When I woke up I knew I was in a MACROHARD holding chamber. Shit, shit, and shit again. SHIT! This was not a good place to be. Bad news, completely bad news. There was no good side to being in a MACROHARD holding chamber. No good can come of this, absolutely not. I knew a guy once who had been sent to do "SOFTIME." He had been a regular guy before he went in. Afterwards he became a data entry operator. A DATA ENTRY OPERATOR. I couldn't believe it. He wouldn't talk to me. He was a great guy, a great buddy, and then...it was all different. Total fuckin' mind change. They messed with him in a bad way.
There were rumors about the treatments. I had studied a little psychology just by chance. A friend of mine hacked me some psyche files that were not for on-line access. So I knew a little about the psychogibberish nonsense MACROHARD was calling "therapy." MACROHARD had their own philosophy about how to rehabilitate prisoners, and it was pretty scary. MACROHARD had developed a new psychological program. The first step was to erase previous conditioning. MACROHARD discovered that bringing a human or an animal just to the edge of a nervous breakdown causes previous conditioning to be "reset." The program originated from a study of conditioning that noted that a group of lab animals who had been recently conditioned were trapped in a room flooded by a faulty fire sprinkler. The surviving animals were discovered with only two inches of air space left in the room. They were so frightened all of their conditioning was erased. A state of complete panic acts like a reset button on a computer: the person's mind "reboots" itself leaving the individual in a highly suggestible state for any future conditioning.
MACROHARD'S programming technique was called "THE STAB" (staged artificial believability). The procedure involved inducing fear through the creation of an artificial event designed to bring the "patient" to the edge of total panic . The idea was to bring the person just barely to the edge of a complete nervous breakdown by tricking the poor soul into thinking the pearly gates themselves are opening to swallow 'em up. Then at the very last second MACROHARD's psyche engineers perform a miraculous rescue and immediately recondition the grateful bugger. The trick, of course, was that the patient couldn't know he was going to be rescued; he had to believe he really was about to die. Only then would the old patterns erase.
MACROHARD psych engineers had developed a battery of different methods, all originally tried on various societal misfits. The variety of techniques involved in producing the elaborate dramatic staging of events was astounding. One such approach involved kidnapping the patient, tying him up, gagging him and putting his feet in cement. The patient would then be taken to the ocean and thrown in. Usually after thirty seconds he would be rescued and given the new conditioning. One dude was beat up and thrown out a thirty-story building--only he didn't know he had a rope attached to his leg. He fell five stories, then they hauled him back up and reprogrammed every circuit in his poor overloaded brain. Some of the STABs involved high drama. Pure fucking Hollywood shit from what I could tell. Actors, props, make-up, elaborate sets--MACROHARD went all the way to insure the STABs were absolutely convincing.
This was not what I needed. Not one bit. I looked down at my body. I was dressed in what looked like a jacket cover: a one piece suit with no arms; your basic makeshift straightjacket. My room was about the size of a closet only with no roof. If I were four feet taller, I could stretch my neck and look out. I could tell my cubicle was somewhere in the middle because I heard several people crying and groaning all around me. At least I'm not claustrophobic. I tried to sit down, but there wasn't enough room. I leaned against one wall while my knees pressed against the other. On the floor I read in large red letters: NEGATIVE 3. That was me, I guess. After a couple hours of squirming from side to side, the walls started to rise up into the air. I tried to stand up straight, but I couldn't keep my balance because my legs had fallen asleep. As the walls continued to rise, I could see the entire structure was built like a honeycomb keeping about one hundred of us separated. I was surrounded by others, all dressed like myself, standing on their numbers. I tried to stand up, which wasn't easy without using hands. I felt a wave of nausea and a sharp pain in my bowels.