I made it as far as a gasping noise before my eyes shot open, and my consciousness returned to me, profoundly like an overwhelming tsunami. The light on the sterile white ceiling of The Raven’s laboratory came into focus, and I rubbed my eyes to clear my vision. The adrenaline was rushing, and I could literally feel sweat on my forehead and my heart was racing.
“Brianne?” Chase’s tone was nervous when he spoke and his words penetrated the haze that had settled in my head. “Can you hear me?”
I tilted my head to the side as I felt how rigid my neck muscles had become. Chase’s worried expression was above me and I could see that even in this young man’s face was etched with concern.
Beside him, Zoe leaned against the wall with her arms folded over her small chest and eyes displaying anxiety. And there, slightly withdrawn from the rest of the men, was Detective Morris, whose austere-lined face was the picture of a cop’s worry mixed with some shade of apprehension.
“I… I’m here”, I said as it was slightly hard for me to speak due to the dryness in my throat. “What happened?”
Zoe approached me and held a glass of water and put it in front of me. I accepted it gladly and then struggled to sit up on what was apparently one of The Raven’s examination tables. As I let the cool liquid go through my throat, I could feel various devices that are connected to my body beeping and humming softly as if in harmony with the silence resting heavily on the room.
“You have been out for almost 48 hours,” Zoe spoke calmly. “We. .. We weren’t sure you were going to wake up. ”
The time lodged itself in my throat and my stomach filled with something akin to lead. “Oh forty-eight hours?” I repeated the words, still stunned with disbelief. “But she was just. .. I was in Central Park and then. .. ”
It was precisely when I tried to recall events that occurred during a certain period of my life that everything seemed to collapse and all the memories came rushing in a swirl. Tear in actuality, that is the cosmic mess of an infinite number of parallel worlds, the enigmatic words of my alter ego. And then. . . What? I knit my brows and attempted to pull at the thin strands of the events in my head if it were a dream that were disappearing as if I was a Wizard trying to hold on to mere smoke.
You fainted during the experiment and The Raven’s betrayal,” Chase stated, emotion choking his voice to a near impersonal rasp, “One moment you are fine, and the next… God, Bri, you just decreased so suddenly, it is like you dropped like a stone. We tried to shake you up, to try and get some reaction, but you didn’t stir. It was like you they wanted to kill you. .. ”
“Dead” Detective Morris concluded gruffly. It was the worst thing I could imagine because his brain activity was incredibly high, but he was unconscious and unresponsive to anything happening in the outside world: “Brain activity off the charts, but completely unresponsive to external stimuli. Care to explain what the hell kind of ‘experiment’ you are running here, only you can’t save the world and…
“Why did you let me choose?” I looked at him.
Chase looked nervously at that accusation in my tone, but before he could say anything, I stopped him by raising my hand. “It wasn’t his fault” Zoe
Replied heatedly, feeling as if the fog in my head had lifted slightly. ‘I was thinking I wanted to… oh yes I volunteered once, we were…’
I searched for the words to describe what we had been trying to do, and then I stopped mid-sentence. It may be a little difficult to describe the ideas that we had been trying to justify in our minds at that juncture. The notion of the existence of multiple worlds, of an actually existing multiverse, even complex to the idea of the human mind?
We were always interested in the nature of consciousness,” Zoe said quietly, trying to ease an atmosphere that was rapidly turning hostile. “Able to challenge the current established paradigms of how our brain works, especially in relation to reality. ”
Morris snorted. I find it ridiculous, like any new age babble that you are; you are lucky The Raven did not let you become brain-dead.
“No I’m fine”, I repeated, swaying a little from side to side. It was evident that internally I was overwhelmed beyond measure.
Chase looked into my big eyes, and he touched my shoulder very lightly and said softly, “Bri, don’t be so hard on yourself, you’ve been through a lot, maybe we should do more tests to see if everything is okay. ”
“No,” I interrupted him, and maybe I did it a little roughly on purpose. ‘No more tests. Not now. I must. I need to try and reason about what has happened to me. ‘
The dark cloud had descended over the room as there was total silence which could be regarded as heavy. Across the room, Chase stared at me with concern in his eyes; Zoe’s eyes were considering me; Morris glared at me with suspicion. But how could I explain to them what i have seen with my own eyes, but now they are saying it’s a lie. The ever-spinning whirlpool of Realities, the countless Me’s, the feeling of the existence of Something That Is beyond our knowledge and comprehension?
“I saw… things,” I said slowly, then quickly realized that the wording did not sound quite right. There were other realities, other versions of us. It seemed as though… it was like a kaleidoscope of what could have been and there was a voice; an entity…
I stopped in mid-sentence, realizing how batty I must appear to anyone listening to me. Morris was already shaking his head, with an utter look of disbelief on his face and a worried look in his eyes. Then looking embarrassed at my words, Zoe said: “Maybe what has just happened to you was, in fact, not a real vision, but just your mind playing a trick on you. You know how it sometimes happens, when a person sees something that, in fact, wasn’t there at all. ”
Raising my voice in anger, I said, “It wasn’t a hallucination”. “Yes, it was more real then… than this”. I pointed at the lab interior filled with white walls and shiny sterile equipment. I have to change and switch sides to what if…what if all of this is the dream?