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Most people come to recollectionists because they want to remember something good, he’d been scolded.
Kennex snarled to himself. If he could just get the clue that he needed, that would be recollecting something good. As it was, he just had a collection of flashes, shouts, tearing flesh, and sulfur up his nose, over and over, that ought to be resolving themselves into a case. First-hand accounts weren’t admissible as evidence after repeated Recollection treatment, but he if he could at least pull out some kind of clue…
The recollectionist was just giving him shit again about how he was weak, how he shouldn’t be reliving this trauma so soon, even though he’d been awake for over six months now. But it the memory itself wasn’t going to hurt him, and if the other man didn’t understand, well—he was a doctor, for god’s sake, not a cop. It wasn’t Kennex’s problem if the recollectionist bitched at him. He wouldn’t actually let a patient get hurt, right?
But it was Dorian who had awoken him from a deep seizure, twenty minutes later. The recollectionist was cowered in a corner, saying, “I told him not to do it, I told him it was too dangerous,” as if Kennex himself had connected the wires to his brain and hit the button.
The recollectionist had known Kennex seven months, had feared him as an officer of the law, and had apparently been planning to do nothing to prevent his brain damage. This DRN didn’t know him at all. Furthermore, “Dorian” was actually a synthetic with a programmed sense of ethics. Kennex felt sure he couldn’t really value a human life, that he was just like that MX who’d abandoned him in the ambush yesterday… two years ago… continued to do, in that one event that looped endlessly in his brain.
And Dorian had broken him out of that seizure, just when he’d been on the goddamn edge of some kind of breakthrough. Anna… had she really been there? She’d betrayed him as well. Or maybe she’d betrayed him by being in the wrong corner of his brain at the wrong time. Maybe it was her fault. Maybe it was the recollectionist’s fault.
Anyway, it certainly wasn’t Kennex’s fault.