Full immersion, p.3
Full Immersion, page 3
The techs continue to watch her work, Evans twitching his leg nervously. A digital clock app counts the seconds passing on his desktop.
“If she doesn’t hurry up, we’ll have to reset. We can’t keep the patient out of flow long without messing everything up.”
“I’m doing the best that I can,” the Nurse replies tartly, from behind the glass. The Boss has forgotten to switch off her desk mic. The older woman rolls her eyes at Evans and placates the Nurse.
“Thank you, you’re doing a brilliant job,” she soothes, before switching her comms off.
Evans jiggles some more in his chair. “We’ve not had a puker for a while,” he says.
His Boss shrugs. “It happens. Some are more sensitive than others. Tiny inaccuracies in the visuals…”
“How very dare you.”
“…her personal simulation threshold… all sorts of factors can affect it. The longer she spends in there, the easier it’ll get, I hope. Can’t be easy, lying suspended and semi-unconscious whilst, you know, walking around in your mind. Gravity feels different, everything at odds with everything else. She’ll get used to it.”
“It’s not that easy sitting in here, waiting to get the fuck on with things.” Evans screws up his face, peeved.
His Boss sighs again. She feels like she is doing that a lot, lately.
“Cheer up Evans, would you? Go make the coffee if you’re bored.”
“Fine.” Evans is tired already. “Coffee it is.”
“Milk, no sugar please. And be snappy – the Nurse is almost done.”
“Milk, no sugar. Right you are.”
I wiped my mouth, feeling better. A small puddle of yellowish-brown bile had been deposited onto the mud bank beneath me.
I looked down at it, froze.
And saw a slender, female hand sticking out of the mud.
Fuck, I thought. Fuck!
Had it had been there all along, for me to see it only now? Elegantly beckoning: Come here, it said.
I remained fixed to the spot. Fear and indecision took hold of me. I felt blood pounding against my ear drums. I looked about for some help. There was none; it was not long after dawn. The city still slept.
I thought about calling someone, but then I remembered I had no phone, and no money with me. That realisation hit me in all the wrong places. Why would I have left the house without money? Did I even have my keys? I patted myself down. No. That didn’t make any sense. I always took my keys with me when I left the house. Why would I have…
Does it matter? I cried, silently. There’s a fucking hand sticking out of the mud bank not ten feet away!
I looked at the hand again. It was a good job I had already been sick.
What the fuck was I supposed to do about this? I couldn’t call anyone, so common sense dictated I should go and get help. But I couldn’t just leave the hand sticking out of the bank like that, unattended. It felt wrong, to my core. There was, presumably, a body attached to the hand, lying down there in the sludge, and leaving it alone felt cruel, for reasons I didn’t understand completely.
Carefully, I climbed over the wall and hopped down onto the rickety landing station. It creaked and moaned underneath my weight, but held. I inched across to the edge of the station, so I was directly above where the arm poked out of the mud. I lay flat on my belly, threaded my feet through the gaps in between the timbers. Reached out.
The hand was too far away.
“Wait!” a voice cried, and I nearly fell headlong off the station and into the riverbank. There was a thud, and a jolt. Another person landed on the jetty next to me. A man.
He spread himself out beside me. I looked at him in shock and grateful surprise.
“Let me help,” he said. I was in no position to refuse.
I let him hold my legs as I shuffled further forward, allowing my upper body to hinge and hang down from the waist, straining, reaching, until finally, my fingers brushed the cold, wet fingers protruding from the bank.
“Got it!” I gasped.
Together, we braced ourselves, and pulled.
The body resisted at first, then, like a babe from the womb, slid free from the mud. The noise was indescribable. Excruciating. I knew I would never forget it. Between us, with huge effort, we hauled the corpse up onto the jetty. I don’t know how, exactly, but we did. I then lay on my belly for several minutes, spent, panting, covered in slimy filth. It felt as if I’d given birth once again.
(Given birth once again never again not after last time I’m sorry, I know you’re disappointed but–)
Suddenly it was hard to breathe. I pushed up onto my knees, dry heaving.
What the fuck was wrong with me?
There was nothing left in my belly to vomit out.
“Is she going to hurl again?”
“She’s got barely anything left in her stomach, so I hope not.”
“It’s going to be really, really difficult to implement anything if she spends this whole scenario blowing chunks.”
The Boss squeezes a fold of skin between her eyebrows, feeling faintly stressed. Evans has always been a complainer, and the Boss knows it is mostly harmless bluster, but he is starting to grate on her.
“Evans,” she says, as patiently as she can, “I know we don’t hire you for your bedside manner, but do you think you can at least try to have some sympathy for the poor girl? She’s clearly having a rough old time of it. How about a bit more patience for the patient?”
Evans snorts, folding his arms.
“Fine,” he says, eventually. “But it’s putting me right off my lunch, I’ll tell you that much.”
I heaved a few more times, got a hold of myself. Eventually, I sat back on my heels, looked across to my helper. He was a youngish man with a short, dark beard, longish hair and pale green or blue eyes, I couldn’t tell which colour, exactly.
We acknowledged each other silently, and turned our attention to the body.
It was female, of average height and weight, and she had long wavy hair coated in gelatinous mud. Her skin was cold, livid. A thick, dirt-flecked film of mucus glazed her unseeing eyes. She was well and truly dead, and reminded me of a jellyfish washed up on a beach: spent, limp.
Tentatively, I scooped the dirt away from her eyes, her mouth, her nostrils, hoping in vain that she would perhaps find herself able to breathe, wake up.
She did not.
And the more I cleaned her, the more I began to tremble. My own skin grew cold. Shock, I thought, remotely. I’m in shock.
Because I realised, as she emerged from underneath the filth, that I knew her.
I found a handkerchief in my pocket, spat on it as best I could with my now very dry mouth. Wiped her lips so that the colour could seep back through: it did not, they remained pale, blueish. I slicked the hair back from her forehead, removed the clay from her eyelashes, wiped every finger clean. Tears ran down my face. A few of them dropped, left wet clean trails on her skin. She didn’t flinch. She remained cold, motionless, uncaring. It might have been mistaken for poise, were it not for the lividity.
I stopped when I knew I could do no more.
She was dead, gone.
My new friend placed a hand on my shoulder. It was warm, a welcome contrast to the hand that I now held.
“Do you know her?” he asked, his voice kind.
“I do,” I said, for the body I was looking at was my own.
My own.
My lifeless face, staring back uncomprehendingly.
Mirror, mirror, on the wall, who is…?
Dead?
You are, my dear.
4
DEBT
“How’s she doing?” The Boss returns from a bathroom break, rubbing sanitizer into the dry skin of her hands as she carefully re-seats herself at the control deck.
“Better. Sickness seems to have abated. She’s not pregnant, is she? Just a thought.”
The Boss shakes her head. An odd look paints her face. “Definitely not,” she says, in a curt tone.
Awkward silence prevails for a moment. Evans, not oblivious to tonal shifts, tries to lighten the mood.
“Well, she’s running with it just fine now. That’s the beauty of this method. It gives her back some control. Or the illusion of it, at least.”
“All is illusion…” The Boss mutters, to herself.
Evans rummages around in his nose with the tip of a pen.
“Although if you ask me, this scenario is a bit brutal. Finding her own dead body like that. It’s… downright morbid.”
“Don’t you ever read the script properly, Evans?”
“Nah. Too busy, you know, working. The beat sheets work just fine for me. I always was an edited highlight sort of guy.”
The Boss shakes her head. “I swear you are the sole reason I have gone so grey. But okay, yes, it is a touch dramatic, I suppose. But that’s what the Psych ordered, so that’s what we’ve delivered. He’s obviously decided a more extreme approach is necessary this time.”
“Shouldn’t we be worried about triggering her?”
“To do what? She can’t harm herself now, not the way we have her restrained. She’s safer here than anywhere else.” The older woman gestures to the Observation Room. Inside, the patient is leaning forward, her knees drawn up beneath her as far as the wires will allow. Her mouth hangs open beneath the visor. She is crying. It looks highly uncomfortable.
“Besides, we know she’s in denial over previous suicide attempts.”
“All three of them, too. Talk about selective memory.”
“Trauma response. Unusual for her to have blanked each attempt so completely from her mind, but everyone is different. Memory loss, delusions… maybe it’s better that she doesn’t remember.”
“Can you imagine? Throwing yourself off a bridge that high? I can’t.” Evans shudders.
The Boss sighs. “I don’t want to imagine. I want to help her. And so does the Psych. Perhaps he thinks that shock tactics will help… shift things around a bit, so to speak.”
“Epiphany.”
There is a pause as the techs take a moment to think. Eventually, Evans clears his throat.
“It is… you know. For her.” He stumbles with his words.
“Sad?” The Boss sighs. “Yes, yes it is. Hopefully, we can put a stop to some of her more dangerous compulsions. I guess only time will tell. How do you think she’s responding to our guy?”
“What’s his name again?”
“Oh, this is one of our Anonymous Psychs. He’s been on our books for a while. I’ve never worked with him directly before, but I’ve heard good things.”
“Anonymous Psychs. Pfft… Fucking hubris, if you ask me.”
“The opposite of hubris, surely? Being Anonymous. Means you can’t claim the credit for anything that comes after.”
“Or blame. Fine, not hubris, but still a bit dramatic. Regardless, the Introduction seems to have gone well, I think.”
“Well, it’s early days yet. Is the text-to-speech bot working okay? I’m having a hard time figuring out if he’s getting my messages.” It was unreliable on the best of days, but the easiest way of communicating with the Psych when he was otherwise occupied. The Boss texted a two-way inbox that converted her directions to speech and fed them into his earpiece where he received them at a time that was convenient for him. It felt convoluted, but it enabled the Psych to interact with Tech when he was ready, without the distraction of anyone chattering directly into his ear mid-session. Easier to listen to a pending message than constantly mute and unmute an active dialogue, the thinking being.
“I think so. I’ll add it to my ever-growing list of things to keep an eye on. Fancy another coffee?”
“Thought you’d never ask.”
Once I’d gotten over the shock of finding myself dead, I began to turn my mind to the important questions.
How?
How did I die?
Well, that much was obvious. I’d jumped off the bridge and into the river.
Hadn’t I?
It made sense. It was, after all, a wholly impractical way to go. And I did love the bridge. Maybe that was why I walked here every day. Maybe I was supposed to find myself, quite literally. After I’d jumped, fallen the two hundred and forty-five feet into the water, my broken form had bobbed to the surface like a cork, and the current had carried me along a little ways. I’d ended up here in the mud bank, like a fossil in the making, an ammonite in slow bloom.
When?
Did it matter? I seemed to be dressed in the same clothes that the alive version of me was wearing. I was missing my shoes, but I suppose that was to be expected. The force of impact alone would have torn them off easily, and if not that, the insistent pull of the current.
No, when it had happened didn’t matter, not one bit. Time had lost all meaning for me lately, and on reflection, I realised that it had been that way for a long while: hours, days, minutes, seconds, markers, meaningless ways of dividing time into digestible little chunks, like dicing a steak before we chew on it and swallow.
And the more I thought about it, how it happened also didn’t seem to distress me as much as it perhaps should. I was remarkably accepting of the idea that I had done this to myself, rather than been pushed, or simply fallen by accident. I couldn’t explain it, but jumping just felt like something I might do.
Why, though?
Aha. That was the big question.
(“The Question”, why do they always want to know why, if I knew that I wouldn’t–)
I reached down and gripped my own chin between my numb fingers, searching for answers, and finding only mud in the familiar lines of my face.
I drew a horrible blank.
And then, without warning, everything flickered, and stopped.
In the Control Room, the monitors suddenly snap and blink in a rippled wave of distortion, and then each one in turn goes black.
At the same time, a faint but marked tremor runs through the room, sharply jangling and rattling the equipment around the techs for a split second, like a tiny earthquake flexing its muscles.
The Boss pushes up, half-out of her chair.
“What was that?”
“Uhh, just a glitch, I think?” replies Evans, furiously tapping at some keys. “Hang on just a sec…”
“No, I mean the tremor.”
“What tremor?”
“You didn’t feel that?” The Boss looks at Evans incredulously.
“Feel what?” He avoids eye contact.
Confused, the Boss looks to the patient in the OR. She is still in a kneeling position mid-air, but swaying a little more vigorously than her motion allows for. Something has disturbed that room the same as this one. A small commotion, but a marked one.
The Boss looks back at Evans. “I think we just had a miniature earthquake,” she says, eyes wide.
“In Bristol?” Evans scoffs, still markedly preoccupied with the tech blackout. “Don’t be daft!”
“I swear to God! I have no idea how you didn’t feel that. The whole room just…vibrated.”
“I honestly think it was just a glitch, Boss, I…”
The screens pop back into life as if nothing at all has happened, and Evans breathes a huge sigh of relief.
The older woman lowers herself slowly back into her seat, a little ashamed of how quickly she lost her cool.
“Just a glitch,” both techs murmur, as they wait for their heart rates to return to normal.
On the screen, the patient still stares at her own muddy corpse.
“That’s you, isn’t it?” My companion said, over my shoulder.
I shuddered back into the moment. An internal voice whispered:
What just happened?
The man, who knelt beside me, gently touched the little brown mole that lived under my left eye, and then touched the corresponding mole on the dead woman’s face.
I flinched, then nodded my head mutely.
“That’s a shame,” the man sighed. “Don’t you have any family? People who will… miss you?”
“I do.” I bit my lip, thinking furiously. “At least I think I do.” (Wanna know a secret? You love me? I know. I know you know, but I’ll never stop saying it.)
“I’m married, maybe. There is… something…”
My mind was a basket full of holes.
“This just doesn’t make any sense,” I burst out, exasperated.
“You can’t remember? Why you did it?”
“What makes you think I did anything?” I reared back from him, angry. “I could have fallen, you know. Who even are you?”
“Just a friendly stranger,” he replied, holding his hands up in a placatory gesture. “I think the situation is sad, that’s all.”
I couldn’t argue with that. It was sad, terribly so. I looked down at my corpse again.
Why?
Something nudged at my mind. A sound. A… cry? (Please stop please stop please) Was that a memory? A child crying, or was it a woman? I couldn’t make it out.
I sensed, although I had no idea what his motivations were for doing so, that my new friend was trying to keep me talking, distract me from something. Maybe from the awful truth of myself as a corpse. Perhaps he was only an innocent bystander, trying to help, but there was something off about his expression, as if he were not really concentrating, as if he were half-listening to me, and half-listening to someone else. My hackles rose, just a little. I took a moment to newly examine this new person, his shifting eye-colour, subtly changing facial contours, thick brown hair that sometimes appeared longer than it was. I really saw him, and re-appraised.
“Is this my George Bailey moment?” I asked suddenly, noting how complicated the look in his eyes was, how resolute the set of his mouth. It was the only thing that seemed to make sense to me. I was in a movie, or a novel, perhaps, and my character was about to be taught an important metaphysical lesson.
