They carved the operations center out of what used to be a storage room in the Red Rock Flats administrative building. A chaotic mess of extension cords, mismatched monitors, and folding tables filled the walls, apparently placed in haste. The machines produced a scent of dust and overheated plastic when people pushed them beyond their design limits.
Leah Gagnon sat hunched over a workstation near the back wall, her fingers moving quickly across the keyboard. The glow from the monitor cast a pale light across her face, sharpening the lines of concentration on her eyes. She’d been at it for hours, combing through the data scraped from the server Solstice Logistics had abandoned in their midnight exodus.
Most of it was junk — corrupted files, empty directories, placeholders, decoys. Solstice was good at covering their tracks. Too good. But Leah had learned long ago that even the best digital ghosts left footprints if you knew where to look.
She clicked open another folder. More junk. Another. Empty. Another. Encrypted.
She leaned back, rubbing her temples. “They scrubbed almost everything.”
Hayes stepped beside her, holding two paper cups of coffee. He set one down next to her elbow. “Almost everything isn’t everything.”
Leah gave him a tired half‑smile. “You’re an optimist today.”
“Not really,” Hayes said. “Just stubborn.”
She took a sip of the coffee — bitter, burnt, but warm — and turned back to the screen. She clicked into a directory buried three layers deep, its name a meaningless string of numbers.
Inside was a single file. BCP2_Schematic.pdf
Leah’s breath caught. She opened it. The screen filled with a blueprint — clean lines, precise measurements, annotations in a cold, clinical font. At first glance, it looked like a piece of industrial equipment. Something you’d find in a factory or a research lab.
But then she saw the restraints. And the sensory emitters. And the pulse generators.
Her stomach tightened.
Hayes leaned closer. “What am I looking at?”
Leah zoomed in on the central diagram. “A chamber. Behavioral conditioning. Phase II.”
Hayes frowned. “Phase II? What was Phase I?”
Leah shook her head. “I don’t know. But this… this isn’t a prototype. This is a production model.”
She scrolled further. The designers did not design the chamber for one subject. It accommodates twelve. Rows of restraints lined the walls. Each station had its own sensory array: visual, auditory, tactile. A central control node sat at the heart of the room, labeled:
Cognitive Suppression Interface
Hayes’ jaw tightened. “Jesus.”
Leah didn’t respond. She was already clicking through the annotations, her eyes scanning the technical language with growing dread. “Look at this,” she said, pointing to a section labeled Compliance Threshold Calibration. “They’re not just restraining them. They’re measuring how quickly they break.”
Hayes swallowed. “Kids.”
Leah nodded. “Kids.”
The room felt colder. She clicked to the next page. There were more diagrams. More annotations. More horror. A section labeled Group Synchronization Protocol caught her eye.
Hayes leaned in. “What’s that?”
Leah hesitated. “It looks like… coordinated conditioning. Multiple subjects responding to the same stimulus. Same commands. Same punishments.”
Hayes stared at the screen. “Why would they need that?”
Leah didn’t answer. Because the answer was too awful to say aloud. She clicked to the last page.
A date. Operational: 48 hours.
Hayes exhaled sharply. “They’re starting soon.”
Leah shook her head. “No. This isn’t a schedule. This is a confirmation.”
Hayes frowned. “Meaning?”
Leah looked up at him, her eyes dark. “They have already started.”
The room fell silent. Behind them, Chief Samuel Greyeyes entered quietly, his footsteps soft on the concrete floor. He didn’t speak at first. He simply stood behind them, looking at the blueprint over their shoulders.
After a long moment, he said, “This is what they were hiding.”
Leah nodded. “This is what Solstice was protecting.”
Greyeyes’ expression didn’t change, but something in his posture did — a subtle tightening, a shift in the surrounding air. “How many children could they put in that thing?”
“Twelve at a time,” Leah said. “Maybe more if they changed the layout.”
Greyeyes exhaled slowly. “And the heat signatures the RCMP picked up?”
Hayes answered. “Multiple. Small.”
Greyeyes closed his eyes for a moment. When he opened them, they were steady. “Then we’re already behind.”
Leah turned back to the screen. She zoomed in on a small notation near the bottom of the blueprint — a serial number, followed by a location code. Her breath caught. “Hayes,” she mumbled. “Look at this.”
He leaned in. “What am I looking at?”
“That location code,” Leah said. “It’s not random. It’s a site identifier.”
Hayes frowned. “For what?”
Leah swallowed. “For Saskatchewan.”
Greyeyes’ voice was low. “The site that just went live.”
Leah nodded.
Hayes straightened. “We need to get this to the RCMP. Now.”
Leah didn’t move. She was staring at the blueprint, her fingers hovering over the keyboard, her expression unreadable. Greyeyes watched her. “Leah?”
She didn’t look away from the screen. “This isn’t just a chamber. It’s a system. Designed to run multiple subjects at once. Designed to break them in sync.”
Hayes placed a hand on her shoulder. “We’ll stop it.”
Leah finally looked up at him. Her voice was steady, but her eyes weren’t. “We have to.”
She closed the file and stood, her legs unsteady for a moment before she caught herself.
Greyeyes stepped aside to let her pass. “What’s our next move?”
Hayes answered. “We coordinate with the RCMP. We move fast.”
Greyeyes nodded. “Then let’s move.”
But Leah didn’t follow them immediately. She turned back to the monitor one last time.
The blueprint glowed on the screen — cold, clinical, precise. A machine built not for punishment, not for interrogation, but for reshaping. For molding. For erasing.
She felt a chill run down her spine. This wasn’t just Bergmann’s work. This was his evolution. And whatever was happening in Saskatchewan…
…it had already begun.