You discover the horrifying trauma that left a friend amnesiac. Do you tell her?

In My Humble Opinion
1

It’s another longish fantasy hypothetical, amigos, this one a direct sequel to last week’s. You’ve been warned, so kwityerbitching. To recap: the dear friend of the thread title is Esme, a Spider-man-strong, hypergenius superhero and former brainwashed slave of the Villainous Cabal of Genocidal Assholes. The hypothetical you, incidentally, is no slouch him- or herself: no superpowers, but possessing computer hacking and forensic science skills that would make Abby Scuito green with envy. You and Esme met when you freed her from the VCoGA’s brainwashing, and she’s been platonically in love with you ever since.

Esme has no memory of her life before being a brainwashed assassin. For the first three years of your friendship this bothered her greatly, and many of your adventures together had at least a secondary goal of finding out about her past. But the tale related in the previous thread shocked her out of that, and she said “I’m gonna let it go. I wish I knew the truth about my past, but I’m not letting the quest for it rule my life.” Since then she’s gotten psychologically healthier: not as emotionally dependent on you, more able to make connections with others. She’s even gotten laid (not all that hard, given that she looks like Swin Cash.) But she’s still not completely stable. Ordinarily she kills only when necessary, but on the three occasions you two have confronted any VCoGA bigwig, you have had to restrain her from immediately ripping their heads off, regardless of whether the bigwig was surrendering or retreat was the better option for the two of you.

So enough backstory. In your most adventure, you and Esme broke into one of the VCoGA’s many headquarters for two purposes: she was rescuing a kidnapped scientist while you hacked into the bad guys’ computer systems for, I don’t know, building a wave motion gun or something, it doesn’t matter. Both phases of the mission were successful, but Esme got badly injured; a norm would have been killed, and even she needed a couple of weeks bedrest. While she did, you analyzed the terabytes of data you downloaded–and found to your surprise that that data included her origin.

Esme was not born super. She was given her powers by the VCoGA, whom she worked for thinking they were an arm of the US army, who gave her her powers–for obvious reasons after brainwashing her. The brainwashing procedure required that the [del]subject[/del] victim be subjected to an extreme trauma. In Esme’s case, that meant, during a combat training exercise, using holographic and auditory illusions to manipulate her into killing her entire family: her mother and father, her husband, and even her two-year-old daughter. When the illusion was lifted, Esme was horrified to the point of catatonia, and that opened the door to the memory wipe and brainwashing. There are audio-video recordings of the whole process.

The files include a psychological evaluation on her. The two lead [del]psychiatrists[/del] motherfuckers on the project disagree on what will happen if she is ever told the truth of her origins. One believed that she forgo all other considerations for a revenge spree; the other that she would become suicidal. Both agreed that, given that any revenge spree would be focused on them and the other VCoGA bigwigs, it was best not to risk it.

You spend days analyzing the data. As best you can tell – and nobody in the world is better at this shit than you – everything you have seen is genuine.

When you see Esme again, she asks only about the MacGuffin y’all were looking for. Do you tell her what you discovered about her as well?

2

You lost me at platonic.

3

Seriously, though, I’d probably tell her.

4

She is a psycho. You can tell her if you want, I’m trying to stay as far away from her as I can.

5

Step 1: Build a bomb shelter at least a continent away from any participants in this fiasco.
Step 2: Leave all of the evidence anonymously on her doorstep.
Step 3: Remain in the bomb shelter for at least six months.

6

I’m no psychiatrist, and I’ve no business second-guessing the analyses of the two shrinks who came up with the two most likely outcomes of a reveal. Neither suicidal depression nor revenge-fueled berserker frenzy qualify as conditions that I would view as healing to my friend. And Esme is my friend (and I am hers). Her emotional well-being is important to me. I can shoulder the burden of this knowledge for her, for the sake of that friendship. In short, no, I do not share my discovery.

On one level, of course, this could be construed as denying her agency, but I’ve successfully rationalized that doing so in this matter is justified (the elements of that rationalization being our shared history, and my knowledge of the progress of her recovery).

The question remaining before me is, do I find myself a collaborator (or a monitor) who will restrain me from making a habit of it, and if so, who and where?

7

Haha, “pork cops.”

8

I started to think along these lines, but the more I hear about this girl, the more I want to be hiding in a bomb shelter. No healthy relationship includes the statement “I can’t tell her the truth or people will die.”

9

  1. When can we buy the book? :smiley:

  2. I tell her what I have found, lay it out for her, including the possible outcomes, and ask her what she wants to do. Whichever road she chooses, I’m on board.

  3. knowing the possible consequences, I would ask her to agree to a few conditions before the reveal ('cause she’s picking that, you know she is). She needs to agree that I get the last say on the outcome of any “hunt”. She’ll be mad and she won’t be rational. If we can capture and turn them in for justice and exposure, we need to do that. If, for whatever reason, we can’t capture, Ii’m good with destroy. She also needs to agree to counseling.

  4. Taking down VCoGA is now the top of my to-do list, whatever she decides.

  5. No chocolate? :dubious:

10

My first question would be, “Does Esme really want to know the horrible truth?” Given her truth-hunting spree before, I would infer that she does. Accepting that she may never know is different from not wanting to know anymore; according to what she said in the OP, she still wants to find out, but isn’t making it the centerpiece of her life anymore. If she’s super-smart then she’s considered the possibility that her origins may be appalling, and decided she would want to know anyway.

I’d sit her down in the safest place I knew, and have a chat about it. I’d probably ask if she wanted to see the evidence, or just be told about it, and give her which ever one she picked. I’d also probably point out that the shame of exposure and a lifetime of rotting away alone in prison is worse torture than the sweet release of death, but that’s just my opinion, and I don’t have a remote control for anybody else, so it’s her choice.

I would, however, be very firm that she was to leave the uninvolved families of the evildoers alone. You want to kill the baddies, you kill the baddies, but murdering innocents just to torture someone else is not on. Vengeance could be had rather effectively by telling the evildoer’s loved ones exactly what s/he did, and watching them cut off all contact. There’s an argument to be made that the best revenge would be to make sure the baddie’s family had a brilliant life on the condition that they never acknowledge the existence of said evildoer again.

Also probably worth pointing out that any minions she encounters may well be in the same boat that she was, and that killing them would not count towards any sort of vengeance high score. No sense in being wasteful.

11

Since I don’t know that it isn’t a really good fake, I’m not telling her, at least not the details directly. I will tell her that we found what appears to be her origin, but emphasise that it could be fake. Because, you know, it’s an awfully convenient coincidence that we just happened to find it, don’t you know? I will also emphasise the statement of the two chief malefactors. Then I will give her a DVD and leave it up to her. She can play it if she wishes.

12

I would probably tell her something along the lines of “I think I’ve discovered where you got your powers, and I warn you, it’s extremely traumatic and depressing and nothing good will come of it beyond ‘knowing the truth.’” She seems to want to know, and in her shoes I’d want to know too, so if she confirmed that, I’d tell her.

13

Suppose you had surgery done without anesthetic. You were tied down and screamed and screamed in horrible pain the whole time. Then, after experiencing the agonizing pain of being cut and burned for hours, they give you a drug that erases the last couple hours of memory, making it so you don’t remember it even happened. You wake up from the drug and feel fine.

There is a way to restore your lost memories. Would you take it?

14

Of course I’d tell her. Not doing so is a form of terrorism.

Also I’ll take the lamb chops.

15

Ah, schnitzel . . .

What was that? Oh yeah, first I’d lay everything I know out to her - that I have a piece of information about her past, that she might not want to know it, that the most qualified people said it would make her go berserk, etc. If she still seems rational and logical, and still wants to know, then I give her the whole story. Maybe not the wisest course of action, but I feel she has a right to know about her past if she wants to.

16

I want a trained psychiatrist to treat her, so that he can gradually approach the critical memories, without just stomping on 'em bluntly.

Not, “You killed your own mother, ha ha!” but, very slowly, over a period of months, even years, “How do you feel about your mother?”

When the groundwork has all been prepared by proper psychiatric technique, the patient will be ready for the truth.

If someone had been kind, caring, and patient and led Oedipus Rex carefully to the truth, he might have coped without gouging out his own eyes.

17

Well I suppose there are 2 kinds of preferences. Those that make you better off and those that make you worse off. Knowing her origin is pretty clearly an example of the latter. And she’s resigned to not learning about her past. So I’d keep it a secret.

“What am I doing? Oh, just going through some files…”

This is actually a no-brainer for me. If I understand it correctly Esme exists outside the law in many ways given her superpowers. If she was an ordinary woman, the moral calculus would shift somewhat. In that case I might tell her what I thought she could handle and what I thought her “Better-off” preferences were. But in this case there are innocents involved, those caught in the potential cross-fire. So it’s best to err on the side of caution.

18

I don’t think this situation is analogous at all to the one presented in the OP. There’s a large difference between undergoing a (presumably) consensual surgery, which is also no mystery (you knew you were going to undergo it) and not having any memory about your life before you got your powers, or where they came from, if anything was done against your will, etc.

Piggy backing off this, I actually think a much more interesting hypothetical is this - what if you find out that Esme had been a supervillain before her memory loss, someone totally depraved and evil who willfully committed numerous atrocities? Do you tell her then? There’s still the risk of her going suicidal (“I’m a monster and deserve to die!”), as well as the risk of her flipping and going homicidal… but not just against those who wronged her; instead possibly going back to villain status. Which to me seems more of a questionable risk.

19

I’d tell her about it, in roundabout terms, before I tell her about the details, but yes, I would if she asks to know more. Nothing was her fault, she was a victim. She didn’t kill those people, the guys brainwashing her did.

It’d be different if she was a terrible person who then was given amnesia and is now a good person, in that case I might not, I’m undecided.

20

Di I tell? I use three rules to decide:
Is it true? Yes.
Is it kind? Nope.
Is it helpful? There lies the rub. I’d have to watch her and possibly question her gently, to see if it’s actually helpful. if it seems she has actually left it behind and doesn’t want to know, then why bring it up again?

One thing I might do is delete all of the video and audio. Nobody needs to see that shit.

If I did tell her, then I’d drop everything and spend time with her. I wouldn’t just let her run off. If revenge is in the cards, I might even help her, but I’d try to help her do it with a cooler head than in the instant rage, and I don’t want her to suicide.