Vicious Memories

Chapter 103

It was a small cough. Such an innocuous thing, really. An action that happens every day, on its own signifying no underlying health problem whatsoever. That tiny, dainty cough could be ignored. Everything was fine.

"Stand down," I tried saying to the guards, but my voice came out as a croak. I repeated myself. "Stand down. They won't do anything."

"Like hell we won't," Arun said.

"Everyone, wait, please. We don't have to do this. If you come forward now, she'll kill you. Don't throw your lives away. Please."

"Traitor!" a voice in the back of the pack yelled. "Don't listen to him!"

"She has a point, Oliver." Alice moved to stand next to Arun, her graceful frame tense and ready. Her face was a mask. "Why would we ever listen to you? If she's going to kill everyone, we'll take her down with us."

I waded past the pain of Alice's words to find another way to stall. My eyes landed on Bev, who was glancing between me and Alice with undisguised relish. This was her ideal situation, apparently, fully in control of the people and things around her. She had exhibited such an insane need for power. Maybe giving her an excuse to reveal the depths of that power would help.

"Bev," I said pleadingly. "We deserve more of an explanation than what you've given us. A two year experiment, stealing so many peoples' lives, killing so many of your subjects on purpose... how does any of this make sense?"

A silver star flickered overhead as if its power source was starting to fail. The blood rushing through my head moved a little faster.

"Deserve? You deserve nothing." Bev lifted her chin. "You all volunteered for this. Well, not you, Ollie. But the rest of you. None of this was done against your will."

"None of what?" Tana asked derisively, and I wanted to hug her. "For someone with an attitude as haughty as yours apparently is, you aren't very good at explaining things. So much dissembling and generalizing, it makes me want to throw up."

"Fine, then," Bev snarled, "at best you're just going to forget it all again anyway."

Those words meant far more to us than they ever could to another human being, and the reaction to them was visceral. Everyone recoiled, the realization that they might have to live through the whole nightmare all over again too frightening to take.

"That's right," Bev pressed. "You were originally supposed to be the lucky first batch, reset and placed back into the world. To a tee, you were all destined for lethal injection, but lucky for you, your atrocities coincided with one of the worst crises in modern history. The mutated Zika outbreak decimated our childbearing potential. Plummeting of birth rates made labor the most valuable resource we had, and Project Noah solved two problems at once. The labor shortage and rising incarceration costs. My experiment proves that murderers aren't born, they're made. A simple memory wipe is all it takes to reset you, and then we can put you in places to contribute where we need you most. You volunteered to avoid your impending sentences, and your reward was supposed to be forgetting that any of this ever happened. You'd be given new lives."

"Why did so many have to die?" Alice asked. "What about Felix? He was a murderer, in the end."

"Always such a simple view of things, Alice. On the contrary, Felix was our greatest triumph. We had to show that one of you was capable of killing in general, which would make choosing not to kill a real choice, not a unintended side-effect. A choice that isn't really a choice doesn't prove anything. The rest of you were given that choice with Felix's trial, then again just now, with the Strangers. You chose not to murder in cold blood."