Absolute black, heavy silence, it was... familiar.
- "Am I dead again?"
Finally something resonated in this absolute darkness.
A dull sound, regular, like a distant drum.
Boom-boom. Boom-boom.
Haha I've never been so happy to hear you old friend, well old friend, my heart is young now... He laughed with relief hearing it beat. I'm still alive!
Aiden tried to open his eyes, but his eyelids seemed to weigh tons. Damn, opening my eyes had become a final boss level challenge again.
What happened ? he finally wondered.
The memories came back to him in fragments, his memories or those of Mrs. Pemberton? he had no idea, her entire life had become his.
He spent an incalculable amount of time trying to sort and untangle this mess and allow his brain to tell the difference between his identity and that of the old woman.
While trying to untangle these memories, he relived the scene, the eye contact, the tunnel of colors so beautiful and the memory fragments that rushed at him like guided missiles.
I dove into her head, he realized with a mixture of fascination and horror. Literally dove into her memories.
He untangled and untangled and untangled, again and again but the knot of memories had no end, he pulled on one memory and it completely tightened the knot on the other side.
- "FUCK! I'm a neurosurgeon and I can't untangle a simple knot!??? there's no fucking logic it's just impossible!" He got angry.
Logic, the principle that had always cradled his former life, everything had meaning, a cause and effect, an action and a consequence, to a question there was necessarily an answer. But here, this rule didn't seem to apply here, it had become completely devoid of meaning.
Aiden was completely lost in this fog of nonsense, his spectral form slumped his shoulders before this knot that slowly spun, like a planet following its rotation.
This is my new life, I can't lose my identity like this, not now that I have a new chance!
The knot suddenly stopped in its rotation, a rope stretched and wrapped around his waist and slowly pulled him toward the heart of the knot.
As the rope pulled him, he felt Mrs. Pemberton's memories slowly corroding his own.
- "No, this can't happen no, no, no..." He panicked.
But no matter his pleas, no matter his complaints, the rope nonetheless pulled him and the memories still inexorably corroded his own.
- "NO! I AM AIDEN MARCUS MORTENSEN! I WANT THIS KNOT TO UNTANGLE AND BECOME PART OF ME!"
Like a roar, his voice resonated in a deafening racket in this mental space, the rope stopped abruptly and dropped him brutally, but Aiden caught it just in time and his flaming orange eyes fixed on this knot he now hated.
You won't escape like that, I'm going to give you a taste of your own medicine you shitty knot.
The knot trembled as if Aiden was making it feel terrible pain, it trembled more and more strongly, until the trembling became a shake that made Aiden's mental space become a magnitude 10 earthquake on the Richter scale.
Aiden's grip weakened on the rope, suffering shook his entire being again.
- "I'll never get out of this..." He managed to articulate. "Please, someone help me"
As soon as this will was expressed, the knot froze completely, before swelling more and more and an explosion of light engulfed Aiden who put his arms crosswise in front of him, in a vain attempt to protect himself.
Outside, a familiar murmur resonated in the small room of the orphanage:
- "...stable now... just a little nosebleed... probably atmospheric pressure with this rain..."
The voice of Dr. Whitmore, the doctor who sometimes came to the orphanage.
- "Yes this rain was gentle earlier and I don't know what's happening there, it's a real storm!" replied Mrs. Pemberton.
As soon as her words resonated, lightning illuminated the room, and thunder roared its anger immediately after, so loudly that the room was slightly shaken.
- "Yes the sky sometimes has rather uh, rather clear ways of showing us its emotions haha" the doctor laughed without any worry.
- "Come on doctor, no joking, the sky is not a living being and I must say I'm relieved about that, what a disaster, can you imagine?"
- "I dare not imagine, Mrs. Pemberton, I dare not imagine." he replied.
Inside Aiden however, it was another story. He blinked slightly and opened his eyes completely.
All he saw in front of him were orange clouds that streamed by at a deafening speed, the wind whipped his hair that slapped against his face.
- "AHHHHHHHHH what is this?????"
Panicked, he straightened up but his body immediately froze in still immobility. He slowly lowered his head, he stood on a brick platform, no bigger than an apartment balcony but without a barrier to prevent him from falling, one wrong move and it was direction the void and the expression getting splattered like a pancake would become reality.
- "I'm starting to miss my old life, what the hell is this mess??" he questioned himself.
He studied his environment but apart from the platform and the clouds that streamed in front of him, nothing changed.
He finally decided to sit down and sit cross-legged, hands on his knees.
- "Okay let's calm down! Since the knot exploded in my head, I must still be there it's quite logical..." he thought. "What do those yoga fools do to find their inner peace? Ah! Meditation! I can try to reverse the process and return to the real world!"
He closed his eyes and tried again and again to empty his thoughts, to bring calm to all this and finally with relative ease he succeeded.
He heard nothing around him anymore, just the calm of his consciousness that slowly drifted.
He finally heard Dr. Whitmore's murmur.
If you only knew, grandpa, thought Aiden with irony. Atmospheric pressure, my ass.
He finally managed to half-open his eyes. The ceiling of the nursery. The usual humidity stains that formed bizarre shapes, there a three-legged horse, here what vaguely resembled Winston Churchill smoking a cigar.
Mrs. Pemberton was leaning over his crib, her face marked by worry.
- "His eyes are open!" she exclaimed.
Bravo Sherlock, thought Aiden, even though part of him was touched by her genuine concern.
- "Normal," replied Dr. Whitmore while putting away his stethoscope. "Babies can have little incidents like that. Nothing serious."
Incidents, Aiden scoffed internally. Yeah, incident of diving into others' traumatic memories, getting attacked by a giant ball and ending up in the sky on ground no bigger than your ass. That happens every day to the Mortensens, don't worry.
Mrs. Pemberton leaned toward him, and instinctively, Aiden looked away. No more crossing her gaze for too long. He'd had his dose of painful memories for the day.
But even while avoiding her direct gaze, he still caught her superficial thoughts:
- "He's avoiding my gaze now. As if he were afraid. Poor little one, I hope he wasn't traumatized."
If you only knew to what extent, thought Aiden. But not in the way you think.
The hours that followed were devoted to pure observation. Aiden had become ultra-cautious with his new powers. No more playing apprentice sorcerer without understanding the rules.
In any case, he had learned a crucial lesson, the longer the eye contact, the deeper he dove into the other's mind. Superficial thoughts were easy to access, almost passive. But beyond that, it was like exploring a mine, the deeper you go, the more dangerous it gets.
And the more painful, he added remembering the explosive migraine that had knocked him out.
When evening came, as the last glimmers of day filtered through the dirty windowpanes, Aiden made a new discovery.
The rain had stopped, and with it, that melancholy he had felt. In its place, a gentle serenity floated in the air, accompanied by those strange whispers that seemed to come from the sky itself.
Calm... finally calm... the tears dry...
This time, instead of being frightened by these atmospheric voices, Aiden tried to concentrate on them. It was like tuning a radio to a particular frequency.
Who exactly are you? he thought toward the ceiling.
Silence.
Then, so faintly that he first thought he had imagined it:
Curious little one... so young and already so perceptive...
Aiden's heart raced. They were answering him. These... entities, these consciousnesses, whatever they were, they were capable of bidirectional communication.
I didn't dream it?