Unlimited Plan (*)

Paranoia, paranoia

13

London, United Kingdom

The Doctor is brimming with effervescence. He is corroborating the results of his preliminary research for over thirty continuous hours. Penetrating the Toronto Morgue's autopsy records system presented no problems once he figured it was part of the Mount Sinai General premises. He exploited a security loophole in the health center's email gateway to execute code, thereby circumventing the firewalls supposedly protecting the hospital's internal network from Internet intrusions.

He then leveraged his skills to gain privileged access to various global medical databases, searching for theses, theories, and statistics on the cause of his former shadow collaborator's death, Brian. The mass of information quickly accumulated, and anyone else might have crumbled under the data overload. But the Doctor's mind affords him incredible analytical capability, and with his unmatched tenacity, he managed to discern the essential material.

He traced the path, from essays to dissertations, from graphs to figures. He eventually compiled a list of Mulcinchen syndrome cases. Across the North Sea, in Oslo, Norway, a prominent neurology professor has specialized in this rare pathology. With a network of colleagues and the support of several international medical foundations, most Western hospitals report any death showing symptoms distinctive of this disease to him. A condition characterized, among other things, by the hypertrophy of the thalamus, identifiable by a routine scan.

A meticulous census updated thanks to modern communication tools. The Doctor had no trouble finding Brian Wessler's name at the bottom of the list.

The Doctor's mental disorders have long pushed him into deep recesses of human cognitive capacity. Paradoxically, it also led him to waste countless hours on futile searches and unproductive obsessions of all sorts. Twenty-five years ago, when he started participating on certain projects for the Rise of The Phoenix group, he only contributed on the condition that he would not appear on the official roaster. Although Jeremy credited his work several times with slogans using the term "Doctor," no mention of an additional teammate was ever made in the gang. "Doctor" represented an avatar of the IT world already used by the famous antivirus brand Norton in those years.

In those days, he also invested considerable time looking into each team member. He already knew Jeremy since they had been correspondents for years, but he could not bring himself to collaborate with people without identifying them first. That's why he traced the pseudonyms of the group back to the phone numbers used in their modem communications. The Doctor had long discovered the civil identities of every former RoTP member. He felt very surprised to recognize two more names besides Brian Wessler in the census of Mulcinchen syndrome victims, the latest just a few hours ago.

Anyone would find this suspicious. But for the Doctor, already naturally incredulous, the news exploded like a 4th of July fireworks. Seeing what he considered irrefutable proof that the group members were being killed one by one, his genius gave way to his madness. Obsessive paranoia began to rise within him, annihilating most of his cognitive abilities in its wake. The early warning signs crept in one by one, as he digested the information the list brought him. First, the loss of control over his eyes' movements. They started to dart from left to right, distracted by the slightest flicker, the tiniest motion, or fluttering at will as the Doctor's mind wandered. Next his throat and mouth suddenly dried up. Finally, nervous tics kicked in. Lip pinching and repetitive swallowing accompanied the dryness, then blinking, fidgeting of extremities, and compulsive scratching. Eventually, retreating more and more into his inner self, the Doctor began to exhibit autistic-type behaviors, continuous head movements, rhythmic swaying of the body.

Without external help at the moment such a crisis strikes, the Doctor can in no way control his symptoms on his own, which only worsen his overall condition. Labored breathing adds to the heat build-up in his body and adrenaline production, which reinforce the initial anxiety. Soon, he turns into a perfect self-feeding mode of his personal fears, with nothing and no one to break the vicious circle, the Doc will remain in this state until total exhaustion.

From the moment a lump formed in his throat recognizing the names of RoTP members to when the Doctor nods up and down, repeating like a mantra, "They're after me... They want me dead...", only three minutes had passed. Three minutes during which the inevitable veil of paranoia slid onto the Doctor's shoulders, enveloping him in a dark and cold cloak.

The Doctor leaps from his seat. Rolling on his office chair from one computer to another is no longer an option for him. He hurries with uncertain steps towards a small screen occupying the far right end of his immense crescent-shaped desk. Standing, leaning over the monitor, he presses a button. Immediately, a red laser projection outlines the keys of a virtual keyboard on the desk surface. Biting his lips, the Doctor begins to type feverishly. The tiny projector interprets the position of his fingers and relays the information to the computer, just as a real keyboard would.

Doc rubs his nose with the back of his right hand and scratches his wrist with the other, then resumes his frantic typing. He has executed a series of commands that trigger an emergency protocol he designed himself. Upstairs, reinforced steel curtains that roll down from the ceiling now protects all accesses, doors, and windows, driven by the regular hums of electric motors.

A heavy metallic sound echoes in the ground floor living room; a thick iron bar now locks from inside the bookcase hiding the bomb shelter entrance. The same happens at the foot of the steps it conceals; a reinforced door seals hermetically with a brief suction noise, preventing any intrusion from the stairwell, whether human or microbial.

Simultaneously, the shelter's autonomous ventilation system kicks in. A complex maze of ducts and active carbon filters begins to circulate air from the Doctor's second house. He looks up to see the wall in front of him open. A huge high-resolution display appears.

The Doctor, feverishly, leans back over his virtual keyboard and types some instructions through the shimmering red laser characters on his desk. Immediately, the gigantic screen lights up, presenting all information related to the anti-intrusion mode triggered by the property owner. The monitor displays carefully segmented data sets across its surface.

In the center, various cameras covering the street, the entrance to both houses, and their different rooms, alternate with each other, showing four at a time. On each side, summary tables present relevant bunker statistics. Air quality, alarm status, energy reserves of the two generators installed in the second house's basement, and the emergency batteries inside the shelter itself, everything is meticulously listed.

In the lower part of the monitor, messages from the computer's protection system scroll by, informing the Doctor of any intrusion attempts into his network.

He has stepped back, now standing at the supposed center of his crescent moon-shaped desk's diameter. He murmurs in the empty space, repeating his fears in a loop, formulating his hypotheses, inflating a conspiracy, imaginary or not, whose sole purpose is to annihilate him. Eyes glued to the screen, his body sways back and forth. Unrecognizable, the Doctor is but a shadow of himself.