End of Side B

I remember my hand, my left hand, groping against the smooth-painted brick wall, my fingertips in the groove under which there would be mortar. The world spun around me, buzzing, blurry, all except for my hand against that wall. The one thing anchoring me to reality as my mind clamored against a slick surface, looking for something to hold on to.

And in an instant, everything was fine.

I stood up straight and looked at the gun in my hand. No smoke. No recoil pounding in my still-clenched fist. So, I was dead.

I let go of the wall and brought my left hand to my chest, my stomach, my neck and my head. All dry. So, I was alive.

A few feet in front of me, Lieutenant Colonel Chuck Schumer was slumped on the floor, leaning slightly against the wall behind him. His eyes were wet, glossy, scanning slowly from left to right. His mouth was drawn on one side to a tight point, the other side hanging slack. His arms were down at his side, on the floor; his right hand empty, his hand open, his index finger still hooked around the trigger guard of a small revolver.

There was a fresh hole through his gut, his overcoat sure to be ruined by the free flowing blood.

To my right, just a few feet, Amy was still holding that silver Beretta I pulled off a Marine guardsman. She held it out, straight toward where Schumer would have been standing. Her hands shook, her eyes were wide, her breathing sharp. A few feet to her right I could see light reflecting from a brass 9mm casing on the floor. I could smell gunpowder, I could still hear the echo of the gunshot through the ringing in my ears.

She wasn't moving. Just standing there, arms outstretched, cradling the pistol with both hands in what something told me was called an isosceles stance.

Nothing is ever going to be the same.

Gathering my thoughts, I took a long breath and spoke, quite slowly, "What did you do?"
As soon as the last syllable was completed, Amy replied in one breath, "Idon'tknow."

She was still looking forward, at the wall, the end of the corridor. I looked down at Schumer. He was breathing, slowly. His eyes were as unfocused as Amy's.

I slowly held out my left hand toward the gun in Amy's hands, to lower it. When my hand was a few inches from hers, she sucked in an unsteady breath and suddenly turned sharply toward me, pointing the gun at me now.

The instructions were sent from my brain as clear as could be. Duck the left shoulder down, push left leg against floor, move to the right. I ignored them, though. I just stood there. Amy just stood there, nothing between us but a loaded gun.

"Is it true?" I asked, just as deliberately. "You're part of this?"

Her eyes were unchanging, like a spooked wild animal.

"Idon'tknow," she repeated.

Amidst the cardboard box Amy had brought in were scattered dozens of papers and folders, haphazardly dropped around Amy's feet. On top of them all was a file folder laying open, its contents spilled to the side. I could see pages and pages of typed text, some handwritten notes, and a few photographs. I saw a little girl smiling against a blue patterned background, like any school portrait ever taken. The girl had brown hair, and as she smiled her eyes narrowed in a familiar way. They were eyes I knew, eyes now staring at me.

It was a photograph of Amy, taken years ago. Around it were other photographs, some of her younger, some older.

There was a pain in the back of my throat. The pain came after the realization, the only explanation for why there would be a file full of documents and photos of Amy in a series of files about Schumer's program. I breathed slowly, letting the implications branch out in my mind. Schumer had just been trying to distract and disorient me. I hadn't killed Comstock and Amy wasn't working for anybody.

I grabbed the gun from Amy's hand, just as I had from the Irishman in Comstock's house. One quick arm movement and a turn of the wrist and she was disarmed. I dropped the gun on the floor, stuck my own gun back under my belt, and snapped my fingers in front of Amy's face a few times until her eyes refocused and the color seemed to return to her face. It was shock.

"You didn't know?" I asked as Amy began slowly looking around, rubbing her head.
"I..." she began, then seemed to lose focus again.

I repeated the question, louder this time, trying to break through the mental barriers our brains throw up when we can't process any more information.
"I..." she repeated, "No. I just saw a folder. My name was on it, there were pictures of me, logs, names, and I.." She looked over at Schumer on the floor, no longer breathing. "He had a gun," she said, looking back at me.

I nodded, then just stood in silence for a while. Amy did the same, and the silence began to fill up the room and hammer at my skull. There was a body in the floor, a pile of evidence. We had to get out of there. I had to go somewhere and let my brain explode.

"That should be enough," I said to nobody in particular. Then I lifted the front of my shirt, pulled the strips of medical tape from my skin, and freed the long wire running from my back pocked, around my side, and up my chest. I pulled Rubino's recorder from the pocket, turned it off, and stuck it and the bundled-up microphone wire back into my pocket.

"That should be enough," I repeated.

* * * *

Schumer's near-meticulous records painted a clear enough picture of the truth.

In the case of myself, it turned out, most of what he said was true. I was the first in a series of experiments to test the possibility of using hypnosis as a training platform where a subject doesn't know he's being trained. This was all shoehorned in with another project in in-vitro fertilization and, most likely, genetic engineering. The files didn't detail anything on the genetic side of the program, but the logs and notes made consistent reference to things like reflexes, vision, hearing, and critical-thinking skills.

Amy's file told, with a cold disconnection, the story of her entire life. Erik Westborne, her father, was approached because his Marine Corps profile listed personal financial trouble and problems with his wife conceiving. He was told that by volunteering for a new project he could solve both problems. His wife could receive an in-vitro fertilization without cost, and he would receive an initial payment of $63,000 and a conditional bonus of $15,000 when the child turns eighteen.

The "catch" was of course clearly explained.

And so Amy was born and raised, at first, on base in Quantico. Her training was done on-site at the project headquarters within the Marine Corps University until her father withdrew himself from the Corps and they moved to Fredericksburg so that she could attend my school and her training could be orchestrated by Comstock as well. Every day, she and I would report to an empty classroom for what we thought was study hall. A hypnotist would put us under quickly, using phrases we had already been programed to respond to, and the schooling began. Different instructors were brought in to cover different topics for around an hour, and then the hypnotist repeated the necessary prompts to keep us from actively remembering the whole process, and told to remember sitting quietly at our desks for an hour and reading or daydreaming.

Our files each stated that we were told not to talk to each other, perhaps in fear that if we ever got to know each other we would expect to talk during out imaginary study hall. We would expect to have conversations and remember them, or we'd decide that today we'd work on homework together and afterwards wonder why nothing was accomplished.

After my father's death and my return to school, which was, I later realized, rather soon, there was apparently some concern that my social isolation would be amplified and I might develop the the very disorder that I indeed developed. It was suggested, then, that Amy should start talking to me. She should find me interesting now, so that I would have somebody to talk to. They decided that, should we become friends, it would be worth the extra effort of making up excuses for why we can't talk to each other during study.

The day before my fight at school was the last entry in both of our logs. The day of the fight, when the imaginary wall holding back a lifetime of training finally broke, I left school before my fourth hour study hall and, I found out, Amy did too. The next day was when we tried to get into Comstock's bank account. I didn't attend any classes that day, and Amy skipped fourth hour to perform the phone scam with me. After that, I never went back to school and Amy started leaving at lunch so she could join me on my inane adventures.

With the benefit of hindsight, the events of the past few weeks became perfectly clear to me. It was that we both started missing our daily training sessions that got people worried. Comstock feared that we had somehow found out, and that Schumer was angry with him. He hired Dingan, Schumer's apparent go-to guy, to track us down and see what we were up to. Dingan took the job a little too seriously, and made the mistake of threatening my life. After I killed him, Comstock really got nervous, and apparently tried to flee to Austria, where he'd stowed away most of the insane amounts of money Schumer was paying him. After our little encounter in his hotel room, he assumed that I was a messenger from Schumer and that I hadn't killed him must have meant that Schumer wasn't too angry.

After that, though, things get a little fuzzy. Schumer must have found out that I was working with the FBI and feared that I had found out the truth and would help them raise a case against him. He must have sent the men to my house, and he must have had Comstock killed and put the hit on me that almost killed Amy. It wasn't as clear-cut, but it was the only thing that made sense.

The biggest surprise in any of it was that it wasn't just me. I had a stack of names of kids, ages ranging from barely-seventeen to just over six. Just children, who, like me, were designed at a genetic level and daily taught the art of soldiering.

The sense of isolation I'd had was gone, though somewhat rebuilt when I learned that I was the only one who had his program changed, as Schumer described. Amy and the rest of the kids scattered across the country were only being trained as Marines, as I once was. Only I had been fortunate enough to have all those awful things put in my mind.

To find out that one's entire life is a lie is not an easy thing to just deal with. I, it seemed, was taught to suppress trauma and distractions as part of my specialty. People who pull triggers for political gain need to be able to wash themselves of the guilt, they need to be able to see their friends slaughtered and still pull that trigger. They need to march over a field of butchered innocents to get within range of the warlord whose will ended those lives. Mental compartmentalization was a part of my programming and, ironically, was the only way I could handle learning of it.

Amy wasn't so fortunate. She seemed to take most of it in stride, until she figured out that the reason her mother had left was because she'd found out everything and couldn't be around her or her father knowing what he had done and what she really was. I didn't see much of her after that.

When Rubino gave me the recorder and microphone, he had been expecting some kind of confession out of Schumer to tie him to my father's killing, not a giant box of evidence. All of it was enough to open a formal case within the FBI to investigate the entire history of Schumer's program and hopefully bring charges against any other people responsible.

Like all government bodies, though, the FBI moves slowly.

It all likelihood, the entire operation would be swept under the rug and forgotten about until anybody could be brought to answer for it. With Schumer gone, those who had been taking orders from him would all disband and wander around aimlessly until finding new jobs. There would be no way to guess what would happen to those kids who had been in the middle of their programs. Would their hypnotists and instructors be there when they showed up for their nonexistent classes? Would their unconscious training stay buried without daily intervention to keep it so?

Dead men couldn't be convicted, and for this, I suppose, Carl Dingan, Chuck Schumer, and the Irishman later identified as Thomas McMahon got off easy. It was likely that one of those three had killed my father for trying to expose Schumer.

In the end, I'm left with too many unanswered questions. There was no evidence at all to suggest who Schumer's newer sponsor was. Nothing connected me with any deaths in Austria. There was no telling who those people were who'd come to my house and, ostensibly, blew it up. None of Schumer's records actually outline, detail, or even mention the specifics of my altered training program.

It almost seemed if Schumer wasn't the top dog he made himself out to be. Everybody takes orders from somebody, they say, and removing somebody who only takes orders just leaves open a position for a new fall guy. I once thought this was all about Comstock and was quickly proven wrong. I wondered, how long until thinking this was all about Schumer will seem just as silly.

Confronted by confusion, the best thing to do is to look at facts. Nothing I could learn would bring back my father. No amount of revenge would justify his death, or that of Bremer or everybody else who died for nothing. My mind was very nearly lost to one invented for me, the mind of an unquestioning killer. Everybody said I acted different after Schumer died. I never smiled.

I hoped, above all, that there would be a way to free myself from the weapon inside me. Perhaps time would wash him away. Perhaps, after a lifetime of solitude, he would simply die of atrophy. Perhaps, whatever happens, he'll always be in there. Perhaps I like being him better than I liked being myself. Perhaps I'm more good to the world as a means of chaos than as a simple kid who just wants his life to be normal again.

What say should I have in my own destiny, after all, if I was built to be a weapon? Built, all that I am. Mind, and body.