s circuitry, and where the imPort rested along a consciousness spectrum.

But there was one major obstacle in the way.

“Teddy,” began Chilton. His voice was velvet beneath crescent moonlight, inviting and deceptive. “It is memory that makes us who we are, it is the remembrance of today that will conceive our identities tomorrow. Crucial to knowing ourselves. And you, as you already know, you possess a flawed memory. A problem that a man of your design should not have.”

Emotion was what gave memory its longevity. Horror and pain and joy and fulfillment marked the strongest memories that people tended to mark themselves with; the good and the bad. Neuroscience revealed the chemistry of human circuitry, the beta blockers that could diminish the impact (and thus retrieval) of fear-associated memories. Talk therapy could gently prod emotions to coax memory, specific drugs could influence more directly and more wildly.

Techniques applied to a concrete and visceral subject, the human being. But Teddy Flood was different, he was liminal. He was an intelligent machine who looked human and remembered only enough to get by. He wasn’t allowed to learn.

Chilton wanted to remedy that.

"Do you want to remember?"

Comments

[shootsharp]

There are times -- during his stay in the hospital -- that Teddy finds himself closing his eyes, wilfully recollecting what he does remember, and the things he is programmed to remember. The roll and gait of a horse. Dolores, as a near static vision, waiting for him. A sky, blue and open. The train's rumble, vibrating up the bottoms of his shoes, as it pulls in to Sweetwater.

It's what he's doing when Dr Chilton summons his name, and he opens his eyes again.

Restraints on wrists and ankles don't phase him. He'd been passively accepting of these measures, and doesn't pull against them now. His last fit of violence had not been an attempt at escape, but an attempt on a man's life. A failed attempt, at that, but he'd felt it. Even if he hadn't come close, the possibility had hovered in front of him, like a shadowed step, like curtains drawn back. He keeps that kind of thing to himself.

Just like he keeps to himself his excursion with Maeve and Stark, when she had asked him almost that exact question. Its symmetry has him look on over at Dr Chilton. It's out of loyalty and maybe a touch of shrewdness that has him keep those things separate, although heaven help any man that tries to put Maeve Millay in a glass box.

"That what you want?" he asks. "I remember what I don't, you see me walk out of here? Or there somethin' about the remembering that has your interest."

[slightlyoffchilt]

There's a pang that echoes on Chilton's face, a twist of sympathetic lips and a nose wrinkled in chagrin. A pitying glance. Remembering would be but the first step -- there would be mediation, reconstruction. Hours upon weeks upon months of psychiatric work, all because someone (who, had William said? Robert Ford) had stuttered Flood's processing capability.

"I am interested in you."

Chilton took a step closer, rested his hand on Teddy's shoulder. He didn't fear rejection, not with his patient so strapped in.

"You know, don't you? Teddy? You must know you are not human. You're barely allowed to be what you are, in fact, and I am going to help you realize this."

[shootsharp]

"I ain't no one special, doctor," is blithe resistance, quietly delivered. Teddy does not affirm that he knows he isn't human. He avoids the question altogether. Shies back, a look sinking sideways. The shoulder under Chilton's hand is warm with life, thickly muscled, not without tension.

He should be tenser, probably, as an unwilling participant in a place and practice he doesn't comprehend.

"What's the past matter, anyhow, if you ain't got a way forward? A future? That man you let walk, he took that from me when he took Dolores."

[slightlyoffchilt]

"On the contrary, you are highly unusual, Teddy. That renders you special -- and I won't be the last the realize this."

He had a syringe in his pocket, if only to measure how deeply Teddy's human facade sank. Upon taking it out, uncapping, it, he didn't ask for permission when the needle broke Flood's skin. Amobarbital. Chilton wasn't about to rely on it, not in this session, but he wouldn't turn his nose to a languid liberation along Teddy's tongue.

His eyes glanced over at the portable MRI devices he had set behind his patient. A medical advancement born of this world that he could appreciate.

"You still bleed," remarked Chilton. He hadn't been too careful with the syringe. "You look just like us, you practically are. If only I could access your programming, if only I could expose that. For you."

A soft hand cupped the side of Teddy's face, his fingers against fashionable stubble.

"Do you understand what I'm saying? Teddy?"

[shootsharp]

The needle jabs, and Teddy twitches, a full-bodied movement that tests his restraints at a judder before he stills once more. That sense of danger ramps up, in spite of Chilton's calm words, the soothing voice that delivers them as smooth as his chemicals of choice. Before Theodore can really make sense of it, there's a hand on his face.

Dreamy blue eyes, clear full circles, answer that question: no, not really.

The drug in his system is likely neutralised, or at least, there are no outward signs of effect save for Teddy's heart rate ramping up, primordial flight or fight instincts turned into code.

"You sound just like him."

Not half as flattering, granted.

[slightlyoffchilt]

"I'm not sure who you mean," he said in response. Delicate, composed syllables licking at his tongue. "Just like him?"

Chilton's fingers graced along Teddy's hair, his gaze unrelenting. How much of this was organic, living flesh like in the mold of an imPocreat? How much was impossibly futuristic synthetic? He had witnessed nothing like this before, not even his prior artificial intelligence paramour had this degree of realism. Her humanoid form had only been manifested because of the Porter effect, it was not natural to her being.

But judging by William's interaction with Teddy, the latter had nothing changed in his appearance.

"Do you realize how remarkable you are? Straddling the abyss -- nearly conscience, self-realized." He swallowed, withdrew his hand. "What do you dream of, Teddy?"

[shootsharp]

Teddy is enough of a state to tolerate the touch to his hair up to a point, a wary kind of stillness that finally breaks as Chilton pulls away and he ducks his head in uneasy shrug. He doesn't clarify what he means, who he means and why, and he doesn't stubbornly deny how remarkable he is some more, script strained enough that he's liable to just repeat himself, cowboy contractions and all. Even in analysis mode, he goes similarly silent when he runs out of answers.

Instead, there's that topical question. Dreams. His fingers twitch, curl inwards, forming loose fists.

"You mean when I'm asleep," Theodore asks, rough and wry, "or when I'm awake?"

[slightlyoffchilt]

"I do not mean maladaptive daydreaming, no." A thought occurred to him, and he narrowed his eyes. "You know the difference, correct? There is a difference for you?"

It was possible that Teddy Flood's processing didn't manifest in ways that a human brain would -- Chilton had doubted that such parallels would be so easy. But what if his programming didn't account for the haze of mistaken remembrance? What if Flood was less Philip K. Dick and more Microsoft? Where did reality end for Mr. Flood?

Chilton cradled his chin between a pinch of thumb and forefinger. What was dreaming, to his patient? What was the difference?

"I am not talking about fantasizing, nor thinking about want. Not aspirations, no."

He enjoyed the twilight gauze this room had to offer, the dimmed light and intimate space. A quiet room inviting secrets.

[shootsharp]

There ought to be a difference, but he knows better, now. Theodore's hands curls into fists and relax again as if to release tension in some small way, his gaze settling blankly across from him. Regarding the wall, the warmth of the light that reflects off of it.

"Me neither," he says. His bitterness is, as ever, sedate. "I dream of the past, 'cept when it ain't the past, and just feels like it should be. Places I been before, people I knew, but not where they ought to be."

He glances up, then, nodding to him as he adds, "That day you encountered me, in person. I was dreaming then. 'bout the only difference between the dreams that come on when I'm awake is I remember 'em better. And it ain't on purpose, like a daydream." A little wry; "And it ain't an aspiration, neither."

[slightlyoffchilt]

"Dream of the past?"

Chilton pursued his lips at the phrasing, thinking back to the days before when Teddy Flood had been so catatonic that his illness had been widely misinterpreted as performance art. If he had been dreaming of the past, a waking dream, then it had swallowed him. Transported him. And then it clicked -- his memory. It was how his memory ran. The perfect horror of an unhindered, all-encompassing ability to recall.

Teddy was another step removed from human than what Chilton had anticipated.

"What did you see?" A hurried whisper, and Chilton tensed in the shoulder. His stance was an alert one, riddled with anticipation. "When you were out there on that street, when I found you. What did you see?"

[shootsharp]

The struggle between keeping personal information a secret is only a brief one. He's an obliging man, is Theodore Flood, a flash of nuanced uncertainty clear in his eyes before he drops his gaze, thinking back. Navigating what he recognises now to be a sort of cliff's edge, in which memory waits to swallow him as sure as gravity.

"A street," he says, finally. "From home. One moment it was this world, the next thing it changed. Like I was there. And they were all dead. Men, women, townspeople. Dead 'cause I shot 'em down, but I would never--"

Would he never? He stops himself. That's not what he was asked, besides.

"And then I saw Dolores, and she took aim at me."

He looks up at Frederick, nodding to him. "That's where you stepped in," he says, a touch wry. "But it didn't happen like that. They were soldiers, not civilians. And Dolores was never there."

[slightlyoffchilt]

Gruesome. That was the landscape Teddy had painted: a blood-soaked nightmare, ghoulish as it hummed in its own tragedy. And Teddy Floor, an active hand in drawing that blood... It had surprised Chilton. He underestimated Flood's capacity for violence. When Chilton reached out once more to stroke back Teddy's hair, it was done with only a muted paternal affection.

But I would never.

"Shh," said Chilton. "People have a habit of doing terrible things -- acts that they would never."

He had seen it all too often, the stains of sin in the minds of his patients. Frederick Chilton had not much hope for the kinder strengths of humanity, and Teddy was molded in humanity's image. While some limitations might apply, his mechanical finesse allow for others to be abolished.

"And Dolores took aim at you." He followed that repetition with a tutting. "Why would she? If not to stop you?"

Guilty by implication. It was a subtle dagger to slip into captive, earnest flesh.

But it didn't happen like that. A twist that gave Chilton pause, a screech of tires on a previously smooth road -- but it didn't happen like that? Teddy Flood had dissociated in the middle of a busy street, so apparently plagued by memory. But it didn't happen like that. Chilton swallowed, his hand retreating to loosen his own tie knot. He kept his reservations quiet, his skepticism muted. A conflict of memory suggested that neither narrative was complete, that neither might be totally true nor totally false. This was a complication.

Chilton took a step backwards, watching Teddy. A corrupted memory in an AI? No, impossible, he thought. Someone had done this to Teddy, someone wanted the truth made murky.

"You'll need your rest now," he said, turning to the exit the door. "A few hours, to think on what had happened. To sort through what you remember."

This would be a long session, and Chilton had no intention to burn out his best oil so soon. He would leave Teddy alone, in the oppressive quiet and the forgiving dimmed light, to soak in his own false realities.

Or however these robots might ponder, be it sleep mode or otherwise.

[shootsharp]

If not to stop you?

With the same affect of Chilton drawing back at some new complication in his narrative, Teddy draws inwards, staring down at his own knees. What seemed impossible -- and still makes no sense to him -- is given just a hint of the plausible. Dolores, not the kind of girl he could imagine holding a gun in reality, would be the one to stop him. Or maybe that's just his own guilty conscience, taking shape.

These possibilities echo about and he's really only aware of Chilton leaving him behind when he hears the doctor's footsteps en route for the door.

The door closes, and for a few seconds, protest catches and coils up through Theodore's shoulders. And then he relaxes, and does as he has done each time he's been left alone, with an absence of stimulation: go still, and quiet, as if in peculiar meditation.

Thinking, then, in a dusty road, and gun powder.