research

That night, Diego got out of bed when he couldn't sleep. For hours after Diego hunched over his laptop, the glow burning into his sleepless eyes. The house was quiet except for the faint creaks of his mother moving around in the kitchen below, humming in Spanish as though she’d been born into that role.

He typed furiously. Personality changes sudden adult onset. Enter.

Search results: neurological disorders, brain trauma, rare diseases.

He scrolled, jaw tight. None of it fit—Valeria hadn’t hit her head, hadn’t had seizures, hadn’t shown signs of dementia.

Next query: **** identity change psychological.

A trickle of results: cult indoctrination, coercive control, Stockholm syndrome. Diego clicked one, skimming articles about isolation, manipulation, the slow erosion of self. He underlined phrases in his notebook: gaslighting, dependency building, erasure of old self.

It sounded terrifyingly close.

But when he tried brainwashing methods adults, he found military reports, CIA declassified experiments. ****, isolation, sensory overload. His stomach knotted. Is Chase doing that?

No—he would’ve noticed ****, machines, something external. Instead, Chase just talked to her, spent time with her. Valerie returned looking… different, not just acting different.

Diego rubbed his temples. “How do you change someone’s face, their voice, their whole… self?”

The answer seemed impossible. He found forums with wild speculation—MKUltra, microchips, subliminal messages hidden in TV shows. Some threads he closed in disgust, others he bookmarked desperately, chasing the faint hope that one might contain a clue.

But not once did the word hypnosis enter his search terms. The possibility didn’t even flicker in his mind. He imagined Chase as some kind of mad scientist, with chemicals and secret labs—not a man who simply whispered truths until they became real.

By dawn, Diego had scrawled a list in his notebook, each word circled, underlined, stabbed into the page:

• Cult techniques

• Psychological manipulation

• Brainwashing (cold war)

• Identity erasure

• Reprogramming

At the bottom, in a jagged scrawl: Find reversal.

When his mother knocked gently on his door, speaking soft Spanish—“Dieguito, ¿quieres desayuno?”—his chest clenched. He slammed the notebook shut, shoving it under his pillow.

Her voice was warm, maternal, but not hers. Or maybe it was, and he was the crazy one.