Enigmatic Engrams

No matter how hard I tried, I just couldn’t bust through the steel wall that Daniel had built around the secrets that he had kept even from Drake. It was there in my head now, that much was maddeningly obvious, but I couldn’t find the key I needed to unlock this last line of defense he had raised against some Caster barging into his head and stealing his secrets...yeah, sort of like I did to him.

The harder I tried to just force my way through by sheer force of Will, the louder the voices deep inside clamored to be let loose.

I decided to end that course of action. It was tempting to rush back to my body and head for Ravyn’s farm where I could grab the knucklehead by the shoulders again and see if I could force the key out of his body, but somehow I knew that would be useless. The poor bastard was wiped pretty clean in my search. I sincerely doubted the answer lay within him any more.

That meant the answer had to be here somewhere.

The more I worked around that barrier, the more images I began to get of what I could only describe as ‘current events’...mostly images of soldiers in dusty, tan Middle Eastern villages, tanks and trucks and other military vehicles moving.

Strange, Daniel had never been a soldier, but he certainly had a lot of engram fragments relating to the military, especially in Iraq. Many of the images and memories had the feel of someone who had watched the events from afar, like on a television, but more than a few had a sense of...reality...about them that might have meant that they were personal memories of experienced events.

I began to focus on those fragments, the ones that evoked real memories and some pieces of a very strange puzzle began to fall into place.

It must have taken hours of being wrapped up in another man’s memories, but the fragments were gradually pieced back together into a set of cohesive memories that now made more sense. Ironically enough, it was one of my own memories that helped make it all possible.

In the six months or so before I had been killed, Daniel had been absent from the NecroLab. His absence had been notable because he was the primary guy who usually ran a rather large battery of medical tests on each of the program participants. He would then give us our assigned prescription of pills and supplements that was to prepare our bodies for the rigors of the program. But during this time that he was gone, one of his underlings had taken over. Whenever any of us had asked where Dr. Geek was, we were told that he had been sent on assignment by the Bureau to Iraq. Why he was sent to Iraq, no one would tell us, but we all assumed that it was to help wounded soldiers, since Daniel was seen as an expert in restoring connections between badly damaged nerves and fixing shattered bodies.

But seeing things from Daniel’s perspective, I gained a whole new set of insights into the depths of evil that Drake had sunk down to.

It turns out that Daniel was indeed over in Iraq and he was using his unique skills in ‘support’ of the war effort, but in a far ghastlier way than I had ever expected. Drake had offered Daniel’s expertise on the workings of the human body and its various strengths and frailties to the administration to assist in the ‘rendering’ of captive Iraqis. He had spent his time there torturing hundreds of Iraqis. Granted, many of the victims of his torture sessions had been officials in the Baath Party, Iraqi military officers, or agents from the Mukhbarat (the Iraqi secret police), but more than a few had turned out to be innocent victims.

Those memories were horrible enough, but to actually feel how much pleasure he had taken in administering doses of excruciating but precisely measured pain to other human beings made me sick. I certainly felt a Hell of a lot less sorry about what I had done to him.

Things became really interesting, though, when I discovered the shards of a particular memory that Daniel had tried very hard to forget. As I pieced it back together, I began to get a glimpse of just what might be behind that steel wall he had tried so hard to build in his own mind.

This engram was about an extracurricular torture session he had engineered to take place on a particular prisoner, an agent in the Mukhbarat who had also been assigned to the Ministry of Culture, someone whom he had met years before at an academic conference after being introduced by Drake.