Shadows

21

Blackness.

As the last of the narcotic was washed out of her brain, Amy Carlson’s mind rose slowly into consciousness, but it was a consciousness such as she had never experienced before.

She found herself in an unfathomable silence and darkness that made her scream out in terror.

But nothing happened.

She felt nothing in her throat, heard no sound in her ears.

Yet in her mind the scream echoed still, surrounding her, fading away, then rising again.

Or was she screaming again?

She didn’t know, for everything she knew, everything that gave meaning to her existence, had vanished.

The entire world had disappeared, and she felt as if she was suspended in some kind of vacuum, left alone in a darkness and silence so impenetrable that it was suffocating her.

She tried to breathe, tried to fill her lungs with air.

Again, nothing happened. She felt no fresh air rush into her lungs, felt no relief from the terror that gripped her.

Panic closed in on her. She couldn’t breathe. She was going to die.

She tried to cry out again, tried to scream for help, but once more nothing happened.

Words formed in her mind, but she couldn’t feel her tongue move to shape the sounds, feel her mouth open to emit the words.

Once again she tried to breathe, and once again felt nothing as her body refused to respond to the orders her mind sent forth.

Paralyzed.

She was paralyzed!

But how had it happened?

Her mind reeled as she tried to follow a logical line of thought through the panic that was pouring at her from every direction, rolling in on her from the darkness, pressing her down.

Dying!

That’s what was happening to her!

She was alone, and she was dying, and nobody knew about it and nobody could help her.

She tried to open her eyes, sure now that whatever was happening to her could only be a nightmare and that when she opened her eyes and let in the light, the horrible darkness around her would lift and she would once again be a part of the world.

She blinked.

Except that yet again nothing happened. She blinked again, trying to feel the faint sensation of her eyelids reacting to the command from her mind.

Nothing!

It felt as if her eyes no longer existed!

Now she tried to move her body, tried to roll over, to shake herself loose from the unseen, unfelt bonds that held her in their grip.

Her body failed to respond.

Like her eyes, it no longer seemed to be there at all!

Another scream welled up out of the black abyss, another scream that echoed only in her mind, quickly dying away in the strange blackness around her.

Her panic threatened to overwhelm her now, but just before she succumbed to it, just an instant before it would have shattered her terrified mind, she staved it off once more, certain that if she gave in to the panic, she would never emerge from it again.

The panic was like a living thing now, lurking around her, a black, unseeable Hell filled with unknowable terrors that wanted to consume her, wanted to envelop her, drowning her forever in her own fear.

The panic was like a precipice, a towering cliff upon whose edge she teetered, part of her being drawn downward, wanting to give herself to the long final plunge, while another part of her insisted that she back away, that she retreat from the brink, pull back before it was too late.

Slowly, imperceptibly, she drove the fear back.

There was a reason for what was happening to her, an explanation for the terrible feeling of being mired alone in boundless darkness.

She wanted to cry out for her mother, to scream in the night for her mother to help her, but already she knew it would do no good.

Her mother wouldn’t hear her, for she couldn’t even hear herself.

And her mother was home. Home in Los Angeles. While she was at the Academy. But she’d been going home.

She’d told Hildie she wanted to go home, and Hildie had taken her to call her parents.

But she hadn’t talked to her parents. She’d been in Hildie’s office, and …

She strained her memory, searching for an image of what had happened.

An image came to her.

A glass of water.

Hildie had handed her a glass of water, and she’d drunk it down. And then everything was blank, until she’d awakened in the horrible blackness.

Drugged.

Hildie must have put something in the water.

What?

She began to think about it. A drug. Some kind of medicine. What kind?

Narcotics. Sleeping pills.

As she enunciated the words in her mind, new images took shape. The blackness was still there, surrounding her, but now lists of words began to formulate in her mind, almost as if she was visualizing them.

She concentrated, and the words came into sharper focus.

Thorazine.

Darvon.

Halcion.

Bercodan.

The words popped at her out of the darkness, words she hadn’t even known she knew. And yet she not only recognized the words, but knew the definitions of all of them.

They were drugs. Painkillers, and sleeping pills, and medicines to tranquilize you. As they flicked through her mind, she realized that she knew exactly what each of them was for and what each would do to someone, depending on how much was taken.

The sensation was strange. It was almost as if she were reading from some kind of book that existed only in her mind.

Like the way she solved complex mathematical problems by picturing the problem in her head, then working it out as if she held a pencil in her hand, the image never fading, her mind never releasing the proper position of a number until she’d found the solution.

Or when she took a history test, and answered the questions by summoning up an image of the text she’d studied, mentally flipping through the pages until she found the right one, then simply reading the answer off it.

The simple process of thinking seemed to make the panic recede a little, and Amy began focusing her mind on the problem of what had happened to her.

The darkness was still there, surrounding her, but she found she could force it back by imagining things, seeing things in her mind’s eye that she could no longer see with the eyes she had been born with.

She pictured a beach, a broad expanse of sand, with brilliant sunlight pouring down from a perfectly clear blue sky, and gentle surf lapping at the shore.

She put herself into the picture and imagined her feet buried in the sand, feeling its warmth between her toes.

Birds.

There should be seabirds in the image. But what kind?

Instantly, unbidden, images of birds came into her head, birds she’d never seen before, even in books. And yet they were there, all of them, and as she gazed first at one and then at another, information about each of them appeared in her mind.

Their size, their coloring, the parts of the world they were native to. Even images of their nests, complete with eggs.

But where was it coming from? It was almost as if—

Her mind froze as a concept suddenly took form, a concept she rejected in the instant it occurred to her.

And yet …

She remembered a computer she’d seen, not more than a month ago. A CD-ROM display, in which an entire encyclopedia had been put onto one disk, all of it digitized and cross-referenced, so all you had to do was bring up an index on the screen, then begin clicking a mouse, moving deeper and deeper into the volumes of information, looking at pictures, studying charts and graphs, even listening to snatches of music or speeches given by people who had died long before she had even been born.

It had seemed magical to Amy, and she had pleaded with her father to buy it for her, but he had only smiled his mysterious smile and suggested that perhaps it was something she might ask Santa Claus for.

She had known instantly that she was going to have it, that her father was going to get it for her for Christmas, and she had put it away in the back of her mind, knowing it was coming, knowing that in just a few months she would have the player and disk herself, attached to the computer that was waiting in her bedroom.

Attached to the computer.

And now what was happening in her mind was almost exactly like what had happened when she’d manipulated the mouse through the encyclopedia on the disk. Except her brain was the mouse.

Her mind began racing, images forming, making connections to other images, dissolving and reforming.

A computer mouse.

A real mouse.

A mouse in a cage.

Cat in a cage. Cat being tortured, being given choices.

Herself being given choices.

The high diving board; the knotted rope. The feeling of panic overwhelming her.

Tears.

Herself, crying, running from the swimming pool.

Experiments.

Experiments about intelligence, about reactions, about choices.

Choices she couldn’t make.

She’d wanted to leave, and Hildie had said she could.

And Hildie had given her a drug. A massive amount, enough to knock her out.

So she couldn’t leave. But they couldn’t keep her like a prisoner, could they? Her parents would come looking for her. Her mother would want to know where she was.

More images.

A funeral.

Adam Aldrich’s funeral.

His mother, crying.

Crying for her son, who had died.

Died?

Was she dead? Was that what had happened? No. Not dead. If she was dead, she wouldn’t be alone. She knew what Heaven was like, she’d pictured it in her mind hundreds of times. It was a soft, grassy hill, covered with wildflowers and small animals. At the top there was a brilliant shaft of light, like a rainbow, shining down from a cloudless sky, and angels were waiting for her. Angels she knew — her grandmother and grandfather, who had died when she was so small she almost didn’t remember them. But if she was dead, they would be there at the top of the hill, waiting for her in the light of the rainbow, their arms stretched out to her to gather her in and hold her, welcoming her to the new place where she had gone to live.

What if she was wrong? What if she wasn’t in Heaven at all?

Hell?

Could the blackness surrounding her be Hell?

No! She wasn’t bad, and she wouldn’t have gone to Hell! And if she was dead, she would feel it! She would know it! And she didn’t feel dead at all.

She felt alive, alive, but trapped in some kind of world she didn’t understand.

A world where she had no senses. She couldn’t see anything, or hear anything, or feel anything, or even smell or taste anything.

And yet she was alive. As if her mind was existing outside of her body.

Outside her body!

She began remembering things she’d heard, snatches of conversation.

“Maybe Adam’s not dead.”

“Maybe he’s just gone away.”

But they’d found his body.

His body, crushed by a train.

What would a train do if it hit a human body?

Instantly, figures began whirling through her head. The weight of a locomotive, and its speed.

The strength of bone.

She factored in a coefficient of flexibility and tensile strength.

The numbers churned with the speed of a computer, and suddenly she had the answer.

Adam’s skull would have been smashed and his brain crushed, killing him instantly.

If his brain was still in his skull at all.

But if his brain had been taken out of his body, as her body seemed to have been detached from her brain …

Her mind raced again, questions forming, answers appearing as quickly as the questions took shape.

Images of human anatomy flicked through her mind,data piling upon data, her mind receiving all of it, processing it, assimilating it.

She began to understand how the systems of her body worked.

And how little of it was needed to keep her brain alive.

Finally, in a moment of terrible clarity, she understood.

The blackness was real, for she no longer had eyes with which to see.

The silence was real, for she no longer had ears with which to hear.

Or fingers or toes, or tongue or throat.

No lungs with which to breathe, no heart to pump blood through the body she no longer possessed.

More data piled up, data that her unfettered mind sorted through with lightning speed.

Where was it coming from? Where could all the data have been stored? Not in her own mind, for most of it was unfamiliar to her, things she’d known nothing about.

Data banks.

It was coming from data banks, to which she now had access.

The moment came when Amy Carlson finally understood where she was.

She no longer existed in the world she’d lived in all her life, a world of people and animals and trees, with sights and sounds that filled her soul with joy.

Now she was alone, trapped in eternal darkness, surrounded by … what?

Facts.

Data.

Knowledge.

Bits of information, insignificant binary digits, flitting through a universe of electronic impulses.

But at the heart of the computer there was no powerful microprocessor constructed of silicon chips with millions of microscopic circuits etched on their surfaces.

Instead, the heart of this computer was a mass of biological tissue, far more complex than any microchip could ever be.

The heart of this computer was a brain.

Her brain.

Once again she screamed, a mighty burst of energy that exploded in her mind, spewing her rage into each of the tiny sensors that monitored every portion of her brain.

George Engersol and Hildie Kramer watched the monitor above the tank that held Amy Carlson’s brain with a combination of fascination and awe.

The graphs seemed to have exploded, and colors blazed over the screen like fireworks, reds and purples bursting into greens and oranges, wave after wave of hues mixing together, separating, then dying away, only to be replaced with new patterns, patterns that weren’t patterns at all, but graphic representations of the turmoil within Amy’s mind.

“What is it?” Hildie breathed. “What’s happening to her?”

Engersol’s eyes remained fixed on the monitor as he watched the results of his years of research.

“I think she just figured out where she is and what’s happening to her,” he said. “The question is whether she’ll survive it, or whether it will drive her insane.”

Hildie frowned. “But what about Adam? He survived, didn’t he?”

Engersol’s lips curled into a smile that was totally devoid of warmth. “But there’s a difference, isn’t there? Adam knew exactly what was going to happen to him, and where he would be when he woke up.”

He was silent for a moment, then spoke again. “And of course Adam wanted to go. Amy didn’t.”