What to do about Katrina, Ep. I, Eris, sc. 59-60
In which Katrina shows off her Wechsler attributes, ahem
Welcome to my strange hybrid serialisation of spec fic and conspiracy/spy thriller, in which our iconoclastic anti-heroine, the lovely Katrina, wakes up to find herself young again in a dystopian parallel world Paris, and quickly falls into the clutches of Her Majesty’s Secret Intelligence Service.
This also happens to be my 200th post! Just thought I’d mention it.
If you have just joined us and wish to avoid spoilers, your options are start at the very beginning with My Intro there or the Prelude & Scene One there. You can also skip those first 50k or so words (up to scene 36) and head for the Intermission, which will give you a story-so-far. You would then be able to catch up more quickly. We’ve had at least another 25k words since then, however, so yeah, catching up is becoming a little harder to do each time. Like breaking up, I suppose. It’s worth it, though. Catching up, I mean, not breaking up. Unless you’re some schmaltzy 80s balladist maybe.
I have definitely decided on a title for this first book (Eris - see new title), which will comprise this ‘act one’ which I have been using so far. This means I’m going to have to go back over all those instalments so far and do some renaming. Book two would then be the first half of act two, book three the second half of act two, and then book four would be act three. Otherwise the entire thing would be, well, four novel-lengths worth. And if I ever do get it published, then four separate novels is more profitable than one, if I’m to be mercenary about it (but editors and agents would likely agree with me, so there).
What this also happens to mean is that Katrina’s Journal, which you can start reading there, would in fact be contemporaneous with Book/Episode Five (so you’ll get nice teasers). She must write something new for that soon, as it’s been a while. Fear not, I will poke her about it.
Sorry for the longer intro. On the Previously on Katrina, we got to meet the enigmatic Severin and find out his dark backstory, and that of Smersh-FS (Foreign Section).
Today’s instalment is a total contrast in tone and I think/hope you will appreciate that. It’s far more lighthearted. After Julian (one of Katrina’s chaperones - he has a name now - yay!) informs Peter about Katrina’s possibly ill-advised comment about the Samson Option, Malcolm has completed Katrina’s Wechsler intelligence test and has a few questions to ask her about it.
And to help with lifting your mood, here is another beautiful feline spy for you with eyes from two different worlds.
“I have a recording of what she said. She was burbling a little, as usual. I’ll come over with it rather than send it. It should probably be marked Alpha.”
“Can you precis it for me?”
Julian hesitated over the phone. Peter tried reassuring him the line was secure. But you can never be too sure. “She says Sy Hersh’s Samson Option is a limited hangout and it’s not really about Israel’s nuclear weapons on their own territory. And she says it involves hundreds of devices across the world at major cities and high-value targets, sleeper cells, MKULTRA and programmed multiples. I’m really not comfortable with doing this over the phone, Peter.”
Peter sighed. “Ok, you’d best come over. Where is she now?”
“Finishing her Wechsler with Malcolm. Apparently she’s off the scale. She has a maximum 160 for the verbal.”
“Why am I not surprised?”
“I don’t know. Why aren’t you surprised?”
Peter shrugged, as if that were visible over the phone.
“Should we still let her go swimming?”
“Yes. Definitely. I’m getting the impression if she can’t go swimming she’ll get extremely agitated and something bad will happen. And we wouldn’t want that now, would we?”
“Absolutely not. But without telling you what she said, the most obvious question is simply this. Where did she get this information?”
“I thought you said your performance was twenty points lower than your verbal?”
Katrina shrugged and decided against telling him she’d been lying. Sarah had, after all, told her to do so for the sixteen-year-old test. The one at thirty, however, she could misdirect about that one.
“The one when I was fourteen,” she effortlessly invented, “was the one for children and I just got totally bored and frustrated with it because it was beneath me. Wasn’t Philippa’s fault, I should add. We both agreed she should’ve given me the adult one. The one for children, as you know, is for 6-16-year-olds, right?”
“Sure.”
“Well, there’s obviously a huge difference between six and fourteen. And I went to a Steiner-type school, and that made me a good two years’ more mature than my peer group. Same with all my friends who went to the same school of course. Which included Pippa. Same for intelligence level. At least twenty points higher.”
“I suppose you’ll tell me your world’s average IQ is the same twenty points higher than here, then?”
“I do hope I’m not detecting any resentment, Malcolm?” she smiled.
“No. Honest.”
“Well, it’s not the whole world, but certainly in Britannia. We’ve had the new education system for what, seventeen years now. Plus a healthier life, lots of fun, no poverty, no stressors, good government, no wars, no pollution or pesticides or industrial farming or toxic vaccine adjuvants and all the rest of it. I’m guessing you still have an obesity and autism epidemic, right?”
Malcolm could tell where this was going and attempted to shift her back into focus. “So how come you only got, what did you say, 135 on the performance?”
“I got bored, like I said. I told Pippa why can’t we just skip these baby questions and go straight to the harder ones and she was like, that would be cheating, Katrina. You have to do the whole thing. She still threw some curveballs at me though, ‘cos she knew how intelligent I was.”
Malcolm had already decided to like this Pippa. She was his sort of psychologist.
“Don’t think I’ve got ADHD or some stupid shit like that. I’m perfectly capable of giving something my undivided attention if it interests me. Pippa dismissed that diagnosis right off. Not being able to concentrate on boring mundane stuff is a measure of high intelligence, not low or messed up, and especially creative intelligence. Of course they wouldn’t want people to have that, so they call them ADHD sufferers or something then they shove them full of fucking Ritalin or whatever and dull their brain development. Like blaming depression on the individual rather than the external environment, and shoving them too full of toxic chemicals. Dystopian as fuck, wouldn’t you say?”
“Actually, Katrina, this is one area where I agree with you utterly and completely.”
“Oh?” She was genuinely taken aback. Although on reflection she shouldn’t have been.
“It’s where my own interest in psychology comes from originally, if you were to ask me.”
She contemplated for a microsecond. “Ah! I get it! You were diagnosed with it, weren’t you? I should’ve known, what with your Gittinger. But when you’re out there on your bike or running up that fell you are not really internalising everything, you are at one with the world, with nature. Like when I’m swimming. Others might perceive that as anti-social, but I don’t. It’s the opposite. The planet is our social, after all. What say you?”
Malcolm was being charmed again. And he didn’t mind showing it. “I was twelve years’ old at the time and being assessed for scholarship class for my secondary school. The educational psychologist decided I had ADHD. Fortunately, my parents stood up for me and wouldn’t have it.”
“Bloody good for them. Bravo Malcolm’s parents!” She punched a fist in the air.
He certainly couldn’t help laughing at that one and just gave in to the charm. “Quite. As far as they were concerned there was nothing wrong with me whatsoever. I was just studious and not prone to the kind of mindless hijinks in which most of my peer-group indulged themselves in trying to look hip.”
“Paying for education means half the people in those prep schools are stupid as. You’d just be too polite to admit it.”
He was still laughing. “I’m not going to deny that. Anyway, thanks to them, I escaped medication. And developed something of a distrust of professional psychology. Still, I was curious enough to want to become a psychologist and, well, maybe do something about that.”
“Good for you too! Bravo Malcolm’s career choice!”
“Stop it!” he giggled as if from a tickle. “You still haven’t answered my question.”
“Yes I have. I got distracted and couldn’t concentrate. This time around I was totally curious about your version of the Wechsler and fully engaged with the questions. Do you want to know about our version?”
“It’s different, I suppose?”
“Well, it’s recognisable to you, I would say that. It’s just more varied and fun and also tests for creative and strategic intelligence. The problem with people getting frustrated and bored is fixed by turning most of it into a game. Like those children’s games you’ll know. Jenga, for example. Then there’s that doctor one where you have to navigate this electrified ring around a circuit. You know that one?”
He nodded through a smile. “Sure. Although isn’t that the one with tweezers?”
“Hmm. Yeah, maybe. Anyway. Then there’s my favourite which is based on that game Risk. So you have this group of four counters, the examiner presents you with a series of maps which have groups of the enemy on, and your task is to navigate your group of four to the other side of the board. If you pass an enemy group of four or more, then you lose one of your counters. Your points score is simply how many you make to the other side. And some of the later ones are sort of Kobayashi-Maru type shit.”
“What’s that?”
“Unwinnable scenarios. You know, like in Star Trek.”
“Oh! Sure!” He slapped his forehead.
“Thought you were a Trekkie. You’ve got that thing about you. Bet you used to play D&D too, eh?”
“I’m not going to deny it.” Without even an embarrassed smile.
“Bravo! Me too.”
“Really?”
“Really. I love that stuff. My company also bought some of the IP in the early 2000s, along with my brother’s gaming department at Meyella. Then we did Raven, which was our first massive streaming show, in the mid-2000s. Based on the Ravenloft campaign setting, if you remember that one?”
“I do, yes!” Malcolm was utterly given in to the charm spell by now, and absolutely didn’t care.
“Obviously that setting is quite dark and gothic and so on, meaning we could do it as a sort of 18-certificate type thing. And riding on the success of Jackson’s Lord of the Rings. Ten million minimum an episode, no expenses spared. Game of Thrones came several years’ later so they got away with it too.”
“Were you in that?”
“Game of Thrones? No fucking way, Jose! I’d have to have been mad to be in that. Take my clothes off every other episode, get repeatedly boned by a randy dwarf then gratuitously killed off in some gruesome manner? Fuck that.”
He chuckled. “I meant your one. Raven?”
“Ah. Yeah. I was in that one, actually. As the equivalent of an NPC. Queen Selena, that was me. Dark, gothic, witchy and scheming. Had a pet wyvern. Very high-level demonic magic-user, as it twistingly turned out towards the end. I loved that role.”
“I can see you doing that.”
“Quite.” Then she sighed ostentatiously. “Ok. With the third Wechsler, when I was thirty, I do confess that I lied. Or rather, I cheated on the test. With the performance, so as to confuse their Gittinger analysis.”
Malcolm was still smiling. It was the charm spell, of course. “Who is they, in this instance?”
“Ah. SIS, I suppose. And MI5. Although also the CIA, who would inevitably get a hold of it, one must always assume. It was one of the many conditions for my becoming Russian Ambassador. And they wouldn’t let Pippa do it either. That would’ve been WAIS-3 I guess. Can’t remember when that came out.”
“1997.”
“Ah. Ok.”
“And the one we’ve just done was 2008. WAIS-4.”
“Hmm. Our version four came out a few years’ earlier than that. The children’s versions, that’s to say one for primary school age, one for secondary, was an entirely British affair off the back of the new education system. So every child gets tested every two years from the age of six to sixteen. A lot of adults like having a test too, especially when they’re looking for work, because they know employers like it. It’s not mandatory, though, for employers to demand it I mean. That’d be discrimination.”
“Have you done that one?”
“Hah! You got me there Malcolm.” Equally ostentatiously, she clutched her chest and feigned a bullet through it.
Still the charming spell, naturally.
“Are you going to tell me what that result was? Or is this classified?”
“Hah! No, of course I’ll tell you. Just add twenty to what I originally told you. So my true Wechsler, according to our expanded version, which allows scores up to 200, is 175 for the verbal and 165 for the performance. I was in a good mood when I did it. And that one was Pippa. But I wasn’t lying about my Gittinger. I really am an EFA.”
“You’re the most blatantly obvious EFA on the planet, Katrina.”
“That’s a compliment, right?”
“A reluctant compliment.”
“Gracefully accepted. I’d add a good 10-15 for yourself as well, by the way, if you were doing our version. You strike me as far more intelligent than, what did you say, 135?”
“Equally gracefully accepted.”
“You’re welcome.” She fluttered her eyes at him. “Can I go swimming now?”
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60s balladist even? Although (soz Neil Sedaka) I do prefer the Partridge Family version. That aside - lovely fun episode.
Malcolm seems like too good a guy to be working for the government. I did enjoy this installment, thank you! Lighthearted and mischievous beats dark and evil every time. 😎