“Every day?” Vi said, looking down, reading the notes. “I think they normally do, like, two or three a month? That’s what Gran’s told me, anyway. That many… it’s a miracle you’ve got a brain left.”
Iris flipped through the pages. “But why? Why do all of this to me? Hypnosis. Sleep deprivation. The drugs. The shocks. Leaving me in that dark room, in that cold water for hours. Why?”
To wipe everything clean, Vi thought. To take a human being that Gran thought was inferior in some way and remake her. Tear her apart, erase everything so that she could build her back. “Well,” she said. “？‘Start with a blank canvas’—that’s what she wrote in her notes on the Mayflower Project.”
“So who am I?” Iris said, looking up from the notes. “If she’s taken everything away—all my memories? Everything I was when I first came here?”
“You’re you,” Vi said, her voice breaking a little when she thought, You’re her monster. “She can’t have taken everything away. And there have to be clues in these files about where you came from, who you were before you got here. The papers I took earlier said your parents were members of the family that Dr. Hicks and Gran studied. And Julia has been researching the family. She’s had contact with remaining family members. She can help us figure it out. We can look through the files for more clues.”
“But my parents are dead!” Iris said. “That’s what the notes said. I killed them! Them and my sister. I started the fire.”
Vi shook her head. “Only because she made you. You were brainwashed. Programmed.”
Iris was quiet for a second. “What else have I done? What else might I be capable of?”
Vi put her hand on Iris’s, resting on top of the open file. “I know you. And I’m with you all the damn time. There’s no way you’re doing anything bad.”
“Promise?”
“I promise,” Vi said. “Now, come on, let’s quickly look through these and see what we can find. We’ll grab what we can and get out of here.”
Iris reached all the way into the back, took out the last folder.
“Bring it over here,” Vi said, standing up and going over to the desk. “You go through that one. I’ll get the folder before it. Pull out anything that seems important. Anything that might help us. Look for stuff with names. History. Where you might have come from. We need lots of documentation.”
Iris nodded as she started reading.
“Vi,” she said a minute later, her voice higher than usual. “Vi, come here.”
Vi set down her own folder and walked back to the desk, looked down at the paragraph of scribbled notes that Iris was pointing at.
The experiment has exceeded all expectations. Patient S fully believes that her parents were killed in a car accident that she and her brother survived. She does not question that this boy she lives with is her brother. Patient S believes in this fictional version of herself so strongly that she is able to tell me about early memories she has of her parents, of the accident itself.
Vi’s mouth went dry. The room began to shift and spin.
No. No. No.
She was shaking her head.
Can’t be. Can’t be. Can’t be.
She was back in the car at the bottom of the river. The water was so cold, and she couldn’t move.
10, 9, 8…
This wasn’t Iris they were reading about.
This was…
… 7, 6, 5…
Iris flipped the pages to the back of the file folder. A photo was attached to the back with a description below, penned in Gran’s messy handwriting: