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Session Two

“I hate my job.” said Charly with a snarl. She folded her arms and dropped onto the patient’s couch near Doctor Evans’ plastiwood desk.

“So, why did you do it all those years?” he asked. Doctor Evans was surprised to see Charlene walk in. After their first session he was certain that she wouldn’t come back. It wouldn’t get her out of jail any faster. She knew that now. Yet here she was, her face a mix of determination and anger. Her prison clothes hung from her lithe form seductively and for a second he asked himself, what if?

“Because I’m not a morning person. I can’t work a nine to five.”

“Take a second shift if you like. Or a third if you like nights so much.” He smiled and put his pen down. He had been hand writing notes about his last patient, a computer hacker who called himself Jaz. For some patients it’s safer to avoid putting their notes on the computer altogether.

“Ha ha. You’re a real card Doc. They should put you up there on Laugh Attack. You’d win millions. Christ, I would think you’d know what I meant by that already.” She ran her fingers through her hair and gathered it into a ponytail. Using a rubber band she liberated from his desk she tied the ponytail.

“Should I? I’m sorry but I don’t.”

“I hate repeating myself Doc, maybe you should review your session notes once in a while. Like I said last time, I can’t do the wage slave thing. It isn’t my bag. I mean, I like running the shadows and all but—”

“But you don’t like all of it.” He finished her thought. Charly nodded quietly in response before he continued. “What part of shadowrunning do you dislike the most, Charlene?”

She thought about it for a second. “Honestly? The people I have to deal with. You may not know this but shadowrunners are dirty people. Ronin; They don’t have any idea of honor, or even friendship for that matter. You don’t make a lot of friends out there Doc. Not in my business.”

“Do you have any friends?”

“What kind of question is that Doc? Of course I have friends!”

“And?” He twirled his finger in the air, daring her to say more.

“And they’re good people? What do you want from me? They’re people who help me out from time to time, that’s all. I probably would be up drek creek without them. You wouldn’t believe how many times their data has kept my hoop out of the fire.”

A smile crept to the Doctor’s face. It wasn’t an evil smile. More so a mischievous one; the kind you would find upon a child’s face once the cookie jar had been emptied or a big sister’s diary had been ‘misplaced’. “These friends you describe, how often do you see them when you don’t need something work related?”

Charly wasn’t paying attention to him anymore. She had decided to attend to her hair again, undoing her ponytail and raking her fingers through her loose curls. “Hmm? Oh I don’t know, not a lot I guess. Why?”

“Because they don’t really sound like friends to me, Charlene. They sound more like acquaintances. Contacts, if you will.”

“Contacts.” She repeated flatly.

“Yes. People whom you rarely see outside of business, but are almost always there for you when you need them because you pay them to be. People on the payroll, people who owe you favors.”

“Contacts.” She said again, nodding absently. Doctor Evans smirked at her.

“I know what you’re trying to do Doc. That’s fragged up.”

“What am I trying to do, Charlene?” His voice sounded genuine.

“Hmm I don’t know. Let’s see. You’re trying to make me feel like I don’t have anybody. No friends, no fun, no life. I’m just a gun with tits, isn’t that right?” She tried to mock his voice, but ended up sounding like her nose was clogged.

Doctor Evans bit back his laughter. “Is that how you feel about yourself, Charlene? A gun with tits it was?”

“Don’t try to turn this around on me tricky. I’ve had just about enough of you and your psycho-froid crap. No matter what you try to pump me full of, I know that I am a real person and not just some programmable shell the corps use when they need someone geeked.”

“Prove it.” He said suddenly.

“Excuse me?”

“Prove to me that you’re more than just a shell. I want you to prove to me that you’re a real person.” Doctor Evans folded his arms across his chest and looked down at her from the tip of his crooked nose. A smirk still hung on his lips as if it were natural for that expression to be there.

“You can’t prove something like that. It’s like being a virgin. You either are, or you aren’t. And in regards to your stupid little question about being real, I’d like to say that I fall into the are category, thanks. So we can leave it at that.”

“Not quite. To go on your analogy, you can prove whether or not someone is a virgin. Just like I can prove whether or not you’re as ‘real’ as you say you are.”

Charly sighed. She let her head fall back on the couch and stared at the ceiling fan. “I’ve been to the gynecologist before Doc, not that it’s any of your business, but I know what they do to find out those things. If what you have in mind to figure it out is anything like that then you can go on believing what you want because there ain’t no fraggin way I’m gonna—”

“No, no nothing like that Charlene. It is a test, but not a physical one.”

She sat up frowning. It wasn’t until then that Doctor Evans noticed that the top two buttons on her prison shirt were undone. A gold cross dangled against the pink flesh there. What if?

Charly protested, “I hate tests, even the multiple choice ones. And those tips teachers give you? Lies and propaganda. It’s never C! Don’t believe the hype.”

“No Charlene. It’s not like that either. These are just some questions to make you think. If you can answer them all, I’ll believe what you said about not just being a shell. If you can’t—”

“If I can’t, then we’re both in a lot of trouble. You’re gonna have to figure out why I don’t have the answers, and I’m gonna have to sit here and listen to you do it.”

“Heh, fair enough.” Doctor Evans swiveled his chair so that he was facing his computer. He flipped the on switch and it hummed to life. It wasn’t difficult to call up the file he was looking for. In a few moments Doctor Evans was ready to begin.

“Ok Charlene, I’m going to start with a simple question. Have you ever rejected a job because of ethical reasons?”

Charly thought about this for a moment and then shook her head.

Doctor Evans looked confused. “By that, are you saying that you have never been approached with a job that you found ethically objectionable, or that you’ve carried out the job despite that?”

She shrugged and said, “Business is business Doc. Right or wrong, ethics have no part in business.”

“Are you saying that if you were hired to kill a Nun for example, you would see no problem in doing so?”

Charly shrugged again, “I’m not catholic. A nun is just another slitch wearing black. It wouldn’t make any difference to me whether she lived or died.”

“My mistake. I saw the cross around your neck. I just thought that it meant something.”

“It does.” Charly clasped her fingers around the cross. She looked down at her shirt shamefully and then closed the buttons all the way to the top, hiding her cross from view.

Doctor Evans stopped looking at the list of questions he had prepared. “Tell me about the cross, Charlene.”

“No.”

“Charlene, if you aren’t willing to answer my questions, we aren’t going to be able to make any progress.”

Charly pointed at the computer screen. “You want progress Doc, you stick to the questions you already wrote up.”

“Ok Charlene, we’ll move on.” Doctor Evans glanced at the screen for a split second and then said, “Have you ever been in love?”

“Yeah. Well, I thought I loved someone once. Maybe I really did.” Charly sighed and began to fidget with her hair again.

Doctor Evans rested his chin in one hand and watched. “Tell me about how you felt.”

“Have you ever been in love Doc?”

“I’m not the subject here. We’re talking about you.”

“Come on Doc, you’ve been shootin’ questions at me since I met you and I still don’t know drek about you. Hell, I don’t even know your first name.”

He grinned. “It’s Mark.”

“Nice to meet you Mark. Have you ever been in love?”

“This question seems very important to you. Why do you think that is?”

Charly leaned forward and smiled. “Because it matters, and because I don’t think you’ve ever been in love Doc.”

“What makes you say that?”

“Because if you’ve been in love before you wouldn’t have asked me how it felt. You would have known that you can’t describe love. It’s not even a feeling, in love. It’s a state of being.”

Doctor Evans fixed Charly with a quizzical stare but didn’t say anything. Charly smirked at his silence and said, “Exactly.”

“Exactly?”

“Exactly what I thought. You don’t even know about love. Empty shells can’t love. It’s not in the programming. So I guess I’m not an empty shell then am I? Maybe you are.”

Doctor Evans sighed and folded his hands in his lap. He took a deep breath before speaking. “What you’re doing is called transference. Basically that’s when you shift the burden of your problems on to someone else. By changing the subject of our conversation to whether or not I have been in love or whether or not I am the person who doesn’t have anything outside of their work, has no function other than to distract us from our goal.”

Charly chuckled. “Come on Doc, that’s the biggest load of drek I’ve ever heard! Why don’t you be honest and admit that I hit a nerve.” She reached over and patted his knee mockingly. “It’s ok that you’ve never been in love. You’ve at least had sex haven’t you?”

His eyes lit up and he slid his chair back away from her a few inches. “Charlene! If you aren’t willing to take our sessions seriously, I’m going to have to advise that we stop having them.”

“I am serious Doc. I’m answering your questions and even putting up with your bulldrek theories. The least you could do is indulge me on a few questions of my own. How else am I supposed to trust you?”

“Ok Charlene, I’ll indulge you for a moment. Two questions and then we get back to business ok?”

“Deal.” She crossed her legs Indian style on the couch. “I’ll start with something simple. What do you do for fun?”

He shrugged. “I have hobbies. I fish a lot and I have an extensive simsense collection.”

“Ever use BTL’s?”

“No, all my simsense is on the up and up. Any other questions?”

“Yeah just one.” She dropped her chin into her hand and asked, “Have you ever killed anyone Doc?”

He looked at her for a moment and then looked down at his watch. With a frown he said, “I’m afraid our time is up.”