Memories Made of Lies | A Short Story [COMPLETE]

| Ben |

Help me, Ben. The voice was clear as day. The voice was Katie's.

But how could it be? She was unconscious and she definitely didn't say it out loud. So how did I hear her say it?

I shook my head. The stress had to be playing tricks on me. Katie had been screaming and balling from agony. She couldn't have said that to me. I had to be hallucinating.

But it seemed so real.

I forced away that train of thought and sent daggers through the glass at Malric who stood staring at Katie's sprawled out form, his fist clenched tightly at his sides.

Teller had taken a few steps back in the chaos, though he still held the brain probe and sensors in his hands.

"What happened?" Malric said, his voice low and cool with rage.

Teller frantically shook his head. "I have no idea, sir. I did everything I could think of to make sure that it wouldn't happen again. I doubled the sedative amount and made sure that the machine was firmly planted in her brain stem. Everything was how it should-"

"There had to be something wrong, Teller," Malric growled, his self control starting to thin. "There had to be something wrong because people don't just wake up in the middle of a brain probe without there being a reason. It isn't possible."

"I'm sorry, sir-"

"Sorry doesn't fix the problem!" he snapped. The syringe in his hands that had been drained of three doses of sedative to knock Katie out again looked as if it was about to shatter in his vise-like grip. "Do you understand that if we don't get the location of the R94 prototype in the next week, we could both get laid off, and not just from our jobs. We could die, Teller! So fix the problem!" Malric slammed the door open and stormed out of the operation room, leaving Teller stunned in silence.

For a moment, I just stared at him, just as shocked as he was, but then Katie's yellow flashing monitor and blood curdling scream came rushing back to me and I knocked on the glass. "Teller?"

He swallowed, turning to look at me. His eyes met mine and he nodded weakly.

I rushed into the room, instantly at Katie's side. She looked horrible. Her skin was flushed and pale and dripping with sweat. Sticky tears lingered under her lashes. Though she was unconscious, her body still trembled violently from the event and her eyebrows were knotted together, almost like she was having some sort of nightmare in her sleep.

I hoped that she wasn't.

The room stayed silent for a long time as I held Katie's shaky hand and Teller stared at her, trying to find the answers he was looking for in Katie's face to no avail. His hair was disheveled and heavy purple bags hung under his eyes and I wondered if he really got any rest the night before like I had told him to.

I wanted to ask him if there was any chance that something was wrong with the machine or if they were going about the procedure wrong, but I knew that his only answer would be that he didn't know what was happening. But there had to be an answer. If they kept doing this and there wasn't a fix, Katie would...

Die.

I felt all the air drain from my lungs just as it did every time I thought of Katie not making it through this. I couldn't handle life without her. I could never live in a world where Katie wasn't alive. I had tried to convince myself that I would be able to, but I couldn't even fathom it anymore. I couldn't even remember how I lived before I met her.

"I'm getting you out of here," I whispered to Katie. "I will."

"I don't understand," Teller growled under his breath. I looked up to see him at the computer, going through Katie's recorded memory. It replayed out on the giant screen in front of me, just as it had when they were doing the probe but Teller stopped it every once in a while, looking for clues.