Having started this as a very very short piece of fiction, I must confess my surprise that i felt the urge to keep going with it, and I’m rather enjoying the experience so far. I’m kind of surprised that I kept adding more to it. But after writing the original piece, as a five minute fiction, I thought, “hey…I kind of like this idea.” Anyway, here’s the first few parts, collected together to read.
I was dreaming. I was positive I was. She was curled up into a ball next to me. Her blonde hair fell over her face, and she was running her hand up my chest. “I miss you.” She said. “I miss you too.” I replied. She straddled me, and I grabbed her hips. “Won’t be long.” I said.
I woke up.
The nurse had come into the room. My sense of hearing and sight were connected to a small camera / microphone at the front of the case my brain sat in. I’d been here for a year now, a brain in a case, floating in liquid. My body had been horribly horribly burned in a plane crash, beyond anything the doctors could do for me. They did the only thing they could do: Remove my brain and let my body die. My brain was suspended in liquid with life support attached to it.
The nurse was looking at his pad. It apparently provided him with data fed to him from my life support systems. The tap tap tap from him poking at the pad was probably what woke me up. I was always sensitive to that kind of noise, I could never sleep if water was dripping. Even if it was across the house, I had to get up and fix it, or put a cloth under it to stop the noise.
He sat down in the chair next to me after he’d taken a look at the case my brain was in. I used the camera to follow his every move. I was glad they didn’t have to change my fluid today; this was just a routine stop for the nurse as he went from room to room.
Brain cases were situated in small, narrow rooms. They were longer than they were wide, giving them the look of a wide hallway. Most brain cases were given virtual environments to connect to, to minimize the trauma of being disconnected from their bodies. Doctors would “connect” with the patients when talking to them…again, to minimize the trauma of their situations.
After looking over a few things on his pad, the nurse said “Dreaming?” “Yes.” I replied. He never even looked up as he spoke. He was looking at a real time scan of my brain. It seems so strange to say that. But I just can’t bring myself to say that he was looking at a scan of me. My body was long gone. My brain WAS me. I just can’t say it.
I watched him do his nurse thing. We made small talk. “Any good news? ” I asked. “Do I have a brain tumor?” “Hahahah, no, Mr. Lawson.”
I don’t think that nurse ever realized just how much I hated him for being able to move around, to see with his own eyes. I hated that he could go somewhere and eat, or pick up a hooker after work, take her somewhere, and fuck her. I hated him for all the things that I couldn’t have, and couldn’t do. I hated him for having a body.
I wanted to go back to sleep. I wanted to dream of Holly again. She left me a little while before the plane crash. She called me at the hospital, after I’d been stabilized in the case. She wanted to come visit. I told her no. I said, “Look after the kids.” She’d started crying. We had gotten divorced for stupid reasons. Fighting over money, that kind of shit. Basically taking our stress out on each other. We never meant it. We just didn’t know how to deal with it.
“Seriously.” I said to the nurse. “Kill me.” “Can’t do that,” he said. “I was kidding.” I said,”Seriously, I was kidding.” Awkward silence followed. He got up from the chair a few minutes later and turned to leave.
“You gotta hang in there Mr. Lawson. Won’t be long before the airliner comes through on the medical bills, and then you’ll be able to get a new body.” He walked towards the door of the room, gripping his pad, and walked out.
********************************************************************
The lights in my room were low, making it difficult to see a great deal with my cam. There wasn’t really anything to see. There wasn’t even a television, or a web connection. They didn’t want me getting upset about looking at real people…I’d stopped thinking of myself as a real person months and months ago…I could barely stand the idea of being disembodied. I didn’t need it rubbed in my face, they figured, by having a tv on.
I think they were wrong about the webs though. I could have connected virtually with people, and that would have made me feel a little better…but the inevitable “i really want to meet you” scenario would have come up. What would I have said, that I had to go on a trip to Jamaica to help refugees evacuate from rising sea levels? Christ.
But, the lights were low, and I found it was actually painful…well, not painful exactly. I didn’t feel the usual pain associated with low lighting…I didn’t have eyes. So, the actual pain created from eyes trying to adjust wasn’t there. In fact, there were a lot of things I didn’t suffer. It really helped sharpen my mind, in that respect, because I didn’t feel the physical aspect of being sleepy, or crying. I didn’t feel any of those things. That was what took the most getting used to…other than not having a body…it was the things that you associated having a body with that was the strangest part of it. It’s almost impossible to explain. That’s why most brain cases got simulated environments, so they didn’t have to really deal with that kind of shit. But, I can try to explain what it was like in reverse…Imagine that you are nothing but eyes and ears, and you can only look in one general direction. Now, remember that when you want to cry, you’ll feel nothing. No heaving, no sobbing sounds, no tears…Nobody can hold you and comfort you. Your pulse won’t quicken, your eyes won’t become sore…and nobody would be able to tell you’re crying because your voice box comes directly from your brain, and there’s no flesh to make your voice crack. Imagine what it would be like to exist purely as a mind with no body. When you see someone attractive, you don’t feel the blood rush to your sex. You feel a vague…something…but there’s no blood rush to anywhere, so you feel…nothing but a recognition that they’re attractive. Imagine that.
************
After I said “seriously, kill me” to the nurse, I was expecting a visit from a psychiatrist or something. They had them on staff at the hospital. They practically lived for talking to brain cases, besides. Don’t ask me why.
I could tell the nurse had been really annoyed by my asking him to kill me. I couldn’t blame him, really. I mean, who asks a nurse something like that? But I couldn’t help it. I HAD been going insane. You show me anyone other than a goddamned Buddhist monk, maybe, and I’ll show you someone who’d lose their shit if they were just a goddamned brain in a jar. It had been, christ, a year at that point, that I was in there. I think maybe longer.
So, when the shrink came in to see me, I wasn’t really surprised. She came in and sat down in the chair by me. I registered that she was attractive, of course. Slim body, slight cleavage, hair back in a bun and glasses. The parts of my brain that were expecting to register an erection spun their wheels uselessly as I looked at her.
“How’re you feeling?” she asked. I didn’t respond at first. Finally I said “that’s about the stupidest question anyone’s asked me, under the circumstances.” She looked dead at the camera for a few moments. Then she said, ” I know you’re going crazy in there. It’s a horrible thing that’s happened to you. I’m not going to mince words, but I’m not going to humor your self-pitying my life is over crap. See, when I ask how you’re feeling, I expect an actual answer. As in, I expect you to tell me just how bad your crazies are.” That kind of shocked me. Not that she’d said it to me, but that she’d said it at all.
“I’m losing my mind. I know it. I have murder fantasies about killing people out of revenge for their having bodies. I asked the nurse to kill me the other day. I told him I was kidding.”
“Were you kidding?”
“I don’t know.” I said. “Maybe it was a little of both.” She nodded. “You’re new here.” I said.
“Yes.”
“So,” I said, “are you new to brain cases, or you been talking to them for awhile?” She leaned back in the chair, stretching out her legs a little, and kind of relaxing. She said, “I’ve been doing it for about ten years. I just got to St. Gerome’s a few days ago.” She took a sip of coffee and said, “I’m here to talk about you. Your case is extreme in that you’ve been in a case longer than anyone else. Most people are put into a body about three months at the most after being put in a case. The effect it’s having on you…I can’t believe you’re even talking at this point.”
I thought about it. Thought about why I was still thinking, talking, able to interact. “I’m holding on because I want to beat the living crap out of those corporate fuckers that have me stuck in here. I can’t even get net access. They won’t pay for it. I want to watch them hurt.” I said.
She nodded and said “My name’s Doctor Stevens.” She took a sip of her drink and then said, “That’s a good motivation for staying in the real world.”
“Yes.” I said. “It is.”
*******************************************************
Sitting in a case, day in and day out, no arms or legs…It’s like a parody of Johnny Got His Gun…with the exception that you can talk and hear people. I’d been in the case for about a year at this point, if I’m not mistaken.
I apologize if I get caught up in describing what it’s like to be in that state, but I get hung up on it quite easily. I feel the need to convey what it’s like, to get it out of my system. Everything about being disembodied is nightmarish, and I still feel a certain futility in describing it.
You have no sense of balance, for one thing; no ears. I would often feel like I was suffocating, because I had no lungs. Your brain is hard wired to receive these sensations. People often ask me if there’s a sense of having a “ghost body”, something akin to a phantom limb. No, there is no such sensation. Phantom limb sensation, as I understand it, is caused by the nerves of what’s left of the limb. It tells the brain that the hand or leg is there, so the brain says “Oh, ok.” This even though the brain can plainly see that there’s nothing there.
So, I’d spend my days dizzy and suffocating at first, till I learned to filter out those sensations. After a few months, I was fine, as far as coping with my brain trying to process sensations that weren’t there. After awhile the doctors stabilized those centers of my brain that were causing such sensations, and I didn’t have to filter it out. They only did this after it became apparent that the airline wasn’t going to come through anytime soon, in terms of finding me a body. The process of deadening those centers can cause permanent damage to a varying percentage of people, making it impossible to ever put a brain into a new body.
At times, I think it would have been better if I couldn’t see or hear anything, or speak. That way I wouldn’t have had anything to react to, and it would have been like I was in a very peaceful and dark place. It would have been a nice illusion, but honestly, I think that would have driven me insane. By the time they found a body for me, I’d have suffered terribly. Not that I didn’t suffer in other ways, but the isolation would have caused an emotional schism that I wouldn’t have recovered from.
I would occasionally protest my condition when I’d get a visit from a doctor. I’d say things like “this is inhumane, you should find a body for me now, what kind of doctor are you to let me suffer”. That kind of crap. The doctors sympathized. They were good people but they were actually legally restricted from doing the body transplant pro bono. In fact they had signed papers stating that they would not do this, in my specific case, as long as the airline was investigating its legal recourse in the matter.
I still don’t get all the intricacies of the legal bullshit. What it did was create a lock on any kind of procedure that would allow me to actually get placed with a new body. When you’re waiting, every day, for somebody to walk through the door and tell you that they’ve got good news, and day after day it doesn’t happen…and you’re stuck staring at a tiny room, with only your thoughts to keep you company…I’m just trying to make it as clear as possible what it was like for me, and I don’t mean to get all dramatic. I’m just trying to get it out of my system.
****************************
They say that any landing you can walk away from is a good one. I don’t know if my situation, such as it is, applies. After all, I didn’t walk away from the plane crash. I was dragged out of burning wreckage. It’s not the same thing, you know?
In the old days, if a plane went down, you went down with it. These days, they have mass ejection systems for passengers. Your seat slides down into a pod. Once you’re in, the pod closes and is ejected. Ideally the passenger’s seat is slid into the pod and it’s sealed within a period of about eight seconds. Your chair doesn’t fall into position as much as it is lowered into place very quickly. Eight seconds is about right, I think. This happens simultaneously, with all passengers dropped into their pods at the same time. The pods aren’t sealed until just before the passengers are dropped. There’s a two second gap between each pod. Usually what happens is, the pods are ejected one at a time. They can override that and launch two at a time. It’s done randomly, so you can’t pick a spot on the plane based on when you’d get ejected from it.
I did some research after the crash, about how those things work. Apparently they rely on electromagnetic technology to make the pods float down to earth at a slower level of speed. It’s the emergency ejection that’s the real bitch. They only use those pods if a plane is going down like a bat out of hell. And, you know, even then it’s not a guarantee. Obviously if a plane cartwheels on the runway, you’re nothing short of fucked no matter what, right?
There’s a lot of stuff they don’t tell you voluntarily about the ejection pods. There’s a short period of acceleration to make sure the pods are slammed out and away from the plane. The tubes open on the plane’s belly, shooting the pod out, like a giant metal bird shitting out an egg in mid-flight. That’s what they look like.
Once the egg is safely away from the plane, the mag field kicks in, slowing its speed to something like an elevator. The closer it gets to the ground, the slower it descends.
Once the passengers are safely ejected, the crew of the plane moves to a group pod, usually below the cockpit. I’ve seen pictures of that thing. It essentially looks like an elevator on the inside, with a few modifications. The plane is set to autopilot, and ordered to find as clear an open space as possible from civilization. That means that if the plane is over a city like say New York, it ditches into the ocean. If it’s in New Mexico, then it’s going to ditch in the desert, of course. And what happens if the plane is too damaged to do anything like steering? Then the pilots stay aboard and ride it out, to try to keep the plane from becoming a giant missile. There’s usually one or two coffin-style emergency pods, just in case of something like that happening, like say the pilots manage to get temporary control of the plane, and they manage to point it towards a nice patch of terrain. The stewardesses have already gone byebye in the crew pod. The pilots hustle to the coffins and gtfo.
It’s funny, how they put so much stock in these safety pods, when most times there’s no time to eject. Alot of times, a plane is going to crash on take off, or during landing, right? When that happens, the passenger pods are supposed to create “an extra level of safety”. They’re supposed to be fire proof, impact proof…that kind of thing.
I want to tell you, real quick, before I go any further…the crew did every goddamned thing they could to stop that plane from crashing. They really did try to be heroes, dammit. And then there was the stewardess.
You may have an idea in your head, of what happened, even before I say it. My escape pod jammed in the tube. The accelerator shorted out. The plane had an electrical fire. It’s a rare goddamned thing, but that sort of shit still happens with planes, even with all the safety features. So, the engines started shutting down. With only one engine left, and no control of the plane at all. That’s when they started ejecting us.
I could feel the plane jolt as each pod was pushed out, one after another. The pod closed, then tilted and rotated into a launch position, so that I’d be facing the angle of descent instead of away from it. I could hear barely hear the wind beneath me as the launch tube opened. I thought “shit…this is it.” I tensed up, trying to prepare for it. Then there was a loud popping sound and a grinding, whirring sound and a thump thump thump sound against the sides of the capsule.
At first I didn’t know what had happened. The flight attendants had been very clear in describing the escape pod launch procedure. A “please wait for assistance” light flashed on the wall in front of me. The thump thump thump started slowing down. The grinding sounds stopped. I remember shouting “HELLO?”. And then I just started shouting, period. I don’t remember what all I was screaming. I looked above my head, and saw an emergency release lever. I popped it open, but it wouldn’t open all the way. It was blocked by the hatch that had closed right after my seat had been lowered. I began frantically slamming the pod door against the
hatch. I heard voices….I heard someone say “That’s it, they’re all clear.” Then I heard another voice say “What’s that banging?”
It hadn’t really dawned on me that I might be in a really really bad situation. As the voices got closer, and one of them said “Oh my God, that one’s jammed” I began to get that sickening feeling. Fear is kind of like a fever, you know? You feel it, and think, oh I’m ok. I’m fine. Nothing’s wrong.” Then, when things get worse, it begins to dawn on you that you may have something serious. Then you really start to get scared when you realize that you SHOULD be scared. So I started screaming even louder, but I wasn’t actually afraid yet, I figured, hey, they’ll get me out of here and I’ll just get in another pod. That’s the kind of stupid thinking you do when you’re starting to get scared, and you’re trying to think rationally, and you’re trying to keep calm.
I felt the plane dip a little, felt my stomach trying to keep up with the rest of my body, and it was like a roller coaster. I heard someone shout, “HIT THE OVERRIDE! JUST DROP HIM!” I shouted up at them, “GET ME THE HELL OUT OF HERE!” I banged the pod door against the hatch again, frantically as I felt the plane dip again. I’m pretty sure I heard people falling down above me, or getting knocked into walls or something. When I heard a voice say “you’re going to be ok” I calmed down. I heard muffled sounds above me. I relaxed a little.
That’s when I realized, I could smell smoke. You know, the kind of smell that comes from electrical fires.
The smell was really strong. I closed the lid of my pod to keep out the smell and the heat, which was getting worse.
…Back in the day, I worked as an electrician before I became an EMT. I’d have to say that being an electrician was a better job, if only because I got a lot of time to myself. Ironic that I ended up having so much time to myself later. Anyway, I was brought in on a contracting gig to inspect bad wiring at a hotel. Apparently some of the wiring had caught fire. The smell on the plane was exactly like that. That’s how I knew, something Bad had happened.
Voices above me were yelling “It’s not the sequence circuit, it’s the launch mechanism.” then “We need to get him out, we’ll put him on the lifeboat!” then “pry it open then!” Then I heard another voice say “We’ve got five minutes to get off the plane.” Silence. Then I heard a woman say “Go. I’m going to try to get him out of here.” About sixty seconds later, I felt another jolt, heard something underneath me go screaming by. Then I heard the woman above me yell down to me, “Listen, your pod is stuck, I’m going to try to get you of it.”
“THERE’S A FIRE down here!” I screamed back at her. “WE KNOW!” She shouted back. The plane was picking up speed, it seemed like. The plane began pitching forward, into a sharp angle of descent. I felt like I was in some kind of horrible recliner. My equilibrium told me I was tilting backwards, which meant that the plane was beginning to go into a dive.
“We’re not going to get him out of there in time!” came a man’s voice. “GODDAMMIT! HE CAN HEAR YOU!” the stewardess screamed at somebody I assume was part of the flight crew. “Oh God.” I thought. None of it was real, my brain wouldn’t let me think of it as real.
I had a moment then, a real peaceful moment that I didn’t think was possible. I stopped clenching my arm rests, stopped thinking about anything. I became calm. They talk about how you hear another voice say something, but it’s coming from your mouth. I hate that phrase. But, that’s what it was. I didn’t make a conscious decision to do it. I yelled “GET OFF THE PLANE! IT’S OKAY!”
I didn’t know it at the time, but there were only three emergency pods on the plane. There were four people.
I heard somebody say “She’s going.” Heard the stewardess shout profanities in protest. At this point, there was maybe two minutes left to “abandon ship”. I don’t know what happened next. I felt another jolt and felt the plane shudder, then I heard what I assume was the stewardess’ pod go whistling by.
The plane was beginning to dip more sharply now. I became aware of tilting back even further, my back facing the direction of the ground. The crew members were arguing. In case you’re wondering, my seat had been near the front of the plane, which is why I was able to hear so much of their arguing. Just an fyi for clarification. “You’re fucking going, Tom.” “Fuck YOU!” “What about HIM?” a third man said, referring to me.
“FORGET ABOUT ME!” I shouted up at them. Sixty seconds to go.
“GET INTO THE DAMNED POD!” shouted the voice that I later found out belonged to Paul Howard. He was the flight engineer. It turns out, he was the only one of the three that didn’t have kids. In fact, his wife and two kids had been in a car accident. His wife lived. His kids didn’t. Unfortunately, his wife was brain dead and in a hospital when somebody “accidentally” pulled the plug on her life support.
There was silence followed by two thumps and more windy, whistling sounds. Then a voice said to me, much closer this time, “I’m sorry. I’m so sorry.”
That’s when my brain let my mind know, it was really real.
******
Johann Johnson was a writer. He published his first book in 2112. It was about a guy, an olympic class runner. The character’s name was Tim Travis. In the book, he’s in this horrific accident…gets cut nearly in half and has to be put in a critical care pod. And I thought, jesus, that’s a pain that’d be hard to get over.
Not to get on a tangent, but sometimes I really wonder about who the asshole was that started putting the name “pod” in every goddamned phrase you can think of…critical care pod, ejection pod, etc. Seriously, in the world I was living in, I couldn’t get away from that damned word. When they took my brain out of my skull, it was put in a suspension pod. What’s wrong with the word “chamber”? Or “unit”? It’s like it was a federal law or something, everything having to do with containing a person had to have the word “pod” in it.
Anyway, they tried reattaching his lower body to this guy’s body, but they couldn’t do it. Too many mangled bits below the torso. So they give him a lower body transplant. The problem is, they can’t find a set of legs that match his old ones. They give him the parts of a guy that’s maybe 5 feet 6 inches, and it effectively ends Travis’ running career…though, honestly, getting cut in half had already effectively done that. But Travis freaks out. And, when he gets out of the hospital, the first thing he does is he goes and buys a gun, and walks into a random building and shoots everybody on the first floor. Then he walks into the building next door and does it again. And again, and again, working his way through five blocks of buildings before the police catch up to him. And he’s screaming at the police and he’s waving the gun around, and he shoots at the building across the street from where he’s standing. And that’s when the cops gun him down.
They rush up to him, and he’s bleeding to death, and he’s coughing and holding on to the gun, and he pulls the trigger but it’s empty. And his last words are “I’m done runnin’.”
Crazy shit.
I didn’t think Dr Stevens meant to give me an audio book to listen to that ended quite that way. Took her quite a bit of doing to get permission to let me listen to it in the first place. I dont know why that is. Strikes me as odd, though, that it would even be an issue. I couldn’t understand at the time why the hospital administrators even gave a shit about whether or not I got to listen to an audio book, but apparently to them it was a big deal. Honestly, when it comes down to it, I think Stevens sweet-talked the nurses into going along with it. Whatever. I’m just grateful that I finally got something that broke the monotony. The point is, I didn’t think she’d meant to give me a book to listen to that would give me the idea to go killing people, whenever I finally got a body transplant.
A few days after I finished listening it, Dr Stevens came in and had a sit down with me. She had her cup of coffee and her clipboard. “So, yeah. You’re probably wondering why I gave you a book about a guy in a similar position that ends in him committing mass murder.” she said. “Yeah,” I replied, “You might say that.” She just stretched her legs and kind of slumped down in her chair, took another sip of coffee and rubbed her eyes.
“You could take it in one of two ways. Escapist fantasy that you can use to precariously satisfy the daydreams youve been having, God, I’m not going to say this right. I’m alot better at getting in people’s heads, so to speak…sorry.”
“It’s okay”, I said, “Go on.” “You need to realize that you’re not crazy, first of all. Second, you need to be reminded that these fantasies you’re having….It’s a fine line between a fantasy and actually plotting to do something.” she finally said. Then she looked at me, right at me. She said “It’s fine to have a daydream about committing acts of violence. I think everybody does it. That doesn’t make it a good idea. I know you already understand that. I just want to make sure that you really get it.” That was the only lecture she ever gave me about my murder fantasies, and it was actually quite a bit longer and eloquent, but that’s what I remember, and even that isn’t word for word, but it catches the jist of it, at least…I think…I’m not sure. I’d like to tell you it word for word, but I’ve got a bad memory when it comes to remembering things people say. Be that as it may, certain things that happened are etched in my mind, obviously. It’s just important to me that I make it clear that I don’t remember word for word everything that happened. You’d think the exact opposite would true, what with me having to rely on my mind to get by. She did make a point of bringing up my fantasies, trying to find out if my attitude had become more nihlistic. After the 7th or 8th time going over them, I finally said, “Look, I’m rational enough that I know the difference between self-pity and plotting to kill people.” Because that’s what my fantasies were, really. They stemmed from me feeling sorry for myself. They came from resentment and irrational jealousy. I was smart enough to know that, which is why I always said they were fantasies.
She started bringing in audio books for me once a week. I’d never really been much for books. I never had the time when I was older, and I was never really into reading when I was younger. I was one of those kids that liked to go hiking, swimming…that’s the kind of kid I was. When she started bringing having me listen to stuff like Tom Sayer and Catch 22 it was weird at first. It was like I’d been living my life with a bunch of different worlds floating around me, and I never noticed them. And then when I did, I felt like an idiot, or felt like I’d been blind or something, and that I was just now noticing this stuff made me realize what I’d been missing. I know that the fact that the audio books broke the monotony of my life, and gave me something to focus on, that made me really become attached to them. At any rate, they grew on me very very quickly.
Listening to the audio books, ultimately, was a way of living precariously through them…Helped me picture a life beyond the walls I was forced to stare at. Some days, I’d be listening to them and could almost see what was happening in full detail, instead of my little room. In a weird way, fiction reminded me of what it meant to have a real life. There’s a nice bit of irony for you.
