Lost Past by Teresa McCullough, Zachary McCullough

the risks and believed them to be worth the gain.
                  “It is not ridiculous. If you don’t want to take the risk, assuming there is a risk, you should say so now.”
                  “I’m in,” said Cara, too promptly to have thought it over. Jun and Pedro also chimed in with their concurrence, after brief pauses.
                  “I didn’t expect you to stay out,” John said. “However, I want recordings of what I say distributed as widely as possible, as quickly as possible. You can’t keep a secret if thousands of people have it in their computers. I want you to prepare for sending the information to a large number people. I don’t just mean the Internet. They may be able to stop that. I don’t even want to know what you are doing. What I don’t know, I can’t betray.”
                  When John returned to his apartment, Tom was in the shower. Linda apologized for going into his computer. He waved it aside. “I want you both to leave tomorrow and go back to school. You aren’t really accomplishing anything by staying here. If there is any news, it will reach you anywhere.”
                  “That’s not why you want us to leave,” Linda said.
    How did she know? John wondered. “No. I’m going to do something that is against your father’s advice. I have a feeling it might be dangerous. I am going to tell Eric and the others everything I know about psychiatry. I may not get another chance. I am not sure why I kept it a secret, but…”
                  “You didn’t,” Linda interrupted.
                  “What?” John said.
                  “You didn’t keep it a secret. You let people figure out what was going on and copy what you were doing.”
                  “I could hardly not cure patients.”
                  “Of course you could, if it was important to you. Also, you could persuade people it wasn’t what you did, but, oh, coincidence, or how the patients reacted to you. But you weren’t a resident for six months before you had a following. You steered them to watch what you were doing.” She wasn’t speculating, John realized; she was confident of what she said. 
                  John stared at Linda. “I didn’t tell you…”
                  “Of course not. It wasn’t hard to figure out.”
     
                  John’s body demanded rest, but his mind wouldn’t let him sleep. Somewhere in his mind was knowledge of his past. He went through a list of things he would do if he were trying to obtain the information from a patient. He reminded himself that dreams were sometimes revealing and therefore sleep should help. He also wondered about Linda. He didn’t think he taught her how to read people, yet how did she read him?
    John dreamed about aliens. They were a little less than five feet tall and were a light bluish gray. Some of them had faces that made sense. The ears were just entry holes and the nose was on the back of the head near the top. Others were missing a mouth and thin. The ones with mouths varied from very thin to very fat. Their two arms were more like tentacles without discernable joints. The legs were concealed under clothing, but the feet were almost like flippers. In his dream, he felt respect, even worship, but no repulsion.
    The dream was so vivid that he felt it must mean something. When he tried to come up with a name for these aliens, he had no word in English, but in Vigintees , they were the Plict .
     
                  Eric emailed him the three papers he published, as well as the draft of one he was working on. After Tom and Linda left, John read them with increasing disappointment. He was shocked at what they contained, not because they were innovative, but because in his mind, they weren’t. Was psychiatry that primitive? How was it that John knew more than