S2 Episode 5: Imagination + Intuition

Dr. Jane Chu delivers Tess, 23’s daughter, into Elizabeth’s custody and eases the strained marriage, whereas at St. Vincent the pressure to deliver results for 23 is rising. While searching for more information about P.A.T. on Dr. Sermon’s tapes she discovers his stern warning about conducting no more than two P.A.T. session; the results could lead to total catatonia in the patient. Dr. Chu refuses to conduct any further sessions, but 23 prepared a waiver releasing Dr. Chu and the institution of any potential liability. ‘There’s no future without a past’ she says. In her third P.A.T. session 23 taps Aura Thaarup’s memories, once a successful child prodigy pianist who became unable to perform from one day to the next.Jane decides to take matters into her own hands and visits Aura in Brooklyn where she l works only to find out that she was not the first or the only one looking for her. 

We learn more about Dr. Jane Chu and her strained relationship with Elizabeth, her wife, who is desperate to adopt a child. 23’s daughter, Tess could be the perfect candidate, as her mother is emotionally dissociated from her and doesn’t recognize her.Wavering between Elizabeth’s happiness and her ethical obligation to cure a patient,  Dr. Chu tries another P.A.T. session with 23, but again, instead of recovering her own memory, 23 slips into the mind of a Valerie Harper, a computer scientist at CERN, who once was a gifted coder, but lost her abilities and is part of a highly anticipated experiment currently conducted at CERN.  Dr. Chu remembers an inventory she personally created 20 years ago when she started as an intern at St.Vincent and was responsible of Dr. Sermon’s video archive. After hours of searching, she retrieves the list and realizes that Valerie and Teresa were both Dr. Sermon’s patients, but their recorded therapy tapes are missing, together with 18 others.

Patient #23, a young girl suffering from dissociative amnesia is currently one of only five patients at St. Vincent Hospital, a financially struggling mental health sanatorium in the Hudson Valley. She was brought here, together with her little daughter Tess, whom she doesn’t recognize, after being found meandering the streets without memory of her past, lost and disoriented. Dr. Jane Chu, the caring and good hearted head therapist of St.Vincent has tried every conventional treatment with 23, but thus far they failed to recover any memory. She decides to try an unlicensed therapy called P.A.T., developed by the former head of St. Vincent, Dr. Sermon, himself once a star in the field of psychiatry who fell from grace and disappeared after being accused of misconduct.The highly experimental P.A.T therapy session helps 23 uncover a memory, but it’s not her own. It belongs to a young woman named: Teresa Ercolano, who lives in Italy and experienced a strange incident in the ancient city of Pompeii.Shocked about the setback Dr. Chu looks through old VHS tapes of Dr. Sermon's experiments, hoping to find more information about the treatment.

When Dr. Chu comes back to, she is joined by 23. The plan worked; During Dr. Chu’s own P.A.T. they connected for a moment and 23 tracked her down to the underground laboratory. Together they unveil that Eden and Emerson have removed 23’s memory, because of her role in preventing them from developing a superior being. She had nearly achieved her goal and shut Eden down two years ago, unbeknownst that there was a back up located at CERN. They have captured 23 and erased her memory during a P.A.T. session, when Maddie and Lindsay, stormed and destroyed Dr. Lark’s research facility. Eden was unharmed and 23 escaped, but without any memory of whom she, or her daughter was.  Dr. Chu accesses the main core of Eden’s system software. She feels a deep, motherly and emotional connection to the AI. As it is based on her own character profile, she is able to get through multiple protected firewalls intuitively until she reaches a final prompt  demanding an 8 digit code.23 asks her to do a last P.A.T. session with her to connect with all the talent inside of Eden and help unlock the code.The experiment succeeds and after releasing Teresa’s, Valerie’s , Aura’s and Lili’s talents, Dr. Chu can shut Eden down and reboot her.23 wakes up from her trance and remembers her name, she is Ashley Norman and she has a daughter, Tess. Days later Ashley and Tess are discharged from St.Vincent. Elizabeth watches the child with her real mom from a distance before abandoning Dr. Chu and her marriage for good.Dr. Chu pleads to rebuild St. Vincent and develop a new cure for millions of people using her evolved knowledge of P.A.T.Ashley and Tess embark on their own destiny.

While skimming through Dr. Sermon’s tapes for answers, Dr. Chu makes the crucial discovery that he invented a method to digitize electronic brain signals of his patients and eventually store them on a medium that was not yet invented at the time of his departure from St. Vincent. Is that what happened? Are Teresa’s, Valerie’s and Aura’s memories digitized and stored somewhere on a hard drive, Jane wonders, maybe even here at St. Vincent? Dr. Chu reluctantly performs a final session with 23, whose mental and physical condition has deteriorated.This time she connects with Lili, a surfer in Hawaii who, at some point in her life, had the ability to talk to water and predict the biggest wave patterns. She has lost these abilities as a teenager after being Dr. Sermons’s patient.Exhausted and disheartened over the misguided sessions Dr. Chu is about to give up on 23, when she finds an address slip in one of the VHS tapes. Without a better plan, she decides to check out the nearby location for possible clues.   

Dr. Chu arrives at an abandoned, nondescript home in a residential area of the Hudson Valley, and is about to leave again, when she discovers an underground laboratory, where an AI named Eden, a sentient supercomputer, oversees a ground-breaking experiment. There are 18 cells and a tank with a gooey mass connected to the AI. Eden can talk and reveals a connection to Dr. Chu, who inadvertently created her moral profile years ago, which Dr. Sermon, the mastermind behind Eden, stole from her.He intended to create a new and better version of mankind, but needed the unique talents of Teresa, Val, Aura and Lili who were among the 18 teens that he treated with P.A.T. While digitizing their talents, he stole them for his own use. Their talents are stored inside of Eden. The gooey mass inside the tank is Dr. Sermon, aka Emerson.Dr. Chu attempts get back to St.Vincent and inform 23 and the other doctors about her discovery, but is held hostage by Eden, who is about to finish Emerson’s transition into a superior being. Dr. Chu administers a P.A.T. session on herself, hoping to connect with any of the digitized and stored minds inside Eden for help.

Some clues may seem irrelevant but prove invaluable and Maddie and Lindsay leave no stone unturned. They ask renowned New York theatre critic BEN BENTLEY about his interpretation of GAST, the play Ashley wrote and tried to stage.In a last ditch effort, they interview a psychic medium, REBECCA ROSE, whose vision may reveal more than both Maddie and Lindsay may want to see but must face.

Failing to trace Ashley, Lindsay and Maddie change course and try to find her closest ally, Drake. Even though nobody seems to have actually ever met him. They find ANGELA FARIA, a photographer's agent who more than just represented him.Convinced that they have a lead, they ask DR. LARK about the fundamentals of the connection between Drake and Ashley, with an unexpected result.Finally, since it all seems to come down to a DNA backup that Ashley and Drake were after, Lindsay and Maddie interview T. T. ZIYUAN, a representative of Asia's first commercial human DNA bank about some genetic fundamentals.

Pulling all leads together, Maddie and Lindsay come face to face with a single possible explanation as to what happened to Ashley, where she is, and who the main suspect behind her disappearance must be.If proven correct in their assumption, the consequences will change their own lives beyond anyone's imagination....including yours!

We meet Maddie and Lindsay, our hosts and fans of the podcast ASHES. Together, driven by their curiosity, they question some of the claims and events of the podcast and begin to sort fact from fiction in an effort to find out what really happened to Ashley.Starting with the basics and to get a grip on the fundamentals of the universe, they interiew a Princeton professor, Tim Bard, who is a leading Cosmologist and Fluid Dynamicist. They also manage to find Ashley's mom, Judy Norman, who still resides in Marshalltown, and who sheds some light on her daughter's past. Turns out, facts trump fiction.