Day Twenty Two : Fortitude - You Drive Me Crazy

Fortitude

Definition

: strength of mind that enables a person to encounter danger or bear pain or adversity
with courage

Fortitude comes from the Latin word fortis, meaning "strong," and in English it has
always been used primarily to describe strength of mind. 

The last test of our Academy was the hardest and most destructive. You passed it and you were in -
you were officially an employee of one of the most exclusive firms in the world.  

Fail it and, well, let’s just say you wouldn’t be employable by anyone after that. 

It changed year to year, student to student so you would know what to expect and could do no sort of
advance preparation. 

I’d heard rumours from the other students that one year, the entire class had been abandoned at the
north pole and had to make their own way back to civilization, another had tales of them being
dropped in the deep southern jungle - after first being infected with malaria, yet another of those
forced to infiltrate a drug smuggling ring and either take over the operation or disband and destroy it
from the inside.

As outrageous and embellished as these rumours may have been, our teachers were that sadistic and
imaginative, they still fell within the realms of possibility. 

As I sat in my own final exam, I felt my body want to tremble (it no longer could of course, not after the
many nerve manipulation surgeries I’d undergone that were compulsory at the Academy. You don’t
want a random twitch to give you away after all. Therefore it was mandatory for all students to go
under the knife. Once you have passed the initial trial period, and then the second trial period and
then the third and fourth, you were considered to have some potential - or at least some stamina - so
you were outfitted with many internal nanobots that gave you complete muscular control over your
own self. Of course, any student exhibiting uncontrolled, subconscious body movement after that was
harshly punished. No random finger twitches or facial tics allowed. After the surgery you were given
two weeks to adapt. If you couldn't figure out how to make your own heartbeat and lungs breathe after
that, well, what do you think would happen if you couldn’t figure out how to breath?)

So no, my body did not tremble, my face was still and calm with an expression of pleasant interest as i
sat is the hard and uncomfortable chair and waited for them to tell me which hell i was to be dropped into. 

In the end, my mission was, relatively, straightforward. I was to be admitted to the most brutal psychiatric
hospital in the world as a patient and then survive there for a month. After a month, they would , if I was
still in a somewhat reasonable state, come and collect me. If my mind was still intact, I would have the
job. If it wasn’t, then surely I was in the best place possible for me they said oh so reasonably. 

Lunar Psychiatric Hospital was located in a small southern country that was constantly in political turmoil
with new despots/tyrants/sacrificial lambs coming to power every week it seemed - and then every week
being disposed of. With the constant civil strife, armed riots and rapidly declining welfare of its
inhabitants, no one really had time to do any proper legislation of medical practices. 

Which is how Lunar Psychiatric Hospital got away with the shit it did. Had it been running in a stable and
just country, the hospital (along with the staff) would have been burned to the ground by now. 

Outdated medical treatment practices such as electroshock and cold water dunking were still happily
practised, patients were used for various drug and medical testing, the staff sometimes even entertaining
themselves by forcing hallucinations on the patients and laughing at their reactions. Patients were
barely fed and kept on a starvation diet in order to remain physically weak and to ‘be better managed by
the staff’.

They were also dark rumours of the most damaged of patients being ‘rented out’ to those who could pay
whose appetites would not be tolerated by society. 

The hospital and its staff didn’t even try to hide their wickedness - and they were notorious for accepting
‘patients’ that ‘kind relatives’ had sent there for recuperation that not only did not appear to be mad in
the slightest, but they also happened to be mafia members who had committed a crime against the family
, rival politicians, journalists that were becoming too much of a nuisance and anyone, really, who you
wanted to disappear, along with the inconvenient information within their heads. 

Not even the UN could touch them - the mad spill all their secrets, as they are no longer in possession of
enough wherewithal to understand what a secret is anymore. The staff of the hospital had so much
blackmail, they could run the hospital indefinitely. 

This was where the teachers had imprisoned me and had promised that they would retrieve me after a
month. 

It was now three months later.

The piercing howl of an inmate shattered the night air, their constant undulations forcing us all into
wakefulness, denied the privilege of a night’s sleep. I personally suspected it wasn’t an actual inmate at
all - just a recording of a long distant one that the wardens played over the speaker system for their own
amusement. Just another way to break us down. 

I gritted my teeth and put my hands over my ears. I could, theoretically, forcibly freeze my ear drums into
temporary deafness but it did not pay here to be robbed of one of your senses. Who knew what could
sneak up on me in the night. Or day. Or at any minute in each one of these twenty four hours that
seemed to stretch on endlessly. 

I huddled into myself, beyond caring at this point if the teachers may have snuck in cameras to monitor
my every move and judging me on them. My blunt, filed down nails dug into my hands. 

At first, it hadn’t been too bad. With my nanobots I could monitor my body, control the amount of pain I
felt, calmly increase the amount of oxygen in my veins if needed. Of course, it was not good to treat my
body like this, but it was only for a month. I could cope if it was just a month. 

One month came and went. 

Two months, two months I could deal with the humiliation of being poked and prodded, stripped and
examined. Of having drugs injected into me, of having my body forced under the freezing water until I
couldn't breath, of being strapped to the electric chair and having so much electric coursing through me
that not even my nanobots could save me from the pain. Of being constantly watched, leered at, groped
by both patients and staff, all of them mad. Of being starved and sleep deprived.

Of being told I was worthless, useless, unwanted, not even good enough to be thrown out with
yesterday’s trash. 

Two months came and went. 

Halfway into month three, the director himself came and saw me as I was strapped to the chair. I had just
undergone one of the many, many ‘personal hygiene’ examinations that the staff seemed to love giving.
I was strapped down, mostly naked and extremely sore. He leant over me, gloating. 

“Well, well, well. Still in there I see.” he said with a chuckle at my glare. “That school of yours really does
know how to train you. I suspect you even have torture classes hmmm?”

My glare faltered. No one should know i was from the Academy. No one. 

He laughed at my expression. “Ah, I see you haven’t figured it out yet. A little slow are you hmm?
Probably that’s why they sent you to us. I expect you think this is your final exam?” he raised an eyebrow
at me but I said nothing. “Well, you see, we have a little arrangement with that school of yours. They
send us the duds - the ones that seemed to have so much potential but never really quite make it. But,
of course, after all that training they’re far too dangerous to set free into the world. Oh no. so they send
them to us where,” he grinned at me as he lent down and whispered into my face, “we neuter them.
Make them nice and safe hmmm?”

I lunged forward and bit his nose. I was only sorry the angle was off so i couldn’t rip it from his face. 

I was chucked into the grave for that. A deep hole in the basement, pitch black with barely enough room
to move and about as big as a, you guessed it, grave. 

It gave me plenty of time to think.

Mostly about the Academy, what i’d sacrificed in order to be the perfect student, the hoops of fire i’d
thrown myself through (literally at one memorable point), the tests I'd taken, the surgeries i’d undergone -
all to impress them, all to prove my worth to them. 

I thought about the fact that I'd basically aced the final three times over and they’d still abandoned me
here. That, to them, I still wasn’t enough. 

I stared into the darkness. 

Well bugger that. After all that shit they’d put me through, all that blood i’d pissed for them, they owed me.
I knew my worth.

And I was worth a damn sight more than just rotting in this shithole. 

***

A few days later I was sitting in the interview room where it all started. The bland walls were the same,
the horribly uncomfortable eighties chairs were still horribly uncomfortable. The two way mirror on the
wall showed me that my hair was more than slightly singed from the fire that burnt down the Lunar
Psychiatric Hospital. Maybe with all those lunatics on the loose, the government and insurrectionists
would have too much on their hands to start another civil war - at least for the time being. Their economy
might even have time to recover before the next strife hit the fans. Maybe.

Along with my  basically fried hair, I hadn't really had time to change and was still in my dirty, blood and
soot smoked strait jacket. All in all, not my best look. 

The interviewer entered and I gave him my biggest smile. 

“So, I understand that you believe you have completed you final and that you now wish to seek
employment with the firm.” the immaculately dressed gentleman sat down in the chair, his body
language clearly implying that this was his throne, he was king and i a mere peasant come to beg his
mercy.

“Oh, no, no, no.” I waggled my finger at him, lounging back in my chair, my smile only growing brighter
with my next words. “I’ve come to see why I should work for you.”

The interviewer smiled back.