What Albus, or rather Francis Bacon, was going through is a special kind of torture. The Renaissance had been defeated a while ago. Their leader, Bacon, was taken as prisoner. As punishment for treason against the United States government, Bacon was sentenced to what is called Nightmare Torture. Essentially, Francis's mind does the torturing. They hook him up to a machine, wipe his memory, and plant vivid, life-like simulations in his brain. The catch: they let his mind do the planting. They force him into a perpetual state of dreaming. To Francis's mind, he wakes up with no memory of who he is. He then tries to escape, but he never can. His memory is wiped each time, and the cycle starts over. Thus, they have effectively turned his mind into his own torturing device.
Francis is doomed to never escape, instead having to "live" through it again and again.
But is that really much different from our own minds?
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And So It Begins Again
Science Fiction"The things...all the things I've seen. It's the same forwards and backwards. It's all the same. We said we'd learn from the past, but we never did." - Excerpt from "And So It Begins Again" I'm going to destroy the universe. My future self, I mean...
