Chapter 3: Liam Reed
The first thing I noticed was the beeping.
Steady. Rhythmic. Annoying. Like my alarm back home.
The second thing I noticed was that I had a body again.
That probably sounds obvious but when you've been floating in a void having an argument with a sarcastic god for however long that was, suddenly having arms and legs and a chest that moves when you breathe is a lot. I could feel sheets under my hands. Rough ones. Hospital sheets. I could feel something taped to the back of my hand, probably an IV. And I could feel someone holding my other hand.
I didn't open my eyes yet. I needed a second. Because this was it, wasn't it? This was the new life. The new body. The new everything. And the person holding my hand was probably his mum. My mum. Whatever she was now.
Okay. Deep breath. Or as deep as I could manage because my chest felt like it hadn't been used properly in weeks. Which, thinking about it, it probably hadn't.
I opened my eyes.
Everything was blurry at first. White ceiling. Fluorescent lights. The kind that make everyone look slightly dead, which was ironic considering I'd just come back from being actually dead. I blinked a few times and the room started to sharpen up.
Hospital room. Small. One window with the curtains half open, grey sky outside. A chair next to the bed. Monitors on my left, that's where the beeping was coming from. A whiteboard on the wall with some writing I couldn't read from this angle. And machines, tubes, wires. The works.
And then I looked down at my hand, the one being held, and I saw her.
She was asleep. Sitting in the chair next to my bed with her head resting on the mattress, her hand wrapped around mine. She looked exhausted. Like she'd been here for days. Weeks, maybe. Her hair was messy and she had dark circles under her eyes and she was wearing a cardigan that looked like she'd been living in it.
This was Sarah Reed. My mum. Well, his mum. The woman who'd sat here every day talking to her son even when the doctors told her he probably couldn't hear.
And now her son was gone and I was here instead and she had no idea.
I felt something in my throat. Not sadness exactly. More like weight. The weight of what I was about to do. Because the second she woke up and saw my eyes open, her whole world was going to change. She was going to think her boy came back. She was going to cry and hold me and say his name and mean it. And I was going to have to look at her and pretend that I was him.
I'd told the god I'd do it out of respect. And I meant that. I did. But sitting here with her hand in mine, it felt a lot more real than it did in the void.
"Okay," I whispered. My voice came out rough. Dry. Like I'd been gargling sand. "Okay. You can do this."
She stirred.
Her fingers tightened around mine. Her head lifted slowly off the mattress and her eyes opened and for a second she just looked at me. Foggy. Confused. Like she wasn't sure if she was dreaming.
Then she saw that my eyes were open.
"Liam?"
It came out as a whisper. Like she was scared that if she said it too loud, it wouldn't be real.
"Hey, Mum."
I don't know where that came from. I'd never met this woman in my life. But it felt right. It felt like the only thing I could possibly say in that moment. And the second I said it, her face just crumbled.
She burst into tears. Not quiet ones. The kind that come from somewhere deep, the kind you can't control. She grabbed my hand with both of hers and pressed it against her face and just sobbed.
"Oh my God. Oh my God, Liam. You're awake. You're awake, baby, you're awake."
I didn't say anything. I just let her hold my hand and cry. What was I supposed to say? "Actually, I'm not your son, I'm a dead warehouse worker from another life who made a deal with a sarcastic god"? Yeah. That would go well.
So I just squeezed her hand and said, "I'm here, Mum. I'm okay."
She pulled back and looked at me. Really looked at me. Her eyes were red and her face was wet and she was smiling and crying at the same time and I thought, this woman has been sitting in this chair for weeks waiting for this exact moment. Every single day. And she never gave up.
"Let me get the doctor. Don't move. Don't you dare move!" She stood up, almost knocked the chair over, then turned back and grabbed my face with both hands and kissed my forehead. "I'll be right back. Don't go anywhere."
"I mean, I'm connected to about six machines so I wasn't planning on it."
She laughed. A wet, messy, crying laugh. And then she was gone, practically running out of the room.
I lay there staring at the ceiling. Different ceiling than the one in my flat. No crack. No boot-shaped water stain. Just plain white tiles and fluorescent lights.
Well. This was my life now.
I lifted my hand, the one without the IV, and looked at it. Still felt weird. I don't know how long this feeling was going to last. Like, I didn't really feel guilty because without me there wouldn't be a Liam at all. He was gone. But I also did feel guilty because she was never going to get her son back how he was before this. The real Liam, the one she raised, the one she talked to every day in this room. He was gone and she'd never know.
But luckily there was an excuse for this. Comas do that to people. You can come out different. You forget stuff, your personality changes, your memory's patchy. I could use that. If anyone noticed I was different, I could just say it was the coma. I didn't know if it was going to work long term, but it was something. We'd see.
And then something happened.
I looked at the heart monitor next to my bed and I just... saw it. Not just the screen with the numbers and the little blinking line. I saw how it worked. The wiring behind the screen, the sensors on my chest, the circuit board inside, the way the data flowed from the sensors through the processor to the display. All of it. Like someone had peeled back the casing and shown me the blueprint.
I blinked. Looked away. And then I thought, can I undo that? Like, is this something I can turn off? Because it's going to be really annoying to look at this for the rest of my life. Oh, this stupid god sold me on something I can't turn off!
I looked back. It was still there. Not overlaying my vision like some sci-fi heads-up display or anything. It was more like... understanding. I looked at the machine and I just knew how it was put together. I could see where the solder joints were weak. I could see that one of the cables was slightly damaged and would probably need replacing within a month. I could see that the software was running an older version and had a bug that occasionally caused a false reading in the oxygen saturation data.
What the hell.
System Insight. That's what this was. I had to give it to the god, he wasn't messing around. But still, could I turn it off? Maybe I had to focus. Okay. Focus. Real hard. Hmmmm.
I looked again and it was gone. The machine was just a machine again. A screen with numbers and a blinking line. Just a normal heart monitor.
Okay. So I could turn it off at will. It just needed focus. I felt it like a switch flipping, and suddenly I was seeing the world normal again. Good. That was important. I didn't want to walk down a street and see the blueprint of every building and car and traffic light all at once. That would drive me mental within a day.
I turned it back on and looked at the IV drip. Same thing. I could see the flow rate, the mechanism, the way the valve controlled the dosage. I could see that the nurse had set it slightly too high for my body weight, but not dangerously so.
I looked at the window. The lock mechanism. Simple latch. Two screws. One was loose.
I looked at the door. Electronic lock. Card reader. The system it was connected to, the network it reported to. I couldn't see all of it from here, but I could see the edges of it. Like looking at the corner of a massive jigsaw puzzle and knowing how the pieces connected even though you couldn't see the full picture yet.
This was insane.
I switched it off again and closed my eyes. Took a breath. My heart was going faster now, I could hear the beeping speed up. I needed to calm down before the doctor came in and started asking questions about why the kid who just woke up from a coma had a heart rate of a hundred and thirty.
Okay. Think. What do I know? I'm in a hospital. My name is Liam Reed. I'm nineteen. I've been ill. The doctors didn't think I was going to make it. My mum has been here every day. And I just woke up with two abilities that let me see through machines like they're made of glass. And I can turn them on and off, which is good because otherwise I'd lose my mind.
And somewhere out there is a god who's watching this like it's his own personal Netflix and probably laughing his head off right now.
I heard footsteps in the corridor. Multiple. Mum was coming back with the cavalry.
"Alright," I said quietly. "Let's see what you've got, Liam Reed."
The door opened.