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His breath on my skin is the last thing I feel before I go under. The last thing I hear is his answer, soft and certain:

“Yes.”

Chapter Four: Bentley

He’s deep into unconsciousness and I’m back in the control room. In front of me, the wall of screens. Each monitor streams a different angle of the subject in Test Cell 4, but the one that draws my eye is the upper right: live biometric overlay.

Samuel’s heart rate spikes at 101, then falls back to a steady 83. Blood oxygen, perfect. Skin conductivity, slightly elevated. Respiration, even despite the stress. I like him already—he understands the rules of the game. Most men at this point are crying, or in denial, or both. He’s riding it out.

I appreciate that.

In fact, I’m fascinated by it.

On a far console, a technician with sharp cheekbones and hair cropped to the scalp leans forward and catches my eye. “Blood panel from last draw is clear. Compound is metabolizing on schedule.”

“Good,” I say, voice pitched even lower than usual. “Prepare for sequence two. Notify me the moment he hits phase threshold.”

There’s a chorus of affirmatives. No one here needs a second order. The Ministry handpicks, and every one of these operators has passed a battery of tests more rigorous than most black site clearances. My predecessors did not believe in overkill, only in certainty.

The room hums with anticipation.

I watch as the team at Station B primes a new syringe, tip glinting under surgical LEDs. They calibrate the injector, double-check the lot code, then hand it off to the masked handler in the adjacent room. The handler moves with smooth, animal grace, entering Test Cell 4 through a pneumatic seal and circling to the subject’s left flank. I watch the needle plunge into the vein, and note with satisfaction that Samuel doesn’t flinch, not even when the chemical burn hits.

On the overlay, his dopamine curve bends sharply. The monitor registers a delta. Not enough to incapacitate, but precisely what I asked for: heightened sensory input, inhibition collapse, every nerve tuned to the frequency of panic and arousal. I catch the faintest quirk at the corner of my mouth.

The handler retreats, door hissing shut.

In the control room, I feel the focus shift to me. Even the hum of electronics grows stiller, waiting for the next order.

“Proceed,” I say. It’s not a request.

In the test cell, the lighting drops from clinical white to blue. Two strobes above Samuel’s head activate, cycling at frequencies calculated to disrupt REM sleep and shatter sense of time. At the same moment, the room’s industrial speakers engage. They don’t play music or speech, but a hybrid waveform of white noise and infrasonic pulses—each note a punch to the lizard brain, engineered to bypass cognition and reach the core.

I watch Samuel in split screen: left monitor, his face bathed in strobe, jaw tight, eyes slitted. Right monitor, his biometrics begin to flutter, then stabilize. He’s fighting for rhythm, and for a minute, I suspect he’ll hold it.

This is where most break. The Ministry’s clinical literature refers to this as the “de-coherence threshold,” the point where the subject loses track of input, and identity fragments.

Here, though, he seems to embrace the loss.

He almost relaxes into it.

The only other person I know to have that type of response is me.

And I’m a psychopath.

I adjust my tie. The fabric is heavy, bespoke, a comfort I afford myself. No one else in the Ministry of Design has the same tie; that, too, is by design.

I lean into the console. “Amplify by point two. Add sensory distortion at will.”

The technician closest to me—Lane, with her neat nails and posthuman focus—nods and keys it in. The strobes cut to a faster pattern, switching from left-right alternation to random, microsecond pulses. The noise changes, too. It’s not louder, but there’s a new undertone, something guttural that you can’t hear so much as feel in the bones.

I glance again at the monitors. Samuel’s face is slack now, sweat slicking the line of his scalp, but his heart rate remains below 120. He’s started to hum, I realize. It’s hard to hear over the engineered chaos, but he’s humming a note that lines up with one of the infrasound layers. His body has begun to resonate with the machine.

I admit, I’m impressed.

The room’s other operators track my reaction with small, nearly imperceptible head tilts. I know they want to ask if they should increase to threshold three, but they know better than to break protocol.

I let the hum continue.