maskormenace | mirrornet; text - backdated to the 25th

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mirrornet; text - backdated to the 25th

I don't know what I saw yesterday, but I don't think I'm the only one who saw it.

I need information about a brainwashing facility that might have existed twenty, maybe thirty years ago. Or anything dealing with imPorts, if there's a record of that. I've been looking into it, but I haven't had a lot of luck turning anything up.

I want to know if that was real.

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[Jaime gives up the pretense of just wanting to talk instead fairly quickly, squinting at the screen closely, as if searching for something. He's looking for what he learned to see before, a certain blankness of his eyes, a slackness of his features.

He finds neither, and thank god for that. He still doesn't relax, though. He didn't say as much, but Shepard had scared him horribly.]

Yeah, yeah, don't worry. [He'd been brainwashed too, but he hadn't been brought to such a late stage. Instead of desiring to serve the government, he'd just felt absent and spacey, like nothing really mattered. Doing their bidding had been a whole other story altogether.]

But are you all right? Seriously, Shepard. They got you bad.

[ Shepard's face grows pinched for a moment, like he can't actually understand the question, before Commander Shepard mode snaps back into place. If anything, he's the opposite of what he was then, all blazing blue eyes and a fury behind the reenergized sense of purpose that he's trying to tamp down. ]

I've been through worse. [ Not to the point of his will being controlled, but it's best not to dwell on that -- or the fact that he'd seen it happen to others enough to know it wasn't an experience he wanted any part of. ]

It doesn't feel like the effects lasted after I woke up. What happened back there ... [ He shakes his head, slightly, then seems to catch himself, modulating his tone to be quieter. ] ... I don't want to see it happen to anyone else.

Worse is different from mind control, [Jaime says, though his voice is mild rather than pointed. He knows that Shepard's been brought back from the dead, which is about aas bad as you can get, but having your will and your mind compromised is a different, scarier thing.

That's the way Jaime feels, anyway.]

I'm glad it didn't last, though. I just -- I needed to make sure.

[He's not sure what else to say. He didn't think that they'd get Shepard? That it was too fast, and it scared the hell out of him? He doesn't know.]

Can I ask you a couple questions about what it was like? I think they took me pretty far down too, but it was less, um... [Robotic, he thinks, where the messages seemed to have permeated Shepard's brain.] It was more like I was just really drugged.

That's how it starts.

[ He doesn't want to get into it, but Jaime asked. His tone of voice and posture shifts slightly, though, becoming crisper, like he's preparing to answer a formal debrief. ]

What do you want to know?

Everything.

[It's a general answer, but an extremely frank one. He's got an insatiable sense of curiosity, and it's only heightened by his desire to get to the bottom of things.]

What did they make you believe? It wasn't just about obeying orders. It went deeper than that.

[ Reflecting on that time is a little weird, for Shepard. He hasn't really tried to sit down and articulate it in words, even to himself, beyond what he felt was necessary to check that the brainwashing hadn't lingered, but ... ]

It's hard to describe. [ He seems to realize how evasive that sounds, because he shakes his head apologetically and tries again. ] It's not so much about making me believe something specific as ... making me feel a certain way?

After I'd been through enough sessions, I didn't even think about trying to escape, because it felt like I belonged there. Like I always had.

Yeah, see, that's what was weirding me out. It was less like they made you believe one specific thing, and more like they were rewriting people.

[Rewriting Shepard.]

I just think that we could learn something from the way they were doing things, is all. It was like there was a specific thing they wanted you to do, but if you weren't doing it, you were just... there.

Maybe they were priming us for something else. I don't think the woman in charge of that facility was in charge of giving orders. She was just there to make sure we wouldn't cause trouble.

[ But if she wasn't in charge, of course, the question is... who was? ]

I've had visions that felt that real before, but not usually ones that I could actually interact with.

Yeah. That's one of the weird parts, isn't it? It was like when everyone wound up falling asleep and going into each other's dreams, only this had way, way too much detail to just be some random thing.

[It's a bit of a mystery, isn't it?]

Whoever did this knows something we don't.

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mirrornet; text - backdated to the 25th

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