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Don't Make Me Go Back

He looked at the clock above the reception desk. What had felt to him like half a life time had only been 2 hours.

By R P GibsonPublished 2 years ago 7 min read
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Photo by Martha Dominguez de Gouveia on Unsplash

David shot up and gasped for breath, flailing in what appeared to be a bathtub of thick water.

The last he knew he was at the resort, about to step in to the pool. Julie was in there already, waiting. Had he fallen in? But this water was cold, and these lights…

“Mr Moss?” a voice said.

Was it Julie? It was hard to be sure of anything. Over his vision lay a thick fog, and his senses seemed separate and delayed. Distorted almost. It didn’t feel like his body splashing in the water.

He felt arms on his body, holding him, lifting him.

He wondered if he was perhaps having a heart attack, or drowning, or maybe he was being kidnapped or something like that. All these possibilities seemed very different from one another, but such was the confusion, he honestly wasn’t sure what to make of any of it. Why wasn’t Julie calling an ambulance or the police though, why was no one helping him or explaining?

As if reading his mind, a voice began speaking, sounding a bit clearer than before, but still unfamiliar:

“Welcome back, Mr Moss. The disorientation you’re experiencing is normal, just remember deep breaths and it will pass in a few moments.”

It definitely wasn’t Julie’s voice, he realised. And what was this “welcome back” stuff all about? Welcome back where? Where had he been? His vision was still foggy, like his eyes had been smeared with Vaseline.

The gripping hands stood him on his feet and let go, and he felt as though the world beneath his feet had been tilted to one side, and he toppled and crashed in to some metallic sounding equipment.

“Good Lord. Help Mr Moss up, come on! Thank you. He’s still disorientated. Give him the injection.”

He felt a clamp like grip on his arm, followed by the sting of a needle, but at the same time it felt like someone else’s arm, that this wasn’t happening to him at all, he was merely experiencing it.

Within a few seconds of the sting, and after a few blinks, his eyes regained focus, and he saw he was standing in a white room, full of medical equipment and people he had never seen before, with the exception of Julie. But even she wasn’t quite right: she was wearing a lab coat, writing on a clipboard and she kept calling him Mr Moss for some reason.

“Mr Moss, is that better?” she asked.

“What’s happening, Julie? Where am I?”

“Julie?” she frowned, then shook her head. “I’m not Julie. The experiment is over Mr Moss, you’re back in the test centre. What you have been experiencing has been an engineered social construct.”

“Eh?”

“He’s still confused. Give him another.”

David stood again uneasily. His legs were still wobbly but he was held in place by a strong grip, and as he felt the sting in his arm once more, he found his legs became stronger and steadier, and the growing sense of déjà vu in his mind was focusing in to something more concrete.

What had Julie said just then? An engineered something or another. He thought back to the resort, to Julie in her swimsuit holding her flute of champagne, waiting for him. That felt real, but this certainly didn’t. These white walls and lab coats and injections. This seemed more of a nightmare.

His eyes now saw the others in the room, all medical personnel it seemed: a nurse with a syringe and two brutish looking orderlies who still gripped his shoulders.

And of course Julie with her lab coat and clipboard who was apparently in charge.

“Feeling better?” she asked.

“I think so, Julie, but-”

“Any familiarity of who you think I am was just part of the construct, Mr Moss,” she said, cutting him off. “I’m not Julie, although I suppose by you mistaking me for her that I was part of your world in some way? That is common. I am often the last face a person sees before being induced. Our nurses and technicians also appear frequently. It is also common for the mixing of memories as your brain tries to make sense of it all, confusing faces and events and presenting them again in a different form when inside. For example, although you feel you know me already, I assume my voice is different? That’s because you never heard it until now.”

David nodded his head. It was becoming clearer.

“So all these memories… they aren’t real?”

“I wouldn’t say they weren’t real, no,” the Doctor said. “They are real memories, just not from the real world, not from real events that happened in your reality. A bit like when you remember a dream. Your real world memories, previous suppressed, should start returning shortly, and then it will be clear which are which. Now, tell me everything you remember.”

David sat down and began to run through everything that came to him: the resort, the endless supply of champagne and women, his personal helicopter, Julie… a dead-end job, a broken marriage, all that debt…

“Oh God…” he said. “All that debt.”

All the real life memories had started to intermingle with the others, and then as they all danced in his mind hand in hand, they suddenly separated, so he could draw a distinct line between them and tell which was which.

The Doctor sat quietly taking notes, nodding her head at key points as if expecting to hear them, or as if she had heard them many times before.

After hearing all she wanted to hear, the Doctor stood and shook his hand, and gestured to the nurse to finish up. He was handed a bag containing his clothes and other personal items, and was given privacy to change back in to them.

As he pulled his trousers up, he fished in to his pocket and pulled out an old leather wallet, opening it and seeing a picture of his ex-wife. It was an old photo, one he’d been meaning to get rid of it for a while.

“Are you done Mr Moss?” the nurse asked, reappearing in the room and seeing the photo. “Is that Julie?”

“Yes, it is,” David said, but something seemed off. He knew it was Julie, but there was a hanging feeling that perhaps...

Led out of the room to the front desk, he remembered everything now: the unhappiness, the despair, signing up for a 2 hour trial in some experiment he found in the newspaper. It had been a desperate act to escape for 2 hours, nothing more.

He looked at the clock above the reception desk. What had felt to him like half a life time had only been 2 hours.

On the desk he was given a consent form to sign and then he was paid £100 for taking part in the trial, and that was that. He started to walk towards the front door, to go back to the real world. He could see and hear it on the other side of the glass.

He walkded forward, paused, and glanced back towards the front desk, with the sign behind it that read: A Better Life. That was the name of the company. His vision went foggy again.

There were others sat waiting, he could just about make out, and figures moving back and forth.

“Don’t make me go back,” David said, and the nurses paused to look at him.

He walked back on unsteady legs. The world was tilting under his feet again, and he dropped down to his knees and clutched at a nurse.

“I don’t want your money,” he said. “Don’t make me go back!”

The Doctor reappeared, checked her watch, nodded to the nurse, and helped him up.

“Okay Mr Moss,” she said, and led him back down the corridor, as if she had done this many times before.

Sci Fi
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About the Creator

R P Gibson

British writer of history, humour and occasional other stuff. I'll never use a semi-colon and you can't make me. More here - https://linktr.ee/rpgibson

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