[Short Story] Industrial Machinery, Part 1

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I don't remember blacking out. Or anything prior to waking up strapped into this chair. At once I discovered my vision was dark and patchy. But I could hear voices drifting in and out of my consciousness. They soon revealed themselves to be engineers or scientists of some kind, "Harry" and "Stan". I tried to minimize eye movement. I didn't want them to know I was awake.

"When were you in Tibet?" Harry plied, punching in his login info to the terminal. Stan was spinning another one of several travel yarns I'd already been subjected to since waking up, evidently one of those people who based his identity around having visited many exotic countries.

"1992. This was business if you can believe it. The Institute sent us to study the EEG readings of monks perfoming various inexplicable feats of physical and mental discipline. Obvious applications for this project."

Project? I very subtly strained to get a sense of what I was bound to. It was very much like a dentist's chair. That was evidently too much. "Hey. Look at the readings." I laid still. Tense silence followed. "How long do you think he's been awake? Tricky fucker. Alright fella, you're not fooling anyone."

I opened my eyes and found my vision had cleared somewhat. Their faces were still difficult to resolve. "Where am I? Release me and I won't call the cops." Took a while for the laughter to die down. "Hey buddy? The cops brought you here. This is a federal research program, we need a steady supply of convicts for it. Not very high survival rate. Do you remember what you did? Strangled all those hookers?"

I didn't. It wasn't that the memory was absent, I realized, but some new sensation of being blocked as I tried to access it. For the first time I noticed the feeling of something other than hair on my head. I wiggled my brow trying to get it off. "Easy, killer. You'll unseat the electrodes."

The pieces began falling into place. I'd done something so reprehensible, the state handed me off to some shady government lab to be used as a guinea pig. I knew I was fucked when they said I'd been convicted of serial homicide. I just hadn't a sense of how fucked until now. "Oh God. Oh fuck. Oh God."

"Make up your mind. Do you want to fuck? Or do you want God?" The blurry one whose voice I recognized as "Harry" thought he was funny. "Anyway, it's no use. There is no God here today, friend. Only us." He fiddled with the terminal and my arm involuntarily spasmed. "Are these the newest motor control routines? No, look at the timestamp. Harry you idiot, you were supposed to take care of this."

Minutes went by as they hammered away at their computers. Finally, at the click of a mouse button, my arm raised up placidly and rotated about the shoulder. Bent and pivoted at the elbow, then returned. The wrist now rotated, followed by a full range of motion swivel of my thumb. Then one by one, each of my fingers touched themselves to my thumb, spread out, then returned. My arm laid back down.

Alarmed would be an understatement. All of this occurred without my input and I could not stop it. "What the fuck have you fruits done to me? How did you do that with my arm? Why can't I see clearly?" The same feeling of blockage behind my eyes clued me in. They were suppressing my vision. Clear enough to perform tests, not clear enough to identify them.

I struggled again to remember killing anyone. Was that like me? I couldn't really say what sort of person I was. I could not remember anything except by sustained effort, and large parts of it were selectively blocked by whatever the two psychopaths had done to my brain.

One of them came over with what looked like a spray bottle filled with pink fluid and lightly misted the top of my head. I couldn't feel it anywhere above my eyebrows. "You know, the brain is essentially a sugar powered, fat based computer. It was difficult to recognize this at first because of the unusual architecture evolution arrived at. Massively parallelized and redundant to guard against injury. It's certainly inspired a fair bit of biomimickry in the microprocessor industry. But that's not our field."

I didn't care. I wanted to tell him to go fuck himself but found I couldn't speak. That, too, was a faculty they appeared able to switch on or off. "Because it is so complex it has effectively infinite possible failure states. Most of which leave you insane, comatose or some other useless outcome. But there are a few which have proven themselves useful."

I thought back to the monks Stan mentioned. Even such a recent memory was a chore to recall. "If you could selectively induce these useful glitches whenever you needed them, imagine what you'd be capable of. Switch off your ability to feel pain and fear during combat. Then turn them back on when they're needed. Become a mathematical savant, photographic memory, even ASD if you need to perform some repetitive task for days on end without losing your mind."

He mentioned defense applications only in passing but it was enough to suggest to me that this was a military project. He sprayed my head again, and wiped the residual fluid from my brow with a napkin. "The really interesting shit comes from linking parts of the brain, causally. For example, fear and pleasure. You'd absolutely love to be terrified. But then some people are like this naturally. What about hatred and fear? You'd feel terrified to hate anybody. Think about how that could improve society. Or disabling the link between inflicting suffering and pleasure. Make it so people feel whatever they inflict on others. The potential to improve humanity is endless."

"But that's not what you're using it for, is it." He looked startled, then checked the computer. Evidently I wasn't supposed to be able to talk yet. It was some small comfort that their control over me was not complete. He sighed. "No, one of the many downsides of this profession. You can harp on about the revolutionary uses of some new technology all you like but the guy who signs your paychecks typically has much more small minded plans for it. In our case, enhanced interrogation."

My blood ran cold, imagining Gitmo prisoners restrained in a place like this, computers invading and tampering with their grey matter. "You monsters. You absolute fucking degenerates. I'd like to-" Harry cut in. "Kill us? I'm sure. Even without your memories you're still inclined towards criminality. Elevated tesosterone, low capability for thinking ahead, poor impulse control. None of this came out in the trial of course or they might've concluded you were helpless, from birth, to turn out this way. The intersection of neuroscience and the court system is one of those things that keeps me up at night. Cutting up guys like you, not so much, because I know you're all guilty of much worse."

My vision grew sharper. For the first time I could see Harry's shit eating grin. He must've seen my pupils contract because he frowned and went back to typing. "That's another remarkable thing about the brain. Very malleable, always repairing itself. Usually a good thing. For our project, a very annoying obstacle. Some sort of implant that adapts faster than the brain, continually inflicting specific damage of the desired type regardless of how your neuronal connections reorder themselves would be ideal."

Stan broke in. "That's Harry's thesis. Mine is that if you reinforce specific pathways enough times, the brain will give up and embrace that new structure. Of course this doesn't allow for the flexibility you want in most cases but for interrogation, who cares if he's crazy afterward? All the better, nobody will believe him if he sues the state."

Harry misted my head again. I began to wonder why. Stan got up. "I'm going to the cafeteria. You want me to bring you instant noodles or something?" Harry waved him off. Stan shrugged and left. Harry craned his neck to make sure Stan had left. Then punched a few keys and glanced around the room at cameras I could only notice now that my vision was clear. One by one their little red LEDs went dark.

"God, I am so sorry. Usually they die before it gets this far. I can only imagine what it's been like for you. I'm gonna release you in a moment." What the...? Was this some kind of fucked up test, or prank? He could see my confusion. If not on my face then on the EEG readings on the monitor. "There is embedded resistance within the government to this kind of research. A movement the goal of which is to disrupt the development of new tortures. I was sent by them to free you."

Music to my ears. The first good news I'd heard since waking up today. "I'll need a fresh pair of clothes, some coffee, some cigs, and you'd better have a car waiting." He frowned, then looked troubled. "Oh no. No, that isn't why I'm releasing you. I was sent to put a permanent end to this project. Simply extracting you would accomplish nothing. They would just continue the project with other subjects."

I had a sinking feeling, even if I couldn't say why just yet. "There needs to be a spectacular failure that discredits the program, and we need to get rid of all of the scientists involved so they don't take their expertise to the private sector or other countries and reproduce this project there."

I wanted to plead with him but found my vocal chords were again disabled. "Can't let you identify me if you're captured. Sorry." In my final moments of cogent thought I saw him withdraw a small coin from his pocket, unscrew it to reveal a micro SD card inside of a hidden compartment in it, and load a program from it into the terminal. The English language has no words to express what followed.

Try to imagine a screwdriver or some other sharp object thrust into your brain in slow motion. Imagine your inward, mental experience as it tears through your fragile brain tissue. Disrupting your memories, your grasp of math and language, your emotional regulation. Something like a violent, wildly unstable computer glitch, afflicting your very conscious mind.

Where before it was a unified whole, humming along, performing as it should, suddenly it is fragmented into thousands of separate, panicked sections in total chaos. The sheer visceral madness I experienced was beyond the realm of human experience. I thought at first it must be something like a drug trip, but those are usually reported as beautiful. This was terrifying and incomprehensible.

Sharp angular shapes, tearing of my vision, loud repetitive buzzing and shrieking noises, every possible smell and taste. From moment to moment at random I could either recognize an object or had no idea what it was. I knew I was convulsing in the chair. I mainly smelled burnt toast now, and saw shimmering horizontal lines breaking up my vision, rearranging pieces of it, my shattered mind struggling to make sense of what it was seeing.

Harry said something which sounded sympathetic but it was garbled. I couldn't understand speech. My thought processes had become stuck in a loop, and the loop was tightening, such that my thoughts repeated themselves at smaller and smaller intervals. He got up, loosened my restraints, switched the cameras back on, then made a hasty retreat.

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^{Stay tuned for Part 2!}