John arrives back at his apartment, a relatively small but functional place not far from the clinic. He carefully flops onto the couch, and checks his phone instinctively. No emergencies or trouble tickets from work, but there is a new text from Lia.
"Hey, I'm glad you didn't jump out the window today. I'm used to bad first reactions from people I interact with so it's refreshing to not have to explain everything and try to do a bunch of prep first. It never works anyway, people are gonna do what they do."
"I have to admit I was a bit shocked at first, and the receptionist tried to warn me but she was talking far too fast to really get it. I was more puzzled by how it's possible to not be dead under your circumstances - I thought you might be some kind of robot or something lol."
Lia replies "Ha! If I was a robot I wouldn't need to exercise though - at least I think that's how robots work... I went to school for programming not robotics"
"I'd hate to ask too many uncomfortable questions if you don't want to talk about it, but I have a ton of them."
Lia texts back "Let's start at the top - no pun intended... I got diagnosed in my junior year of college when my hearing started to go, so I had to learn some sign language. After graduation I tried to get a job, but by then my vision was starting to fade. It was getting harder to remember things too, and I was starting to lose coordination.
One of my friends found out about this place and the drug trial. I didn't think I had much time left before things got too bad so I signed up. Once I was accepted, they did a ton of scans, IQ tests, interviews, the works.
Over the next couple months I received a bunch of injections of the drug, and each time they said my memory and coordination were getting better, but my senses weren't really improving.
After the last big round of testing before all the craziness, they found out I was starting to lose sensation in my head and face, and it was likely that I wouldn't be able to eat unassisted soon.
I think they were getting pretty frustrated so they set me up with an MRI, CT, PET, EMG, MEG, basically every expensive test they could find a free time slot to run, to try to figure out what the hell was going on.
After the docs got the first set of results back they were pretty frantic. My brain was basically gone, and there was no electrical activity going on at all."
"Um, what?"
"I know, right? I was in uncharted territory - according to all their schooling I was brain dead so how was I still walking around (sorta, my balance was terrible) and passing all their tests? Apparently with no brain left the demand for blood flow upstairs was a lot lower too, so they were worried about anything else breaking in the process as the arteries started to shrink down.
Once they found that out, and after they stopped panicking, they re-ran the tests with the same result. One of the docs got the idea to do a PET scan again but do it on my whole body, and although I was kinda fed up with getting irradiated I went along with it.
They found the brain activity they were looking for, just spread out everywhere but where it was supposed to be - I had an even smearing of brain cells across my whole body, and my spinal cord had basically converted to a bit of stretched out brain. They didn't see anything happening above my neck, so that explained my face going numb - the facial nerves were basically wiped out with the rest.
That's part of the reason I'm still here - they're paying me a ton of money to be a guinea pig and I could probably sue them for like a billion dollars for malpractice. I also might be able to help them eventually save lives with the data."
John replies "So something else must have happened after that, mind if I ask?
