I awaken from my bizarre journey to the feeling of tiny claws digging into my chest. My new friend Shadow is staring at the window above my head. He looks like he’s seen a ghost because all his fur is standing on end. There is a static charge in the air and my hair is standing on end also. Shadow gives me a concerned squawk and keeps on watching the window. I can’t see anything from where I’m at so I sit up to get a better look. I can feel the coiled tension in Shadow as he goes along for the ride. Still nothing, maybe we should go outside to get a better look. As we reach the front door my pocket starts talking.
“Are you alright? All the environmental sensors around your cabin shut down after we got a strange energy spike,” said the voice of Cole as I reach into my pocket to take out the small metal shield he had given me earlier.
“I’m fine but something happened while I was trying out that new headset. Heading outside to check right now,” I replied while heading through the door. Everything is quiet, too quiet, a hushed silence has settled over the Biolab. My hair is still standing on end as we make our way around to the bedroom window. No signs of any intruders but there is a perfectly clean circle about the size of a softball in the pollen and dust on the outside of the window.
“Walt just reported in and he saw a small ball of light come from the direction of your cabin. He said there was a crackling static-like sound and then it shot up through the dome and disappeared,” said Cole with the tension now creeping into his voice. “I’ll try to download the readings from the headset when the system comes back online. Come and see me as soon as you can.”
Everything starts slowly spinning as a pressure begins to build in my forehead, the center of which begins twitching, it feels almost like a muscle spasm. Images start rushing through my mind at a furious pace. I struggle to remain upright while I ride this invisible roller coaster. Pictures of my time in the hospital, fear and dread, an odd elevator ride, electronic malfunctions, the number 22 over and over again, waves of synchronicity, what appear to be giant wolves, strange lights in the sky, a multitude of glowing red eyes attached to shadows. I can remember feeling like I was going crazy until other people started seeing these things too. Information broadcasts from some invisible other. The presence of some unseen powerful hand guiding me along the path.
Bits of my life come rushing back to me in a cacophonous wave of sights and sounds. The pressure in my head is still building and becoming painful. I remember the doctors waking me up over and over again, always in someplace new and unfamiliar. Images of myself strapped into a car seat as a child and a bright blue light flying over the car. A dark shadow standing in the corner of my bedroom. Small white balls of light weaving through bushes. Objects thrown by invisible hands. Precognitive dreams and visions. A group of doctors surrounding me in a small room and large rack of hypodermic syringes. My childhood home with all the cupboards and closets opened mysteriously. Visions of ghostly birds flying out of speakers during musical trance states and then blackness.
I’m awakened by the sandpaper texture of a tiny cat tongue. The grass tickling my face in the breeze. For a moment I can hear everything. The tiniest sound of a bird shuffling in the trees. Wings of an insect somewhere in the grass. Everything is still spinning but it feels like I’ve made some sort of breakthrough. Some forgotten force awakens in my mind and for just a second everything makes sense but the feeling is fleeting. Ensign Cole is standing over me now and he reaches down to help me up. Shadow stays close to me looking concerned and rubbing on my leg. “How long have I been out?” I ask Cole.
“Long enough. What happened?” he asks me still holding me by the elbow with an astonished look on his face.
“Not sure. I came around the back of the cabin and found a circle in the window glass and then the floodgates of my mind opened up and let loose all sorts of bizarre information. The pressure in my mind was almost unbearable. From what I can tell strange things have been happening around me for my entire life,” I responded to him as the gravity of the situation began to sink in.
“Tell me everything you remember,” he said as he led me back into the cabin.
Zap-Zap brought us coffee and I tried to relay as much of the information as possible while I could remember it. We sat in stunned silence for a few minutes trying to understand what it all could mean. If all of this was happening in my old life how did it follow me here? Or was it the thing that brought me here? And the question of exactly what that thing would be was a question we couldn’t quite get our minds around. The why and how was like a thousand pound gorilla in the room.
“The telemetry from the headset shows a huge energy spike and an activation of some normally inactive areas of the brain. Your brain lit up like a Christmas tree with all sorts of new connections and pathways. We haven’t seen anything like it,” muttered Cole who was now visibly shaken.
“Strange lights and telemetry spikes? There are so many questions here. Do you think the light that Walt saw also left the circle on the window? And if it did, then was it also involved with the images in my mind?”
“It’s the best guess at this point. There must have been an extraordinary amount of energy involved and that may explain the sound he heard, the static electricity you felt, the circle on the window, and the loss of communication with the sensor array,” he speculated as we waded through the information we had.
“I feel like someone charged my batteries for lack of a better term. I can still feel the energy coursing through me. Who I am is still just out of reach but it feels like someone has unlocked a door in my mind somewhere,” I said. We sat there in stunned silence for a while after that. The silence was only disturbed by the sound of another bowl of cat food being destroyed by Shadow.