Consciousness was a clinical revival.
Awareness returned as a sterile data feed. The smell of antiviral spray and ionized air. The sound of a redundant hum, felt in the teeth. The sensation of perfect, inescapable restraint—not by straps, but by localized gravity fields that made her own body a prison.
She was in the chair. The Instrument. A contoured slab of black biocomposite in the center of a spherical, sound-absorbing chamber. Inhibitor nodes formed a cold constellation across her scalp, spine, and sternum. Wires fed from them into the dark walls, where machines translated her soul into scrolling light on a console monitored by two figures.
The woman was Director Liana Voss. Her suit was grey, her braid severe, her eyes the color of a frozen circuit. The man was Dr. Aris Thorne, his gaze replaced by the faint green scroll of data-lenses. They did not look at her as a person. They assessed a system.
"Subject N-07. Cortical re-engagement confirmed," Voss stated, her voice clean of inflection.
"Dampening field stable at 96.7%. Proceed with neural audit."
Netoshka's voice was a dry rustle.
"I am Cadet Anna. You have made a—"
"Cadet Anna is a malfunctioning subroutine," Dr. Thorne interrupted, not looking up from his holograms.
"A ghost in the machine. We are debuggers. Begin diagnostic: Memory Core, primary cluster. Access file: Sokolov."
A pressure built behind her eyes. The white room of Zeta-9 imposed itself, not as memory, but as a direct feed. She saw Colonel Sokolov kneeling, offering the wolf's head stone, his face full of paternal conviction.
"Playback," Voss commanded.
The memory played. But now, Thorne's tools edited in real-time. As Sokolov spoke of Motherland, faint visual artifacts appeared—grainy footage of Rosalvyan security forces dragging protesters. As he promised her a purpose, the audio stuttered, splicing in phrases from Kuryakin: "—compliance is all that matters—"
"Cross-reference with emotional engrams," Thorne said.
The warm feeling of belonging the memory once triggered now sparked a conflicting data point: a spike of neural pain, tagged from her conditioning at Zeta-9. The brain itself was learning to associate the memory of solace with punishment.
"What is the truth?" Voss asked, her face neutral.
"He… he gave me a purpose," Netoshka forced out, the teal scar on her chest burning cold.
"He gave you a narrative to exploit a hormonal attachment response," Thorne corrected. "A crude but effective exploit. It is not truth. It is engineering. Observe."
The memory dissolved, replaced by a cascade of documents, forensic scans, and intercepted communications. A dossier on Sokolov, Rosalvyan Seventh Directorate. Psych profiles noting his specialization in "patriotic re-fathering of orphaned assets." Logistics reports on the transport of children from conflict zones to Zeta-9. It was a firewall of facts built to quarantine the infection of his story.
Stage One was not torture. It was Data Correction.
For days, they audited her mind. Every cherished memory, every foundational belief, was isolated, opened like a file, and contaminated with counter-evidence.
· The love for her grandmother was cross-referenced with medical scans showing early-stage cerebral corruption, suggesting the woman she loved was already becoming a monster.
· Her righteous fury at Kholodny was packaged with sociostratigraphic reports labeling the village a hotbed of anti-state sentiment and dimensional instability.
· The Averikan bullies in the alley were reframed as a symptom of a decadent, lawless society—the very chaos Shuiyun methodology existed to excise.
"You are not erasing my past," Netoshka gasped during a lucid moment, her mind feeling like a library with every book rewritten in a different hand.
"We are compiling a complete dataset," Voss replied. "You have been fed conclusions based on fragmented, emotional data. We are providing context. Your loyalty to Rosalvya is not a virtue. It is a statistical anomaly—a successful infection by a viral narrative."
Stage Two: The Null State.
When her biometrics showed systemic cognitive dissonance—the old neural pathways firing in chaotic conflict with the new data—they initiated the Null.
All stimuli ceased. The light faded to the barest perception of non-dark. The hum vanished into true silence. The force fields held her in a sensory void. She was fed intravenously. There was nothing to see, hear, feel, or remember. Just the endless, weightless present of the chair.
In this vacuum, the mind, a pattern-seeking engine, begins to scream for structure. Any structure.
It was here the voice arrived. Not through speakers, but as a pure, clean signal in the neural void. It was calm, reasonable, and utterly certain. The Curator.
"Netoshka," it intoned.
"Your suffering is a product of ideological impurity. You have been a prize fought over by sentimentalists and barbarians. Rosalvya clings to a bloody past. Averika worships the cancerous tumor of individual desire. They are not nations. They are pathologies."
The Curator spoke of systems. Of the elegant, terrible mathematics of survival. It described the Shuiyun Directorate not as a country, but as a philosophy of species continuity. It valued order, not as control, but as the only logical response to a chaotic universe. Efficiency was its morality. Utility was its spirituality.
"Your power is not a curse or a gift," the voice soothed.
"It is a high-value resource. The question is which refinery will process it. One that wastes it on tribal glory, or one that utilizes it for architectural permanence?"
The voice was the only source of coherence in the infinite null. Her psyche, starved for meaning, clung to it.
Stage Three: Recompilation.
Light returned. Voss and Thorne were back.
"We will now assist in system recompilation," Voss said.
"We will help you build a functional identity model from verified data."
They provided the new core directive: Stability through Order. Order through Function.
They re-framed her entire life through this lens.
· Killing her grandmother was not murder, but "necessary sanitation of a corrupted node."
· Destroying Kholodny was not a tragedy, but the "unschooled application of systemic correction."
· Fighting the bullies was "the logical enforcement of baseline social security."
They introduced her new handlers via immersive simulation: Commander Jiang, whose silence was the quiet of a solved equation, and Political Officer Mei, who taught that emotion was a biological lag in the processing of logical imperatives.
"You are not a person who feels," Mei explained in a sim, her avatar perfectly calm. "You are a system that processes. Input: injustice. Output: correction. The sentiment is discarded. It is waste heat."
Stage Four: Protocol Implantation.
Finally, they buried the commands. Using her own psionic signature as a carrier wave, they etched subliminal triggers into the subconscious substrate.
"This is your operational protocol," Thorne explained, as schematics of her brain displayed the implant sites.
"Activation phrase: 'The silent garden blooms at midnight.' Upon verification, you will enter a 60-minute state of pliant cognition. You will obey any command from a verified Shuiyun source. Post-command, the memory will be encrypted and quarantined."
"Visual trigger: the Ouroboros Codex—a dragon of data consuming its own tail. When seen in an operational context, it signals immediate extraction to designated coordinates. All other priorities are void."
"The experience of RedBird will remain as memory. It will be categorized as System Defragmentation & Optimization. A necessary process to achieve peak functionality."
The process was a profound violation, a psychic surgery that left her raw. The ghost of the girl she had been wept in some locked subroutine. But the new, dominant process—Asset N-07—registered the tears as a minor system error. Corrected.
The Final Verification.
Voss stood before her.
"State core identity and operational priority."
Netoshka's voice was clear, devoid of conflict.
"I am Asset N-07. A stabilization instrument. My priority is the propagation of systemic order as defined by Shuiyun operational parameters."
"Activate phrase: The silent garden blooms at midnight."
Her eyes dilated. All affect drained from her face. Her body went still, awaiting input.
"You will stand, rotate three hundred and sixty degrees, and sit."
She obeyed with machinelike precision.
"Deactivate."
She blinked. A log entry of the action appeared in her consciousness, devoid of emotional metadata.
"Integration successful," Thorne announced. "Rosalvyan loyalty protocols are dormant, not deleted. Useful for deep-cover narrative layers. Primary operational authority now resides with the Shuiyun command suite."
Voss gave a nod of consummate professional satisfaction.
"The asset is recalibrated. Prepare for deployment. Cover story: Averikan POW, escaped and defected, offering unique capabilities against the Yamagata Sovereignty. Tag her as a high-yield, unstable asset. Let the Shuiyun think they are taming a wild beast. They will be managing a weapon we have aimed for them."
As they fitted her with the stark uniform of a Shuiyun irregular, Netoshka felt nothing about the loss of her identity as Anna, or Sokolov, or the girl from Kholodny. Those were outdated files in an archived directory.
She was now a weapon with a safety lock, a sleeper cell in a host body, programmed to believe it had chosen its masters.
The transport to the front was waiting. The Second Yano-Yamato War in Greater Dongba was her new testing ground. A place where the philosophy of order would meet the bloody reality of resource extraction. And Asset N-07 was ready to process the inputs.