Mostly Dead.
Now that I know what I'm without
You can't just leave me
Breathe into me and make me real
Bring me to life - Evanescence
I found myself in total darkness for what seemed like forever. I could not see, hear, or feel, but I knew that I was something. I knew that I was somewhere but what that something was I did not know. I had a feeling that something terrible had happened, but what I knew not. While I was deprived of my senses I could think, reason, and understand but the only thing that I could use my mental faculties on was the darkness that my mind had become.
I was alive, or maybe I was between being alive and being dead but I knew that I existed. I knew that I had a body, a mind, and I had my senses yet none of them were active externally. I tried to reach out with my mind as if I were telepathic but I could not read thoughts, could not sense feelings yet I continued to try until I heard in waves of thought the Music of the Spheres or "Musica Universalis" as it was called by the ancient Roman philosophers. Roman philosophers? How did I know this and who were they I began to think, and this brought me to the reality that I could indeed think and that I was now closer to life than I was to death.
Roman philosophers... Kalabarian philosophers... who were they and why was I thinking about them? Kalabara, a country on a small sub equatorial continent on my home world Annu. Again I reached out with my mind and now I could see the Roman philosophers and the Kalabarian philosophers together on a warm sandy beach, looking out over the ocean as two ships pass each other on the horizon. One ship flies the standard of Rome; the other flies the banner of the Kalabarian Conclave of Merchants. Both ships are powered by sails and oars pulled by many strong men. I watch as the ships begin to pass each other then merge into one, and as the ships join so do the philosophers. All reference of Rome has disappeared from view as the Kalabarian imagery took up dominance.
This meant something but what? As I pondered what I had just witnessed in my mind's eye the darkness came again, but I could still think, I could still reason. I turned my attention to what I had just witnessed and as I focused on the scene that had just vanished my mind I began to process massive amounts of raw data that was being poured in from an unrecognizable source. The flow was too fast to comprehend and decipher on the fly but now I could see it as I focused on the incoming stream. It was numbers, equations, and some sort of code that had meaning perhaps but not to me, at least not right now.
There was nothing to mark the passage of time as the data stream continued. My mind attempted to make sense of the seemingly random numbers and symbols that were being dumped into the empty bucket that was my brain. The stream of data seemed to go on forever and all I could do was watch just as a child would watch vehicles moving on a busy highway as she looked out her bedroom window. Wait, child and window, that means something too?
The data stream had stopped suddenly as I recall seeing myself as a child in a window, but I was never a child in a window. I was a child in a maturation chamber, but how did I know this?
I saw myself as a young girl sleeping in what looked like a stasis pod. There were tubes connected to my arms, and inserted into the various orifices of my body. I knew what this was but how was I seeing myself? Maturation chamber, it has to be. On the chamber is a symbol for a place called Osaka Eugenics... below that is the logo for a corporation named Drax.
My view changed from looking in upon myself to looking outward and seeing what looked like my twin moving toward a control panel mounted to the wall opposite the window where she was watching me. Her young hand moves and dances over a series of keys on a data terminal before the lights inside my maturation chamber go out. The flow of oxygen ceases and I begin to panic. I can no longer see the girl in the darkness; I can no longer think or process what is happening. Once again I am in darkness. For a short period I am once again deprived of my senses, including the capacity to think and reason. My thoughts are black and void once again.
When the light inside my mind comes back on I am aware that my brain is processing something. Much of my available mental power is diverted to doing something with the raw data that had just come in. I gave up on trying to understand what my brain was processing and instead tried to figure out what the meaning was behind the imagery that was being present to me. I thought long and hard of the girl and the darkness that surrounded her movements, then there was a flash forward, or was it backward?
Once again my mind's eye opened and I could see myself as an adult. I was looking at myself as if I were someone else. I circled around my naked self and the me that I was seeing stood perfectly still in the darkness. The void I was in was dark but yet I could see myself. As I examined myself in detail and I brushed my long black hair aside I could see the barcode on the back of my neck, which represented the numbers, "92123931" just below the base of my skull. I was seeing myself as the person known as Kitty, but how did I know this?
My gaze was transfixed on the Kitty representation that stood motionless before me. I was so caught up in trying to figure this out that I failed to notice another naked female moving toward the Kitty that I was examining. As the new entity entered the picture it stopped and stood motionless before Kitty. I had the feeling that I was supposed to know what this meant but my mind was unable to process what was happening. I moved from the Kitty representation to inspect the other entity.
I looked the new woman over and found her to be the twin of Kitty, but a soft voice whispering in my thoughts told me that this was Maew. Who is Maew I thought to myself. This name was foreign to me. I went back to my examination of the second girl, she was the same as the first but she was not the first. She was a duplicate of the first except with one difference. The barcode on the back of her neck was missing. The name, "Maew" echoed through my thoughts as if spoken in a soft whisper by a female voice.
Using my mind's eye I circled them both once again, then felt myself being drawn into the Kitty representation. My view brought me in behind Kitty and for what seemed like a few seconds I stood behind her, admiring her slender figure before I felt myself being pulled inside the body of the Kitty twin that I had just been admiring.
A bout of dizziness took a hold of my thoughts. When I was able to compose myself I found that I was staring at Maew from inside the Kitty representation. For all intents and purposes she was my twin, my exact double and as I admired her beauty... or my beauty as it seemed I could feel renewed life coursing through me. My lungs seemed to be processing oxygen, my heart was beating and worm oxygenated blood was coursing through my veins and arteries. I was alive?
Memories? I remember myself as a pre teen, fresh out of the maturation and basic education chambers. I could see my friends, my instructors, my owner, and the scientists that looked over me as I matured naturally. From there my thoughts advanced as if sped up by a temporal compression wave. I gained life experiences that were foreign to me but in everything that rapidly passed through my mind I knew that these were my life experiences. I knew that I had lived it all, but even through I had lived these experiences, I had not felt the experiences as though I had actually lived them. It was as if someone was reading a story to me about what I had done in the past.
I knew that I had lived my life, or a life that someone or some thing wanted me to live, and remember a life that had passed into history. In all that I had seen I had never witnessed my birth or my death, which was something that I was looking for as the data stream taught me about myself. I do not know how long this took but when it was finished I found myself still standing upright staring lovingly at Maew.