by E. L. Aldryc
She couldn’t cry. It would bring the information overload back. This wasn’t part of the current.
But it could crush her too, sneakily. Paragnosis. The other edge of the blade.
This wasn’t supposed to be like this. She was told she was going to wake up and finally feel like the person she was meant to be.
“I’m getting everyone out. They’ve seen her now. She’s fine, let’s give her space,” Augustina said.
Great idea. She felt a fabric under her fingers and realised someone had swapped her clothes for a bland hospital robe, and that really was it.
“What did you do to my dress? Where is it?” she snapped. Everything in front of her eyes was still warbling and wanting to remind her of something else, and else and else. Nothing stood still. New information prickled her awareness, and a mere inch away, the barrier she had set up with her own blood, sweat, and spit was threatening to give in. Being mad about how some gifted hippy handled AI-hand woven silk, however, helped.
“We’ve put it away. Safely,” Tammy said, and sat next to her.
Elodie realized that she’d been sleeping on some sort of dentist chair. Uncomfortably. This annoyed her. She moved up and her spine cracked. More pain.
“Talk to me, sweetie,” Tammy continued, and motioned the doctor to come closer. He used a portable application to once again check her vitals, did a quick blood analysis and looked into a scan of her brain.
“Do you feel good?” he asked. Good? This was a question?
“Not at all,” she said angrily. Tammy took her hand and squeezed it.
“You’re good, trust me,” she said. “You’ll only get better from now on.”
“No,” Elodie replied. “It’s all broken.”
Uncomfortable, in pain, balancing on a razor blade between being lost in the futures and awake, with the reality trying to crawl inside her mind from every cubic inch of the room, Elodie squirmed and tried to retreat. But there was no safe space. There was no blanket to hide under. There was no machine to take off, no command to log out, nowhere to hide, no one to help. She inhaled and tasted what the voice of each of the six people who left the room had ever sounded like and the make of the windows and the type of protocol that constructed them, and all the protocols that are used for window construction, and how old the plant inside was, and how pure was the golden ring that Augustina wore, suddenly and it didn’t help she wasn’t interested. She twitched and Tammy held her hand tightly, but touch was the last thing she needed, and she started screaming, eyes wide open, darkness descending, pain approaching.
“Make it stop! Make it stop!”
Tammy said something to Augustina, and an unnatural golden orange glow appeared at the edges of her peripheral sight. Boom. She lost the floor beneath her feet and fell into darkness. Sleep.
The Turning of the Eye
The next time she woke up, Elodie got up by herself. Not that it made any difference to her crushed insides, hollow and replaced with a screeching horror that wanted to swallow her whole. This time, Tammy led by telling her she was assigned a guardian. Tammy deployed one of the most powerful telepaths in the business to help soothe her pain a little. Augustina had recently ended her rotating presidency of the whole of Rising Dawn, and now they put her on standby to keep Elodie calm or something. But Elodie wouldn’t calm down. Augustina was honest in her walkthrough. She said the abilities could crush you, right from within. It was a singular warning at the time. Something to spice up the excitement with a little danger. The longer she was awake, the more Elodie knew.
This thing would crush her. It was only a matter of time. There was no strength in the world that could keep it away. And if there was, Elodie didn’t have it.
The recovery room still had no windows now, so the place looked positively like a dungeon. Tiredness from excessive sleep made it easier to keep the paragnostic information overload away. Silver lining.
Unlike Tammy, Augustina wasn’t one for protocol. She went straight for the hug. As insufficient as it was, a telepathic understanding resonated through her. It was unconditional. Elodie felt it. She knew her experience echoed straight through to another person in unaltered form.
“It doesn’t get any better, but you have to,” Augustina said.
“Or else what?” she replied.
It was a trigger. Elodie thought of a question, and instead of her fears creating an imaginary scenario, the current from inside pulled her right under.
The current cut at her, exhausted and afraid, fearing what would happen if she let go. All that was keeping her at thinking was her will to return. But even that had its limits. She fought to reconstruct a barrier, and just as she did, she was pulled back into a state of awareness. She couldn’t have been out for more than a second.
But it was already late at night, and Augustina wasn’t with her anymore. She was sitting in a room surrounded by strangers who were perched on the soft floor, meditating. She had been sitting in an improvised lotus, typical for someone who hated yoga with a passion. She looked around in panic and saw about a dozen peaceful faces illuminated by soft candlelight. There was a stage in the front and on it, a person was reading words in a calm, placid voice. How did she get there? Why did it seem like she was awake while she was back in the current?
“The turning of the eye brings a time when its secrets give way to my infinity.
But in the storm I stand, until its flow is weak, I live in the echo,
The eye provides the antidote to blindness.”
She looked around, hoping to get someone’s attention, but no one broke from their murmur of the words chanted in the front. There was no obvious entry or door, but when Elodie checked into her tola network-based applications, they worked, giving her the time, place and an abundance of messages she had missed out in the last few days.
The comms weren’t supposed to be working. It must have been an error. She was prohibited from interaction until she was more stable. Just a quick one then.
[You were right.]
Nothing came back. Elodie sat there, in a crowd of strangers and feared being swallowed again.
The current was inside her, waiting patiently, eating at her will to hold on. It was like it knew she wasn’t strong enough. All it needed was time.
The next time she came close to conscious, she recognised the recovery unit. But darkness took over again. The current had like a claw that rushed to grab her the moment she faltered. It was impossible to stay awake for more than a few seconds.
She came back to it, in a different spot than the last one she remembered. Confusion grew into panic. Panic grew into—
The stretches of habituating in the current led to her being able to think, albeit on the side of a treacherous battle of resisting gushing information in a current that followed her, of all people, of all points in the universe at once.
Disorientation was something the gifted expected. They defined it vaguely before the augmentation, with a side stare. It was mentioned as a dreamy state. Not an infinite battle. And it had a sound, a high-pitched tune that wouldn’t disappear completely even when she was awake. But when she started losing ground, it gained volume. It was the first sign.
Augustina said the relationship with the current was personal, and that the interpretation was unique to each prognost.
The first time Elodie witnessed it, she was too busy to think about it. After a few times when it pulled her back, she understood just how personal it was. This was why she was afraid of it so deeply, that she had trouble explaining it even to herself.
The current told her that she was irrelevant.
The interconnected, rapid, flowing, synced, and harmonised universe rushed on. She had no power to stop it going through her, forever trying to make her disappear. To prove, finally and forever, that she had no counterweight to gain her worth in the universe. It was the deepest insult possible.
And Elodie sometimes felt like the anger she felt towards it was the only thing keeping her alive. Sh
e denied the universe this little victory. She was kicking. Irrelevant, but kicking.
Swinging between awareness and the current, in and out, Elodie managed to keep her eyes open for seconds sometimes, sometimes minutes. When she was awake, she knew what time it was. She knew when it had been a day since she last woke up, she knew when it had been minutes. Sometimes, she made it several times a day. It was just enough to try and gain clues as to why she was waking up in unexpected places, as if she were present the entire time she should be unconscious. The gifted weren’t that weird. They wouldn’t just carry her around.
But the current always grabbed her and pulled her back before she could speak.
Pictures were forming. Augustina was always beside her, reacting first to her awake state. She sometimes noticed the orange hues, as if something were reaching toward her to help, but if Elodie learned one thing from the experience, it was that the telepaths weren’t that much of a helping hand when it came to prognostic problems. She slipped out of the realm of human interaction pretty quickly. She just wasn’t in her own head—and a telepath didn’t seem able to travel into the current with her. If anything, when she felt the telepathic intrusion, she felt like it accelerated her fall.
The two times she saw Tammy, it was obvious she was concerned. Instead of waking up into a gorgeous future, Elodie transformed into a messy, unresponsive wreck. Passing out, awakening, repeating the exercise.
When she woke up on Sunday, they were seated in a bright office, and she caught Tammy speaking about her in third person.
“… matter how rare it is, I’m positive. I think that’s what’s happening. Haven’t you noticed anything?”
“She might just be adjusting. Power is pain.”
Augustina hit the nail on the head.
Elodie smelled jasmine. She opened her eyes into full consciousness. Tammy was drinking tea from a fragile little cup.
“There! Now!” Tammy practically threw the tea and reached for her.
“W—what’s wrong?” Elodie said.
“Stay with me! What’s the last thing you remember?” Augustina asked, both verbally and telepathically. Elodie felt a different type of pain, frontal, as if something singed her awareness.
“Help,” Elodie said, the high-pitched noise approaching again.
When she got pulled into the current again, she was ready for it, but it felt stranger this time. She lost track of time, carried away and defending herself from drowning. The next time she opened her eyes it was only for a blink. She couldn’t tell what was happening, but she felt Augustina near her.
Down again. The next time she opened her eyes for a moment, it was days later. Elodie didn’t know what time was supposed to look like, but this was wrong. More wrong. It was night. And silence. And then she fell back into the current again.
Before she could collect her thoughts, she almost crashed into a clear awake state in the recovery unit. A small laser light danced around her hands, reflecting on the metallic machinery that was gathering around her head. She even felt a new word in a sentence she was saying form in her mouth, but she couldn’t for the life of her understand what she was about to say. How was she talking? Was she talking while drowning in the current? Dr Hollbrook looked at her, puzzled. He must have realised something had changed. Whatever expression she wore transformed into panic and confusion.
“I have one, I have it again,” the doctor said and pulled out some kind of pop-up window that revealed a bunch of intertwining lines.
“What’s happening?” Elodie breathed, and grabbed him by the pristine MediMundus robe. He turned all of his attention to her, abandoning whatever he tried to do with the screen. His eyes were that peculiar English blue that shines brighter on rainy days but otherwise never attracts attention.
“Stay with me. If you can stay in this moment with me, I can help you get rooted,” he said. Augustina rushed through the door, opening a line to someone and talking on the comms. The orange invaded Elodie’s visual field so much that she didn’t see who was grabbing her head and shaking it as if to try to keep her awake.
“I don’t understand,” she said, then shouted, “I don’t know what’s happening!”
The distance between her and the current was reducing again, and the last thing she saw before she was pulled back into it was the excess of orange that grasped desperately to hold on to some part of her consciousness and keep her there. The current engulfed her. It was vast and silent and lonely. Fragments of information flowed all around her. She was only a minor obstacle. Not even a permanent one. She was running out of strength. Every time she woke up, she felt more tired when pulled back in. She sensed a thought forming inside her mind, an ambivalent one. One that would end her existence in the current when she couldn’t go on. It hurt so much.
Now she woke up in the middle of a session with Tammy, one on one, in different clothes, in physical pain. She was on the floor, and the chair was lying on the side. Tammy got up to help but didn’t help her up. Instead, she crushed a small metallic ball on her skin. Elodie felt a jolt of energy and awareness. Tammy spoke to her, fast and concise.
“Help me out, sweetheart. Stay in this moment. Don’t drift away again. You need to root yourself in this moment.”
“How?” Elodie asked, panicked. Two days had passed since her last waking moment. But she didn’t live them. Someone else did. Her memory started syncing, but it didn’t feel like her own. Someone was enjoying the lesson, the yoga, the treatment, the attention, the awakening, the recovery. She was trapped in some kind of hell she was only able to penetrate long enough to cry out and vanish again.
“Tell me the date. Every time you wake up like this, tell me the date. We’ll know what’s happening and guide you back. You’ll be f—" and Elodie fell back into darkness, even faster than before. This time, the current grabbed her without warning, and Elodie shouted in horror as the millions upon millions of images, sounds and impressions of other senses descended on their unrelenting mission to crush her.
She only sensed how much time had passed when she was able to resist the flow for long enough to create a distance once again. She was so tired that she rested in the blissful nothingness of a quiet mind. This was the halfway between the current and being awake. She was safe here, but it was never forever.
“Fourth of March 2363!” she shouted the moment she was out again. As fate would have it, she also spat out some food she was just eating, and about fifty people looked at her. But one knew exactly what it meant. Tammy was ready and grabbed Elodie by the elbow and dosed her again.
“Lose this one, come back next round with more strength, just think of the question, and then come back again with an answer. Remember what I’m telling you, the order matters,” she told Elodie, her voice so commanding that Elodie didn’t question it. She let go and voluntarily retreated back into the current carefully, so that it was easy to stay afloat and go back into the state of peace, where she could gather strength. She was getting better at creating a distance between herself and the current. As long as nothing bothered her, she could keep it up for hours.
And then:
“Sixth of March 2363!” Elodie was alone, in the dark again, in a bed inside Rising Dawn, and there was no one to save her. She tried to remember what Tammy had told her. Focus on the food. Was she hungry? What was the last thing she’d eaten? And just like that, she fell out of the moment again, and woke up in a classroom with about four different people and one coach, and Dr Rusu talking to them.
“Seventh of March 2363!” she shouted, and Dr Rusu stopped his lecture straight away, and knelt beside her.
“What is the last thing you’ve eaten?” he yelled.
The question confused Elodie even more, but she felt a part of her brain work that hadn’t felt active for a long time.
“Porridge. I had porridge,” she said.
“What kind of porridge?” he shouted and all the other four students with her abandoned their seating to witness this.
&n
bsp; “I…” she struggled.
“Don’t leave me now, Elodie,” he said.
“With bananas. And dates!” she shouted back.
“And yesterday, what did you have for dinner?” he asked quickly, and Elodie felt once again as if something moved in her head.
“Nothing. I didn’t eat,” she said. “Why didn’t I eat?”
These last words echoed around in her skull as the darkness took hold again. Elodie tried to fight it, but it made her only slur something in response, and she witnessed a sound of a thud, which must have been her body losing control again.
“Eighth of March 2363!” she shouted again the moment she woke up and felt the time. She was strapped to that damn dentist chair, but there was Tammy, right next to her, as well as the man, and they sprang into action. She felt the same jolt of energy as if she’d been given something to help maintain her state.
“I didn’t eat because I had a late lunch. Pasta. And you made me eat dessert even though I was really full. It was a cherry almond tart, and I don’t regret it,” she explained hastily.
“Go on. What about breakfast yesterday?”
“Tea, only tea. I had a long bad dream, and I can’t eat after I had nightmares. This is why you asked me for lunch. You said there was an eighty percent chance I’d sync,” Elodie said. She heard herself yelling while listing her meals, but something in the act alone made her feel as if she was finding her footing in the present moment. She began to remember everything about the last three weeks and how she was terrified of blacking out, even though it was always only for a few minutes. It was as if another self, one that was outside of time, tried to barge in. A strange horror came over her, but at the same time it was beautiful. Like two stories converging into one ending.
“Go slow. Don’t panic. I need you to try and synchronise the memories. You are one. You are one person. You were merely displaced in time for a little while, and now you’re here and you’re fine. Do you hear me?”
