Hunt Down Rose

Chapter 2: Elimination (Part VI)

For a moment I can still remember those harsh memories that I’ve encountered during this prospect of business. The pain this thing has cost me, lead me to this catatonic state that I can’t seem to recall the life that I have, the existence of random places in my mind, and the missing fragments of my childhood.

“Hey, are you ok?” He asked me waving a can of beer on my sight. Somehow he knows what happened to me during my earlier years.

“Yes,” I replied to him. “It does make sense that they have these records since that project was famous among black market investors,” I added, keeping myself together.

“It’s true, but I still can’t believe you were a part of that project yourself.”

Recalling some memories of mine, I was indeed once a part of a certain project revolving state of the art drugs and technology. It is an abominable research that shouldn’t have been conceived in the first place, in my perception that is.

Everything that I’ve lived up to now is based on my ideals that I should avenge the people that helped me get all the way here. For what it’s worth, I shouldn’t have been alive in the first place either, along with these memories, these precious memories that are more valuable than the money the world can give to me. It all comes down to this self-realization.

My family name isn’t Garcia, My existence is still a question, and my memories are fragments based on that happening 19 years ago.

 I was back to square one, the day when I met those people seem to have a place in my being, and “Grimnoir” the personality in charge of my subconscious has a deep history embedded in me.

I was a mere child back then, with high hopes of being somebody special and make his parents proud of everything he does. I have an adopted older brother - unfortunately, he was found by our butler near a garbage can searching for something to eat. He was passing by with a few of our employees so he decided to bring him somewhere he could stay for a while. 

Noticing that he doesn’t have any parents along with his lifestyle, he decided to bring him home to us as a new member of our family. My parents, even though they were busy, they sure kept my sister, me and my new older brother company by treating us outside whenever we want to go to parks and malls. According to my father, my sister died early because of leukemia. 

At an early age, I was still clueless so I wasn’t aware of what’s happening to our family during that time. Especially when we weren’t even allowed to see the corpse of my sister due to various reasons. As a child, I didn’t suspect much but knew something was amiss. My brother would often ease my sadness, by telling me stories from stuff he heard on the streets, and our butler was always there to care of us in those dark days. For a moment I thought our family would stick together like glue, but just like everything, it has its own limits.

Because of depression from the death of my sister, our father became obsessed with a certain drug that he thought induces a person’s subconscious to dive into his own memories and use his consciousness to travel back in time. At first investors from all over the world wanted to see the prospect and flow of the project. Due to the expected profitability, we gained popularity and tried to conquer the East Asian markets with the technology that we had. 

Test subjects surfaced and proved to be excelling during the prototype launch of the drug. However the scientists noticed that what they have done wasn’t a time-traveling drug, rather they noticed a few odd things during the results of their progress.

From fifteen patients, ten out of fifteen showed side effects of the drug intake after a few shots. The remaining five were surprisingly gaining increased muscle coordination along with their senses and reaction time.

The company began to run the project again to know what they’ve created, and successfully after three weeks with plenty more subjects to choose from, they found out that the drug was somehow related to a psychological process we use to contain our memories.

According to the psychologists involved, the drug can initiate a certain level of sleep wherein your consciousness can exist without the internal manifestation of the subconscious part of your brain for a certain period of time. In short, there are no loopholes of memory, no shifts of areas just a pure slate with yourself in control of the situations inside your head. Once a person’s consciousness is active during his sleep, they will use the drug to delay the subconscious taking its part inside a person’s dream, making it possible to review memories in complete comprehension without fail. 

The subconscious now acts as a box filled with pictures or memories ready to be plucked out by the conscious mind for viewing and comprehension. The person’s brain, on the other hand, grants access to past memories in detail acting as a 4D projection of the internal memory of the person. For scientists, they called or referred this state as the Void mode of consciousness, wherein synthetic replacement of memories is possible by using visual references before the drug intake or by sending wave frequencies to the brain, controlling the subconscious memory bank of the human mind.

For what I’ve experienced, those synthetic memories involve cases from past murders and highly coordinated cases such as espionage or so. They will allow the person to pick which method is possible for them to use before they give a complete analysis on the case. Using the test subjects, they began using those case files and strategic plans to device a situation inside the person's mind, with the subject himself/herself as part of that situation. 

Scientists developed a way to induce reality into the person's mind by using certain frequencies similar to when we are awake with the use of special magnetic patches. Once those frequencies reach the brain, it would be impossible for that person to distinguish dream from reality. Even the people inside his dream would be real, though they are synthetic; it’s nothing but a piece of ice melting inside their head with them not knowing the difference.

But what’s truly interesting is that even though they are sleeping, their muscles are reacting to what’s going on inside their dream. Of course they are still and on a submissive state, yet the tensions in their mind are so real, that the body accepts the fact that what’s happening inside may be true and similar to the real world. 

If you die inside your dream, you will eventually feel the pain and everything will reset according to what the memory replacement has been programmed to in the first place. The pain shared by your emotions will be also shared by your physical self, such as strains, bruises, blood loss and more. 

I myself am once a part of the project under my father’s guidance. I was one of the five subjects that survived the test and the ones that failed, suffered a complete mental breakdown, some even committed suicide afterward due to severe paranoia and headaches. What the company created wasn’t built for solving unsolvable cases or for time traveling, rather they used it to program a person’s mind to kill relentlessly. The drug became a lethal weapon capable of starting an army itself with the public not knowing its very presence. 

The rest of the subjects were returned to their families with alimony and mental services for a complete recovery from the drug. Since the withdrawal symptoms of it were severe enough to induce psychosis based on the people they’ve encountered during the Void consciousness, the therapy took them roughly 4 years to fully restore the brain’s function to normal, removing the implanted synthetics inside their memory bank.

After a few controversies, multiple organizations and even the government banned the drug from even stepping outside the factory of its creation. In order to wipe traces of the drug and the memories of those involved, a reverse-engineered serum was made and everyone was forced to take it.

They even extended the scope of their plans by manufacturing countless loaves of bread, filling it with the serum, and feeding it to the general public through the guise of feeding programs and such, making sure that everyone would soon forget the project’s existence on a wide scale. Though for me, I was the only one who was forced to take the weaponized drug to further use during that time with no choice but to accept the dire fate that was ahead of me.    

(To be Continued)