Disclaimer: I do not own Nineteen Eighty-Four or anything else that George Orwell put in his book, but I own the other concepts and characters.

I give permission to others to use this, change this and complete this fanfiction how they wish, provided they do it purely for fanfiction and don't make money out of it for anyone, and they acknowledge exactly what words were my work at the beginning/end of their fanfiction. (Translation: I'm hinting that I might be too lazy to finish this fic, and I will want someone to do it for me.)

Winston Smith opened the door to his apartment, entered, and closed it, cutting himself off from the celebration outside. He would also have celebrated Big Brother's achievement at increasing the chocolate ration to fifteen grammes and solving the razor blade shortage problem, but he had been working frantically recently to correct Big Brother's grammatical mistakes in speeches he had made regarding the war with Eastasia, and he was very tired indeed. He put his coat on the table and strode towards his kitchen, in order to have some Victory Gin before going to bed.

He was suddenly aware of something acutely wrong, and he stopped walking. It was too quiet. And he could feel something: he thought about it for a second, trying to place it, then he realised it might become crimethink (a thought contrary to Big Brother), and so he quickly did crimestop (to deliberately forget any thought that might cause one to not love Big Brother). He took another step forward, and stopped. It was as though his head was itching, yet he knew it was not.

Suddenly, completely out of the blue, came a thought:

You do not love Big Brother.

Winston felt scared: he could not let this rogue thought get to the telescreen. At the same time, he did another crimestop, and wiped the slate clean. But instantly, the thought reappeared.

You do not love Big Brother. No one loves Big Brother.

He quickly forgot it again, and began striding more purposefully towards the kitchen; the doorway to it was only four feet away. But he could not escape the thoughts.

They made you think you loved Big Brother - but you do not. You never did. Remember Aaron-

Winston forgot the thought even as it materialised. Goldstein was trying to break into his mind. He smiled. Goldstein would never win. Big Brother was just too good.

Right then, something was wrenched out of his head. He staggered from the queer feeling of hundreds of synapses firing completely of their own accord. He searched his scalp: there was nothing missing. He then realised he no longer knew what crimestop was.

Something else was ripped away, leaving a slight feeling of nausea. He had no idea where this room was. He cried out. He knew he needed Big Brother now. He would probably be punished for thinking these thoughts, but only Big Brother could stop them. And to get Big Brother, he needed the telescreen. He ran into the kitchen, yelling as his varicose ulcer throbbed from the friction. He put his face inches away from the telescreen.

The woman on the telescreen was frozen. He now realised why it was so quiet: she was not speaking, not moving.

"Help me!" he said in desperation to the telescreen. "Big Brother! In your mercy, help me!" The woman did absolutely nothing. He realised she was not just failing to move, but her hair, which usually fluttered slightly, was stock still. The image on his end, not her at her end, was unmoving. Which meant Big Brother could not see him, and could not help him.

"NOOO!" he shouted. Then there was another wrench, and he forgot who Big Brother was. He still knew the words Big Brother and crimestop, but not their meanings. He sobbed: Goldstein was winning the battle against his mind.

His mind experienced continuous pulls and scratches, and he realised most of his memory was being destroyed. He lost the meaning of Anthony Goldstein, thoughtcrime, thinkpol (the Thought Police), all of the Ministries, and what he soon came to realise was everything that binded his love to Big Brother, although he didn't remember who Big Brother was. He had long since fallen over from this onslaught. He could no longer stop the wave of sick that was washing over him, and he vomited all over his floor.

Suddenly, he lost the memory of all the words that he had lost the meanings of. He searched for them, but they had been wiped out of his mind completely.

Instantly, it all stopped. He had complete control of all of his synapses now. He searched his memories. He could vaguely remember there being a war on, altthough he didn't know who was involved. Besides that, a lot of his mind was now empty. Except for his selfish impulses. He stood up and began walking around in confusion, wiping vomit off his face.

He could remember the kind of food that O'Brien and other Inner Party members ate, although he didn't know who O'Brien was or what the Inner Party was, and could only barely remember that he wasn't in it. Why couldn't he have such food?

He remembered the taste of black-market coffee. Why couldn't he have refreshments like that all the time, instead of it almost always being Victory Coffee? By the same token, he mentally compared real cigarettes to the crumbly kind that he usually had. Why did he have those? What was to stop him having the good ones all the time?

He looked around his apartment. The prevailing smell of his apartment was the powerful smells of his own or, more generally, other bodies. Everything was dirty, because it took too much energy for him to keep it clean. Did he really have to live in such squalor?

"No," said a man as he opened the door to the apartment. "You don't have to."

"What?" asked Winston, turning. The other man looked very muscly and fit as he walked backwards into the apartment, with his head turned towards where he was going. His face was unshaven and he had a scar on his jawline. His stubble, thick eyebrows and short hair were all brown, and he was carrying one end of a heavy six-foot long, three-foot wide, thick black bag in both hands. He entered the apartment, and another man was carrying the other end of the bag. Between them they carried it easily.

"You heard what I said," said the man. "I was answering your thoughts." Winston looked startled. "Yes, I can read your thoughts. I am plugged in to them through a device in a vehicle outside." Winston looked astonished. "It is how the people in the Ministry of Love convinced you that you loved Big Brother - by deleting your previous thoughts and shoving in some new ones. I see here that you do remember your stay in the Ministry of Love." Winston looked offended. "Hey, the only way we could get you to hate Big Brother again was to delete the propaganda they filled your brain with. Yes, I will tell you who I am eventually. For now, all you need to know is that you are being removed." Winston looked even more offended, then determined. "Six. Eighteen. Blue. Julia's lips. Oranges and lemons, says the bells of St. Clement's."

"Get out of my head!!" screamed Winston.

"Fair enough," shrugged the man, handing Winston a little electronic box. Winston looked at the display: it was deactivated. "Whatever you do, don't look at your own thoughts. The Thought Police killed dozens of proles because they saw their own thoughts, when they were testing the device in the 1960s. They don't know how it kills people, but it probably has something to do with infinity." Both men finally reached Winston's bed with the bag, one took out a knife and cut open the bag, and they both unceremoniously dumped its contents onto the bed.

Winston screamed again. The bag had contained him, dead. "What the hell is that?" he said, his breathing and speech irregular from fear.

"This? This is a fake dead body," he said. "Come on, it's time to leave." He began dragging Winston with him. Winston didn't resist at first, but once he was out of his apartment he began thrashing wildly, breaking the electronic box over the head of one of the men. Both men were individually stronger than Winston, and one of them took Winston bodily down the stairs and outside while the other went into the next room.

"Who are you and what are you doing here?" he shouted. "Where are you taking me?"

"We are the Resistance," said the man. "We are freeing you from Big Brother."

"It doesn't feel like being freed!" Winston continued.

"Of course it doesn't," said the man. "Memory alteration always produces irrational fear afterwards."

"Why are you taking me?" gasped Winston.

"Because it's time you left the rule of Big Brother," said the man. "Believe me, you'll be living better without him. Now shut up, we're about to go outside. Don't make me gag you."

"Who is Big Brother?" demanded Winston. "Where are you taking me? Tell me!"

"God dammit, I don't have time for this," said the man. "Look, I'm taking you to a better place. Now eat this." He stuffed a large woollen sock into Winston's mouth, then dragged him out of the building. His eyes burned from the bright light outside, compared to the dark interior of the building, before he was thrown into the back of a truck, and the darkness swallowed him whole.

ooooooooooooooooooooooooooooooo

"Where is this?" yelled Winston, the instant he'd woken up. "Who are you?"

"I told you, we're the Resistance," said the man that had kidnapped Winston. "It has been around since before the Ingsoc party came into power, even, although all of the original members are dead, and there is currently only one member who has been with us for over a year and lived."

Winston was lying on a hard wooden bench twice as long as he was tall, in a square room made of dull grey material. The bench reached one side of the room to the other, along one wall. There was a wooden door in the far corner or the room to where Winston lay, and next to it was a metal chair, sat upon which was the man that had taken him from his apartment.

"What the hell is Ingsoc?" said Winston, sitting up quickly.

"You remember we altered your memory?" asked the man.

"Very well!"

"Well, right now, you shall learn again what Ingsoc is. You shall relearn Big Brother, doublethink, thoughtcrime, all the things we caused you to forget at an accelerated rate. You shall do so from the very same textbooks that current children learn about Big Brother from, and you shall read all the news. In theory, learning it from those sources would help you trust us to not to brainwash you, but since they are altered constantly by Big Brother, it won't make much of a difference."

"Why have you taken me?" asked Winston.

"Because this room has no telescreen in it, and neither do any of the other rooms." Winston remembered how telescreens always intruded into his life, and usually chastised him for not going to social events or not doing enough toe-touches in time, and decided this place couldn't be as much of a prison as his apartment. His outlook became less complaintive.

"In addition, this building is lined with lead, fifty feet underground, because we believe that Big Brother is developing a device to read people's minds at range, in order to seek out and destroy creative thought. We brought you here so you can have creative thought without there being a chance of Big Brother finding you and altering your mind again."

Winston tried to take this all in. "So, Big Brother is bad? You're trying to protect me from Big Brother?"

"In my opinion, yes."

"And you made me forget everything about him, just so you could teach it to me again? What's the point? What difference will it make?"

"The difference is the brainwashing. We will give it to you without telling you it's the truth, and without forcing you to make speeches to others about his greatness, and without coercing you to go on a march that promotes Big Brother, ad nauseum. We will also give you our version of history, which you will find is a polar opposite of their version. We have no proof, because it's all been hunted down and destroyed or altered, but hopefully you'll find it more believable than their version."

"By 'their' you mean 'of Big Brother and his workers and supporters', right? And what if I find their version of events more believable?"

"I read your mind back in the apartment. You're not a stupid person, and only a stupid or brainwashed person would believe the stuff they force- feed the young people these days. I shouldn't be saying this, because you might later think it's brainwashing, but their version of events reads like a children's fantasy fiction. Not to mention their version of history's evidence is all controlled by Big Brother, which essentially means their version of history is as proofless as ours."

Winston thought about this. "It is equally possible that they have taken control of historical proof to stop the likes of you, i.e. kidnappers, altering it. And that they convince children of Big Brother's superiority out of love for them, to stop them from being convinced otherwise, to some evil way of thinking that would be wrong and damage them or others."

"Quite right," said the man. "I believe that Big Brother is evil from what I have seen, but you have never seen or heard of Big Brother's actions according to your memory, so you can't judge anything. The whole point is for you to make up your own mind. If we forced our opinions on you, we would be no better than them, and if we did nothing, you would always be loyal to Big Brother. Do you at least understand our motives for taking you?"

He thought for a moment. "Plainly," said Winston. "Whether you're telling the truth or not about wanting to help me, you're trying to convert my way of thinking, and you couldn't do that while Big Brother was watching. And then you faked my death," said Winston, remembering. "That way, Big Brother wouldn't look for me."

"And you understand why I will not let you leave?" he continued.

"No!" said Winston, shocked, but he soon worked it out. "Because you think I would tell Big Brother where you are and have you destroyed."

"Exactly," agreed the man. "Understanding is the first step to trust, but unfortunately we have to treat you as a security risk until you are truly one of us. Now, before I give you all the information on Big Brother and Ingsoc there is, I will do two more things, with the aim of trying to get you to trust me." He pulled out a gun, walked over to Winston and thrust the gun onto his forehead, face set in a grimace of violence.

Winston gave a little shriek and scuttled away down the bench. The man followed him. This continued until Winston was wedged in the corner, with the man barring all means of escape, and creating a groove on his target's forehead with the gun muzzle. Winston was shaking uncontrollably, adrenalin sloshing around his arteries, with his heart beating twice as fast as normal.

The man took the gun off Winston and shot the bench three times, the sound echoing so fast in the close metal-lined walls, it was as though each gunshot actually took the half-second both men heard them, to occur. Then, incredibly, he forced open Winston's hand and put the gun handle into his palm.

"There, my trust exercises are finished," said the man. Winston was still scared from the near-death experience, shaking like a leaf in a gale, face white. "Damn, that wasn't good," he muttered to himself. "Sorry about that, I'm no good at getting people to trust me. You understand why I did that, right? I could have shot you, but chose not to? Yeah? Now, you can keep that gun, as well, and I'll give you more ammunition when I get hold of some. Damn, sorry. I'm really bad with people, I've alway been better with machinery and objects and animals. I shouldn't have done that. Goodbye for now, I'll get the literature. Yeah. Sorry." He left, with Winston crouching on the bench clutching the gun, staring blankly ahead.

Author's note: I burn in jealousy when my other fics get no reviews, and other people get a dozen per chapter or more. So review! Even if you're just gonna say I'm undermining the meaning that George Orwell gave his masterpiece and I ought to die for it, or if you're asking me whether brown shoes go well with jeans, or if you want to know what the chemical structure of propane is, review!