Intober 2024: Day 10 - Original

The lights came on, sudden and bright. Susan struggled against her restraints. It wasn't more than a simple rope tied around the back of a folding chair. If she could just think back to one of those evenings with Robert where things had gotten a little more involved, she might remember how to undo the knots.

"Susan Jane Smith," A voice droned monotonously from somewhere outside the narrow cone of light. "Graduated with a Master's in Education from Syracuse in 1966, taught for a year before relocating. Husband... former husband is Roger Tanenbaum, no children."

"Go fuck yourself," Susan spat. "You know, this Gestapo shit isn't the reason we call this country fascist, but it doesn't help."

"Came after relocation to develop connections and begin political activism with the SDS and Weather Underground," The voice followed like she hadn't talked. "We have one witness that puts you at the courthouse on February 17th. We have you dead to rights for inciting a riot, Ms. Smith."

"Yeah, and I'm sure that witness will get a great severance package from the agency when all this is done." Susan leaned back and tried to make it look like she wasn't playing with the knot behind her back. "But for now, I'm also sure he's eating the same donuts and drinking the same coffee as the rest of you. What are you, CIA? FBI? NSRP dicks?"

"Ms. Smith, our file says that you come from not insignificant means. Father was a successful businessman, mother was a present and caring homemaker. What would make somebody like you choose to throw all that away?" Whoever's voice it was, he sounded detached. Like he was trying to imitate a machine. "You were a perfect home-grown American girl, but somebody filled your head with all of this... commie gobbledygook."

"The problem with your home-grown American girls is that some of their parents teach them to think," Susan spat again. "Maybe your parents were fine with raising some flunky who didn't question what he was told, but my 'means' meant I got a real education. And part of that education means I won't sit idly by while this country carpet bombs-"

"Ms. Smith," The voice interrupted. He was still trying to sound cold and impassive, but he was clearly impatient with her. Impatient with the kind of rhetoric that 'her type' was going to have for him under interrogation. "Do you think that, if dropped into the jungles of North Vietnam, you would be worshiped as a liberator and savior? Or do you think that things would be playing out similarly to how they are now?"

"Even if it played out the same, you know what the difference would be?" Susan slumped a bit in her chair. She could just about get one of her fingertips on the knot. "They'd be doing it because they were getting off on it. I don't think you fucks even get that much. I think you're just doing this because it's what you've been told to do. I think you're going to do whatever it is you plan to do without feeling so much as a twinge of excitement. Then you're going to go back to your department head and he's going to tell you how good of a job you've done, then hearing that is going to make you fill your pants with-"

"Thank you, Ms. Smith. That will be enough," The lights went off. Susan suddenly felt even blinder in the darkness than she had been before they came on.

***

Agent Davis pushed his chair back and ran a hand through his thinning hair. On the other side of the desk, Agent Brown gave a churlish grin. Behind them, Junior Agent Brunson sipped her coffee idly.

"She's a firecracker, isn't she?" Agent Brown spun in his chair.

"All these hippie birds are about the same," Davis wrote something down in his notes. His voice was much softer and higher than the affect he put on during interrogation.

"You think she'll sign?" Brunson asked softly from behind them.

"They all sing," Brown turned to her. "Everybody likes to think they can resist torture, but you can't. What you can do is just start spewing so much garbage that it takes us forever to sift through. Tell us the name of every Tom, Dick, and Jane that lives within fifty miles of her and let us guess which ones the agency wants."

"So you go after her several different times and you see what names come up the most," Brunson shrugged.

"Gees, you really are doing some Gestapo shit," Brown snickered. "It's a diminishing returns game. If she keeps thinking about her husband, that name is going to show up just as much as any other. No, this is what the Subprojects are for."

Davis didn't even look up, just pointed at Brown in affirmation as he kept writing.

"Subprojects?" Brunson looked up from her coffee slightly.

"Right, new girl," Brown handed her a folder. When she opened it, close to the majority of every page was blacked out. "The agency is always looking for new and better ways to handle these kinds of problems. Some of the subprojects are R&D, some are info gathering. Most of the stuff you can think of, we've got a subproject for. Plus way more stuff you'd never think of."

"Not exactly a detailed read," Brunson flipped through the mostly-redacted folder and set it down next to her.

"Majority of subprojects are need-to-know, but it's generally safe to assume they fall into one of five categories." Brown pushed his chair over to her and flipped to one of the pages, seeming to know what it was without being able to read it. "First is drug research, both manufacturing and how they might be utilized by the government. Even a few antidotes."

"What would the government need a drug antidote for?" Brunson asked, assuming she already mostly knew.

"The humanitarian answer is imagine if you could take a pill that lets you skip your hangover." Brown pointed to a specific redacted part of the page, then back to the top. "The practical answer is what to do when one of our agents fucks up administering it."

"Right," Brunson nodded.

"Second is magic," Davis gave her a shit-eating grin that seemed to be gratified by the scowl she gave back. "Checking in on local cult leaders and spiritualists, but also seeing how stage sleight-of-hand might be useful for an agent in the field. Sneak a document right out of somebody's pocket without them noticing, steal somebody's bra before they can object.

Junior Agent Brunson held back a sigh. As the Agency's first official female agent, she was used to this kind of thing. By the time she got enough sway to complain about it, they'd have probably given her accolade to somebody else as a cover-up.

"Third is general anti-communist surveillance and activity. Monitoring migrants, keeping an eye on college campuses. Fourth project is bribes. These are the boring jobs. The kind of shit work you get put on if you get on Chief Roemer's bad side." Brown flipped to another page and pointed. "Unless you want to spend the next few years smelling patchouli and reefer, do what the big man tells you."

"I try to," Brunson tried to smile good-naturedly.

"And then, this is the really fun part, you have the fifth category." Brown flipped to a page that was entirely redacted aside from the subproject number. "Also know as the shit where if the public ever finds out we're doing it, we'll be lucky if we get fired instead of lynched."

"Do I want to know?" Brunson asked nervously.

"The better question is, if you need to know," Brown chuckled to himself. "But if you want an example, Subproject 30. Eggheads called it Operation Whitecoat. Rounded up a bunch of those... whaddayacallem... the guys who say they won't go to war because of their religion?"

"Conscientious objectors," Davis mumbled across the room.

"Right, them." Brown snapped. "Well, the Agency got them all on a base together and exposed them to a bunch of different diseases. Spanish Fever, Hepatitis, plague... whatever."

"We intentionally exposed American citizens to diseases?" Brunson asked skeptically.

"Proud American tradition," Agent Davis straightened up. "Not the first time, not the last."

"Well, the point was that it let us test how to treat them." Brown cleared his throat. "In case of a bioweapon or some big outbreak. Figure out what protective gear works and doesn't. Test the efficacy of our vaccines and whatnot."

"All very humanitarian," Davis added sarcastically.

"Well, that's why I lead with that one." Brown shrugged. "Hell, the American public might not even be that mad about that one, since there is a potential benefit to them. But there are worse. Much worse."

"I don't doubt there are worse," Brunson scooted a little over toward Davis. "So what subproject do we intend to use with Susan, and how horrified should I be?"

"If I had my way, it'd be the sneeze gun-" Brown started.

"No," Davis immediately responded.

"This guy doesn't like the sneeze gun," Brown rolled his eyes. He saw Brunson's look of confusion. "Handheld trigger-activated device. One pull and you blast the target with anything from the common cold to the black death. Like a portable sneeze."

"We haven't gotten it to work," Davis sighed impatiently. "Don't let his horror stories about the subprojects fool you. Most of them are failures who never make it past the design stage."

"Just because it hasn't worked yet doesn't mean we stop trying!" Brown pounded his palm with his fist. "Imagine it, one guy walking around Moscow brings all of Communism to its knees with something that doesn't even make a sound."

"Give up on the sneeze gun," Davis mumbled as he went back to writing in his notes.

"You won't be saying that when the Russians have a sneeze gun gap on us," Brown snickered at his own joke and pushed his chair back into place.

After a moment's pause, Davis seemed to finish writing his notes and pushed his chair back, tucking the whole collection of them in a manilla folder before rolling back into place.

"Sneeze gun wouldn't work for what we want anyway," He folded his hands over his pot belly, "If we wanted to kill her or any number of Weather Undergrounders, there would be much more efficient ways to go about it."

"Sure, but every chance we don't take to test new sneeze gun designs-" Agent Brown started, then stopped himself and straightened his face with a gesture from Davis.

"Our goal with Ms. Smith isn't to kill her. Nor is it to torture information out of her." Davis sipped his own coffee. "While the identities and locations of her colleagues would be beneficial to the Government, from what I understand the Bureau already has most of that information anyway. If the Government really wanted us to know, they'd hassle those clowns into sharing it."

"All due respect, but fuck the Bureau." Brown scowled. "You'd think a government agency would be secure enough not to get raided by a bunch of college students. Can't fucking sneeze on a college campus anymore without somebody saying you're part of COINTELPRO."

"To be fair, you do look like a cop," Brunson joked.

Brown turned to her with a cruel smirk, but before he could say anything Davis let out an uncharacteristic chuckle. Brown looked over from one colleague to another in amazement.

"Hey, I never made him laugh," Brown scratched the back of his head.

"You aren't funny," Davis responded casually before rolling over to a different cabinet and pulling out a different file.

He set it down on the desk in front of him and let them both read it. Though 'read' was a strong word. It was the least classified subproject document Agent Brunson had seen by virtue of only about three quarters of it being redacted.

"Oh shit, 97?" Brown asked after a second, mainly focusing on the header number.

"Yes," Davis rummaged for a few other documents in the cabinet. "The Agency has largely concluded LSD testing as it pertains to conditioning and hypnosis, but the field of mind-alteration and control remains something it is invested in."

"LSD testing?" Brunson had heard the rumors.

"Yes," Davis seemed to find what he was looking for and grabbed a phone from near his desk, but paused before dialing. "LSD demonstrated an ability to heighten response to hypnosis, but not significantly more or less so than alcohol or most other hallucinogens. Its government use remains limited to if you wish to induce the symptoms of LSD intoxication."

"Didn't empower suggestion either," Brown commented idly and took a bite of his lunch. "Turns out if you strap somebody to a table and pump them full of LSD, then repeat something like "Stop being a Communist" for several days straight, they mostly just come out on the other end wanting to sue the Agency."

***

The overhead lights came on in Susan's room. She was definitely in a holding cell of some kind; fake brick walls painted stark white and a concrete floor with a small drainage gate in the middle of the room. She had tried at her knots in the dark, but didn't feel like she'd made any real progress. It wasn't exactly brightly-lit, but after the darkness it made her blink and wince.

There was an undecorated steel door on one wall next to a car-sized pane of one-way glass that showed Susan's reflection like a mirror. Her long, brunette hair was a tangled mess. She was still wearing her ankle-length pleated skirt and tie-dye top from when she'd drunk whatever it was they'd slipped into her beer. It probably hadn't been that long since then. She didn't feel gross and her clothes didn't feel stifling, but it wasn't exactly the kind of thing she'd have picked to wear to an interrogation. She wasn't wearing a bra, for one, so she was probably perpetuating a stereotype there.

A moment after the lights kicked on, the heavy steel door clicked and then swung open with a squeal of hinges. A figure came out wrapped in surgical scrubs, face covered with a mask. Even under those conditions, the shape looked vaguely female to Susan. The figure came in with a pair of scissors and bent down next to her. Their eyes - decorated with a bit of makeup - looked into hers briefly and then looked away almost guiltily. The scissors cut up both sides of her shirt to the armpits and pulled it away, leaving Susan exposed from the navel up. As the figure started to cut off the skirt, Susan sighed.

"You could just take it off, you know," Susan grumbled. "I liked that shirt."

The figure glanced up at her for a second, their expression almost apologetic, but they finished cutting, then finally removed Susan's underwear as well. Susan had prepared to be stripped, beaten, probably even raped. Even then, finally feeling the cold air of the room around her on her privates gave her a bit of an involuntary shudder. She could only hope her unkempt bush was either covering her up a bit or popping a monocle behind the glass. One of the two. The masked figure carried the pile of ruined clothes out of the room and then wheeled in a cart slowly. There were two things on it. One was a metal box with a pair of electrodes running from it, the other looked like a raygun from some cheap network science fiction program. The masked figure started to attach the electrodes to Susan. First her head, then down her neck and about her chest.

"Let me put it in no uncertain terms, Ms. Smith." The voice returned, a slight echo added to it by the voice coming through the door as well. "You will give us the names and addresses of the other six who organized the riot back in February. If you do not, we are prepared to torture you."

"You're wasting your breath, fascist." Susan spat. "We all knew the risks when we signed up."

"Ms. Smith, I want to disabuse a notion you seem to have." The voice sounded almost patronizing in how fatherly it became. "You will not resist torture. Nobody does. But if you do not comply, even at the point of your torture when you divulge what we are after, we will not stop torturing you. Your refusal to speak will not create a situation where you can then close the flood gates that you are opening. We will burn what there is of you down and salt the Earth where it once grew. What you have now is an opportunity to stop us before we invent new ways for human beings to punish each other."

***

On the other side of the glass, Susan responded with a string of expletives. What was remarkable wasn't how many she knew or how varied they were in their meaning, it was how eloquently she managed to make them into a proper and coherent statement with a beginning, middle, and end.

"Well, she found her calling as a teacher," Agent Brown muttered under his breath, careful not to let her hear with the door open. Though she was still loudly continuing her tirade, so he probably needn't have bothered. "I thought it was a good speech, you know."

"Thank you," Davis nodded apathetically and took a bite of his donut.

"You know, one of these days, somebody is going to take you seriously and start squealing when you talk like that," Brown checked the readout from the electrodes. "What's the plan in that case?"

"Continue on with the experiment anyway," Davis added just as apathetically.

"God, that's cold," Brown flicked on the last remaining switches.

Agent Brunson finished attaching the electrodes, moving down Susan's body as she went until more than half of them decorated the woman's inner thighs and hairy vagina. Susuan glared at her with a look more of betrayal than anything else. Like by sheer virtue of sharing womanhood, Brunson should have been above this cruelty to humankind. When Brunson made sure she was finished with the first stage, she turned the main gun toward the test subject and flicked it on, then took a few cautious steps back before moving out of the room and closing the door behind her.

"You know, we should probably design that thing to not have the on/off switch actually on the gun," She commented as she took off her mask with a sigh. "Hearing that thing hum while I was in the same room nearly gave me a heart attack."

"Take it up with the eggheads," Brown commented idly as he worked the computer. "Their concern is that the big scary machine works, not that it's safe."

"I don't care if it hurts her," Brunson pulled off her surgical gloves and stuffed them into her pocket. "I care if it hurts me."

"If it's any consolation," Agent Davis watched the screen boredly, "The gun part doesn't actually do any of the work here, it's more of a stabilizing beam that comes out of it. The electrodes are what makes the magic happen."

"Great, so it can stabilize the shit out of me," Brunson muttered as she sat back down, scooting up between them.

"Look," Davis pointed at the monitor. A series of waving patterns were flowing, stacked on top of each other. "The electricity in the brain follows these sort of on-off wave patterns. That's gamma on the top there, those correlate to concentration and problem-solving. We put a puzzle in front of her, the gamma goes up. We put a puppy in front of her, it goes down. Right now, her beta - this second one here - is the most active. Beta is conscious thought, moment-to-moment focus."

"This one looks like it isn't working," Brunson pointed at the bottom.

"That's Delta, those are your deep sleep and your non-control waves." Davis waved her hand away from the console.

"If we were to dose her with LSD, that would jump right up." Brown added.

"So what are we doing to her?" Brunson sat back and folded her arms.

"Well, if I turn this to the right," Brown turned a knob on the console. The raygun kicking up in the other room was loud. Susan looked terrified, but was trying not to show it. "You can see a spike in the gamma, even though the stimulus hasn't changed."

"The gun got way louder," Brunson objected. "I'd say the stimulus changed."

"Not in a way that would require problem-solving." Davis turned the knob a little more and the gamma went up a lot more. "Even if she's thinking about how she's going to escape, you wouldn't see the gamma fluctuate this high for this long. These jumps and dips are usually short-term, they don't stabilize like this."