By the end of the opening paragraph, Alex was so engrossed that he had forgotten he was in the midst of a battlefield.

Deal? What kind of deal did I make?

And why don’t I remember it?

… What will I tell the others , once I find out what I did?

A song tried to enter Alex’s head, but he managed to keep it out.

Wait, what was that about?

He read on, his heart thumping against his chest as if trying to make him stop.

On April 25th, Year One, an intrusion was made by five members of Terrorist Faction 001: Alex Ginelli, Ewan West, Kate Arrowsmith, Jack Hopper, and Charlie Coleman (deceased). Ginelli was separated from his group and trapped inside the Clone Factory Alpha Control Room, and the decision was made to involve Dr Gwen Crossland (psychiatrist/experimental hypnotherapist).

There was a whisper in Alex’s memory about a woman called Gwen, but no more. However, the mention of ‘experimental hypnotherapy’ frightened him.

Dr Crossland’s previous interactions with insurgents had yielded no positive results, despite her unparalleled expertise. Her previous test case, Daniel Amopoulos (deceased) was unable to offer details about Dr Joseph McCormick or ‘Spitfire’s Rise’ due to his own lack of knowledge. He also did not consent to the cloning process before his death.

A nd I did?

In contrast, Ginelli’s resilience was soon worn down, and he was amenable to a deal whereby he would provide a new clone model – and information about his group’s whereabouts – in exchange for his own safety.

Alex’s stomach started to disagree with him. Nothing in these words sounded like the person he believed himself to be. The real Alex Ginelli would last longer than Daniel, surely? Why did he volunteer himself to be cloned? How was his resilience ‘worn down’? And how could he give away the location of Spitfire’s Rise without knowing it himself?

None of it made sense. Grant’s staff would not offer him a survival deal and actually keep him alive at the end of it. And Alex was smart enough to know that, so he would never have accepted such a deal.

A song tried to enter his head again, and he dismissed it. He scanned through the document to get to the part where he was manipulated.

Dr Crossland was instructed to use her experimental ‘two-track mind’ therapy to create two different memory streams: one where Ginelli would remember the entirety of his experience with us, and one where he would remember none of it. Ginelli would be forcefully switched between each memory stream depending on our purposes.

Dr Crossland was able to glean Alex’s vulnerabilities using data from his old social media accounts. Two songs were chosen as triggers to switch Ginelli between his typical state of ignorance and his state of full awareness. His full memory would be switched on and off respectively by: 1) Smoke on the Water (Deep Purple, 1972) 2) Barbie Girl (Aqua, 1997)