The technician knew what was going on in his mind because he was a technician--everything he was feeling the technician must have had an answer for. The others must have--There are no others, James. You're the only thing like you. No, that wasn't true. There were other assets, there had to be. Weren't there?
Or was the voice right? Was he a prisoner of war? The very thought made a few of the slippery ideas he couldn't quite put his fingers on slow down, enough for him to get more of an idea of what they were. Prisoner of war--and yes, of course that made sense. He was a Sergeant with an American name. And that number... Serial number.
The man from his memory loomed large in his mind for just a moment, the one that had called him the fist of HYDRA. Arnim Zola. Wow, you're awful with names. He'd loomed over him more than once. Several times, he'd dealt with James.
And he wasn't willing to accept the war prisoner idea because it directly contradicted what the programming was telling him. That he was a weapon. Not an individual of the enemy's army. There you go, sport. Putting it together.
"I was a prisoner of war," he said. "A soldier of the United States Army. One of the--" Howling Commandos. Boy, we gotta work on names. "Howling Commandos. And HYDRA captured me after I fell." This snapped to another memory; the top of a building, standing beside a small man. The name was irrelevant. He was a handler, not a target. The Soldier was expected to jump from one rooftop to the next. He was told he could do it. But he had frozen, would not move. Stay in the present. Worry about what they programmed out of you later. "I lost my arm in the fall. They made me something different. Is that right?"
There we go. See? You're listening to what he said. And for the first time, that voice in his head was beginning to sound a little more familiar, like it sort of belonged there.