Random Access Memory

With a clink, the can fell into my shopping cart, briefly muffling the tune of the easy-listening music in my ears. It bounced a bit before coming to rest gently against the bag of carrots that sat behind it. I looked up, smiling - not at anything in particular. Today was good. Today, I'd get my groceries for the week and spend some quiet time alone, finally off of work. It'd been so long since the last time I was able to simply be with myself, quiet and mellow. Another day, unassuming as the pile of mundanities that sat in my cart.

I was always an introvert. I strolled the aisles looking for the tea I liked, noticing as other shoppers came and went around me. Something about the idea of constant human interaction annoyed me; the lack of privacy, the constant motion, the constant speaking...

A woman bumped into me from behind, enticing a sudden squeak of surprise from my lips.

"Ah! I'm so sorry," I gasped, even knowing it wasn't my fault. "My bad!"

Her black hair bobbed a bit as she stopped in her tracks, yet said nothing. The woman stood perfectly still, regarding me as if I'd just spoken to her in a foreign language - a mix of confusion and discomfort. The gaze she gave me chilled me to the bone.

"Are... you okay?" I asked. Still she said nothing, merely tilting her head to the side and turning away from me, basket in hand. It was full of nothing other than bottles of water - dozens, easily, all the same brand. Within seconds, she was gone, leaving the aisle for... wherever she was going. I blinked, standing still and confused for a moment. Something... something about my eyes felt off. Speaking to her was taxing - more so than usual. I wanted to sit, take a rest; quickly my mind caught up to me, forcing me to shake my head. Why would I sit down in the middle of a grocery store's... canned food aisle?

Before me, on the shelves, now sat boxes of cereal. I knew there'd been canned fruit there just moments ago - I'd bought one! - but now there was no trace of them. Maybe I lost focus and wandered. I... I did that sometimes, didn't I? With some strange caution I tilted up towards the information board above the aisle.

"CREEE", it read, the letters fuzzy and hard to make out. I rubbed my hands against my eyes, trying to focus and make it out. The more I strained, however, the more I found myself unable to comprehend the words. I could read them, and yet they made no sense, shifting and moving like they were floating on water. "CRLEELEELEE." "CERE." "EEEEEEEEEE."

My eyes darted from side to side, then down to my shopping cart. Despite the strangeness, I still recognized it and its contents: cans of fruit, some produce and bread, flour for baking, all arranged neatly above the wire lattice of the cart. With creeping, sinking realization, I noticed the branding on each and every thing in my cart was nearly identical; black labels, heavy white text, few designs or images to speak of. Surely mistaken, I picked up a loaf of bread and rolled it over to look at the label, contents sagging strangely in my hands.

"B", it said, the label minimal and difficult to see clearly. It was trying to crawl away from my gaze, it felt, my eyes struggling to even pin the soft object to examine it. Was I having a stroke? I quickly felt the sides of my face in search of any numbness to no avail. I... I needed help. Though the thought of having to bring the matter up with others pained me, I had no further recourse; whatever was happening to my head was not normal. Leaving my cart where it sat, I left the aisle - whatever it was - and searched for an employee.

For the middle of the day, the market was starkly quiet. I'd expect a few people to be milling about, groceries with them, but as I peered out into the more open walkway I found scarcely two people, both looking away from me and minding their own business. Electric lights hummed uncomfortably loud above me, the easy-listening music now beginning to grate on my frightened psyche. Deliriously, I stepped out into the rest of the store, in search of someone - anyone - to speak to. Maybe the woman from before - she must be nearby.

My feet sounded deafeningly loud compared to how quiet the market was as they clicked along polished, pristine floors. Each of the signs I passed espoused the same nonsense writing as the bread in my cart and the label above the other aisle; jumbles of letters, symbols, and colors, yet fuzzy and indefinite as if they were melting snow. Despite the mundane shelves of boxes and packages, I felt increasingly claustrophobic. My head thrummed with worry, compounded by the fast beating of my heart. I round a corner and, finally, locked eyes with an employee. His hair was short, fuzzy, eyes distant - as if he'd not even noticed me.

Approaching him was... difficult, somehow. It was impossible to point to a single reason; the fear and confusion, of course, were ever-present. My feet... they felt as if I were wading through mud. Simple movements were a challenge, legs weighed down with something sticky, viscous...

Cautiously I approached him, legs still working against me. He was holding a clipboard in one hand and a pen in the other, apparently marking something down from a row of chip bags; as for what I did not know, as the sheet of paper he was marking was clearly blank.

"Hello?" I asked, more skittish than usual. "I'm, uh, having... problems. Could you tell me w-which... aisle that is?"

I gestured towards the aisle with my cart still in it. The man blinked a few times, tilting his head as if he were confused.

"The... aisle. Which aisle is this?" I repeated.

With a backwards nod of his head, the man answered.

"You're really struggling."

Soft music filled the uncomfortable space between his words and my own thoughts. Done... what? Huh?

"I've... I'm sorry, I don't understand..." I said, glancing back at my cart only to find the bag of carrots in it was now a bag of leeks. Gravity began to hit me like a bag of bricks. My blood rushed to my head - or had it always been in my head? Something... woozy in my stomach. Leeks. Not carrots, now.

"Excuse me."

I pardoned myself from the strange man and took off walking - perhaps slightly too fast for manners - in the opposite direction. The checkout tills - they could take my groceries back, for all I cared. Something was horribly, horribly wrong with my head - I dread the thought of staying inside the claustrophobic store a moment longer, as my brain clearly attempted to work against me.

Others had arrived in the time it took for me to have my bizarre exchange with the worker. A woman and a man, standing vaguely close to one another, looked over at me in confusion. They were sharing the same basket of groceries, each sharing the handle with one of their hands. The look on my reddened face was clearly catching my eye; my ailment was bad enough, now mixing in with embarrassment and shy defensiveness.

"Are you alright?" the woman asked, in a strange and deadpan cadence.

I stopped mid-step and whipped around to face the couple, now behind me. The employee had been a fluke! Someone sane spoke to me! My frightened face quickly turned to a smile.

"Oh! My God, thank you for asking! I'm, uh, actually not! I'm, uh, h-having some kind -"

It occured to me, mid-sentence, that the woman was speaking to her partner. They'd not even noticed me - even in my misjudgment they weren't listening to a word I said.

"Am I going fucking crazy?" I asked them, directing it at myself almost even more. No response. The man picked up a candy bar next to the till and showed it to the woman.

"It's so wet. It's so cozy." she said, staring wide-eyed at it. Ignoring me. Acting like I'd not even been there.

I screamed. I screamed so loud I thought my throat would bleed, screaming and screaming into the deaf and uncaring ears of the people around me. My feet kicked and struggled to move as I forced myself through the empty tills towards the front door. Tears streamed down my face, landing all over the polished tile floors. Every second longer I spent walking in slow-motion was torture. My own fucking legs were disobeying me, now, conspiring with my mind to bring me down and bury me in fear. I was dying. Oh, my God, I was dying and no one was helping me.

I approached the automatic doors and watched as they opened like melting ice sculptures, impossible for my brain to pin as a solid object. The way it moved made me seasick, my footing already barely solid enough for my gelid legs to stand. My joints screamed at me and I screamed back, no longer having any care for social norms; if anything, being as loud and obscene as possible would be good. Maybe, maybe, I'd be able to get the attention of someone not wandering around in the same fugue state that I was stumbling through.

"Gonna keep laying here and laying here."

Someone behind me shouted at me. I spun around long enough to make eye contact with the same employee who I'd hurried away from. He was still holding a clipboard in one hand and a pen in the other, standing idly behind one of the tills. Blank paper. Blank stares. My heart burned from its over-stressed beating and forced my legs to move.

With a scream I threw my weight towards the doorway and out into the parking lot.

My body fell against the concrete with a soft, almost numb-feeling flop. The pain I was seeking to bring myself back to lucidity was completely gone, as if I were now laying atop concrete-painted padding. A nervous hand rubbed along the filthy ground, the slight coarseness of the material become harder and harder to feel the longer I held my hand down. It was... fading, in and out of my sensations. Ripples of touch, of sensation - I noticed I'd not been paying attention to my hands. Nothing felt the same, felt how I remembered; I ran a finger along the sleeve of my jacket to find it felt almost identical to the rest of my skin, as if all the sensation was beginning to blend together.

The winter sun beat down on me, frigid and uncaring as I lay, convulsing, wrought with panic. I couldn't control my breathing, my chest pounding against the smooth concrete with every further breath. My legs... they felt like they were floating, being lifted by whatever unseen force made it so difficult to walk and denying me even the little rest it would bring. My head... oh, my God, my head...

In defeat I raised a hand to cover my eyes - but, somehow, I found it more difficult than anything before. Despite how the mere act of crying in public lead me to feel even worse, my sobs were interrupted with a sudden twinge of confusion. I... I couldn't bring my hands closer to my face. For a moment, confusion and fright graced my panic-stricken grimace. Tears abided by the pulse of animal instinct, forcing me to draw in a sharp breath as my body seemed to force my hands away; regardless of how much I squirmed on the concrete with pained effort, I could barely bring my hands more than a few inches in front of my face.

Something was wrong - and even in my delirium, animal instincts told me that whatever something was went beyond my brain. I stared at my hand in an equal mix of fear and curiosity. Perhaps... perhaps I was imagining it. Already so utterly torn with confusion, perhaps my hands were hesitant. That must be the case. Again I watched through tear-filled eyes as my hand approached my face - and stopped, unable to go more than a few inches in front of my nose.

I wrapped my free hand around the other's wrist and began to push. Despite my efforts I could push my hand no further than before, both arms now straining from the effort - but I wasn't going to go down easy, no matter how many people saw me as a disturbed woman having some kind of episode in a parking lot. Teeth grit and tears running, I forced my hand closer, closer, closer, struggling to push even an inch -

Until the light went out. The sky became nothing more than a sea of lines, swirling in patterns I never knew possible. Red and white, overlapping and intertwining like woven threads. In my sudden alarm I realized that, now, my eyes were open; I could feel them struggling to stay widened, as if I'd woken up from a deep sleep. I began to become aware of the sensation of something moving all over my skin. Something wet, viscous, thick like syrup clung to every inch of my evidently-exposed flesh, entombing me in suffocating, amniotic warmth.

My hands were resting on... something, over my eyes. It was warm, as warm as the homogenous sludge I was sitting in, but distinctly metallic. Cautious fingers traced the object around to find that it'd been secured to my head with heavy, rubbery straps; more horrifically I found that my head was shaved clean, my hair ripped away with what seemed to be hasty, electric razors. The thickness and smoothness of the liquid surrounding me made it impossible to grip the thing and remove it. My fingernails were clipped bare, preventing me from even the animal indignity of gripping anything with my nails.

In fright I moved my head, heavy as it felt, in an attempt to ball myself up. Sudden discomfort overwhelmed me, a building pressure in my sinuses and down to my throat. Could I even breathe, I wondered? Instinct was urging me to move; with hasty, unproven action I attempted to find some leverage somewhere, anywhere in the soupy void I floated in. Coughing rewarded myself, the air sliding around a tube forced down my throat and into the liquid beyond me.

My fingers ran right into it. Corrugated tubing ran from my mouth to... to somewhere I couldn't see. I followed it up my body to find that smaller ones, intertwined with what felt like insulated wiring or thin hosing, were jammed into my nostrils and ran down into my throat. The intense discomfort followed soon after, like being told to blink or breathe manually. I felt cramped inside my own head, fighting for space with whatever or whoever had done this to me. Claustrophobia began to set in as the grid of light before me turned redder and redder - an impossible color, more intense than my already reeling mind could handle.

Unrelenting sensation bombarded me from every angle, and with little other recourse my body began to spasm in hopes of release.

Whatever screams I was able to muster above the feeling of harsh plastic shoved into the depths of my body were clearly muffled by the gel before ever reaching another set of ears. My struggling had little effect beyond forcing more of the disgusting gel into my mouth; it burned my tongue like toothpaste or alcohol, the taste carrying an unearthly quality of sterility. Whatever fate I was being led into by my intubation and restraint was not one I wished to dwell on for long; the thought of my struggles making the situation worse slowly began to dawn on me. My tears were wicked away with some kind of mechanism embedded in the visor I wore, denying me the freedom of crying.

I needed to get out or I would die.

My head was empty if not for those words.

Trembling, gel-soaked hands gripped the hoses jammed into my head, pulling the other end as not to hurt myself. To my delight, they gave; wherever they came from, it was outside of the gel. Something similar to relief welled up inside me, a feeling under duress as the red grid before me felt as though it were stabbing me with crimson anger. Could it tell I was conscious? The thought of something happening the longer I waited frightened me more with each second. With a grip as powerful as my sleep-addled body could muster, I began to pull myself up by the taught tubes.

Pulling myself through the gel felt like I was being held down with a thousand-pound weight. The harder I moved the more it locked up, resisting any kind of further movement like cornstarch and water. My breathing was controlled meticulously by the tube down my throat, it seemed, making it even harder to exert myself; I sucked in a few desperate gulps of the sterile oxygen, holding it in and making the most of my next few movements. One hand wrapped around the other, holding the tube for dear life, I forced myself upwards - and felt the freezing, familiar sensation of real air.

I planted a shaky, slippery hand onto the edge of the tub I was floating in, holding myself there for a moment as I waited for the tube to refill with breathable air.

Unwelcome thoughts of exhaustion began to crowd my mind; the exertion had already worn me out, something completely unusual for me. I was never one to be considered weak, and yet even aside from the weight of the gel, I still felt considerably more exhausted than normal. The air began to bite at my fingers, evidently used to the warmth of the gel - I wasn't able to waste more time. Beams of blue struck my eyes as if the visor were agreeing with me.

With great difficulty I managed to hoist my opposite hand onto the ledge. Both now free of the gel, I was able to leverage myself and begin pulling upwards. The cold made my digits ache as they struggled to hold onto the strange, flat surface outside the tub. Whatever it was felt like smooth, flawlessly-polished marble, honed to an otherworldly quality - yet I could grip it like it was finely-textured sandpaper.

Slowly I could feel the gel giving. My trembling body shook a little in excitement as I felt closer and closer to the surface, the tubes showing no sign of giving way any time soon. Once I was free I could finally get my bearings, figure out something like a plan; the grid in the visor turned a deep purple as I started to wonder just what the gel even was, exactly. It was almost reminding me that I wasn't out of the woods, that I still felt several inches of gel on my fear-racked body left to pull myself through. I tried kicking my legs upwards only to find that they barely moved at all.

My forearm broke the surface and emerged like a glistening salamander into the cold, sterile air. I tossed it up onto the ledge and used it to wiggle my head out at long last; instantly I almost fell back down into the gel from the shock of the cold hitting my face. Was I outside? I couldn't tell until I managed to get the visor off, but it sounded perhaps correct. The warmth of it sang siren-like to my weak body, eagerly encouraging me to sink back down and back to sleep. In response, I put both my elbows beneath me and hoisted my chest onto the side of the tub, now hanging freely; the tub was only deep enough to cover me completely while laying down, and for the first time I was able to stand.

Trembling, I reached for the visor secured to my shaved head; instantly I was rewarded for my efforts by a sudden burst of painful, searing light that dug into my eyes like knives. It was a color I couldn't comprehend but remembered so vividly - the same that was flashing in the sea of grid lines as I lay unconscious in the gel. The visor constricted a bit, only motivating me further. I slipped my fingers under the leathery rubber straps and forced it upwards and, finally, off my face.

I was greeted by dim, almost impenetrable darkness and a loud, shrieking alarm. The visor - it clearly detected I'd removed it and had begun letting out an ear-piercing siren as it clattered uselessly to the jet-black floor. I covered my ear with my free hand as I grabbed it back and shoved it into the gel, hoping to stifle it enough to let me think. It sank like a rock, the gel vibrating from the force of the noise.

Where... where was I? I looked around through the nearly pitch blackness for something, anything to use as a landmark. Endless catwalks and steel railings went on above me, spinning away up into the unseen ceiling. It must've been miles to the top of wherever I was! Faint red lights dotted some massive steel structures I couldn't even begin to imagine the purpose of, covered in pipes and live, sparking wires.

The alarm was still loud enough to worry me. It was echoing loudly through the unfathomably massive chamber, melting into a haunting din as it bounced across walls and into the infinite dark above me. Slowly, I began to appreciate just how loud the noise was - a noise going off right below my feet in an unknown and evidently-uninhabited environment.