tempusfuckit | concept notes

What if your government-sponsored supersoldier/genetically engineered assassin was

unfinished
amnesiac
kind of stupid

Tom knows stuff, as he would be the first to angrily proclaim. He can learn new things too, if it's procedural. Unfortunately, his explicit memory doesn't work so great, he has trouble recognizing faces, and he can't remember much from before the Embiggening.

Fortunately, he doesn't really give a shit. The reeducation system got turned off early and his handlers got super dead and he can be talked into doing things easily because what he does have left is a ridiculous physique and the vague desire to be helpful. And once he's decided to be helpful, it can sometimes be very hard to change his mind or make a dent in his persistence.

He's more a giant manchild than a blank slate. Good intentions, petty criminal tendencies, and lazy hedonism mean that he is nearly indistinguishable in demeanor from your average bro — he comes off dumber maybe, and less malicious. The impression of stupidity does stem mainly from memory problems and malapropisms. Tom tries to keep a journal of Important Lessons, but his motivation to work on it waxes and wanes, and it's terribly disorganized as well. If he tried harder to get his shit together, he probably could do it.

Because he doesn't usually, though, he sort of drifts through life, unfairly healthy and able-bodied, unfairly strong, unfairly mentally resilient, trying to figure out what kinds of people he can trust to give him advice and then trying to apply that advice to his life. His immediate goals are to get a job he can do and to hold onto that job. His long term goals are to fix whatever's wrong with his head so he can remember stuff better. He's not very concerned about what he can't remember, i.e. family, friends, whoever he used to be. He is smart enough to understand that if he's in this position at all, he might very well have been short on social connections.

BACKGROUND NOTES:

the organization that made him was not the U.S. government, and it is separate from the organization who put him in the reeducation box - there's been a coup in Org 1, and Org 2 has been infiltrated and mostly routed
these organizations are not directly in conflict but one was poaching the other's stuff, basically
the U.S. government itself has tried doing this shit in the past, but with limited success; their tendency to rely on contractors is what led to this situation. They got the ball rolling, this isn't directly their fault.
Tom has been lost in the paperwork and the ongoing conflicts between these organizations, actual government agencies, etc.
Big AU point for this universe: the more ridiculous aspects of MKUltra, i.e. The Men Who Stare at Goats stuff as opposed to the torture/interrogation and psychiatric abuse stuff actually bore some fruit. But since the hideously unethical LSD experiments also happened and there was a lot of fallout, the remote viewing and other bizarre psychic stuff also got canned or swept under the rug.
The people involved with those projects, now scattered, are probably the same people from whom Org 1 and Org 2 are mostly drawn. They were both pretending to be affiliated with the U.S. government.
Tom is actually part of one of the less crazy projects (because dude, MKUltra...), and there are a couple dozen others like him with differing loyalties. Most of them are the second phase of Org 1, the ones responsible for the coup; they are trying to take Org 1 in a different, more ethical direction. Those who were successfully "reeducated" by Org 2 are mostly on the run, convinced the government has been "infiltrated" (but are generally unable to form any coherent explanation of how, or who is doing the infiltrating). Org 1 people are trying to track and talk them down.
Who Tom was before is not all that different from who he is now; his memory worked fine, he was an above average student, and he was enlisted in the army as a combat engineer. He spoke almost exactly the same as he does now, minus all the mix-ups in sayings.
He had family, he had a good relationship with them, they are unaware he is missing (fake updates are still being mailed out, but they are going to get suspicious soon), he's currently unaware they exist.

Other thematic notes:

It should feel like the "real story" is happening somewhere else — basically, as if Nikita/Dark Angel/Every Canon That Has These Supersoldiers Or Trained Assassin Characters is going on somewhere else, and Tom is just the lousiest fuck-up who is directly off stage trying to remember the capital of Arizona
He is irrelevant to yet representative of the Amnesiac Escaped Science Project thing going on in his universe. He is going through all the problems the "real characters" are going through, but on his own and with a lot less angst because he's a little bit dumb. He's not as dumb as he comes off, just really loud about it.
And because he has fewer people pulling at his loyalties and pressuring him to make hard decisions, he's better able to hold onto basic humanistic principles, and better at making mostly good decisions. He treats people well. He cares about them, even if he's not the most thoughtful person. His life has lower stakes than all the "real characters" fighting to turn their organization around and Do The Right Thing. He's a little bit Rosencrantz to their Hamlets.
There should be the sense, in many of his scenes, of something like AMAZING SCIENTIFIC ADVANCEMENTS WHICH COULD BE USED TO HELP PHYSICALLY DISABLED PEOPLE ALL OVER THE WORLD (this is one of the things that Org 1 is now pushing for), BUT HAVE INSTEAD BEEN WASTED ON THIS DUDE??? because yeah, Tom is as nice a dude as you can hope for, but it's like, THIS dumbass is gonna maybe live forever? Really? This guy?
He's not going to live forever, though, the nanomachines do have a shelf life, and once they go, the cybernetic stuff will probably follow pretty quick since they're what maintains it all. Then again, Tom is a really weird case, so it's a bit ambiguous.

skills/abilities:

THE BIONIC DUMBASS: he has cybernetic alterations which are deeply integrated into his body, so it's not like MECHANICAL BITS!! but rather, denser muscle mass, reinforced joints, stronger bones, something which monitors and better controls chemicals like adrenaline and dopamine and whatnot. The upshot is that he is peak human athletic condition, has amazing reflexes, and a busy flood of nanomachines constantly healing his body up and keeping it in top shape. It's not super fast, major injuries will take anywhere from 6-12 hours to get back to normal, and he can't regrow things but he may be able to reattach limbs if he's fast enough. Like Claymore but less intense.
PROCEDURAL & BODY MEMORY: a lot of combat stuff never actually got "uploaded," so to speak, so he actually has no special combat training or knowledge, only personal experience. Things that he learned before the various experiments, he stands a good chance of remembering how to do, if not the actual circumstances of how he learned it. He is also very good at learning to do stuff now, as long as it's stuff you do. How to fix something, how to operate a machine, how to get somewhere (but you have to show him, not give him written directions), this stuff you only have to show him once or twice, as he is primed for this kind of learning.

weaknesses:

MEMORY: it's bad, not Memento bad, but he needs to be really paying attention and probably feeling a lot of emotions in order to remember something, and this is still not reliable. Related to this is his trouble remembering faces. He wants to remember very much, but about half the time it doesn't really work out. Things that help are repetition, people not changing their appearance too much, writing in his journal, and involving some kind of physical/kinesthetic component in the teaching.
EASILY CONVINCED: he's unusually agreeable to things as long as they are not straight up "let's do a shitty thing". He tries to be careful about being conned, but the problem is that he still has the compulsion to help and obey, so if something sounds sufficiently non-harmful, he tends to want to do it. He is really not aware of where the compulsion comes from. In his own mind, it has to do with how the first person who helped him after he escaped the lab got into trouble because of him. Basically, he could be sold on something like, stealing these TVs off the back of a truck is totally fine because it's insured and the driver won't get in trouble and I really need the money!!

Some notes about his experiences thus far: early on in his haphazard, dazed escape, he kind of hung out with this older woman who looked out for him a bit. She wasn't a saint or anything, but compared to the rest of his circumstances, she might as well have been. All she did really was not be shitty to him and help him out in fairly minor ways (food, basic good advice, pointed him toward some job opportunities). There wasn't any mentoring or mothering involved. It made a big impression on him (in part because he was still feeling the effects of interrupted reprogramming) and she is one person he makes a real effort to remember.

He has sort of forgotten her face, unfortunately, but he's sure he would know her if he saw her again, and sometimes, if he hits the right combination of environmental/emotional cues, he can dig up a good, clear memory of his time with her to see her face again. This makes him happy, though he also instinctively suspects that the more he does this, the less reliable these memories are. Like making a copy of a copy. So that makes him sad again. He used to have her address in his Things to Remember notebook and would send her postcards, but then after a few scary encounters he still doesn't understand, he became afraid that he would somehow get her in trouble, so he ripped out the page and destroyed it.