Total pages in book: 86
Estimated words: 83040 (not accurate)
Estimated Reading Time in minutes: 415(@200wpm)___ 332(@250wpm)___ 277(@300wpm)
Estimated words: 83040 (not accurate)
Estimated Reading Time in minutes: 415(@200wpm)___ 332(@250wpm)___ 277(@300wpm)
I’m sure she’s thinking the same thing about me, since I was just as delusional as her.
So we’re grappling with the inconsistencies that implanted on our brains in those first two weeks.
But still, living with Olive—prison vibe aside, but I’ll get to that in a minute—truly does feel like the fresh start I was looking for.
The second thing I realized on my way back to sanity is that I’m a stranger to myself. I’m not convinced that anything I thought I knew about my past is true. The woman in my head, the one pretending to be Olive, but wasn’t.
I knew her. I think she was my handler.
I think I’ve been manipulated for a very long time. Was I even in prison for five years? Couldn’t they have dropped me off out in front of it and woke me up, or whatever? And that’s why I have memories of riding my bike across the country to West Virginia?
Maybe.
But it’s just as likely that I was never in prison, that they implanted those memories, and they woke me up the moment I showed up at Edge.
I have no idea which one is true, but I’m leaning towards the second one.
I saw a bar in the middle of the forest. It was filled with people. I sat on a couch. I drank. Olive was there.
But she saw a train tunnel. She rode an underground train to the bar in the forest every morning. She and her partner, who we are mostly convinced is even real, were living in a mansion in Virginia. They took that train together.
What the fuck happened to us?
At first, the doctors came to the Edge compound because Collin was afraid to let Olive and me out of the SCIF just in case that old man from CORE—if that’s even the real name of that organization—was lingering about, waiting for his next opportunity to be our puppet master.
But after a couple of weeks Penny Rider set things up in a proper lab at a private institution in Kentucky. We go there three times a week by helicopter.
Penny wanted us to move in over there and spend about six months full time with them, but Collin put his foot down and told her absolutely not. He has his friend with the helicopter, Calder Boone, take us by air. Boone looks like a man who’s seen things and doesn’t even bother making eye contact with me or Olive when he and his team escort us back and forth to Kentucky three times a week.
In fact, I’m pretty sure he considers us both prisoners and not clients.
But I get it.
There’s something really wrong with our brains.
It’s hard to believe that people were inside my head. But they were.
Project Mastermind, Penny Rider called it.
But it’s much more than that. Because Olive and I both heard our puppet masters call it Chain Reaction. Which makes sense. Somehow, some way, CORE has developed a protocol that can infiltrate a person’s mind. But not only that, they can piggyback off that mind and leap into another in close proximity. And once inside, they are pulling our strings.
We’re thinking this is why I saw the bar the way Olive was seeing it. She was projecting images to me. And that’s why she was in my head at the end there.
Someone put her there.
Ambrose Sinclair put her there.
Olive is steadfast in her opinion that someone else was controlling Brose, but neither Collin and I are convinced, so every time she brings it up, we’ve agreed that downplaying any and all thoughts about Brose is the best way forward.
“She needs to forget about him,” Collin said.
And I can’t say I disagree.
Whoever he is, he’s a bad guy and I hope she never sees him again.
The idea that the science has progressed far enough now that mind-control in real time is possible is more than just frightening, it’s the literal end of the world as we know it and something must be done to stop these people.
But every time I bring that up, Collin plays it down the same way we’re playing down Brose. I don’t know him well enough to decide if this is just for my benefit so I don’t get myself worked up about some crazy save-the-world plan, or if he knows something I don’t and he’s really not worried about it.
Olive doesn’t know him well enough either. We’ve discussed this at length. The one thing about living inside our cube is that it’s absolutely, one hundred percent private.
Which brings me to the third thing. The cube and living inside it with Olive.
Edge Security built a SCIF for a reason. They use it.
So Olive and I were kicked out in week two after an extensive renovation of a small house out back of the church. All the windows were boarded up, the walls were lined with Faraday fabric, and then they renovated it from top to bottom. It’s small—the size of a studio apartment—but it’s functional, has a bathroom and a small kitchen, and if you don’t think too hard about it, it’s easy to forget that you’re literally inside a Faraday cage prison cell.