I was hoping the procedure’s anesthesia would keep me from dreaming, but it was not to be. Normally, I would have welcomed more visions of the past, but these weren’t of my days before the mind-wipe. No, these were the one set of memories I wanted nothing to do with.

The Factory.

The place I was forged.

It was six months before I awoke in the metal room for the first time, after my mind had been wiped but before I’d been cleared as a Letter. It was here I was conditioned to be a soldier for the International Refugee Society and where the process was at its flimsiest. I often got flashbacks from this time, each more terrifying than the last.

This night, I was standing in a close-quarters combat (CQC) pose in a two-story concrete room lit by fluorescent lights. There was a large Karma Corp logo on one of the pillars holding up the ceiling with a red-letter 17 underneath it. I was surrounded by an audience full of people with shaved heads and identical army green t-shirts with camo pants.

I, too, had my head shaved, but my shirt had a stylized G on it where the others didn’t. I was covered in sweat and my body ached all over, but I was feeling only a fraction of the pain due to the heavy drugs coursing through my system. I’d been hit numerous times but was still at near-peak capacity. I would need to be. This was my third fight of the evening and my opponent was fresh.

Standing across from me was F, in a similar pose and attire. F looked ten years younger, which confused me, but he had a focused look of determination on his face. I had no doubt he was ready to kill me, and if they had ordered me to do so, I would have done the same to him. The trainers wouldn’t like if I killed him, though, so I focused instead on planning ways to disable him.

It was… difficult.

“You’re not going to win,” F said, his voice somehow both empty and cocky at once.

I didn’t respond.

He wasn’t worth it.

On the second level of the concrete room, I saw a balcony full of a different sort of guests. There were military men and women, corporate executives, politicians, and individuals I knew to be doctors and scientists from their participation in the experiments on us.

Doctor Marcus Gordon walked in front of the balcony from my right side, carrying a stopwatch. He was wearing a lab coat with a little splotch of blood at the bottom, making him look menacing in an understated way. His appearance here might have been an accurate reflection of past events or just my mind cobbling together various disparate elements into a coherent whole.

Marcus addressed the people above us. “Stage two of our program has done what no regimen of training has accomplished in a millennium of war: standardized the human soldier. Each of our prospective Letters, male or female, is equal in terms of strength, speed, agility, and yes, even intelligence. Experience, however, cannot be compensated for and is the difference between a hardened veteran versus a Letter.”

I was getting really annoyed at having to keep my combat readiness pose, but the emotions seemed distant.

Stunted.

“How do we know this is going to be an accurate reflection of their fighting skills?” one of the general says.

Marcus snorted. “You’ve seen actual soldiers fight, gentlemen. You can tell for yourselves when someone is faking.”

That seemed to satisfy the general, but a female colonel said, “We have experienced soldiers, Doctor. If they’re superior to your lab rats, why should we replace them?”

“You’ll see the answer to that,” Marcus replied, smiling. He gave us a brief glance. “Fight.”

F, or perhaps it was better to say the future F, moved faster than any normal human being and harder. A punch from him would take a normal man’s head off. I ducked mine out of the way, and delivered a brutal series of retaliatory punches to his chest. It was like hitting iron. The future F spun around to strike me in the face, only for me to grab his arm and with a swift twist, break it.

Then I kicked his kneecap and broke it, too.

Then I threw him over my shoulder and placed my foot against his neck.

My instincts told me to break it.

I didn’t.

This time.

“Twelve seconds,” Marcus said, checking his stop watch. “As you can see, we’re not faking the damage they’ll take.”

“Is he going to be… processed? He’s not much use like this,” one of the executives said, trying to find a euphemism for killing a broken soldier.

“It’ll be healed in two weeks,” Marcus said. “Another benefit of our program. But before you ask—no, it’s not available for soldiers in general. It’s built into the Letters. We are, however, willing to work on it with sufficient funding.”

The colonel said, “I want to see him fight another Letter. The other winner.”

Marcus looked up and nodded. “S, please come forward.”

Everything started to get blurry and I wondered if that was part of the memory or something related to the fact that it was a dream. They were sticking an updated IRD into my brain right now and I didn’t know what that was doing to my head. The room started to spin around me, but I managed to focus on S regardless. Beautiful even with a shaved head, black eye, busted lip, and broken nose from her earlier fights that evening.

I couldn’t remember the next few minutes.

But I lost.

Badly.

My next memory was being inside an infirmary, underneath a plastic oxygen tent filling my surroundings with gases designed to accelerate my body’s healing. I had a mask over my face to keep me from breathing them in. I was barely conscious but sensed a presence in the room. Was it Doctor Marcus? Someone else?

Love this story? Find the genuine version on the author's preferred platform and support their work!

I didn’t know.

However, the presence was comforting to me.

Comforting but sad.

Pitying.

“You should have hit her harder,” the voice said. “I can’t protect you if they think you’re weak.”

I didn’t respond, instead looking through the gases and plastic at the indistinct figure before me.

“I’d say think of your family, but we both know you don’t remember them at this stage. Know that they love you, though, and you love them. I’m diluting your dosage for your next round of treatments. That should allow more of who you are to survive.”

I lifted my hand and put it on the side of the oxygen tent, muttering something that had no meaning to me in the present but something that meant a great deal to my past self: “I am not who you think I am.”

“Get some sleep.” The figure just turned and walked away.

“Rebecca,” I mumbled. “I am not…”

And then I wasn’t there anymore.

I was somewhere else.

The office was absolutely beautiful. Two glass walls overlooked a Japanese garden on the second floor of a Karma Corp building in Sweden. The carpet was blue shag, which went well with the blue leather on both the chair I was sitting on as well as the couch behind me.

I was sitting in front of a desk with a glass of brandy in my hands, listening to a black-haired man in an Italian sport coat prattle on about his golf game. I was dressed in the attire of an upper-mid-level executive and wearing a wig styled on John F. Kennedy Jr.’s trademark style. There was a flat screen television set on behind him, playing the movie Memento, starring Guy Pearce. The movie hadn’t been playing in my real memories, I was sure, but was now for some reason.

I knew where I was.

My first kill.

Or was it my second?

Or even fifth?

It was hard to tell.

“And that’s when I said, ‘Finish blowing me and I’ll tell you about sexism in the workplace.’ I swear, she was an awful caddy, but the service of that country club was like nothing I’ve ever experienced anywhere else.”

I struggled to remain interested in the misogynist douchebag’s statement. “If what you’re saying is true, that’s definitely the club to join.”

“Pfft,” the man, Aaron Stevens, gave a dismissive wave. “You think that’s unbelievable? I could tell you shit that would make your hair turn white. The kind of stuff that goes on here is enough to make Stratton Oakmont look tame.”

I had no idea what he was talking about but faked interest. It was a Saturday and the two of us were largely alone in the office. This location was in the process of being shut down due to widespread speculation of securities fraud. It was all true, but Aaron believed, correctly, that he was going to be protected from prosecution.

Just not in the way he expected.

In the corner of my eye, I saw S move a janitor’s cart to just in front of the secretary’s empty cubicle. She was wearing a pair of jeans, a faded Eurovision t-shirt, and a ball cap. S deliberately wore no makeup and was wearing an ugly bottle-blonde wig to minimize her attractiveness.

I still thought she looked gorgeous.

S gave me a slight nod of her head, telling me she was ready.

I nodded back.

“So, have you heard about this Black Technology bullshit?” Aaron said, looking back at me. “I mean, seriously, we spend like a billion dollars developing the stuff and then sit on it? It’s such bullshit. If you ask me, it’s just them trying to hide quarterly losses in a way they can’t investigate. Its like, ‘Oh, no, we can’t talk about that. It’s classified.’ I wonder who they had to bribe to keep the government pumping zeroes into the development budget.”

I didn’t know which government he was referring to and didn’t care. I stood up and adjusted my tie. “Aaron, I’m afraid I have to get going.”

“Ah, but you just got here, John.”

I walked around the side of his desk and reached into my pocket to pull out a plastic bag. “And it has been far too long.”

Aaron struggled as I forced it onto his head and pulled him off his chair, keeping him away from anything breakable. The regional CTO thrashed his legs and threw out his arms but was smothered within a surprisingly short period.

I felt… nothing.

“Do you need help?” S asked, bringing the janitor’s cart into the room. She carefully removed the trash bags on the top and I slid the body into the bottom of the container. It would be her job to dispose of it in the incinerator we’d prepared for this mission.

“No,” I said, rubbing my hands before helping put the trash bags back over the corpse. “You had the easy part of the job this time.”

I’d had to play the role of Aaron’s corporate toady and new best friend for close to a month. All just so I could set up the information that would make it look like Aaron had stolen a large amount of money and was fleeing the country.

A tidy explanation for a tidy murder.

S stared right into my eyes. “In order to get samples of his voice for the financial cleaners, I had to be his caddy.”

“Ah.” I grimaced. “I withdraw my statement.”

“Men don’t get that kind of work.”

“Not often.”

S sighed and wheeled out the cart. “Do we have any idea what he did?”

“No. Not this time. It could be he was involved in the fraud.”

“Or he was the one guy who wasn’t involved.”

“Possibly,” I said. “I like to think my targets are guilty when I can.”

“I prefer to know the truth,” S said. “Don’t you?”

I paused. “I don’t know.”

“You will.”

As she departed, I couldn’t help but cough into my hand. “Uh, S, do you have a second?”

“We’re on a bit of a time crunch here.”

I took a deep breath. “Are you, like, do you want to have dinner later?”

S stopped in front of the second-floor elevator and turned back to stare at me. “Are you asking me out on a date? After killing someone?”

I paused, thinking about that. “Yes?”

S blinked, then shrugged. “Sure. We’re never not going to be killing people, after all.”

“For the next ten years at least.”

S gave an enigmatic smile.

And I woke up.

I was now sitting in the middle of a private jet’s lounge, relaxing in a white reclining chair, wearing a new suit and feeling like I’d been drugged. The jet was travelling through the air, and through the closest window, I saw it was nighttime and we were flying over the Atlantic Ocean.

My first act?

I pinched myself in order to make sure this wasn’t another layer of my Inception-like series of dreams.

I didn’t wake up again, so that was good, but had they really performed surgery on me and then dumped me on a plane for Italy without waiting for me to wake up? Surely, even the Society wasn’t that crass. Oh, who was I kidding? Of course they were.

Feeling my head, I stood up and stumbled to the bathroom in the back of the plane. Staring into the mirror, I saw F’s face looking back at me. His—my—head was shaved, but the resemblance was uncanny.

My eyes had surgically applied high-end contacts in them, changing my color from blue to brown. The facial structure reproduction was perfect, and there were even the tiny scars he’d taken from various battles. There were slight differences in our builds and heights but nothing that couldn’t be compensated for with the right pair of shoes or clothes. Still, it was the first time I’d ever looked into a mirror and seen a dead man. There were no signs of my face being operated on, let alone my brain, which was impressive.

Closing my eyes, I gave my new IRD implant a try and found my mind filling with hundreds, if not thousands, of facts stored within. This included criminal profiles, schematics, security protocols, and even instructions on how to drive various kinds of vehicles. I was tempted to try mentally “dialing” the home office, but I wasn’t sure I was comfortable enough with my new implant to try it. Still, it was an impressive piece of engineering, and I was looking forward to getting a chance to test its limits.

I splashed some cold water in my face, walked back to my chair, and sat down. Marissa’s absence was expected but still disappointing. I needed someone I could talk to about my recent dream to help me sort through it all. I wasn’t terribly surprised about Marcus being involved in the creation of the Letters. Persephone had alluded to that fact during our short conversation about them. It just added another reason for me to find him. It did, however, call into question whether or not he was my father. If he was, what kind of parent would let their son become a monster? No, helped their son become one?

And who the hell was Rebecca?

I had a long flight to think about it.