Darkness.
Not the peaceful kind. The swallowing kind. The type that presses against your eye lids like wet cement. A sound pierced through, a steady rhythmic beep….beep…..beep.
A scent. Vanilla, like someone had sprayed perfume all over to hide the scent of blood. My fingers twitched. Cold sheets. Starchy pillowcase. The metallic tang of blood still coating my tongue. Last memory. 9:50 Am.
The clock won.
Memories surfaced like a corpse from deep water. The deer's Black eyes, the crunch of my ribs against the pavement, dad's voice whispering through the pain.
"They don't give a shit if you live or die."
A sharp inhale. My lungs burned.
Alive. I was alive.
The door creaked open. Heavy footsteps. A shadow looming over me, a mountain of a man in a cheap suit that struggled to contain his bulk. His face was a roadmap of bad decisions, a spiderweb of burst capillaries across a bulbous nose. He didn't look like a doctor. He smelled like stale coffee and old secrets.
"You're awake," he rumbled, the words gravel in his throat. It wasn't a question. He knew. He gestured with a thick thumb toward a whiteboard on the wall. "Name?"
My throat was a desert. I tried to swallow, a painful, dry click. "Carole ."
He grunted, uncapping a marker with his teeth. The squeak of it on the whiteboard was a gunshot in the quiet room. CAROLE . He wrote it in big, blocky letters, under a line that said PATIENT.
"Last name?" he asked, marker poised.
I stared at him. The name was there, I could feel it sitting on the tip of my tongue, a ghost. It was my name. It should have been easy. But my mind was a scrambled radio station, all static and snatches of forgotten songs. The man's stare was physical, weighing me, judging the empty space where a name should be.
The man grunted again, a sound of dismissal, or maybe disappointment. He capped the marker. "Doesn't matter for now." He pulled a small, sleek phone from his pocket and thumbed the screen. A message notification, I could see the glint of it from my angle. "Your mother's on her way. She was… tied up."
Tied up. The words hung in the air, wrong. Mom didn't get tied up. She taught third grade and organized bake sales. Her entire world was ruled by the unforgiving tick of a wall clock, a world my father brought her into. My mother was never late.
Something cold coiled in my gut, colder than the sheets. Dad's words echoed again, a sinister refrain in the static of my mind.
They don't give a shit if you live or die.
This man. This room. The vanilla-and-blood scent. It wasn't a hospital. The steady beep wasn't a heart monitor. It was a timer. And my mom being late was the first rule being broken.
I had to get out.
My gaze darted around the room, past the man's bulk. A single window, high on the wall, bars slicing the morning light into a cage pattern on the floor. The door was heavy, steel, with no handle on this side. My eyes landed back on the whiteboard. Under my half-finished name, he'd written something else.
PROGNOSIS: UNSTABLE.
I wasn't a patient. I was a project. An asset. Or a liability.
The man slid the phone back into his jacket. "Your memory will be… selective. For a while. The procedure was invasive." He used the word 'procedure' like it meant 'murder'. "But the core programming is intact. That's the important part."
Programming.
My breath hitched. The deer. The crash. Dad's voice. This mountain man. This place. Nothing seemed to make any sense.
The beeping quickened. My heart was a trapped bird in my ribs. I looked at the man, really looked at him. His suit was cheap, but the watch on his wrist was heavy, dark metal, a chunk of brutalist architecture that probably cost more than my childhood home.
"Where am I?" I managed to croak out. The words felt foreign, like I was borrowing them.
He gave a thin, humorless smile that didn't even reach his eyes. "Somewhere safe."
He was lying. Everything about him screamed the opposite. From the stale-coffee smell, to the way he watched the beeping machine with a detached, clinical interest. They weren't monitoring my health. They were calibrating me.
The door creaked open again. A woman, this one in a crisp white lab coat over a dark pantsuit. She moved with an economy of motion that was predatory. Her hair was pulled back in a severe bun, her face sharp and intelligent and utterly devoid of warmth. Her eyes, a flat, dispassionate grey, fixed on me.
"The sedation is wearing off faster than projected," she said to the mountain-man, her voice crisp and cool as spring water. "Subject's anxiety is elevated. We should administer a mild suppressor."
Subject.
"I don't want a suppressor," I said, my voice stronger now, fueled by a sudden, sharp terror. "I want to leave."
The woman ignored me, addressing the man. "The memory fragmentation is within expected parameters. The identity matrix is the primary concern. If the anchor isn't set soon, the whole integration could fail."
"Understood, Dr. Aris," the man rumbled.
Dr. Aris. She finally turned her full, chilling attention to me. "Carole," she said my name, a scalpel in her hands. "Do you remember the accident?"
The deer. The screech of tires. The world tilting. my ribs cracking against the pavement, how could I forget.
"Yes."
"Good. That is your anchor. Everything else… is negotiable." She stepped closer, her scent sharp, like antiseptic and crushed mint. "You were in a very bad accident. Your mind has constructed a… narrative to protect itself. A little story to make sense of the trauma. That's all this is."
Her words were designed to soothe, but they felt like shackles. A narrative. A story. She was trying to tell me my life, my memories, weren't real. That my father's voice was a hallucination.
"I know what's real," I whispered, but the conviction was draining away, replaced by a fog of confusion. The beeping on the machine began to slow, its rhythm calming, lulling. The mountain man was watching me, his expression unreadable.
"Of course you do," Dr. Aris said smoothly. "And we're here to help you separate the signal from the noise." She turned to the man. "I'll prep the recalibration suite. Bring her in ten minutes. And make sure she's compliant."
Compliant.
As she left, the scent of mint lingering in her wake followed, the man stepped forward. He didn't have a syringe. He had a small silver cylinder, like a penlight. He pressed it to my neck.
There was no pain. Just a sudden, spreading warmth. A tide of peace washing over the jagged rocks of my fear. The beeping slowed to a gentle, steady rhythm. The bars on the window seemed less like a cage and more like… decoration. The whiteboard with "PROGNOSIS: UNSTABLE" looked like a simple medical chart.
My father's voice faded, becoming a distant echo, a bad dream.
"There now," the man said, his voice softer, almost gentle. "Nothing to worry about. We're just going for a little walk. To get you settled in."
I nodded. It seemed like a perfectly reasonable thing to do. A little walk. My mind was quiet. The static was gone. And in the silence, a single thought bloomed, clear and sharp as a shard of glass, the only thing left that felt truly mine.
He's lying.
….9:56AM