Mindless

Chapter Nineteen - 008

"So, why am I here, exactly?"

I struggle to get the words out, glad for my voice glitcher which ocvers that struggle. I''ve started to feel funny-- None of the food looks appetizing. I got in the long line for it at lunch yesterday, recieving some strange globs of color on a hard metal tray. I poked at them with some kind of stabing spoon for an hour and then threw them away. Same thing at dinner. And the no breakfast today-- and no dinner the day before yesterday. I haven't eaten since I elft the moonBases.

"We need to prep you for the surgery," Kay says, then all but slams her tiny, delacite hands over her mouth. I can almost imagine my voice becoming more dangerous, causing the glitcher to add more of a range as it jumps between frequencies.

"What?"

"Uhm..."

"Kay. Now."

She seems to hear somethign in my voice despite the glitcher, or maybe see somethign in my expression, because she starts to expain things that there is no way she is cleared to talk about.

"So, you understand that to an extent, the entire population is brainwashed, correct?"

"No," I deadpan. "I completley missed that part."

She doesn't laugh. Good. It's not funny.

"And you probably wouldn't be surprised if I told you that the peopel that did this had to... alter everyone's mind, to some extent?"

"I actually knew that, believe it or not. Maybe it's the whole 'staring at my brain-dead instructors, peers, soldiers and fellow citizens all day every day' thing."

"Well, how do you think they did that?"

I pause for a minute. The fifty different branches of thought in my head that are normlly running all over the place quickly multiply into five hundred. I close my eyes, backtracking through every file I've ever seen.

"An implant," I reply, opening my eyes. "They did somethign to mute brain function, to make us feel less and less. The mroe a person feels, the more the brain is muted."

"Yes," Kay replies. "It's like a sedative, except it lasts forever and grants a person the ability to think completley clearly, just without the brain funcion of emotion."

That's awful, and some part of my realizes that, but te shock refuses to register. Becausse I'm not shocked, that these people would do somethign like this. That's not unexpected.

"Ok, I get that you might have gotten a bit of a negative reaction from us, but why keep this a secret? We would have agreed either way, and it wouldn't have gone well for anybody if one of us woke up one day and discovered you all had done a surgery in secret."

Kay's frown deepens. "There's more."

Oh, Stars, it never ends. "There always is," I reply with a sigh. "Do tell."

"Memory."

"What?"

"Our memories. They alter them."

I open my mouth to make a reply, then close it again. And then I think of a reply, but I can't form the words.

"You can't... you can't remember unless we take out the device that mutes the emotions."

I remain silent. All the shock that refused to register with the earlier statment comes crashing down on me, crushing me, drowning me in shock. I can't move. Can't breathe.

"You haven't been in that base... all your life." She shudders, as if picturing that happening. To her. To someone else. To anyone.

"It's your Earthen mind that saved you."

I go through the rest of the appointment numbly, not speaking. She runs a brain scan, and there it is. I glare over her shoulder and watch the computer, willing the screen to change. There can't be anythign there. That's my brain. mine. I cannot be seeing a small metal blip in the center of the scan, right in the center of my brain. It can't be there.

The rest of the day passes in a blur. I don't remember anythign from my classes, don't remember what the strange food blobs were for dinner, don't remember if Xan cam over to talk to me or not. Don't remember what kind of code I wrote. on't remember if I went to training or skipped it, knowing that I couldn't deal with Seth and would end up punching him in the nose.

Don't remember. Just like I don't remember anythign before I was ten years old. Just like how every other memory of mine is smudgy aroudn the edges, as if it's fake. Just like how every emotion I feel is fadign away, like a memory that hides in the corners of one's mind and lurks there, never coming into the spotlight of memory. They did this.

The moonBases did this to me.

Who is me? I don't know right now.

I can't remember.