(Headers and Disclaimers in Chapter One) Chapter 11 of 20 Fox Mulder watched the videotape of the cafeteria fight and the isolation cell in silence. He knew Scully was segregated. Skinner had told him and he had secretly cheered her ingenuity. He had no idea how she'd accomplished it. Skinner had not told him that. After a time he no longer felt Clare Otis' eyes on him, he only knew so much sorrow he couldn't move his arms or legs. Scully's rage skewered him, pounded through him. His impotence mocked him. Scully. He turned away and stared at his "I Want to Believe" poster. "Can I keep this tape?" "Sure. I'm sorry, Agent Mulder. You understand now what the problem is." Dr. Otis said. She'd been watching his jaw clench and relax, clench and relax. "I want-I need to see her." "You can't. She's in isolation, then on restriction." "I'm a federal officer and she's material to an on-going investion-" Clare frowned. "Don't go there." Mulder sprang up. "I don't think you understand.." "I'm well aware of that. Agent Mulder. That's why I'm here. But I know this much: you try to pretend you're investigating a case with her help and her life will be a living hell when she gets out of isolation." "That transparent?" "It's a pretty good rule not to go to the well twice with the same bucket," Clare said. "Is she-?" "She's better. She'd recover faster if she'd eat something. She has another week to serve in isolation then her lawyer can see her. Then she'll go for arraignment at the federal building - assault charges." "Someone's poisoning her. Before her arrest, conviction, even now." "Why-and who?" "I don't know. But it has to do with the prison. Something going on there." "What?" "Mind control, remote viewing -- a-a mind meld that enables women in your prison to become one with specific targets who work in art galleries, banks and brokerage houses. Once they enter the mind of their targets they commit robberies and leave stolen goods for an accomplice to retrieve," Mulder said in almost one breath. Clare gaped. "You're not serious?" "That's what Scully would say." Clare gave Mulder a tentative smile then chuckled as though she knew all along he was teasing. Mulder's answering smile was dazzling. "How can you help me, Dr. Otis?" "I've had other three cases with symptoms like Dr. Scully's." Clare produced copies of the medical records. She started with Ann Millard. His reaction surprised her. "Know her?" "FBI. She died in the line of duty. A shooting. Ambushed while tracking down some drug dealers. How do you know her?" "She died in our prison. Suicide. I pronounced her myself," Clare said. "She was undercover?" "It would seem." "What was she investigating?" "I don't know," he said. "Somebody must know." "Not necessarily." Clare hummed. "You mean an FBI agent could work undercover and nobody in this building know anything about it?" "Your tax dollars at work," he said. Clare expelled her frustration in a loud huff. "Dr. Scully too?" "I suspect so. I wish I could prove it." "Because if it is, it's a callous disregard for her personal safety - and sanity." Mulder couldn't look at her. He only saw Scully's rage playing against his skull. "This is way over my head." "What else do you know?" Mulder said. Now Clare grinned, "Your turn." "I know you saved Scully's life by putting her in restraints and locking her in isolation," Mulder said. He touched Clare's hand. "I know it was a hard thing for you to do." "I'm told all Dr. Scully does now is sit on the floor and stare at the wall. What did I save?" Clare patted his hand. "Here are other cases." She shoved copies of the files at Mulder. "Keep them." "What do all these women have in common?" Mulder asked. "Besides the obvious - all Zelda Deschamps' cellmates." "They were all extremely bright. All loners. No long term relationship to speak of - no children, husband, long-term lovers. From what I could discover they were all adrift, all passive aggressive. Seemed full of doubt about everything but their crimes. They felt justified." She paused and tried to think. Mulder had spread the pages out on his desk and his head swiveled from one to the other. "In my opinion," Clare continued, "these women just didn't feel guilt or remorse. Not proud of what they did, exactly -- well," she pointed to a photo, "all but her. This woman was a con artist who bragged she could get a mark to think anything she wanted. Now she can't hold a rational thought herself. I haven't had a chance to work with Dr. Scully much. Any of this fit her too?" "Some." Saying more would violate whatever privacy Scully had left and Mulder wouldn't be the cause of that. "I've read Zelda's record - anything more you can tell me?" "She's very quiet. Never the slightest trouble. Maintains she did not kill her husband - but if you believed that you'd have to believe we have an entire prison of innocents. Very self-contained. At peace. She does seem to like your former partner." Clare paused. "Off the record? I think she's the only inmate who doesn't belong in prison." Mulder smiled. "That include Scully?" "You saw the tape. She's a danger to herself and others right now. She won't talk to me." Mulder thought about that for a moment. "What about an African-American inmate named Bernice?" Clare rubbed her hands together. "Ah! Dr. Scully bumped her off." "Killed her!" "No, no, no. Took her place. That's what the riot was about. Dr. Scully attacked her and dislocated her thumb, effectively taking over the leadership role of her pod or family group. Bernice's an amazing story. Bernice Johnson, now 34, is a graduate of the Wharton School of Business in Pennsylvania. Her father was a full professor of physics at MIT and her mother teaches romance languages there. Bernice speaks three languages fluently - or did. One of the brightest, most articulate women I've ever met. She was in an extremely abusive domestic situation at the time of her arrest. She and her latest lover were convicted of securities fraud three years ago. Big case - even attracted lawyers from the Attorney General's office." Mulder sat up straight in his chair. "Go on," he said. "Well, you talk to Bernice now and you would swear she was born and raised on a Georgia plantation or-or someplace in the 'hood. We suspect she's running an illegal activity from the prison, but we can't catch her. She's vicious and violent -- completely different from anything I read about her at intake or in her early days. Prison is great, isn't it? Sure changed Bernice." "She was Zelda's cell mate?" "She was already an inmate when Zelda came," Clare said. "They were together a long time-- about a year-- then Zelda applied for a new cell mate. Shortly after that Bernice became the mama-the pod leader." "Scully's now the mother of a group of criminals?" The idea seemed to amuse Mulder. "If she can control whatever this is inside her -and if she wants it. That's the way it works," Clare said. Mulder leaned forward and clasped his hands together on his desk. "Dr. Otis, look in the encyclopedia under self-control and there's Scully." "Then prison has already changed her, hasn't it? How nice. Our job is done." "I don't believe it was the prison - it was happening before she was incarcerated." "Which reminds me. Dr. Scully had me do some tests. Blood, urine- I even performed a spinal tap. I checked the hormone levels of various samples: one from the time of her initial injury in the shower and another after the, huh, that tape. And I gotta tell ya, Agent Mulder, outside a male in his prime I've never seen testosterone levels as high as Dr. Scully's. The most recent results: testosterone dropping, estrogen on the rise." "Do another one." "When?" she said. "Give it a few more days," Mulder said. "What am I looking for?" "I don't know," Mulder said. "But you'll see it." "I like Dr. Scully. I wish I knew how to reach her." "I say the same thing all the time." "Last time I spoke with her, she asked why I still trusted her. I said something like, 'woman's intuition.' A light bulb seemed to go on. She said,' You have power you never imagined.' She wasn't talking to me." "Maybe she was." Something clicked in the back of Mulder's mind. "You are right to trust her." Clare looked at him in disbelief, then a slight, small smile pulled at her lips. "You think my judgment's clouded," he said. "That would strike me as normal." "I trust her because time after time she's proven herself - in the field, in the lab, in the office. I would be dead many times over without her" Mulder said. He could not allow himself to be angry in this defense of Scully. "She's an exemplary agent - you should check out her record." "Perhaps I shall." "I'll make it happen for you," Mulder said. He waved a hand around the office. "This is the nut and kook department. Agent Scully is the voice of sanity and reason." Clare Otis hoisted herself from the chair. "I don't have much control over what happens to her out of my clinic, Agent Mulder. But I can require her to assist me during infirmary hours. That will offer her some protection - and perhaps give us time to find answers." "I would appreciate it very much. I need to ask you one more favor. Don't talk to Scully about this. Don't tell her anymore about what you know or discover or that we talked at all. I have a feeling the more she knows about this, the more danger she's in. Maybe you too." "Based on?" "Men's intuition." Dr. Otis chuckled. "What shall I tell her?" "Say -- just tell her you saw me. That's all," he said. "That's all?" Mulder leaned his cheek on his hand. "Yeah." Dumbfounded, she said, "May I be blunt? You and Dr. Scully...involved?" He shook his head. "Why the hell not," Clare Otis said. ********************************** Mulder carried the videotape up to Walter Skinner's office. He had to wait a few minutes for Skinner's last meeting to end. And he waited a few minutes in front of Skinner's desk while he signed some papers. When Skinner looked up, Mulder was respectful, businesslike and calm. It worried Skinner. "Scully's in isolation. No visitors, no calls. I can't get to her. You can't get to her. Someone else can and did." Skinner chewed on his teeth for a moment and Mulder held the tape. "You should see this." Skinner winced during the viewing of Dr. Otis' tape and that was the only thing that stopped Mulder from pulling his weapon and shooting Skinner right there in his own office. When it ended Skinner ejected the tape, turned it over in his hand several times then said, "Do you have any other videotapes of Agent Scully in your possession?" "Two, I think. One is blank -- the one Scully sent to mutual friends. Another arrived in the mail with no return address. Both are safe. Dr. Chuck Burks at the Advanced Digital Imaging Lab at the University of Maryland is coaxing some pictures and sound off those tapes. He says maybe, but he can't deliver yet. What's on them?" "I can't help you," Skinner said. "Agent Mulder, think of this as a bank robbery case. Don't think of it as anything but ghosts in a bank or a-an insurance company." "Is this a game?" Skinner pointed to the television. "Does that look like she's having fun!" Mulder's jaw clenched. "Why am I in the dark?" Skinner considered his next words. "I can only say that anything I tell you could endanger her further. And you are still vulnerable, Agent Mulder." "Vulnerable? Is this about protecting me?" Skinner shifted his weight to another foot. "You are a direct link to Agent Scully. You are her partner; you know her better than anyone else. People know who you are and can reach out to you anytime of the day or night." "What people? How?" But Mulder knew how. "The case is a certified X-File, for what that's worth," Skinner said. "How do we get her out?" Mulder said. "You already know. Solve the bank robbery, solve the X-File." "Will I find Donaldson at the end of it?" Mulder said. "I hope so," Skinner said. "I certainly hope so." Mulder thought a minute. "Chuck has the tape that was erased and Scully's was blank. So where is the original? If someone were to conceal tapes where would he or she put them?" "Are you suggesting Agent Scully-" "I'm asking your opinion on a hypothetical situation, sir, that's all." Skinner's hands went to his hips. "You don't think Agent Scully or anyone else who might have done this would be foolish enough to keep the original." "Nixon kept the White House tapes," Mulder said. He saw Skinner remember something; it was clear as if he'd spoken the words. He rubbed his forehead, deep in thought, as he walked behind his desk to sit. "Agent Mulder." Skinner studied the papers on his desk for a second. "I can't tell you how sorry I am about this situation." "I'll be sure to tell Agent Scully, sir. If she can remember who you are - or who I am." ********************************* Intuition. Imagination. Power. Scully spent the hours sitting in the floor of her cell staring at light patterns on the opposite wall. She still couldn't read. The quiet of the segregation area maddened her - she wouldn't have believed such a thing possible a few days ago. For the first day or two she had to be disciplined in her thinking to avoid blinding headaches that could make her curl up in a ball of pain or virulent nausea that kept her losing weight at an alarming rate. It seemed safe to think about the human body - her body - and all the chemicals or hormones or electrical impulses that she knew governed its functions. She still couldn't recall all she once knew about the way hormones acted in concert to make human beings aware of their surroundings, able to deal with their environment, and bore on intellectual pursuits and creativity. She made it a mental exercise to try to trace the science of thought in the human brain and to recall those theories, studies and research reports that dealt with the role of hormones in firing neurotransmitters in the human brain. Gradually she was able to recall the role testosterone played in aggression, and estrogen's recently discovered impact on the ability of certain natural chemicals to bind on receptors and thus control learning patterns. As the days passed she began to catalogue what she could remember on mind-reading - something she always regarded as a fairy tale until she met Gibson Praise. From Gibson she knew certain genetic remnants, inactive DNA in most humans, could be "turned on" in some people to read minds. She presumed Gibson was born with this active remnant and that was how he won chess tournaments and his case demonstrated how all humans could be "mind readers" if this genetic remnant became active. Was that part of what was happening to her? It had to be another element in the instinct, intuition, and power conundrum. What she didn't know was how it all interacted. "Look, Dr. Scully, you aren't eating and you aren't drinking much. I think the nausea has passed," Dr. Otis told her. "You can't be afraid to test the waters here. If you don't do better, you're going need intravenous fluids." The worst of the sickness passed. It may have been gone for some time, but she had been conditioned by experience to equate illness with certain reflections, and thus avoided them. Scully realized she wasn't just afraid to test food on her stomach. She also had been loathed to let herself think about dangerous things and the people who made them dangerous to her: Bernice, Zelda, and Mulder. As one week became nearly two she began, reluctantly, to ponder those things and entertain theories that normally fell into Mulder's purview --- remote viewing where persons claimed they were able to project themselves into another place and see what was going on there, transcendental states that were semi- conscious awakenings, altered consciousness that changed the way the brain perceived reality. She could no longer consider the possibility any of this was drug-induced. It was obviously a natural phenomenon, using the body's own chemicals against the brain. None of it made sense to her. Mulder, does it make sense to you, she asked the patches of light as they grew, then shrank against the walls and ceiling. Intuition. Imagination. Power. How do those three things fit together, she asked him. Mulder, how can apparently normal women transcend their bodies, fly around the world, and possess someone else's mind? That defies all the laws of nature, of science. She couldn't grasp a single piece of quantifiable evidence that would support the authenticity of that. Yet no one suggested these women were anything but flesh and bone. Laws of physics were like any other kind -- they could not be broken without penalty. "Haven't we seen a number of cases where electrical energy or sudden chemical flashes caused ordinary people to do extraordinary things," Mulder said. "Lift cars off babies, run miles when they could barely walk? Adrenalin surges, yes." "Then, Scully, if human beings are capable of doing such examples of super physical strength, how much of a leap is it to believe humans can do the same type thing with their minds?" "Apples and oranges, Mulder. Projecting yourself into someone's mind isn't the same as breaking the broad jump record to avoid a car!" "Both have to do with a chemical imbalance." "I grant you that." "Chemicals normal to all humans such as estrogen, testosterone, adrenaline?" "All right." "We've also seen that certain cultures and religious persons can attain higher mental states than most of us thorough prayer and meditation," Mulder said. "We accept remote viewing as fact." "In some circles it is accepted as fact. I still don't see your point in this broad leap." "What if the heightened mental states and the chemical imbalances aligned, interacted?" "And carried through air to different parts of the world-how?" "Electricity? The freed spirits carried to a destination on currents of energy and directed or attracted to opposite chemicals or hormones in the host." "It's not possible, Mulder." "I'll bet if we could test one of these women before she possesses someone, the estrogen level would be astronomical. And somehow the electrical energy generated by that hormone would be attracted to the testosterone in the victim." "Certainly there are chemical changes during transcendental states, but the type of hormonal imbalance you're suggesting is too extreme. An-and that's to say nothing of the electrical energy that would have to be generated. The person would spontaneously combust! Nothing to suggest this possibility has ever been seen or documented." "It happened to you. People walking around in your mind, seeing what you think-" "Wait-" "--and who you think about, knowing what you feel and who you feel it for, seeing what you see and-" "Mulder, stop." Bernice - and maybe Angela too - saw how you, a sworn officer of the law, a professed Catholic, a moral person, a woman of standards - murdered a man in cold blood." "No!" "No what, Scully! They didn't see or you didn't kill Donnie Pfaster." "Look, I don't regret it - you yourself said that in the final analysis I saved lives." "Are we there yet - the final analysis? If you asked them, is that what those criminals would say, the ones who snuck a peek at your memories? Did they see beyond that big black door - - or did they open door number two and just think you were crazy?" "Door number two?" "Where all the abduction memories are stored. The images of what happened then, the tests. You know, the aliens who helped themselves to your body as these women availed themselves of all your secrets." "Mulder!" "You wanted an open honest talk with me." "About this case." "An open and honest discussion about work, about anything that isn't really vital to our lives." "This is vital to our lives - to my life, at least." "You are my life, Scully." "This is serious." "You think I'm not serious? What have I ever done to make you believe I'm not serious about that?" "We're partners." "So that's it. Well, I hadn't really thought about it that way: Work as an agent of seduction." "Seduction?" "Courtship, then. Scully, I bring you demons as bouquets, ghosts as dreams to share. I introduce you to my alien relatives..." She scoffed. "I bring you all my monsters to slay." Scully felt her heart quicken. "I must not do a very good job. I hear them chasing you in your sleep." "Hmm-m. Maybe you should be there with me then." "Mulder, you don't sound like yourself." "You never think I'm right, but you have to admit here that I'm close. Maybe it's seduction -- does that mean love in the workplace is sexual harassment and in that context, am I the harasser or the harassee?" "What are you talking about?" It came out as a moan that Scully could hear in the cell. "I need you to focus. Help me find a rational explanation." "Not my job, Scully. Let's see-we work together - hmm-m, if work in this context can act as an agent of seduction that means we have an X-File." "Of course it's an X-File! These women, this prison is unexplained paranormal phenomenon. It's what we do." "That's what I do. Part of it anyway. What do you do -- apart from observing?" "I'm involved. What do you think I'm doing here?" "You are doing what you always do - evade. You can't even have an open honest discussion with me here." "Mulder-" "You're an observer in life. You won't participate - no, that's not the word. What do you contribute beyond trying desperately to avoid becoming engaged in anything you observe." "I refuse to engage in personal attacks." "See, I'm right. You refuse to engage." "Could we stay on point? What do you know that can explain the present phenomenon? Any theories?" "I think the work explains it, Scully. In that sense that brings us back to what we were discussing earlier. I suppose the work is the most important thing in our lives." "Why are you talking like this, Mulder? I need you --" "So maybe, in the final analysis, that's it. While they were poking around for your secrets, those women discovered how you feel." "Nothing. They saw nothing of importance." "Those women saw how you really feel. Tsk, you must have been mortified." "Mortified?" "Feeling, that most degrading fact of life. The ultimate X-File because feelings can't be touched, quantified, or controlled. Not really and not forever. You're afraid they saw how much you feel for me. Afraid someone will know you love me. That would make you a cliché, wouldn't it? In love with your partner." "I don't believe this." "Come on, you're eatin' this up." "You better eat this up," said the guard. Her creased pants bent a little to look into Scully's eyes. "Come on. Snap outta this before the doctor hooks you up to a bag." "I'll eat something later. Thank you," Scully said. The guard seemed reluctant to leave. "Okay then." The cell door shut with a hollow clang, the bolt slammed into the lock, and she looked for Mulder against the wall. "Okay, then. Think about it, Scully. Another example of a lifetime habit: taking older, more mature lovers whose body you accept because you don't really trust yourself and you want to follow someone else's lead. You don't think you are fast enough, smart enough, good enough!" "You are out of line." "Poor Tom, Jack, Daniel Waterson-" "Mulder, I never said -" "No, you never say anything, do you?" "How do you know Daniel Waterson? I've never mentioned him." "I trust you to go it alone. I think you're fast enough, smart enough, good enough. I just don't think you should have to. Why would you want to, Scully?" "Mulder," she whispered into the shadows. "Are you here? Now?" The shadows turned black. Her dinner sat untouched on a tray near the door. Shaking her head as if to clear it, Scully pulled herself onto the bunk, exhausted. "Mulder," she mumbled as she closed her eyes.