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 thelong 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 thatmy 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.
I am waiting for some sort of aftershock after the events at dinner, something to tell me that the trauma of what happened with his family is still rotting in his brain. But I see nothing. No emotion, no sadness, no rage. Just pure boredom. Nothing he saw last night disturbed him. He finally feels nothing, and there is nothing bottled up that could make him explode if left unattended for too long.
The sound system in his cell had been left on for fifteen hours straight, looping an ambient track composed entirely of distorted infant screams, scraped violin strings, and the final sounds his family made on this planet. But again, indifference. Nothing can touch him.
I step into the room where 738 is waiting. As the subjects don’t have a schedule or anything that could give them a clue as to what’s about to happen, I’m surprised when he greets me while his back is still turned to the entrance, facing the wall with his hands behind him like he is looking through a hypothetical window.
“Good morning, Doctor.” His voice echoes in the empty room.
“Sit,” is my only reply, and he complies in a heartbeat.
“What time is it?”
“Irrelevant,” There is no reason for chitchat, and he knows it. “You have nowhere to be.”
He laughs, most likely out of habit. I wonder what the exact moment was that the coping mechanism turned into behavior. I cannot help but be proud of what I created.
Turning around to face me, he whispers, “Doctor, I dreamed about you.”