The Innocence Treatment

by Ari Goelman

“I like them much more now that I don’t have to go.” Evelyn examined me, suddenly seeming uncertain. “Sasha was … nice?”

  I nodded. “I know he’s an agent for the Department, Ev. But Sasha and I understand each other. You should be more careful around Peter, though.”

  Evelyn frowned. “You too?”

  “Your father and Evelyn had a big fight about Peter earlier,” my mother said. “Your father says hello, by the way. He’ll be back tomorrow evening.”

  “I’m not going to abandon Peter—” Evelyn started.

  “I don’t care if you abandon him,” I said. “Just don’t say anything incriminating around him. The guy would narc on you in a heartbeat.”

  “Is that what your boyfriend said? He would know.”

  She meant it as an insult, but she was absolutely right. It was what Sasha had said, and he would know. I gave her a hug. “Just because Peter went to jail doesn’t mean you should, Evelyn.”

  Even writing this on a safe computer with no immediate intention to send it to anyone, I’m reading this over to make sure there’s not the slightest hint of anything seditious in Evelyn’s words. She’s trying to be a loyal friend to Peter, that’s all.

  I said good night to my mother and Evelyn and walked upstairs. Leaving my lights off, I slotted the nano drive into this old laptop. And that’s where the good part of my night ended.

  Dr. Corbin, I don’t understand the science, not really, though it seems that you did something impressive. Not just garden-variety genetic manipulation. I’m sure you’re very proud of yourself.

  Sad thing is, it turns out it’s too late for me to do anything to stop you. Killing myself a few months ago—now that would have put a serious crimp in your plans. It’s a tough realization—knowing that nothing I do now could possibly accomplish as much as dying before the operation.

  But that’s … what’s the expression? A day too late and a dollar too little.

  It’s 1:30 a.m., and my head hurts. So I’m going to sleep. Don’t worry, Dr. Corbin. Tomorrow I’ll come back and edit this into a journal entry I can send you. I’ll take out the bits about the Department’s database, and make up some stuff about how Sasha and I made wild, passionate love on Riley’s bed. I may need to look up some of the technical details about the lovemaking, but I’m sure I can figure out something juicy and plausible. Maybe even a little acrobatic.

  Then I’ll write up a real journal entry about what I found. Not for you, Dr. Corbin, but for someone else. Hopefully lots of someones, if things ever get desperate enough for me to post this online.

  Not-so-sincerely yours,

  Lauren

  Video Clip #1

  Caption: Innocence Treatment

  Experimental testing protocol #0239A67 Recorded October 8, 2031, at the Department’s detention facility in San Luis Obispo, California.

  Description:

  A young man in a maroon T-shirt sits at a steel table. His eyes are red-rimmed and his nose is running, likely with the aftereffects of tear gas. He’s in his early twenties—maybe even younger.16

  “You have no excuse for holding me,” he tells someone offscreen. “I was participating in a peaceful protest. What am I charged with?”

  “You’re not charged with anything, Mr. Palmer,” the offscreen interviewer answers. “Rather, you’re helping the march of progress. You’ve been recruited into a small experiment the Department is running at this facili—”

  “I’m not taking part in any experiment. I want to see a lawyer.”

  “Let me start by asking: what do you think of the government?”

  “I have nothing to say. Not until I see a lawyer.”

  “After this experiment—which should take no more than a few hours—the Department will release you, with no charges and with no additional consequences.”

  Palmer stares into the camera. He says nothing.

  After a moment the interviewer says, “I just told you that we’ll be releasing you soon. Do you believe me?”

  Palmer’s lips thin. “Of course not.”

  “And—finally—please give me a list of the protest’s other organizers.”

  Palmer rubs his reddened eyes. “I’m not giving you names,” he says. Not defiant, but resigned. “Do what you want to me, but I’m not giving you a single name.”

  The interviewer makes a sound that could be a laugh, could be a cough. “Excellent,” he says. “So concludes the first part of our time together. Baseline responses are established. Go on.”

  A gray-clad guard appears in the camera frame, back of his head to the camera. In his hand he’s holding a small plastic container with a spray top—like a bottle of cheap perfume. Palmer looks afraid, but he doesn’t move as the guard brings the bottle toward him and sprays him full in the face.

  At the last second Palmer closes his eyes and brings up his hands, but he still gets a faceful of the spray. “Not a single name,” he repeats.

  The interviewer says nothing. In the corner of the screen a little digital clock appears and starts ticking down from thirty. By the time it hits zero, Palmer is sitting up straighter in his chair, his eyes wide.

  “All right,” the interviewer says. “Please tell me what you think of the government.”

  “It’s a kleptocracy,” Palmer says immediately. “A government made of thieves, each desperate to get their own slice before things fall apart for good.”

  “Hmm,” the interviewer says. “I completely agree with you. I have good news. There are going to be elections in three months. No big campaign donations will be allowed. We expect an entirely new government by February.”

  Palmer’s face breaks into a huge smile.

  “That’s why we took you in,” the interviewer says. “Just to let you know. Could you tell us the names and addresses of everyone you can remember who feels like you do about the current government? We want to get in touch with them and let them know the good news.”

  “Oh my lord!” Palmer says, grinning like he’s won the lottery. “I want to call them right now.”

  “Get him the phone,” the interviewer calls to someone. (Or, more likely, to no one at all.) He shoves a pad of paper onto the table in front of Palmer and hands him a pen. “Why don’t you write their names down while we’re waiting for the phone? We don’t want to forget anyone.”

  Palmer leans over the pad of paper and starts to write, smiling in anticipation of how happy his friends will be to get the news.

  Caption: Two hours later—post-treatment interview.

  Palmer is still behind the steel table, slumped in his chair, gray-faced with exhaustion or despair. Or both.

  “Mr. Palmer,” the interviewer says. “I want to ask you a few more questions and then, I promise you, your part in this experiment is over. What do you think of the United States government?”

  Palmer shakes his head and mutters, “You bastards drugged me. So what? That’s not admissible in court.”

  “Hmm. And would you care to confirm the list of like-minded individuals you provided?”

  Palmer wipes his face, still staring at the table. “Go to hell. They were just people who popped into my head. Nothing to do with the democracy movement.”

  “And, finally, when do you anticipate being released?” the interviewer asks.

  At this Palmer looks directly at the interviewer. “Whenever you damn well please,” he says.

  Fade to black. An appended data file notes that “post-intervention” medical tests showed no identifiable chemical signature in the subject’s body.

  Additional Comments:

  There are three other video clips much like this one. A would-be suicide bomber is easily convinced to provide a list of his handlers and their contact information. A drug boss turns over detailed access information on the investment accounts where he’s laundered his illicit fortune. An illegal immigrant volunteers the names, addresses, and jobs of a dozen family members, also in the country illegally.

  The format is the same in
each video: an individual is sprayed (with what one presumes is an aerosol version of the Innocence Treatment) and quickly becomes so gullible that they are easily induced to act against their own, or their group’s, self-interest. (As a researcher, of course, I wonder if there were other test subjects whom the treatment affected less. I can easily imagine Paxeon exaggerating the treatment’s impact in order to excite their Departmental sponsors.)

  If you’d like to watch any or all of these videos yourself, they are readily available online (though I strongly suggest you anonymize your computer before watching them). In the interests of brevity, I’m only describing one more video clip at length. This final clip is quite different from the others, veering away from experimental verification and toward marketing. It’s worth considering, if only as evidence of how the Department intended to monetize its investment in the Innocence Treatment.

  Video Clip #5

  Caption: Innocence Treatment Proof of concept, worker pacification

  Description:

  A silver-haired white man stands behind a lectern, beaming at the camera (and at his presumed audience of CEOs and government officials). “Does your company struggle with the consequences of low worker morale? Absenteeism, worker theft, labor organizing? They all have the same root cause—your workers don’t trust you to do what’s best for them. What if you could convince them?”

  He snaps his fingers and the screen fills with images of Chinese workers filing into a large warehouse space filled with what looks like voting booths. “The following is real-life footage of a recent experiment carried out with workers in a factory in Shenzhen, China. The factory does high-end fabrication for some of the world’s most successful electronic companies.

  “First, workers were surveyed anonymously about their feelings for their employer.”

  Caption: The proportion of workers who expressed high levels of trust in their employer was less than 20 percent.

  “Next, workers were exposed to our patented trust-enhancing chemical regime. The treatment is odorless and takes only a few seconds to administer to hundreds of workers.”

  An image of workers assembled in a smaller room, presumably to economize on the amount of Innocence Treatment necessary to reach them. A barely audible hiss as a mist comes through the vents. The men and women look around, worried for an instant. Suddenly animated, they exchange words in a southern dialect of Mandarin Chinese peppered with English slang.

  The door opens and the workers walk back to the voting booths, presumably to fill out a post-treatment survey.

  Caption: The proportion of workers in the experimental group who expressed high levels of trust in their employer more than tripled.

  The video moves on to show the workers hard at work. One employee is filmed doing something complicated with a 3-D printer while two others lean over a large touch screen, collaborating. They all look happy.

  “Our treatment improves morale without degrading workers’ abilities to accomplish complex tasks. The effects will entirely dissipate by the end of the shift, leaving the workers ignorant that they’ve been exposed to anything at all. Don’t take our word for it. Contact us for a free trial.”

  The Paxeon logo floats across the screen, while in the background the workers continue to demonstrate their productivity.

  “Paxeon Solutions. Making change profitable.”

  JOURNAL OF LAUREN C. FIELDING

  Sunday, November 2, 2031

  Dear Dr. Corbin (or, okay, whoever actually ends up reading this):

  This morning, when I was changing my last journal entry into something I could send to you, I realized that I never said what I actually found out last night. To anyone who ends up reading my journal: sorry about that. I wasn’t deliberately keeping anything back. It was more that writing it down seemed like it would somehow make it more true. And I don’t want it to be true.

  But, shoot. What’s the point of keeping a journal if you’re not going to be honest, right? And if I ever do wind up posting this online, I want people to know what you did, Dr. Corbin. Not the details (which are totally beyond me), but the gist: you took my parents’ genetic material and twisted it. Not to make me superstrong or smart or anything fun, but to make me useful.

  It turns out it’s really hard—almost impossible with existing technologies—to make a new chemical compound with predictable effects on the human brain. The brain is a subtle place, I guess, and even the most sophisticated computer is better at replicating human proteins than making new ones.

  So you did what you had to, Dr. Corbin. Or what you wanted to, anyway. You engineered my genes so that when my brain was developing I would make a new kind of brain cell. From the moment I was conceived in your laboratory, my brain didn’t just make all the usual white- and gray-matter cells that people use to think. It made all those, but it also made one additional type of brain cell. In your return-on-investment statement (thoughtfully kept in the Department’s file on me) you called it the “Innocence Treatment.” Nice name, by the way. Much catchier than the technical term, which, if I read the files right, is “modified oligodendrocytes.”17

  This “treatment” was the reason I used to be the way that I was—I was so awash in the additional type of brain cell that my brain could barely function. Once you were sure the cells were stable, you could extract them, study their cellular structure, and figure out how to encourage normal people’s brains to make that kind of brain cell. I still don’t know if taking out all the weird cells just happened to fix my brain, or if you fixed me on purpose and this is an additional experiment that I’m experiencing now.

  No big mystery why the Department would be interested in the Innocence Treatment. I can imagine the folks in charge drooling at the thought of a drug that turns anyone into a cheerful informant (with no Rule #7 to keep their mouths shut).

  I could imagine that, but I don’t have to—I can just watch a video. Thank you, Department! They’ve already gone ahead and tested it on a bunch of prisoners, recording the results just in case some foreign dictator didn’t get exactly how useful the Innocence Treatment would be to them. Those were the videos I couldn’t stop watching last night.

  So that’s what I found—the purpose of my life was to be a petri dish, growing a chemical that temporarily turns people into a replica of the old me. Stupid. Pliable. Happy.

  I spent most of today inside, watching old movies. Trying and failing to distract myself. Trying and failing to believe that at least you were done with me, and now I could move on with my life. The problem is, I saw the way you looked at me the other day, and I know you’re not done with me.

  I really felt like spending the night inside, too. I had no desire to go to Sasha’s house and tell him that I was a genetically engineered mutant who had already served her purpose, which was to produce a special kind of brain cell. I didn’t feel like seeing his face and trying to guess how much he already knew or what he thought of me now.

  But a deal’s a deal. I slipped out of my house just after 10 p.m.

  It was harder to get out this time. Every time I opened my bedroom door, I found Evelyn at her desk across the hall, door open, chair half turned to face the hallway. I think she’s trying to keep track of me, worried that I’ve gotten involved in something over my head with Sasha. Which is kind of right, except that it’s not really about Sasha and I’ve been involved since the moment I was conceived.

  I eventually went downstairs. Evelyn came with me. I pretended I was hungry and got myself a snack. She had a snack, too. I went back upstairs, and she went back upstairs to her room and resumed reading, door still open, her chair still facing the hall. I could have just told her I was going out, I guess, but I didn’t want to tell her about the Innocence Treatment, and I didn’t want her getting our parents involved.

  Plus, sneaking out my window seemed like a lot more fun than walking out the front door.

  I locked the door to my room and opened my window. It was a cool night, so I quickly pulled on a fl
eece before poking my head out the window. There’s a little ledge beneath my window, shingled with solar panels, then another ten feet or so to the ground. Ten feet. Too far to jump.

  I stripped my bed, tied the sheets together, and secured one end of the sheet rope to my desk. After tossing the other end out the window, I climbed out myself and gently sat down on the ledge of solar panels.

  Then, very slowly easing my legs over the lip of the ledge, I climbed down the sheet until my whole body was dangling in the air. I had another foot or so of sheet to go when I heard a ripping sound from above me. I bent my knees and let go.

  I hit the grass next to my house and fell forward. The grass was moist with dew, the ground hard and cold. I got to my feet and brushed myself off. My knees and wrist hurt where I’d fallen on them, but they weren’t too bad. I heard nothing from inside the house. No windows opened. No one thundered down the stairs to stop me.

  Keeping to the shadows, I ran through our neighbors’ backyard before emerging on the street a few houses down. Just like the last time I snuck out to meet Sasha, being outside at night on my own lifted my spirits. I didn’t run this time. I walked slowly, appreciating every step of my freedom. My whole existence might be due to Corbin’s nasty little plan to make nasty little chemicals, but tonight, at least, I was free.

  This time, I didn’t look in people’s windows. Instead, I kept to the darkest patches I could find. It was a clear night overhead and after my eyes adjusted to the darkness I could see the stars. I found the Big Dipper, or maybe it was the Little Dipper—I don’t really know constellations. Still, it was nice to see the stars. In eighth-grade science we learned that it takes centuries for the light from our sun to travel to most of the stars in our galaxy. That might not sound comforting, but it was a comfort to me tonight—the thought that Dr. Corbin and I would both be long dead before the sunlight from today hit most of the stars I was looking at right now.

  I found Sasha at the base of the tree, looking around a little anxiously. He relaxed when he saw me. “Hi,” he said quietly. “I wasn’t sure you were coming.”