As Jo enters Dr. Claire's calming civilian psychiatric practice – the usual effects you'd expect to be on the walls of an early '70s progressive psychiatrist: "world" art, lots of knick-knacks to keep the patients looking up, etc. – Jo sees Dr. Claire with a SANDMAN dossier in a folder and his usual herbal tea.
"Jocasta, please, have a seat. It's been a while. It's good to see you again. I read the details of your latest unexpected field mission. Do you want to talk about what happened?"
"Yeah. I know I usually need some convincing to talk about this stuff, but, well, not this time. If you read the report, you know I froze up. Again. At a moment that could have been pretty costly, and for people who really don't deserve it." Jocasta takes a long drag on a cigarette. "I need help, Dr. Claire. Something besides just meds. I need to get right."
"Well," Dr. Claire says with quite a bit more gentleness than he might have in past sessions, "while of course there are no instant cures and medications, either prescribed or, er, off-book, are helpful but not ultimately cures in and of themselves, there only remains the slow process of analytic therapeutics." Claire folds his hands on his knee. "So you say 'freezing up.' I'm curious as to what triggered this response in you. Not what the text of the report says, the mere situation; we've known for a long time that stressors can put you on a defensive posture ... what was happening in your mind at the time. What did you experience, what did you sense that resulted in this mental paralysis?"
Jo is thoughtful for a moment. "It was the situation, obviously, it was the irruptor ... seeing it, and seeing it so close to Archie's kids ... and of course these things have power; they can terrify you irrationally, and it's always hard to separate that from whatever we think our 'real' feelings are." She crushes out her cigarette. "But honestly...without putting quote marks around everything ... I think I just got stunned and, frankly, crushed by having it confirmed that this this was in control of the old woman. It was everything together, sure ... but I thought back to the old man, Zeb? I told you about him? And I thought about Frank's dad, and ... I may have even flashed back on those kids in Namibia."
She takes another long pause. "Look, Dr. Claire. I will be clear: I performed my duties. I protected those kids. I helped stop that thing. And I have no qualms, no regrets, no doubts that my training let me do what I needed to do. But I lost some precious seconds, seconds that could have meant disaster, paralyzed with the fear that we were just destroying another life, just showing up to put the final cap on the work these evil fucks had been working on innocent lives for who knows how long. I don't want to ... to lose that sense of empathy for their human victims. But I can't go on being scared like this."
Claire intensifies his gaze at Jocasta. "Jocasta, have you ... have you heard of the term pulhata? It's from the Enuma Elish, it describes the fear that surrounds the mother of chaos, Tiamat, and her many monstrous spawn. It's come down to us in SANDMAN to describe just that feeling you're talking about there, the power of the Irruptors." Claire sips his tea; his voice was croaking by the end of that long explanation. "If for a moment I thought this was pulhata you were suffering from, I'd sign your mandatory discharge papers on the spot. Agents with a weak spot against the Irruptors' powers are ... well, useless to us. Moreover, they're a liability."
"No, Jocasta, this freezing up isn't thanks to the power of the Anunnaki to cloud your mind. Your mind is sharp and un-altered as ever." Claire leafs through Jo's file idly but seemingly finds nothing of interest in it. He turns back to Jo.
"Let me change tacks for a moment. We've never talked about Namibia, not really." Claire clears his throat. "What happened there?"
Jo takes a moment, considering his words about the pulhata. She lights another cigarette and thinks back to Namibia, barely suppressing a slight shudder.
"It was my last action with the Guard. The last run I had before they sent me here," she recalls.
"It wasn't supposed to be anything, really. I'd done some fairly successful fieldwork, as you know, and they moved me down there through South Africa to do – well, I mean, it was supposed to be just a training exercise, really. Don't get me wrong, I knew it was a hot zone; Johannesburg wanted to hold on to Walvis Bay really bad, and there had been some serious firefights between their SWATF proxies and PLAN. We'd been doing a small-scale training and development operation outside of the city with some of the locals; they had a good connection with the land and my C.O. thought that a few of them had some psi potential that could be developed with the right discipline. The trouble was that most of our likeliest candidates were getting vanished before we could really cultivate them. I was sent out to reconnoiter and I found a PLAN camp. Naturally, it was swarming with people from the other side – a few Soviets, but mostly East Germans."
"It was too hot to go in directly, so I did what I always do: took good notes, meditated and observed, let the vibes of the place inform me, made a few sketches, and came back to Walvis Bay. I had a really bad feeling about it, but it wasn't anything I could articulate to command, so I just gave them the facts. They came up with a good enough plan – a quick raid, take out their heavy hitters who had been greasing our star pupils, and, time permitting, snatch and grab a few of theirs and see if we could turn them, maybe have better luck than the GDR gray boys had. He scheduled the action for a week later. Perfectly fine timeline, under any other circumstances; I never questioned it for a second."
She takes a long, shaky drag off her cigarette. "I'd read the whole thing wrong. I wasn't close enough to get a good feeling, and when we breached the compound, it was all over. For them. For us."
"The GDR grays and the Soviet advisors had failed, all right – and they didn't realize it any more than I did. The Reds' heads were on poles as we walked in, and the Germans were scattered all over the place. In bits and pieces. I guess the PLAN kids figured they learned everything they could learn from them. And, uh, well. They were. They were kids."
Jocasta swallows hard. "There were 23 of them, which I know because I helped clean up their bodies after. If any of them were more than sixteen, I'll ... well, I won't have to, because they weren't. But, Dr. Claire, they were so developed. Whether they were like this before the other side got hold of them, or whether the Reds just really dug into their minds ... opinions differ. Lt. Hewitt and I don't see eye to eye on that, or on pretty much anything. But they were ... their minds weren't part of our world anymore. They were ... their bodies were here, and they talked to us, if you can call it that. They toyed with us. But their minds were over there. Across the veil. On the other side, the other history. They understood all ... all this, way more than anyone I've ever met in URIEL. Because that's where they lived. That's where they grew up. We couldn't have converted them; us talking politics with them, using our best techniques ... it would have been like a bug talking to us about economics. They were ... so far gone."
"They got the drop on us. You know that much from the after-action report, if you've read it, and I know you have. They made you. And so you also know that we had an eight-man team and only three of us made it out. But one of the three was me, and when they decided to pull Sefako's brain apart, they lost track of me. I put my head on straight while I was hanging from a tree, I got my gear, and I started taking them out. One at a time. It was the only way."
She stops for a moment, then resumes. "When Hewitt filed his report, he was fine with what I did. I guess I am too; it was either them or us. And I have never felt ... not physically or mentally or spiritually ... anyone as, well, evil as those kids. But they were still kids. Just poor kids who never had a chance. The enemy didn't care. They chewed up their brains and their souls and handed them over to people who stripped them of whatever else human that was left. Shit," she half-laughs, "I probably did them a f ... fucking favor."
"But they were still kids. Still kids. And I did what I did, and that's when I started having the nightmares. The next night, I went to an Eleven Arrows match, and the next morning, I woke up screaming. So that's what happened in Namibia."
Dr. Claire allows himself a single arched eyebrow, right around when Jo first describes picking off the kids. But throughout that monologue he sits mostly impassive but still alert and attentive. "As I see it, you followed deployment protocols on every one of your missions, either Natural Guard or SANDMAN. But the common theme here is the one that I think has reinforced your trauma, Jocasta. These children. The veteran's father. The street musician. The washerwoman. All innocent victims of the Red Kings. They were blameless, either thanks to possession or reprogramming. I'm not sure, though, it's quite as simple as not wanting to harm the innocent, of a subconscious block having been erected at the thought of a victim of the Anunnakku being in physical danger that makes you hesitate in combat."
Claire leans forward, and asks, "Jocasta, could it be that you yourself wonder ... what if they're right?" Claire holds a moment, then says, "That these children knew bliss, that old man knew purpose, that old woman knew love. That all these people weren't somehow innocent, but implicated by their desires, their subconscious choices. And that in confronting them, you confront the side of yourself that maybe thinks... what if they're right?"
"This is not pulhata. This is something far more elementary, far more human. No glyphs, no inhuman awe. Simply the thought, the possibility that given a choice, you might choose wrongly?"
Jocasta turns it over in her mind. "I have thought about it, Dr. Claire. My loyalty to this country has always been strong; my dad built ships for the Navy and he loved America. And ever since I found out about what's really happening, that hasn't changed. I literally can't imagine the world they want to turn this beautiful place into. I know they lie. I know they lie. I know there's a reason that they snatch up the old, the weak, the vulnerable, and they make us have to hurt those people, and it makes me hate them even more." She crushes out her cigarette. "It's just that ... it's never like I think it'll be. I thought I'd be saving people like that and instead I'm just putting an end to their misery. I thought this job might save me, you know?" She laughs.
"I guess, to answer your question, it's not that I ever think I made the wrong choice. It's that I thought standing against them, it would made me different. Instead, I don't think I'm all that different from them after all."
Dr. Claire makes a couple of notes on his pad at that, the first time he's done so all session. "I would invite you to examine those feelings the next time you are in a crisis situation. You could even meditate on it in your calmer moments. Think clearly and carefully about the idea of ... mirroring Their behavior, Jocasta. Even a momentary belief that you are like Them could leave you vulnerable, vulnerable to much worse than a momentary fugue in combat. That ... concept is how They get inside people's heads."
Claire frowns, and then follows up with, "I don't mean to frighten you, of course. But this fear could be at the root of your issues. Your decisions are your own, your identity is your own, and your beliefs are your own. Those things in and of themselves make you completely different from the Red Kings."