For the record, I'm not bashing the government or politics or religion or anything in this chapter, save for just making use of things that have really happened for the sake of drama. The bad guys are bad guys who just so happen to be able to play the system against itself, not necessarily because the government itself is corrupt. It's just a story, just fiction, nothing more, so yeah. Just trying to head those flames off at the pass ;)

( )

Jeff frowned a little from where he was settled more or less in Morrison's lap, both of them squished into a corner of the compartment, holding his cell phone a little bit hesitantly. "I don't know about this."

"You're the only one of us who was ever in TNA, you know more about the people there than we do," Chavo said.

"You do understand that I wasn't even slightly in my right mind during that time in my life, right?"

"If people see a lot of TNA wrestlers suddenly showing up at D'Amore's school, it'll get noticed by the news people so they'll be more interested in a press announcement, and it won't make anyone suspicious that we might have anything to do with it. And anyway, you might have been a little...addled back then but it wasn't like you were a bad person who hung around bad people. And besides which, for the most part, we don't know any of those guys ourselves, or at the very least we don't know how we would call them without it being a little suspicious, that would get them talking about 'oh, hey, John Cena or Dave Batista called us.' It'd be less startling for you to call."

Jeff made a face. "I wasn't really that close with any of them..."

"Jeff..." Eddie said softly. He was holding Rey close, letting the smaller man rest against him. They'd given him a couple of extra Tylenol to try and help ease the pain left from the impromptu surgery, so between that and being completely exhausted overall, he had been easily lulled to sleep by the steady sound of the car. Since it was so far a much more peaceful sleep than the one of the night before, Eddie was being careful not to wake him. "Please just try. It's not going to ruin our plan if you can't convince anybody, but it's worth a shot to increase our chances anyway."

Jeff muttered a little, but opened the phone and stared at it a moment, motioning his thumb over the keypad as though trying to remind his fingers of a particular pattern, then dialed it, putting it to his ear and plugging the other with a finger to try and keep from being distracted, starting to talk quietly to whomever he'd called, leaning back against Morrison, who wrapped his arms around Jeff and just let him talk.

"Do you think there's really a big need to get a lot of other wrestler people at this school place you're going to?" Keith asked from the front seat, where Dave was driving again and he was taking shotgun, as they were the largest two and it would help the others have a bit more space in the cramped compartment.

"Look, you said your back-up may not be able to get to us very fast, and I'd be willing to bet it's because your guys have a lot of red tape and clearance and things like that to work their way through. Our's don't. I'll just feel better if we and D'Amore aren't the only ones there." Eddie chewed his lip. "Besides, with our boss involved, and knowing he got Dave and Kane to get involved too, I hate to say it but we just can't trust any of our coworkers..."

"But these...TNA people, aren't they your competition?"

"Our bosses are competing, sure," Chavo said. "But for the most part, that doesn't carry over to us. We're just guys doing our jobs. Always going to be people who just don't, but mostly we all get along fine."

"Wrestling is a family, man," Cena said, nodding. "We look out for each other against outsiders like...well, you, dude, no offense."

"But especially against people who want to hurt us," Beth said. "Or who have hurt us."

"Like the people responsible for all this."

"Speaking of which, since we have a bit of a drive ahead of us, and what should be a mostly safe one..." Josh said, looking over. "Maybe you could fill us in."

"Yeah, man, you were big in on this whole thing," Cena said. "You know a lot of what's happening or something. Spill."

Keith clicked his tongue once, rubbing his head a little. "It's a long story."

"It ain't like we've got a prior engagement to get to."

"All right, well..." Keith shook his head a little. "Chavo mentioned the MK-ULTRA project before, so...you know the American government, the Canadian government...hell, probably every government there is, to be frank...has already dabbled in experiments in mind control, Manchurian candidates, things of that nature. There's always been a desire for a perfect method of control, a way to really get into someone's head and be able to get anything out of them you want...or to get what you want out of enemy spies or combatants."

"That'd be one hell of a weapon to have," Batista said, sniffing and wiping his face slightly."Being able in any way to gain control over people whenever you want..."

"Exactly." Keith sighed softly, turning somewhat in the seat to be able to look back fully at them. "A few years ago, a government thinktank pieced together a chemical that acts as a sort of...well, 'blocker' isn't the right term exactly, but I can't think of a better layman's term for it, so it acts as a nerve blocker in certain areas of the human nervous system, particularly the sections involving memory and self-control. It would allow them to cause memory loss for several hours before and after the dosing, which seemed to cause the subjects to enter a highly suggestive state where they were somehow incredibly open to hypnotic suggestions, code-worded orders, things like that, without ever being able to recall that it had been done to them. What happened to you, Cena, was actually perfectly within parameters...it only takes a matter of minutes to get a single item pressed into place, which is apparently what Krugman did to you with that numbing command Alexander used on you."

"Great. Good to know," Cena said dryly.

"What about the fits he was in?" Beth asked. "He was screaming and trying to hurt himself..."

"Like I said...it has an effect on self-control. No matter what sorts of thoughts or sensations come wafting through a person's mind, they can't be resisted...and unfortunately, it seems that the most negative of impulses get brought to the surface...some kind of so-far unexplained side effect. The only good side is that it sedates them and usually also weakens a person's motor control so that they can't achieve much. Although in some cases, maybe about 10 to 15 percent, it would have the opposite effect, something similar to the freakish strength experienced by users of PCP or other drugs, where the subject would seem to actually gain inhuman amounts of power."

"You were in that percent, John," Morrison said, shifting a bit to speak around Jeff, who was still mumbling on the phone. "There were a couple of times it took four of us to keep you down, and we barely managed it."

"The theory was that in that minority of the population, there was some sort of allergy or other factor that caused the difference, but last I had seen, the cause hadn't yet been determined with any accuracy. And seeing how there was no other difference of the drug's effectiveness besides that, I doubt any of the scientists involved actually bothered to check into it too deeply." Keith groaned a little, rubbing his temples as though to ease a headache. "Anyway...the first experiment they tried, on various captured terrorists and prisoners of war they could sneak past the Geneva Convention, was naturally using it to force them to give up whatever valuable information they had. But gradually, as much through accident as actual testing, they discovered that they could dose people to a point that they could cause them to not only forget real memories, but to establish brand new ones that would be held up under the most strenuous of circumstances. Then...one doctor in the study, Gladys Bettler, suggested that there was a truly extraordinary secondary use for the drug and requested...and got...permission to begin a whole new study around that use."

"Gladys?" Batista asked, blinking. "That Dr. Bettler I kept hearing about is a woman?"

"Some doctors are women, Dave," Beth said, smirking faintly.

"Oh shut up. It isn't the doctor part, it's the mastermind of an enormous government conspiracy part that threw me."

"Evil knows no gender," Eddie murmured softly, rocking Rey a little as he gasped and squirmed a moment in his sleep, then settled down peacefully again.

Keith sighed. "Gladys Michelle Bettler, age 46, a doctor of psychiatry, biochemical studies, and pharmaceuticals. She's a brilliant and highly motivated...if slightly immoral...woman who's done more to advance the study of the human mind than anyone else of this generation, as often as not through questionable scientific means. There were rumors that her father was involved in a British project similar to MK-ULTRA but I've never seen any confirmation in any of the files we have on her. That's all beside the point though. The point is, the study she visualized was a way to use the drug to erase and rewrite the memories of violent criminals and enemies of the state, in an attempt to see if programming them with new memories...essentially giving them a brand new life...would change their ways, cause them to no longer be the way they were..."

"Like nature versus nurture," Josh said. "She was throwing all her eggs in the nurture basket, thinking that rewriting a sociopath's life would stop them from killing people."

"Exactly. She believed that just by creating a new life for people would be enough to solve their problems, or at least give them more of an advantage over stopping them."

"But that's crazy," Josh scoffed. "Things like sociopathy, depression, things like that, they're as often as not biological, you can't just make them go away by erasing bad memories and putting in little happy sunshine ones in their place."

"But in some cases, there would be applications," Keith replied. "Soldiers returning from war, for example, would have their memories of the traumatic things they'd been through taken away, rape victims who wanted to go back to a normal life could have the memory of the attack taken away. It would essentially be the end of post traumatic stress as we know it. And there would be plenty of criminals who would benefit, people who did in fact end up going down the wrong road because of their early life experiences, who would as likely as not be put back onto the straight and narrow by having those experiences deleted."

"Deleted?" Chavo shook his head, scowling heavily. "Deleted. You say it like it's...like it's just no big deal. Deleted, as though people's brains were just any old laptop that you could just hit a button and have the virus scanner go through and clean everything up!"

"In a sense, that's exactly how this was considered. Bad memories, bad experiences, led to bad outcomes. Removing them removes the risk, makes life better for everyone."

"But it's...it's the start of such a slippery slope," Cena said, shaking his head, clearly getting more and more agitated. "I mean, first you're deleting bad memories to keep people from being bad people. But then who's to say what's a bad memory? I mean, some people take trauma and things like that and use it as a motivator, use it in a way to better themselves and the world. And you have to do bad stuff to learn from it, you know, like...like the whole those who can't remember are doomed to repeat thing. And like, who's to say that the next thing that'll happen won't be that some government guy won't go say, you know what, we can get rid of people's memories of...of...fuck, I don't know, their first bite of chocolate, every time they ate sweets ever after, then they wouldn't eat junk and they'd be healthy, make them forget about scandals that might cause them to vote out corrupt officials...and that's not even getting into what they did to me now, with this fall over in a mini-coma shit! They could take something this powerful and go way overboard with it, start unleashing it on the country to make a bunch of controlled drones!"

"It would probably be beyond the call of duty for them to start doing widespread brainwashing of everybody in the country," Josh said.

"Yeah, and it was beyond the call of duty for them to kidnap thousands of people to test this shit on, too! If I could think of it, you know there's some creep involved with the program who could think of it and would just be drooling at the thought of being able to dump this shit in the water supply and start playing tapes at night telling everyone to eat their vitamins and say their prayers! It only takes one asshole in the wrong position of power to start pulling this kind of crap!"

"You're preaching to the choir here, my friend," Keith said. "I'm on your side in this." He blew out a breath. "Besides, I have more to tell."

"Like what?"

"Like what's the point of all the things they were doing back at the hospital?" Batista asked. "Those bizarre scenarios and the staging of the mental hospital?"

"That's the last part. Dr. Bettler knew that the false memories that were placed seemed to be absolutely rock solid. But she also knew that the mind can be a tricky thing. She worried that as strong as the chemical seemed to be, that the erasure and replacements might still be deceptively superficial. She wanted to see if a person were put under a powerful enough stressor, if the falseness would be broken through to any degree and cause...problems. And being a devout student of the scientific method, she knew the best way to be sure was to gather as much of a random cross-section of the population as she could, work all of them over with the drug, and then...start hammering away at the false memories. So she collected a battery of data from places like the census and worked out a computer program to start selecting citizens at complete random, and arranged for them to be...brought in for testing by any means necessary."

"How could she get clearance to do something like that?" Beth asked. "Wouldn't the president or Congress or anyone have to approve something of that magnitude?"

"There's a lot of paperwork involved in government, a lot of things that require oversight. Even at the smallest it can be, governments tend to be big and bloated and without enough oversight to take care of accurately tracing every single thing. A little bit of muddy writing, a few bribes in the right places, not to mention more than one office in Washington overly concerned with national safety, it probably wasn't hard at all for her to convince the right people that this was all for the good of the country."

"Okay..." Chavo said, frowning. "So she manipulated the fears of the people in charge to get her way. But the test they were doing to Rey...the shit with Hell and...what was that about?"

"That was only one of about a dozen different tests the doctors and scientists came up with. Someone theorized that a heavily religious person, like Rey, might be easily broken down by a highly positive or negative spiritual experience, as it could prove the most intense thing that they could be put through. Religion is a very personal and very valuable tool to a true believer. There are documented cases of people experiencing miraculous healing, spontaneous stigmatas, visions and abilities, and the only scientific explanation is more or less the sheer power of faith."

"So they were trying to drive him to a point of a religious fervor...to see if he would use it to actually will himself back to normal?" Beth asked, somewhat skeptically.

"Not exactly that. There were two branches of the test...extreme positive experiences, and extreme negative experiences. Rey was involved in the second...they tested both religious and nonreligious people in both sets to see whether or not it would cause any losses, and it seemed that they were just about convinced it didn't. Like I said...it was only one of at least a dozen scenarios that the testers were trying to use to break the memories down. Every floor of the hospital had different tests going on. It wasn't even the first one they'd done to Rey. By the time you got involved, Dave, it was his fifth session of testing, and after the first four, his false memories were every bit as strong as they'd been from the first day." Keith chewed his lip. "Thank God for that, because it also means that more likely than not, he'll probably never remember the vast majority of the things that were done to him."

"What sort of things?" Eddie asked softly.

Keith shook his head, lowering his gaze, putting a hand to his forehead, going quiet a moment. Finally, he practically whispered a response, voice almost trembling. "I'm not going to tell you. It won't do you or anyone any good to know right now...or ever. Suffice it to say that they were things that no person, no matter what sort of heinous things they were capable of, could possibly deserve, and just having seen it done keeps me up at night. If he ever remembered...he'd be better off dead than living with that."

There was a somewhat shocked silence in the wake of that, with Eddie scooping Rey up and holding him even tighter, as though worried he could be snatched away again somehow. The quiet was broken by Jeff clearing his throat, and they looked over to see him holding the phone between his hands, watching them, apparently having been waiting for a break in the conversation to speak up.

"We're going to have some help at the school..." he said. "I got hold of Chris Sabin, and he's going to round up some people and meet us there in about a day. And he promised to call Scott and tell him to have some media on call to come."

"Does that give us time to get there too?" Batista asked, looking back at Josh, who had already taken a map, pilfered from the park they'd just left, and was looking over it.

"Yeah. If we stop to rest for the night, which I think we should, we can be there by tomorrow afternoon."

Jeff made a face. "I didn't exactly tell him what was happening," he said. "I didn't figure he'd believe me if I told him the truth, so I made up something about us wanting to jump ship but being afraid of Vince trying to do something to us...I don't know if he entirely believed that either but it was enough to convince him we needed help."

"Whatever you had to do, they'll understand the lie when they see what's really happening," Cena said, nodding.

"So what now?" Beth asked.

"We find a hotel, and an actual decent vehicle...Keith, will you be able to help us with that? We worry about being recognized..."

"I can do that," Keith said, nodding. "I think I'm with you guys from here on out, anyway."

"Good, thanks. Then we rest without having to stare over our shoulders for once...and then we get to Scott's school and we end this."