Chapter Seventeen
Immediately after they extracted me from the life support incubator, I experienced a moment of complete, almost inhuman disorientation.
My every thought, my every physical sensation was reduced to mere radio static.
A fuzzy crackling sound. Nothing more. Even holding my gaze on a single spot for longer than a second seemed impossible.
Everything kept sliding out of the edges of my vision and turning into undulating halos of light.
Only after I was wheeled out of that room, or at least what I presumed had been a room, did I regain enough consciousness to be able to process my surroundings: the long white corridor, the sterile trail of overhead lights floating past my horizontal form, the clinical air quality, the sound of automatic doors opening to extrude my body to a place I didn’t know.
In my lungs there was a clean, chemical scent, like I was in a hospital. And, indeed, a doctor came in to see me, to check my vitals, give me medicine for my splitting headache, and reassure me in her toneless, impersonal voice that everything was going to be alright.
I could only lie there and nod, feeling almost alien. A test subject of some kind. I wasn’t even sure that we were speaking the same language, although I did seem able to understand them just fine.
Then came another room, another reclining surface, another cold rush of confusion. Where was I? What was happening? What had happened to me? No one was willing to answer me. All they did was smile and tell me to take a deep breath and try to relax as if I had any other choice.
Physically, I was exhausted, my limbs as unbendable and immovable as mountains, and my mind was still muddled, uncomprehending.
The only thing that seemed to work right was my heart, its vitality manifesting through an interminable mechanical sound produced by the ultra-thin monitor next to my bed.
If it wasn’t for that, I would have believed myself dead.
After an indefinite period of time, a woman in a crisp white lab coat came into the room with a strange, glossy touchscreen in hand and an affectless smile on her face.
“Welcome back, Ms. Larsson,” she said in a voice so expertly gentle it sounded prerecorded, like it was coming from an invisible speaker from the side of her neck.
She stood over me by the bed and checked something on the monitor, her fingers moving deftly over the glowing screen. “How are you feeling?”
There was an acrid, chemical taste in my mouth, and the inside of my throat felt so raw that I had trouble believing I’d made use of it before. I could only shake my head. I don’t know.
Thoughtfully, she nodded, her eyes on the screen.
“Because of your premature awakening, it is possible that you’ll experience feelings of confusion, disorientation, and a general sense of disquietude.
However, we urge you not to panic. Your remaining memories will return to you within the next twenty minutes.
Please stay still as I update your status. ”
She lowered some kind of scan before my face, a droning flashlight-like object. Without warning it flared hot and bright and burned through my retina.
I recoiled, startled, my eyes snapping shut, and out of sheer shock, it seemed, my voice returned to me, a broken, faint croak, “Where am I?”
“You’re at Hive, Ms. Larsson, where we provide you with advanced simulated realities. Please try to relax. Mr. Lawrence has been notified of your situation. He will be visiting you within the next hour.”
Inanely, I stared at her, and she stared at me in return, the two of us silent, alert, waiting for me to understand. But I couldn’t understand. That thing she was trying to imply kept on dangling right beyond the reach of my comprehension.
“Mr… Who…”
With exaggerated precision she pronounced, “Mr. Lawrence.”
Gritting my teeth, still pushing through the swamp of my thoughts, I growled at her, “Who the fuck is Mr. Lawrence?”
“The creator, Ms. Larsson.”
“Creator of what?”
Inclining her delicate neck, she said in a disturbingly tranquil manner, “Of the Nostalgia Program, of course. Your chosen simulated reality.”
Instantly, all the apprehension and utter confusion sloshing through my head morphed into something else. Terror and anger and brutal, goring panic.
“Where is Kai?” I demanded, floundering on the bed heavily and uncoordinatedly. Because of the inactivity, I realized with a fresh pang of horror. The incubator. The advanced life support. The SR headset. Its pale blue light bleeding through my eyelids.
“Please lay back, Ms. Larsson,” the woman insisted, clutching my shoulder and pressing me down against the mattress.
“Your memories will return to you shortly. I understand this is an unusual situation, but I assure you it is not unprecedented. Everything is being handled for you as we speak. All you need to do is stay calm and relax.”
Carefully, she released my shoulder and touched her hand on the white wall next to the bed. A compartment unfolded outward, something between a drawer and a desk. Atop it, two silver devices were set neatly within an inch from each other: a laptop and a mobile phone.
“Here are some of your personal belongings,” she continued in the same peaceable but firm manner. “Feel free to browse through them while we wait for Mr. Lawrence. They might help you reconnect with the real world.”
For a moment longer I went on staring at her, my head throbbing from the sheer effort of trying to work this whole thing out. Then, slowly, hesitantly, I picked up the phone, the device foreign in my hand, thin and sleek like a piece of glass.
Gathering breath, I glanced at my reflection on the unlighted screen. Nothing about me had changed. I looked exactly the same. The same person I’d always been and would always be. In and out of the Program.
My name was Anya Larsson. I was twenty-eight years old, an associate attorney at Lyndon & Smith, and I was without the first eighteen years of my life.
Of course, the memory deletion Hive offered in real life was a far more complex and selective procedure than what it had been in the Program.
Although I could no longer remember my life with my parents, not even their names or faces, I could still remember certain things from my childhood, memories I’d been suggested by Hive to retain so as to prevent the immense mental disorientation and possible psychosis that comes with complete loss of identity.
I could remember for a fact that growing up my parents had abused me and that this was why I had decided to undergo memory deletion, although I could no longer recall the nature and severity of the abuse.
I could not remember the inside of my house, but I still remembered my route to school, my days of studying, working bar shifts during the weekends in secret, saving money, and my teachers, proud and sympathetic, telling me that with my outstanding test scores I could pretty much go to any university I wanted, on a full scholarship too.
Law school, I decided. At first not just because of the money and therefore the freedom and security this particular career path promised, but because of the intricacies of law itself, which had fascinated me at the time.
This was what I wanted to do with my life.
To be able to dissect and decipher the delicate mechanisms of a system so inescapable that it could just as well be called the blood of society, running vitally and imperceptibly throughout its every vein.
To know the law and to be able to practice it was my way of pinning down the exact point where this so powerful and austere system had failed me.
And to maybe, just maybe, do for others what so many people had failed to do for me.
It was a lot later that I would learn that this holy, revengeful work I imagined myself doing, helping the defenseless and abused find justice in a fundamentally unjust world, was in actuality ungrateful, unpaid work.
Work that being who I was, a parentless, moneyless nobody from nowhere, and still deeply traumatized, having not gone through memory deletion yet, did not have the luxury of doing.
Ugly thing to think about, but true. Because to do anything in this life, even good, especially good, you needed the money to do it.
Corporate firm, then. Soul-crushing disappointment of my mentors. A mind like yours. You could have made an actual difference in the world. You could have become a judge one day.
No, never mind. Not for me. I’d be just another money-grubbing litigator.
The godless life, Theo, my boyfriend and colleague at the time, would call it after handling cases for people who did not even understand the concept of law.
Because laws did not exist for people who made more than seven figures a year.
Yes, a godless, faithless, soulless life.
Late-night office haze, catching inconsistencies, sustained only on ego and antidepressants.
Going to bed after midnight feeling too jittery, too vulnerable to my own thoughts and memories to sleep.
Another dose of alprazolam. It was prescribed for me.
For Theo, not so much, but then again, everyone was doing it.
Nothing hard to find. Where there was money, there was a way.
And I had plenty now. Sexy virtual zeros in the bank.
Got myself a downtown apartment so expensive it was borderline obscene.
Highly intelligent security system. Face recognition lock.
No passcodes. No one could get in but me.
All my youth and drive and supposed genius sacrificed on the altar of safety.
Ever since I was a little girl, this was all I wanted. This was the greatest happiness I could possibly imagine. To live with just a modicum of dignity, clean and safe and independent.