K’ has had a good run of leaving trashed and torched NESTS bases in his wake; quietly making the world a better, megalomaniac-free, place to live from the shadows. But when you’ve made a track record of that without breaking much of a sweat? You start to get cocky. And cockiness leads to mistakes. Mistakes like getting captured.
The smart thing for whatever NESTS remnant(s) captured him to do would be to kill the cartel’s biggest traitor. Instead, it’s payback time for this particular renegade creation of theirs...
They’re going to completely strip K’ of the freedom and autonomy he fought so hard for.
Activating Program 70599 won’t do; it still has too many kinks to be ironed out, and is still only fit to be used in bursts, besides. Instead he’s relentlessly tortured, drugged, and brainwashed - sometimes all three at once - for months on end. Until eventually, inevitably, he breaks. His memory, so fractured and fragile to begin with, erodes away completely. He remembers nothing; is nothing. Just a freshly blanked slate for NESTS to reprogram as they see fit.
They decide to make him their attack dog, sending him specifically after the very people he’d turned traitor alongside. As well as those he’d unknowingly inspired to rebel from afar, or people otherwise presenting themselves as nuisances to NESTS’ efforts to rebuild.
Speaking to him - pleading - will yield nothing. No response. No change in blank expression... nothing. People once friends are now merely targets to be eliminated. He’s essentially been reduced to little more than an order taking doll. Even outside of those missions he’s a shell of the person he once was. He barely talks unless it’s to acknowledge an order, and won’t do anything unless ordered, sometimes including even the more mundane things like eating.
He even seems to avoid sleeping, but this is probably the only conscious self-made decision he makes outside of making snap judgements in combat. To sleep is to invite nightmares of people and things that inexplicably make his chest tighten and ache to the point he can’t breathe, and his skull to throb so hard and painful it’s threatening to split at the seams. He doesn’t understand why this keeps happening and what it means, but it scares him. So as a result, sleep is eluded for as long as physically possible.
Perhaps this means there’s hope for him yet; that there’s still some tiny fragment of him buried alive under all that subliminal programming?
As a side note, I think would be interesting to explore Isla’s thoughts on such a situation, whether she was the one that brought him to this, or was contacted by another sect of NESTS agents and put in charge of him. If it’s the latter, maybe she’d come to realise that this is... wrong? Or at least, not at all what she wanted in terms of revenge; that such a victory is as hollow as the new look in K’’s eyes. Cuz I imagine ordering him to wait on her hand and foot is amusing af for the first couple of weeks but then it’s just.... vaguely uncomfortable? Or just not as fun as it should be for some reason? ¯\_(ツ)_/¯ Idk if that’s something that’d ever cross the trashbaby’s thoughts, but I think it’s an interesting show of character growth imo.
