“Please…don’t,” I said.
My pleas fell on deaf ears. They brought the bed up right next to Laura and carried another apparatus over. The orderlies attached a few electrodes to my head and stuck it into the apparatus. I felt defeated as they did this, watching them work in silence while Colburn observed near the door, quietly talking to a man in a lab coat.
Everything seemed to be done slowly and meticulously, while I could only watch and guess what might happen. I imagined them flipping a switch and then immediately find myself being born again in my next life, having died from whatever they were going to test. I imagined reverting back to what I had been experiencing the past four days, my psyche shattered and mind completely detached from reality. I imagined nothing happening, all the orderlies looking on in disappointment as their procedure fails. I imagine feeling immense pain shoot through my body, unbearable and inescapable, being carried with me through the rest of eternity. I imagine dying and never coming back, dead forever.
That last thought sounded comforting.
“There’s something unusual about subject two’s brain pattern,” one of the orderlies said.
“Yes, we saw that before,” Colburn replied hopefully, “he tells me he’s been treated for seizures.”
“It might pollute the data,” another voice said.
“This is just a proof of concept,” Colburn said, sounding a little impatient, “I just want to show the top brass that this procedure can actually work.”
“I’m sorry,” I heard Laura’s voice faintly, “I…shouldn’t have run off…selfish…”
“I’m sorry, too,” I said, “If…this works, you…might not like…what you learn…about me…”
“All monitoring systems are setup,” an orderly said, “shall we proceed?”
“Yes,” Colburn said, “proceed.”
An orderly approached me. I could only see a part of their torso as they fiddled with something. A hand reached down, tilting my head. I wanted to protest, to resist, to struggle against them, but it just didn’t seem to matter. Their other hand reached in and brushed up against the back of my head.
And then there was a strange sensation on the back of my head – a moist, warm tickling and then pinching followed by a surge of euphoria as they slid something soft into my flesh. And then a ringing in my ears as my vision began to blur.
“Second subject connected,” the orderly said.
He took his hands off my head, letting it rest. I could feel something warm and soft on my neck, connected to the back of my head. And then it hit me.
I screamed.
Chapter 43
“Subject one seems to be responding better than subject two,” a disembodied voice said.
I looked around, confused, eyes unable to focus. There were people around, their faces were blurry. Smeared. Lines and smudges of flesh colored blurriness seemed to streak behind their obscure faces as they looked about, murmuring incoherently at each other in far off voices. All I felt was cold and fear.
Something else was off. The room looked different, but the confusion was the same. Beeping and humming echoed through my head, eyes dry and itchy. The orderlies had different clothes on. Lab coats. The featureless smear of their faces was like a toddler’s coloring book. A fleshy blur that seemed to track along with their movements before fading. None of it was the same, yet it was all the same. The instruments attached were different. The walls, ceiling, computers. All different.
I shivered uncontrollably, reaching up, rubbing my eyes with small, icy fists. It felt as if it was someone else rubbing my eyes for me. It was a motion I wanted to do, but it wasn’t me doing it. Voices floated in and out, most of what they were saying incoherent. An overwhelming feeling of remembering coursed through my mind. Stronger than memory. Stronger than Déjà vu.
There’s something different about me, too… Through blurry eyes, I look down at my body. It was naked. The skin pale gray. A female body.
I tried moving, but every muscle was too weak. My head pounded.
Am I…hung over?
The last thing that happened…
“Will either of the subjects be ready for testing soon?” another voice asked.
“Both are still weak from the resurrection procedure,” the first void said.
“They want to do the interrogations…”
I sat in a room, a man and a woman on the other side of the table, another man by the door. The room had a strange vagueness to it, some areas clearer than others. A dent in the table reflected the fluorescent lights in a large, three-pointed star. Blurry, endless hallways stretched away from the small window on the door. Shackles bound my wrists, looking almost comically large on my scrawny, pale arms.
Words grated against me with impatient harshness. I could only focus on the man’s large, pink lips that looked almost perpetually moist, like two blood-gorged leeches, his tongue worming out of his mouth and lick over them every time he stopped talking. The woman had nails painted red, hands constantly folding and rubbing one another as if giving each other warm, comforting hugs, one occasionally sweeping over the table in front of her. A gentle but incomprehensible voice washed over me with soothing lies I couldn’t understand. All I noticed of the man by the door was the bulbous bald head with an ugly pink smudge on top.
Otherwise they were blurry and featureless, barely discernable from the room. I rubbed my eyes, still dry and itchy. Ringing in my ears almost drowned out their soft murmurs.
Everything ached. My throat scratchy from breathing tubes. Wrist sore from IV drips and restraints, now covered in tape. Punctures in my back, chest, legs, arms, fingers and toes from probes and syringes being inserted. More instruments had been stuck in my nose, ears, mouth, anus, vagina, and urethra on an almost daily basis, making every mucous membrane raw and sore. Head throbbed, hair shaved off, sutures making a jagged circle around the crown of my skull. My stomach was cramped and nauseous, my waste having come out as liquid, pink with strings of dead flesh for days. I had no microbiome because…
…because she was dead for decades.
As I sat, fear and anger swelled through me in confused waves. I watched leech lips and hugging hands and bulbous head move about the smeared, distant room and all I wanted to do was hurt them. I could just about feel a knife in my hand, slicing the blade, feeling the resistance of flesh as I pinched the thick, pink lips, pulling them away from the pale, featureless face so I could run the blade across, peeling them off. I could feel the crunch as I sliced that blade through the hand’s fingers, pushing down, increasing the pressure until crack, the knife went down to the surface of the table, taking a red-tipped finger off. I could feel the tip of the blade smashing into the skull of the bald head, blood gushing from the ugly birth mark.
Anger mounted when their meaningless chatter came to a stop, waiting for my reply.
“You can shove this fucking contract up your shit-caked ass, you withered cunt,” I heard myself say in Laura’s voice, raspy with pain, “you better let me the fuck out of here.”
The voices began shouting. Pain swept over me as the table rushed up to my head, slamming into me.
Back in the bed again, surrounded by doctors with streaks and scribbles for faces, blurry lines extending out past their bodies. I shouted in Laura’s voice as fingers prodded over my naked body. Cold. Calculating. I was nothing but an object to them. A reanimated corpse. Whether I could even be considered a person wasn’t just a philosophical curiosity, but a practical question with an answer that was very important to a lot of powerful people.
My weak, shivering arms were held down in restraints. Fingers pried my eyes open, shining lights into them. More needles were poked into my flesh. The entire world consisted of fingers crawling over me like fat spider’s legs. Jaw aching from constant shivers and chattering teeth. Eyes somehow both dry and flowing with tears. Fingers pushed my head around, groping at the back of my skull.
“W-why can’t I s-sleep?” I hissed in Laura’s voi
ce.
No answer came. The doctors murmured amongst themselves, their fingers unrelenting and unafraid of touching my body everywhere.
Faces came into focus. Burned into my mind – into Laura’s mind. Faces I recognized with names I remembered from Laura’s wall. Hugo Fischer, the CEO with a mouth like a puckered asshole. Tobias Kraus, the hugely overweight R&D financial officer with the tacky tie his sycophants might describe as ‘fun’ because he was the boss that needed their approval. Eduard Winkler, the project manager with a face pocked by acne scars and huge sweat stains darkening his armpits. Lukas Zimmermann, the communications director who couldn’t wipe the shit-eating grin from his dull-eyed babyface. Ilse Richter, the gargoyle-faced lawyer with short, gray hair that said she fully accepted how unpleasant she was to look at. Nina Frank, the chubby cryogenecist who reeked of cats, lonely tears, and last night’s whole bottle of wine.
Time lost all meaning. Searching fingers and cold instruments were my only companion. Laura’s wall of faces came and went as thy pleased. Huge smiles plastered over their hideous visages as they looked upon the culmination of their tireless work.
God, how I wanted to hurt them.
Another bed was eventually brought into the room. In it I could see a lump, and nothing more. It moved and pulsated. Low noises emanated from it as the jumble of flesh like a large, distorted maggot. Other doctors tended to it. I could tell that it wanted to communicate with me, frightened gurgles oozing from its tired maw.
“Don’t let them in,” a voice said as featureless men in a suits piled into the room.
One of them prodded the pulsing maggot with a fingerless stump. It moaned, moving to escape the streaked, walking mannequin. Two of the suited men stood with pistols. The weapons were easy to discern, every detail showing through the haze. They were salient. And I wanted one.
And then black. Everything spun. So sleepy. The featureless men were making some kind of commotion. So tired. All I wanted to do was-
Gunfire split through the darkness, echoing. People screamed. The lights came back on. The featureless men were switched out for Sachi and Rocky, Eddie and Savita and several other people I didn’t recognize. They were more discernable, but even the ones I recognized were distorted. Like Picasso paintings, both eyes always looking at me no matter which direction their heads turned. The Sachi figure leaned over the maggot in the other bed.
“Are we taking both?” the Rocky figure asked, his face turned away but the wide eyes stuck on the back of his head, looking inside me.
“No,” Sachi said, her eyes looking angrily at me, holding the gun in her fingerless hand up to the maggot. A shot rang out.
Now I was in a different room. There was a sterile feeling to the room that was polluted by the presence of someone else. A man. His face seemed to switch between two frozen expressions – a furrowed brow and pursed lips when he was quiet or an open mouth and wide eyes when he talked. My tutor. Laura’s tutor. He spoke, but the words just seemed to pass over. They were meaningless. Uninteresting. Everything was uninteresting. There was nothing left to live for. Not stuck in this sanitized hell.
“Please,” I pleaded in Laura’s voice, “you have to let me out. I have to get out.”
“We’ve been over this,” he said, a third static expression coming to his face – a look of mild impatience for a petulant child.
“I’m going to kill myself if you don’t,” I said in Laura’s voice.
“No, you won’t,” he said in a voice like he was talking to a small child, the impatient look plastered to his unmoving face, “you say this almost every time. But we both know that you’re too important to your father.”
“Fuck him.”
“Your father loves you,” he said, the look of impatience unmoving, yet somehow looking like it was lying.
“You let me out before.”
“To see your mother,” he said, his furrowed brow expression back, “and I almost got caught.”
“Please,” I said in Laura’s voice, reaching a scrawny hand over and touching his inner thigh, “I know I can do something to convince you again.”
A fourth frozen expression came over his face – eyes to the side looking to the bedroom door, a mischievous grin, and a nervous sweat. He hesitated a moment, but I crept my hand up his slacks, feeling him stiffen to a cartoonishly small size. I tried everything I could to stop, but Laura’s body continued, getting down on my knees in front of him. His face remained frozen as fingerless hands undid the belt and slacks, pulling them down to his ankles. There was only a black hole where his legs came together. Fingerless hands grabbed the back of my head, bringing my face closer to the black hole, Laura’s whimper escaping my mouth as I felt his pudgy flesh press up against my face.
Everything became hazy for some time. The next thing I remembered he was doing his belt, my saliva thick and disgusting, tears welling in my eyes.
“Your father will be home soon,” his voice said as he walked to the door, a strange look of satisfaction and disgust frozen to his face.
“But you said you would let me out!” I shouted, Laura’s voice cracking.
“I’ll owe you one,” he said, “it’s too late now.”
“I swear to God I’m going to kill myself,” I said in Laura’s voice.
“Oh no the fuck you won’t,” he said, “If you want to see your mother again, you’ll still be here next time I come over. And you won’t say a goddamn thing.”
There was no time to respond before he was out the door, leaving me to my sterile room again, body racked with sobs as I wailed in Laura’s pitiful voice. I sat down at the chair in front of the desk, reaching a scrawny, wavering arm over to the CD player and hitting play. Some kind of sad music seemed to come from inside my head. Laura’s head. I immediately recognized it as Alice in Chains, No Excuses.
I felt myself reach to the desk, seeing Laura’s small hand out in front of me. An automatic motion, as if being led by some outside force, yet not wanting to stop it. I opened a drawer, picking up a bottle. A fifth of vodka. Laura’s hands quickly opened it, tossing the cap onto the desk and bringing the mouth of the bottle up to my lips. The burn of it clawing its way down my gullet was welcoming. Fire warmed my stomach. Cleaning the taste from my mouth. Cleaning my soul. I kept chugging, feeling like I might throw it back up before setting the bottle down on the desk.
“You stupid fucking bitch,” I heard Laura’s voice say, looking at myself in the mirror and seeing her face.
The reflection seemed to melt, bulge and collapse until everything became distorted. Every infinitesimal imperfection was magnified a million-fold. Other imperfections created from nothing. Her nose was large and lumpy. Her eyes too close together, hooded by a large brow and surrounded by wrinkles like an old woman. Her skin blotchy, covered in warts and acne, arms and face covered in moles and hairs, chest too flat and lopsided, stomach lumpy and gross. But worst of all, everything was unclean.
“I hate you,” Laura’s voice said, watching the body in the mirror become more distorted, “you stupid ugly whore. Dad was right. He’s always been right. I’m disgusting. Polluted. Just fucking die you useless fucking whore!”
My arm reached to the desk again, grabbing a bottle of pills. They used to be my mom’s. Laura’s mom. Until the last time the tutor had let me out. Until the last time I let him pollute me with his sickening carnal desires.
And mother. She was a dirty, polluted soul who wanted to corrupt me, too.
That’s what dad said.
I couldn’t read the label on the bottle of pills, but I opened it and started tossing the small ovals into my mouth in fours. I used the vodka to wash them down, chugging the bottle until nothing was left in it.
Dizziness took hold almost immediately. I got up from the chair and tried staggering toward my bed, unable to keep balance. The last thing that I remembered was falling backwards, trying to catch myself on the chair, tipping it over onto myself as I hit the floor. Everything went black.
Another room with medical equipment. This time it wasn’t for me. Other people were in the room. Featureless people, but I knew who they were. My mom and dad…Laura’s mom and dad. A few cousins, aunts, and uncles from my mom’s side. We were around the bed where an old woman lay. Grandma. Dad’s mom.
“It will be okay,” the woman said, as if she were comforting everyone else, “I have to do this.”
Everyone looked frustrated. Sad. Angry. Laura knew she was dying, but at the time, she didn’t fully comprehend what it meant to die. I was ten. No, Laura was ten.
“Can’t you stay alive a little longer?” I heard Laura’s young voice ask, feeling the words coming from my mouth.
“I’ve…made my decision,” the old woman said, her features blurry, barely visible, “come here sweetie.”
Laura’s legs carried me to the tall hospital bed where a pair of strong hands helped me climb it, setting me next to the old woman. She reached a fingerless hand out. The only features prominent were purple veins worming their way through her wrinkled skin.
“Everything will be fine,” gnarled teeth showed through her blurry face, “death isn’t the end for everyone.”
“Will you…will you come visit me?” Laura’s voice whispered.
The old woman’s distorted face came close to mine, features solidifying. Her eyes were large, staring at something a thousand meters behind me.
“Of course, I will,” the old woman said, baring her gnarled teeth again, “in a future life, I might find you.”
Everything faded into a distant fog until blackness, a pulling and sucking feeling on the back of my head…
Chapter 44
“Get up,” a woman said as she stood over me, “we don’t have much time.”
“What-what’s going on?”
The woman walked over to Laura, holding a knife. She had pale white skin with mousy looking features, light blue eyes, and short, dark hair tumbling about her head. She reached down, pulling a gray cord out of Laura’s head and removing the electrodes.
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