Which means Realm shouldn’t leave me alone with the Program doctor! I’m not like him or James—I can’t just lie my way out of everything.
“You’ll be fine,” Realm whispers, widening his eyes as if asking me not to reveal what he just told me. Oh, sure. I haven’t even had time to process it, but let’s pretend I don’t know. I’m hiding so many things I’m starting to lose track.
Realm touches my shoulder as he gets up, and once he’s gone, the doctor comes to sit next to me on the bed. I feel him watching me, and slowly I lift my head, petrified of what he’s here to say. Rather than continue pleading for my help, he takes out his wallet to remove a photo. When he hands me the picture, I see tears gathered in his eyes.
“I’m sorry for all that’s happened to you, Sloane.” He pauses.
“May I call you Sloane?” I shrug, a noncommittal answer, and then gaze down at the picture. “I think it’s time you hear the reason,” he continues. “The purpose behind it all. I want you to know why I created The Program.”
The words are too big for me to comprehend. It’s as if God has just shown up to tell me the meaning of life—only it’s not God. It’s the disturbed doctor who stole who I was. And now he’s going to tell me why.
Arthur Pritchard taps the corner of the picture I’m holding.
“She was seven when this was taken,” he says with a faint smile.
“My daughter, Virginia.” For the first time I study the picture in my hand. There’s a little girl wearing a princess crown, a feather boa wrapped around her neck. She’s yelling or laughing, I’m not sure which. But the picture is sweet and sad and oddly lonely. The doctor takes it back from me.
“She had just turned fifteen the day I came home early from the office,” he says. “I found her hanging from a wooden beam in the attic. The rope was poorly tied. I imagine she struggled to breathe for quite a while.”
I blink quickly against the sick image of a girl suffering. I can feel her desperation, her isolation. It strikes me that I was probably suicidal once, suffering and alone. I’m alive now. Had I changed my mind in my last moments? Had my brother? Had Virginia?
“She left a note,” Dr. Pritchard continues. “A page of scrib-bles and nonsense. Virginia’s mother passed away when she was just a baby, and so it’d just been the two of us for so long. My daughter was among the first of the epidemic.”
I want to tell him I’m sorry, but I don’t. I don’t know how to tell the man who ruined our lives that I’m sorry for his loss, not when I can’t even remember all that I’ve lost.
Dr. Pritchard tucks the picture back into his wallet, running his index finger over the plastic where the photo has started to fade. “I used to work with the pharmaceutical companies,” he says. “I would prescribe medications for depression. But after Virginia’s death, and after the news started to break that antidepressants were a possible cause, I threw myself into finding a cure. I lost six patients in one week. I couldn’t keep them alive.”
“What caused the epidemic?” I ask him. The thought of finally knowing the answer makes my body electric in anticipation.
“It was a combination of factors,” he says simply. “Side effects of medications, news coverage, behavioral contagion.
The government is about to pass a law banning stories about suicide from the news networks. They claim it’s contributing to the outbreak—the cases of copycats. We’ll never know exactly where it started, Sloane. We can only guess. But we tried for a cure right away. I got a committee together—ones who were fearful enough to volunteer their own children as test subjects.
We experimented with a mix of counseling and medication, intense psychotherapy. We even lobotomized one at his father’s insistence. We tried everything. But then we found that if we take out the behavior, the contagious part of the epidemic, then the patients could retain most of their personalities. It became the trick of how to target them.
“Some of the smartest minds of our time came together to create The Program. I’m the one who created the black pill, the last step in locking away the memories—the final pill you take.
It was meant to be a permanent solution. Of course it was all to be followed with extensive world-building, slow integration into society. But after a few months, we weren’t at one hundred percent and the committee made it clear that perfection was the ultimate goal. They began to turn up the pressure, they brought in handlers, embedded others. They will stop at nothing to get the results they want—and that comes at the expense of your lives. Even if you take The Treatment now, you can’t really go back to who you were, Sloane. Too much has changed now. You see that don’t you?”
“Maybe I don’t want to be who I was,” I say, a familiar ache at my words. “I just want The Program to leave me alone.”
“Yes, I suppose that’s true. But it’s not that easy. The Program has many flaws, and one they’re starting to discover is with the returners themselves. The brain is smarter than any therapy can be, and trauma and overstimulation are affecting rehabilitation. Mandatory resetting is inevitable for someone like you—a person in a high-stress situation. It’s the only way to keep you sane.”
My stomach takes a sick turn. “Are you saying my memories will come back?”
“No.” He shakes his head. “Not all of them. Bits and pieces out of place, sometimes skewed. It occurs only under extreme duress: tragedy, grief, joining up with rebels, say. These cause cracks in the otherwise smooth surface The Program created. I can imagine it would be very traumatizing to have these unfamiliar thoughts. People have gone crazy from them.” He pauses to study me. “Have you had this problem, Sloane?”
“No,” I lie. It happened when I remembered Miller. I saw what it did to Lacey. Dr. Pritchard’s telling the truth about this.
Could he be telling the truth about everything?
“That’s good,” the doctor says, smiling. “That means it’s not too late. If I had the pill, I could clear the fog and treat the real problem. The Program’s locked away your memories, like those of your brother, to keep you from killing yourself too. What I’m suggesting is that they let patients keep the painful stuff—and no, life won’t be happy and normal. But then again, none of you were really happy, even after your transformation. You wouldn’t have joined the rebels otherwise.”