Chapter 16
AZRAEL
The first time I descended into the Facility, it felt like slipping beneath the skin of the world into a sterilized hell.
The elevator sank in silence, a coffin of steel and light that allowed the macabre aura of the place to invade my senses, foreseeing a place where tormented souls go to find their ending.
When the doors parted, I stepped into a corridor too clean to be humane.
Walls, ceiling, floor, all the same icy white that burned your eyes if you stared for too long.
The air reeked of chlorine, rusted metal, and cheap disinfectant, while the over-scrubbed floor mirrored the overhead fluorescents until the hallway seemed to stretch into infinity.
Everything about this place screamed damnation. I was finally home.
No signs on the walls indicated a direction, nor were there plaques on the doors naming the inmates inside. No details, no information, no pretending anything in there is alive or worthy of being remembered. I’d already removed them all.
The mind, especially the fractured one, clings to context and recurring signs that can keep up contact with reality. It begs for normalcy, something that makes sense in an abyss of nothingness. I took that away too. No room numbers. No clocks. No ‘you are here’ markers.
In this place, you aren’t here. You aren’t part of something. You aren’t alive or worthy of being something. All you are is a nobody in a place that doesn’t exist. Which is just a metaphorical way of saying, ‘you are fucked.’
Anyone that steps inside this underground building unwillingly will not come out alive, or at least not with all their pieces intact.
At twenty-five, I’m the youngest clinical director in federal history.
Appointed not through favors, but because no one else dared to do what I could.
Two doctorates—one in neuropsychology and one in behavioral engineering—and with more published papers than most tenured professors.
Of course, some of my work had to be censored.
Experts in the field feared the idea of me applying the concepts I was preaching, and I made the Review Board nervous. Rightly so.
It’s just, I’d always craved chaos, always wanted to inflict pain and see how far the human mind could be pushed toward self-destruction before it realized it was too late. And now, I finally have the free rein to put all my fantasies into practice.
On paper, the program is called Cognitive Realignment Mapping, but this is just a bureaucratic euphemism.
The government’s goal? To take life-sentenced inmates and create subjects who do not question the reason anymore and will fearlessly go straight into the middle of a battlefield when they are told to, because their brain has forgotten how to process emotions.
My goal is less patriotic and more focused on the only goal in life that truly matters, the only result worth pursuing.
I want to create an army of psychopaths, the perfected version of humanity.
An elite class of individuals immune to empathy, fear, or any other stupid feeling that humans seem to possess.
The Paragon Project—a project meant to create pure perfection.
Reconstruction. Evolution. The federal boys think I’m cataloging subjects, bribing their starving neurons with promises and rewards. But I know better. They must relinquish their free will, submit to my desire, and forget everything that once made them alive.
The idea is simple: don’t fix broken minds. Destroy them. Build better ones.
The old definitions of psychopathy are pitiful, to say the least. Trauma, abuse, neglect, unstable attachments.
They treat it like it is some disease. Like something that needs to be cured or managed and kept under control.
But I see it for what it truly is: an upgrade.
A mind beyond fear, beyond guilt, beyond useless emotional static.
Psychopathy gives clarity. If you want a mind that never breaks, you must first design one that has nothing left to lose.
They give me criminals, people who society has forgotten or wishes never existed. I take away their pasts, shove their memories into a corner of their brain that will never be touched again, and redesign them into my subjects.
They are no longer people, just numbers, variables in my experiment.
Stage 1: Break the mind. No-touch manipulation of the body and mind.
We start with deprivation of anything that could awaken their senses: light, sleep, and sound.
Remove everything they’ve regarded as normal until now.
Then comes the overstimulation, with contradictory narratives such as calling them random names, providing a fake description of their past, and switching the clinician who is training them, while using the same nametag.
Then we create memory loops, repeating the same interviews for days or weeks in a row until they start to question their own lucidity.
In other words, remove their sanity.
Stage 2: Pair the pain with pleasure. Physical attacks to target the mind.
The second step, creating a bridge between pain and pleasure, is my personal favorite. Make them believe that pain is its own reward, the ultimate goal. Push them until they are begging for it with a large grin on their face.
The key is to let others inflict the pain, while only you provide the rewards. This way, their stupid brains cannot associate you with what hurts, only with what’s given.
Drip rewards into the agony like dopamine injections, but only as a temporary relief, conditioned by their actions.
And as soon as they drop from the high of receiving it, they end up asking for more.
To be punched harder, to be stabbed with a sharper knife, to be electrocuted with a higher voltage.
I teach them to chase the pain as if it is salvation.
Once they stop screaming and start begging for pain with no mention of the reward, that’s when they are ready for the last phase of the process.
Stage 3: Give the subject a way to repay you for your kindness
I need them to be mine, to follow my commands, to forget they were once in control of their own bodies and thoughts. I want serving me to be their singular purpose, the reason behind their actions.
The key to dominating someone is not depriving them of everything—that’s called control, and it’s utterly useless in the long term.
What really works is giving them everything but making them believe still being around you is the only reward they should seek.
They all get the chance to make me happy, a task that even a criminal should find abhorrent.
If they follow through? Then my job is done. The transformation is complete.
Not all of them made it past Stage 1. Many cracked and stayed that way.
Some tried to kill themselves, and enough succeeded.
Depriving someone of light for weeks and keeping them in a pitch-black room while the only sound playing on repeat is the screams of people about to die in atrocious ways, can be quite unsettling.
But if they cannot make it past the initial stage, the possibility of them succeeding is nonexistent anyway.
I’m not wasting my time with unworthy people.
The second stage left me without enough subjects to clean out an entire prison.
Some couldn’t take the pain; they died after the first amputated finger or went into a coma after just a couple of weeks of starvation.
Their brains might have been able to complete Stage 1, but their bodies weren’t strong enough to finish the process.
Stage 3 is reserved for exceptional minds, those who don’t ask questions.
Their preservation instinct is so strong that, despite their bodies being alive, their minds are empty cages.
But even then, only a few of them completed the process.
Sixteen, to be exact. And out of them, Subject 738 is my favorite.
He is special; he didn’t break the way the others did.
He smiles when he bleeds and flinches when offered comfort.
He learned the system too fast, adjusted too well.
From the very beginning, he adapted his behavior to fit the scenario and said the right things, exactly what you’d not expect from a normally functioning person.
He even began to mimic the behavior of the people he got in contact with, including mine, to the point that my team became a tool for him to play with.
It’s as if his entire life had been a performance.
I often wonder if he wasn’t, in fact, a psychopath from the very beginning.
But that was ruled out easily: he cared too much for his family, loved them, even.
That love was the reason he ended up in prison.
Five men attacked his family while he was overseas on a business trip, and the only thing he could do was watch it happen through a security camera. He single-handedly killed them all.
However, during the second stage, when we made him re-watch the footage of the events while enjoying his steak, he looked completely indifferent.
The only emotion he showed was when one of his family members screamed too loudly, and that look was a look of disgust, as if the sound was disturbing his peaceful dinner.
My most exquisite subject. I even had to adjust my notes for him.
Day 543.
I take my coffee the same way I always do, black, sipping it as I review Subject 738’s night recordings.
Frame by frame, I watch him staring at a wall for what feels like an eternity, while I am sure for him it must have felt like seconds.
Dissociation is common in psychopaths. We tend to easily detach from reality. It’s a survival mechanism, a way to navigate a world we often find uninteresting or simply useless.