Thank you for the tag, @boatcats!
Two (2) people left comments last week on my 2014 story, "The Persistence of Memory", in which Elementary's Joan Watson wakes up in the 22nd century. I ended up pulling out all my old files for the sequel I'd been working on lo these many years ago, and one thing led to another.
Specifically, led to new words written over today's lunch hour:
Continuing her way through the case file the robot had brought, Joan was surprised to find its own video and audio recordings of events it had witnessed. Many of its recordings were of Sherlock hypothesizing during the course of his own investigations, and she laid those aside: the synergy of multiple investigators would need to wait until she had formed her own, preliminary hypotheses. Instead, she began the meticulous business of working her way through the robot’s “primary source” video and audio files, beginning with Fenwick’s defeat of his cryptosis programming.
That immediately sent her back to the library to discover what cryptosis was. Cryptosis: rehabilitative neurological reprogramming that nearly eliminated the need for imprisonment. It was used for mental illness and substance abuse, also -- and that led down a rabbit hole of what substance abuse treatment looked like in these modern times. Her own training had been to radically respect the autonomy of the patient, as a matter of both ethics and and effectiveness. Now, it seemed, society had been seduced by the siren song of alleged effectiveness into giving up its ethics: her skin crawled at the marketing materials showing happily cryptosized people who seemed to bear no resemblance to their former surly selves. Was this what Sherlock would have faced, had he been born into this century, instead of the twentieth?
Tagging: @beanarie, @phoenixfalls, @amindamazed, @oldshrewsburyian, @educatedinyellow.
