Nobody I Know

The Franco-American psychiatrist Professor J. O'Neill is still proud of the work he did with a couple of Mormon colleagues developing enhanced interrogation techniques for the CIA in places like Abu Ghraib, Guantanamo Bay and black sites all over the world. But after publication of the U.S. Senate's report into CIA torture he became a pariah among fellow psychologists in North America and had to move back to France. In exchange for his unorthodox methods of reintegrating into French society violent jihadis returning from their terrorist activities in Syria and Iraq, the French deep state has given him total control of a rundown psychiatric institution in Paris. He continues to use the enhanced interrogation techniques developed for the CIA, reframing them for the French as a form of enhanced therapy. The psychiatric institution in Paris is now known as the Black House. In addition to the returning jihadis, O'Neill experiments on patients with delusional disorders, focusing on how to prevent them from having a greater choice of behavioral patterns than are available to their psychiatrists. This work of fiction recounts the brutal physical and mental battle between O'Neill and a man of no fixed identity.