"They're fine," said Natima. "They're worried about you. That's why I'm here; you've been non-responsive for a long time, and they want to know if you're OK in here. They just want to know you're still in here."
"How long have I been in a coma?" Eileen asked.
"Four years."
Eileen looked startled at this news, and then her face crumpled as she started to cry.
"Poor mum and dad," she said, between tears. "They must have been so worried about me. Can... can you take them a message from me?"
Natima smiled.
"I would be glad to."
"Tell them I love them, tell them I'll see them again some day." She paused, and her brow furrowed. "I will, won't I? Now you know I'm still in here, you'll be able to wake me up, won't you?"
"We're not sure," said Natima ruefully. "This was mostly a scouting mission, to see if it was possible to contact you. Now that we know your consciousness is still inside your mind we might be able to find a way to revive you. Right now we have no idea how we might achieve that. You'll be seeing a lot more of me as we work out the kinks."
Eileen nodded, choking back the last of her tears.
"Okay. I guess I've been here four years already, what's a bit more time?"
"Hold on just a little longer Eileen, we're doing all we can."
The two women lapsed into a companionable silence for a while, simply watching the eerily still water on the lake. It was a strange world, but there was something peaceful about the absolute stillness of the place. Natima could almost start to understand how it was possible to linger here for as long as Eileen had.
"How do you get out of here anyway?" asked Eileen, interrupting Natima's thoughts.
"My people on the outside will inject a counter-agent to the anaesthetic after an hour. Unfortunately I've no way of knowing how long it'll be from here. Time works oddly inside another person's head."
Even as she finished her sentence, Natima felt a slight tug on her being, and she knew that she was being revived.
"Looks like it's time for me to wake up. I'll see you soon," said Natima.
She felt the tug become more insistent as the drugs fought to wake her mind and body up. Natima focused on relaxing herself, trying to make the transition as easy as possible. The world inside Eileen Li's mind began to fade to blackness. Before it disappeared altogether, there was a sudden shaking, almost like an earthquake.
"What was that," shouted Eileen, the sound of her voice distorted.
"I don't know," Natima shouted back, trying to fight down her instinct to panic.
The intensity of the earthquake increased. The peaceful hospital garden was gone, replaced by a nightmarish landscape. Eileen fought to keep a hold of the bench as the world collapsed around her; trees came crashing to the ground, which cracked open. The sky had turned a dull red and the sun was no longer there. Natima knew something had gone terribly wrong. The fabric of Eileen's mind was starting to crumble and she was still partially inside it.
Now she did panic. From where she was, she had no idea which one of their worst case scenarios had actually come to pass. She could do nothing to help those who were presumably trying to stuff her mind back inside her body before it was too late. Whatever had gone wrong out there she knew one thing for certain; if Eileen Li's mind fell apart before they could get her out, she was dead.
Natima did the only thing she could; she screamed.
Eileen grabbed hold of her, her hands phasing through her body, and started wailing herself.
Suddenly, Natima was back in the real world, yelling herself awake as she fought against her restraints. One of her colleagues rushed to administer a sedative. It calmed Natima enough to stop her from screaming. Then she remembered Eileen and glanced over at the other bed.
Members of Natima's team surrounded Eileen's bed. They were all shouting orders to each other and wheeling equipment into the room. Eileen was convulsing violently, fighting against her restraints so hard that her wrists were bleeding. The researchers fought to get some drug into her and suddenly the convulsions stopped. Some piece of machinery started screaming a warning, and Natima knew that Eileen's heart had stopped. Someone wheeled her out of the room, still strapped to her chair. As she left, someone else started frantically shouting for a defibrillator. She heard the initial shout of "clear" and then a horrible noise as Eileen was shocked.
Natima started screaming the other woman's name. Someone came over and injected something else into Natima's arm, and everything went black.
****
The first time Natima woke up, she found herself in a hospital room a lot like the one she'd encountered in Eileen Li's mind. For several terrifying moments she thought she was back inside that poor woman's head, and she started to panic. She screamed and flailed her limbs. Her movement was restricted by restraints, which only made her panic worse. Someone came over to her bed and added something to her drip and soon after, everything faded away again.
The second time she woke up, there was someone sat at her bedside and that was enough to keep her from yelling. Natima was drowsy from whatever drugs they’d given her, but she was functional enough to recognise her visitor. It was her boss, Rhonda. Her mouth was dry and felt like carpet, but she tried to speak anyway.
"How long... how long was I out?" asked Natima, her voice a barely audible croak.
"A few weeks," replied Ronda. "They kept you under while we ran some tests to see what kind of damage the sudden extraction had done to you. You'll be pleased to hear that they've not been able to detect any damage to your brain. Of course there's more tests to do and you'll have to answer a bunch of irritating questions from the psychologists. But as far as we can tell, you're fine."
"What happened?"
"We're not sure exactly. Eileen had some sort of adverse reaction to one of the drugs we gave her. She started convulsing and all her vitals crashed so we had to pull you out of there fast."
"Is she...?"
Rhonda shook her head. "Her heart stopped as soon as you were out. We managed to stabilise her but our scans indicate there's nothing left. Whatever part of her mind was left after the accident is gone now."
Natima punched the mattress in frustration.
"We failed."
"Hey," said Rhonda, reaching a hand out to offer reassurance. "It was a long shot and we tried. I'm sure you did everything you could, and that will come out in the debriefing."
"What happens now?"
"The Li's want to bury their daughter. She's on life support for now but they're going to pull the plug as soon as we wrap up our investigation. Which will happen much more quickly now you're awake."
"My parents? If I've been out of contact with them for a few weeks they'll be worried."
"Relax, they don't know anything. We had to run a bit of interference, but we got them thinking you've been on a research trip abroad."
Natima nodded, relieved that her parents hadn't been worrying all this time. She flopped her head back down on the pillow, suddenly exhausted.
"Get some rest," said Rhonda gently. "You'll want to save your strength for all the testing they're going to do on you."
Rhonda wasn't kidding about the tests; they looked at everything they could think of, and then some. Basic cognitive functions, reading, writing, coordination, colour blindness. They tested her for just about everything. All the tests came back normal. There was no physical damage to her brain that they could detect. Cognitively and psychologically she was no different to before the accident. They had no choice but to discharge her. Natima had hoped that would be end of it, but the worst part was just beginning.
She went through days of intense interviewing as the Institute tried to find out what went wrong. She gave detailed accounts of what had happened from her perspective. The same questions were asked and answered again and again. It wore her down and Natima simply stopped caring about what she was doing and began giving short, sarcastic answers.
"What was your reaction
when you first realised something had gone wrong?"
"Screaming."
"Did you attempt anything to try and help those who were trying to extract you?"
"No."
"Why not?"
"Too busy screaming."
"Did you attempt to help the subject at all?"
"Not really much I could do."
"Are you certain there was nothing you could do?"
"Pretty sure, yeah."
"Are there any lasting effects of the incident that you have noticed?"
"Not so far, no."
And so it went. They finally seemed to get the hint that she'd told them all she could. The only good thing about these interviews was that she was able to pass on the message Eileen had given her. Her interviewers were a little sceptical, but promised to pass on the message to Mr and Mrs Li. Whether or not they would was another thing. Whatever happened, Natima had done her best, kept her promise to Eileen and it was now out of her hands.
Several weeks later, the investigation concluded. It had taken far longer than it should have, at least in Natima's opinion. She was cleared of any wrongdoing or negligence. The conclusion was simple. The patient had had an unexpected reaction to one of the drugs. Everyone had done everything they could to save her and no one was responsible. Natima was also declared completely fit and sane and cleared to return to work.
She declined.
Her boss organised some compassionate leave for her and she went to stay with her parents for a while. They were full of questions about her "trip abroad," which she answered in the vaguest way possible. The first time she went back to the Institute after the incident was the day they turned off Eileen's life support machine. She'd wanted to be there. She held Eileen's hand as she took her final sputtering breaths; passed on her condolences to the family.
She stayed off work until after Eileen's funeral. She attended, despite being expressly forbidden from doing so by the higher-ups at the Institute. It was odd, attending her funeral, with all those people who had known her saying nice things about Eileen and her life. These people who had known her and yet didn't know her as well as Natima did from spending an hour actually inside her head. It provided some sort of closure for Natima though, and she returned to work feeling much better.
Rhonda helped to ease her back into it, giving Natima low impact work that kept her away from the incursions into people's minds. Natima was fine with that; she wasn't sure she ever wanted to step into another person's head ever again. She kept her head down, worked hard and pretended nothing was wrong while everything went to shit.
Natima had noticed it just after Eileen's life support had been turned off. It was subtle at first, just the odd stray thought that she wasn't convinced she'd actually had. She'd feel hungry when she'd just eaten, and get cravings for foods she was certain she'd never eaten. Her dreams were extremely vivid, and definitely odd. She would revisit that hospital garden almost every night in her sleep. She would spend hours sat talking with Eileen on that bench. Or sometimes they'd take a walk around the garden as they talked. On the nights when they'd walked, Natima would wake up drenched in sweat, as though she'd been walking in her sleep.
It wasn't until she remembered a family visit to China that had never happened that she understood what had happened.
Eileen Li was inside her head.
Natima assumed it had something to do with the fact that Eileen had been holding onto her when she'd been extracted. Eileen's consciousness must have been dragged along for the ride. There were now two different people living inside Natima's head. The thought was frightening.
All the planning they'd done, all that brainstorming of potential worst case scenarios. They'd prepared so thoroughly and no one had even imagined that this was something that could happen. There was no record at the Institute of it ever having happened before. But then, a lack of records didn't necessarily mean that it hadn't happened. The Institute were the kind of shady organisation who would hide this kind of outcome, even when it was pertinent to a current project. Even the Lewis files hadn't been declassified for them to look at before making an attempt.
But then, even if they'd known, would they have been able to stop it from happening? Natima didn't know. The only thing for sure was that it had happened, and she was the one who had to live with the consequences.
The headaches started not long after that.
The human brain was barely capable of holding the consciousness of the person it belonged to. It was definitely not set up to cope with two separate entities occupying the same physical space. Natima's brain was dealing with it the best way it knew how; and the odd flashes of memory and the weird dreams were the result. The headaches were simply a side effect of having a head that was too full.
She decided to hide it from her family. They knew barely anything about what she did for a living, there was no way they'd understand what had happened. She also tried to hide it from her boss, her colleagues and most of all from the higher ups at the Institute. She had absolutely no desire to be poked and prodded by them as they tried to discover what had happened and how.
Besides, they had already declared her completely fit for duty.
So Natima did her best to hide it. At first it wasn't too difficult. The headaches mostly felt like a weird pressure behind her eyes, and she could pretty much ignore it. But they slowly got worse. Her intake of pharmaceuticals started to ramp up. She started with ibuprofen, then paracetamol and specialist migraine tablets. Then she moved on to co-codamol and eventually, when that stopped working, a cocktail of all of them. She knew enough about pharmacology to know that she was doing a huge amount of damage to her liver with all the drugs she was taking. She also knew it probably wouldn't matter.
When she'd first realised what had happened she'd started doing some research, looking into the Institute archives. She was trying to find if there were any recorded instances of anything similar happening. If there were records of a transference ever happening before, Natima couldn't find them. They were locked away well above her clearance level. The archives she had access to were spotty and not very helpful, but there was enough anecdotal evidence to come to a conclusion.
She was going to die.
She had to read between the lines a little but that was what had happened to everyone else in even remotely similar situations. The brain just couldn't cope with the job of housing two separate consciousnesses and simply shut down. That was what was causing her headaches; her brain was literally collapsing in on itself. If she took a scan of her own brain, she knew that there would already be dead areas in her neural tissue. There were parts of herself that she would never get back.
Natima knew that memories are built into the physical structure of a person's brain. Their life's story is literally written into the synapses and neurons. As Eileen's memories surfaced in Natima's consciousness they were also rewiring her brain. They were eating away at the memories she herself had made. At some point the brain simply couldn't take any more; it burned out like a VHS tape that had been recorded over too many times. With every memory of Eileen's that surfaced Natima lost a little more of herself, and a little more of her brain went dead. Eventually the loss of neural tissue would start affecting things like mobility and breathing. Unless she could find somewhere else for Eileen's consciousness to go, her brain would simply die, and she with it.
The problem was that there was nowhere for Eileen to go. Her body was dead, cremated and scattered. There was no artificial means of storing consciousness either; all previous attempts had been abysmal failures. The only place for Eileen to go would be into another person, and Natima wouldn't wish that on her worst enemy. Anyway, even if there was somewhere else to put Eileen, they had no way of actually transferring her consciousness. It had only happened this time by sheer accident. On top of that, the barrage of medical tests Natima had endured afterwards hadn't even picked up a problem. She didn't hold much hope that they'd be able to find a way to solve it.
It didn't matter. Whatever new knowledge or advance in technology was needed to rehouse the mind of Eileen Li, Natima would be long dead by the time it was usable.
So she trudged on with what was left of her life, determined not to let anyone know the truth.
The headaches worsened. The over the counter medicines stopped working.
Natima started experimenting with anything she could think of to simply ease the pain. Marijuana helped for a while, relaxing her enough to sleep through the night. Amphetamines and cocaine gave her enough energy to get through the work day. She timed it so that the crash would help her sleep through the night. Due to the stressful nature of their working environment, almost everyone at the Institute was on something. The Institute neither encouraged nor dissuaded them. A persistent drug culture was the least of their worries should the government ever come knocking.
Eventually the endless cycle of uppers and downers took its toll on Natima. In the end they simply didn't work any more.
Or they made things worse.
That was when she stopped sleeping.
By this point she was so tired and in so much pain that she'd actually started hallucinating that Eileen was with her. She started talking to her. Natima would tell her it wouldn't be long now. She would talk about the memories that were still coming to the fore. At night she would lie awake, muttering to her invisible companion, desperately wanting to sleep. But she couldn't.
She couldn't do much of anything any more. Couldn't eat, couldn't sleep, couldn't think. She couldn't see a way out. There was no way out, except one.
Natima cried when she wrote the letter.
It was for her parents, whom she'd barely seen since just after Eileen's funeral. She knew they were worried about her; when they had seen her they commented on how thin she was, how pale and drawn. They'd tried to goad her into seeing a doctor but Natima had refused. There was nothing they'd be able to do. She'd accepted her own fate and now sought only to reassure her parents. She tried to explain what had happened in words they'd understand, but it was getting harder and harder to do everything. Natima struggled with the finer movements required to use a pen, and her handwriting looked like that of a child.
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