-Five Years Later-

  I woke with a start as a voice crackled in over the speaker in my room and the lights flicked on.

  “Subject M-436, please report to the rehabilitation room for morning duties,” a machine-generated voice said, and with a click, the door to my cell unlocked. Atlas seemed to have decided that a sense of irony was warranted in the choice of my identification code.

  “A few more minutes,” I groaned, rolling over and burying my head in my pillow.

  “Failure to comply will result in disciplinary action,” the voice said after thirty seconds. The collar around my neck began to beep, each pulse coming quicker than the last.

  “Mhmm,” I mumbled, rolling out of bed to my feet moments before the shock would have discharged. I was getting better at timing that.

  Slipping my sweater on, the only thing they allowed me to keep, and even then, only because they exhausted all other options trying to get me to comply first. I ran my fingers through my hair to make myself halfway presentable and headed out the door to start the workday. Ever since… well, I didn’t really become grungy anymore, which I was glad of. I hadn’t been allowed a shower in a long time.

  The hallway outside my room had lights on the ground highlighting the path I was supposed to take. I didn’t see a single employee on the way over. They were very careful to ensure I was perfectly isolated from anyone with any power over my current situation.

  Not that I blamed them, I would do the same thing in their shoes.

  Walking up to the rehabilitation room, I pressed my thumb against the reader next to the door and accepted a handshake with my interface, then waited a moment until I heard the locking mechanism disengage. I entered, ensuring I fully closed the door behind me. The room itself was entirely sterile and white, the only furniture being a table and two chairs, one of which had manacles built into it. The restraining chair was holding a man who had decided the best use of his time was to get on my nerves.

  “I thought I already made it clear, you Atlas dogs aren’t going to get me to do your bidding! Either kill me or use my brain as wetware, I don’t care,” my patient for the day screamed at me the moment I entered. I noted scars on the side of the head where he had his interface removed. A dissident of some kind, then.

  I wish I'd had the guts to have done that myself.

  I noted his missing fingernails, signs that he had been tortured before they brought him to me. They just loved to make my job harder than it had to be, didn’t they?

  With a sigh, I said, “We’re actually setting you free. Lucky you. Unfortunately, we're going to have to put a pin in that for just a moment while I review your file.”

  Then I took advantage of his surprise and the pin imagery to pin his thoughts in place so that he never quite finished internalizing what I just said. His expression shifted from anger to confusion and back again in a loop while I sat down and reviewed his file. It was a little annoying because the brightness of his spotlight kept flickering. At least he was quiet now.

  Scanning the file, I noted my objectives with this one. He was the owner of a startup company that had stumbled into technology that Atlas wanted to get its hands on. They wanted me to ‘suppress maladaptive group identity drives within the target’ so he would accept a merger that would harm his employees in exchange for enriching himself.

  Yet again, they misunderstood how my skillset actually worked. Not that it mattered, I could make it work.

  The loop was already wearing off as I finished going over the specifics. Putting the folder down, I looked up at the guy cuffed to the chair.

  “Alright, Grant, can I call you Grant?” I asked, while unpinning his thoughts.

  He blinked a few times as he reoriented with being able to think again, “Yeah, call me whatever you want, what just happened? You said you’re just going to let me go?”

  “Look, Grant, I get the problem you have. You don’t want to put people whom you’ve spent your life working with on the streets. You’re loyal, and that is a respectable quality in a man.” As I spoke, I watched his conceptual state react to my words. I had to bypass his initial barriers and open him up. Because at the moment, he was both metaphorically and literally a stone wall. “I’m going to help you out here so that we both get what we want, okay?”

  “What are you? The good cop? They already tried bribing me, it isn’t going to happen,” as he mentioned the bribe they tried to use, his conceptual identity shifted from a stone wall to an impenetrable vault. I put my hand into his cognition at this moment and entered a code into the vault, specifically his wife’s date of birth. I didn’t finish the input, though; I stopped with the code in place without hitting confirm.

  “Nah, you think they’d put one of these on the good cop?” I said, tapping a finger against my collar.

  The moment he noticed it, and his eyes widened, I hit confirm. The vault accepted the code and clicked open.

  “I’m… sorry, you probably don’t care,” I said, faking embarrassment. I riffled through the file, not really looking for anything, just trying to play a role that made him sympathetic.

  “Are you okay? Are they hurting you?” Grant asked. I had to control my expression to prevent myself from smirking. Reaching in, I slowly opened the vault, revealing the contents.

  “Can we get back on topic, please?” I asked, looking up at him, attempting a pleading expression. My eyes darted to the camera in the corner of the room just long enough to let him notice. As I spoke, I looked through the vault, which was filled with neatly sorted files. He had a very organized mind.

  He turned to look where I had glanced, but snapped back to me when he saw the camera mounted behind him, “I can help, you said I’m being let out? I have contacts. They can find you and get you out of here.”

  I gave him a soft smile and faked a blush by recalling that time I called the cops while in the middle of experiencing psychosis due to a stimulant overdose. It still embarrassed the fuck out of me to this day. His appeasement indicated my manipulation was already working. I just had to point it in the right direction.

  This tale has been unlawfully lifted from Royal Road; report any instances of this story if found elsewhere.

  As for what he was suggesting, there was no fucking way that would work. I was too valuable an asset for a team of corpo fixers to even be able to find me. Not to mention the other things being held in this facility. They’d be dead on arrival, hell before arrival. I would know, I’d already tried.

  Atlas showed me videos of the last team that tried being gunned down in their homes, then I got to enjoy ‘correction’. That was an unpleasant month.

  “Thank you, but I couldn’t impose myself on you. It wouldn’t feel right to put myself under your wing,” I said, as I slipped his conception of me into what he considered to be his team, his people. The vault shuddered slightly but didn’t close.

  “Look, I protect my people. You already know this. That includes you. If you need help, then it’s my responsibility to make things right,” he said without even realizing that what he said made no fucking sense, given he just met me minutes ago. Human minds were terrible at resolving conflicts like that, I’d found.

  “I get it, I really do. It’s not that I don’t trust you. I just don’t think you… or anyone... can beat Atlas. It’s not possible. Your best bet is to sell your company and take your team with you. Atlas doesn’t care about your team; all they care about is your intellectual property. Hand that over, make your bag and walk away. That’s the best you can do for all of us,” I said, emphasizing ‘us’ while lowering the volume of my voice and slowing my cadence. My importance within ‘us’ was rising as I spoke, overwriting his loyalty for the rest of the team.

  Obviously, without his intellectual property, there was nothing for his team to actually do and no way to afford their salaries, but I didn’t need to mention that part.

  “You’re sure? You’d be okay with that?” he whispered, almost reverently.

  “I would love nothing more than to see you sign,” I said, slipping a contract and a pen in front of him as I looked him directly in the eye despite how uncomfortable that made me, and I hit a button under the desk. With a click, his manacles came undone.

  Grant rubbed his wrists, picked up the pen, and signed away his life’s work for a pittance. Not even taking the time to review the contract.

  “Good?” he asked.

  “Perfect,” I said with a smile. Standing up, I went to leave the room.

  “Wait, you’re sure there’s nothing I ca—” he started, the door closed before I heard the rest of what he was going to say.

  Well, that’s today’s workday over and done with.

  I didn’t even have to burn myself out to the point of being unable to link comprehension with action. I always hated those days. It reminded me of when I first gained my ability and used it more like a blunt instrument instead of a scalpel.

  Walking down the halls, I followed the glowing arrows on the ground to the rec room. Or at least that’s what I called it. I’d never heard Atlas actually put a name to it, so nobody could contradict my naming scheme.

  As I entered, I saw a woman already in the room waiting for me. She perked up at the sight of me, a big, stupid smile broke out on her face as she leapt to her feet and ran over, practically glomping me.

  “Reeeeen! I’ve been so lonely without you!” she cried out as she picked me off the ground and squeezed the life out of me.

  “It has barely… a day… since we… please off,” I struggled to vocalize as my lungs collapsed and my ribs creaked.

  “I just missed you so much! Please don't leave me alone again!” she intoned as she squeezed me tighter. I tapped her shoulder twice and escaped as the command I had installed in her activated, and her body went slack.

  “Sorry, Aurin, you know I have no control over that,” I replied as I found a seat on the couch across from the TV I was given for good behaviour. Unfortunately, when I made the request, I didn't specify what I wanted to actually be on the TV, so all it had available was those videos you play for cats when you leave them alone for extended periods of time.

  Aurin dove into the seat next to me and curled up against me, “You could always ask for us to bunk together. Maybe they'd set a goal for it like the TV.”

  I let out a sigh. I could probably do that. My eyes wandered to the security camera in the corner of the room. The thing is, I didn't want them to think that they could use Aurin as a point of leverage against me. More than they already did.

  At least right now, I could pretend like I didn't really care about her. That she was just the first test subject I used to learn how my skillset worked, and was okay with her staying around because it allowed me some modicum of interaction with a person who wasn't a patient of mine.

  Wrapping an arm around her, I pulled her in close, and she giggled. One of her hands went to my waist, and she tapped out a phrase using a language I'd encoded into her mind.

  “Are you doing okay?”

  I ran my hand across her back in a pattern that read, “Yeah.” In doing so, my hand ran over the collar that she was also wearing.

  This was one of the various capabilities that I would never tell Atlas about. Not that they'd care. There was no use case in which my installing a language in a non-Atlas employee would ever be useful. Or at least I couldn't think of one.

  We stayed like that for a couple of hours, as I mindlessly watched videos of birds flitting about on the TV. Normally, this time would be used for me to recover my mental state, but given the light load of today's work, I got to enjoy just being in the company of someone else.

  Who cared if her mind was rewritten to be like this? We were all prisoners in our own way here, and for her, it was probably better than the alternative. At least she was happy like this.

  I know I'd love for someone to come along and rewrite my mind so living here wasn't a form of extended torture. Atlas wouldn't even let me die. I didn't age anymore, and trying to find another way out resulted in waking up in my bunk without a scratch on me.

  It helped that she was probably the only person in the world that I could actually trust as well.

  At some point, a buzzer sounded, and food was served through a service hatch. The hatch was one-sided so that I couldn't lay eyes on whoever brought it. We ate on the couch because I couldn’t be bothered to use the table.

  You'd expect the food to be prison quality, but as long as I met the standards set by Atlas, it wasn't actually half bad. I think they gave me part of whatever the rest of the employees were eating. Today’s meal was butter chicken with naan.

  Halfway through the meal, the speakers in the room crackled to life.

  “Subject M-436, please report to the rehabilitation room,” the generated voice said. The end of it was clipped off awkwardly as they reused the same one from this morning.

  This had never happened before.

  “Oh come on! They’re interrupting your break! This isn’t fair!” Aurin yelled, slamming her fists on the coffee table.

  I placed my hand on hers and looked her in the eyes, shaking my head slightly when she met my gaze.

  With a sigh, she buried her head in her hands, “See you later, I guess.”

  “Yeah, see you in a bit,” I replied before heading out the door and following the lights to the rehab room.

  Following the usual procedure, I unlocked the door and entered the room. Only to pause when I saw what lay within.

  A girl who couldn’t have been older than twelve was sitting at the table, leaning back in her chair with her legs kicked up on the table. Her eyes glowed with a golden light that made me shiver with recollection. That light winked out the moment I entered, as her eyes changed to an uncanny yellow.

  That wasn’t the strangest part, however. The odd part was that she had an ahoge, a single strand of hair sprouting from the top of her head, that was wagging back and forth, almost as if it were alive.

  Looking over the room, I noted there were no files for me to review.

  I pulled out my chair, sat down, and looked her in the eye.

  “So am I being… decommissioned?” I carefully asked.

  The twelve-year-old girl burst out laughing.

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