My apartment is basically generic; just one more box in the buildings whose only redeeming feature is that they're near campus. I've joked a couple times that I worked very hard to keep the place nice and bland, but the truth is that faced with an aisle of linens or a cluster of coffee tables to pick from, my first thought is "What can I grab that won't clash, and get out of here?". Which has, over time, a kind of non-effect.
What I'm mostly saying here is that the contents of Gina's boxes, which included a huge pile of file folders, a few metal footlockers, a test-tube rack, and what I think was a twenty-year-old EEG and EKG meter, completely overwhelmed the decor. Gina was playing with that last one as I walked in, and had a couple electrodes stuck to her temples.
"Whaddaya think, coz?"
"I think I brought beer."
"Think we might, maybe, need coffee instead?"
Surveying the disaster, I agreed, and pulled out my coffee press, put on a kettle, wandered back over to my kitchen island, and opened the first file folder to come to hand. Charts and tables, patient information, dosages and dailies. I sat, and started digging in.
The files were pretty dry stuff; data tables. On the surface, it was all about drug trials. This drug, this amount, this long, these results. Which meant no results (but lots of side effects), then a bunch more no results (and more side effects), and then the end of the file. The notes down in the side effects and daily marginalia added a little more to the story, though. The `no results` were from readings, andd trials with the mind-reader cards - star, wavy lines, can you see what I'm picturing? That kind of thing. By the time we got into the second run at the coffee, it was pretty clear - they'd been looking for a drug to create, or boost, something like telepathy.
Instead, they gave everybody sleep disorders, serious mental health issues, and sent a bunch of them straight down into endless sleep. But according to Gina, that was because they'd found what they were looking for; they just hadn't recognized it. Bowley, one of the subjects, had written a book a decade later about lucid dreaming techniques he'd leaned from Yogi masters - and they worked like a hot damn. Except, Gina said, they didn't have thing one to do with Yoga, Tantra, Chakras, nothing. His techniques were actually from traditions about something called Tulpas, and the works of some historical mystic, Alhazred.
Which is to say, translating from the Gina-speak, skin-crawlingly horrible stuff. While I'd been looking athrough the files, she'd pulled out the ORIGINAL DOCUMENTS baggie, and a small collection of small leather-bound books, and had been hammering away at her laptop. She was pretty sure that these pages were also part of some "elder work", in her terms; they sure looked elder enough for me.
She asked me to chart out the side effects.
"Make an intensity scale, right? Think of it like, a coma is an overdose, like a 10. A report of weird dreams or sleep trouble on a given drug is a five, or nightmares are six, whatever. No report is zero. So, for each drug, box out the results to show the usual range, and the outlying edges. Keep them in order of application - chances are, some of the later effects are results of earlier drugs, or combinations, leading to overdose. You know the drill. We're not looking for a paper we can defend, coz, we're just looking for the pattern."
So I got to work at my own screen, and a couple of nights passed with me working on that. Gina, meanwhile, was using my student card to grab books out of the library - botany, chemistry, hunting for stuff.
Looking back, Gina just dropped directly into my life, and I accepted it, without a single ripple. It seems like I should have an explanation ready, about how the files were really fascinating (which they were), or how we had some kind of history of sleuthing things out (which we didn't). But I can't explain it, really. She moved in her toiletries while we read and chatted about the stuff we were doing, she got the couch, and conscientiously made coffee in the mornings, and life just kept moving, seamlessly. A testament to how bare my life had been beforehand, I suppose - there was room for a whole other person to just walk in and set up shop. More than one, in the end, of course, but I'm getting ahead of myself.
On the third night, I got to make a little presentation, after printing out my new charts.
"The doctors were pretty good at recording specific side effects; I charted from unusually wakeful dreams to serious nightmares to coma, with differences all along the scale. Now, it looks like either some of these later drugs combined with ones from the days before, or they were just plain stronger. But it's not all additive; this one was pretty much a dud, and everyone that was getting up into the higher number recovered really fast while they were on it."
We played with it some more, and Gina had me play around with the data a few other ways, especially looking at the cases where people had been given the early trial drugs in different orders, that kind of thing.
"B-3. That's the one, coz."
"The one that what?"
"Lucid dreaming, reports of odd sensations and beliefs in shared dreams with others, right? B-3, everyone taking it moved towards that set of side effects."
"Oh. Yeah, totally, sure. If there was a useful drug in there, that'd be the one."
"There is. They were trying to recreate Ianathos, a temple incense they used way back, in Sarnath."
"I've never heard of either of those."
"Well, sure. Sarnath got wiped out in a flood before there was such a thing as countries. We're talking like Sumeria and Akkadia, way way back. Maybe even before those."
"Okay, but how would anyone know what the hell they used for incense?"
"The Sarnathi were a lot like Sumerians in one way - they wrote on clay, and they did it all the time. Not as much of their stuff has survived, but some. And a bunch of their religious stuff got piled in with different magical revivals, you know? Ianathos, the incense, was one of those things. In the right circles, everyone has a homemade recipe for Ianothos. But the orginal stuff was a powerhouse drug, to let people share consciousness."
"Telepathy again."
"Right. But, coz, a bunch of the Sarnathi poems talk about waking up in the temple, after long visits to far places."
"Astral travel, then? Come on."
"No, coz, they're talking about the same thing. Shared dreaming. Telepathy, far places, sleeping in the temple, it's all the one thing, get it?"
I'd like to say in my defense, here, that I'm not actually stupid. I just didn't believe her, so I hadn't been following along closely. But I got it. "Okay. So, we've got proof - more or less - that a government expirement was messing people up. So, we're charting out just how messed up, and what they got messed up with. We can probably find an Associated Press writer, get it out there, kind of thing. That's the idea, right?"
I asked this prompted by the slowly dawning realization that this almost certainly wasn't the idea. Gina had been chasing this stuff for years. It wasn't a funny list of amateur occult detective stories to her; never had been. And it was becoming less and less distantly funny to me each second. Ancient drugs. Serious mental traumas. A government cover-up of sorts. All real things; whether or not there was some magic drug at the end of the rainbow didn't change that people had chased it in ways that were very real and dangerous as hell. I stood, waiting for an answer, considering this.
She cocked her head, examining my face. "Lookit that. Just look at it."
"What?"
"I can actually see the smug draining out."
"Hey, that's not..."
"Oh, look! There's beer in the fridge!"
There's a reason Gina is my favorite cousin. Of course, she hadn't actually answered my question.
