“They wandered over from a neighboring farm several years ago and have yet to leave, though I must admit, they do bring a bit of joy into my static life.”

I don’t care about his stupid goats and say, “Okay, so my mom is running the show, you are bankrolling it from behind the scenes. Where do I come in?”

“Well, Elena and I never spoke face-to-face, but we did pass information back and forth through a series of different channels. In one letter, your mother told me she was going to take a step back from the program.” He nods at my father and says, “She’d fallen in love and was getting married in the coming months.”

My father let out a long exhale. “We were married on June 17th, 1977.”

“Right. Well, I didn’t hear from her for over a year, then I received a report from her that she and one of her partners — I never did know the ins and outs of the program, who exactly your mother was working with — had made a breakthrough in sleep amplification. In the animals they were testing on — I believe they were pigs, yes, pigs — they were able to keep them asleep for exact periods of time. After much trial and error, they had perfected a compound that kept the pigs asleep for exactly twenty-three hours a day.”

My chest begins to tighten.

“This wasn’t like giving someone anesthesia — that would negate what they were trying to achieve. This was twenty-three hours of regulated dream-sleep. However, that wasn’t the breakthrough. The breakthrough was the hour the pigs were awake. They were disoriented, depressed, far less stable than the other pigs — the pigs being deprived of sleep. Elena theorized that if the compound were to be combined with our nightmare serum in interrogation — thus, giving prisoners twenty-three hour nightmares, followed by a single hour awake — they would crack in record time.”

“And did they?” I ask.

Ewen puts up his hand. “You are getting ahead of yourself. At this point it was just a couple pigs, the next phase was—”

I finish for him. “—human trials.”

::::

“Right,” he says. “Human trials.”

“So that’s where I come in, after the pigs? She tested this bullshit out on me?”

Ewen shakes his head. “You have it all wrong. Elena, your mother, she wasn’t like me — at least back then. She wouldn’t have dared test something out on an unwilling human, certainly not a baby. No, Elena tested it on herself.”

My eyebrows jump. “She what?”

“Your mother was the first human trial of Compound-23,” he pauses, then adds, “or should I say, you and your mother.”

I lean forward in my chair.