You wake up one morning, and perhaps you find that everything is different than it was before. Strange, unknowable. The same way things seem to be when an adult tells you, go to school, get a degree, get a job. They are bound by their experiences, and simplicity; a life born in a world lacking advanced and advancing technologies. If someone had taught them just a little bit differently, perhaps they would tell you something else altogether. The very essence of truth might have changed for them. That’s the thing about truths though, they are ever present, permanent, and cemented in reality. Even if Newton hadn’t thought to name it gravity, would that have made its presence any less palpable for us? That’s what it was like when we had undergone the experiment. A little twist here, a bending of the mind there. In no time at all, you’re who they make you out to be, a viscous liquid given a name and form. Sure, there were some of us who didn’t much like what we were, but what choices were there? The adults had already made the decisions, and like all good children, we had to fend with the consequences.
The synapses of the brain are impossibly efficient at what they do. Before you have even dreamt of raising your arm, they are already firing off a hundred thousand electronic pulses in preparation for your actions. Free will made manifest in a single action. What is it like then when your brain betrays you? When the carefully cultivated motoneurons and circuits of the body, cultivated through generations of evolution, are aggressively changed to meet other demands? They took it from us. Our beliefs. Our personalities. The adults. When the experiment ended, I wasn’t who I was supposed to be but I had somehow become who I was meant to be. They simply pulled the plugs, closed the incisions on my body, and raised me up from the amniotic fluid. Washed, cleaned, dried. A pair of pants cleaned up after having been sullied from overuse. Then they got me ready. A seventy-two-month program. Coding, and conditioning combined with a healthy dose of experimentation. Guinea pigs in a lab room surrounded by so called professionals and know-it-alls. Surprising, then, how little they anticipated the plethora of changes in our brain chemistry. I suppose that in itself was a gift, courtesy of mother nature and father time themselves. Many had to be put down in those first fifty months. Our numbers, seventy-nine, cut down to fourteen. The rage, distress, and derangement metrics were off the charts. Fifty dead in the first month; everyone else murdered or laid to rest across the next forty-nine. Our remainder became the first platoon. Then came the psychological testing. We were plugged back in, twenty-four-hour timeframes. Drugs every day of the week till we couldn’t speak or think for ourselves. Individual thoughts became as snowflakes in a deep and eternally raging snowstorm. Our brains had become unattached. They got together after week one of testing. Too many deaths, they said, too many moral repercussions, they cried. Survival of our species, replied the majority. Testing continued; new members joined our ranks in the following months, sometimes ten, sometimes one, sometimes twenty, but more. Always more. Second platoon, third platoon, fourth platoon. Analysists and monitors came and went over the next twelve months. Despite exceptional technological and subsequent medical leaps, the architecture of the brain was still a mystery. Testing decreased, but now there was something new in the adults. Care. We were strong. Strong like thousand-year-old oak. Difficult to cut down, awe inspiring to behold, but possessed of a fragile existence. It was life. Despite our best attempts to immortalize ourselves, life had the habit of making us forever breakable. In effect, our existences had to be protected. Drugged, I contemplated the value of that very existence. What had I done that made my continuity more important than those that had left us in the early months of the experiment? My survivability? My genetics? My luck? Answers eluded me; my mind a fine drizzle turned to steam by hot asphalt. Others were not so fortunate during their sessions. Rage, derangement, fear, paranoia. All the metrics seemed to rise up. They died. Whole platoons broken and scattered by the psychological tests. The survivors were changed. Minds like steel traps as they once said in the Americas. Our platoon was discharged. We were almost ready, said some. They need more time, said others. Let them kill, said the majority. Like a mother eagle pushes her babes from the nest, we were sent out. NEXUS. Homebase. Forty-eight months of intensive training. Day one we received our first presents since our lives had been gifted to us. Morphine. Then it was out into the fields to cultivate our skills. Our folded minds were finally there. Different. Other. Practice sessions became as children’s games. The adults were astonished. They never said as such, but their facial expressions betrayed them. Fear. Their time was nearing its end. Ours was only beginning. A changing of the old guard was in the offing. Faster. Stronger. More efficient. Communications changed. We were as mutes, little if any verbal communication between us. The flicker of an iris, flair of a nostril, twitch in face, smell in the air. I’d look at my platoon, but their existence was muted. Will-o’-the-wisps born from decaying plants. Hand signals became the new game. Recode. Recondition. After the first month, second platoon joined us. Their numbers were significantly depleted. The next month we were pitted against each other. The remainder of their platoon did not survive. Cold and callous. Thoughts became dark shadows. The faces of our fallen kindred visited daily. The psychological test results began to show themselves in us. Brutality. Hunger. I was different. We were different. As third platoon arrived, we were quarantined. Isolation, said the adults. Each of us was confined to a room on site. Conditioning kicked in, and we did as we had been trained to do. The morphine took us too a quieter place within our minds. Subdued. Sublime; until I opened my eyes and the darkness was no longer fearsome. Instead, I was. Fearsome. Terrifying. Ungodly. If not for the fear, they would have patted us on our backs. Third and fourth platoon had combined, their numbers counting two more than our own. They were different. Wilder. Freer. I hated it. NEXUS provided literature, and cerebral implants. Knowledge was given over to us. Learning took on a whole new meaning. Recode. Recondition. From blunt instruments to thinking weapons. History. Culture. We knew what we were. Now we knew who we were. The platoon’s paradigm began to shift. Cruelty spread amongst us. Schisms became apparent. Boulders shattering under a drop of water poured over it across a thousand years. It was our intelligence. Our new-found understanding made us cruel. Infighting became our daily exercise; our waking moments a trial against one another. Destruction had become our present, and now we gave that gift to one another as lovers might exchange kisses. Pull the plug. The adults made a choice. Recode. Recondition. Fire and brimstone for those that couldn’t be adjusted. Quietly they pushed us. Suicide. Overdose. Insanity. The newly crowned third platoon was renamed. A new first platoon. The adults came to me, one of the last of the old first platoon. A simple thank you for your service. A medal and award ceremony in a quiet bunker beneath the dirt and bodies. Then; the hardest part. We lived. Written By: ALAN "VIENNA" SINGH
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