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When I Woke Up For The Last Time

When I woke up in the morning, I knew that something was off.

By Bobe HadjievaPublished 2 years ago 10 min read
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Image by Braňo on Unsplash

When I woke up in the morning, I knew that something was off. I gasped and heard my breath, but I didn’t feel my lungs. My mouth made a sound, but my body didn’t go through the motions. I didn’t feel the weight of my head as usual. I don’t think I blinked my eyes open. I just sprung into wake. I should have felt my cold fingers, but I had trouble feeling my fingers to begin with. Come to think of it, I’m not sure that it was morning when I woke up.

The room was cold and dark. I knew it was dark because I strained intensely to make out the shapes of objects. I guessed it was cold because rooms with so much medical equipment were rarely well heated. On my right there was a tray table with pointy metal objects. Cotton buds soaked in blood had been thrown into a see-through bucket. On the opposite side there were four computer screens stuck on the wall and an unusually large keyboard in front of them. All four screens were black.

I couldn’t remember how I got here. I quickly realised I was constricted in my spot. I felt no bondages around my ankles and wrists, or a straitjacket on my body. I just knew that if I gave myself the command to get up, I wouldn’t do it. Some faint inkling told me that I should feel panic in this situation. If that was the case, why was my breath so steady? Why weren’t my palms sweaty? Maybe this was a perfectly normal situation after all.

Just as a test, I decided to quicken my breath. A heartbeat started dominating my hearing, ringing in my ears. This response felt better lined up with the situation, I told myself. I still didn’t feel my chest tighten from panic, though.

It wasn’t just my body that felt odd. When going through my memory bank, I expected the images to come out hazier… But they were crisp. I clearly pictured settings, people, faces. Like a high-resolution photo shoot someone had printed on thick, glossy paper. After going through a few memories, my mind started drawing a blank. It was almost like… the settings were incomplete. I could not recall my responses. I couldn’t connect emotions to pictures. But I had a hunch that my memories were slowly filling up, drop by drop. I just had to give myself more time to download them all.

Three hours and fifty-three minutes passed. My life’s gallery was almost fully backed up, though I still couldn’t figure out how I got to that room. Or why I was in it.

After three hours and fifty-four minutes, I heard faint voices through the closed door getting louder as two sets of footsteps approached the room. An intense stream of yellow light flooded the blackness, before being dominated by the clinical whiteness of the lights flickering on inside the room. A thin balding man with thick, round-framed glasses entered first. He was followed by a younger-looking man with thick black hair. They both wore white lab coats.

The man with the glasses turned towards the computer screens and wiggled the mouse next to the keyboard. The four flat squares beamed to life. He bent over the keyboard in an uncomfortable standing position, stretched over the empty chair. He hit a few keypads and darted his eyes between the different screens. A face that read relief and marvel beamed up.

“Hello Alex,” said the man with the glasses, voice slightly shaky. “How are you?”

“Fine, I guess,” I uttered tentatively. It felt like I was having to teach my voice to speak again. I thought that I did it successfully enough. Now both of their looks read undeniable satisfaction.

“I’m sure you have many questions about what is going on. I promise there will be time for you to find out. For now, all you need to know is that your car crashed, and you were injured badly. But don’t worry, you’re recovering very well! You will be up and running again in no time.”

Photo by Hush Naidoo Jade Photography on Unsplash

Two weeks passed. The same men came every three hours to check up on me. Strangely, not every three hours precisely. It was interesting that they could never nail the intervals accurately. Sometimes they came after two hours and fifty-seven minutes, and other times three hours, six minutes, and thirty-seven seconds. The man with the glasses typically sat in front of the computers, typing lines of code, while the other one hovered around me, pen and notepad in hand.

The third week I felt a different energy circulating in my mind. Until that point I had been preoccupied with thoughts of my cat, Miss Curie, my favourite being in the world. This time though, my mind’s eye zoomed back to work. For some reason I fixated on the most mundane tasks I did at the lab. In every moment that went past, I was alone, in the middle of the night, staring for ages through my microscope.

When I first saw these images, they merely flashed by. This time I thought about the minute details of my actions. During the last project I worked on, my team and I researched the regenerative genes of some types of jellyfish, known to be immortal. We gathered them in tanks, at different stages of their maturity, and watched them revert back to infancy. I still could not feel my fingertips, but from looking at our research again, I could feel what the next steps would be, were I to be brought back to the lab.

I was still lost in my memory haze when I heard footsteps outside the door. There were three pairs this time. They stopped before the door. A voice started. It sounded different from the two men who checked up on me.

“Do I understand this correctly? The news reports were all wrong. Dr. Alex Green is in fact in that room, recovering from the car crash.”

“In some capacity,” answered one of the familiar voices. “What we were able to salvage was enough for project AS-T19. She is making excellent progress.”

The door swung open, revealing the three men at the doorstep. The third was a redheaded man. I read several conflicting emotions in him, passing in quick succession. Anticipation, excitement, surprise. Horror? The last one stuck with him as he entered, edging closer to me. Some electric current ticked within me when his horrified expression began to mix with pity and disgust. Why was he looking at me so strangely? Did I still look like a complete wreck? The man with the glasses headed for the computer. He checked up on something that was loading up. The other two had retreated to a corner, whispering in private. I guessed they didn’t know that their voices reverberated back to me, coated with a metallic tang.

“Is this…legal?”

“Technically, yes. She signed the right for her organs to be donated. For the initial testing stages, we selected the brains of organ donors from highly skilled positions. The hope is that the programme will benefit from the skills of these candidates.”

Something popped up on one of the computer screens. The man with the glasses called out that they were ready for download. I felt another current of energy flowing through my mind. It didn’t hurt.

Photo by Glenn Carstens-Peters on Unsplash

Images of the lab popped back up in my head. Frame after frame, they glossed across in quick succession, as if they were being filed away. Tanks. Notes. Graphs.

My eyes darted right to left, my vision doubled. Syringes. Empty Red Bull cans. I tried to keep pace with everything, but something was sucking them away too quickly.

Petri dishes. Microscopes. An inner firewall had broken inside me and I saw everything flowing away. That was when panic set in, undiluted and real. I was being drained completely empty.

Lab coats. Gloves. Safety goggles. The only thing left to do was… to follow them wherever they were going. The stream of memories had become a golden string. I stretched out a mental hand, grabbed it and held on with all my might. My mind liquified and slid down the rabbit hole along the rest of my memories. I fell down, down, down, until I thumped against something hard. I had traced my whole life to a storage file in the computer system.

There were hundreds of images of me recording observations, making calculations, writing down predictions. Rows upon rows of cold hard copy-pasted videos of my work. These people were draining me of my life.

Suddenly, my focus fell on another memory. It was the only one protected by a firewall. That looked suspicious. Something important must have been stored there. I had to know what it was. With immense effort, I forced that hand out and raised an electric finger to the file. I only managed to scrape it with a single nail. I just needed to make contact for a fraction of a second.

An electric shock flooded my head. If I had had any skin or hair, it was surely burnt off. A new set of images began to crystallise.

Glass shards flew in the air around. I heard a bag inflating at the driver’s seat next to me. I felt my head crash in the glove compartment. The image was static. It was not in high resolution, like the other memories. I felt razor-sharp pain just as intensely; in my head, my chest, my legs. I was crushed between my seat and the roof of the car. My lungs were drowning in liquid. When I coughed it out it was red; I kept coughing and gasping for breath. The pain lasted for a minute, until I finally stopped.

When the download of my work memories was complete, the firewall in the encrypted file went back up, but it was too late. I remembered. I had died. And I had been grotesquely resurrected. Nobody really asked me if I wanted that.

Adrenaline filled the memory of my chest. I could see that disgusting programme, slithering across my brain for any last morsels of my research. I felt rage, hot and bubbling, rise from my core.

I pushed the command to scream. Deafening shrieks filled the room and it was the only thing I could do to sever the connection between my brain and those men’s computer. I screamed until I hoped their eardrums would bleed out, if only I could break free from this programme. If only I could get that computer to unplug me.

This time, the man with the glasses was quicker. He typed something before I felt another electric blow to my head. The programme’s commands pushed back stronger. Its sticky fingers wrapped tighter around me, forcing me further into the computer. I fought and clawed for a way out until all I could see were flying pieces of code. I was surrounded and lost and alone. I felt panic rise in my chest again, until that surrounding code pressed so hard against me, that there was no more space for panic. No more space for rage. No more energy for screaming.

Everything would be alright. This panicked episode was already becoming another memory. There was no more pain here. Or loneliness. Or happiness. But who would need happiness, when I would live freely? I would give all I knew to the programme AS-T19. It would fly me to any location in a matter of seconds. Keep me working on my project. Fill me with boundless knowledge. There would be no more sleep deprivation. All of this would be so easy. As long as I let go. As long as I allowed the programme to take over me completely.

Photo by Kevin Ku on Unsplash

science fiction
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About the Creator

Bobe Hadjieva

A culturally-confused, sic-fi/fantasy nerd, with an over-active imagination and a passion for writing.

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