The Innocence Treatment

by Ari Goelman

  “Look,” Jeff said. “No hard feelings about what happened with the Taser. You’re an impressive kid. Seriously.”

  I went back to my push-ups. Sixty-three. Sixty-four.

  Jeff relaxed a little, though he left his hand on his Taser. “So I’m asking you as nice as I know how: Please. Please take the damn shower by yourself. Get yourself dressed. All of us will have a much better day.”

  I thought about it. Thought about how Dr. Corbin would probably enjoy watching me fight, would enjoy seeing me forcibly bathed. “Okay,” I said. “Give me twenty minutes and I’ll be ready.”

  He nodded and backed out the door.

  I went back to my push-ups, but once I got to one hundred, I took a shower and put on the clothes Dr. Corbin had sent me. A long-sleeved blouse and jeans. Nice clean underwear and a bra. All of which would have fit me perfectly a few months ago. I’ve lost a lot of weight since the operation. Riley would be so jealous. I wonder what Riley and Gabriella think has happened to me. I wonder if they’ve read my journal entries. If so, I hope they get that I appreciated them again by the end.

  I knocked on the door to my room when I was done. Jeff and the other security guy were waiting for me. I stood there while they cuffed my hands and my ankles, then shuffled after them as they led me toward the elevator.

  Dr. Corbin’s office is on the top floor of the Paxeon building. I remember visiting her with my parents, staring out the huge windows at the distant mountains, so certain that everyone had my best interests at heart that I didn’t bother paying attention to the conversation.

  Corbin was sitting behind her desk when we arrived.

  She looked up when the door opened, smiled, and came around her desk to take my handcuffed hands in her hands. “Lauren!” Her genuine pleasure at seeing me was creepier than fake pleasure would have been. “It’s so nice to see you. I would have visited you earlier but, you understand, I didn’t want to throw off your various indicators, not when Dr. Brechel was working so hard to establish them.”

  “Indicators?”

  She dismissed my question with one hand. “Nothing that need concern you now. I’ve satisfied myself that your condition’s stable—that’s the important thing.”

  “What happened to Dr. Brechel?” I asked.

  Her eyes shifted up to the ceiling. “You know—I’m not entirely sure.”

  “How can you not be sure? Did you kill him or just fire him?”

  “I”—she emphasized the word—“did nothing to Dr. Brechel.”

  “Is he alive?”

  “I doubt it,” she said, looking mildly bemused, as though I was pestering her about something that had nothing to do with her. “I think he got himself into some trouble. Listen, Lauren. I want to offer you a job.”

  “Yeah right. And what happens when I ‘get myself into some trouble’?”

  She chuckled. “Unlike Brechel, you have the sense to stay out of trouble. And, besides, you will be far more useful than Dr. Brechel, so trouble will avoid you.”

  “Useful,” I said. “How so?”

  “A beautiful young woman, uncannily perceptive, and with no restraint on her violent tendencies … You could be a very valuable member of my team.”

  “I don’t buy it. Why don’t you just turn me stupid again already?”

  Corbin surprised me. “We tried, sweetheart. We gave you a complete dose of the Innocence Treatment the day you came back to us. Since then, we’ve exposed you to it half a dozen times. The last time we gave you”—she thought for a moment—“about ten times the dose it would take to turn an ordinary person of your weight into the most easily led idiot you can imagine for at least a few weeks, if not a few months. None of the doses had any impact that we could measure. That was where Dr. Brechel was so useful—if the treatment had any impact at all, it would certainly have become apparent in your sessions with him.”

  Oh. Suddenly things made a little more sense. “That’s why I’m still alive.”

  Corbin made a face. “Puh-leeze. I never intended to kill you. But yes, your immunity to the Innocence Treatment is one more reason you’d be a great addition to my team. You’d have to grow your hair out, or wear a wig if you prefer, but beyond that, I think you’re ready to go into the field. Your personality profile, your skill set. It’s all perfect.”

  “You had me seeing a shrink twice a day for the last three weeks to change my personality profile.”

  Again she chuckled a little. She was genuinely enjoying our conversation. “Don’t be ridiculous. We both know that wasn’t why I hired Brechel. I had to make sure your condition was stable, that’s all. Imagine if we hired you only to find you no longer wanted to hurt people. Or, say, you were no longer good at reading strangers. Dr. Brechel assured us your paranoid tendencies are extremely stable. He was very confident.

  “And then your performance a few days ago.” She kissed her fingers. “Beautiful. Handcuffed, you Tasered three people, including two very well-trained soldiers … and a completely harmless medical orderly.” She grinned and shook her head, every inch the proud parent. “All that for no reason aside from you felt like it. In fact, unless I very much miss my guess, you tried to resist, but you simply couldn’t restrain yourself.”

  “You liked that, did you?”

  “I … appreciated it. Lauren, we’re here today because I want to offer you a job. Not just a job, a life. A much longer life than the one that otherwise faces you. All you have to do is what you want to do anyway. Hurt people who anger you. Reveal liars and spies. You’ll get very rich in the process.”

  “What did you do to Brechel?” I asked.

  “I did nothing. Brechel killed himself,” Corbin said. “No one made the idiot threaten the Department. He sent a copy of your case notes to some higher-ups in the Department, along with a warning that they’d be posted online if he died.”

  “Oh,” I said, feeling sick. “I told him to be discreet.”

  “I know you did, sweetheart. I saw the video. You can’t blame yourself.” She shrugged airily. “You can imagine how his threats went over with the big guns at the Department. They care far less about exposure than they do about being threatened by a podunk subcontractor. Especially now, when everyone can smell the Department’s blood in the water. One sign of weakness and the piranhas will swarm.

  “But enough about Brechel. You have to decide if you want to leave this compound with me or be handed over to the Department. Whatever’s left of it, I mean, with the top dogs jumping ship like rats from a sinking Emergency Act.” She chuckled at her own words.

  “I never expected to leave,” I said.

  “I don’t care about your expectations. I can use you.” She tapped her mobile device. “I just got a message from a contact in West Africa—one of their native foremen has been pilfering diamonds for months. You could go there for a few days and find the culprit. Or, if that’s too far from home, something similar in Canada where some of the aboriginal tribes keep blowing up the oil pipelines in the north. The Department has a strong hunch that some sympathizers in the Canadian military are turning a blind eye to the terrorists. Passing on kill-switch sequences and so on. You could settle that.”

  “So what? We’d just let bygones be bygones?” I said. “I’d go to work for the Department?”

  “Of course not,” she said. “The Department will never forgive you. We’d feign your death and you’d come to work for me. I have new identity papers all lined up.”

  “The Department would never forgive me but you will? Just like that?”

  “I have nothing to forgive, sweetheart.” Corbin smiled the broadest smile I’ve ever seen from her. It was the first time I noticed her teeth, which are absurdly perfect—obviously the result of some expensive surgery. She saw me looking and her left hand twitched toward her mouth. I could suddenly picture her when she was my age. Brilliant but awkward, a scholarship student at the most expensive schools, concealing her horrible teeth from her wealthy friends. Driven to succeed a
t all costs. Show the snobs that she was smarter, tougher, better than they’d ever be.

  It annoyed me, the sudden insight and the sympathy it gave me for her. It’s not like she was some pathetic poor girl now. She stood there beaming at me, and I had never found her so frightening. Because I had no idea why she was so happy.

  “You somehow edited my journal before it was released, didn’t you? Took your name out of it?”

  She shook her head, still grinning. “Perish the thought. Your little journal entries were released exactly as you wrote them.” I stared at her face, and I was positive—as positive as I’ve ever been about anything—that she was telling the truth. Either they’ve made me an idiot who will believe anything again, or Dr. Corbin was genuinely happy about the fact that I exposed her scheme to the world.

  “Thanks to you, the world knows all about the Innocence Treatment. Not just that—it’s come out that the Department exposed several United States senators to the treatment, hoping to change their minds on the Emergency Act. Once this became public, there was widespread outrage throughout Congress, some of it actually authentic. All talk of extending the Emergency Act ended.”

  She stopped smiling for an instant, putting a look of mock horror on her face. “And obviously I was shocked, deeply shocked, at the discovery that the Department had used my research to meddle with the brains of elected officials in the United States. I had no idea that was what the Department intended. In fact, I’ve left my position with the Paxeon corporation as a result of this shocking revelation. Effective as of next week.”

  She let the grin slide back onto her face. “Which is not to say I won’t continue to supply certain services and products to the Department. As it happens, all the patents that resulted from my most important work were filed in my name. Paxeon is facing legal action from several quarters and, with any luck, the corporation will be driven into bankruptcy soon. It will be years before anyone can mount a serious challenge to my intellectual property. Also, oddly enough, the details of my most successful and experimental procedure have all gone missing from the Department’s database, something that no one there can quite explain.”

  I kept my face blank, not wanting to give her the satisfaction. Not that it was such a big surprise that Sasha had been working for her, but still … I felt something inside of me die. Maybe one last bit of the old, hopeful Lauren.

  “And I haven’t even mentioned the publicity.” She shook her head. “Money cannot buy the kind of publicity your ‘exposé’ has gotten me … Every time a powerful person has made a mistake in the past month, it’s been attributed to our treatment. People are very interested in getting access to the Innocence Treatment. Some extremely rich people, along with their associated corporate interests. Not to mention some extremely wealthy foreign countries. And thanks to your journal entries, they know exactly where to get it.”

  It’s funny in a way. There I was—little Miss Perceptive, lecturing Dr. Brechel about how I see things as they are and not just how I want them to be. And still, Corbin’s betrayal of the Department caught me completely off guard. I stared at her for a few seconds.

  “Dear girl.” She patted my cheek. “Surely you can see that I am in your debt. Thanks to you the world knows what I can do. Which brings me back to my proposal to you: imagine us as a team, Lauren. You’re the one person in the world who’s immune to the treatment that I’m selling. Let’s say the CEO of some corporation is annoying someone. You can take a swig of some treated, but still very nice wine, then offer it to him. He thinks, ‘No one would deliberately expose themselves to the Innocence Treatment. If they did, they certainly wouldn’t be able to lie about it.’ He takes a drink and off you go.”

  “Was this your plan all along?” I said. “If I hadn’t released my own journals would you have released them yourself?”

  She shrugged. “Let’s just say, whatever happened, I was bound to come out ahead. The business journals call it ‘positive structuring.’”

  “But why would you trust me to work for you?” I said.

  “Trust you?” Corbin rolled her eyes. “Have you ever noticed that it’s only the weakest people who are concerned with trust? You want to know what I trust? I trust that you’re smart, and I trust you to pursue your own best interests. As your manager, my job will be to make sure your interests line up with mine.”

  I looked at her closely. There was something she knew that I didn’t know. Something she couldn’t wait to tell me. “What?” I said. “Go ahead and tell me. I know you want to.”

  “Ah. You are good. I have been looking forward to introducing you to the manager of field operations at my new company.” She pressed a button on her desk. An old-fashioned intercom—I’d seen them in movies, but never in real life before.

  I could tell—for all the good it did me, which was none at all—how much she enjoyed the theatricality of leaning toward the intercom and purring smoothly into it: “We’re ready for Mr. Adams now.”

  I didn’t need to turn toward the door to know who was going to walk in. But I turned around anyway. I couldn’t help myself.

  So I was staring at the door when Sasha walked in, wearing the same rumpled jeans and faded T-shirt as usual. No glasses though. He smiled at Dr. Corbin and squeezed my shoulder. “Hey,” he said.

  “Tell her,” Dr. Corbin said eagerly.

  “She knows,” Sasha said. “She heard you say ‘We’re ready for Mr. Adams.’ Plus, she heard you gloating about how the Department doesn’t have the records on the Innocence Treatment anymore.”

  “Tell her,” Dr. Corbin repeated, smiling a little.

  “You’re a drama queen, you know that?” Sasha turned to me. “You wanna say it yourself? You must have figured it out a few minutes ago, if not earlier.”

  I looked back and forth between the two of them, hardly paying attention to his words. It was the rapport he had with Corbin. The common affection. He wasn’t faking it. He liked her and she liked him—it was the most genuine emotion I’d ever seen from her—the little crinkle around her eyes when she looked at him, the slightest turn-up of one side of her lips.

  “You had a side contract with Corbin,” I said. “That’s why you deleted the files on me. That’s why you helped me break into the system.” I tried to remember whose idea it had been to break into the Department’s database in the first place. It had been mine, hadn’t it? “You were on her side all along.”

  Sasha nodded. “Well. Yeah. I hope you’re not expecting me to feel guilty. You’re the one who blogged about my betrayal of the Department to the whole frigging world.”

  “I warned you,” I said.

  “Oh, yeah. That was really generous of you.” His face took on a mock-sorrowful expression and he imitated my voice. “‘Um, hey, Sasha, listen. I’m going to get the Department super-pissed at you. You have four weeks to figure out a way to not get killed or deported.’”

  “They had my sister.”

  “You know what?” I heard a strain of real anger in his voice. “Your sister made her own decisions. You warned her, but she had to keep hanging out with her loser friends and visiting ‘activist’ websites. There’s a ridiculous phrase—‘activist website.’ Sitting in your parents’ home writing secret messages to other spoiled middle-class kids does not make you an activist.”

  “Sasha,” Dr. Corbin said indulgently. “You’re supposed to be convincing her to join our team, not insulting her sister.”

  “I’m appreciating his honesty,” I said. “Finally.” I stared at Sasha’s face. “Did I ever mean anything to you?”

  “Of course,” he said. “You still do. Just not quite as much as staying alive and free means to me.”

  “You’re not free. You’ve just got a new boss, that’s all.”

  “Everyone works for someone, Lauren. I sure feel free.” He tapped his eyes. “You notice I’m not wearing glasses? I got the eye operation the day I left the Department. And I don’t have to wear camera-enabled glasses anymore. These
days when I go to the bathroom, I don’t have to worry about some Department bureaucrat seeing my junk if I look down before zipping up.”

  He looked at my face and his voice softened. “I’m sorry I couldn’t tell you about this before, but we couldn’t risk it. What if the Department asked you some questions before handing you to Patricia, you know?”

  Corbin nodded and leaned toward me. “Join us, Lauren. Don’t you want your skills to be used?”

  Sasha sighed. “Are you trying to sound like Darth Vader, Patricia?” He did this deep breathy thing and said, “Luke, join the dark side. Embrace your anger.”

  Corbin laughed, but Sasha must have seen the confusion in my eyes. “Star Wars?” he asked.

  I shook my head.

  “Stupid Department trainers,” he said. “Making us watch stuff that no actual kid has watched for years. Look. This isn’t a big deal. It’s a job, that’s all. You agree to work for her, and Patricia gives you a new identity. You don’t want to end up in the Department’s custody. They are not happy with you.”

  I’m not saying it wasn’t tempting. I don’t want to die. And the thought of being with Sasha indefinitely … of course I liked it. But sugarcoat it as they would, all their jobs would be for the wrong side. Because it’s always the wrong side that’s willing to pay someone like Dr. Corbin.

  “I’m not interested in joining your team,” I said. I kept my face expressionless and my voice light. I didn’t want Sasha or Corbin to see what this conversation was doing to me. I couldn’t believe Sasha was going along with Corbin. I had always thought … I had always hoped that there was something more to Sasha. “Thanks, though.”

  As for why I didn’t go along with Corbin just long enough to get free of the prison, I … It’s complicated. I’ve been thinking a lot about this kind of thing since I turned myself in to Paxeon. It seems to me that no one sets out to work for the bad guys. Not Brechel, not Sasha. Not the big guard, Jeff. Maybe not even Dr. Corbin. They’d just made the compromises they thought they had to. Then, all of a sudden, there they were, informing on their friends or interrogating a political prisoner. I wasn’t going down that path.