Trust

The wood slatted bench was beginning to get uncomfortable. The air was getting colder. The slight breeze was becoming offensive.

"Ok," I said, "so, explain this to me. Step by step."
"Step by step?" Schumer said, breaking his own silence.
"How all this happened. How this program works, how I came to be."
"You want me to tell you about the birds and the bees?" he said, arms still crossed.
"Alright, genius, you just told me that I was a test for your insane fetal recruitment program."
"No, I didn't."
"Yes you-- you just did."
"We should talk about this later."
"Yeah, after my birthday. My eighteenth birthday when someone takes me into a dark room and waves a gold pocket watch in front of my face and tells me I'm feeling very sleepy."

Schumer scoffed, or guffawed; I don't think I could ever tell the difference. The wind was picking up, knocking around the branches of the trees.

"The program was nearing its tenth year, we had all of the specifics worked out. The genetic profiles, the training curriculum, everything. Powers-that-be were getting tired of paying for such a preposterous program, so Daniel said we should try it. A clean run-through, prove we can do it."
"Easy to objectify the creation of human life, isn't it?"

Schumer unfolded his arms and sat up straight, looking over and down at me like I'd just insulted his haircut.

"I don't know what you think, but we're not monsters here. We don't grow creatures in vats and strap electrodes to their bodies and tell them to be killers. We took the young field ofIVF and made huge breakthroughs, doubling the success rate. People are conceived and born from in-vitro every day, there's nothing unorthodox or unethical about it. Your parents were trying to conceive and failing. It was IVF or adoption, and considering your father's vocation, the choice there was rather obvious."
"And this... hypnotic training. How is that orthodox and ethical?"
"Because hypnosis is equally legitimate and perfectly ethical with parental permission. A person can be put into a hypnotic state very easily by a trained professional, you're just told to visualize yourself going down an escalator or something, and the subconscious takes over and is open to suggestion. It's not like in the movies, where you can hypnotize somebody and tell them to kill the President. The hypnotist just acts as a stream of consciousness communicating with your own. If you tell a hypnotized person to jump off a bridge, his mind will reject it. You can only tell him things you could tell him while awake, the only key advantage is that the subconscious is more willing to... pretend. This is how those stage hypnosis shows are possible, you can suggest to somebody that their shoe is a telephone while hypnotized and they'll go along with it, but they know it isn't."

Like lymphocytes attacking a transplanted organ, my mind was rejecting the entire concept. I kept going over it in my head, trying to find a weak spot to attack. The problem was, it was so huge. So huge, yet I couldn't react to it.

"So the training, how does it work?"
"Hypnotize somebody, tell them that a mile is 5,280 feet, wake them up, and ask them how many feet are in a mile, they'll know. Hypnotize somebody, tell them how many feet are in a mile but tell them not to remember until you instruct them to remember, then wake them up and they'll have no idea how many feet are in a mile until you put him back under and tell him to remember. Do that a thousand times with a thousand facts, and you've got hypnotic training. It's a lot of work, but it's the only way to train somebody without them remembering it until you want them to, so it's the only way we could train a child."
"And you'd just take one of these kids on their eighteenth birthday and, what, say, 'If I snap my fingers, you'll know everything a well-trained soldier knows. How would you like that?'"
"We had a script prepared for that conversation. The important thing, the psychologists told us, was that we be able to answer all of the questions they'd have. Questions like these."
"And the training, when exactly do you do that? If I was being hypnotized every few years, wouldn't I be missing time? Have periods that I couldn't remember or not know how I got somewhere?"
"You weren't being hypnotized every few years, Chris. Training somebody in everything that a reasonable soldier knows, deliberately, point-by-point takes an extraordinary amount of time. You were being hypnotized every day."

My heart skipped a beat.

"Every day?" I said, no longer taking time to think about what I was saying, "How is that possible?"
"In school. You've always had a class or a period of the day that wasn't a real class. You went to an empty room where a team would put you under, train you for an hour or so, and bring you back. You were told to remember a typical boring class, your mind making up the details as you needed them."

I was breathing faster, sucking the chilled air into my lungs; it felt like shock was slowly taking over my body. I was shaking my head, slowly, without realizing it at first.

"No. No. Too many lies, all of it, my whole life?"

Schumer ignored me. "Obviously, to facilitate this we needed to have somebody inside the school system to coordinate everything and to monitor your progress and behavior. Nate Comstock was looking for an early retirement from the Corps, so we gave it to him and put him into your schools since Elementary. He made sure that your class schedules allowed for a free period, coordinated the training team, and made sure you were behaving normally for the rest of the day. We had to keep moving him around from school to school to follow your scholastic career."

My face felt hot. "Comstock," I said, finding it harder to speak. "He... Dingan."
"Dingan?"
"Some guy, in Lorton. Police officer."
"Oh, him," he paused.

"This all started with the fight in your school," Schumer continued.

I tried to remember it. Just over a week ago, it felt like a distant memory. Vodka in orange juice. A locker handle into my back. Hands on my arms. A fist coming at my face. A twitch in my brain. That was it, I realized, that moment. Something snapped in my mind when I was attacked, and my life was never the same after it.

"We hadn't anticipated the effects of the fight-or-flight response when we were developing the program. All of your training, knowing how to fight, how to use weapons, how to live like a soldier on the battlefield, it was all protected from your conscious mind through a series of mental barriers put in place during hypnosis so that the only way to 'unlock' the knowledge would be for a trained hypnotist to specifically reverse the series of barriers. But fight-or-flight is above all that, it seems, a core component of our basic evolutionary programming. When one feels like his life is threatened, the mind literally grasp at anything it thinks it can use to defend itself. As far as we can tell, acute stress of being in a fight combined with external stresses like grief over your father's death or other social issues weakened the mental barriers, and when you thought you were in mortal danger for the first time, your mind broke down its own walls and used whatever it could. Unfortunately, you never returned to classes after that event so we were unable to repair the damage."

"Damage," I said, reflecting on it all. The damage. My car, some guy names Dingan, a wake of destruction in Austria, my house.

"After that, with the walls cracked, it seems that everything you know has been leaking through and you've been able to recall it as instinct for self-preservation. I didn't believe it at first, but then I saw what you did to the two guards in my office."
"Why did you even have bodyguards?"
"I called for them when you showed up at the front gate. I thought you might be out to kill me," he rubbed his stomach through his clothing where the edge of his desk had fallen on him. "Clearly I was wrong."
"Why would you be afraid of me?" I asked, "You didn't seem worried when I came the first time."
"The first time I didn't know how much you knew or even what happened. Comstock said you got in a fight, and then stopped showing up at school. After that he stopped contacting us. Apparently he thought we were trying to kill him. Nervous guy, Nate."
"That was you on the phone that day, wasn't it? Telling him not to punish me for the fight or to tell my mom. 'It could be expensive'."

Schumer's brow furrowed slightly.

"Why didn't you want him to tell my mother? Doesn't she know about all of this."

Schumer looked down at me again from the corner of his eye. He was getting better at telling me things without saying anything.

"She didn't?"
"Not as far as I've been lead to believe."
"So it was just my dad? He lied to her, just told her she was getting an in-vitro and don't ask questions."
"Don't ask questions," he repeated.
"She never knew about the training? The program?"
"Don't think so," Schumer said.

"Ok," I said, trying to get back onto one of the trains of thought I hadn't finished. "Dingan. Why did Comstock hire him to bring me in, and why did he try to kill me?"
"According to Nate, when you stopped showing up at school and things started happening with his bank account and car, he thought we were angry so he contracted somebody to scare you into coming back to school, or to bring you in so you could be put back under and the problems fixed. I don't understand why he did this, but he did. His mistake was that he contracted the wrong kind of somebody. Somebody who usually doesn't finish the job with the target still alive."
"Another member of the program?"
"No, somebody outside the program. Outside the military. Outside a lot of things, actually."

Ok, a hitman. At least I was right about that.

"You know more about what happened that night than I do, but you must have done something to upset him if he did try to kill you."
"I think I broke his wrist," I said, recalling the cracking sound and the feeling of pushing through the blistering pain in my eyes and forcing an arm into the edge of my car's open window. "Or his arm."

Schumer smiled slightly. "Well," he said, "we'll have to work on getting that cleaned up with the police. We'll also need to sit you down with one of the psychologists and work out what went wrong with your training and how to fix it."
"What?" I said, standing up from the bench and facing him. "You want to put me back under and start screwing around with my head again?"
Schumer looked up at me, confused. "Something has clearly gone wrong with your mind, you've practically got two conflicting subconsciousnesses. One of a teenager, the other of a trained soldier. We can have the training removed if that's what you want, but the broken parts of your mind still have to be put back together."
"How do I know you won't just make me forget this whole conversation, make me think I spent the last week camping in the woods or something?"
"Chris, you have to trust that what we're doing here isn't as devious as you assume--"
"Devious? You still haven't explained why my house was burned down last night, and why guys in tac gear with prototype assault rifles stormed my house, or why I'm probably a wanted fugitive in Europe now."
"I told you, some of your questions I can't answer -- because I don't know the answers. If you would just come with me back to the labs, we can have somebody go over your experiences and try to figure out what went wrong."
"What went wrong? Why would you need to know that? So you can fix your program and do this to more kids without the nasty side effects? Use me like the test subject I was born to be?"

I stepped back from the bench, turned to face the river, and then turned back to Schumer when he didn't say anything. "I'll just go to a regular therapist, have him undo whatever you did to my head."
Schumer stood up weakly, "You can't do that. If someone doesn't know what he's doing, he could cause more damage to your mind. He could either further blur the distinction between who you are and what you know, or introduce too much stress to your subconscious and make it collapse. You need to see somebody who knows the exact protocol for your training."
"You just want to clean up your own mess, put back together your broken toy soldier."
"You need to understand, Chris, you're in danger of literally losing your mind. Until those walls in your mind are put back up, any amount of stress will destroy them further. Haven't you felt it growing worse? Felt yourself doing things you can't account for?"

Doing things I can't account for? He was right, I realized, I was getting worse. I could feel my personality diminishing with every event. Looking back, I had no idea why I did what I did to those Interpol agents in Vienna. What I did to Comstock in that hotel room; or driving a knife into the body of a person I didn't know; or only passively wondering if I'd killed him when I'd twisted his neck with his own rifle strap; or aiming at a man's head down the slide of a rifle and being a hair from pulling the trigger; I didn't give those things a second thought as I did them, but I would never have dreamt of them before all this. Before all this, before the seams of a secret life were pulled free by the stress of my father being killed by and for that very secret life.

My jaw was clenched so tight that my whole head shook. I pulled the Beretta from my belt with my right hand and pointed it at arm's length at Schumer's chest.

"The only thing I'm in danger of is you, your program, and the hitmen you have on speed-dial. Whatever is wrong with me, I'll figure it out myself." I kept the gun pointed as I backed away. Suitably distant, I turned in the direction we'd came and started to walk forward.

"You have no idea how far any of this goes," he said with a whole new clarity.

I kept walking.

"You won't know who to trust," he shouted from a distance.