I'm a tank again, looping in a pool of horrors, blood trickling beneath my gridded toes as I swing my sword through the neck of another screaming woman while two of my other instances hold her down.
I'm flying, tumbling arse over wing as my thumb sings a keening pain of broken bone, and I smell the fresh water of the roaring waterfall beneath me.
"Make it stop," I hear someone mumble, and there's blood on my lips where I've almost bitten through them. It's me who's being held down by the tanks, facing a woman with burning eyes, and behind her is a man who loves me, if I could only remember what his name was.
The snakes bite again and drink deep, and the sun goes dark.
RESTART:
I become aware that someone is holding my right hand.
Then, a timeless period later, I realize that he's still holding my hand. Which implies he's very patient, because I'm still lying in bed, and it's very bright. "What time is it?" I ask, mildly panicky because I need to get to work.
"Ssh. It's around lunchtime, and everything's all right."
"If it's all right"Sam squeezes my hand"how long have you been sitting there?"
"Not long."
I open my eyes and look at him. He's on the stool beside my bed. I pull a face, or smile, or something. "Liar."
He doesn't smile or nod but the tension drains out of him like water and he sags as it runs away. "Reeve? Can you remember?"
I blink rapidly, trying to get some dust out of a corner of my left eye. Can I remember "I remember lots," I say. How much of what I remember is true is another matter. Just trying to sort it out makes my head hurt! I'm a tank: I'm a dissolute young bioaviator with a death wish: Maybe I'm a sad gamer case instead, or a deep-cover agent. But all of these possibilities are a whole lot sillier and less plausible than what everything around me is saying, which is that I'm a small-town librarian who's had a nervous breakdown. I decide I'll go with that version for the time being. I hold Sam's hand tight, like I'm drowning: "How bad was it?"
"Oh Reeve, it was bad." He leans across me, and hugs me and I hug him back as tight as I can. "It was bad as can be." He's shaking, I realize with a sense of growing awe. He feels for me that deeply? "I was afraid I was going to lose you."
I nuzzle into the base of his neck. "That would be bad." It's my turn to shudder with a frisson of existential dread at the thought that I could have lost him . Somewhere in the past week Sam has turned into my anchor, my refuge in the turbulent waters of identity. "I've got... well. Things are a bit jumbled today. What happened? When did you hear... ?"
"I came as soon as I could," he mumbles in my ear. "Last night they called but said I couldn't visit, it was too late." He tenses.
"And?" I prompt. I feel as if there should be something more.
"You were fitting." He's still tense. "Dr. Hanta said it's an acute crisis; you needed a fixative, but she couldn't do it without your permission. I told her to give it anyway, but she refused."
"A fixative? What for?"
"Your memories." He's even tenser. I let go of him, feeling cold.
"What does this fixative do?"
Dr. Hanta answers from behind me as I turn round to look at her. "Memory is encoded in a number of ways, as differential weightings in synaptic connections and also as connections between different nerves. The last excision and redaction you underwent was faulty. You began to experience breakthrough. In turn, that was triggering alerts in your enhanced immune system, and then you got yourself exposed to a mechanocytic infestation, which made things much worse. Whenever new associative traces would start integrating, your endogenous robophages would decide it was a mechanocyte signal and kill the nerve cells. You were well on your way to losing the ability to form new long-term associative tracesprogressive brain damage. The fixative is normally used as the last step in redactive editing. I used it to renormalize, erase, the old memories that were breaking through. I'm sorry, but you won't be able to access them nowyou keep those that you've already integrated, but the others are gone for good."
Sam has loosened his grip on me, and I lean against him as I stare at the doctor. "Did I give you permission to mess with my mind?" I ask.
Hanta just looks at me.
"Did I?" I echo myself. I feel aghast. If she did it against my will, that's
"Yes," says Sam.
"What?"
"Sheyou were pretty far gone." He hunches over again. "She was describing the situation to you, and me, and I was asking her to do it, and she said she couldn'tthen you were delirious. You began mumbling and she asked you, and you said yes."
"But I don't remember..." I stop. I think I do remember, sort of. But I can't be sure, can I? "Oh."
I stare at Hanta. I recognize the expression in her eyes. I stare at her for a long timethen I manage to make myself nod, just a quick jerk really, but it's enough to break contact, and I think we all breathe out simultaneously. Meanwhile I'm thinking, Shit, I'll never be able to figure out where I've come from now, will I? But it's not as bad as what was going to happen otherwise. I don't remember the attacks, exactly, but I remember what happened between them, the consequencesit's a consistent story. A new story of my life, I suppose. "I feel much better," I say cautiously.
Sam laughs, and there's a raw edge in it that borders on hysteria. "You feel better?" He hugs me again, and I hug him right back. Hanta is smiling, with what I think is relief at a difficult situation resolved. The suspicious paranoid corner of me files it away for future reference, but even my secret-agent self is willing to concede that Hanta might actually be what she seems, an ethically orthodox practitioner with only the best interests of her patients at heart. Which is a big improvement on Fiore or the Bishop, but at least one out of three isn't bad.
"So when can I go home?" I ask expectantly.
IT turns out that I'm stuck in hospital for the rest of the day and the next night, too. Hospital life is tedious, punctuated by the white-clad ghosts wheeling around trolleys of food and different things, instruments and dark age potions.
I still ache from the fever, and I feel weak, but I'm well enough to get up and go to the bathroom on my own. On my way back I notice that the curtains around the other occupied bed on the ward are drawn back. I glance around, but there are no nurses present. Steeling myself, I approach.
It is Cass, and she's a mess. Her legs are encased in bright blue polymer tubes from toe to thigh, and raised by wires so that the bedding dangles across her in a kind of valley. The bruises on her face have faded to an ugly green and yellow except around her eye sockets, which look simultaneously puffy and hollow, her eyelids sagging closed. She's still thin, and a translucent bag full of fluid is slowly draining into her wrist through a pipe.
"Cass?" I say softly.
Her eyes open and roll toward me. "Guuh," she says.
"What?" She flinches slightly. I hear footsteps behind me. "Are you all right?"
The nursing zombie approaches. "Please step away from the patient. Please step away from the patient."
"How is she?" I demand. "What have you done to her?"
"Please step away from the patient," says the nurse, then a different reflex triggers: "All questions should be addressed to medical authorities. Thank you for your compliance. Go back to bed."
"Cass" I try a last time. Gross memory surgery falls through my mind like a snowflake, freezing everything it touches. I feel awful. "Are you there, Cass?"
"Go back to bed," says the nurse, a touch threateningly.
"I'm going, I'm going," I say, and I shuffle away from poor, damaged Cass. Cass who I thought was Kay, obsessing over her, when all the time Kay was sleeping in the next room, and Cass was living in a nightmare.