Static

He woke up in artificial sunlight.

Not under a greenhouse lamp, nor a warehouse flood light, in fact, Yeung-Sung wasn’t certain whether he was actually ‘seeing’ the light.

The light was just there. Two miniscule spores of pus floating through the madness of the air. They moved. Along currents, a dandelion clumping and spreading apart. When it tightened, it strummed with effort, creating something that could be considered an eye.

But not a human, optical eye; an eye of the mind. An introspective lens. A camera. Somehow, Yeung-Sung was creating a nano camera in the air to see through.

How the hell am I doing that?

Squinting through it, he made out the enclosed white of hospital walls. With instincts acquired from his Gauntlet runs, Yeung-Sung tried to zoom, but the little balls of energy were not advanced enough for that. Still, after continuously pushing against it, the camera closed in on the wall, stripping back the layers of white plaster and grey filling to show Yeung-Sung that his ‘hospital’ flickered a translucent, server room green. Through the flickering wall was the hustle of important work in pristinely pressed lab coats. There was the array of a million strains of data, of satisfying number crunches that strobed across black screens like sizzling bacon. And finally, there was a single man that oversaw it all. His head began to swing around at Yeung-Sung. Even through the flickering walls, even crossing the mirror of the nano-camera, Jordan knew he was being watched.

I’m inside of GLI. But how?

Yeung-Sung tried to move, tried to connect this ensnared state of mind away from Jordan’s eyes, but it was as if the nerves, the connections to his limbs were under maintenance. Slowly, he realized that he was unable to contact any sense, feel anything at all except this unusual form of sight he had assembled for himself using the latent energies in the room; through the photon mirror.

If I can push it forward, he thought, maybe I can push it around.

With the bulging effort of an insect turning a millstone (correct if wrong), it swivelled. Reluctantly. Then, momentum built to the point where his ‘eye’ was a coin landing on its edge and spinning and spinning. After the delirious blur of motion began to give way, he saw it; himself, in a bed. Comatose.

In a rage, he flicked the photon mirror again, and saw Jordan -A different Jordan- stride into the continuously dissolving room. This Jordan was not as solid as the other. Like the walls had, he flickered, a little thicker than his surroundings but still, Yeung-Sung knew that this afterimage was not real.

But old fears do not die. And even though this Jordan was not real, he was close and coming closer and he inspired fear like a thick steam fogging up the mirror.

Is this how it ends? Am I about to go from a near-death experience to a full dead experience?

What is he doing -reaching for -a plug?

His throat gurgled like a shallow toilet. But…he felt it. He was himself again, he had reconnected with his body, everything rushing back in to cancel his subconscious mind’s first (and only) short break.

Firstly, the light had gone. He had to draw his own eyelid over his own eye, take in his own light to see that he was, indeed, in a closed off hospital ward, with only a square of opaque glass in the door giving a hint of an outside world. And a hint of a flicker, the dark soul of a ghost across the white paint.

Then there was the smell of purple incarnate that slunk in under his nostril like sticky egg sacks. Fucking lavender. Then, the taste of bile, but milky like the reed sap that had been whisking with other fluids in his body as he slept, foaming out of the creases of his lips.

He’s close.

Oh, and the hearing; the ever-present hum of an electronic predator looming in the circuitry that beeped beside him, looming over him without any of the familiarity of MEDB’s voice.

He’s here!

And finally touch; weight. And with that; strength. The instant Yeung-Sung felt that come back he surged forward and throttled Jordan’s neck.

And fell…. through empty air, overturning his thin-frame medical bed and now, he found what he had been longing for, the thing that got him here in the first place: Pain.

And he burned.