The sun outside the window is a blinding white, so much brighter than anything I’ve ever seen. The buildings are a stark bright white, the only sense of scale and depth that I have is from the shadows which are sharp as a razor. I realize that this window exists in a room, it’s a kitchen.
A clothed middle-aged woman is on her back on the kitchen table. A nondescript man talks into a recorder as he pushes open her mouth, shining a light inside of it. She is continually producing gagging noises. “Menopausal structures present, no fluid build-up noted. Artificial joining seems. . .” and here he pauses for a bit before he continues, “Wait, we have confirmed breach on the alpha and zeta welds. No ganglia are visible. Some swelling on the upper parts. I will administer a light massage to attempt to induce emissions.” The man said with a dispassionate tone of voice.
I can’t do anything, I would shudder if I could. What I hear is some strange, wet, and crackling noises as he unexpectedly turned her whole mouth inside out, somehow making it easier to get to the back of her throat. My field of view zooms in, following a thin strand of gleaming metal that shows more and more of something that has red stripes as it trails up the throat structure of the woman.
Eventually, I see something metallic slightly protruding from the back of her throat as the doctor places his thumbs against it. But, first, he turns her grotesquely deformed head to the side so he can look into her right eye, which is now watering and rolling around in a panic. He attempts a smile that strikes me as very forced. Then he speaks to her. “Don’t worry Mrs. Bimolá, this is all quite safe. I will administer a drug to make you forget this afterward. This is for the good of the state, do you understand? Blink once for yes, two for no.”
The woman blinks twice at him, shaking like a leaf. It becomes horrifically apparent to me that she’s being forcibly paralyzed. My field of view zooms out slightly so I can see that one of her feet is bare and that it has a small thin tube coming out of something attached to the back of it. I want to scream, to struggle, to do anything, but I’m forced to be a muted observer.
“It is too bad, that you do not understand then. It still must be done. Please do not resist. It will only prolong the procedure,” he said with an odd sense of finality to it.
And here my gaze zooms in again as he started massaging the metallic piece in her throat with both of his thumbs. Her gagging turned into gargling noises and several times, the man reaches over to pick up a small tube which he sticks down her throat, siphoning out drool. After a while, he stops, sighs, and again in some weird grotesque way he turns her face right again, the noises are as sickening and revolting as before. She lets out a faint monotone moan that is almost like an eternal exhalation since this procedure seems to go on forever.
A long time passes as he watches her face intently, checking his watch. Then he shakes his head and picks up what looks like a stapler. He quickly puts it to her head and I can hear a sharp click. To my horror, I see that her gaze instantly goes still as he slowly lowers her head against the table. A drop of blood runs down the right side of her temple where he previously placed the device. I can faintly see something has been pushed in there, instantly killing her. As his breathing gets lighter, he takes off his surgical gloves and touches a device on the table, and then speaks. “Upon administering treatment, the structure came even more undone. This necessitated the cancellation of the subject. I’m afraid this is yet another botched attempt. Please inform insertion techs that method 41 is to be discouraged as it has universally resulted in rejection in all implantation hosts. That is all.
ASA 3 Meditech signing off.”
And here I wake up, stifling a scream. No kitchen, no woman, no man, no strange and creepy neon-white dystopian city outside. Just the darkness of my apartment. It takes me a very long time before I can get up from my bed. What I want to do is to go into the shower and let the warm water rinse off this horrible nightmare. But I set my course for my office instead, I sit down and I type this all out. While some of my dreams make for great horror and fantasy worlds, this one didn’t make me feel anything but pure hatred and disgust. So I sit here, wanting to kill a man that doesn’t exist for a crime that never happened. What was that world? Who was this poor woman? Who was this man? Why did he do the things that he did? Was she even human? Was he? Either of them?
The kicker is that I can find out about all of those things, I just have to turn my mind’s eye back to that terrible world. I push the save button in my word editor and sigh deeply. I need a damn shower first.