Barry stared at the old man, trying to reconcile the frail elderly figure in front of him with the powerful genius who had founded the organization decades ago.
"I'm Thomas Chen," the old man said. "The original Thomas Chen. I faked my death in 1983 as part of a plan that I'm only now ready to explain. And everything you believe about the organization, about the experiment, about your purpose in life, is based on a foundation that was built on deliberate deception."
"How are you alive?" Barry asked. "There were death certificates. Medical records. A funeral."
"I created all of those," Thomas said. "I created a false narrative of my death as a way to test whether the organization could function without my direct leadership. I wanted to see if the institution I had created could survive i
