Refraction | Part 1 | Darwin's Steroids

9) Awake

So I am awake, I think. I think I am awake. I am insensate, but I feel, in a completely silent, dark, temperature free sort of way, awake. I am not sure when I became aware of it, the feeling of awake-ness out of a time of nothing. I am still in the nothing, but now somehow awake in it. Maybe I am dead. Panic wells in me, in some nowhere I imagine my body, the stiffening legs, the tightening in the stomach, the respiration increase as fear induced nor-epinephrine dumps into my bloodstream, and I feel, not a thing. The silence does not change, the darkness does not change, I cannot hear my breathing, the blood does not thrum in my ears. I am mind free of sensation. Thought connected only to the blinding dark.

Fear ebbs and flows through my, what, my brain? I try again and again to take stock of my situation. Count all the fingers and toes, get a bearing on my surroundings, anything. I am well trained, and not unintelligent, but this is outside the scope of my experience. Maybe I am fucking dead. Shit. I wait. I try to avoid counting, time can go fuck itself right now, thinking about it, or attempting to keep track of it is a sure path to insanity. At the moment I feel altogether too close to the edge of that particular precipice already. I try to focus my thoughts on what happened last, to remember anything about how I came to be in the state of affairs I am in. Whatever state of affairs that may or may not be.

The intense desire to close my eyes against the black, to see the swirling stars and mesmerizing patterns of my eyelids. To lock on to something normal, no matter how small, pain even, something to let me know...pain. The last thing I remember is pain. A nightmare of agony from the cold needle. How many times? Was this the plan? Kill my nervous system and leave me in the nothing? Why? I don't remember questions, or malice. Why such intense prolonged torture without a word? Did they drain me of something, some thought or piece of information? Some vital essence?

No, I remember them monitoring me, surgical precision surrounded by sterile safety. The pain came from the inside. I was injected, I was in an underground facility, there was a stone wall. I am neither insane, nor deceased. So, I am part of an experiment then. I am for whatever reason shanghaied to wherever it is am, I am tortured by unseen forces until I believe I am dying, an unknown amount of time passes, then I wake up. Sort of. Or not. The mysterious result of the unknown test for an obfuscated hypothesis. Not dead, not crazy, just in the dark for the time being, just...awake. I think.

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