“Ohmygod…”I whimpered, horrified. “P-please don’t hurt any more people, not because of me.”
“Don’t give me a reason to. Be fucking good, Milo. No more kissing other men… In fact, no moretouchingother men. Keep your hands to yourself, and no one gets hurt. Understand?”
“Y-Yes,” I croaked.
“Good. Good boy,” he mumbled before finally turning and leaving me alone in the dark.
NOVA play: Specter by Bad Omens
“He’s going to be fine. He’s smart,” NOVA reassured me through the small speaker in my mask. I was pacing the rooftop of the Annex, using tactical binoculars to watch as Sebastian led Milo toward NeuroWell, where I knew he would then escort him to The Cave.
Spinning the dial to zoom in, I counted the small constellation of freckles that dusted Milo’s cherubic cheeks.
“Yeah. He’s smart as fuck, but you know he has like, zero self-preservation skills or situational awareness. If this all backfires and he gets hurt…”
“Well, if that happens, then you can go postal and just hit the big red button early. But it won’t.Trusthim.”
I snorted.
Trust him.
I’d lost my ability totrustafter my first ‘tour,’ if you could call it that.
Maybe I’d lost it well before that.
I still wasn’tsure if I’d actually fought overseas or if the memories I had were fabricated.
I’d told Milo to call me ‘The Forgotten,’but for two fucking years, the only name I’d answered to wasPatient 001.
I had memories of who I’d been before Luke Stevens and his mad Doctor, Caspien Grey, had forced me to undergo severe memory alteration with a faulty, early prototype of the NeuroManipulator—but those memories all felt like they belonged to someone else.
I think I used to be a good person, but I now felt so emotionally disconnected from that part of myself, it was difficult to know which memories were real and which ones were fake.
NOVA often helped me. She used to be the predominant AI here, but something happened that booted her out, and Luke implemented a new AI called TECHA.
Despite the fact that TECHA had fought NOVA out of the campus servers, she and I were slowly working to sneak her back in.
Much the same way I’d been planting bombs strategically through campus, NOVA had been planting little viruses specifically designed to attack TECHA’s markers.
We’d been testing it by putting TECHA in a sleep-like state periodically when we needed to move about freely, like last night, for example.
But when the time came, we’d be putting TECHA to sleep permanently, along with the rest of this god-forsaken campus.
The one place NOVA couldn’t seem to access was The Cave.
It made sense that The Cave was more heavily guarded than the rest of the campus.
That was where Luke built his top-secret shit.
It is also where I’d been locked up for years, being forced to undergo several sessions of memory manipulation.
My head was now a jumbled mess of wars that I wasn’t sure I’d actually ever fought in. I had a Frankensteined mix of intensive military and combat training. In some memories, I was a Navy SEAL. In others, I was a Marine. In most of them, I was killing people.
Every time I’d succumbed to the guilt and trauma that comes with indiscriminate murder, they would strap me back to the table and fuck around in my brain until they killed the parts of me thattried to rebel.
It wasn’t until NOVA had been able to weasel her way back into Neurovance’s servers and temporarily plunge the entire campus into a full-blown blackout that I’d managed to escape.
Bet they regretted turning me into a Frankensteined jarhead now.
