His first assignment came within a week of his consciousness. It was simple, to break past some rudimentary firewalls and slip a kill order into a set of documents. All based in text- the young man would never see the blood and guts, the grim and often shocking reality that comes with death. It would have taken him mere hours to complete, but he thought about it for days, doing a little each day to look busy so the people holding him here in this ugly, gray cubicle of a cell would not pull their guns (for he was sure beyond any doubt that they existed, and even if they did not it would not take much effort for the bulky man to snap the technophile's neck) and shoot him right then and there. He mindlessly played with important-looking programs, always seeming much busier and less alert than he truly was. In reality, he paid very close attention to his captors and their reactions to him, as well as their emotions (which they hardly seemed to have, but the young man was observant and quickly picked up on small things) and the chance that he would be dead within the next hour, which stayed low most of the time. From the way the pair looked satisfied, he easily concluded that they knew nothing or next to nothing about computers. He could probably be fiddling around on a dinky little paint program made for kindergarteners and they would be happy. He knew he was valuable, and he exploited it, because he did not want to kill. Deceive, mislead, trip up, possibly, and these things he had done, but he would not mindlessly claim the life of another, whether he was behind glass or face to face with his intended victim.
He played around for an entire week before he was questioned about his assignment. He gave a carefully crafted neutral answer, including just enough jargon and complicated bullshit that they accepted like stupid dogs. He often caught himself smiling a little, thinking that he could fake his way out of the killing and maiming and evil that his captors wanted him to orchestrate, but somewhere he realized that it could not be done. Death for death, either he killed to their specifications or they would quickly and painfully kill him. There was nothing he could do besides stall and hope for the best, perhaps some kind of rescue, but it felt far-fetched. How could he possibly be important enough to spend that kind of time and resources on?
Even though it occasionally felt like a waste of time and a risk, he still stalled in completing the assignment, giving the same kind of wordy and meaningless answer he had the first time, this time complete with some sort of excuse about firewalls and password protected documents. He hoped, going against the sickness he felt as he lied, that they ate his bullshit with the same placidity as before, but he grew more and more anxious with each passing day.
He woke up one day to the tough plastic of a recently manufactured gun pressing against his forehead. The hired muscle from before gave him a knock on the head with it, deep and damaged sounding voice growling, "Do the fucking work now, boy, or it will be fun to see your big brain dripping out of your skull." He had a thick Northern accent and absolutely no signs of intelligence, but the technophile did not doubt that he now knew what to look for. They had gone to the brass, his current worst fear confirmed, and now he would have to quickly complete the task or he would be shot. He guessed that he would have no leeway the next time, and his hands began to shake as he pulled up what he needed and started his lethal work. He was all too aware that his actions would cause someone else's essential bodily fluids to drain out of them, and he was paler than usual, upset and somehow scared of doing his job wrong, even though he knew exactly what he was doing. In reality, the work was child's play, but the anxiety of his situation and his habit of stalling slowed him down, and hours facing the barrel of a gun feels like years staring into the face of death itself.
What he had feared and dreaded for so long took him less than three hours, and he showed the finished work to the gun-wielding thug so he would lower the gun. The plastic barrel had left a circular red welt on his skin, and he was shaking as he shut the laptop with a soft snck of the magnets. He no longer wanted anything to do with a cold killing machine, be it the man's gun or his own computer. He laid down completely and fell asleep nearly instantly, though he was plagued with nonsensical dark dreams about slit throats and explosions. He slept for the better part of a day, still with no real sense of time, and woke up to another assignment, which he refused to do.
"I am not hired muscle. This is complicated work and you must give me time. I have a headache, allow me to rest," he said in a clipped tone with a dash of false confidence. Now that he had proved himself useful, if more so under direct threat of death, he felt that he had some leeway in his own doing. His voice was rough with disuse, and cracked slightly, but he had faked enough conviction to hopefully be successful. Surprisingly, the thug backed down and he was allowed rest before being assigned again, this time to set up and carry out an assassination, something that he would be directly controlling instead of commanding.
In the day and age of advanced technology, computers were everywhere, and if one was good enough, they could access many of them. The young man was indeed good and it took little effort to readjust life support or redirect vehicles. He worked quickly and efficiently to try and avoid the sick sense of guilt that he had, and the burning hatred that he felt for his abductors. He knew that they monitored him while he carried out an assignment, but he began to work on something else in the little free time that he had. He began to devise a program that would send messages en masse to important organizations with the information of people whose death he would be forced to command, and thus maybe some of them could be saved or hidden before the orders were carried out. He tried to be as detailed as possible, so the messages would at least be looked into instead of dismissed as harmless, or pranks. The messages also contained the location of the sender, and the technophile hoped that the receiving end of the messages would decide to look into the coordinates attached and find whoever was ordering the death of their agents. It was a long shot, but he worked on it whenever he can, wanting to retain some hope and some sense of connection to the world outside.
The more assignments that he carried out, the more detached he felt. The young man's morals were still strong, but somehow less in place as he carried out elaborate assassinations to stave off his own death. He felt less human.
He was beginning to scare himself.
He hesitated still, knots in his stomach forming whenever he received a new assignment. One in particular was especially hard, as he was interested in the target and decided to read his personnel file "to gather more useful information about the subject." She ended up to be a mother taking care of her two small children with her brother, readying for a civil partnership with her partner of twelve years. He felt incredibly disturbed, nausea churning deep in his gut. He did all he could to screw up the assignment, and make sure she would be avoided instead of hurt. He felt better after that, and tried to save as many as he could, but his pair of captors (or their brass) were monitoring him somehow, and he couldn't screw up too often or he felt he would be detected.
Another case in particular stood out to him, that of a man who was in Montenegro on an assignment for some British government agency. It seemed odd, out of place, as the target was to be spending most of his time in a casino. It didn't exactly sound like top secret government work to him, and he spent a while trying to get at his personnel file as well, but that one didn't come easy. He was supposed to set a couple of hired thugs hired by the casino's corrupt management to kill the government agent instead of muscling money from the rich players who cheated, and the poor ones who swindled the rich ones. It was interesting how easy it would have been, but he ended up falling asleep in the middle of looking for the personnel file and the job was never finished. Oddly, his captors never noticed, and he often wondered what had happened to the man he was supposed to be assigning death to.
What felt like weeks of this was nerve wracking. The worse and worse he felt, and the more detached he became the more useful he was. He was treated better with every passing day, but he hardly noticed. Ordering death became a full-time job. His hope drained away with the seconds, and the message he was sending became a memory distant in the back of his mind. They allowed him to shower and shave properly, and he felt more like himself for the first time in a while. He was unconsciously becoming used to his surroundings and condition, and he rarely reflected on it.
He awoke a few hours into sleep to a deep rumble that felt like it was shaking the entire building. In reality, it was the noise of many powerful engines purring as they approached the ugly suburban house, but his ears had become used to hearing less and less and had picked up on the sound quickly. He looked up and around his cell, the concrete room that kept him prisoner. He found his glasses, a near carbon copy of the old pair that he had bribed out of his captors, (because he knew his prescription by heart) and shoved them on, sitting up in the too-loose clothes on the hard bed. His curiosity had been piqued, and he moved over to the door to see if he could hear well. The clothes that were too large on him made the soft noise of fabric on fabric, and he ignored that noise, pressing his ear against the door. The rumbling had intensified.
Two sleek government cars had approached the house. They seemed out of place on the long street with the lone yellow house, with their glossy black coats of paint and buffed steel and chrome-plated bumpers. Their engines idled but it did not disguise the true power they held. Two men in fitted black suits stepped out from separate cars, glanced around to analyze the threat level, and approached the squat house. One was tall and light skinned, the other darker and a few inches shorter, but they had the same brown eyes, cropped dark hair, strong build, and icy demeanor. They knew what they were doing, and it would take them very little effort to achieve it. They were extremely quiet, and pulled their guns as they approached the house. One gently pushed in the door, seeing as it was a bit ajar already. He stepped cautiously inside, looking around to cover every base. He nodded to his partner, who followed and immediately went down the stairs that both could see. There were two silenced shots, and before either could react, both of the guards were shot in the calf. The muscle lashed out, going for his gun, but another shot served as a warning and embedded itself deep into the wall. He did not move after that, and the woman went without question. It took both of them to subdue the muscled man and secure him into a closet. As soon as they were done, one of them said in a clipped tone, "MI6, step away from the door."
He was hearing all the action from inside the concrete cell, and had absolutely no idea who was behind the door, or who had been victorious in the scuffle, before the voice at the door identified whomever it was as MI6. A deep feeling of relief rushed through the lanky brunet, and he scrambled to move away so whoever was on the other side of that door and the other end of the gun could have their way. The lock was done for after a single precisely aimed shot. He scrambled back into view and looked oddly shocked at the two professional-looking men, even though he knew that they were MI6. One of them identified him by name and told him to take the laptop, and to go with them. He quickly grabbed the scuffed-up computer from the ground under the bed and hurried to follow them. He was practically dragged up the creaky wooden stairs, and his eyes flitted all over the place, seeing the inside of the house where he had been kept prisoner for the first time. His brain catalogued the missing paintings on the walls, or the sun-damaged space around where they had hung. He ran his fingers over the edges of the peeling light blue wallpaper. There was so much more to this place than a tiny, foul-smelling basement, and he briefly wondered whom it had belonged to. He gripped the computer tightly with his left hand, already feeling a headache coming on with the much brighter light of the sun, as opposed to the artificial light of the bare bulbs of the basement which shone weakly and only when he wanted them to. It was a dramatic change and he squinted, nearly tripping over the top stair. One of the agents kept a firm hand on his arm and helped him up to the ground floor, where he was greeted with the sign of windows for the first time since he had been captured. The sight was nearly blinding to someone who had spent a long time underground in mostly low light. He felt the headache rapidly building then, and was glad for the tinted windows and dark interior of the government cars. The one in the other car took his laptop, and he gladly relaxed into the posh leather seat and enjoyed the car trip, falling at one point into a quiet, dreamless sleep, lulled and kept under by the purr of the engine.