Incarnate- Essence

by Thomas Harper

  “This is private property,” Doctor Taylor said, “and you’re harassin’ a patient.”

  “Does the Colorado gov’ment know what these terrorists’re involved in?” the Texan asked angrily, “are you censorin’ us?”

  “If you continue harassing patients on private property, it’ll be construed as initiating force,” Riviera said, putting a hand on her pistol, “and I’m authorized to answer in kind. So please, if you wanna stay here, step away from the other patients.”

  Both reporters glowered at her, but heeded the warning and walked away. I watched as they sat in seats on the other side of the waiting room, making glances toward us.

  “Sorry bout that,” Doctor Taylor said.

  “Its fine,” I exhaled, looking to Akira.

  She looked somewhat shook by the experience. It was the first time she was confronted by the press. And her tattoos were all out in the open.

  “I’m ready for ya now,” Doctor Taylor said, forcing a smile, “We can have Major Riviera come with us to make sure they don’t bother us again, if ya like.”

  “Sounds good,” I said getting up, nudging Akira.

  She looked to me and then to Doctor Taylor before getting up, pulled from her reverie. “Alright,” she said, a smile spreading across her face, “I’m excited to see this procedure.”

  “You seem more chipper than usual,” Doctor Taylor said to Akira, genuinely surprised.

  “Things have improved,” Akira said, “It must have been the quinceañera.”

  A slight nervousness passed briefly over Doctor Taylor’s face before she said, “that’s, uh, good news. I’m glad somethin’ finally helped.”

  “So, what is this procedure?” I asked as the four of us started down the hallway, “Is it painful?”

  “Nah,” Doctor Taylor said, “I getta high-resolution EEG of your brain to find the errant signals. The seizure signals. Then I blast it with a shotta highly focused transcranial magnetic stimulation to realign everything.”

  “Anything with magnets is always cool, I guess,” I said.

  Both Akira and Doctor Taylor laughed. Doctor Taylor gave a subtle curious glance at Akira, still somewhat surprised at her sudden change in mood from what she had gotten to know.

  At the examination room, Major Riviera kept a lookout in the hall as Doctor Taylor led me to the chair. It looked like a dentist chair, with a touchscreen control panel to move it about, an arm above it with what looked like a helmet on the end. I sat down at Doctor Taylor’s behest, Akira leaning on the wall near the computer, looking on.

  “It’ll take a few to get a baseline for ya,” Doctor Taylor said.

  She lowered the helmet onto my head, strapping it in place so it wouldn’t move around, and began chatting with Akira, telling her about all the different specifications and details for the instruments, both women hovering over the computer.

  I looked out the door to where Major Riviera stood, once again remembering her is the little girl I’d known in my past life. It was strange how much things could change in such a short amount of time. I couldn’t help but wonder what Silvana would think about what her daughter had become. This was a different world than when I last knew Rosy. My former niece adapted to the times. Something Silvana probably wouldn’t understand.

  “Somethin’s wrong,” Doctor Taylor said, eyes fixed on the monitor where squiggling lines ran across the screen.

  “What is it?” I asked.

  “These frequencies,” Doctor Taylor said, “they’re way outta range…this has to be a malfunction. Nobody could live with frequencies like this.”

  Akira looked over her shoulder, exchanging glances with me.

  “This isn’t…completely unexpected…” Akira said, “Do you think we can still go through with the procedure?”

  “I don’t understand,” Doctor Taylor said, turning to look at Akira, “how could this be expected?”

  “It’s kind of a long story,” Akira glanced at me, biting her lower lip.

  “A story longer than you can imagine,” I said.

  “Let’s just say Eshe has a…unique brain,” she said.

  Doctor Taylor’s gaze went back and forth between us for a moment, confused. Finally she said, “I’m finished takin’ the baseline now. I really don’t know what a healthy reading would look like for his…unique brain, but we can run the program and see if anything changes.”

  “Will I feel anything?” I asked.

  Doctor Taylor turned back to the computer, “you might have some weird sensations, but nothin’ drastic or painful.”

  “Okay,” I said, looking to Akira. Her eyes were glued to the monitor, watching the readings. She’s as interested in seeing what’ll happen as she is in potentially fixing my split-brain condition…this is a science experiment for her.

  “Ok, I’m gonna turn this…wait, what’s this?”

  “Is something-”

  Everything blinked out. Pitch darkness. And then everything came back…but different.

  The room unfolded, expanding into something that wasn’t there before. The entire spectrum of light seemed to flash and streak over everything, colors I’d never seen before washing over the roiling, folding, expanding room, before combining back into dim white light that curved through space. Furniture and medical instruments rearranged inside themselves, corners and edges bending into impossible shapes, extending in directions that shouldn’t exist.

  Everything in the room became visible from all angles at once – three dimensional objects suspended in dimness, every surface pointing at me at once no matter where I moved my gaze.

  Other objects lurked in the new space.

  “What-what happened?” I asked, the sound quiet when it reached my…

  I brought my arms up. They were made of a fine, floating powder oscillating in space, unconnected to each other by any force I could see or feel. It was round with crystalline structures protruding out, moving and rotating across my un-integrated flesh in a repeating pattern. I saw every side of what was effectively my arm, even as I rotated it through a space that seemed directionless.

  I looked up. The sun hovered dim and cold in the sky – above? – the ceiling and roof, both visible at once. Objects streaked through the air, leaving transient trails that disappeared so fast it was difficult to know if I even saw it.

  The objects visible in the expanded space gave my eyes a strange sensation. Not pain, but unpleasant. Spots flickered over them, as if parts of it came in and out of existence.

  Where Akira and Doctor Taylor had stood only flickering specters fluctuated, every side of their formless, ethereal geometry visible to me at once. Energy frozen in place.

  I stood up, lightheaded, barely able to keep my balance, and fell down. The fall to the floor was slow at first, but accelerated quickly, and I landed on what passed for my hands and knees. I crawled forward, turned right and crawled up to what had been Akira. The flickering phantom made no noise, the limbs silently flailing in all directions. My ‘hand’ passed through, bending and curving inside without any pain. An odd sensation – not hot or cold, but something else – tingled through me. Pulling my hand back, it straightened out.

  I turned back and crawled again, yet somehow ending up in a different place. I glanced around, eyes straining, feeling dizzy and nauseous. I crawled in a circle. A sphere? Forward-backward, upward-downward, side-to-side, and…something else.

  “W-what the hell is going on,” my tinny voice sounded in my ear, a crushing pain surging into my skull, radiating from my eyes and ears.

  The floor beneath me was a three-dimensional surface. The ceiling of the room below me was visible at the same time as the floor. The flickering, amorphous ghosts of patients below flailed silently in place. I could see the entire hospital from all angles. More structures extended off from it into the…something else.

  I looked to one direction – left? – and saw something moving. Something big…something gargantuan, extending in all directions. Buzzing sound
ed in my ears. My stomach heaved as I looked at the colossus on the other side – the outside? – of the wall. It was made of interconnected fractal helices that moved in all four dimensions, towering over the building. It slowly lifted its towering legs, moving. Toward me. The buzzing grew louder. Deafening.

  “W-w-w-w-w-w-wuuhhhh,” was all I managed to utter as I impotently held my ears.

  Everything went black and then came back. The room folded back onto itself, the strange sensation of silence and earsplitting noise happening simultaneously. I cried out. The something else compressed down to nothingness, the new objects folding in with it. Vast rainbows of light streaked across the walls. The surfaces of all the instruments went back to normal, no longer visible from all directions at once. The buzzing leviathan disappeared. Frozen energy solidified and took form…

  -wrong with him?” Akira finished, and then shrieked, “what the hell?”

  I retched, still screaming as I vomited onto the floor at the side of the bed. Pain spiked through every part of my body. Doctor Taylor rushed over, kneeling, putting a hand on my back. Her voice was saying something, but the entire world spun, became foggy, and finally after one last heave, I fell forward, blacking out before my face landed in the puddle of sick.

  “How…long was I out?” I asked, a dull headache still lingering behind my eyes.

  “Bout an hour,” Doctor Taylor said, leaning over to shine a light into my biological eye.

  Akira stood a few paces away, Rosaline outside the door. Akira’s eyes were fixed on me, concerned. I had been taken to a normal hospital room, an IV needle in my forearm and other monitoring instruments wired to me, including an EEG net on my head.

  “What…happened?” I asked.

  “Not sure,” Doctor Taylor said, standing up straight and putting the light in the pocket of her lab coat, “the program ran like it was sposed to. I got a tech in to look at it and he couldn’t find nothin’ wrong. But when I started the program, it looked like all of your brain waves…”

  “They all inverted,” Akira said, “like multiplying by negative one for each frequency’s signal in Fourier space.”

  “I don’t…I had this weird hallucination,” I said, closing my eyes and holding a hand to my forehead, “it’s…hard to explain. It was like I could see everything at once. And the colors were…different.”

  Doctor Taylor exchanged a glance with Akira. “I was…we were afraid you might have been brain damaged from it.”

  “Brain damage…that’s what it felt like,” I said.

  “I switched it off right away,” Doctor Taylor said, “it only lasted about a second.”

  I opened my eyes, “I was hallucinating for…I don’t know…it felt like five or ten minutes.”

  Doctor Taylor shook her head, “you musta been dreaming while you were out cold. I flipped it on and off and then bam! You were laid out on the floor, screamin’ and pukin’.”

  I looked around to the three of them. Akira gave a slow nod, agreeing with Doctor Taylor’s account of what happened. I looked to the door, sitting ajar, Major Riviera outside still keeping guard.

  “I specifically remember it happening right after you said you switched it on,” I said, “Akira started saying something before it started, and then finished her sentence after it was done.”

  Doctor Taylor exchanged another glance with Akira before looking back to me again.

  “We’ve been monitoring your brain waves,” Akira said, “it’s difficult to tell with your unique brain, but nothing I saw gave any indication that you were dreaming.”

  Doctor Taylor shook her head, “there’s somethin’ you two aren’t tellin’ me here. How was it you expected to see patterns as…as bizarre as what he has?”

  “Like I said, it’s a long story,” Akira said, keeping her eyes on me.

  “I’ve got time,” Doctor Taylor said, turning around to look her in the eyes, “because everything I seen today’s impossible, and I almost lost a patient cuzza what you might be keepin’ from me.”

  “You wouldn’t believe us if we told you,” I said.

  “I’m havin’ a hard time believin’ anything I heard today,” she said, “I never saw you get up off the bed, so I’ve no idea how you instantly got on the floor, the apparatus suddenly off your head. I’ve no idea how you’re alive with the sortsa brain waves you have as a baseline. And I have no idea how you lived through a complete inversion of all of ‘em at once.” She looked back and forth between us, “and you’re both here tellin’ me that all of this was to be expected? Please, just humor me.”

  I sighed, seeing her turn around, looking annoyed.

  “I have this…unexplained phenomenon that happens to me,” I paused, trying to think of the best way to say it, “every time I die, I’m reborn into a new body, still retaining all the memories of my past lives. And this has been going on for…ages, really. Since before human history.”

  Doctor Taylor looked back at Akira, incredulous. “And you believe this?”

  Akira exhaled, “I didn’t at first, when I met him almost eighteen years ago. In a prior life of his.”

  Doctor Taylor looked back to me, “of all the stories you coulda come up with…”

  “Given what you’ve seen yourself,” I said, “is this really that hard to believe?”

  “Yes,” she said, “yes, it is. It’s impossible. It don’t make any sense. And I can’t help but feel like you’re lyin’ to me to hide somethin’ else.”

  “What else could we be hiding?” I asked.

  “No idea,” she said, “some kinda advanced gene doping? Some new technology? I dunno. But this reincarnation tale…I just ain’t buyin’ it.”

  Akira was about to say something, but Doctor Taylor stormed out of the room before she could. Akira looked back to me, eyes wide.

  I shrugged, “you didn’t believe me at first, either. I didn’t expect her to.”

  “You think this might have been a bad idea?” Akira asked.

  “I had no idea this was going to happen,” I said, “I still don’t even know what happened.”

  “I saw…something,” Akira said, “when she started the program. It was just out of the corner of my eye, before I could even turn to look. Something like a streak or blurriness. A shadow, maybe. Faint…subtle.” She shook her head, “I still don’t even know if I saw it. But by the time I turned my head, you were on the floor screaming.”

  “What I saw,” I said, “what I experienced…I’ve done hallucinogens in the past, but nothing’s ever compared to that. I saw things I couldn’t even begin to wrap my head around. Impossible things.”

  “It must have to do with your reincarnation, doesn’t it?” Akira asked.

  “I don’t know,” I said, “in all my past lives, nothing like that’s ever happened.”

  “You’ve also never had your brain probed that way,” she said.

  “I’m really starting to get tired of having my brain screwed around with,” I said, leaning my head back into the pillow, “was any of this at least helpful in figuring out how it all works?”

  “Actually,” Akira said, “it just might be.”

  “Yeah?”

  “I still have to think through it a bit,” she said, “but I think you might have seen a higher dimensional spacetime.”

  “Great,” I said.

  Akira forced a smile, “I can go and try to talk to Doctor Taylor.”

  “She might just need some time to think about it,” I said, closing my eyes.

  “Maybe,” she said, “but I want to go over the brain readings again. I’m guessing that’s what she’s doing.”

  “Hell, if you got a theory about what happened, take all the time you need,” I said.

  “I’ll come and get you in a while,” she said, “if you want to rest a bit.”

  “Sure,” I said, keeping my eyes closed.

  I heard Akira leave the room, hearing what I thought was eagerness in her gait. She was even more interested in trying to figure o
ut what happened after hearing my account. What she said about higher dimensions sounded about right for the something else. How it connected with reincarnation I couldn’t even begin to fathom.

  I exhaled, trying to picture the hallucination in my mind again. A sense of anxiety came over me. I couldn’t stop trying to visualize what I’d seen, even as I tried to clear my mind. The images – only confusing approximations to something that didn’t make sense in the first place – forcing their way into my head. Sweat started beading on my forehead, breaths becoming faster.

  A panic attack.

  But this time it wasn’t images from my past lives bubbling up from the cavernous depths of my memory Now it was impossible images trying to make themselves possible, paradoxes trying to reconcile themselves in my mind. I groaned, squeezing my eyes tight, trying to push the thoughts out. The heart monitor beeped faster, pillow soaking with sweat.

  “No…”

  Images splashed like blood in my mind. Vivid, yet still wrong. Not how they were. Yet they stained my vision, unable to be scrubbed away. I pushed my hands to the sides of my head as if I could squeeze the thoughts out. The buzzing came back, tantalizingly quiet. My stomach pitched like it might take leave of my remaining breakfast. And then-

  “Is everything okay?”

  My eyes shot open, room blurry, spinning. The monitor’s beeping and my panting breaths falling flat in the small room. I looked over, seeing Rosaline standing near the doorway, eyes furrowed. The distraction shook the images away. The beeping slowed.

  “I’m…I’m fine,” I said, still breathing heavily.

  “You sure?” she asked, “You don’t look so well.”

  I forced a smile, “I’ll be okay.”

  She looked back to the door and then back to me, taking another step inside. The M249 was still slung over the shoulder of her well pressed dark blue uniform, ID card and utility belt pristine. She looked over her shoulder again at the door, rubbing the buzzed hair on top of her head, and then approached the bed.