Metro (10 page)

Finally
 . . .

Our boy looks at the man with the white hair and asks him what his name is, asks him where he came from, asks if they are destined to move through life together as father and son. And the man with the white hair says he must never ask at all where
either of them
came from. He must only do as he is told.

He must
do
.

“That is how we operate. That is how we control things. You are one hand that will never know what the other hand is doing. You must have unquestioning faith in the machine that you are a part of. And I am not your father. You have no father. You are better than a child with a mom and a dad. You are a
man
now, strong with wisdom and ready to be born again, and again, and again.”

Our boy looks right into the eyes of the man with white hair, and this man's words are absolute.

Final.

After that, our boy never sees the man with the white hair again.

Something terrible happens then, deep inside our boy.

Something like the world bottoming out.

Something like your father going away forever and never coming back, without even a word good-bye or a handshake for the road.

• • •

A
t first, our boy isn't even aware that his heart is broken. That is, until they change everything. They put another blindfold over his eyes and take him out of the place that was his home. Then they give him a new home. He goes to sleep this time and wakes up there.

And there she is.

His new teacher.

She is a beautiful woman in a black suit and buzzed black hair and hard jaw and large assets, stabbing the ground in stiletto heels that click to the center of the earth. His new room is bigger, with a desk and chair and a bed and a television set. The woman says he has a TV now, so he can begin the next phase of what she suddenly calls his
training
. They never called it that before. She sits him down on his bed and sits across from him in the chair and explains that the man with the white hair is gone forever. And that it was time for that man to leave because our boy
loved him
—they can tell this about our boy, you see, because they can tell everything—and
love
is dangerous in this world
, she says.

Her voice is dark and beautiful.

Elegant and deep.

“Love is an illusion,” she says.

And she lets the words settle over the room for a long, long time before she explains what she means. The words are deep and gorgeous.

Beautiful beyond anything he's ever known before.

“Love is something that people like us must turn away from. You are still too young to understand. But you must develop patterns early in life that will condition you to the work you will do as an adult—and you must do it before your sleeping manhood awakens. That will be in just a few years, if we've predicted the trajectory of your development correctly. And we always do.”

Our boy knows what all those words mean because he is classically educated. He's even been prepared for his manhood and all those awakenings she's talking about. He was prepared by the man with the white hair, whose name he never even knew, and whose face he will never forget. She tells him not to love that man. She tells him not to love
her
.

“It will be hard not to love me,” she says. “That will be the next lesson we teach you—alongside the other lessons. About the changing world, about the technologies that rule us. About the endemic industries and social cliques that define humanity.”

Then she pauses, and the light in the room hits her in just the right way.

Making her some kind of wise spirit.

A goddess who knows all.

“
Endemics
is what we do here,” she says. “We adapt to the world and we watch what happens in it, day by day. We prepare our people for what happens. We send them out to live there. One day,
you
will be out there. But you will not go lightly. You will go with all speed and ammunition. You will be brilliant and wise, armored against anything they can throw at you. And you will know, all the while you are there in that world, that you are the
master
of it. That you work for a greater good, a bigger picture, a
plan
that holds it all together. You are the very builder of the human race and the world at large.”

Closer now, her voice, her beauty.

Complete truth, right there before him.

“So don't be fooled by attachments. Do not love your teachers. Do not feel as others in the world feel, because to feel is to be
one of them
, and you are not one of them.”

You are the master of them
.

“I will test you endlessly. I will try to reach you and break you. It will be hard, but you will learn. You will become stone. A master of deception and betrayal. You will be able to work any equation with ease, slip through the noose of humanity and come out the other side with their secrets. You will even be trained to kill, but that's for later. When you are all grown up.”

All grown up to become the master of the world.

And so it goes.

• • •

U
nder the watchful eye of the beautiful woman in the black suit—a woman whom he does indeed fall in love with, secretly at first, then passionately and openly—he learns the trick of his masters. Learns that you can turn those feelings off and replace them with
something else
. Learns that loneliness is not really loneliness, if your mind is full to breaking with the right kind of knowledge. That love is not really love, if you stand away from it.

And there is more to learn about.

The cultures that break their waves on the dazzled face of the new America in the mid-1980s are radical and colorful, unlike anything that's come before, overhyped, hair-sprayed and full of shit, flashy and flaky and shimmering in gaudy imperfection, like half-formed illusions masking the most significant changes that modern civilization has ever experienced—and those changes all come just beneath the surface of popular culture, all tied to advancements in technology and entertainment. You can almost see it moving in the faces of Madonna and Michael Jackson, heightened perceptions diluted by the flash of MTV. The merciless steel hammer of the Terminator comes down at home and abroad. We go to war and nobody even notices. We sell off our own stockpile of antiquated military hardware to our enemies and the media reports that we are buying back hostages. But that's all just what's on the surface. What's really happening is the rise of a dynasty so huge and the mutation of a bloated, half-destroyed superpower so completely overworked and drunk on its own juice that the mob operators and ghost agencies are put into a sort of overdrive, just to check the spread of the cancers.

They explain to him that the oil crisis of 1979 was an elaborate hoax.

They tell him the Reagan assassination attempt of 1981 was staged.

They just laugh when he asks about JFK and say
What do YOU think, kid?

They show him evidence that the last twelve presidents were appointed, not elected, tell him the twenty-second amendment was ratified in 1951 to keep guys like FDR from running the world for too long—because they saw all of this coming and wanted to stop it from happening. They tell him that our involvement in Korea, South Vietnam, and all the other military actions that still run today on a business-as-usual basis are little more than public smokescreens for a covert series of very important black-ops missions, and it's usually all about securing our future through natural resources and a lot of incredibly advanced technology, all of it held hostage by people without an idea in hell that they are poisoning the lifeblood of civilization. They tell him that the shadow organizations that currently control the US government are planning a twenty-year series of dangerous social experiments and controlled media-hyped
happenings
—that's what they call things like Operation Desert Storm, which are on the drawing boards even now, more than fifteen years before they will blow up in public.

It will be a brave new world.

People must know they are protected from it.

People must know their place.

And so must you.

• • •

O
ur boy is eleven years old when his manhood finally breaks over him—one year earlier than they predicted it would. He burns for his brilliant busty teacher, and she says it's time for him to become a man. But not by her. She is only an ideal, only a conditioned response, only a lie told to him by his own subconscious—one that must be debunked.

He is brought to a room filled with teenage ladies, perfumed and pretty, half-naked in lingerie, and his teacher smiles at him, saying that he can have his pick of the litter. He is lost in a sea of eager flesh and desire that overwhelms every sense in his body.

“And now do you understand? Your love for me is only
this
. Only a response that we can condition. When you are taught to be a man by the ladies you choose, I will become nothing but a dull memory.”

His teacher says all this to him, and she's almost right.

But he
does
remember her even after that day, which is the last time he sees her—the same way he will never forget the man with the white hair. They were his mother and father. He will never forget them, though his next teachers tell him to forget, try to drive the memories from him, bend him over and break his ass hard.

• • •

T
hese new guys are tough bastards, and almost kill him dead.

They train him to be like a robot over the next four years. They put him through martial-arts training that feels like rocks beating against his flesh and bones. They teach him endurance and relentless drive on refrigerated target ranges and deep-sea simulators. They strap iron bars across his back and tell him to run, run, run. They break his bones and replace them with implants, so he literally
is
part robot when they are done with him.

The worst experience is what they do his hands.

The master sergeants and martial-arts instructors—he can't remember their names or faces because there are so many, always on constant rotation, always with some new torture—tell him in seven different voices that he must be able to act in any situation, defeat any enemy, escape from any cage. The first thing the enemy will try when they want you to be helpless is immobilization. They'll inject you with drugs, hammer you senseless, cuff your hands behind your back, and shoot you in the head if they can. This is unacceptable. You must be tactically ready. You must know twenty ways to kill that man. You have to do it without hesitation. You need the tools. And even with every bit of secret knowledge we can fill you with, handcuffs will always be a problem. There are too many types of handcuffs. Skill alone will not save you. So they knock our boy out with heavy dope and put him in a room with a brilliant high-tech surgeon, who breaks apart his fingers and reworks the bones, replacing joints with plastic ball sockets. A year later, when the healing is done, and our boy is nineteen, he is able to fold both thumbs across the palms of his hands in such an inhuman configuration that Spider-Man himself would be amazed. The idea is to compress your fingers into a space narrower than your wrist, so you slip right through the iron or the plastic or the cheap aluminum that binds you—and it works like a charm.

After that, they test him for a very long time.

They chain him in a box with his arms and legs wrapped in manacles, then throw the box in a river, and he makes it to the surface in three minutes. They bury him alive in a wooden coffin with tear gas in his eyes and he comes up for air within an hour. They sic a pack of starving dogs on him in an enclosed concrete bunker with his hands cuffed behind his back and he makes it out alive—almost bleeds to death, but he made it.

And that seems to be the story of our boy's life.

Survival, and more survival.

He hears their brutal, punishing voices in his sleep—
GET UP, NOW!
THE ENEMY NEVER SLEEPS! GET THE HELL UP!—
and it is the voice of God
.

Three days after he turns twenty, they make him take LSD for the first time.

• • •

T
he experience is mind altering, of course.

Like no torture they have ever inflicted on him before.

This is the next phase of his training, which he doesn't understand at all—even when they tell him that his
mind
must be able to survive anything, just like his
body
must be able to survive anything.

They are careful not to overdose him at first.

He just gets a lab-grade quarter hit of something incredibly potent, and it still blows his brains out, but it isn't even close to what they will give him later.

That first night, they leave him alone with it.

All by himself in his room, tripping balls.

Our boy hallucinates that the man with the white hair returns in a glittering shower of gold and our boy cowers in a fetal knot on the floor, begging his father to explain why he left. He even gets a lot of answers back, but none of it makes much sense. It's all a wave of weird sound, undulating just beneath his skin, double-amplified by his own wrecked emotions, one cascading into the next. He sees the woman who should have been his mother—the beautiful busty truthteller in pumps who proved that love was a lie—and she oozes from his eyes and hovers there and laughs at him and says he is unworthy of anything. He beats on the walls and the walls tumble down hard. He screams like a child and turns inside out, outside in.

The next day, while he's still coming down, they yank him from his room, put a pistol with eighteen rounds in his hands, rip the clothes from his back, and force him to run naked through a drill that almost costs him his life. Ten shooters in a concrete-walled maze, coming after him with live ammo. He scores five of them in their Kevlar target vests before his dull reflexes cost the sixth shot, the world humming and vibrating, the LSD still strong in his system, making the entire world skip and bump and slide—and the return fire hacks a piece of his shoulder off, jarring everything back into sharp, sharp focus. He scrambles behind a concrete wall while the other bastards try to nail him. Somehow manages to use his last eleven shots to score them all. He does this acting on nothing but sheer will and muscle memory and the primal power that now lives in his blood.