New Life: A Short Mystery Story

You wake up on a steel table. Its harsh coldness chills you to the core as you try to make sense of your surroundings. A bright, white overhead light shines down on you. The intensity of the light conceals the rest of the room from you. In the outer darkness you can hear the metallic clang of some sort of instruments being placed on tables, shuffling back and forth of unknown persons, and constant mumbling. You're able to pick up a few words uttered by these mysterious individuals. They are at once alien and tantalizingly familiar.

"Synaptic converter is online."

"Rate is two gigaquads and rising."

"Bioelectric field is steady."

You try to connect these words to the past, but when you try to remember all you find is a vast emptiness. It's not just that you can't recall. You know there's nothing there to recall. This ceases to be of importance when you feel a great pain in your head. It's almost as if someone is slowly inserting a white-hot needle into your brain. Instinctively, you want to pull out the painful spear, but your arms will not move. Your body, though you can still feel it, though you still know it is there, refuses to move even a millimeter - a conspirator against you. But, slowly, without volition, this concern begins to fade away. It begins to feel like, you think, that you never even had a body to begin with. Memories of smelling the perfume scent of roses, of the sweet and sour taste of freshly ripe blackberries, of listening to birds chirping on a spring day as you lay in the soft grass watching the clouds drift by. They are like dim stars in the night that slowly fade away until there is nothing left but the monolithic totality of darkness. You know they happened; you know the stars were there. You know they never were. A disembodied voice, quieter than before, pops your fragile thought bubble. You feel angry for a moment at the interruption, then nothing.

"Completion in five seconds."

"Link terminated."

The light is gone. There is only darkness now. You know you are not in the dark, but that you are the dark. You feel its unity. You feel its perfection. It's almost mathematical. Suddenly the universe makes sense to you, and it's all so simple. The epiphany does not excite you. You tell a joke to yourself about how it's as easy as pi. You do not laugh. That was another life. Now it doesn't matter. Now it's all so trivial.