Ghost in the machine

Falling...

She's spinning. Nauseaous. Her chest locked tight. Her eyeballs and stomach floating free of her body as she rolls head over heels in a silent, viscous darkness. No up, no down, no light and no sound, pummelled all the time by an unrelenting vibration that pounds her organs through every pore, every hair, every cell in her skin.

Liquid filling her nose, mouth and lungs.

Her heart begins to pound and a cry of terror bursts from her amygdala, flashing along her nerves toward her adrenal glands. A heartbeat later, her brain explodes in an adrenalin-fuelled super-nova. A wave of panic grips her and she screams. Her arms and legs flail, desperate to flee this place and find some form of equilibrium.

At least, that was what her brain commanded. But the commands never reach their destinations. They are intercepted and silenced. No part of her moves, no sound comes from her throat. Her body is not her own. The only thing over which she exercises any control are her thoughts.

Then, even as the torrent of adrenalin is coursing through her veins, she notes a sudden, exponential widening of her senses as some dormant part of her brain awakes and expands, amplifying her perception and quickening her cognition. It's like having a blindfold removed, ears unplugged, nerves extended and multiplied outside of her skin, her nose, her tongue. New and marvellous information floods in from all of her senses, so much and so fast that time seems to slow almost to a stop. She marvels at how she is able to observe, collect and analyze every input, every thought and every feeling, however small, irrelevant or unconscious they might seem.

Her command to scream is extinguished, cut-off by the sudden knowledge that she isn't drowning. Her blood oxygen saturation is normal. The liquid filling her lungs isn't killing her. She's breathing it, and she was good. She doesn't know how she knows, just that she does, that her body's homeostatic systems are in harmony, that this place, this... artificial womb... is keeping her alive.

The tumbling stabilises to a slow, counter-clockwise rotation.

Inside, her temperature, blood pressure, blood composition, heart rate, bones, muscles and internal organs are all healthy and functioning within their expected limits. Her body is not her own because electrodes in her spine are overriding all motor instructions from her brain. The signals from her vestibular apparatus, the sensation in her eyes and stomach is indicating weightlessness. Zero gravity. Free fall or free space. No way to tell which. No way to know. No memories. Just a hazy cloud of half formed images and feelings that scatter when approached, like a single fly singled out for capture amongst a buzzing cloud of flies. No sound but the beating of her heart and the blood pulsing through her ears. Nothing to see but the darkness. Nothing to feel but the gelatinous mold encasing her, the tubes penetrating her body, bringing nutrient, taking waste, and the superoxigenated liquid around and inside her at thirty seven degrees centigrade.

With no external stimulus, deprived of context and history, of anything that might indicate identity or purpose or the reason for which she found herself floating in the dark, her brain does the only thing it can. It reaches outside itself, searching for meaning, calling out like a lost child to the mother it assumes will be there.

And finds nothing.

She is alone.

For eighteen minutes she searches. For eighteen minutes that, in her heightened cognitive state seems to last as many years, she endures an emptiness, a yearning for something that twists and tears at her insides as her panicked brain reaches out with ever increasing power and desperation until, when it feels as though it is on fire and her blood pressure and temperature have risen to dangerous heights, it shuts itself down.

When she comes too, many minutes later, off-line and once more in-time, the terror of alienation has subsided, replaced now by a new and terrible panic welling from within. Claustrophobia. She can cope with ignorance, with being unable to see or hear or feel, even with not being in control of her body, but not all three. Alone, trapped in the dark, unable to hear or move or to struggle or scream, and not knowing why, is driving her insane.

Dark thoughts run wild and she fights to control them and to focus on what she knows. She is trapped and immobile, yet she is safe. She has been asleep. The word hibernating comes to mind. A word that implies growth, repair or transit. Since she is neither sick nor damaged, and has no memory of having ever been either, the probability of the latter seems greater.

Moments later she is shaken again. Once with a violence that leaves her winded. Then again and again and again with decreasing intensity until the movement stops and her stomach returns to her body with the force of a punch.

Instinctively she knows the feeling means gravity. She is at rest, or moving with constant velocity, inside a gravity field. Or she is accelerating. Which it is, she has no way to know. Time passes. Seconds. Minutes. With nothing else to do she begins to count, and reaches fifty when a gut-wrenching thud followed by a violent shaking and an eerie stillness provide her with an answer.

A moment of fear and uncertainty passes. She's still alive, and still in that same gravity field. She waits for more information, her senses attuned to the slightest change. But nothing happens, and her senses begin to dim.

Liquid crystals rearrange themselves and a window ripples open right in front of her eyes. Light strikes her retinas like a white-hot needle, blinding her. She cries out and closes her eyes, but not before she makes out the shape filling the light.

A head. With the light behind it's too bright to see but her heart leaps. It's him! Come for her. She's not alone.

Now she can hear noises. Tapping, reaching her ears through the viscous liquid. Sharp yet distant.

She waits, though for what she isn't exactly sure. Certainly not the slow blurring of her thoughts and the creeping, nameless fear that blossoms into mindless terror when she realises that her blood oxygen saturation is falling. The liquid that has been keeping her alive is killing her. Her brain screams. Its desperate cries flash along her nerves, still unheard by muscles. She's suffocating. She's going to die and there isn't a thing she can do about it.