Final Confession from the One-Woman Department of Mind Control

by Phoebe Barr

I’m giving you my research. All of it, including the information you need to reverse everything I’ve done. Figured I’d get that out of the way first. I know you’ll make better use of it than I have, certainly better use than the ones who have their hands on it now. This isn’t a plea to reconnect, to call up and have a real long conversation the way we used to. I’m not going to pull some “it was all for you” bullshit, as though that’s an excuse. I’m not asking you for anything, and you never have to contact me again after this. But I hope you’ll listen to the end of this message.

I hope you can stand to hear my side of the story.

Here’s the thing. That first year in California was hard. Our whole college friend group scattered across the country, you still on the East Coast, choppy FaceTime calls replacing a shared dormitory floor—I had no idea how hard it was going to be. I missed you all so much it felt like steel plates being cranked apart inside me. Just opening up this big metal emptiness. I’d spend twenty hours at a time in the lab, then go back to this eight-by-ten windowless apartment room, and I’d sit there and miss everyone until I wanted to scream.

Then, when things got bad with you. Jesus. I spent days looking up flights to try and find one I could afford. But you remember: even then, prices were skyrocketing. People fleeing California as the wildfires flared up. There was no room for me even on the cheapest plane, not with my measly little research stipend. And FaceTime calls were hard at the best of times, what with time zones and shitty signals; when things got bad, they were impossible.

We called for ten minutes one afternoon. Your cheeks looked hollow, you had circles under your eyes, but you pasted on a fake smile for the camera. I asked how you were doing, and you avoided the question. I wanted to throw up.

I cleaned out my bank account to the penny and sent you that care package with all your favorite snacks. And that long handwritten note. It felt so stupid and empty. I wanted to be there, in your room. I wanted to hold you while you cried into my shoulder. I wanted to make you soup while you told me everything.

But I was spending twenty hours a day in a lab; I was supposed to be doing research on neural chips, which they’d just started rolling out that year, remember? Back when it was only a metal implant that monitored your brain activity, nothing more. So, I thought, if I couldn’t come to you, if I couldn’t do what friends are supposed to do, maybe I could put my work to good use.

A simple first invention. An upgrade to the neural chip that, either upon request or whenever it sensed dopamine levels tanking, would selectively stimulate neuron pathways associated with pleasant memories. I thought it could help you remember the good times we had in college. When you were feeling low, you could just switch it on, close your eyes, and you’d see us all crowded together at the drag bar on a Thursday night, buying each other’s drinks and scream-singing along to the performances. Or the sunlit Saturday mornings where we gathered in my dorm, supposedly to study, but always ended up passing a joint around and telling stories and laughing until we couldn’t breathe. Or the night we spent in the school greenhouse, when you went on that two-hour-long rant which ended in a PowerPoint about plants that need bugs to survive. I don’t know how you managed to make a rant like that interesting, but we all came out of that night with a new appreciation for bugs.

You could remember a time when you were happy, I thought. When you talked fast and cracked jokes and were unashamed to love things no one understood.

I admit, I was uneasy about the funding. When you’re just out of college, you really can’t afford to be picky about who sponsors your research, but I’d never expected megacorporations like that to be writing me a check. Half the reason I came to college at all was so I wouldn’t have to spend my adulthood working for places like that. But the pay was respectable, and I was desperate. I took the check, started saving up to come see you on a holiday weekend, and got to work.

It took two years. In that time, I saw you just the once—that random rainy weekend in February, when you and I and some of our other friends went to a butterfly sanctuary. I could tell you’d lost weight. I tried to get you talking about butterfly species, but you barely said anything. When I got back to California, I worked faster.

The invention turned out better than I’d hoped. By the final round, every test subject was leaving the lab in high spirits. I got a hefty additional check from my sponsors. They started selling it right away, and, since a majority of young people had already gotten the neural implant by then, the update sold great. People switched it on at parties to reminisce with old friends. Some even used it at funerals to celebrate memories of the deceased. With standards of living tanking all over the country, hurricanes wrecking supply lines, and droughts causing food shortages, that update was a welcome escape for a lot of people. Remembering better times. Sure, I wasn’t thrilled about lining the pockets of a bunch of megacorporations, but the ends justified the means, right?

I just wanted to see you using it.

I don’t know what I thought. That the second I got you the update—I wouldn’t let any of my friends pay for it—you’d magically be better? Surely, I wasn’t that naive. But your birthday was a few months later, and I managed to get out to see you again on the funds from that second check, and I thought we could have a night of easy good moods like the kind springing up all over the country that year.

It was a good party. I can’t believe how many people from the old friend group managed to come. I know you felt bad that there was so little to eat, but none of us blamed you for not wanting to brave the grocery store on your birthday. I liked the cheese and crackers. I was just glad we all got to switch on the update and talk about college. Sitting there surrounded by all of you, for a second it really felt like old times again. Like light was breaking through the clouds. And you were eating, drinking, laughing at my stupid jokes; I thought maybe things were finally going to get better.

I know you tried. Really, I’m not blaming you. But I saw you switch the update back off when you said you were going to the bathroom. I heard you in there later, crying. I knocked on the door, wanting to come in, to try to comfort you, but you didn’t answer.

And I had to go back to California early the next morning. Sitting in my little plane seat, I couldn’t speak, I couldn’t eat. I didn’t even know that birthday party was the last time I’d ever see you in person.

It was after that night when things started getting worse.

You have to understand, I had no more control over the product at that point. It belonged to my sponsors. They could do what they wanted with it, and they didn’t even have to inform me. Yes, I knew that, and no, I didn’t imagine what it would mean. Of course, they didn’t tell me a thing about what they were doing to the workers in their warehouses. I’m sure they figured it was none of my business. When the headline hit the Internet—Union-Busting Neural Chip Update Suppresses Employee Discontent—well, I was as shocked as everyone else.

Probably more shocked than some. Those secret unions, which you only heard rumors about in those days, whispers rippling across warehouse floors, they probably saw the whole thing coming. Because they knew how workers were being treated. I didn’t. I didn’t see the fifteen-minute sleep breaks at one in the morning, or the used bottles employees were pissing in, or the raffles of dried beans and flour for the ones who volunteered for twenty-four-hour shifts. I didn’t understand anything.

By the time I’d grasped a little of how my first invention was being used, I was already deep in development on my second. And I wasn’t thinking about the factory workers slogging through inhumane conditions, their minds forcibly turned to pleasant memories to ward away subversive thoughts. I was thinking about you.

I wanted to invent something that would erase traumatic memories.

Okay. Look, I’m not blind. You never told me the specifics, and that’s fine, I didn’t need to know them. But I noticed, the month before we graduated, how you suddenly stopped talking about that professor. He’d been your favorite. You’d been gearing up for a year of independent study with him. He was going to help you apply to graduate school. Then, one day, you stopped going to his classes and office hours, and you dropped the idea of graduate school out the window. I said his name once, and you went pale, so I never said it again. But I knew. How could I not know?

I’m so sorry. I never got the chance to say it properly before. It’s terrible and cruel and unfair that that happened—I mean, that it happened at all, and that it took so much away from you. The world of scientific study that made you so happy. I hate that he got to keep teaching and that you had to leave. I’ve been stewing in that hate and anger for years.

I just thought, maybe, if you could make yourself forget it. If you had that option, even for a little while.

It took me almost another year to create the second update. Since the megacorporations still had their hands full implementing my first update, I scrambled around for a new sponsor. A lot of places that used to give research grants had gone under in the latest recession, but I found one that offered me enough to live on, a brand-new foundation I’d never heard of. If I’d done enough digging, I could have learned it was just a shell for the Department of Defense, but I didn’t want to know. I wanted to work.

Eleven months I toiled away at the update, sleeping at the lab more nights than not. The friend group was scattering farther and farther apart by then, everyone ferociously busy, but we managed to arrange a couple of FaceTime movie nights in that time. I remember the one you showed up to. The room around you was dark, like you didn’t have any lights on except your laptop screen. Everyone went around giving updates about their twentysomething lives, and you merely said you were all right, still cleaning tanks at the aquarium, no changes. Listless.

The only thing that riled you up at all was when someone mentioned the secret unions. Wondered aloud if there was going to be a war, one of these days, between bosses and all the minimum-wage workers in this country. Your eyes got a little sharp, and you said you hoped so. You said something had to happen, some massive earth-shattering change, or the world would just keep turning into hell; but there were enough workers that if they all acted at once they could build a new society.

Remember when you said that? God, I thought, there she is, that’s my friend. But the rest of the call I felt like I was watching you fall away from me. Down some long dark tunnel into oblivion. I felt like I wanted to call out to you, to grab you and scream, but I had no idea what to say.

Three months later the update came out. The same month as that first wave of layoffs.

I never got a chance to ask: were you one of the twenty million-odd people turned out of their jobs that month? Did the aquarium give you notice, severance, anything, or was it only a notification in your inbox one morning to be gone by noon? Were you left with any money to cover rent the following month? Or were you shoved out into the streets, forced to gather some blankets and bed down beneath an overpass? I knew those things happened, sort of. I read about it on the news during the few times I really extracted myself from the lab.

But I wasn’t really paying attention. Horrible as it sounds, my financial situation was improving around then. My previous stipends were small change compared to what the Department of Defense paid me for that trauma-suppressing update. Of course it wasn’t enough to travel; traveling cross-country was a distant memory by then. But I took a massive chunk out of my student loans, made a down payment on a car, and moved into a nicer apartment. It had a guest room and a couch in case anyone came to stay with me. I think I texted something about that to the old college group chat; vaguely aware of the layoffs and evictions, I said if anyone needed a place to crash, I could help. But no one lived near enough to make that make sense.

When I was settled into that new apartment, I took a few weeks off from work and waited. I’d told all of you, again, that you could get the update from me free of charge. I sat in my bed, or at my kitchen table drinking sugary coffee, or on my couch surfing my laptop, and waited for you to ask me for it.

The world was turning into hell outside, like you said it would; hordes of hungry people massed outside of grocery stores, and rifle-armed cops patrolled the entrances. Strikebreakers were escorted into warehouses by the army. Tent cities were broken up every night, homeless people tear-gassed to make them disperse; later, organized protests were put down with gunfire. And I sat curled up in my bed dreaming of how it would be when you finally got better. How the gray weight would lift off your face, how you’d start making jokes again, how you’d talk about bugs with that old breathless enthusiasm. I immersed myself in that future, thinking about it so hard the individual thoughts became a blur.

For days I sat there with my heart buzzing in my chest. My limbs felt too light to walk on. I didn’t sleep. I didn’t look out the window. Headlines popped up on my computer, but I clicked away the minute I saw them. I drank more coffee and didn’t eat, and the world sharpened to a laser point around me, and the images of you happy again got so vivid they felt like visions. I barely heard the frantic pace of my heartbeat or the way my breaths got shorter and shorter because I was listening to you laugh, stupidly loud, leaning against the foot of my dorm room bed.

And I didn’t hear from you for a week. Then a month.

I didn’t notice when my second invention started seeing use as a mind-control technique for soldiers forced to gun down protestors. I know now how entire battalions were given the update right after a slaughter, before they could reflect on what they’d done, before they could become disgusted with their assignments and try to leave. I didn’t know then. I was thinking of you. Slowly, sitting there with the growing silence, my visions started tipping over into nightmares.

In those last months I think I really wasn’t in my right mind. I kept asking myself where you were, why you’d gone silent. I started seeing other things, you in your dark room, lying on your bed and staring at the shadows on your ceiling, too miserable to answer your phone. Too miserable to eat or drink or shower. No energy even to ask me for help. I started imagining—well.

I thought, she has to be okay, she has to get back to me. I finally have something that’ll help her. I repeated that to myself like a mantra.

But then I thought, what if this still isn’t enough? Or what if—God, what if it’s too late?

And then.

You want to know the truth?

I’ll tell you, every ugly word of it. The truth is I’m selfish. I’ve been acting like I had such righteous motives for all my work. Just concerned for a friend. And God, yes, I was worried about you, of course I was. But the real truth is that I wanted to feel useful. When things got really bad, and I was trapped three thousand miles away, and I couldn’t do anything but watch and wait, I got through it by convincing myself I could help. Convincing myself I shouldn’t just sit there in pain and fury and terror, because if I handled everything right I could fix it.

Maybe I wanted to be the hero. Or maybe I wanted the same thing my sponsors did: to be in control, to be able to order the world when the world was falling apart around me.

It’s sick, I know. But for all that—you have to believe me—I was really terrified those last months. I would never have done what I did if I wasn’t terrified. Or if I’d gotten to speak with you. If I’d spoken with anyone, maybe. If I’d turned on the news. Something to snap me out of the headspace I was in.

All I got instead was a message from that Department of Defense shell, letting me know they’d write me another check the same size as the last one if I gave them another update by New Year’s.

And I thought of an update that could do more than the first two, more than some voluntary mental regulation. Something that could really protect you from anything bad happening again.

This update took the least amount of time; it hit the market within a hundred days of the previous one. I don’t think I slept more than two hours those whole hundred days. I worked in a fugue state. My brain kept bouncing back and forth between picturing you healthy and picturing you wasting away. The pictures barely had context by that point; it had been so long since I’d actually looked at the world outside, but I knew we weren’t going to be hitting up drag bars or butterfly sanctuaries anymore. I was pursuing an idea, a memory, more than a future. But that idea was powerful. It drove me to work harder, faster, every time I slipped.

I barely felt better when it was done, but it was a little bit of satisfaction.

I’ll admit, when I finally started paying attention to the world again, it was because I’d heard the update was being used for good. I heard soldiers were getting sick of fighting a war against their own country’s citizens, gunning down people who just wanted food. Groups of them were switching on the update before being sent out against rebel mobs, and it paralyzed them before they could shoot. There was a little while where I heard those reports from far away and thought I’d helped make the world a better place. It sounds nice, right, making people physically incapable of violence? Doesn’t that sound utopian?

And then the massacres started.

Jesus. Okay.

Certain things you can’t ignore. Certain things shake you out of even the most addictive mental spirals. I saw a headline that said an entire rebel encampment had been wiped out in one afternoon, no army losses, a clean sweep, and I couldn’t look away like I’d been doing for so long. I saw videos of rebels being dragged out of their tents, shot or led away in handcuffs, limbs locked and unable to resist. And I knew before any article confirmed it. I knew they’d weaponized my work again. I knew it was because of me.

All that death. All that hope, all those defiant people coming together to fight for a better world, all crushed to dust.

I saw one video, and then I went looking for more. Mostly shaky phone footage posted to social media. I saw the armored trucks plowing through rebel shelters and hospitals; I saw men and women in camouflage opening fire on crowds armed with rocks; I saw that one viral video, which I must have been the last person on the planet to see, of that group of little kids sharing a stolen family-sized bag of potato chips, every one of them paralyzed and then shot at close range.

I saw the soldiers’ dead eyes, slack faces, and I guessed they’d been forced to forget most of their lives for the past hundred days.

And interspersed with the violence, I saw videos taken in secret from warehouse floors, where strikebreakers were still working for pennies on endless shifts to make those megacorporations richer. They were bone-thin, circles under their eyes, but they were grinning these gaunt, lifeless grins. Happy memories.

For a while it plunged me into despair. I watched video after video on repeat. I read articles and posts from people who’d been mind-controlled, telling harrowing stories of losing their grip on their own thoughts, their wills subsumed by corporations or armies. I read manifestos from the rebels. I saw my own name appear; the rebels knew about me, referenced the well-paid young researcher who was destroying them all with her monstrous inventions. They called me the one-woman department of mind control. I bet you’ve heard me called that, right?

I read it all. It felt like submerging my hands in acid, then holding them there while the skin blistered away, desperate to see my own bones. I guess I was trying to punish myself. I thought, this is all my fault, I’ve ruined the world. As if I was really that powerful; as if I’d ever been anything more than a tool.

You know what pulled me out of that?

A video I saw on my second night of bingeing the news, a clip of a rebel crowd holding shields up against gunfire. I’m sure you know the one I mean. A rare video where the rebels were advancing rather than retreating. And right at the end, like some miraculous sighting of an extinct caterpillar species, I saw you.

Your face was mud-streaked, your hair sloppily cut, your eyes bloodshot, but you were standing with the rebels. You looked scared, and you looked furious. Heels dug into the ground. I think you were chanting something.

Jesus, when I recognized you, I started crying. I don’t think I’d actually cried this entire time.

Seeing you alive, seeing you fighting—

Yeah. So, after that I knew what to do.

I drove through the empty streets back to the lab. I gathered up all my research, every last scrap of data on the lab’s computers, all the test chips, all the footage of my research subjects. The details on how I accomplished every update. I downloaded it onto hard drives and took it all home with me. And then I got to work finding your location, so I could send you one last gift.

By rights, this information doesn’t belong to me anymore. It belongs to the megacorporations and government departments that paid me. Technically what I’ve done is theft, and, since I stole it to give it to the rebels, it’s probably treason as well. Starting today I’m a criminal. This is the end of my career, my research, any chance I ever had to change the world for the better. But oh well; it might give you all a chance to fight the mind control. I guess once I’ve sent this off, I’ll leave this apartment and find a rebel camp to join.

I’m finished trying to control things. I know now, the terrible truth, that there was probably nothing I could have ever done to save you. That hurts; selfish as I am, it hurts almost as much as knowing the pain you were in. But I see it. I understand. And I know, too, that you’re already fighting tooth and nail to save yourself.

So, here’s the research. It’s yours; do whatever you want with it. Use it to build a different world. Maybe one that takes better care of little things like bugs. Use it to defend yourself, to strike back at anyone who ever tries to overpower you.

All I ask in return is one thing. One little thing, please, in the name of every good memory you have of me.

Please don’t fucking do it again.

Just…

Shit, I’m sorry. I don’t mean to—I didn’t mean to—and of course you don’t owe me anything. I don’t blame you if you hate me. But I love you, okay, you were my best friend. You’re the smartest and the weirdest and the bravest person I’ve ever met. And I thought you were dead. For more than twenty-four hours, before the hospital finally called me, I was sure you were dead.

Do you know what that—

I’m sorry. I’m sorry.

All I have left to give you are words. So here they are, I guess. I want you to get better. I want you to fall back in love with this screwed-up world. I want you to find purpose again, and hope. I want you to learn how to enjoy eating again. I want you to feel at home in your skin. I want you to smile and like smiling. I want you to wake up one morning, see the sunlight above you, and be glad you’re alive. The way I am every day.

And it doesn’t have to be for me. But please, please try to live.

Signing off now. I hope I see you again.