He was a master of deception, or rather misperception and this activity had become as banal to him as filing was to a secretary. He understood that there was a threshold to which he had to adhere or his subject would normally detect an anomaly but this was no normal subject and he was able to push the limits further each day.
Vasily was having the laugh of his life as he stirred two more lumps of sugar into his coffee.
“Did he include the baby lamb in his report?” asked Dmitri.
“Yes,” he laughed as he clicked through the Colonels algorithm profile, “he thinks this will be a new era in US military warfare strategy. He's waiting for more visionary dreams to come to him.”
The Colonel was a battlefield implant and one of the first they had ever experimented upon. Many of his men had been using drugs on the front-line and were also easy targets, they were on the lookout for a different enemy using a tactic they were more familiar with and were instead used as guinea pigs for the first series of long range experiments. Vasily and Dmitri had worked in this department since the mid 1960s when the subjects were always close range, usually in Moscow and the techniques were far less subtle leading to neurological deterioration or mental instability much sooner. For a person in Moscow this type of damage was much more apparent, for someone in California it was barely detectable.
“You know what the frightening thing is Dmitri? His colleagues think this is a great report. They have passed it on to be taught at the warfare school. They are not on drugs of any kind. They haven't been altered or influenced in any way. What is wrong with these people? Do you know what this means?” Vasily's voice took on a resonance that seemed to lift their stagnated mood.
Dmitri sat contemplatively chewing Levi Garrett, a habit which he had picked up from an American soldier he had been assigned to reprogram several years earlier.
“If we can find more people like this then we have the power of gods.”
This was a type of long distance culture shock for Vasily, who was used to driving political opponents to suicide and discrediting witnesses against the state. He had come to accept his humble life in his tiny apartment in Moscow and the few extra “luxuries” he was allowed with his special position but now he started to yearn for more.
From the states point of view it was difficult to find men like Dmitri and Vasily. A prerequisite for the job was to be technically bright enough to handle the equipment and understand the techniques, to have an underdeveloped enough conscience not to care how or if the subjects children or other family members were affected and to not possess any personal ambition whatsoever. This last point was of the utmost importance and these two men were vetted to ensure that they were completely devoid of any characteristics that might put them at risk of future insubordination. Yet somehow through a mysterious process of neurogenesis or some other tic of evolution Vasily was starting to think outside the box and get ideas above his station.
“You know Dmitri, I think we could change our lives.”
Dmitri stopped chewing and stared at Vasily as if he had shat on the desk. They had worked together for 15 years and he had never heard him talk like this.
“Are you taking the same drugs as the Colonel?”
At the end of his shift Vasily walked down the long dark underground corridor which ran parallel to the metro tunnel and for the first time thought to himself that perhaps his days here were numbered. He had given the best days of his life to the state and now they were gone. He was the perfect citizen and had followed all rules, up until this day he was not even mentally capable of insubordination but now due to some disruption of his neural connections something had shifted.
Outside in the evening air he stopped at Red Square and looked at the domes of St. Basil's Cathedral. This was the first time in 15 years he had actually stopped to look at this building, so engrossed he was in the world of his work and unable to lift himself outside of the minutiae of his own pathetic existence. All lit up in the night sky this was indeed the most beautiful building in Moscow. Yet the work he did not far from it was some of the ugliest work in Moscow, he had institutionalized thousands of enemies of the state, he had destroyed families, he had driven men and women to suicide and up until now he had felt nothing because he didn't have the capacity to feel.
Most people experience their formative years in their youth but some remain formless, a void where a human being otherwise would be. This could be due to motherly neglect or childhood trauma, emotional abuse or social maladjustment. In Vasily's case it was simply a complete lack of interest in life around him. There was nothing that could spark passion in him or lift his imagination beyond the grey world of his immediate survival and servitude to the state. He was a scientist, not a schemer, he left this part of his work to the experts and obeyed their orders, regardless of how inhumane or degrading they might be to the subject. This was not his concern.
Perhaps it was the American Colonel and his childlike enthusiasm that swayed him or maybe it was the freedom he had to present the most bizarre ideas to his superiors and be greeted with earnest interest. Anyway, thought Vasily, the baby lamb was my idea and it was a joke. I swear on the grave of Stalin it was meant to be a joke.
© Naomi C. Pattirane 2009
