Free Thought Crimes by Tim Richards Page A

time re-reading your journal. Re-reading leads to double-guessing and the fear that you might be disclosing more than you need to disclose. Re-reading his diary, Sam was shocked to find mention of masturbatory activity associated with lurid fantasies about the Jacket he knew as Laura.
    Sam knew that no professional would be disconcerted by sexual responses, least of all one who utilised Laura’s style of interview. His double-guessing related to a concern that an experienced participant shouldn’t be seen to be naïve – so wilfully naïve – about the masking techniques employed in high-risk studies. It’s one thing to believe that a Jacket like Laura might flirt with her experimental subjects, it’s another to want to believe it.
    Altering journal entries was risky. Sam had made one or two deletions in the past, but he wouldn’t say that he’d got away with it. You’d never know how such an action might impact on a researcher’s understanding of a participant. He chose to believe that the erasures had a nil-effect because he had no choice. The alternative was getting lost up your own arsehole.

    Troubled by the sight of two men on a scaffold outside the window, Sam requested a break in the interview.
    When Laura left the room, Sam imagined that she would ask the men to move for the duration of the session, but she returned in the company of a Suit carrying a file thick as a gorilla’s upper arm.
    The Suit told Sam that early results from the current study were unpromising. Worse, they pointed to a coming tragedy. Short of prayer, there was little the Suit or Laura could do. Not unless Sam consented to trebling the dose of AR 2006.
    This treble dose would merit an increased payment of $350 per week, as compensation for the raised stakes.
    In reality, the subject had no choice, and Sam heard their proposal with unaffected calm. He knew that Suits hit you with this Prepare to die, we’re hoping for a miracle stuff from time to time. Someone less conversant with the nature of the business would crumble and beg them to up the dose.
    But once you’ve chosen to be Mr Placebo, never loosen your grip on that confidence. It’s always in the researchers’ interest to slop black paint on the darkness at the end of the tunnel. Inclined to believe that Suit and Jacket were fudging, Sam was now convinced that Laura’s study related to morbid anxiety. Her conspicuous interest in masturbation frequency and the intensity of his ejaculations was a ploy. But Sam wouldn’t mention these suspicions in the journal. After signing a permission to treble his AR 2006, he walked home and waited with some impatience for nothing to happen.

    Something did happen.
    Sam received a letter purporting to be from an investigator acting for a legal company. These lawyers were currently engaged in a class action. Could Sam confirm that he had participated in voluntary psychological experiments while a student at university?
    Was he aware that the professor who authorised those experiments had acted illegally? This man, McGibbon, was subsequently found to be engaged in research for a US intelligence agency. It’s probable that his student volunteers would have experienced difficulties as a result of these experiments.
    In the most commonly reported side-effect, participants imagine themselves as the subject of a long sequence of scientific studies. Sam’s name had come to the legal firm’s attention when they found it on a computer listing of current Australian employees of the intelligence agency.
    Knowledge is as much a matter of personal belief as it is about choosing between competing arguments.
    Some experimental subjects would find it exciting to imagine a brainwashed, stolen life, to feel that their misery derived from one huge fuck-up, and that an antidote for their unhappiness might now be found. If you bought any of these Big Victim scenarios, you might as well kiss your