He lifts his head against the neck restraint, what amounts to a nod. “In several of our subprojects with MK-Ultra, we wiped the subjects’ brains clean. Many had obsessive-compulsive disorders or disassociate personality disorders, and when we wiped their brains, these reset and went away.”

“A personality disorder is far different than my condition.”

“No, it really isn’t. Like obsessive-compulsive disorder, your sleep cycle is learned behavior. Your brain learned to only be awake for one hour a night, just like someone might learn to be afraid of going outside. Your sleep-wake cycle isn’t encoded in your DNA, say like having blue eyes.”

“So, nature versus nurture.”

“Right.”

“But this happened when my mother was pregnant with me.”

“Doesn’t matter. It was still something learned by your brain. Something Compound-23 taught it.”

“Okay, so how do you reset it? You gonna give me electroshock therapy? Because they tried that on me when I was little.”

“No. God, no,” he says, scoffing. “It has to do with electromagnetic radiation.”

I cut my eyes at him.

He takes a long breath. “It is quite complicated, but the short of it is radio waves and brain waves are both types of electromagnetic radiation, waves of energy that move at the speed of light. The only difference is the wave’s frequencies.”

“I’m with you.”

“When you remember something, your brain fires thousands of neurons — perhaps even millions in your case — creating a wave of energy. We simply created a machine that mimics these brain waves, and by concentrating the waves on specific areas of the brain we interrupt normal activity. It is a process called Transcranial Magnetic Stimulation.”

“Transcranial Magnetic Stimulation,” I repeat. I’d heard a thousand medical terms in my days, but this isn’t one of them.

“We overstimulate the brain with trillions of electromagnetic waves the same frequency as brain waves, and the brain can’t handle it, and to protect itself from imploding, the brain will basically dump everything it can, then shut down.”

“What do you mean, everything?”

“Everything that has ever been encoded.”

“So, what, like going back to being a baby?”

“Yes and no.”

“What do you mean?”

“Yes, your brain will be completely blank, possibly even blanker than an infant’s, but your brain will already have the wiring in place, the synapses, connections, that are formed as you mature. And as I mentioned earlier, you have billions more than your average person.”

“So what you’re saying is, my brain would be blank, but I would be able to learn faster?”

“Correct. The subjects who we experimented on learned how to speak in less than two months, to write in four months. Most regained full brain aptitude within three years.”