On the fourth day after Heero began his surveillance, he hadn't seen anything concrete, but his suspicions were growing greater. He'd been following the girl everywhere, and got the impression that she was aware of that fact, although she didn't look around often, the first sign that most people gave to indicate that they knew they were being followed. No, his impression came from the way she moved, sometimes fast, sometimes slow, darting in and out of stores in a way that could be expected of girls that age, but in a way that didn't seem to be natural for her. What really disturbed him was that she had managed to lose him on several occasions, something that she shouldn't have been able to do under any circumstances, no matter how lucky she was.
He didn't even have anything to tie her to the Rebels. He couldn't get into the ambassador's house, so he couldn't get into the hidden room that Heero now knew existed, so there was no proof to be had there. Once he thought he had almost caught her meeting with a known Rebel, but she somehow called off the meeting before the two did more than pass each other in a crowded mall. On the other hand, it could have been coincidence that she just happened to pass the Rebel in the mall - there were a lot of people there. He still had no solid evidence that she had anything to do with the Rebels - whoever had taught her had taught her well.
On the fourth day, when she was headed home from school, she did something very odd. Instead of taking the normal route, she headed into a bad section of town, a dangerous place not at all appropriate for pretty young girls. She seemed to have a specific destination in mind as she wove through the dirty streets, somehow managing to avoid the pickpockets, muggers, and rapists who had to be following her. Heero's sense of unease grew, but that couldn't erase the growing feeling of excitement within him. There was no reason for an ambassador's daughter to be here, unless she was connected with the Rebels.
At the end of a particularly dark alleyway she paused, and glanced around guiltily. He smiled grimly - she had known that she was being followed. He was almost a hundred meters back, even if she knew she was being followed and knew what he looked like, she wouldn't be able to recognize him from there. After a few moments she stopped looking and slipped into the alley. He quickly ran up to the edge of the alley, then pulled out the dart gun he carried. There was to be no risk that the girl might be killed before she could be brought back to Arthur for questioning. He peered around the corner into the alley. It was very dark, and it took a moment for his eyesight to adjust. When it did, he saw a figure sitting at the end of the alley, with a dirty blanket thrown over it. Was it her? No scrap of skin, no hair or clothing showed beneath that dirty blanket that might tell him. It was probably her, but if it wasn't, if it really was an old beggar, and he shot the beggar with a dart, she might be watching from somewhere else, and be armed against it next time.
Carefully keeping the dart gun trained on the figure, he slowly advanced into the alley. "Stand up," he ordered in a low voice. "I've got a gun trained on you."
Suddenly the figure straightened up, and he realized that they'd been crouching, not sitting, a moment before a regular gun was brought into line with his head. The girl stood there facing him, without a trace of fear on her face. "My gun is real, whereas yours is just a dart gun," she said in a low voice. "If you shoot me, that will still give me enough time to get off a shot, and I'll kill you. It might take me a few hours or a few days to wake up, but I have friends in this neighborhood who will protect me, whereas all the attention you'll get is who will take your clothes off your dead body. Drop the gun now, and kick it over to me, and put your hands on your head."
He realized that what she said was true, and dropped his gun, raising his hands. She still didn't know what he was, that he wasn't human. All it would take would be a slight wavering of the gun, and then he'd attack. No amount of training could protect her from what he was. He kicked the gun towards her, but intentionally aimed it a few feet to the side and behind her, so that maybe she'd drop the gun a little when she picked it up. No such luck. The gun stayed firmly trained on his head, as did her eyes as she picked up his weapon. She examined it without moving the gun. "What's in here?" she demanded. He didn't respond.
She smiled slightly. "I should thank you for bringing this," she said, stepping forward a little. He saw an open box behind her, one with bright blue lining and a cleanliness that contrasted sharply with the outside, which looked like garbage. Inside he saw a needle and several vials of a clear chemical. His eyes widened at the implications. "The best I could do was a needle, and I'm not sure I trust myself to inject you without getting hurt. This is much better."
Trap! His mind shouted as she raised the dart gun to face him. The darts would knock out a human in a second, but it would take more than one to down him. He had to use that to his advantage - she would be assuming that he was human. He threw himself at her, but before he'd made it a meter closer he heard three rapid fire shots, and looked down to see three darts imbedded in his chest a moment before everything went black.
------------
When Heero woke up, he was in a completely white room, lying on a low mattress, wearing a straightjacket with reinforced cloth that even he couldn't rip. Damn it. Heero couldn't believe he'd been so careless as to have allowed himself to be caught by the enemy. Well, they wouldn't get any information from him. He looked around the room, but there was no other furniture except the low mattress. Nothing he could use to escape, or even to destroy himself so that they couldn't question him. Someone had planned this well. He cursed himself for so vastly underestimating the girl - she'd obviously had more training then they knew, more than they ever could have guessed, based on the way she handled that gun.
The door at the opposite end of the room slid open, and the girl walked in. She hadn't changed out of her school uniform, which made the dart gun in her right hand even more obvious. In her other hand she carried a folding chair, which she set down and sat in as the door closed behind her. "Sorry about the straightjacket," she said in a conversational voice, "But I don't trust you not to attack me. If you behave yourself, we'll see about getting it off in a few days."
Her tone surprised him - this wasn't the way an interrogation was supposed to start, he'd sat in on and conducted enough of them to know. There had been no isolation, no protein-starvation - he didn't expect the Rebels to have anything like the chamber, but he had expected they would have something equivalent. He kept his exterior calm as his mind raced. She... they're trying to keep me off balance, to prepare me for torture. I won't tell them anything.
"By now you're wondering what you're doing here, and what we want with you," she continued. "I expect that you're expecting torture, the sort of thing that the Alliance does to our people when you catch them. But I know your training, One, and I know that the chances of you telling us anything are practically nonexistent."
He stiffened when she used his designation. How had she known that?!
She smiled slightly. "And now you want to know how I know so much about you. The Phoenix decided when you started to follow me that I would be in charge of your questioning once we caught you, since you already know my face. No need to expose any more of our people to you if it's avoidable. In preparation for this, he showed me your files, everything we have on you, which is to say everything the Alliance has on you. I know how you were created, what your abilities are, everything. And since we have such access to the Alliance's records that we can access even your files, I'm sure it's not hard for you to believe that there's really nothing of value you can tell us that we don't already know."
He still didn't reply, but his mind was whirling with the implications. They hadn't realized how easily and thoroughly the Phoenix had penetrated the Alliance's defenses, especially after Arthur reconfigured the system years ago. There had been a few intrusions they had detected, but nothing like what this girl was saying. She's still lying, still trying to prepare me for interrogation, was his first thought, which he almost immediately rejected. If they knew his designation, then they really did have the access she claimed. Or had she just guessed?
"But I don't really expect you to believe anything I tell you - you'll figure it out for yourself, in time. For now, I just want to answer one more of your questions before you can think of it. The question is, why would we want to hold you like this if you have no information that we want or need? Why not just kill you and eliminate a powerful enemy of the Rebels? If I trapped you, I most certainly can trap the others. It would be a simple matter to eliminate all of you, strike a blow that the Alliance might never be able to recover from."
A chill ran down Heero's spine as he realized that what she was saying was true, that she would certainly be able to eliminate the others that way. He waited for her to finish her statement.
She didn't disappoint him. "The answer to that is quite simple. The Phoenix believes that you can be great allies to the Rebels, once you join us."
Shock forced words from his mouth. "You're crazy."
"Quite possibly," she said, standing up. She nodded at the door, and it opened. Several men wearing masks walked in. Each of them carried a stack of papers that they lay on the ground next to the mattress, always being careful to stay out of his reach.
He didn't even look at them, keeping his attention focused on the opposite wall. They'd have nothing from him. He noticed, out of the corner of his eye, that they withdrew, taking the girl's chair with them. The girl slowly began backing out of the room. "Some reading material." She jerked her head towards the stacks of papers. "We'll continue this discussion later. You'll be sent food. Whether you choose to eat it or not is your choice, but it doesn't make any sense for us to drug it, and if you refuse to eat anything for several days, we're going to assume that you're trying to starve yourself, and start giving you injections of nutrients. The choice is yours." She stepped through the door, and it closed behind her.
--------------
The girl didn't return for several days.
Heero had come to a decision during the first night, during the time when he lay awake for hours, waiting for day to come since his body had never required more than an hour's sleep. He'd decided that the only way he was getting out of here would be through the girl. The security was good, but they'd made a mistake in keeping him in the control of a child. She might know what he was intellectually, but that didn't mean she understood what he was. He knew enough about psychology to make many psychologists jealous - children were notoriously easy to control precisely because they were children. He wouldn't tell her anything she didn't know already, but he might be able to get her to reveal a little bit about the Phoenix. It was worth a try.
It was extremely frustrating the next day when she didn't return so that he could speak to her. Armed, masked guards came in four times a day, twice in the morning to drop off a meal and pick it up, and twice again in the afternoon for the same purpose. They never spoke to him, nor did they ever remove the straightjacket, forcing him to eat his meals on his knees. Was this some sort of primitive interrogation technique? It was irritating, certainly, but hardly what he would consider a torture method.
Because he had nothing else to do, he started reading the papers, using his bare feet to shuffle through them. It was a confused jumble of things, individual accounts by people of attacks the Alliance had made on them, various classified documents the Alliance sent out ordering attacks, public files from before the Alliance took over the colony. It was exactly what he would have expected from the Rebels, a pack of lies, sloppily put together. And that was what alarmed him. He would have expected that they would have at least tried to put a better face forward for him, if they were trying to recruit him. I have to remember, it's the Phoenix I'm really facing, not that girl. And the Phoenix had been outwitting the Alliance for years. But he's never come up against me.
Most likely the jumble of papers was intended exactly for that purpose - to make him uneasy. Certainly no one, not even a Rebel human, would expect him to believe that was the truth. He knew for a fact that the Alliance had killed civilians, he had killed several himself, but that was always because they posed a danger to the Alliance, and therefore to the people the Alliance protected. Those few lives were worth the thousands they protected. But why would the Alliance stage raids on small farming colonies, of all things? The papers had to be to confuse him, because no one would ever expect him to believe such stupidity.
Something within him remained uneasy, though, even after he had thought it through. Knowing what he did about the Phoenix, and assuming that he was the same person they'd faced all these years, maybe even the original intruder that they'd chased through the Alliance's computer, he had to expect layers and layers of reasons behind every action. It had been too easy to figure out this plan, which meant there must be something he missed. Unless that was the next layer, to make him think that he'd missed something when he really hadn't. Heero closed his eyes. This was what made the Phoenix so dangerous - he could create these logical loops, where there was no way to figure out what he was planning based on past actions.
One day, as he was reviewing the fake files in his head, trying to see some sort of pattern in them, he got an idea of another way to approach the problem. He wasn't getting anywhere, looking at the information as the lies he knew they were, so he decided to assume that they were telling the truth, and try to figure out what she was thinking that way.
Almost immediately he had to give it up. He couldn't think that way about the Alliance, even just as an exercise. The papers had to be lies, all of them, because if they were true, then everything the Alliance had ever told him had been a lie, and that just wasn't possible. Why not? he demanded of himself, trying to figure out why he couldn't think this way, even just as an exercise. I belong to the Alliance, and I serve them, and the people, he found himself repeating the words he'd heard so often, and almost frowned, his frustration was so great. In the eyes of the Rebels, the lies they were telling him were obviously true, so in order to get into their heads, he had to figure out why they believed that, but he couldn't do it. How could they be so wrong? The Alliance was there to protect people. It would never have done the things that they said it did. Still... why couldn't he even think that way?!
It must be because it's so ridiculous. I know the Alliance, I know my duty, and I know the truth. The things they're saying... they aren't true, couldn't be true in the mind of anyone sane. The Alliance... He dropped that train of thought. It wasn't getting him anywhere, and he went back to his previous analysis, trying to figure out what the Phoenix had been planning. But a thought kept intruding into his mind, a question that he couldn't ignore. Why was it that he couldn't think about the Alliance that way, even just in practice?
The girl didn't return until six days after he was first captured.
----------
"You've behaved yourself," she remarked as she came in, still holding his dart gun. She pointed it at him and nodded towards the door. Two very large men wearing masks came in. "Untie him," she instructed the men. To Heero she said, "If you try to attack them, I'll shoot you." Heero didn't move as they finally removed the straightjacket. The two men exited without saying a word, leaving the girl behind. "You've read what I left for you?"
He nodded. "How, exactly, do you expect to get me to join you?" he asked. "I hope you have something more persuasive than these lies," he nodded towards the papers. "Or I will be very disappointed in the Phoenix, if that's the best he can do."
Her eyes narrowed slightly, and she hesitated for a moment before answering. "Those aren't lies, and you won't be disappointed with the Phoenix. He has some plans for you."
Heero managed not to smile with great difficulty. The girl had already made a slip. Now he knew that the Phoenix was indeed a 'he'! "And what are they?" he asked, keeping his voice perfectly neutral.
"We don't intend to hurt you or bend your mind at all, because I know that's what you're thinking. That's been done enough times by the Alliance already. They made a mistake when they trained you - they taught you the basic principals of right and wrong, and they lied to you about the Alliance. They would have been better off just telling you to obey the Alliance, but someone had to get tricky and lie to you. Tell me, why do you serve the Alliance?"
"Why should I tell you?" he retorted.
She stared at him without speaking for several long seconds, then said, "Does this sound familiar? 'I belong to the Alliance, and I serve it, and the people.'" He stared at her. "I told you how much access the Phoenix has to your computer. Don't you think that the phrase they brainwashed you with would be a little obvious? My question is, whom do you hold allegiance to? The Alliance, or the people?"
"I serve the Alliance and the people."
"I'm surprised you managed to get out that phrase without repeating the whole thing," she commented, then sighed, looking a lot like a human kid, instead of a Rebel soldier. "Sorry, it doesn't work that way. The two groups are mutually exclusive. You work for the Alliance *or* for the people. You can't have it both ways."
He didn't bother to respond to such an obvious lie, but part of his mind was working on something she'd said before. ...the phrase they brainwashed you with... He knew that it was just another one of her lies, and that he should dismiss it as such. He would have, except that just a few days earlier, when he'd tried to look at things like a Rebel, that was the phrase that had popped into his mind. No, it wasn't brainwashing, it was loyalty, he thought automatically, but that only made him distrust that conclusion even more.
She continued. "*I* serve the people, by fighting the Alliance. I ask you again. Who do you serve, the Alliance or the people?"
"The Alliance is an organization dedicated to peace. Everything we do is towards that goal, to preserve the peace."
"The Alliance is an organization dedicated to control," she corrected him. "The colonies had a notoriously low crime rate until the Alliance started stationing its troops here. We had high morale and respect for our surroundings, until the Alliance arrived with its random crowd-sweeps and careless soldiers. Do you know how many people run the climate-control computer?"
He did, but he wasn't telling her.
"Over two hundred. That's how many people it takes to undo the damage your soldiers have done to our colony, to the dome. You read the records I left for you, do you remember how many it used to take?"
Heero didn't give her a response, but she didn't seem to be expecting one.
"When the colony was still free, it took less than a dozen." He'd been told that the colonies were on the edge of dying out when the Alliance came in to save them.
Acting as if he had spoken out loud, she said, "As I mentioned before, the Alliance has done quite a bit of lying to you, and they've messed up your head, too, as I'm sure you're finding out." Heero stiffened. How had she known that he was thinking about the way that phrase kept coming up in his mind every time he tried to think about what the Alliance told him?
She studied his face carefully, then stood up, picking up the chair in one hand without putting down the dart gun in the other. "The Phoenix has already given you documents, proof that the Alliance has done much to hurt the colonies. Proof that they've lied to you. Of course, we don't expect you to believe any of it, at least not at first, but after a while it becomes overwhelming. After that, we have to see if you can break the hold their brainwashing has on you.
"Tomorrow the Phoenix will send a few people who remember the old days to talk to you. Please don't attack any of them - for the most part they're old men and women who don't have homes anymore and have nothing left for them. They don't have any information you want, and while their deaths would mean a lot to me personally, it would do nothing to hurt the Rebels."
Heero stared at her, angry for no reason he could think of. She's a Rebel, isn't that reason enough? a voice in his mind whispered to him, but that only reminded him of her impossible, ridiculous claims about brainwashing, and of the doubts those claims had raised. "That's it?" he asked scornfully. "You're not making much of an effort to convince me."
"Nothing I say is going to break the hold the Alliance has on your mind. Only you can do that. I'm just giving you a chance to know the truth."
---------------
The witnesses she sent in disturbed him greatly. They were... well, they believed they were telling him the truth, that much was for sure. Heero had heard of methods used to create fake memories for people, he'd even seen them used on a few prisoners, but never to the extent of these people. They had many memories from those times, quite varied and vivid, as opposed to the vague accounts of those whose memories had been altered. He had to concede the possibility that they actually were telling the truth, that the colony had been a peaceful place until the Alliance showed up. That it had been a better place before the Alliance arrived to bring peace.
At least, that's what logic told him he should do. Everything logical told him that there was something here to investigate, but whenever he thought about the Alliance, trying to think of it the way the girl described, that stupid phrase ran through his mind again. No, not stupid, he told himself, horrified that he'd thought of his oath of loyalty to the Alliance that way.
He tried to tell himself that the way logic was pointing him couldn't be right, that this entire scene was part of some trick he hadn't thought of yet. They were lying to him, there was another layer of lies here, they were trying to twist the truth into something they could use to subvert him. He told himself this over and over and over again, and almost managed to convince himself that this was the truth, but the doubts she'd planted in his head forced him to question even this. Why should he have to convince himself of anything? If the Alliance had told him the truth, why wouldn't logic back them up? Could it be that the Alliance had... No! I belong to the Alliance, and I serve it, and the people!!!
Heero paused as he realized he'd repeated that stupid phrase again. Why can't I think through this?
These doubts were alien to him, and he wanted to dismiss them from his mind. He'd never had doubts of any kind before, much less doubts that the Alliance had told him the truth all these years. But he couldn't just dismiss them. He looked over all the evidence in his mind, and thought, for an instant, that he was behaving as if he'd been brainwashed somehow. Immediately his mind responded by telling him that the Alliance didn't do that, that this had to be some sort of trick. Why?! he silently demanded of himself. I belong to the Alliance, and I serve it, and the people.
Damn it! Heero actually slammed one hand into the side of his head. I have been brainwashed.
No, that's not true, it can't be true, he immediately thought. I belong to the Alliance, and ...
-----------------
On the fifth day, no more of those old humans arrived anymore. Instead, the girl came back. By then he was angrier than he could ever remember being, even towards Rebels, and a good deal of that anger was that he wasn't sure if even the anger was his own, or whether it had been planted there by the Alliance. He couldn't even think about it without repeating that damned phrase, and he was hearing it a lot in his head these days. Worse than that was that he didn't know whether this was all real, or some sort of hallucination cooked up by the Rebels to turn him. His mind immediately latched on to that fact, which again raised his suspicions, that he was so eager to cling to anything that exonerated the Alliance. Exonerated? What had the Alliance done? It brought peace to the colonies, protected the people that lived there from themselves! Everyone knew that they were incapable of taking care of themselves! They were too young, too small...
None of this helped him, because he could clearly remember Mem saying every word of those explanations.
This time the girl brought two chairs, and didn't have the gun. He considered attacking her, but assumed that she had a half-dozen people watching at all times, and that chances were he'd barely touch her before those other people would come barging in. Besides, he wasn't sure he wanted to kill her, not yet. Why not yet?! his mind demanded. She's an enemy of the Alliance! He took the opposite chair.
She stared at him for a long time without speaking, and when she finally did, she said softly, "I'm sorry."
He stared at her. "I don't want your pity."
"I'm not offering my pity. I don't think I could ever offer you that, not knowing what you are. What I am offering is my apology. It's a cruel thing to do, to tell a person that things they've believed for their entire life, things they've based their lives on, aren't true."
"I am a soldier of the Alliance, and you are my enemy," he responded automatically in a flat voice, although he had his doubts now. Or did he? Was this all some elaborate hoax that even he couldn't see through?
"You're not a soldier of the Alliance," she corrected him. "Technically, you belong to the Alliance. You're an experiment, not a soldier."
He wanted to argue with her, wanted to fight against her statement, but it was true. He'd said it himself many times. "Then I belong to the Alliance, and I will remain loyal to them." He wasn't sure about that, either, but the one thing he did know for sure was that he'd never let this child know that he had any doubts, let her know that all this was having an effect on him.
"Who needs your loyalty? You belong to them, after all - your obedience is assured, isn't it?"
"Yes," he replied, but he couldn't help thinking about all the times Arthur had been punished because he had failed to show the same unswerving dedication to the Alliance the others did. That was to make him stronger, his mind reminded him, so he could better serve the Alliance and the people. Is that why the Alliance had brainwashed him? I belong to the Alliance, and I serve it, and the people. Heero closed his eyes for a fraction of a second, trying to clear his mind and remain in control of himself. He realized that the girl was talking again.
"It's an interesting thing," she said, fingering the folder of papers she'd brought with her this time. He eyed the packet warily - it was papers like those that had gotten him into this mess, where he was questioning himself and everything he had ever known, and couldn't be sure whether he could trust his own mind or not. She didn't fight with her fists or guns, not really, she fought with words, and papers like those were her greatest weapons. "We live in a galaxy where slavery is completely illegal, yet you think of yourself as the property of someone else."
"Slavery is a term that applies only to humans. I'm not human," he found himself replying, again automatically.
"And how do you determine that?"
The question caught him off-guard. He'd always been told, and believed, that he wasn't human. Why was that, exactly? "We weren't born. We were created."
"You mean genetic manipulation. That has been performed on millions of fetuses, for everything from determining the sex of an infant to fixing disabilities before they can manifest during pregnancy. All of the original colonists went through some genetic manipulation so they would be better suited to live in space. Becoming albinos was just a side-effect of those changes. Just because you've been changed more than most doesn't mean that you aren't human. The original DNA that was used to create you was human, wasn't it?"
"It was," he admitted, his mind flying ahead, searching for problems with her theory. "But there are other differences, too. We have no emotions, we feel nothing except when completing our missions."
"That's a result of drugs and hypnotic suggestion dating back from when you were infants. Back then those things kept you from feeling normal emotions, and as time passed, you believed it was the truth, which further enforced the things they've done to you. Any child, normal human or with manipulations, would have reacted the same way if they went through the same treatment you did." She pulled a few papers out of the folder. "Look."
Heero immediately saw the Alliance seal at the top of the paper. He read it in a matter of seconds, but absorbing and understanding it was another matter. It was a detailed description of the analysis and instructions of several influential psychologists, explaining how to prepare the subjects of Project Titan so that they would be susceptible to the belief that they had no emotions. After that came the steps that were taken to ensure that both the 'emotional training' took hold - that continued until they were six. A chill ran up and down Heero's spine. It was just the way he'd thought it out, they had been brainwashed, and his inability to think badly of the Alliance was just a symptom of that. That thought immediately brought to mind, I belong to the Alliance, and I serve it, and...
SHUT UP! he shouted to himself.
There were various notes concerning how the training had affected them since then, with the specifics on the way that each of them had reacted, each differently. There was a side note that Four's training hadn't taken hold as strongly as some of the others, bringing up questions about his efficiency. The pages looked authentic. Arthur... is that why he's so different? Not because of a flaw in his design, but because he wasn't conditioned properly to think that he had no emotions? No! his mind shouted. It wasn't true. It couldn't be true!
Before he could get control of himself and try to figure out why it couldn't be true, he was talking. "No," he repeated out loud, crumbling the paper and throwing it away. "It can't be true. Why..." he cut himself off, furious with himself that he'd lost control and let her know how much she was bothering him.
"Why would they do that to you?" she asked, finishing his question. "It's a tie that binds you to them. You see, despite the fact that you've never been anything but loyal to the Alliance, they can't trust you, because they know how dangerous you are. If someone had approached you with a bribe to betray the Alliance, they thought this might stop you, the thought that you would never experience joy again if you left the Alliance."
She's missing part of it, he realized. She doesn't realize that I can't even think badly about the Alliance. What is joy? I wouldn't miss it so much, if I could think... the very attempt almost started another repetition of that phrase. "I'd never betray the Alliance like that." The words came out of his mouth before he could sensor them.
"But they can't trust that. Most of the leaders of the Alliance know that they would betray their employers, if offered enough money and power. They can't understand true loyalty, because they have none. So they keep that tie on you. It's not the only one." Before he could figure out what she meant by that, she continued, "It also increases your value. As long as you are without emotions, you can't feel remorse or pity for your victims. Efficient killers, that's what they were trying to create."
"And they succeeded," he growled. "My efficiency rating is off known charts."
"I wouldn't be so proud of that if I were you," she said. "Your creator didn't want it for you."
"My creator? You mean Mr. Mem?" For a moment he was shocked out of his thoughts. Heero couldn't imagine what she was talking about. Mr. Mem always said that efficiency was their highest priority, his greatest goal.
"Mr. Mem?" she asked, momentarily confused. "Oh, Dr. Yirtz. He wasn't your creator, you know. He was one of three doctors who created you, the least talented among them. His contribution to your genes was actually minimal, but he had what the Alliance considered the right attitude to keep the project on track. When I spoke about your creator, I was talking about Dr. Karen Smith, and also Dr. Richard Ethen."
Heero frowned. "No people with those names are associated with the project."
"Well, they use fake names anyway, but you're right, they aren't associated with the project. Dr. Smith was executed immediately following your birth, for failing to obey orders and for making some unscheduled changes to your genes. Dr. Ethen was forcibly retired. He's suspected of knowing about the changes Smith made and not informing his superiors, but they don't have any proof, so they just packed him up and sent him to one of the old colonies. Those two had very different dreams for you than Yirtz, the one you know as Mem. They had both been coerced into doing the project in the first place, and Smith became more and more resisting as she realized what they were planning for you. Richard also sympathized, and if he believed it was necessary to create weapons to fight the Alliance's enemies, he resisted the idea of the emotional training, which was also one of the reasons he was retired soon after completing his assignment. Of the original three, only Yirtz was willing to do everything his superiors wanted, which is how he remained in control of the project and rose as high as Director." She handed him the rest of the papers she held. "This is a full report on Smith, Ethen, and Yirtz, how they created you, what they wanted, and what happened to them."
Heero grabbed the papers, not knowing what to do. His anger at her was greater than ever, which was even more suspicious. Was he angry at her because she was lying, trying to manipulate him, or because he was angry with the Alliance and the emotional training was making him think it was with the Rebels. He was tempted for a moment to throw the papers across the room and then kill her. Damn it! he thought to himself as he started to read the papers. She'd been right about one thing - he needed to know the truth now, was driven by that need. Even though he knew that it would be something he didn't want to hear - she had said as much - he still needed to know. Damn her! he thought as he opened the file. Then, suspecting the Alliance was behind that thought as well, he thought, Damn all of them! Even he wasn't sure if he was talking about the Rebels or the Alliance. I belong...
Stop it!
It took him less than ten minutes to read through the files. They were everything that she said they would be, how their creators didn't want them to become what they were, how their creators had resisted the Alliance, up to Smith's death and Ethen's virtual exile. But there were a few files missing, and his mind clung to that fact as proof that it was still just the Rebels trying to trick him, even though he knew it wasn't true. "These are all lies," he said, standing up, gripping the papers so hard they crumpled before he dropped them to the ground. "It's all lies," he said, utterly confused as to why he was saying all of this. "Dr. Mem created us, we are what he wanted! I belong to the Alliance, and I serve..." he cut himself off, fighting for control.
She also stood up, a sad expression on her face. "It's the truth," she said softly. "I'm sorry you haven't had the life that Smith and Ethen wanted for you ."
"Shut up!" he shouted, but he wasn't sure if it was at her or at the voices in his head, shouting at him that she was the enemy, and that he belonged to the Alliance, and that he had to destroy her. Pain lanced through his skull as he swung a fist at her, trying to silence at least one of the voices that was running through his mind, confusing him. His speed was far beyond any human's, and his fighting instincts were honed to their top capacity. The blow should have connected solidly with her face and knocked her halfway across the room, maybe breaking bones.
Her hand came up and blocked his punch.
For several seconds he was frozen in shock, his mind startled out of confusion. What had just happened was impossible. No human was fast enough to keep up with him, and even if they were, trying to block his punch should have broken her arm in two. He took a few steps back, then attempted a kick that should have connected solidly with her side. She ducked under it and darted in, landing two solid blows on his stomach before he backed up, out of her range. She wasn't even breathing hard, but he was, gasping for air and rubbing bruised stomach muscles. For her to be able to hit hard enough to cause him pain meant that she was incredibly strong, almost as strong as he was. "You..." he said accusingly as his mind began to function properly again, despite a throbbing pain in his temples, as he tried to find an explanation for the impossible. His thought process was interrupted as a man came running into the room.
He stopped short when he saw Heero, then cast a panicked look at the girl. She stared at him. "What is it?"
He glanced at Heero one more time, then turned his head towards her and raised a hand so that Heero couldn't see his mouth but she could. Heero saw the man's jaw moving up and down a little, and saw the girl's eyes fixed on the man's mouth. She reads lips.
Whatever the man had said startled the girl a lot. She suddenly straightened, and cast an angry, frightened look at Heero. Then she looked at the man, nodded once, and ran out of the room at speeds no human should have been able to reach, the man scrambling after her. The door slid closed behind them, leaving Heero alone with the impossible thought forming in his mind.
This was one of the hardest things to write of the entire story. I edited this sections about six times, then threw the whole thing out and rewrote it from scratch because I didn't think it was believable. Did it work this way?
He didn't even have anything to tie her to the Rebels. He couldn't get into the ambassador's house, so he couldn't get into the hidden room that Heero now knew existed, so there was no proof to be had there. Once he thought he had almost caught her meeting with a known Rebel, but she somehow called off the meeting before the two did more than pass each other in a crowded mall. On the other hand, it could have been coincidence that she just happened to pass the Rebel in the mall - there were a lot of people there. He still had no solid evidence that she had anything to do with the Rebels - whoever had taught her had taught her well.
On the fourth day, when she was headed home from school, she did something very odd. Instead of taking the normal route, she headed into a bad section of town, a dangerous place not at all appropriate for pretty young girls. She seemed to have a specific destination in mind as she wove through the dirty streets, somehow managing to avoid the pickpockets, muggers, and rapists who had to be following her. Heero's sense of unease grew, but that couldn't erase the growing feeling of excitement within him. There was no reason for an ambassador's daughter to be here, unless she was connected with the Rebels.
At the end of a particularly dark alleyway she paused, and glanced around guiltily. He smiled grimly - she had known that she was being followed. He was almost a hundred meters back, even if she knew she was being followed and knew what he looked like, she wouldn't be able to recognize him from there. After a few moments she stopped looking and slipped into the alley. He quickly ran up to the edge of the alley, then pulled out the dart gun he carried. There was to be no risk that the girl might be killed before she could be brought back to Arthur for questioning. He peered around the corner into the alley. It was very dark, and it took a moment for his eyesight to adjust. When it did, he saw a figure sitting at the end of the alley, with a dirty blanket thrown over it. Was it her? No scrap of skin, no hair or clothing showed beneath that dirty blanket that might tell him. It was probably her, but if it wasn't, if it really was an old beggar, and he shot the beggar with a dart, she might be watching from somewhere else, and be armed against it next time.
Carefully keeping the dart gun trained on the figure, he slowly advanced into the alley. "Stand up," he ordered in a low voice. "I've got a gun trained on you."
Suddenly the figure straightened up, and he realized that they'd been crouching, not sitting, a moment before a regular gun was brought into line with his head. The girl stood there facing him, without a trace of fear on her face. "My gun is real, whereas yours is just a dart gun," she said in a low voice. "If you shoot me, that will still give me enough time to get off a shot, and I'll kill you. It might take me a few hours or a few days to wake up, but I have friends in this neighborhood who will protect me, whereas all the attention you'll get is who will take your clothes off your dead body. Drop the gun now, and kick it over to me, and put your hands on your head."
He realized that what she said was true, and dropped his gun, raising his hands. She still didn't know what he was, that he wasn't human. All it would take would be a slight wavering of the gun, and then he'd attack. No amount of training could protect her from what he was. He kicked the gun towards her, but intentionally aimed it a few feet to the side and behind her, so that maybe she'd drop the gun a little when she picked it up. No such luck. The gun stayed firmly trained on his head, as did her eyes as she picked up his weapon. She examined it without moving the gun. "What's in here?" she demanded. He didn't respond.
She smiled slightly. "I should thank you for bringing this," she said, stepping forward a little. He saw an open box behind her, one with bright blue lining and a cleanliness that contrasted sharply with the outside, which looked like garbage. Inside he saw a needle and several vials of a clear chemical. His eyes widened at the implications. "The best I could do was a needle, and I'm not sure I trust myself to inject you without getting hurt. This is much better."
Trap! His mind shouted as she raised the dart gun to face him. The darts would knock out a human in a second, but it would take more than one to down him. He had to use that to his advantage - she would be assuming that he was human. He threw himself at her, but before he'd made it a meter closer he heard three rapid fire shots, and looked down to see three darts imbedded in his chest a moment before everything went black.
------------
When Heero woke up, he was in a completely white room, lying on a low mattress, wearing a straightjacket with reinforced cloth that even he couldn't rip. Damn it. Heero couldn't believe he'd been so careless as to have allowed himself to be caught by the enemy. Well, they wouldn't get any information from him. He looked around the room, but there was no other furniture except the low mattress. Nothing he could use to escape, or even to destroy himself so that they couldn't question him. Someone had planned this well. He cursed himself for so vastly underestimating the girl - she'd obviously had more training then they knew, more than they ever could have guessed, based on the way she handled that gun.
The door at the opposite end of the room slid open, and the girl walked in. She hadn't changed out of her school uniform, which made the dart gun in her right hand even more obvious. In her other hand she carried a folding chair, which she set down and sat in as the door closed behind her. "Sorry about the straightjacket," she said in a conversational voice, "But I don't trust you not to attack me. If you behave yourself, we'll see about getting it off in a few days."
Her tone surprised him - this wasn't the way an interrogation was supposed to start, he'd sat in on and conducted enough of them to know. There had been no isolation, no protein-starvation - he didn't expect the Rebels to have anything like the chamber, but he had expected they would have something equivalent. He kept his exterior calm as his mind raced. She... they're trying to keep me off balance, to prepare me for torture. I won't tell them anything.
"By now you're wondering what you're doing here, and what we want with you," she continued. "I expect that you're expecting torture, the sort of thing that the Alliance does to our people when you catch them. But I know your training, One, and I know that the chances of you telling us anything are practically nonexistent."
He stiffened when she used his designation. How had she known that?!
She smiled slightly. "And now you want to know how I know so much about you. The Phoenix decided when you started to follow me that I would be in charge of your questioning once we caught you, since you already know my face. No need to expose any more of our people to you if it's avoidable. In preparation for this, he showed me your files, everything we have on you, which is to say everything the Alliance has on you. I know how you were created, what your abilities are, everything. And since we have such access to the Alliance's records that we can access even your files, I'm sure it's not hard for you to believe that there's really nothing of value you can tell us that we don't already know."
He still didn't reply, but his mind was whirling with the implications. They hadn't realized how easily and thoroughly the Phoenix had penetrated the Alliance's defenses, especially after Arthur reconfigured the system years ago. There had been a few intrusions they had detected, but nothing like what this girl was saying. She's still lying, still trying to prepare me for interrogation, was his first thought, which he almost immediately rejected. If they knew his designation, then they really did have the access she claimed. Or had she just guessed?
"But I don't really expect you to believe anything I tell you - you'll figure it out for yourself, in time. For now, I just want to answer one more of your questions before you can think of it. The question is, why would we want to hold you like this if you have no information that we want or need? Why not just kill you and eliminate a powerful enemy of the Rebels? If I trapped you, I most certainly can trap the others. It would be a simple matter to eliminate all of you, strike a blow that the Alliance might never be able to recover from."
A chill ran down Heero's spine as he realized that what she was saying was true, that she would certainly be able to eliminate the others that way. He waited for her to finish her statement.
She didn't disappoint him. "The answer to that is quite simple. The Phoenix believes that you can be great allies to the Rebels, once you join us."
Shock forced words from his mouth. "You're crazy."
"Quite possibly," she said, standing up. She nodded at the door, and it opened. Several men wearing masks walked in. Each of them carried a stack of papers that they lay on the ground next to the mattress, always being careful to stay out of his reach.
He didn't even look at them, keeping his attention focused on the opposite wall. They'd have nothing from him. He noticed, out of the corner of his eye, that they withdrew, taking the girl's chair with them. The girl slowly began backing out of the room. "Some reading material." She jerked her head towards the stacks of papers. "We'll continue this discussion later. You'll be sent food. Whether you choose to eat it or not is your choice, but it doesn't make any sense for us to drug it, and if you refuse to eat anything for several days, we're going to assume that you're trying to starve yourself, and start giving you injections of nutrients. The choice is yours." She stepped through the door, and it closed behind her.
--------------
The girl didn't return for several days.
Heero had come to a decision during the first night, during the time when he lay awake for hours, waiting for day to come since his body had never required more than an hour's sleep. He'd decided that the only way he was getting out of here would be through the girl. The security was good, but they'd made a mistake in keeping him in the control of a child. She might know what he was intellectually, but that didn't mean she understood what he was. He knew enough about psychology to make many psychologists jealous - children were notoriously easy to control precisely because they were children. He wouldn't tell her anything she didn't know already, but he might be able to get her to reveal a little bit about the Phoenix. It was worth a try.
It was extremely frustrating the next day when she didn't return so that he could speak to her. Armed, masked guards came in four times a day, twice in the morning to drop off a meal and pick it up, and twice again in the afternoon for the same purpose. They never spoke to him, nor did they ever remove the straightjacket, forcing him to eat his meals on his knees. Was this some sort of primitive interrogation technique? It was irritating, certainly, but hardly what he would consider a torture method.
Because he had nothing else to do, he started reading the papers, using his bare feet to shuffle through them. It was a confused jumble of things, individual accounts by people of attacks the Alliance had made on them, various classified documents the Alliance sent out ordering attacks, public files from before the Alliance took over the colony. It was exactly what he would have expected from the Rebels, a pack of lies, sloppily put together. And that was what alarmed him. He would have expected that they would have at least tried to put a better face forward for him, if they were trying to recruit him. I have to remember, it's the Phoenix I'm really facing, not that girl. And the Phoenix had been outwitting the Alliance for years. But he's never come up against me.
Most likely the jumble of papers was intended exactly for that purpose - to make him uneasy. Certainly no one, not even a Rebel human, would expect him to believe that was the truth. He knew for a fact that the Alliance had killed civilians, he had killed several himself, but that was always because they posed a danger to the Alliance, and therefore to the people the Alliance protected. Those few lives were worth the thousands they protected. But why would the Alliance stage raids on small farming colonies, of all things? The papers had to be to confuse him, because no one would ever expect him to believe such stupidity.
Something within him remained uneasy, though, even after he had thought it through. Knowing what he did about the Phoenix, and assuming that he was the same person they'd faced all these years, maybe even the original intruder that they'd chased through the Alliance's computer, he had to expect layers and layers of reasons behind every action. It had been too easy to figure out this plan, which meant there must be something he missed. Unless that was the next layer, to make him think that he'd missed something when he really hadn't. Heero closed his eyes. This was what made the Phoenix so dangerous - he could create these logical loops, where there was no way to figure out what he was planning based on past actions.
One day, as he was reviewing the fake files in his head, trying to see some sort of pattern in them, he got an idea of another way to approach the problem. He wasn't getting anywhere, looking at the information as the lies he knew they were, so he decided to assume that they were telling the truth, and try to figure out what she was thinking that way.
Almost immediately he had to give it up. He couldn't think that way about the Alliance, even just as an exercise. The papers had to be lies, all of them, because if they were true, then everything the Alliance had ever told him had been a lie, and that just wasn't possible. Why not? he demanded of himself, trying to figure out why he couldn't think this way, even just as an exercise. I belong to the Alliance, and I serve them, and the people, he found himself repeating the words he'd heard so often, and almost frowned, his frustration was so great. In the eyes of the Rebels, the lies they were telling him were obviously true, so in order to get into their heads, he had to figure out why they believed that, but he couldn't do it. How could they be so wrong? The Alliance was there to protect people. It would never have done the things that they said it did. Still... why couldn't he even think that way?!
It must be because it's so ridiculous. I know the Alliance, I know my duty, and I know the truth. The things they're saying... they aren't true, couldn't be true in the mind of anyone sane. The Alliance... He dropped that train of thought. It wasn't getting him anywhere, and he went back to his previous analysis, trying to figure out what the Phoenix had been planning. But a thought kept intruding into his mind, a question that he couldn't ignore. Why was it that he couldn't think about the Alliance that way, even just in practice?
The girl didn't return until six days after he was first captured.
----------
"You've behaved yourself," she remarked as she came in, still holding his dart gun. She pointed it at him and nodded towards the door. Two very large men wearing masks came in. "Untie him," she instructed the men. To Heero she said, "If you try to attack them, I'll shoot you." Heero didn't move as they finally removed the straightjacket. The two men exited without saying a word, leaving the girl behind. "You've read what I left for you?"
He nodded. "How, exactly, do you expect to get me to join you?" he asked. "I hope you have something more persuasive than these lies," he nodded towards the papers. "Or I will be very disappointed in the Phoenix, if that's the best he can do."
Her eyes narrowed slightly, and she hesitated for a moment before answering. "Those aren't lies, and you won't be disappointed with the Phoenix. He has some plans for you."
Heero managed not to smile with great difficulty. The girl had already made a slip. Now he knew that the Phoenix was indeed a 'he'! "And what are they?" he asked, keeping his voice perfectly neutral.
"We don't intend to hurt you or bend your mind at all, because I know that's what you're thinking. That's been done enough times by the Alliance already. They made a mistake when they trained you - they taught you the basic principals of right and wrong, and they lied to you about the Alliance. They would have been better off just telling you to obey the Alliance, but someone had to get tricky and lie to you. Tell me, why do you serve the Alliance?"
"Why should I tell you?" he retorted.
She stared at him without speaking for several long seconds, then said, "Does this sound familiar? 'I belong to the Alliance, and I serve it, and the people.'" He stared at her. "I told you how much access the Phoenix has to your computer. Don't you think that the phrase they brainwashed you with would be a little obvious? My question is, whom do you hold allegiance to? The Alliance, or the people?"
"I serve the Alliance and the people."
"I'm surprised you managed to get out that phrase without repeating the whole thing," she commented, then sighed, looking a lot like a human kid, instead of a Rebel soldier. "Sorry, it doesn't work that way. The two groups are mutually exclusive. You work for the Alliance *or* for the people. You can't have it both ways."
He didn't bother to respond to such an obvious lie, but part of his mind was working on something she'd said before. ...the phrase they brainwashed you with... He knew that it was just another one of her lies, and that he should dismiss it as such. He would have, except that just a few days earlier, when he'd tried to look at things like a Rebel, that was the phrase that had popped into his mind. No, it wasn't brainwashing, it was loyalty, he thought automatically, but that only made him distrust that conclusion even more.
She continued. "*I* serve the people, by fighting the Alliance. I ask you again. Who do you serve, the Alliance or the people?"
"The Alliance is an organization dedicated to peace. Everything we do is towards that goal, to preserve the peace."
"The Alliance is an organization dedicated to control," she corrected him. "The colonies had a notoriously low crime rate until the Alliance started stationing its troops here. We had high morale and respect for our surroundings, until the Alliance arrived with its random crowd-sweeps and careless soldiers. Do you know how many people run the climate-control computer?"
He did, but he wasn't telling her.
"Over two hundred. That's how many people it takes to undo the damage your soldiers have done to our colony, to the dome. You read the records I left for you, do you remember how many it used to take?"
Heero didn't give her a response, but she didn't seem to be expecting one.
"When the colony was still free, it took less than a dozen." He'd been told that the colonies were on the edge of dying out when the Alliance came in to save them.
Acting as if he had spoken out loud, she said, "As I mentioned before, the Alliance has done quite a bit of lying to you, and they've messed up your head, too, as I'm sure you're finding out." Heero stiffened. How had she known that he was thinking about the way that phrase kept coming up in his mind every time he tried to think about what the Alliance told him?
She studied his face carefully, then stood up, picking up the chair in one hand without putting down the dart gun in the other. "The Phoenix has already given you documents, proof that the Alliance has done much to hurt the colonies. Proof that they've lied to you. Of course, we don't expect you to believe any of it, at least not at first, but after a while it becomes overwhelming. After that, we have to see if you can break the hold their brainwashing has on you.
"Tomorrow the Phoenix will send a few people who remember the old days to talk to you. Please don't attack any of them - for the most part they're old men and women who don't have homes anymore and have nothing left for them. They don't have any information you want, and while their deaths would mean a lot to me personally, it would do nothing to hurt the Rebels."
Heero stared at her, angry for no reason he could think of. She's a Rebel, isn't that reason enough? a voice in his mind whispered to him, but that only reminded him of her impossible, ridiculous claims about brainwashing, and of the doubts those claims had raised. "That's it?" he asked scornfully. "You're not making much of an effort to convince me."
"Nothing I say is going to break the hold the Alliance has on your mind. Only you can do that. I'm just giving you a chance to know the truth."
---------------
The witnesses she sent in disturbed him greatly. They were... well, they believed they were telling him the truth, that much was for sure. Heero had heard of methods used to create fake memories for people, he'd even seen them used on a few prisoners, but never to the extent of these people. They had many memories from those times, quite varied and vivid, as opposed to the vague accounts of those whose memories had been altered. He had to concede the possibility that they actually were telling the truth, that the colony had been a peaceful place until the Alliance showed up. That it had been a better place before the Alliance arrived to bring peace.
At least, that's what logic told him he should do. Everything logical told him that there was something here to investigate, but whenever he thought about the Alliance, trying to think of it the way the girl described, that stupid phrase ran through his mind again. No, not stupid, he told himself, horrified that he'd thought of his oath of loyalty to the Alliance that way.
He tried to tell himself that the way logic was pointing him couldn't be right, that this entire scene was part of some trick he hadn't thought of yet. They were lying to him, there was another layer of lies here, they were trying to twist the truth into something they could use to subvert him. He told himself this over and over and over again, and almost managed to convince himself that this was the truth, but the doubts she'd planted in his head forced him to question even this. Why should he have to convince himself of anything? If the Alliance had told him the truth, why wouldn't logic back them up? Could it be that the Alliance had... No! I belong to the Alliance, and I serve it, and the people!!!
Heero paused as he realized he'd repeated that stupid phrase again. Why can't I think through this?
These doubts were alien to him, and he wanted to dismiss them from his mind. He'd never had doubts of any kind before, much less doubts that the Alliance had told him the truth all these years. But he couldn't just dismiss them. He looked over all the evidence in his mind, and thought, for an instant, that he was behaving as if he'd been brainwashed somehow. Immediately his mind responded by telling him that the Alliance didn't do that, that this had to be some sort of trick. Why?! he silently demanded of himself. I belong to the Alliance, and I serve it, and the people.
Damn it! Heero actually slammed one hand into the side of his head. I have been brainwashed.
No, that's not true, it can't be true, he immediately thought. I belong to the Alliance, and ...
-----------------
On the fifth day, no more of those old humans arrived anymore. Instead, the girl came back. By then he was angrier than he could ever remember being, even towards Rebels, and a good deal of that anger was that he wasn't sure if even the anger was his own, or whether it had been planted there by the Alliance. He couldn't even think about it without repeating that damned phrase, and he was hearing it a lot in his head these days. Worse than that was that he didn't know whether this was all real, or some sort of hallucination cooked up by the Rebels to turn him. His mind immediately latched on to that fact, which again raised his suspicions, that he was so eager to cling to anything that exonerated the Alliance. Exonerated? What had the Alliance done? It brought peace to the colonies, protected the people that lived there from themselves! Everyone knew that they were incapable of taking care of themselves! They were too young, too small...
None of this helped him, because he could clearly remember Mem saying every word of those explanations.
This time the girl brought two chairs, and didn't have the gun. He considered attacking her, but assumed that she had a half-dozen people watching at all times, and that chances were he'd barely touch her before those other people would come barging in. Besides, he wasn't sure he wanted to kill her, not yet. Why not yet?! his mind demanded. She's an enemy of the Alliance! He took the opposite chair.
She stared at him for a long time without speaking, and when she finally did, she said softly, "I'm sorry."
He stared at her. "I don't want your pity."
"I'm not offering my pity. I don't think I could ever offer you that, not knowing what you are. What I am offering is my apology. It's a cruel thing to do, to tell a person that things they've believed for their entire life, things they've based their lives on, aren't true."
"I am a soldier of the Alliance, and you are my enemy," he responded automatically in a flat voice, although he had his doubts now. Or did he? Was this all some elaborate hoax that even he couldn't see through?
"You're not a soldier of the Alliance," she corrected him. "Technically, you belong to the Alliance. You're an experiment, not a soldier."
He wanted to argue with her, wanted to fight against her statement, but it was true. He'd said it himself many times. "Then I belong to the Alliance, and I will remain loyal to them." He wasn't sure about that, either, but the one thing he did know for sure was that he'd never let this child know that he had any doubts, let her know that all this was having an effect on him.
"Who needs your loyalty? You belong to them, after all - your obedience is assured, isn't it?"
"Yes," he replied, but he couldn't help thinking about all the times Arthur had been punished because he had failed to show the same unswerving dedication to the Alliance the others did. That was to make him stronger, his mind reminded him, so he could better serve the Alliance and the people. Is that why the Alliance had brainwashed him? I belong to the Alliance, and I serve it, and the people. Heero closed his eyes for a fraction of a second, trying to clear his mind and remain in control of himself. He realized that the girl was talking again.
"It's an interesting thing," she said, fingering the folder of papers she'd brought with her this time. He eyed the packet warily - it was papers like those that had gotten him into this mess, where he was questioning himself and everything he had ever known, and couldn't be sure whether he could trust his own mind or not. She didn't fight with her fists or guns, not really, she fought with words, and papers like those were her greatest weapons. "We live in a galaxy where slavery is completely illegal, yet you think of yourself as the property of someone else."
"Slavery is a term that applies only to humans. I'm not human," he found himself replying, again automatically.
"And how do you determine that?"
The question caught him off-guard. He'd always been told, and believed, that he wasn't human. Why was that, exactly? "We weren't born. We were created."
"You mean genetic manipulation. That has been performed on millions of fetuses, for everything from determining the sex of an infant to fixing disabilities before they can manifest during pregnancy. All of the original colonists went through some genetic manipulation so they would be better suited to live in space. Becoming albinos was just a side-effect of those changes. Just because you've been changed more than most doesn't mean that you aren't human. The original DNA that was used to create you was human, wasn't it?"
"It was," he admitted, his mind flying ahead, searching for problems with her theory. "But there are other differences, too. We have no emotions, we feel nothing except when completing our missions."
"That's a result of drugs and hypnotic suggestion dating back from when you were infants. Back then those things kept you from feeling normal emotions, and as time passed, you believed it was the truth, which further enforced the things they've done to you. Any child, normal human or with manipulations, would have reacted the same way if they went through the same treatment you did." She pulled a few papers out of the folder. "Look."
Heero immediately saw the Alliance seal at the top of the paper. He read it in a matter of seconds, but absorbing and understanding it was another matter. It was a detailed description of the analysis and instructions of several influential psychologists, explaining how to prepare the subjects of Project Titan so that they would be susceptible to the belief that they had no emotions. After that came the steps that were taken to ensure that both the 'emotional training' took hold - that continued until they were six. A chill ran up and down Heero's spine. It was just the way he'd thought it out, they had been brainwashed, and his inability to think badly of the Alliance was just a symptom of that. That thought immediately brought to mind, I belong to the Alliance, and I serve it, and...
SHUT UP! he shouted to himself.
There were various notes concerning how the training had affected them since then, with the specifics on the way that each of them had reacted, each differently. There was a side note that Four's training hadn't taken hold as strongly as some of the others, bringing up questions about his efficiency. The pages looked authentic. Arthur... is that why he's so different? Not because of a flaw in his design, but because he wasn't conditioned properly to think that he had no emotions? No! his mind shouted. It wasn't true. It couldn't be true!
Before he could get control of himself and try to figure out why it couldn't be true, he was talking. "No," he repeated out loud, crumbling the paper and throwing it away. "It can't be true. Why..." he cut himself off, furious with himself that he'd lost control and let her know how much she was bothering him.
"Why would they do that to you?" she asked, finishing his question. "It's a tie that binds you to them. You see, despite the fact that you've never been anything but loyal to the Alliance, they can't trust you, because they know how dangerous you are. If someone had approached you with a bribe to betray the Alliance, they thought this might stop you, the thought that you would never experience joy again if you left the Alliance."
She's missing part of it, he realized. She doesn't realize that I can't even think badly about the Alliance. What is joy? I wouldn't miss it so much, if I could think... the very attempt almost started another repetition of that phrase. "I'd never betray the Alliance like that." The words came out of his mouth before he could sensor them.
"But they can't trust that. Most of the leaders of the Alliance know that they would betray their employers, if offered enough money and power. They can't understand true loyalty, because they have none. So they keep that tie on you. It's not the only one." Before he could figure out what she meant by that, she continued, "It also increases your value. As long as you are without emotions, you can't feel remorse or pity for your victims. Efficient killers, that's what they were trying to create."
"And they succeeded," he growled. "My efficiency rating is off known charts."
"I wouldn't be so proud of that if I were you," she said. "Your creator didn't want it for you."
"My creator? You mean Mr. Mem?" For a moment he was shocked out of his thoughts. Heero couldn't imagine what she was talking about. Mr. Mem always said that efficiency was their highest priority, his greatest goal.
"Mr. Mem?" she asked, momentarily confused. "Oh, Dr. Yirtz. He wasn't your creator, you know. He was one of three doctors who created you, the least talented among them. His contribution to your genes was actually minimal, but he had what the Alliance considered the right attitude to keep the project on track. When I spoke about your creator, I was talking about Dr. Karen Smith, and also Dr. Richard Ethen."
Heero frowned. "No people with those names are associated with the project."
"Well, they use fake names anyway, but you're right, they aren't associated with the project. Dr. Smith was executed immediately following your birth, for failing to obey orders and for making some unscheduled changes to your genes. Dr. Ethen was forcibly retired. He's suspected of knowing about the changes Smith made and not informing his superiors, but they don't have any proof, so they just packed him up and sent him to one of the old colonies. Those two had very different dreams for you than Yirtz, the one you know as Mem. They had both been coerced into doing the project in the first place, and Smith became more and more resisting as she realized what they were planning for you. Richard also sympathized, and if he believed it was necessary to create weapons to fight the Alliance's enemies, he resisted the idea of the emotional training, which was also one of the reasons he was retired soon after completing his assignment. Of the original three, only Yirtz was willing to do everything his superiors wanted, which is how he remained in control of the project and rose as high as Director." She handed him the rest of the papers she held. "This is a full report on Smith, Ethen, and Yirtz, how they created you, what they wanted, and what happened to them."
Heero grabbed the papers, not knowing what to do. His anger at her was greater than ever, which was even more suspicious. Was he angry at her because she was lying, trying to manipulate him, or because he was angry with the Alliance and the emotional training was making him think it was with the Rebels. He was tempted for a moment to throw the papers across the room and then kill her. Damn it! he thought to himself as he started to read the papers. She'd been right about one thing - he needed to know the truth now, was driven by that need. Even though he knew that it would be something he didn't want to hear - she had said as much - he still needed to know. Damn her! he thought as he opened the file. Then, suspecting the Alliance was behind that thought as well, he thought, Damn all of them! Even he wasn't sure if he was talking about the Rebels or the Alliance. I belong...
Stop it!
It took him less than ten minutes to read through the files. They were everything that she said they would be, how their creators didn't want them to become what they were, how their creators had resisted the Alliance, up to Smith's death and Ethen's virtual exile. But there were a few files missing, and his mind clung to that fact as proof that it was still just the Rebels trying to trick him, even though he knew it wasn't true. "These are all lies," he said, standing up, gripping the papers so hard they crumpled before he dropped them to the ground. "It's all lies," he said, utterly confused as to why he was saying all of this. "Dr. Mem created us, we are what he wanted! I belong to the Alliance, and I serve..." he cut himself off, fighting for control.
She also stood up, a sad expression on her face. "It's the truth," she said softly. "I'm sorry you haven't had the life that Smith and Ethen wanted for you ."
"Shut up!" he shouted, but he wasn't sure if it was at her or at the voices in his head, shouting at him that she was the enemy, and that he belonged to the Alliance, and that he had to destroy her. Pain lanced through his skull as he swung a fist at her, trying to silence at least one of the voices that was running through his mind, confusing him. His speed was far beyond any human's, and his fighting instincts were honed to their top capacity. The blow should have connected solidly with her face and knocked her halfway across the room, maybe breaking bones.
Her hand came up and blocked his punch.
For several seconds he was frozen in shock, his mind startled out of confusion. What had just happened was impossible. No human was fast enough to keep up with him, and even if they were, trying to block his punch should have broken her arm in two. He took a few steps back, then attempted a kick that should have connected solidly with her side. She ducked under it and darted in, landing two solid blows on his stomach before he backed up, out of her range. She wasn't even breathing hard, but he was, gasping for air and rubbing bruised stomach muscles. For her to be able to hit hard enough to cause him pain meant that she was incredibly strong, almost as strong as he was. "You..." he said accusingly as his mind began to function properly again, despite a throbbing pain in his temples, as he tried to find an explanation for the impossible. His thought process was interrupted as a man came running into the room.
He stopped short when he saw Heero, then cast a panicked look at the girl. She stared at him. "What is it?"
He glanced at Heero one more time, then turned his head towards her and raised a hand so that Heero couldn't see his mouth but she could. Heero saw the man's jaw moving up and down a little, and saw the girl's eyes fixed on the man's mouth. She reads lips.
Whatever the man had said startled the girl a lot. She suddenly straightened, and cast an angry, frightened look at Heero. Then she looked at the man, nodded once, and ran out of the room at speeds no human should have been able to reach, the man scrambling after her. The door slid closed behind them, leaving Heero alone with the impossible thought forming in his mind.
This was one of the hardest things to write of the entire story. I edited this sections about six times, then threw the whole thing out and rewrote it from scratch because I didn't think it was believable. Did it work this way?
