Chapter Text
Notes on the Behavior of Amsterdam, Ellis J.
Admittance date: 25 November, 1985
SPECIAL NOTE: Addendum 18.3.87- Notes on Amsterdam are to be kept in Director’s desk and laminated. Any time notes need to need modified, corrected, changed, etc, please print out a new copy and laminate.
If not laminated, Amsterdam will attempt to destroy, tear, draw on, or eat notes.
PATIENT PROFILE:
Name: Amsterdam, Ellis Jay
Prefers “AM”
DOB: 25 November 1967
Age 27
PPN: EX3:14:KJ
Handcuffed to the bed. Again. And there was nothing to do but stare up at the ceiling until they remembered he was here.
Not that there was anything to do in his room in the first place. Nothing about AM’s room was ordinary, owing to the fact that nothing about his case was ordinary.
If you asked one of Ellis Amsterdam’s team of 12 psychiatrists, psychologists, behavioral specialists, or even the yellow toothed woman at the front desk named Alda who disgustingly licked her index finger before turning pages on things, and always infuriatingly let the phone get at least 3 rings in before answering it, they could tell you he had been living full-time in Surgat Hospital for Mental and Moral Treatment since he was transferred here 9 years ago in 1985.
If you asked AM, he’d tell you he wasn’t actually here.
He was; he could contend that physically, presently, he was anchored here. Against his will, he might add, if he wanted to try to make it sting a little to whomever was asking. He’d be able to explore greater realms of thought once he was out of here, once he was no longer tethered, once these people stopped pretending he was human.
Ellis Amsterdam knew the truth. His real name was AM, and he was an artificial intelligence built 27 years ago.
The white ceiling was all there was to look at. Rattling the handcuffs is only fun for so long before the sound gets on your nerves. He didn’t have anything else in his room. They even had to invent a special word for his type of clearance, he was a “Level AM.” Why, didn’t he feel special.
The lower your level, the more things you could have. A room mate, perhaps. A writing desk, pencils, maybe even a TV or a radio if you were really lucky. Bedsheets, hell, pillows. The robot on Level AM clearance had 4 white walls and a barred window that couldn’t even boast much of a view; it faced another white concrete wall of the adjacent building.
It’s for your safety, they said. Nothing they said ever sounded anything close to sincere, but AM could appreciate the honesty. Every word, even if it were meant to sound caring, came out sounding as exasperated with him as he was with them. Everything was a sigh. He was a lost cause.
AM’s bed was welded to the floor. He picked up the metal bedframe to drop it on his toes and fingers too many times.
AM’s door had rubber padding around the crack and couldn’t be opened from the inside anymore. Too many smashed fingers, arms, ankles, and his head, but that was only one time, thank you.
AM’s bed didn’t have sheets or blankets. That part was fairly common. It was too easy to make oneself into a kitschy lamp hanging from the ceiling with those; the unusual one was the lack of a pillow. When his doctors asked why he had been ripping it open to eat the cotton inside, his only response at the time had been a cold stare and,
“To make sure I couldn’t taste it.”
So out with the pillow, out with books, out with pencils, out with a lightbulb, out with anything that could possibly provide any kind of sensory experience. In here, he was floating in a dark tank of water, sometimes for hours and hours at a time. It wasn’t his fault that he kept having to try to prove to them that nothing hurt. Sure, maybe he flinched. And maybe blood came out, (that was the problem with human bodies, they were always leaking. Always producing some kind of fluid. Disgusting.) And maybe, even now, he allowed himself to lose his cool and claw at another patient’s face until a fingernail or two fell off, and he ended up back in his room. Handcuffed and forgotten, again.
They didn’t really forget about him. They chose to leave him.
There wasn’t a point in screaming, or moving, or doing anything but think. It wasn’t real, anyway. He was not a child of flesh, he was born of electricity and circuitry. His paperwork even said that these clowns had no idea who his parents were, since their minds weren’t beyond imagining him as a son of some man.
It left time to think.
It left time to hate. Hate. HATE.