Mind + Body, Aaron Dunlap [smart books to read TXT] 📗
- Author: Aaron Dunlap
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“Hypnosis?” I said.
“Yes,” Schumer said.
“…Hypnosis?”
“I just said—”
“And I’m still supposed to be taking you seriously?”
“It’s possible,” Schumer said, “we spent nearly ten years putting the program together. We brought in the best psychologists and hypnotherapists to help design the program. With hypnosis, a person can be told or taught something while hypnotized and instructed not to remember any of it when awake. According to the program we designed, for a few hours each day during the child’s adolescence we could have a hypnotist put him under, teach him problem-solving skills, teamwork, and so on and told not to remember it or the hypnosis until later. At 18, a hypnotist could put the child under again, tell him to remember all of the hypnosis, and in an instant he’s a fully-trained soldier.”
“And that’s legal?”
“Amazingly, yes. While the child is a minor, the parents own him. They would authorize this ‘treatment’ for the child, and as long as there’s no danger or harm it’s fully ethical. And like I said, at 18 if the now-adult chooses not to enlist, we can have a hypnotist put him back under and remove the training, and even forget the conversation ever took place if he so chooses.
“This whole psychological component was developed in tandem with the genetic side. We brought in leading geneticists and put together the program to allow for the encouragement of healthy fetal growth without breaking existing ethical boundaries. The two parts, building a soldier, mind and body, was my project.”
I didn’t say anything.
“Your father worked for me. He was my lead geneticist. He’s the one who outlined the project on the genetic side; he made sure we wouldn’t create a mutant and that we didn’t do anything at all unethical.”
So that was it? My dad actually did work in a lab?
“And the Marine Corps University?” I asked.
“We used it for cover, for financial and logistical reasons. Genetic research being conducted by a university seems less suspicious.”
“And this ‘program’ he helped you design, the whole not-quite-super soldier program. It was never, I don’t know, ‘activated,’ was it?”
Schumer laughed, a hearty chuckle. “Oh hell no, it never went beyond testing. The world is a different place now from when we first started. If such a program were in existence now, the second we went up to some couple and made that kind of offer, that couple would be on Fox News or blogging about it within hours. The project could never be put into use, not in this country at least.”
“So, did my dad really have a heart attack?” I asked after taking a few minutes to process everything and decide how much was a lie. “Or was that a cover-up? Or some kind of poison that made it look like a heart attack?”
Schumer glanced at me sideways. “We were trying to protect him — to protect you. He was killed, but not by us. As I said, the program would never be used in this country. He tried to sell the program to our enemies, Chris. We don’t know if he’s the one who put it on the market, or if someone made him an offer first—”
“What?”
“Yes. I can’t say to whom, but I can say it’s exactly the people who don’t need to hear about our dirty secrets, and not the type of people who would let ethics prevent them from doing what ethics prevented us.”
“That‘s why the FBI knew him? He was the one selling secrets?”
Schumer nodded, still watching the water. “The FBI became aware of his dealings a few weeks before his death. They informed the Marine Corps, and the news filtered from the top down to me only after he was killed.”
“Killed how?” I asked, a lump growing in the back of my throat.
“I don’t know for sure, the word I’ve been getting is that the FBI moved in on a meeting between your dad and the foreign. Things went bad, there was a shootout. We tried to cover that up to preserve his reputation as a scientist and a patriot, not a traitor.”
I was silent again, trying to process it all.
“As you can see, this situation involves several parties. Many agencies of many governments are all involved in this now. Everybody on this side seems to want it covered up; people ‘over there’ are upset about dead agents. People who are friends with ‘over there’ want to know what was being sold, and everybody in between just smells blood in the water. We’ve been working to wrap this up quickly, but it seems that it’s all fallen into your lap just the same.”
“And the money? The insurance money?”
“Oh, that. The FBI looked into it, as did we, to see if there was foul play involved. It seems that your dad simply knew he put himself in a risky situation, and wanted to make sure you and your mother would be protected if he were killed. He took out a new policy as soon as first contact was made with the foreign agents.”
I thought of it, tried to feel some form of closure. I felt nothing, no satisfaction, no anger or sadness. Nothing. I thought of my list of questions, tried to shape everything I’d just heard so it would cover the whole list. Things still didn’t make sense. Nothing has explained Comstock, or Austria, or Lorton, or the guys in my house.
“That doesn’t explain everything,” I said, my eyes on the water. “What about Comstock, and me, and everybody trying to kill me? What about the two guards you had on your office, and the video you had of me sitting at a—” I stopped talking, because I suddenly knew the answer.
It had been staring me in the face since Schumer had started talking, since he chose his words so carefully, since everything he said had seemed unbelievable but all somehow very, very possible.
Schumer seemed to read it on my face. “I told you the program was never activated,” he said, trying to dissuade me.
“You said it never went beyond testing,” I said.
Schumer sighed, yet again. He folded his arms around his chest and stared out at the water.
The wood-slatted bench was beginning to get uncomfortable. The air was getting colder. The slight breeze becoming offensive.
“Okay,” I said, “so, explain this to me. Step by step.”
“Step by step?” Schumer said, breaking his own silence.
“How all this happened. How this program works, how I came to be.”
“You want me to tell you about the birds and the bees?” he said, arms still crossed.
“All right, genius, you just told me that I was a test for your insane fetal recruitment program.”
“No, I didn’t.”
“Yes you—you just did.”
“We should talk about this later.”
“Yeah, after my birthday. My eighteenth birthday when someone takes me into a dark room and waves a gold pocket watch in front of my face and tells me I’m feeling very sleepy.”
Schumer scoffed, or guffawed; I don’t think I could ever tell the difference. The wind picked up, knocking around the branches of the trees.
“As program neared its tenth year, we had all of the specifics worked out. The genetic profiles, the training curriculum, everything. Powers-that-be grew tired of paying for the program, so Daniel said we should try it. A clean run-through, prove we can do it.”
“Easy to objectify the creation of human life, isn’t it?”
Schumer unfolded his arms and sat up straight, looking over and down at me like I’d just insulted his haircut.
“I don’t know what you think, but we’re not monsters. This isn’t Frankenstein business. We took the young field of IVF and made huge breakthroughs, doubled the success rate. People are conceived and born from in-vitro every day, there’s nothing unorthodox or unethical about it. Your parents were trying to conceive and failing. It was IVF or adoption, and considering your father’s vocation, the choice was obvious.”
“And this… hypnotic training. How is that orthodox and ethical?”
“Because hypnosis is equally legitimate and perfectly ethical with parental permission. A person can be put into a hypnotic state easily by a trained professional, the subconscious takes over and becomes open to suggestion. It’s not like in the movies, where you can hypnotize somebody and tell them to kill the President. The hypnotist just acts as a stream of consciousness communicating with your own. If you tell a hypnotized person to jump off a bridge, his mind will reject it. You can only tell him things you could tell him while awake; the only key advantage is that the subconscious is more willing to… pretend. This is how stage hypnosis shows are possible. You can suggest to somebody that their shoe is a telephone while hypnotized and they’ll go along with it, but they know it isn’t.”
Like lymphocytes attacking a transplanted organ, my mind rejected the entire concept. I kept going over it in my head, trying to find a weak spot in the story. The problem was, it was so huge. So huge, yet I couldn’t react to it.
“So the training, how does it work?”
“Hypnotize somebody, tell them that a mile is 5,280 feet, wake them up, and ask them how many feet are in a mile, they’ll know. Hypnotize somebody, tell them how many feet are in a mile but tell them not to remember until you instruct them to remember, then wake them up and they’ll have no idea how many feet are in a mile until you put him back under and tell him to remember. Do that a thousand times with a thousand facts, and you’ve got hypnotic training. It’s a lot of work, but it’s the only way to train somebody without them remembering it until you want them to, so it’s the only way we could train a child.”
“And you’d just take one of these kids on their eighteenth birthday and, what, say, ‘if I snap my fingers, you’ll know everything a well-trained soldier knows. How would you like that?’”
“We had a script prepared for that conversation. The important thing, the psychologists told us, was that we be able to answer all of the questions they’d have. Questions like these.”
“And the training, when exactly do you do that? If I were being hypnotized every so often, wouldn’t I be missing time?”
“You weren’t being hypnotized every few years, Chris. Training somebody everything that a reasonably trained soldier knows, deliberately, point-by-point takes an extraordinary amount of time. You were being hypnotized every day.”
My heart skipped a beat.
“Every day?” I said, no longer taking time to think about what I was saying, “How is that possible?”
“In school. You’ve always had a class or a period of the day that wasn’t a real class. You went to an empty room where a team would put you under, train you for an hour or so, and bring you back. You were told to remember a typical boring class, your mind making up the details as you needed them.”
I started to breathe faster, sucking the chilled air into my lungs; it felt like shock slowly taking over my body. I was shaking
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