8.2

“Now where was I?” the professor mumbled to himself. “Oh yeah! The second kind of drug! So, once the servants arrive in Conqueron, they undergo a lot of tests in the Cleaning Facility – or CF for short. We need to know if they carry any bacteria or radiation, so that we can clean them and give them medications to prevent their uncleanliness from entering Conqueron. In addition to the cleaning and decontaminating, the second type of mind-stillers is given to them. This process is actually also split into two separate treatments. The drug used is still the same, but we need different tactics to tackle the issues at hand.
      The first treatment we perform is the one where we remove all the bad memories and replace them with our artificial memories. How do we remove all bad memories, you ask? Well, it’s difficult. It starts with letting them talk to what they think is a therapist. They will talk about the horrible working environment, for example, and we insert them with the drug in the meantime. The drug essentially blocks the bad memories from returning to the storage of the mind. But we just tell them they’re getting water with vitamins injected so their body can adapt to a life in Conqueron.
      This treatment usually takes a few days, considering they can’t recall all bad memories at once. We can’t treat all of the memories in this short amount of time either, as old traumas might surface later on in their life. So, we equip them with a nice little chip to track their hormones and emotions, basically. Whenever we get the idea they need the drug again, they will be called for a check-up and we remove the memory again.
      The second treatment is where we talk about their friends and relationships. Considering we can keep track of whoever they associate themselves with, we can use the same mind-stiller as before, but the process is quite a bit faster. We just tell them to recall those people and their feelings when they think of the person and give them a lower dosage of the drug. This way, it softens their emotions, but doesn’t completely delete their existence from their minds. It does remove a lot of the dialogue in their memories for some reason though.”
      The amount of information presented to Aidan in such a short amount of time was overwhelming to say the very least. Even though the professor hadn’t used any difficult terms or went into the chemical details, Aidan already knew that this wasn’t as easy as he had thought it to be. Everything he had known before about what they forced down the throats of unknowing servants was that it made them docile and happy to be here, barely ever wondering about the state of Underconqueron and their friends there.
      “To continue, we are still improving this drug between each Rite. The side effects used to be a lot worse in the beginning for example. It wasn’t unusual for the servants to vomit uncontrollably after consuming the wine or when they were injected with the drug. Some fainted, some were hospitalised for a few days – which was actually a blessing for us. We could monitor them perfectly because of that and immediately take action when memories were brought up. In addition to that, we have finetuned the dosage of the drug almost to perfection. The wine is an average dosage that’s only meant to suppress emotions, so it’s fine if the light-weighted people feel a bit more jubilant than the heavyweights. The other type is “prescribed” based on their weight we get from them in the CF. It’s one of the first things we do to make a file of them, because we can get the lab working on the doses for each person,” the professor continued.
      Before Wennot could continue, Aidan interrupted. “I hate to be rude, professor, but I’d like a bit more information about the first step. I don’t actually follow how you do that. How do you manage to only block the bad memories from returning to what you called ‘the storage of the mind’. If they talk to a therapist about their experiences in Underconqueron, they will also bring up good memories, won’t they? So how do you make sure those can return to the storage?”
      “That does go into a bit more depth than what I’d like to tell you at first, but we could give it a go. I’d rather not try to explain difficult things like that without a firm foundation. So, for a memory to be stored, certain proteins need to be synthesized by the brain in the hours after an event occurs. These proteins are part of the chemical processes that remodel junctions between brain cells, to make them communicate more efficiently. It essentially changes how neurons, the messaging cells, talk to each other.
      Bad memory neurons and good memory neurons differ from one another though. Both have genes that aren’t found in the other. So, the drug only targets the negative memories. It has been formed to only be activated when any of the genes prone to bad memories are discovered in the activated group of neurons.
      Something we only recently found out though, is that the brain stores good and bad memories in different parts. It’s not a clean line in the middle, there’s also a grey spot where they’re both stored, and neutral memories also exist, so those neurons are also somewhere in the storage area.
      However, we are currently researching if we can manually trigger the storage of bad memories to loosen those connections made by the proteins and then insert the drug into the person, to prevent the memory from returning to its place. That would make the therapist talk completely obsolete and the treatment so much quicker.”
      “Wouldn’t that also make the servants more suspicious of us in the beginning?” Aidan wondered.
      “Perhaps, a procedure like that would probably benefit from a ploy. Summer, would you be a sweetheart and write that down for me?” The question sounded very kind, but the way Summer went lunging for a pen and a paper to jot it down, concerned Aidan. The professor was probably not the nicest to subordinates he did not deem worthy yet, if he were to draw conclusions from what he just saw.