Chapter 7 - The Gallery of Masks
The car swerved dangerously as Miller slammed on the brakes, the sedan sliding to a halt just inches away from a massive rusted iron gate blocking the logging trail.
"Julian, I told you to stay down!" Miller yelled, spinning around in her seat, her chest heaving.
"Who am I?" Julian demanded, holding up the three badges like playing cards, his voice trembling with a mixture of terror and white-hot rage. "Why do I have three names? Am I Julian? Am I David? Am I Thomas?"
Sharda stared at the badges in horror, her breath catching in her throat. She slowly reached up and touched her own neck, her fingers tracing the small silver key emblem. "We aren't real people, are we?" she whispered, the devastating realization finally settling over her features like a shroud. "We're inventory."
"You are survivors of a classified cognitive reconstruction program," Miller said, her voice dropping into a flat, exhausted defeat. She turned off the ignition, letting the engine tick quietly in the cool forest air. "When the federal government shut down the illegal funding streams in 2020, the directors of the Oakhaven Trust tried to wipe the slate clean. They erased records, burned facilities, and reassigned identities to children who had no family left to look for them."
"And my real father?" Julian asked, his voice dead and hollow, the defiance completely draining out of his small frame.
"He was the lead engineer who designed the memory-implantation algorithms," Miller answered softly, looking away out the driver's window. "When he realized what they were doing to you and the other children, he tried to leak the drive. That's why the fire happened."
Sharda looked out the dusty side window of the car. Beyond the rusted iron gate stood a massive, decaying brick structure half-swallowed by ivy and pine trees. A faded sign above the rusted double doors read: Oakhaven Research Facility: Sector 4.
"This isn't a railway station," Sharda said, her voice shaking. "This is where we started."
"It's where the original server room is located," Miller replied, reaching into her trench coat to pull out a heavy iron bolt cutter. "The only copy of the baseline cognitive mapping files—the ones that prove who you actually are before they altered your minds—is stored on a physical mainframe in that basement."
"And Arthur?" Julian asked, staring at the dark windows of the abandoned facility.
"Arthur is the facility's original head of security," Miller said grimly, stepping out of the car and inserting the bolt cutters into the iron padlock on the gate. "And he knows we're coming."
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Before the heavy chain could snap under the pressure of the cutters, a blinding floodlight snapped on from the roof of the brick building, bathing the car in harsh white light.
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