The living room—or as Billy called it, the palace within the palace—was easily accessible from the hallway through a glass door. The radio hummed quietly in the background, spilling the bland trash of the charts into the majestic room. Artistic lamps glowed in most of the corners, providing just enough light to create a cozy evening atmosphere. Without paying further attention to his uninvited guests, the old man collapsed onto a once-white leather couch, now elegantly worn over the years. A set coffee table, with a pot and two cups left from the night before, lent a homely air to what otherwise felt like an interrogation.

"Tea? Coffee? Whiskey?" the old man offered, gesturing toward the pot.

What I’d prefer is an answer, no questions asked, Billy thought as a wave of dizziness forced him to sit on a leather armchair that matched the couch.

"Why did you recite that long number to me at the container port? How was that supposed to help? Because so far, it hasn’t done a thing."

"My son, I already said this, but I’ll say it again—and will likely have to say it a few more times tonight: I don’t know what you’re talking about. Not a clue, I swear. And it’s not because I’m senile. I am, but that’s beside the point. If I owned a private helicopter, I’d know about it. I’d have tripped over it while cleaning."

"You’re lying. You work for the corporation. You’re part of their dirty schemes."

Nicholas Curtis sighed. "Judging by the looks of you two, you went to a lot of trouble to get here. You’d think, at the very least, you’d know who you were traveling so far to see. I’m just a senile old man with a traumatic brain injury. I can’t remember shit." He smiled grimly. "So why don’t you tell me your names first?"

"I’m Billy, Billy Jones."

"Jones, huh?"

"Yeah, why? Do you know me?"

"No."

Billy blinked in confusion. There was something off about the old man, he thought. Neither his reaction to their unexpected visit nor the haunted look in his eyes fit someone who was supposedly free from the burden of memories. Anyone who didn’t carry the past around with them shouldn’t look so weighed down by guilt.

Billy grimaced, signaling to Isaac to take over the questioning, as he lacked the strength. The entire time, he couldn’t stop staring at the man’s face, which looked unsettlingly familiar.

"How quickly we get through this is up to you," Isaac began, adopting a tone far less diplomatic than before. Either he thought it was the right tactic, or his patience was starting to wear thin.

"Just one answer is all we need," he said. "The sooner we get it, the sooner we’re out of here."

Nicholas Curtis licked his chapped lips, but his tongue seemed just as dry as his mouth. "Then ask already; I have to take a leak."

"Nothing I’d love more."

Isaac took a deep breath.

Nicholas Curtis waited, watching them closely.

"How do we get behind the Paradise Walls?"

"The Paradise Walls?"

"Yes. Central Park. Don’t pretend you don’t know."

"Oh, Central Park, right. How do you get in there? You don’t."

"Wrong answer," Isaac growled. "Where’s the secret research facility?"

"Right here," Nicholas Curtis said, pointing straight to his ass.

"Are you messing with us, old man?"

"Of course I am. Or do you really think I’ve got a secret lab up my ass?" He chuckled quietly to himself.

"My wife was kidnapped and taken to Thandros Corp HQ, where they’re experimenting on her. Take a look at the guy sitting next to me—does he look like a healthy, normal person to you? He’s another victim of their twisted experiments. The cancer is eating him alive. He doesn’t have much time left."

Nicholas Curtis glanced at Billy for a moment, but then that familiar heavy guilt seemed to pull his gaze back down to the soft pile of the carpet, where his eyes stayed fixed.

"I haven’t left this little island in ten years," Nicholas Curtis said. "I was at peace until you two idiots showed up. And before that? Well, I don’t know what happened before that—I have amnesia. Medically confirmed." His tone was exaggerated, almost mocking. Either he couldn’t lie or he was trying to provoke Isaac even more.

"And since I can only judge by what I’m hearing and not by what I know—because I don’t know anything—I’m afraid I have to say you sound like a pair of paranoid conspiracy nuts."

"Say it!" Isaac yelled.

"Or what?"

The dog scratched and whimpered at the door, which Nicholas Curtis had closed on him earlier.

"You’re going to beat up an old man? Try to force information out of me that I don’t have? And who told you I could help you, anyway?" Nicholas Curtis wiped dried saliva from the corners of his mouth and looked at them both with piercing eyes.

A fair question.

Why are we doing this?

Because some vague informant named Mimir told us this guy used to work with Henry Thandros?

Did you know this story is from Royal Road? Read the official version for free and support the author.

Are we really so desperate that we’re willing to threaten an old man?

But then again, why does he look exactly like my mysterious stalker?

Billy gripped the soft armrests, preparing himself to stand up. No one in their twenties should find it this hard to get up from a chair.

"Let it go, Isaac," he said. "The man doesn’t know anything. Let’s just give up," he decided, his voice dropping to a low murmur.

His partner looked at him, desperation filling his eyes with tears. "Like hell we’re giving up! This bastard is our last chance."

Suddenly, Isaac sprang to his feet and approached the old man.

"Hey, Isaac! Isaac? We don’t even know if he’s actually involved in all this, damn it! Let him go!"

"Are you saying you feel sorry for this asshole?"

"If he’s innocent, yes," Billy shot back.

"You’re the one who said you recognized him. That he was following you."

"I’m an old man on crutches," Nicholas Curtis interjected, "a washed-up old guy with no memory left and too slow to follow anyone."

Billy took a colorful plaid throw from the couch and draped it over his trembling body. He was unbearably cold. "Yeah, no one’s buying that," he muttered.

Nicholas Curtis gave no reaction. He seemed beyond intimidation, as though neither fear nor persuasion could sway him. "It’s a cliché that older people can’t listen," he said. "We may be getting senile, and sure, we struggle to understand you young folks. We struggle to keep track of what you’re saying or, for that matter, hold onto our bowels. But there’s one thing we don’t lack: hold on a moment, now I’ve forgotten what I wanted to say."

Ignoring his provoking tone, Billy explained the situation again. He showed him the Rubik’s Cube and the hologram of his medical report.

"They’ve done something to me, something that’s making my body deteriorate. My old self is breaking down. And his wife"—he gestured toward Isaac—"was also taken by these researchers. We won’t hurt you; that’s a promise. We’re only here because we need your help. I’m begging you, if you know anything, help us stop those responsible from experimenting on innocent people."

Nicholas Curtis scratched his thumb thoughtfully across his fingernail in silence. Billy wondered if his words had gotten through to him. That had been the plan: to plead with the old man to help them.

"Listen to an old man for a minute," he began. "Anyone who thinks there are good people and bad people is a fool. We all act believing we’re doing the right thing. But what is right? Each of us has a clear idea of how the world should be, and we’ll do whatever it takes to make that idea a reality. Communism versus capitalism, right versus left, terrorism versus the so-called oppressors of the West—whoever gave us this gift of intelligence should have erased all our worst, most animalistic traits beforehand. We’re too narrow-minded to live in peace with one another. Isn’t it a beautiful thought, that we could all live hand in hand, helping each other, protecting our little world?"

Billy looked at him, nodding earnestly. He didn’t fully understand what the old man was getting at, but he felt the same way. That’s why he wanted to defeat Thandros, to end the human experiments.

But the old man burst into loud laughter at his nod. He practically bellowed, half in earnest, half in despair. "Well, son, that’s never going to happen if we just let evolution take its course," he said. "There was a time when we humans had the right values in place, and a time when those values completely disintegrated. Technology advances, but that kind of progress says nothing about our humanity. We can build supercomputers and artificial intelligence, send space stations and satellites into orbit, but we’re still incapable of ending world hunger. If we want to save humanity, what we need isn’t more technological progress but a deep restructuring of each individual’s character, a realignment of priorities, a whole new value system. Humility, integrity, self-sacrifice—anything but the idiotization that lets corporations and governments encourage and satisfy humanity’s lowest instincts. For fifty years I’ve watched human nature regress. Why is that? Random mutation? Reverse evolution? Hardly. It’s deliberate conditioning. People are being shaped without their knowledge. But into what? Naturally, whatever the shaper wants. Do either of you have children? No? Well, all parents do this to their kids. They instill values they think are right. Schools do it with their students, media and politics with citizens. So, whose values are they, really, that we each represent? Here, in America, in the year 2050, we live according to the rules of a single profit-hungry corporation. The Thandros Corporation is the 'paradise,' but its citizens didn’t take love thy neighbor from the Bible; they took only one phrase to heart: 'Have dominion over the earth.' The way the world has turned out is no accident," said Nicholas Curtis, and suddenly he sounded like the conspiracy theorist. "All the misery we see is a deliberate outcome, the consequence of a few people unable to control their fantasies of power, sustained over centuries."

"So... you’re an enemy of the corporation?"

"Am I?" The old man asked, a wry smile playing on his lips. "That’s a good question, son... Einstein didn’t invent the atomic bomb. He provided great, revolutionary knowledge that the government exploited to build the bomb. Good was twisted into evil by evil people. And I fear the same thing is happening with the Thandros Corporation. What you’re seeing is... far more complex than you could ever grasp. I owe the Thandros Corporation a deep gratitude, because the company has made possible something that might otherwise be forever lost—hope for our species."

"You mean creating a carbon-neutral world?" Billy replied, trying to keep his voice steady. "But for that, the Thandros Corporation accelerated the greenhouse effect significantly. And don’t forget the secret research files we just showed you on the cube. Those documents clearly link the company to human experiments."

"My son," Curtis replied, shaking his head slowly, "what would you say is the embodiment of innocence?"

Billy hesitated. "A...child, I suppose."

"Good. So imagine a picture, one where a little child lies helpless on its back, screaming, while the devil himself leans over it with a sharp spear. What do you feel?"

"Anger," said Billy, his voice hardening. "I’d want to help the child, to save it. But maybe I couldn’t... so also, a sense of injustice. Helplessness."

"Indeed. But then let’s say you realize the image has been cropped at the edges. What does that do to your perception?"

Billy paused, reluctant to answer. "Nothing," he said finally. "The devil is still evil."

"Ah, but what you didn’t see was the full picture as it once was," Curtis said, voice lowering. "The child is being carried on the back of a giant snake, one taking it to a nest where its young wait to devour it. And the figure you thought was the devil actually wants to save the child, preserve its innocence, with the spear raised not against the child but against the serpent. Now, what do you think of the devil?"

Billy stared at the old man, confused. "He’s not evil anymore. At least...not entirely."

"What I mean to say is: everything depends on perspective. What you’ve shown me—your hologram, the image of yourself—are isolated fragments, like my example, almost unbearable on their own. But that’s just it: a fragment. A fragment never reveals the whole truth."

"Are you seriously trying to tell me that some higher purpose—whatever it is—justifies these horrific experiments in any way?"

"Then tell me, my son, would—"

"I am not your son, damn it!"

Nicholas Curtis shifted on the couch, pressing his fingertips together thoughtfully. "Tell me, then, would you sacrifice a hundred thousand lives if you knew it would prevent the suffering of billions more who live in this fallen world and those yet to come?"

Billy refused to answer such a hypothetical question. His eyes filled with tears of rage, barely held in check, though his clenched fists told a different story. Like Isaac, he was close to shifting to a more physical method of interrogation.

"You both just don’t understand," the old man said, rising from the couch with a groan. He was suddenly close, just a breath away, and that breath was foul.

"Then I’ll just have to show you," he said, hobbling heavily past them, grabbing his cane as he made his way toward the kitchen.

"My old friend Henry Thandros wouldn’t mind if I gave you a little tour of his research complex," Nicholas Curtis said suddenly. "But first, let me put the kettle on."