by J. L. Lyon
The Capital Orphanage. The nightmare of his childhood.
He would find no children within, not now. The orphanage had been shut down some months ago, its children scattered among several other facilities as the matron grew too sick to run it any longer. Someone else might have stepped in and taken over, perhaps, but it was well-known what the Capital Orphanage was. Matron Young and her loyal Discipliner sold their souls to the cause of destroying children and raising up soldiers in their place—a task few could stomach.
No doubt the robed figure had led him here for some purpose, but 301 could not imagine what it could be. McCall had mentioned Matron Young was dying, and had requested to see him, so perhaps the figure was not a rebel at all. Perhaps it was him.
301 shook off the impulse to flee on the spot. There was no longer any reason to fear that man. As if to prove it to himself, he detached himself from the place where he stood and approached the orphanage. He did so with moderate trepidation, wanting answers but at the same time afraid of what he might find.
He ascended the five stone stairs to the door and hesitated briefly before finding the courage to knock. Silence reigned in his ears for a long while, until at last the door opened just wide enough for a woman’s voice to say, “The orphanage is closed. If you want to pay your respects you can come back after the violence has ended.”
“Is the matron dead, then?”
“She was not to have survived the night,” the woman replied. “As the sun rises I expect she will fade. Are you one of her children?”
“No,” he said acidly. Not hers. Never hers. “But I was raised here, and she sent for me.”
“301?” she asked, opening the door a little wider. “Specter Captain 301-14-A?”
His eyes narrowed, “You know me?”
“No,” she answered. “But as you say, you are expected.” The door opened wide, and 301 caught his first glimpse of her in the pale morning light. She was pretty if not quite beautiful, at least ten years his senior with flowing dark hair that framed a tired face. There was resentment in her eyes as she looked upon him, though she hid it well in her voice. “Come inside, Specter Captain. There is no one here but the matron and me.”
As he stepped over the threshold he was immediately overcome with a wave of memories—not the fragmented visions of his dreams, but the clear recollections of his time growing from a boy of seven to a young man of eighteen. After his OPE he had split his time between the orphanage and the soldier training compound, yet he still considered it the only home he had ever known. His happiest childhood memories were here, though they were few—memories he shared with Liz. Suddenly he missed her deeply. So much had happened that he had barely had time to feel the stab of her betrayal. A woman he had grown up with, even thought he loved once, ready to kill him at Sullivan’s command.
But she chose not to, he remembered. That had to count for something.
“Did you grow up here as well?” 301 asked. He did not remember her, but of course that didn’t mean much. She could have passed through before his time.
“No,” she shook her head as she led the way to the building’s only elevator. “But I delivered many of the children who did.”
301 looked at her nervously. The orphanage’s elevator had seldom been used even when he lived there, and for good reason. It was an old, rickety thing that might send its occupants plummeting to their deaths without a moment’s warning. That’s when he noticed the tattoo on her arm—a designation he recognized all too well.
“You worked for Sir Wayne Collins,” he said as they stepped inside the death trap. He felt the floor creak beneath their weight, and the doors screeched eerily as they closed.
“He owned me, yes,” she replied, a bit more of her resentment shining through. She pressed the button for the fifth floor. “I split my work between the Collins household and Alexandria General Hospital. They paid him for my services, of course, but trained OB/GYNs are in somewhat short supply. Apparently the Systemics equations don’t account for everything the way they are supposed to. When you…” she paused and gave him a wary look. “When he died they allowed me to stay on at the hospital, and when I learned who the matron was I volunteered to manage her hospice care. She gave homes to many children who otherwise might have been discarded.”
“A better fate that what they received, perhaps,” 301 said grimly. “You have no idea what this place was.”
“I do…but a chance at life is better than no life at all, which is what Systemic Law would have given them. Many of the pregnant women who come through Alexandria General have no progeny license, you see. And due to population controls, the only way they were allowed to carry their children to full term was to place them with the Capital Orphanage to be raised up as soldiers. There is always room for more in the Great Army…just not anyplace else.”
301 swallowed hard, wondering about all those children who grew up believing they were orphans and actually weren’t. They were simply conceived outside the limits of Systemic Law, anomalies in the equation that needed to be balanced. And so they were taken from their parents and built into one of Alexander’s machines.
“I hear you were given a slave yourself some months ago,” the woman said as the elevator gave a lurch. She took it in stride and didn’t seem the least bit nervous, but 301 fought the urge to huddle in a corner and hang onto the sides for dear life. How long did it take to go up five floors?
“Word doesn’t travel fast enough, apparently,” 301 said. “That slave escaped and became the commander of the Silent Thunder rebellion.”
Her eyes brightened, “I suspected she was more than just a frightened Undocumented girl. Well, if your actions at my master’s estate are any indication, I am glad she managed her escape.”
The elevator doors opened and the woman stepped out, leaving him stunned by her jab. After a moment he followed, though he didn’t need her to guide him. He had come here very little, but every product of the orphanage knew the location of the matron’s room and feared it.
“It’s good you came when you did,” the woman said as he caught up with her. “She is fading fast. You won’t have much time, and I would not allow it had it not been her last request.”
“Why me?”
They stopped outside the room all children were forbidden to enter, and she motioned to the door, “You will have to ask her that yourself.” She crossed her arms sullenly and stared at the floor.
301 hesitated, “Aren’t you coming?”
“No,” she shook her head. “What the matron has to say is for you alone. I’ll be on the ground floor if you have need of me.” She walked away, abandoning 301 to go the rest of the way on his own. Taking a deep breath, he turned the doorknob and went inside, his steps cautiously quiet.
The only light came from a lone candle on her bedside table, the wick burned down dangerously close to the wood on which it sat. Wax dripped across the surface as the candle met its slow demise, flickering as though desperate to hang on as long as possible. The flame barely generated enough heat to keep the wax from hardening.
Matron Young lay unmoving upon the bed, eyes closed and hands limp at her sides. Her skin was so pale and her body so thin that 301 wondered if she was already dead. What a cruel place to die, 301 thought sadly. But then, this is the building where Elijah Charity died, and countless other names, to be replaced by the rank and file of the Great Army. Perhaps the matron got what she deserved.
The floor creaked as he shifted his weight, and her head moved at the sound. 301 froze with fear as her eyes fluttered open and she asked in a rasping voice, “Who’s there?” She set her gaze on him and he couldn’t stop the shiver that ran up his spine—some childhood feelings never quite go away. But then he saw the fear in her eyes—the kind only impending death can produce—and he pitied her.
He stepped up to her bedside, “Matron…you may not remember me, but I am—”
“301-14-A,” she said, a bit of firmness coming into her voice. “I re
member you very well, boy.”
He nodded, not knowing what he should say.
“Don’t feel obligated to comfort me,” she raised a frail hand to stifle a cough. “I shall receive all the justice I deserve for the evils I committed here in Napoleon Alexander’s name. I didn’t call you here for consolation, but so I could make at least one thing right before I die.”
“What did you do to me?” he asked coolly.
The matron let out a long, painful sigh, “On the night Lauren Charity was captured, soldiers filled the streets with their violence, killing at random much the same as they are doing today. That was the day you showed up on our doorstep, drenched to the bone with rain and scared half out of your mind.”
“But my file…” 301 said. “It says I was admitted to the orphanage in the 1st year of the Systemic Era. Lauren Charity wasn’t captured until SE6.”
“We lied,” she confessed. “Cold—disloyal, perhaps—but necessary to protect the orphanage and every child within it.”
“Protect them from what?”
“From you,” she said. “If anyone found out who you really were, the lives of all in the orphanage would have been forfeit. That night you came to us we assumed you were just another child victimized by the war between the World System and Silent Thunder, and took you in. Only the next day did we realize that all those soldiers in the streets were looking for a child…you. With the Great Army a wise person never hopes for mercy, so we did what we had to.”
“The Discipliner,” 301 said. “My sessions with him had nothing to do with overcoming trauma.”
“No,” the matron said. “The sessions were the trauma. Before the Persians invaded, the Discipliner spent the better part of his time working for an elite intelligence agency in the area of memory reprogramming. I authorized him to use his techniques on you.”
“What techniques?”
“Pain,” she said, and he could hear the remorse in her voice. “In his adult subjects, he had learned certain ways that memory could be repressed. If certain events could be associated with pain, the mind’s self-preservation instincts would kick in and seal that memory away in order to avoid further suffering. It was only successful on targeted memories, but with children he thought it would be different. Most of us only remember bits and pieces of our childhood before five anyway, large or innocuous events that for some reason our mind decided to record. His theory, then, was that he could discover and repress these bits and pieces, after which the mind would more readily accept a new set of ideas and goals. He called this process Fragmentation.”
“So you took my mind apart piece by piece. You reprogrammed me like a machine.”
“Machines were what Alexander wanted, and machines were what we gave. You were not the first child who received the Fragmentation procedure, nor were you the last. The only difference is that with you, a new set of ideas and goals was not enough. We had to create a new identity, and make you believe it was true. The Discipliner used his skills to insert you illegally into the World System databases, installing a subroutine that ensured your DNA could never be matched against that of your parents. But difficult as that was—impossible, some would say—erasing Elijah Charity proved to be ten times as hard. You were an obstinate child, and held so tightly to your convictions that at times we thought the procedure simply would not work. But eventually, as you know, you gave in to our efforts. It took nearly two years, but in the end the Fragmentation succeeded. You ceased to be Elijah Charity and became 301-14-A.”
301 looked down at the floor, exasperated. Certainly he wanted to hear the truth from her after all these years, but how would that help him? If his mind was broken, it was broken—no matter how it had happened. Knowing about the Discipliner’s procedure couldn’t serve for anything more than to inflame his anger, and he didn’t have time for that. The clock was ticking down to Grace’s doom, and he needed more than what the matron was offering. There had to be some reason he had been led here.
“So why have you brought me here? Why tell me this now?”
“I have brought you here to give you a choice, Shadow Soldier,” the matron said. “And the choice is this: do you want to undo what has been done to you, or not?”
301 gazed down at the matron skeptically. Two years to erase his memories and complete the Fragmentation process…it would be foolish to think she could just wave a magic wand and undo everything. There had to be a catch. “What would I have to do?”
“It’s important to remember, 301, that your memories have simply been repressed. They are not gone. As such a partial defragmentation is inevitable. Just as your present life experiences will cause you to recall things from soldier training, for instance, they will do the same with the things we repressed. You will begin to remember them with greater frequency—fragmented and nonsensical at first, but clearer over time. I suspect, however, that time is of the utmost importance in your case and you may not have years to wait. There are ways, then, to speed the process.”
“What do I have to do?”
“Understand that it wasn’t enough to simply target your memories of events. The Discipliner eventually was forced to target your memories of people. The more of those people you come in contact with, the clearer those fragments will become. If you experience an emotional event that parallels one from your repressed memories, it is possible that the reprogramming sessions will be completely negated. However, you must be wary of this, 301. Some things are too much for the mind to handle.”
“Meaning what, exactly?”
“A sudden defragmentation will cause your old self and your new self to collide, resulting in one of two eventualities. If your two selves can be reconciled to one another, they will merge into a new singular identity, carrying traits of both. But if not, it could spark a cataclysmic event in your mind that will sever the two selves and leave you with a multiple personality disorder. In this scenario you would scarcely be aware that your other self existed. You would become a danger to yourself and those around you, and it is possible you would never recover.”
301 struggled for a moment over whether to confess everything to the matron, in the end concluding that he had nothing to lose. She would pass from the world soon and take her secrets—and his—to the grave. “I’ve already been seeing these fragments. Mostly in my dreams, but sometimes while awake as well.”
The matron nodded weakly, “Yes, I thought as much. Word travels fast, and I heard that you had come in contact with Jacob Sawyer. That may have been the event that started your defragmentation. But when I later heard that Grace Sawyer had been in the palace, that she had lived with you as your slave for more than a month and a half, I had no doubts. In your sessions, you held on to her longest of all.”
“I’ve also been seeing…a boy,” 301 continued cautiously. “A child who calls himself Eli. A child who isn’t really there.”
“I see,” the matron rasped, unsurprised. “A manifestation of your subconscious, no doubt, trying to work out the conflict however it can. Rare, but not unheard of. And also advantageous for you—if a relationship already exists between your two selves it may provide the bridge for the defragmentation.”
“And to do that I need this parallel memory,” 301 said flatly. “How exactly does that work?”
“I can’t say,” the matron coughed, even the simple action of lifting her hand to cover her mouth a difficulty. “Only you know what lies in those memories. Search them, find the person they concern, and attempt to relive it. You might even consult this boy you see—your subconscious knows the way back to unity better than you or I. But, as a starting point I suggest you take a look in the room at the end of the hall. There is information there that will help you on your way.”
She grimaced in pain and began to draw short breaths, “Time grows short, Shadow Soldier. If I could say one final thing to you, it would be this: find something to live for, and protect it with all your might. Do not follow me into the abode of wretches where I now must go.”
A tear fell down her cheek and she suddenly reached out to take hold of his wrist. He wanted to recoil, but at the desperate look in her eyes he did not move. “You were your father’s son, and can be again. Save the children of this city from what I have done.” She gave another long sigh, and her life left her. The sickly hand fell limp back to her side.
At last, the flame of the candle by her bed flickered and died, sending the room into darkness with a puff of smoke.
33
301 STOOD OVER THE matron for several minutes in silence, not knowing what to say or do upon the death of the woman who had made his childhood a living nightmare. He thought he would feel relieved, vindicated, free—but he felt nothing. She had promised him answers and given a fool’s errand instead. Create an event parallel to one of his repressed memories? How was he supposed to do that when he couldn’t even remember them clearly?
He turned away from her, shielding his heart against pity, and left the room. Darkness still reigned outside, as the sun had not yet broken over the horizon. He set his gaze on the door at the end of the hall, feeling an intense sense of foreboding as he walked slowly toward it, unable to fathom the irrational dread that rose within him as he drew nearer.
His hand hovered over the doorknob for a moment as he considered not going in at all. The woman downstairs should be told that the matron was dead so that all necessary preparations could be made, and he needed to focus on finding a way to get Grace out of harm’s way. Continuing this personal crusade when so much else was at stake was madness. But he had come so far already, and the possibility of retrieving the life they had stolen from him was too much for him to pass by.
Taking hold of the doorknob, he turned it and pushed, crossing the threshold into the dark, closet-sized room. Only one of the monitors that lined the walls top to bottom was on, and the only furniture was a single chair. But 301 could tell by looking at it that the chair was not meant for an adult. It was for a child. He walked around it slowly, experiencing traces of some unknown terror, and ran his hand over the coarse wooden back.