Decrypted (Part Nine)

Yeah my life a bitch
But you know nothin' bout her
Been to hell and back
I can show you vouchers

Lil Wayne, Eminem - No Love

When I came to, I wasn't surprised to see I wasn't in the ruined safehouse anymore. 

I also wasn't surprised to see all my injuries had reopened and I was bleeding again. 

And I really wasn't surprised to find myself handcuffed to a wall. 

What did surprise me though, was the barrel of the gun pointed two inches from my head. 

Or rather, the person holding it. 

'Cammie?' 

'Hello, mister.' CaramelD's face was a mask of calm. Few blinks. Set jaw. Her eyes bored a hole in my head. It was an expression I had seen many times before. 

The expression captors wore before they executed prisoners they had gotten fond of.

'how's Inpoco?' I asked. 

'She'll live. A few broken bones. But she's a tough kid.'

I nodded. 'She's good with a firearm too.'

'Yeah. I taught her that'

Silence again. She sat in the bare wooden chair watching me. Her eyes were hard and cold like steel. 

'So. What's going on, Cammie?'

'I have no idea. I have some friends who just told me some very interesting things about you.'

'Okay.' 

'Anything you want to tell me, Mister?'
 
'I can tell you I'm not the enemy here.'

'really? My friend Genie would disagree.'

'I didn't kill him. You know that.'

'I know you don't know your name.'

I went silent. 

'I know you have a ridiculous amount of skills for an average hit man in this town. Who trained you?'

'I'm not sure - '

A machine somewhere in the room let out a short, sharp beep. I looked around the room but couldn't see anything. CaramelD spoke.  

'We took the liberty of hooking you up to a digital polygraph device while you were out. That way you and I can have two discussions at the same time.'

I looked down at my hands and saw the near transparent wires running from my body into the darkness of the room.

'you have to listen to me, Cammie.'

'What was your job? Infiltrate the resistance?'

'I'd never heard of your resistance till I spoke to you.'

The machine beeped again. 

CaramelD smiled.

I shook my head.'I am not lying. Four weeks ago I foiled an attempt on my life for the first time. The hitman could only tell me the name of his contractor. Less than a week later I was targeted at a diner. I got the same name.'

'freaksho.'

'yes'

'you ever get a description from any of them?'

'Tall, six feet, maybe six one. Medium weight. Face detail varies. Shaven, bearded, I'm not sure. There's the possibility he has green eyes or wears glasses.'

CaramelD  stared at me. 

'Green eyes.'

'Yes.' 

'Green like The Hulk green?'

'Yes.'

'And glasses'

'Or glasses.'

She gave another smile.

'You know, this probably isn't your most creative moment.'

I shrugged and indicated to the room.

'So why isn't the polygraph beeping?'

'Maybe you know how to beat it.'

'Right. So now I'm James Bond? Come on.'

We both went quiet.

'Inpoco said you told them your name was Joe. What is that? Code?'

'What?'

'Does it mean something? Like, if you say it backwards?'

'No. I don't know. It's what came to my head.'

'Is it an acronym for something?'

'I..I'm not sure.'

'How old are you?'

'I don't know.'

'Why do the Brotherhood want to kill you?'

'I don't know.'

She sat up in her chair, her eyes suddenly burning with fire. I saw her slowly and deliberately bring her pistol forward.

'what's your real name?' She asked, evenly.

'I don't know.' 

I could feel my stomach begin to churn.

'What's your real name?'

'I said -'

CaramelD's breathing was calm.

'What's your real name?'

'Ive answered that. Now either get that gun out of my face or -'

CaramelD stood up so fast i saw the chair skid away. The barrel of her pistol rested on her forehead.

'Or this.'

The click of the safety catch snapped loudly in the room.

'i'm sorry. I liked you. But you're a risk we can't afford to take.'

I felt my heart thump in my chest and nausea rack my body.

Her voice softened for a moment.

'Any last words?'

I had nothing to say.i had nothing to live for. Death would be sweet release. It was time to stop fighting it.

I started to shake my head when I suddenly heard myself speak.

I felt the gun press harder against my forehead for a split second, then stop.

'What?' CaramelD said. 'What did you just say?'

A door opened abruptly and light flooded the room. A stern looking woman in a white coat and glasses rushed in flanked by a dark complexioned man in a suit.

'Cammie! Stop!' the woman said. 'It's him. We're getting positive on the brain activity.' 

The man crouched in front of me and held up my face. The world was beginning to blur with nausea.

'He...said it. I heard him say it.' CarmelD sounded stunned, her voice small and far away.

'He's lost a lot of blood!' the dark skinned man yelled over his shoulder. 'Someone get these cuffs off!'

I could feel the world fading to black as form and figure bled out of the room, bringing in the oily darkness and numbed my senses and drowned my mind.

The last thing the man in the suit said to me followed me all the way down to the depths of unconsciousness.

'Hang in there'

*
The enemy of my enemy is my friend.
The enemy of my friend is my enemy.
The enemy...
...Is me.
*
I opened my eyes slowly as I came to. There were more people in a different room. Three men, two women. The first man was the guy from before. He had taken off his jacket and rolled up the sleeves of his white shirt. Patches of blood stained his shirt. He was talking low with another guy. He wore a plain black t-shirt and blue jeans. Big fellow, full beard. The third man was working a computer system, I couldn't see his face. The woman in the white lab coat was next to him.
 
CaramelD sat in the corner looking straight at me, an unreadable expression on her face.
 
'He's awake.' She said.
 
All activity in the room ceased as everyone turned to look at me. The man at the computer terminal was looking at me with one hand frozen over his keys.
 
I pushed myself off the rough pile of bedding I was on and sat up. I could feel new bandages all over my body and the wires were gone. My mouth tasted like antibiotics and my heart beat a funny pattern in my chest. I swung my legs slowly over the cot and sat for a minute to orient myself.
 
No one offered to come help me as i tried to stand. It took a full minute.
 
Swaying a little on my feet, I I took a deep breath and looked at all of them. They were still watching me with a restrained, wary look. I didn't know what to say so I kept my mouth shut.
 
The woman in the white overcoat stirred a little bit and walked towards me.
 
‘Do you think you can write?’ she asked quietly.
 
I blinked. ‘What?’
 
She handed me a note pad and a pen. ‘Please. Write something for me. Anything.’
 
I looked at her for a few seconds before accepting the pen and pad. After a pause I wrote the first line that came to my head and handed it back. She took the pad and pen from me, read the line and quietly walked back to her group.

Confused, i spoke up.
 
‘Look, i don’t know what you guys thin– ‘
 
‘You’re him.’ CaramelD interrupted.
 
I froze. ‘What?’
 
‘You’re Freaksho. You're the same person we...the resistance have been trying to take down all these years.’
 
I felt my heart skip a beat and begin to slow down.
 
The man from earlier with the bloody shirt spoke up. ‘We weren’t even sure you were a real person. The rumors...conflicting stories. Like a rumor spread to keep people at bay.No one knew for sure if you were real or not.’
 
I stood there looking at all of them, my mind struggling to take it all in when it suddenly occurred to me.
 
There was no nausea. I wasn’t having any nausea attacks.
 
The lady in the labcoat spoke. ‘We know you're very confused. I’m SHE.’ She put a hand on the blood stained man. ‘This is Cereberus. The big guy is Fish and the guy at the monitor is K9. I believe youve already met CaramelD.’
 
I looked at all of them in a dazed haze.

'I'm Freaksho?'

She put up a placating hand.
 
‘Please. We understand that this might all be a bit much for you right now, but it's very important that you understand what has happened here. At least, understand it the way we do.'
 
She turned to the guy at the computer console and nodded at him. He nodded back and began working a program of some sort.

'Just before you met Muse that night she had sent us two things. One was a written note and the other was a heavily encrypted message on a thumb drive. She wouldn't tell us what the message was, only that it would help us understand. Inpoco had been working on decoding it since that night. We just got lucky an hour before you woke up.'

'it's ready.' the computer guy said.

SHE nodded. 'play it.'

There was a soft beeping sound, then a deep, clear well spoken male voice filled the air. He spoke with slow deliberation and perfect diction; I thought I could detect a northern accent in his voice.

'First, there was Nigeria as we know it today. Decadent, violent, oppressive.

Then, a group of bloggers changed the country through writing and sparked a revolution. The government was overthrown and the bloggers put in place. Everything worked for a while.

Then, like everything else, the bloggers allowed themselves to get spoiled. Contaminated. They forgot the very ideals they had fought against and acted worse than those they replaced.

Smarter and more tech savvy than the old regime, they created checks and balances to make sure a revolution like theirs would never happen to them. They Cracked down on the populace and enforced a near police state.

Nevertheless, rebellion will always find a way. Splinter groups from the bloggers went underground to form a resistance through new means, recruiting new minds to the cause. Influential figures which were pivotal to each section of the country spread the word and captured minds.

The brotherhood responded fiercly. People were murdered, abducted and imprisoned. This however had the opposite effect on the resistance, spurring them on and making them bolder. The heads of the resistance underground were well hidden and their locations protected with a ferocious intensity. To crack this, the Brotherhood needed a new tactic.

They would need to plant people in these communities that would operate undetected. Sleeper agents so deep even they wouldn’t know.

This is when the VG solution was introduced.

In real life it was called the Venatic Gene Solution. But in the end everyone called it the VideoGame Solution. This was when the chemical trials started.

A simple idea. Find suitable pro-resistance supporters and break their minds. What made this particularly creative was the method used. Because these were supporters, their minds would reject the idea of them harming their friends. So, mental coercion was achieved using a chemical state that presented them with tasks to be achieved in their heads that yielded rewards. This was complete with bonuses and save spots.

They presented it to their minds like a videogame. And because their minds knew it wasn’t true, it readily accepted it.

Despite the genius of these idea, failure continued. The goal of VGS was to overlay your objectives and what you were seeing in your head over your everyday life without you noticing. The subjects were never supposed to know they had been turned. They were administered their VGS treatments nightly when they thought they were sleeping in their homes and observed during the day. It didn’t work. There were more and more cases of internal haemorrhaging and seizures.

It took three years and a lot of bodies to figure out the treatment was affecting the heart, not the brain. VGS kicked the heart into overdrive in the most lethal way possible. It was a magnification of the rush you feel when excited, in lethal form. It affected everyone.

Except one. And it was the most coincidental occurrence ever.

Test subject six. His cardio records were normal. He exhibited no abnormalities whatsoever. VGS ran through his system like blood and no one could understand why.

We found out later. He was arrhythmic.

His mind accepted VGS in doses we had never imagined. We just kept pumping him for months to see his limits. We didn’t even field test him or begin the physical rehab till much later.

Subject Six has killed more resistance members for the Brotherhood in the past four years than we could have dreamed. His methods are clinical and short. His mind does not discriminate between targets; i have seen him dispatch a crying 3 year old with the same calmness he used to behead a Resistance henchman. He did his job and he did it well. And the best part was, he never knew about it.

Until The Muse.

High ranking Brotherhood member.  Rising star in the PR and Propaganda Department and main squeeze for the man upstairs. I remember when she visited the facility for the first time for a 'research' tour. We had no idea. How could we? 

The irony was amusing. We were so busy making double agents we never noticed one of our own.

Systematically, she ruined everything. She stole compounds.formulas. A ton of confidential research. She opened a communication channel with subject six somehow outside his VGS state. No one knows how long she did this. Or why. There were instances of members of the Brotherhood being sympathetic to the resistance cause, but never like this.

No one noticed anything was wrong with subject six for a while. But we noticed when he went rogue. Missing for weeks. Had disabled his tracker. Then the bodies started showing up.'

There was a pause from the recording. The soft beeping went on for a while.

He’s hunting himself. He doesn't know this, obviously. The trail will eventually lead him back to us and we must be prepared. I cannot stress enough how dangerous he is, even without his dose of x4-16. He must be stopped before he can rendezvous with either Muse or the resistance. And above all, it is imperative that he never - ever, find out about The Light.

That is all.'

There was silence in the room.

I sat down slowly. My eyes looked but I couldn't see.

'who was - ' I began.

The guy at the monitor - K9 - shook his head.

'We don't know. We've run analyzers and identifiers. No luck.'

SHE reached into her pocket and brought out a rumpled sheet of paper as she walked towards me. 

'I told you she also sent us a note.she said it was from her contact on the inside. Here.'

I collected the rumpled paper and read it. It was a short note. 'need to meet you. I'm forgetting things. What is happening to me? Need to meet you soon. EoD.'

I looked back up at her. 'What's EoD?'

'thats the same thing we asked her. She said it was their secret call sign.' 

SHE handed me the piece of paper I had written on earlier.

I saw what I had written on it and my blood ran cold.

Evolve or Die.

The handwriting was the same.Both pieces of paper slipped from my hands and see-sawed their way to the floor.

'OhhhhKay. I am all fucked up right now.' I breathed, my hands trembling.

I was Freaksho? How was that even possible? Mass murderer, killer of women and children - the papers couldn't even show pictures of what The Freak had done in Jos.

Me? 

How had I sent people after myself?

And who was I before I became Freaksho?

I looked up. Everyone in the room was still staring at me.

'The Brotherhood have a HQ? A base of some kind?'

'The Rock' CaramelD said. 'Heavily fortified, heavily guarded dont-even-fuck-with-me kind of place. It's in A Town. We'd have to fly you there.'

I nodded. I wouldn't have expected anything less. 

'So Myne Whitman would be there? Him and whoever did this to me?'

'Joe.' SHE tried to sound calm. 'You're doing exactly what they expect you to do.'

'This has to end. I need to end this.'

I remembered how the Muse had looked at me that night. The only person who had truly known me and I hadn't even remembered her.

I shook my head.

'No. I have to end this.'

To be concluded.

PS: I know. Lol. It took ten years.
But this is it though. Tale's almost told. Hang in there.


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