The original author's notes still apply.
Note to one of my reviewers: this is set soon after 1984, using the interpretation that Winston stays alive (it can be interpreted that Winston is shot right at the end of the book). So maybe you were incorrect, Winston has visited the Ministry of Love, and Room 101. Not in this story, of course.
Note: This chapter is kinda boring and reflective, depending on your mood etc, but I'll try to add in an exciting subplot as the next chapter, I promise.
A Newspeak dictionary flew across the cell-like room and crashed into the lead-lined outer wall, closely followed by a children's textbook about the pre-Party period (now the Party was claiming it invented the practise of tarring wooden ships).
"I'm sick of this!" shouted Winston at the man that took him from his home, whom he now knew was named Frederick. "All these textbooks, all these sources, are exactly the same! They spout the same rhetoric each time of Big Brother being loving and omnipotent, with very little information in between! Is that what you wanted to do? Bore me to death with this - this crap? Why do you make me read them all? Can't you just get on with it and tell me who you are and what your mission is? It's been a week, damnit!"
Frederick, who was sitting on the same metal chair, smiled knowingly. "Listen to yourself, Winston. You sound like a teenager. A complaintive, angsty little teenager." Winston froze at the thought. "And you want to know why? One reason: your food."
"We've been feeding you the same food that they feed the proles. It has two effects, concerning your attitude, anyway. One effect: it's so inadequate that you become constantly irritable. The more sinister effect: they have added enzymes into it, which have the eventual effect of causing you to think at younger and younger ages. It's not permanent, and it will wear off after your next meal, if your meal doesn't contain the enzymes."
"Why did you feed me that, then?" Winston asked.
"For you to feel the effects," said Frederick. "It's a testament to how stupid Big Brother's version of events is that even with the thinking-age-reducing drugs affecting your critical thinking, you can still tell it's a load of lies."
"I've never felt that before," said Winston.
"It's a very subtle effect," said Frederick. "Also, you've almost never had the drug before, either. It's only in the prole food. Sometimes Outer Party types like yourself buy the prole food, but with such minimal dosages as once in three days or less, it has no effect at all, as it was designed to. They wouldn't want the Outer Party members thinking like ten-year-olds, after all: you would be unable to do Big Brother's bidding well."
"Not that there aren't any drugs in Outer Party food, or even Inner Party food. In both foods, as well as black market food that is stolen (rather than illegally manufactured) and prole food, there are additional drugs that reduce critical thinking ability over time. We've been killing the enzymes in those drugs with highly specialised viruses in your food, so you keep your critical thinking for this period in your life, except the effects of having your mental age reduced to what our mind-scanning equipment estimates is 17 years old."
Winston tried to take this in. It had been a week since they had dumped so much information on him at one time: the Big Brother literature was hardly interesting or packed with information. He could feel his head inflating as the holes were filled again with thought, towards a finite maximum. Finally he came up with a question.
"Why do they use temporary drugs to stifle our thought? Why don't they alter our consciousness entirely? The latter would make our current actions impossible: you would be unable to try to convince me that Big Brother is wrong, and I would be unable to make a conclusion from any evidence you gave me, no matter how conclusive. Why not do that?"
"That is some of the most heavily guarded information in Big Brother's scientist networks," explained Frederick. "The only scientists that do anything with human consciousness are either as greedy as him - sorry, you might later think that's brainwashing, I apologise, it's my opinion - or are incredibly stupid and utterly believe in Big Brother's version of Ingsoc. We've never gotten a spy that far in before. Our best guesses are that either they absolutely cannot alter our consciousnesses permanently, or they couldn't do so without altering their own consciousnesses as well. Do you understand so far?"
"Yes," said Winston.
Frederick looked around. "By the way, where is your gun?"
Winston swallowed. The gun was under the bench, in the same corner that he had cowered in a week ago. He was terrified of it. Whenever he tried to rationalise the fear he felt at its sight or even at the thought of it lying there, all he could come up with was a thirteen-inch-long, fat furry horror with teeth like razor blades and a penchant for warm blood and aqueous humour...
"I really scared you, didn't I?" intoned Frederick in regret. Winston nodded. "This fear of yours is too great a weapon against you. Before you learn who we are, we will rid you of your fear."
"How will you do that?" asked Winston.
"Easily," he said. "You never realised it, but we've been reading your mind for the last week, trying to establish what your greatest fear is. Looking at your sojourn in Room 101, you are afraid of rats." Winston flinched. "Do you know why you are so scared of rats?" Winston shook his head.
"Well we do," he smiled. "We will force you to relive the memory that has caused you to be so frightened of rats. You will see that they are not the ones you should be frightened of. Watch."
Frederick sat in silence for a second, then suddenly Winston's vision was torn in two. He yelled as he was blind, then suddenly he saw himself lying on his back. It was a four-year-old version of himself, he remembered, for the other him had his mouth open, and Winston counted the number of teeth in his mouth.
It was during an attack from either Eurasia or Eastasia. He was in a prole shack, one corner of which was ablaze. About twenty rocket bombs had fallen, three in the near area, hitting his house. He wasn't sure where his mother or his sister were. He could see himself partially trapped under rubble, as his frail, tiny limbs tried to push it away. Fortunately, although it trapped him, it was not supporting itself on him, which would have killed him quickly: it looked like two of the walls had fallen around him, and that it weighed at least four tons altogether.
Suddenly a rat appeared on the rubble above him. Winston sucked in his breath sharply, although the younger image of him didn't notice it immediately, and when it did he was impassive. Until the rat began scrabbling over his chest towards his face with its sharp claws, puncturing the skin. Winston felt his heart rate double, and he started sweating. The boy cried out and tried to brush it away. It clung on and continued moving. When it was on his face he closed his eyes to protect them.
Right then the building collapsed completely all around him. The older Winston closed his own eyes then to protect them from the ensuing cloud of dust and dirt, only to discover he didn't have to: the memory he was reliving was only an illusion, and that despite the sights and sounds he was sensing, he was still sitting on that bench in the underground bunker with Frederick at his side.
"Yes, I'm still here," said Frederick, just behind where the young Winston appeared to be.
Winston looked at himself, lying there. He was screaming and screaming with his eyes tight shut. The building coming down had luckily missed him for the most part, but some rubble had come down and crushed the rat on his face, as well as his left cheekbone and the skin around his left eye, making him bleed. He screamed even more when a falling nail rammed into his scalp, barely missing the bone and passing straight through the hair and skin. He began bleeding much faster. Instead of just screaming, he began screaming, "I'm going to die! I'm going to die!"
And Winston understood. He had his eyes closed since the rat walked across them, and he had been deafened by the detonation of the rocket bombs, so the only sense left for him to tell what was happening was touch. Therefore, he had no idea that a shack had just fallen on him. He saw a rat crawling onto his face just before he closed his eyes: he thought the rat had detroyed his face around his left eye, and ripped his scalp apart. He thought he was going to die from it, because he could feel the flow of blood on his shoulder. In that instant, his mind related rats to death.
His sight was split in two again, and again it vanished only for it to return again, this time back in the bunker. He was soaked in sweat, shivering, with his heart beating wildly. Frederick was watching him closely.
"I'm not afraid of rats," Winston realised. "I'm afraid of death."
"Very good," said Frederick. Winston sat deep in thought. Then he spoke.
"How did I survive my head getting split open like that?" he mused.
"Your mother came back, found you, and bandaged your scalp and cheekbone, successfully stopping the bleeding," said Frederick. "The damage to your bone structure was nothing more than cracks, and the damage to your nerves nonexistent, so you recovered well. Either you almost completely forgot about it or the Thought Police moved it to the back of your mind, because it took lots of delving to find that, and even then we had to build on it so you knew what was happening."
Winston snapped to attention. "You mean that memory wasn't real?" he spoke quickly.
"It was real," he said. "You just forgot most of the important details."
"If I thought I was getting mauled by a giant rat, how did you know the building fell on me?"
"You'd be surprised at how well one remembers pain. Even almost half a century later, you remembered very well what happened to you. We deduced that only a heavy impact followed by a stab wound could have done what happened to you; rats just don't have the capability."
"But you guessed the rest?" persisted Winston.
"Yes," allowed Frederick, after some contemplation. "We fabricated everything but the pain, and the image of that rat on your face just before you closed your eyes. That was all you remembered, after all."
Winston nodded his consent. "So, who are you all?" he asked, partially relieving the burning curiosity inside him. "Do you work for Goldstein?"
"I'll tell you later," Frederick said airily.
"Oh, why the hell are you acting like a clam?!" said Winston, leaping to his feet.
"Because you're still under the effect of the mind drugs," Frederick said quickly, cutting off Winston before he could start to really get into his stride. Winston closed his mouth, sitting down without realising it.
"How did you build a giant lead-lined bunker?" he said.
Frederick thought for a moment. "We didn't build it: such a task would actually be impossible. No, it was already built, and we moved in. I won't tell you any more while you're still under the effects of the drugs. I don't like talking to a teenager with grey hair. Just wait it out, the answers will come."
Winston screamed, began yelling out in very colourful language, and kicked the bench as hard as he could, causing his varicose vein to flash boiling hot with pain, as well as registering pain in his toes. His screaming stopped short as he felt pain that he hadn't felt since... he couldn't remember what had happened or when, but it was fairly recently, about four months ago. The pain was so intense he couldn't even use his larynx at all, and he fell back onto the floor, eyes wide and unseeing, mouth slightly agape, with his leg convulsing and twitching.
After a minute or so of recovery, Fred said, "Sorry, teenagers like being in control, I forgot. I will tell you what you want to know after supper tonight, okay? Wait until then."
"I thought you said one meal would be enough to flush out the enzymes," said Winston, remembering that detail very well.
"That's if you have one meal, or two in a row. After having a week's worth, it takes two. Of course, you'll still have the other drugs that you've been having all your life. Those will take years to flush away, and even with our treatment it will take several weeks to kill them all, then repair the damage. So: until tonight."
He began to close the door. Winston foresaw a long day where not even the Big Brother literature could keep him interested.
"How will I pass the time?" he said quickly.
Frederick smiled. "In a few minutes I'll bring you an electronic chess set. You will battle it out against a computer opponent. The skill level will remain fixed: you won't think so. I'll also bring some military training games that were once used to prepare new soldiers for the war."
A general annoyance fell away from Winston: he would soon know what was going on and therefore be able to control it, and he would also receive ways of amusing himself. If they got boring, he supposed he could always call Fred to talk to him, seeming as they read his mind. For the first time since he started eating that prole food, he felt relatively calm and at peace. He suddenly realised he wasn't giving any thought to the situation outside: how the Thought Police had probably figured out that the body in his apartment wasn't real, the ultra-secret manhunt that was probably going on, how Big Brother was still out there, doing what the books said were good but what Fred said was evil...
"The Thought Police, and everyone else for that matter, is completely convinced that the body is real," said Frederick.
"Stop leafing through my thoughts, will you?" snarled Winston.
"Sorry," mocked Frederick, incensing him even more. "Everyone thinks you're dead, our highest-ranking spies confirm that. You can truly rest now, Winston: for the first time in a long time, you can completely relax."
Winston's anger left him immediately as he let the man's words mull over in his head. 'First time in a long time' was actually an understatement: aside from when he was a toddler maybe, he had never, ever relaxed completely. A sound snapped him out of it, and he was surprised to discover that the sound was the door closing. A few seconds later, Frederick returned with the chess set. Winston took it, put it on his lap, moved the queen's pawn forward two squares, and waited.