Epilogue

One year passed, and America and Canada had pretty much entirely recovered from those three hellish weeks. Canada was once again his sweet-tempered and eager (if overlooked) self. America was loud, obnoxious, energetic, and completely normal. In fact, one would never have known that the incident had happened, were it not for one thing: the few times that England, China, or Canada dared ask if anything was learned about the fate of the test subjects or the people responsible for the experiment, America went quiet in ways that were too much like how he looked during times of war for anyone to pursue to topic.

Cuba and China moved on past the incident as well. With all of the things in need of looking after in his country, China had long forgiven America and left it to him to take care of his affairs. Cuba, for the most part, was happy denying that he was ever mixed up in any schemes cooked up by America's government.

Another World Meeting rolled around. Half of the nations were late, and a quarter of the other half didn't show up at all. America fell asleep midway through Spain's presentation, France tried to grope everyone, Canada was marked as absent in spite of actually being there, Russia terrified the Baltic brothers simply by sitting next to them, and Germany nearly burst a blood vessel trying to keep order.

When a one-hour break was finally called, everyone went their separate ways to relax. America sought out Japan to discuss one of his favorite topics - video games.

"So there are these people on the internet saying about this game," America was saying, slurping a cup of some soft drink or another, which he procured from God-knew-where. "They say it was around in arcades in the eighties, but then it disappeared. Its name was Polybius. You ever heard of it?"

"I am sorry, America-kun," said Japan. "I am afraid that no one from my place made such a game."

"Yeah, no one knows who made it. But here's the scary thing! All these people are saying that these creepy men wearing black suits would come in and check the machines! So folks think that the games had been created for some reason, like that aliens are monitoring us through them or something!"

"How interesting," said Japan, which was how he replied when he had no clue what America was talking about.

England was about to go over and tell America off for being such a gullible idiot, but found he couldn't.

Conspiracy theories. The works of bored fools and people who spend too much time on the internet.

But it was only a year ago that he and several other nations had rescued America and Canada from a secret plot to abduct and brainwash countless unsuspecting people, all done through America's government.

And if that didn't sound like a conspiracy theory, England didn't know what did.

So he let America go on with his speculations. It might do the lad good to consider such things, England mused. Several decades ago, a monitored arcade machine. A year ago, brainwashing. Tomorrow, God knew what. Best to think and be prepared and be able to accept it, when the time came.

Because all would most assuredly not be well.

Final Notes: While I did not intend for this fic to have a specific setting (hence the lack of actual dates), I based what happened to America and Canada off of the works of Dr. D. Ewan Cameron, who, among other things, believed mental illness to be a transmutable disease and hoped to cure schizophrenia through a procedure known as psychic driving (mentioned in fic).

Psychic driving pretty much worked as was written in the fic: Cameron would take test subjects (usually patients seeking treatments for minor things like anxiety disorder, and who didn't consent to experimentation) and try to use drugs such as LSD or curare to wipe their minds blank, and then tie them down and force them to listen to a tape on loop to "reprogram" their minds properly.

Cameron's experiments were later used for a CIA program known as Project MKUltra, which was essentially a brainwashing experiment to try to combat brainwashing techniques believed to have been developed by China, Russia, and North Korea.

At least one test subject was believed to have committed suicide because of the drugs administered to him. Many others suffered side affects such as severe memory loss, in some cases forgetting who their parents were, or mistaking the researchers as their parents. To this day, it's uncertain how many people were involved with the tests, and what exactly the extent of the damage was.

So yeah, the more you know! :D

Thanks for reading