Internal Sabotage and Entrapment
Shortly after I turned eighteen years old on paper, my exploiter set me up for a short time in a Yale-owned apartment intended for university society members, housing not normally available to incoming first-year students who were generally relegated to the dorms. Although it seemed odd to me that I hadn’t been placed with the freshmen, there was hope in my heart that the situation was real and that I could finally start living a normal life by attending university at eighteen as a traditional student. That hope would be short-lived.
What followed was her slipping me enough drugs, without my knowledge, that she was able to convince me that I was eight and not eighteen. She then walked me over to the office of a recruiter for a job opportunity that Yale students I had spoken to rightfully deemed as "too dangerous and too much of a sacrifice." We sat down with a military officer, went through a contract that was easily more than thirty pages long, and I signed – because I thought I was eight and it was the quickest way out of the building so we could go get the ice cream that had been promised to me.
If the officer in that room was not in on the con, he should have been fired for hiring an eighteen-year-old who acted like an eight-year-old squirming in a chair.
We walked to Ashley’s Ice Cream, several blocks away and past the law school. That ended up being the most expensive ice cream cone of my life. It was a crunchy sugar cone with a scoop of cookie dough ice cream and a second scoop of mint chocolate chip on top. I paid for it with my entire future. If I had known the real cost, I probably would have savored it for longer.
We returned to the student apartment. There, the recruiter stole my bankbook and told me to pack my things. I didn’t get to attend any classes that year, at least none I can remember. But it would be the beginning of her collecting a paycheck for a job I would be forced into without my true consent or the knowledge of how to get out of it. I had been too high during the contract signing to even remember which Department of Defense contractor or office it had been with.
I did visit one of their offices a solitary time that I remember. It was early on in my work for them, and hidden in a silo beneath a larger structure in what may have been the Florida Keys. I was heavily drugged for the journey, but I do remember The Keys. Sitting in the passenger seat while we were driving between the islands, with me high out of my mind was downright terrifying with the water on both sides.
I was allowed to enter the building, and then invited down into the silo. There, I was given an employee manual to read. The one handed to me must have been at least 500 pages. They said I could skip to somewhere around 170. I wanted to tell someone that I shouldn’t have been there, but I didn’t know who was in cahoots with the recruiter and who wasn’t. Standing there, I had no idea who was a foe and who was a friend, and I had no intention of finding out the hard way while trapped underground with them.
My choice to remain silent made a certain survival-level logic while in that governmental-deceit-accustomed society and in that situation. But you have to realize at the organizational level, at the functional level, at the level of oversight and things actually working as intended - your own first-day employees being so accustomed to levels of infiltration and exploitation within your halls that they can't even take a reasonable gamble to find one legitimate and non-corrupted worker to speak with and voice their concerns - that signals that you don't have a company anymore, or a nation… not a functioning one.
So, while I was stuck there, trying to look like I belonged, I read the manual.
It’s worth noting that, while I barely skimmed most of it in my anxiety, I did read the key points and titles, and came away with the gist of it, most of which I have already shared with you:
Yes, I was a scientist, but my first duty was to the company. Company work came first, and protecting their secrets was the top priority. Everyone who worked for the company did the company work.
If I could manage to also do my scientific research during that, good for me. But it was not a priority and there was no guarantee it would happen.
I was never to discuss anything when above ground / on the public level.
Obviously, I’ve broken rule three intentionally, and probably rule one both intentionally and not. But they broke their side of the contract before I even signed it. You cannot rule solely by fear, especially not while burning out the people you are attempting to rule over. I’m too exhausted for fear.
They should never have let me sign the contract while obviously drugged in the first place. They knew who they were working with. They trained them. And they knew what they had been trained in, including drugging, subversion, and coercion. Not checking to see if a new recruit is sober when sitting next to one of their own snakes is reprehensible and irresponsible. I’d be amazed if someone wasn’t getting a cut of the profits from that one.
By that point, I was already exhausted. In an attempt to take a break from doing damage control for others, I started clawing back more moments of my life for myself.