Content warning: suicide
Fuck Robert Maxwell. Fuck that fucking piece of shit liar.
I spent the last 10 years of my life thinking I was someone else.
My earliest memory--the earliest memory he let me have--is waking up on that ship of his. He said my name was Jennifer Reston. My family had been killed in a horrible accident. He found me and wanted to look after me. I was twelve. What could I say to that? I had to trust him and his creepy friend, Paul.
I didn't know any different. I thought maybe one day my memories would come back. Amnesia can strike if you experience head trauma or suffer intense stress. That's what he told me. "Your memory should come back soon," he kept saying. He lied the entire time. He knew it wouldn't come back. He knew he'd made sure of it.
Bless Mitchell's heart for putting up with me like he did. I don't know how he could have loved this empty shell. I guess one thing about being a hollow excuse for a person is you can project anything you want onto it. But that's exactly what Robert did to me, isn't it?
My real name is Adrianne Berkeley. Robert didn't want me to find out who I really was because he feared what I would do. He thought he could make me into someone else. And he did, in a way: he made me a child soldier. I didn't know there was anything wrong with it, at first. I couldn't remember being a kid, watching Saturday morning cartoons. I thought it was normal to be trained with firearms at a young age. I thought it was normal to be brought into dangerous situations and to be asked to lay down cover fire. I thought it was normal to worry whether you're going to see your adoptive father again because he's on a mission to kill people. What did I know?
Then it progressed to me killing people myself. He said they deserved it. He said we had to save the future. The future would be horrific if we didn't act now. No matter what we did, it was all justified because we were doing it for the right reasons. I believed him. I believed in him. I helped him recruit Mitchell. I worked with Taki and Luthos, even though in the back my mind it always felt like he was using them. Paul, I don't know. He stuck around for his own reasons. And then all the people on the fringes, who helped him out because he told them a good story about how bad the future would be if they didn't. "It may not make sense right now, but trust me," he said. And they did trust him. He used me to earn their trust. Who could think Robert Maxwell, the man who selflessly took this broken girl into his home, into his life, would be a shitty person? I was nothing but a token to him, an asset to be trotted out when he needed to make a point. No, that's true. I was also his tool. He aimed me and I would pull the trigger. I did it happily. It's what he wanted. I only wanted to make him happy.
But then the dam he put in my memory started to break down. It was blackouts at first. Nightmares. Standing over a man I didn't recognize, with a knife in my hand. Blood everywhere. I was crying. I'd wake up screaming from those. He'd tell me they're just nightmares. He gave me pills to sleep. I didn't know at the time that he knew exactly what the dreams were, and asked DANTE to come up with another way to block those memories.
The first time I overheard, I thought he just wanted something to help me sleep. I didn't know his true purpose. I didn't know what he'd done to me. I found that out when I started to increase my suspicions and finally confronted DANTE about it. The ancient computer is programmed to do a lot of things, but lying isn't one of them. He can withhold the truth, though. And he withheld so much that it was obvious he'd been told not to give me the facts.
"What happened the first time I came here?" I'd asked.
"You were injured and required medical attention."
"OK, so you patched me up. Then what?"
"Then Robert took you in as his own child."
"What about before that?"
"My historical records do not indicate any notable traces of a 'Jennifer Reston' prior to that day."
Clever fucking machine. Nothing he said was untrue, exactly. I didn't know enough to realize he was dancing around it. I just knew I wasn't satisfied with those answers.
Robert stonewalled me, too. "You had a normal life before that day," he said. "It's terrible what happened to your family, but you have to move on."
He didn't kill my father. I get that. I did it. The reasons why come to me in flashes of memory, now. I can almost understand Robert doing what he did. He didn't think I could stand having those memories, that I'd be forever tortured by them. He worried I'd be unstable. He needed a blank slate he could mold to his will. In Jennifer Reston, he got exactly what. Adrianne Berkeley was a liability. She had to go.
But he never gave me the chance to decide for myself. He, a total stranger, decided for me what my future should be like. He picked me up like a plaything he found tossed at the side of the road, and treated me with about as much respect.
When I got DANTE to spill, he was actually telling me about June Freeson. That part of Robert's motivation, I understood perfectly. He wasn't shy about it. He'd tell anybody who'd listen, he wanted to prevent the War largely because he wanted to save her in particular. Most people didn't see much to argue with, there. He was trying to prevent billions of deaths, not just one. He wasn't satisfied with just one. What he didn't tell them was how many times he did try to save just the one. The first time he brought her back, he put her in the role of big sister. She was always sweet to me, but her eyes said something was gravely wrong. I didn't have the words for it back then. One day, she was gone. Robert told me he'd sent her back to her future to live out her life safely. DANTE told me the truth: she'd killed herself in front of Robert. She couldn't stand what he'd done to bring her back. She couldn't stand giving up everyone she'd ever known except for him, and seeing him so much older, so cynical, a creature of violence and manipulation. She knew what he was before I did. She was always smarter than me.
I realized he had a pattern. He liked young girls because they reminded him of June. That's who I reminded him of. I can't even get into that whole situation with Arianne, who actually was his flesh and blood, even if she came from a different timeline. Funny that he rejected his chance to be an actual father. But his interest in us wasn't sexual--not overtly. He loved June, as much as he was capable of love, but when he had her aboard the ship, 16 years old while he was pushing 50... even he couldn't bring himself to sink that low.
Jesus, why am I defending this man? So he didn't fuck teenagers, so what? Is this better? Is what he did to me forgivable somehow?
I want to hate him. I want every part of my being to seethe with anger and hatred toward him. But I can't. There were plenty of times he was kind to me for no reason that directly benefited him. Those memories are real. I just can't reconcile it. How can the same man who blocked my memories and gave me a new identity be the same one that claimed to love me like a father? He'd take me out on a mission, I'd shoot some people, we'd come home to Inferno and there'd be a Backstreet Boys CD that he got me. What kind of fucked up childhood is that?
I have to remind myself that the reason behind all this is that he's afraid of me. He's afraid of me, of what I'd done, of what I'd said, and what I'd become. I don't know why he didn't kill me when he found me. Maybe it's like he said. He remembered what happened to June and just couldn't bring himself to do that to anyone. He wanted to give me another chance. But he also thought by preventing me from knowing who I was, he might prevent the things his own history said I would do.
I don't know what drove Adrianne Berkeley to do what she did on "Black Monday." I can guess. Robert told me about what led up to it. The years of economic turmoil and austerity. There was endless money for wars, but none for the people. She'd spent years on the run after killing her father. She fell in with some really strange people--terrorists, to be blunt. They weren't shy about being that. They wore it proudly. They wanted to overthrow what they saw as a hopelessly corrupt parasite government and start a new dawn for America. I can sympathize. I'd like a new dawn for myself, personally.
She went out in a blaze of glory, or at least a blaze of extreme violence. Her allies created a diversion while she got into the Capitol with a suicide vest. She didn't exactly decapitate the whole government in a single stroke, but she crippled it enough that it started to go over the edge not long after. The political machine never quite recovered. But it also set events in motion that would eventually lead to the War. On that balance, I guess she was wrong. But some days you really do want to blow up a lot of shitty old white men just to see what'll happen.
Not me, though. No blaze of glory here. If you're the one who finds me, I'm sorry. Tell Mitchell I'm sorry, too. I really tried to hang in there. I really did. But if you run into that son of a bitch Robert Maxwell, feel free to punch him straight in the dick. He deserves worse.
-Adrianne Berkeley, aka Jennifer Reston September 3, 1999