Hunter. Sydney Robinson
into the sink as he turned on the food processer. The grind filled the room, and Angel looked at Scott, appalled, for a moment before she found her voice.
“Why did you…?”
“You need to contain your emotions!” Scott roared as he rounded on her. “Your tests are almost upon you. Soon you will be assigned a team. They will kill you if you break from doctrine. You do know the seven laws?”
Angel sat in stunned silence as she nodded slowly.
“What is the sixth law?”
“Report any member who has regained the ability to feel beyond the basic emotions.”
“That means you! To uphold the laws, you should and will be reported as soon as you are placed in a team and do anything like what you have done all night. Any emotion like that will betray you. You will be turned in. You will be killed…just like him.”
“Like whom?”
“Let’s go to the other room.” Scott crossed the kitchen in three steps and exited through the doorway right next to Angel, who followed him. She had never been through here, and with the lights off, she had never been able to see what the rest of the upstairs looked like. What lay beyond the empty doorway was a small hallway that had three doors—two were open, and a third was closed. As her eyes adjusted, she could see that one room was a tiny bedroom, big enough for a bed and a bookshelf to be squeezed into the room between the foot of the bed and the wall, though the bottom two shelves were rendered useless. The second open door was the living room, which, now that Scott was in there, had a single lamp illuminating it. This led Angel to believe that the final door, which was closed, led to the bathroom. Though judging by the floor plan of the apartment (and going by the space she knew the downstairs covered), she knew the bathroom was even smaller than the bedroom.
Ignoring both of those things though, Angel crossed to the living room and sat in a surprisingly plush armchair across from Scott. Once she was settled, he began to speak. He began to slowly explain information, checking to see what Angel knew and didn’t know and, for the most part, covering facts that seemed irrelevant to Angel until he came upon the segment of his tale that dealt with the memory pool.
“The memory pool was an attempt to a solution to a problem that we have not always dealt with,” Scott explained. Angel sat forward in her seat, now actually paying attention to what he was saying. “Nor was the sixth law so heavily watched. For the most part up until the early ’70s, we actually ignored that clause. It wasn’t until we noticed a genetic defect arising in the Hessian Recruits from the generation before, caused by the blocker drug, which was causing people to disobey orders. In all honestly, it was driving them crazy.”
“Rouges,” Angel muttered under her breath, looking down at the floor.
“Exactly, though that is a very loose term for them. These individuals were where the classification came from. You see, the original set we called Rouges were not just members who disobeyed orders and put the safety of the organization’s secrets at risk. They were actually insane. You see, we found a mutation in the genetic makeup of every one of these individuals. They had an extra line of DNA. It was almost like an enhancement. The only problem was, when exposed to extreme stimulus, possibly because of the inhibiter drugs, the subject would lose their mind.”
Angel snorted, “And of course, a crazed trained killer running around in the world is not a good idea now, is it?”
“Of course not, so we sought to remove emotions like that so as to stop the triggering mechanism. Originally, the drug was used in higher doses, but that didn’t always work, so I tried to invent the memory pool concept,” Scott answered.
Angel frowned. “Why not just kill everyone who had the gene?” she asked, puzzled.
“If it didn’t present itself in that individual, it could still be dormant, waiting to trigger and cause havoc. No, the Hessian High Council decided it was far better to remove the emotions of those in lower positions than to just kill anyone who had it,” Scott continued.
“Why though, so one generation is thinned out a little? The problem would be solved,” Angel protested.
“Would it though? The Hessians operate on an ideology that a reprogrammed operative is better than a dead one. Not to mention, it made all the Recruits to follow far more docile and more suggestive to the training.”
“Reprogrammed, you talk as if we were computers.”
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