I'm going to tell you something tonight that I've never told anyone outside of a handful of people who were there. Most of them are dead now. Not because of anything sinister. We were young men in the seventies, and young men in the seventies did things to their bodies that caught up with them later. But I'm still here. And I think it's time. I'm not going to give you my full name. You can call me Raymond. That's close enough. I'm not going to tell you exactly where I live now, but I will tell you that I spent eleven years working for an agency that doesn't officially exist, doing work that was never acknowledged, in rooms that aren't on any blueprint. That's just how it was. I was recruited in 1978, right out of the Army. I'd done two tours in Vietnam as a radio operator, signals intelligence, mostly. Intercepting enemy communications, that kind of thing. I had a reputation for having good ears. That's what they called it. Good ears. I could pick out patterns in static that other people couldn't hear. I could tell you if a transmission was being relayed or if it was direct. I could hear things in the noise. Someone noticed. Someone always notices.
They approached me at Fort Meade in the spring of '78. Two men in suits, no identification, no names. They asked if I'd be interested in participating in a research program. Medical research, they said. Related to auditory processing. They said my particular abilities made me a candidate. They said it would be in service to my country. I said yes. I was twenty-six years old and I still believed in things. The facility was in Nevada. Not Area 51. I know that's what everyone assumes, but no. This was smaller, older. A concrete building that looked like it had been there since the forties. No windows. One door. Armed guards who never spoke. There were eight of us in the program. All former military, all with backgrounds in signals work. All with what they called 'anomalous auditory sensitivity.' We could hear things other people couldn't. Subtle things. The hum of electricity in walls. The pitch change when a recording device activates. The difference between silence and the silence of someone listening. They wanted to make that stronger. They wanted to weaponize it.
The procedure took three days. I'm not going to describe all of it because honestly I don't remember all of it. They kept us sedated for long stretches. But I remember the injections. Something into the base of the skull, right where the spine meets the brain. It burned like nothing I've ever felt. Like someone had poured hot copper into my head. And I remember the sounds they played. Hours and hours of sounds through headphones that were bolted to our heads so we couldn't remove them. Frequencies, mostly. Tones that climbed and fell. Static patterns. Clicking sequences. And underneath all of it, barely audible, voices. I could never make out what they were saying. When it was over, when they finally let us out of those chairs, the world sounded different. Everything was louder, sharper. I could hear my own heartbeat like a drum. I could hear the blood moving through my veins. I could hear the electrical current running through the fluorescent lights above us, not a hum, but a song. A complex song with harmonics and variations. And I could hear surveillance equipment. That was the point. That's what they'd built us for.
[ Story continues in the full game... ]