An interval of time passes—an eon, maybe, or a few minutes.
About a month after the bullet and the butterflies, you experience your first coherent thought.
My ass itches like crazy, you think.
First, there is nothing.
No light or dark, noise or silence, presence or absence. There is… sensation. Touch, sight, sound. But each is divorced from comprehension. The chill breath of conditioned air on the body's scalp, the pristine vacuity of the medical chamber, the dull roar of monitoring equipment. You cannot understand it. You reach and reach but it slips through your fingers every time.
An interval of time passes — an eon, maybe, or a few minutes.
The body does not rediscover movement so much as it falls into it; a jolt that passes through the chest and shoulders in reaction to a sudden neurochemical bloom. When it tries to move again, something goes strange in that nebulous space between stimulus and response. The body tries to open its mouth and finds itself wiggling its toes. It tries to raise its arm and the left side of its face goes tense. It tries to turn its head, to close its hands, to throw itself from the bed and watches great streaks of color carousel around the room.
Twitching uncontrollably, the body breathes in, then out. Its heart hums a steady tune. So at least that still works.
Words begin to coalesce.
The words are insubstantial, wispy things, floating along the edges of your cognition like threadbare clouds. They too are beyond your comprehension — you know only the slight shadows they cast as they pass overhead.
—creeps me out, how he's always staring like—
—vitals are steady, you can lower the dosage to—
—swear those things will start strobing one day and give me a seizure—
—practically vegetative but this brain activity is—
—have you replaced the bedpan yet?
Though the body cannot see it, the sun inches across the sky. Shadows shift, then grow. The land remains the same, but is changed by the falling light.
Time passes. Thoughts cohere. The body's ass continues to itch.
Somewhere very far away, a question is asked.
ARE WE ████ YET?
SCP-7408-B INTERVIEW LOG 07
YOU: What was that?
DOCTOR: I said, "how are we feeling today?"
YOU: Right. That's… what I thought you'd said.
YOU: I'm fine.
Roughly three days after your first coherent thought, somebody notices a difference in the body's behavior and sends a woman in a white coat to investigate. You do not know the woman's name, but you're pretty certain the body has seen her in the staff cafeteria before, nattering on about whatever it is your colleagues talk about when they're not working.
This time, when the woman speaks the words, you comprehend.
SCP-7408-B INTERVIEW LOG 01
DOCTOR: Do you understand what I'm saying?
The body tries to speak, but all that comes out is a rasping wheeze. How long has it been since it last spoke?
After the woman holds a cup of water to the body's lips, you try again.
YOU: Yes.
DOCTOR: Can you give me your name?
You have a name, don't you? All people have names and you're a person. Ergo:
YOU: Kondraki.
DOCTOR: Good. And your first name?
Oh, right, people usually have at least two of those.
YOU: It's…
You reach for your other name and find… not nothing, exactly. You have the answer. It's here, in the body's head. But the shape of it is changed. It can't be held anymore.
YOU: I don't know.
YOU: What is it?
The woman's expression does something you can't parse before smoothing back into careful stillness. She has bad news.
DOCTOR: We were hoping you could tell us.
When you wake up, sunlight is pouring through the window like molten gold. The hospital room is clean and quiet, though you can hear the mutterings of activity elsewhere in the building.
A nurse is tending to your IV, opposite the window. She has pale skin like birch bark. Spindly tree branches extend from her head and shoulders. She turns to you and asks—
DOCTOR: Do you know where you are right now?
YOU: Esterberg Memorial Hospital.
Sunlight pours through the window like molten gold.
DOCTOR: Do you know why you're here?
The room is nearly silent.
YOU: I don't…
YOU: The last thing I remember, I was coming into work and—
Time bends…
YOU: Wait.
…then breaks.
YOU: Why am I in Esterberg?
You hear the sound of innumerable tiny wingbeats.
YOU: Wait.
The room sloughs off its skin, revealing its pearly white face.
Somewhere, there is sunlight. But not here.
It's like this: memories are a kind of photograph.
They fade. They wrinkle. Time always pushes forward but memories never move, pinned behind glass. Not the past or the future, but an endless present.
After the contract is signed, a dead-eyed Foundation caretaker brings your kid to you. It's terrifying how quickly toddlers grow — even after just a handful of months, he looks different. The kid's maybe a few inches taller and someone's given him a haircut.
He hesitates in the threshold, eyes shining. He doesn't recognize you — and how could he? The body's lost twenty pounds, its hair only beginning to grow back from the pre-brain surgery shave. To his child's eyes, it must look like an uncanny replica of his father, a skeletal parody.
Or maybe he doesn't remember you at all. He's so young.
Hey, buddy, you manage to croak. I missed you.
Some gossamer strand of emotion seems to break inside him, then, and he tears across the room to bump his head against the body's— against your ribs. Suspended somewhere between relief and agony, you hold him close as he sobs.
When they come to take him away, the both of you are long asleep.
You see him in one of your favorite bars — the kind where bouncers barely glance at your fake ID when you come in. It's that guy from your photography club. He's older than you, maybe late twenties or early thirties, with olive skin, curly black hair and a stubbly smile. Warmth shoots through you every time he praises one of your photos.
You've known, ever since you were fourteen and briefly obsessed with Harrison Ford, that you like guys. It's just that you've never done anything with those feelings in the five years since, always too scared or ashamed to strike up the nerve. But now? Maybe it's the alcohol buzzing at the base of your skull or maybe you caught him looking at you funny a couple times or maybe nobody's touched you since fucking senior prom — whichever it is, now is different. You tip the rest of your drink down your throat and stagger out of your chair.
The two of you have hardly spoken before, so you introduce yourselves. He says, that's a good name. Memorable. Which is a strange compliment to give, but you're oddly, stupidly flattered by it. You chat like that for a while, until he sort of— looks at you. Leans back, eyes half-lidded. Evaluating.
And then he says—
DO YOU WANT TO SEE SOMETHING ████?
It's like this: the body is a photo album. Open it up and there you are.
Turn the pages, flip, flip, flip. This is you, going to work. This is you, talking on the phone. This is you, making a choice.
The body is a vessel for memories, see? It overflows.
Sunlight pours into the PT room like a gushing wound. You're pretty sure it's real sunlight, not illusionary. You're pretty sure about most things, these days. You're pretty sure you're wasting your time.
Your hands clench against the railings as you will your legs to move. Nothing happens.
SCP-7408-A is like an extra limb. When it got grafted onto you, your brain — however little of it remained — didn't know what to do with it. It threw everything off balance; all the signals for conscious activity got mixed up. You're pretty sure.
Your physical therapist is saying something about healing taking time and patience and progress isn't always linear.
Linear. What a fucking joke. You tune him out and try to move your legs again. Nothing.
You grit your teeth and try again. Nothing.
You try again. Nothing.
You try again.
You try again.
You try again.
It's nearly 4 AM when she calls you about the baby. An hour nearly as tired and ragged as her voice when she says your name.
It's 8:30 AM when you leave; you bid your apartment a silent farewell as you go. You'll never see it again.
When you get coherent enough to understand who you are, where you are, and what that means, you become — unwell.
You stop talking. You barely eat. You barely do much of anything, in fact. What's the point?
You're never leaving this building. Not with the Foundation's eye upon you, locked in a cell who-knows-how-many feet below the ground.
You're never going to see the sky again.
You're never going to see your son again.
You start pushing the butterflies around to pass the time. It's not that difficult, once you learn the trick of it. Like clenching a muscle in your brain.
You make a game of it. First, you try colors. Blue, yellow, orange. Green.
Then, shapes. Triangles, cubes, dodecahedrons.
You move on to more complex subjects, recreating objects from memory, faces from half-forgotten dreams. You try to paint the sea but can't get the hue quite right.
You pour every waking moment into it, clenching that metaphorical muscle until droning migraines force you to stop. Your life becomes a binary of sleep and labor.
There is a woman in your cell. She wears a stern expression and a suit the color of—
When you go to fetch the magazine from the mail, feet padding through shag carpet, you can hear your family watching TV in the other room.
Snip.
Images cleave neatly from the pages: A picture of a tree. An advertisement for a portable camera.
Snip.
When the blades slip in your hand and cut into your flesh, you do not think of the pain, at first. For a moment, you see only the magazine, sodden crimson spreading through, page by page.
Snip!
The woman is holding a contract. She is showing it to you.
I would like to tell you about the Radix Initiative, she says.
It's like this: the body is the photo album. The memories are the photographs. And then there's the scissors, making confetti of it all.
The mind is divided, scattered. Nonlinear. Fragments. Present tense.
The pieces are the same, but are changed by their new context.
Blood pours from your hands, seeping through, creating odd colors.
You are unmade. You are new.
You are gluing yourself back together again.
SCP-7408-B INTERVIEW LOG 11
DOCTOR: Now that you've had time to think about it, can you recall anything from the day you were assaulted? Anything, even seemingly insignificant details, could be useful to the investigation.
YOU: I…
—there is a sound, a shout, high and clarion-bright, resounding about the cavern of your skull—
—but it is not a shout, it is a keen and piercing note that slices through you like church glass, cold and clear and sharp—
—not a note, but a many-hued light that fills you like water, swelling your chest to the point of bursting—
—not a light but a spreading of roots beneath your skin, slim tendrils winding around meat and bone until fragrant wings unfurl from mouth agape—
—not a root but a pattern unfolding, enveloping, reflecting a sound, a shout—
YOU: I don't remember anything that happened that week.
YOU: I guess I'm grateful.
