by John Scalzi
Some of you have asked—is it really a hoax? Did I ever really have writer’s block, or was this an exercise in alternate creativity schemes, a weird little side project from someone who writes too many pages about lasers and explosions and aliens? And did my characters ever actually come to life?
Well, think about it. I trade in fiction. I trade in science fiction. I make up weird shit all the time. What’s the most logical explanation in a case like this: more fiction, or everything in the blog being really real, and really happening?
You know what the most logical answer is.
Now you have to ask yourself if you believe it.
Think about it and let me know.
Until then:
Bye, Internet.
Nick Weinstein, Senior Writer,
The Chronicles of the Intrepid
CODA II:
Second Person
CODA II: SECOND PERSON
You’ve heard it said that people who have been in horrific accidents usually don’t remember the accident—the accident knocks their short-term memory right out of them—but you remember your accident well enough. You remember the rain making the roads slick, and you reining yourself in because of it. You remember the BMW running the red and seeing the driver on his cell phone, yelling, and you knew he wasn’t yelling because of you because he never looked in your direction and didn’t see your motorcycle until it crushed itself into his front fender.
You remember taking to the air and for the briefest of seconds enjoying it—the surprising sensation of flight!—until your brain had just enough time to process what had happened and douse you in an ice-cold bath of fear before you hit the pavement helmet first. You felt your body twist in ways human bodies weren’t supposed to twist and heard things inside your body pop and snap in ways you did not imagine they were meant to pop and snap. You felt the visor of your helmet fly off and the pavement skip and scrape off the fiberglass or carbon fiber or whatever it was that your helmet was made of, an inch from your face.
Twist pop snap scrape and then stop, and then your whole world was the little you could see out of the ruined helmet, mostly facing down into the pavement. You had two thoughts at that moment: one, the observation that you must be in shock, because you couldn’t feel any pain; two, that given the crick of your neck, you had a sneaking suspicion that your body had landed in such a way that your legs were bunched up underneath you and your ass was pointing straight up into the sky. The fact that your brain was more concerned about the position of your ass than the overall ability to feel anything only served to confirm your shock theory.
Then you heard a voice screaming at you; it was the driver of the BMW, outraged at the condition of his fender. You tried to glance over at him, but without being able to move your head, you were only able to get a look at his shoes. They were of the sort of striving, status-conscious black leather that told you that the guy had to work in the entertainment industry. Although truth be told it wasn’t just the shoes that told you that; there was also the thing about the asshole blowing through a red light in his BMW because he was bellowing into his phone and being gasket-blowing mad at you because you had the gall to hurt his car.
You wondered briefly if the jerk might know your dad before your injuries finally got the best of you and everything went out of focus, the screaming agent or entertainment lawyer or whoever he was softening out to a buzzy murmur that became more relaxing and gentle as you went along.
So that was your accident, which you remember in what you now consider absolutely terrifying detail. It’s as clear in your head as a back episode of one of your father’s television shows, preserved in high definition on a Blu-ray Disc. At this point you’ve even added a commentary track to it, making asides to yourself as you review it in your head, about your motorcycle, the BMW, the driver (who as it turns out was an entertainment lawyer, and who was sentenced to two weeks in county jail and three hundred hours of community service for his third violation of California law banning driving while holding a cell phone) and your brief, arcing flight from bike to pavement. You couldn’t remember it more clearly.
What you can’t remember is what came after, and how you woke up, lying on your bed, fully clothed, without a scratch on you, a few weeks later.
It’s beginning to bother you.
* * *
“You have amnesia,” your father said, when you first spoke to him about it. “It’s not that unusual after an accident. When I was seven I was in a car accident. I don’t remember anything about it. One minute I was in the car going to see your great-grandmother and the next I was in a hospital bed with a cast and my mother standing over me with a gallon of ice cream.”
“You woke up the next day,” you said to your father. “I had the accident weeks ago. But I only woke up a few days ago.”
“That’s not true,” your father said. “You were awake before that. Awake and talking and having conversations. You just don’t remember that you did it.”
“That’s my point,” you said. “This isn’t like blacking out after an accident. This is losing memory several weeks after the fact.”
“You did land on your head,” your father said. “You landed on your head after sailing through the air at forty-five miles an hour. Even in the best-case scenario, like yours was, that’s going to leave some lingering trauma, Matthew. It doesn’t surprise me that you’ve lost some memories.”
“Not some, Dad,” you said. “All of them. Everything from the accident until when I woke up with you and Mom and Candace and Rennie standing over me.”
“I told you, you fainted,” your dad said. “We were concerned.”
“So I faint and then wake up without a single memory of the last few weeks,” you said. “You understand why I might be concerned about this.”
“Do you want me to schedule you for an MRI?” your dad asked. “I can do that. Have the doctors look around for any additional signs of brain trauma.”
“I think that might be a smart thing to do, don’t you?” you said. “Look, Dad, I don’t want to come across as overly paranoid about this, but losing weeks of my life bothers me. I want to be sure I’m not going to lose any more of it. It’s not a comfortable feeling to wake up and have a big hole in your memory.”
“No, Matt, I get it,” your dad said. “I’ll get Brenda to schedule it as quickly as she can. Fair enough?”
“Okay,” you said.
“But in the meantime I don’t want you to worry about it too much,” your father said. “The doctors told us you would probably have at least a couple of episodes like this. So this is normal.”
“‘Normal’ isn’t what I would call it,” you said.
“Normal in the context of a motorcycle accident,” your dad said. “Normal such as it is.”
“I don’t like this new ‘normal,’” you said.
“I can think of worse ones,” your father said, and did that thing he’s been doing the last couple of days, where he looks like he’s about to lose it and start weeping all over you.
* * *
While you’re waiting for your MRI, you go over the script you’ve been given for an episode of The Chronicles of the Intrepid. The good news for you is that your character plays a central role in the events. The bad news is that you don’t have any lines, and you spend the entire episode lying on a gurney pretending to be unconscious.
“That’s not true,” Nick Weinstein said, after you pointed out these facts to him. He had stopped by the house with revisions, which was a service you suspected other extras did not get from the head writer of the series. “Look”—he flipped to the final pages of the script—“you’re conscious here.”
“‘Crewman Hester opens his eyes, looks around,’” you said, reading the script direction.
“That’s consciousness,” Weinstein said.
“If you say so,” you said.
“I know it’s not a lot,” Weinstein said. “But I didn’t want to overtax you on your first episode
back.”
You achieved that, you said to yourself, flipping through the script in the MRI waiting room and rereading the scenes where you don’t do much but lie there. The episode is action-packed—Lieutenant Kerensky in particular gets a lot of screen time piloting shuttles and running through exploding corridors while redshirts get impaled by falling scenery all around him—but it’s even less coherent than usual for Intrepid, which is really saying something. Weinstein isn’t bad with dialogue and keeping things moving, but neither him nor anyone on his writing staff seems overly invested in plotting. You strongly suspected that if you knew more about the science fiction television genre, you could probably call out all the scenes Weinstein and pals lifted from other shows.
Hey, it paid for college, some part of your brain said. Not to mention this MRI.
Fair enough, you thought. But it’s not unreasonable to want the family business to be making something other than brainlessly extruded entertainment product, indistinguishable from any other sort of brainlessly extruded entertainment product. If that’s all you’re doing, then your family might as well be making plastic coat hangers.
“Matthew Paulson?” the MRI technician said. You looked up. “We’re ready for you.”
You enter the room the MRI machine is in, and the technician shows you where you can slip into a hospital gown and store your clothes and personal belongings. Nothing metal’s supposed to be in the room with the machine. You get undressed, get into your gown and then step into the room, while the technician looks at your information.
“All right, you’ve been here before, so you know the drill, right?” the technician asked.
“Actually, I don’t remember being here before,” you said. “It’s kind of why I’m here now.”
The technician scanned the information again and got slightly red. “Sorry,” he said. “I’m not usually this much of an idiot.”
“When was the last time I was here?” you asked.
“A little over a week ago,” the technician said, and then frowned, reading the information again. “Well, maybe,” he said after a minute. “I think your information may have gotten mixed up with someone else’s.”
“Why do you think that?” you asked.
The technician looked up at you. “Let me hold off on answering that for a bit,” he said. “If it is a mix-up, which I’m pretty sure it is, then I don’t want to be on the hook for sharing another patient’s information.”
“Okay,” you said. “But if it is my information, you’ll let me know.”
“Of course,” the technician said. “It’s your information. Let’s concentrate on this session for now, though.” And with that he motioned for you to get on the table and slide your head and body into a claustrophobic tube.
* * *
“So what do you think that technician was looking at?” Sandra asked you, as the two of you ate lunch at P.F. Chang’s. It wasn’t your favorite place, but she always had a weakness for it, for reasons passing understanding, and you still have a weakness for her. You met her outside the restaurant, the first time you had seen her since the accident, and she cried on your shoulder, hugging you, before she pulled back and jokingly slapped you across the face for not calling her before this. Then you went inside for upscale chain fusion food.
“I don’t know,” you said. “I wanted to get a look at it, but after the scan, he told me to get dressed and they’d call with the results. He was gone before I put my pants on.”
“But whatever it was, it wasn’t good,” Sandra said.
“Whatever it was, I don’t think it matched up with me walking and talking,” you said. “Especially not a week ago.”
“Medical record errors happen,” Sandra said. “My firm makes a pretty good living with them.” She was a first year at UCLA School of Law and interning at the moment at one of those firms that specialized in medical class-action suits.
“Maybe,” you said.
“What is it?” Sandra said, after a minute of watching your face. “You don’t think your parents are lying to you, do you?”
“Can you remember anything about it?” you asked. “About me after the accident.”
“Your parents wouldn’t let any of us see you,” Sandra said, and her face got tight, the way it did when she was keeping herself from saying something she would regret later. “They didn’t even call us,” she said after a second. “I found out about it because Khamal forwarded me the L.A. Times story on Facebook.”
“There was a story about it?” you said, surprised.
“Yeah,” Sandra said. “It wasn’t really about you. It was about the asshole who ran that light. He’s a partner at Wickcomb Lassen Jenkins and Bing. Outside counsel for half the studios.”
“I need to find that article,” you said.
“I’ll send it to you,” Sandra said.
“Thanks,” you said.
“I resent having to find out you were in a life-threatening accident through the Los Angeles Times,” Sandra said. “I think I rate better than that.”
“My mom never liked you as much after you broke my heart,” you said.
“We were sophomores in high school,” Sandra said. “And you got over it. Pretty quickly, too, since you were all over Jenna a week later.”
“Maybe,” you said. The Jenna Situation, as you recalled it now, had been fraught with fraughtiness.
“Anyway,” Sandra said. “Even if she or your dad didn’t tell me, they could have told Naren. He’s one of your best friends. Or Kel. Or Gwen. And once we did find out, they wouldn’t let any of us see you. They said they didn’t want us to see you like that.”
“They actually said that to you?” you asked.
Sandra was quiet for a moment. “They didn’t say it out loud, but there was subtext there,” she said. “They didn’t want us to see you in that condition. They didn’t want us to have a memory of you like that. Naren was the one who pushed them the most about it, you know. He was ready to come back from Princeton and camp out on your doorstep until they let him see you. And then you got better.”
You smiled, remembering the blubbery conversation the two of you had when you called him to let you know you were okay. And then you stopped smiling. “It doesn’t make any sense,” you said.
“What specifically?” asked Sandra.
“My dad told me that I’d been recovered and awake for days before I got my memory back,” you said. “That I was acting like myself during that time.”
“Okay,” Sandra said.
“So why didn’t I call you?” you said. “We talk or see each other pretty much every week when I’m in town. Why didn’t I call Naren? I talk to him every other day. Why didn’t I update Facebook or send any texts? Why didn’t I tell anyone I was okay? It’s just about the first thing I did when I did regain my memory.”
Sandra opened her mouth to respond, but then closed it, considering. “You’re right, it doesn’t make sense,” she said. “You would have called or texted, if for no other reason than that any one of us would have killed you if you didn’t.”
“Exactly,” you said.
“So you do think your parents are lying to you,” Sandra said.
“Maybe,” you said.
“And you think that somehow this is related to your medical information, which shows something weird,” Sandra said.
“Maybe,” you said again.
“What do you think the connection is?” Sandra asked.
“I have no idea,” you admitted.
“You know that by law you’re allowed to look at your own medical records,” Sandra said. “If you think this is something medical, that’s the obvious place to start.”
“How long will that take?” you asked.
“If you go to the hospital and request them? They’ll make you file a request form and then send it to a back room where it’s pecked at by chickens for several days before giving you a précis of your record,” Sandra said. “Which may or may not be helpful in any meaning
ful sense.”
“You’re smiling, so I assume there’s an Option B,” you said to Sandra.
Sandra, who was indeed smiling, picked up her phone and made a call, and talked in a bright and enthusiastic voice to whoever was on the other end of the line, passing along your name and pausing only to get the name of the hospital from you. After another minute she hung up.
“Who was that?” you asked.
“Sometimes the firm I’m interning for needs to get information more quickly than the legal process will allow,” Sandra said. “That’s the guy we use to get it. He’s got moles in every hospital from Escondido to Santa Cruz. You’ll have your report by dinnertime.”
“How do you know about this guy?” you asked.
“What, you think a partner is going to get caught with this guy’s number in his contact list?” Sandra said. “It’s always the intern’s job to take care of this sort of thing. That way, if the firm gets caught, it’s plausible deniability. Blame it on the stupid, superambitious law student. It’s brilliant.”
“Except for you, if your guy gets caught,” you noted.
Sandra shrugged. “I’d survive,” she said. You’re reminded that her father sold his software company to Microsoft in the late 1990s for $3.6 billion and cashed out before the Internet bubble burst. In a sense, law school was an affectation for her.
Sandra noted the strange look on your face. “What?” she asked, smiling.
“Nothing,” you said. “Just thinking about the lifestyles of the undeservingly rich and pampered.”
“You’d better be including yourself in that thought, Mr. I-changed-my-major-eight-times-in-college-and-still-don’t-know-what-I-want-to-do-with-my-life-sad-bastard,” Sandra said. “I’m not so happy to see you alive that I won’t kill you.”
“I do,” you promised.
“You’ve been the worst of us,” Sandra pointed out. “I only changed my major four times.”
