Not Without Protest

Chapter 2 South Wing

No patient had ever left the South Wing alive. Bortz and Douglas handled this fact and the deaths very discretely. The heart monitor sent a signal to the St. Vincent’s main computer and that initiated automatic telephone calls to Morgan Douglas and Carl Bortz on their private lines. If they did not answer their private numbers, then their pagers would signal them. Both Bortz and Douglas knew that if their private numbers displayed on their pagers, a death occurred at St. Vincent’s South Wing. No matter what time of day or night, when a death occurred, Bortz and Douglas headed immediately for the South Wing.

"Nurse, what are you doing?"

"Oh, Dr. Bortz, I was just, well I was just looking up a phone number."

"Making personal calls on St. Vincent’s time? That’s not acceptable, I am certain you have some duties to attend to that are far more important. Now, run along and attend to them."

"Yes - - yes sir." The nursed feigned fear of the Doctor and he knew in his heart he could kill this evil man with one blow from his hand as he was trained to during his Special Forces hand-to-hand combat training received as a Green Beret. Now was not the time. However, he had a mission to complete for the President. The nurse ran along. Acting very effeminately, he left the room.

"I must speak to Morgan about this little faggot" Bortz thought as he went about his business.

Morgan Douglas and Dr. Carl Bortz’s activities involved something more sinister than running a medium-sized nursing home. Morgan Douglas and Dr. Carl Bortz were high-tech mind thieves. They electronically broke into the minds of carefully selected patients, then stole their special knowledge and thoughts and recorded these on a laser discs that they sold to aliens. Douglas and Bortz used a technology developed by the aliens. The aliens paid Douglas and Bortz for the information and they then used it to find ways to infiltrate our society. For years, the US Government conducted similar mind mapping experiments with this alien technology. The aliens allowed the government to do this in exchange for having the privilege to experiment on abductees and cattle. However, the aliens never allowed the government to use the full capability of the technology. Usually the patients never survived this exhausting process. When patients were in an extremely fragile mental state or physical condition, they died. However, patients occasionally survived this process recalling what happened. Awakening of the patients occurred for scheduled visits by friends and relatives. For scheduled visits, Bortz would slowly bring the sedated patients back to a state of semi-awareness. The patients appeared weak and fading, yet, could communicate with visitors for brief periods before lapsing into states of confusion. During these states of confusion, the patients often complained about their thoughts being stolen. As a side effect of this process, the patients experienced lapses in memory with missing time episodes. Unfortunately, when patients verbalized these lapses and made accusations, their friends and families rarely took them seriously. The good Dr. Bortz reinforced their disbelief by camouflaging these episodes with his techno-psychological explanations that visitors believed more often than not.

The process of selective knowledge transfers was complex. It involved electronically mapping a person’s complete body of knowledge into discrete categories. Further subdivision of the categories occurred until a very specialized area of knowledge was uncovered, copied, and transferred onto an optical laser disc. Each area of knowledge, or information was mapped to a specific location within the patients’ brains. To date, Morgan Douglas and Dr. Bortz had transferred the knowledge of forty-three individuals onto optical discs. The optical discs contained the exact imagery, sights, sounds, senses, thoughts, and feelings, from the minds of selected patients.

Before selling the optical laser discs, Martin Belmont copied and filed the entire contents of each disc into the main computer’s optical disc storage system. Only Martin had access to these files once they were copied. Upon request, from Morgan Douglas and no other, would Martin retrieve a given file. This technology was not something either Morgan Douglas or Carl Bortz developed. St. Vincent’s was part of an experiment conducted by the US Government in conjunction with the aliens. Bortz and Douglas received payment to collect data and to conduct a beta test of the system. Until just recently, however, they had no idea where this technology originated or what its ultimate use was going to be. Bortz and Douglas, driven by their greed, dealt directly with the aliens, a very dangerous business, indeed.