Reversion--Part I

"Reversion" is a short story I wrote in my Science Fiction class early on in my time at William Jessup University.  It is my first attempt at the genre, but I found that I was quite fond of the plot and parallels with out present world.  It is a long story, so I anticipate it spanning the next six weeks or so.  Sit back, break out the potato chips/popcorn/chocolate/anything that makes you feel restful and is not illegal, and enjoy the tale!

 

Reversion

“Of late years wealth has made us greedy, and self-indulgence has brought us, through every form of sensual excess, to be, if I may so put it, in love with death both individual and collective.”

                        -Titus Livy, circa 10 AD

           

            The beginning was incomprehensible for Josh.  He could only explain later that nothing was, and then things hardly recognizable, figures that sparked some interest—perhaps fogged reminiscence—appeared in sundry shapes before him.  For a few moments there was a dull, repetitious sound, which was abruptly washed away by a vast darkness.  Time could not be followed in this realm of mental nonexistence, but he could later recall, in the timeline of his second birth, that the hazy shapes and throbbing sound were mixed in the initial scene.  A second awakening followed, and his mind had acquired no greater astuteness in its slumber; but the dull sound had differed, for it was no longer dull but high-pitched, and Josh’s mind moved with vague memory before it collapsed once more.  Many such episodes flooded his inconsistent consciousness prior to his final awakening, each one hardly more intelligible than the last.  In each scene of visibility he had no expectation of a stable awareness or a lapse into darkness—in fact there was no expectation at all; he simply was.  When at last the light and every misty shape remained before him, he could do nothing.  He could not move or speak, nor did he recall the ability to do such things.  He was a conscious corpse.

He could not later recall exactly when his psyche lobbed images of the past at him, but suddenly he viewed familiar pictures in the undying camera of his mind.  A woman stood before him, her lips moving, and the words that she spoke to him, mingled with the crumpled features of her countenance, reminded him of some rebuke he had been given.  She was his mother, a ghastly visual he could not touch.  His lips struggled and his throat flexed to form the words “Mom,” and the image fled from him as his mind was filled with a sense of shock at the audibility of his own voice.  Tears surfaced to his eyes, and he managed to turn his head to the left and right.  The repetitious sound was squealing at him, now quite distinct, while the figures surrounding him were still impossible to describe.  His chest heaved as he asked, “Mom, where am I?  Where am I?”  He panicked.  “What am I supposed to be doing?”

His energy was expended quickly, and he halted his movements altogether.  He did not lapse into the phantom, dark realm again, but it seemed natural for him to shut his eyelids.  There was great comfort in that act, great familiarity, and he contentedly allowed his body to slump into a vegetative pose.  He wished to remain there until the end of his days, if the world before him was real at all; there was a dreamlike quality to it, and yet so tangible did it appear that fleeing it again seemed altogether loathsome to him.  For time immeasurable, those ethereal photos of the mind, his dreams, had seeped into his brain and played before his eyes, now familiar, now wholly foreign.  If this visual was solely among that canon, then it was by far the most realistic, for he could feel a cold substance beneath him; the bleeping din behind him penetrated his ears and caused his body to leap; and some source of illumination above him shed lovable warmth.  As much as he desired to revert to his immobile state, with his eyes shut, he feared that he would lose this beautiful realm.  Some natural inclination pressed him to remain as alert as possible, and so he decided that he would not only stay awake, but find the ability to move and explore.

It took an immense sum of strength to erect his upper body, for in his chest there was the heaviness that one feels after a prolonged period in a prone position, an invisible weight pleading the continued repose of its victim.  He nearly swooned, but he then stabilized himself with his arms.  Josh Eya.  His name was Josh Eya, and he had the faint notion that behind him was a long extension of life, but of life not fully lived.  For when he attempted to recall anything of great significance, the broken countenance of his mother stabbed his mind’s eye, and all else was white.  He immediately began to reflect on his abrupt awakenings and fadings, and was able to separate them quite easily from birth.  I clearly haven’t just been born, because if I had, I wouldn’t be thinking this right now.  This episode was doubtlessly a new birth, a chance to live life, but his mind was so unstable that he could not comprehend it without hindrance.

Josh gazed at the room, now able to take in a full view.  The monotonous beeping returned to him, penetrating through his unfocused thoughts, and his head naturally turned to the left. A small, black EKG monitor crested a stand and hummed its repetitive tune, apparently detailing his cardiac rhythm and a highly realistic picture of a beating heart in the bottom right-hand corner of the screen.  The images terrified him.  With a surge of adrenaline, he leapt from the bed beneath him, and the EKG monitor chimed its speedy response.  His head swung away from the machine and to his right, quickly sweeping over a counter laden with tubes of colorful, medicinal fluids.  Across the dark, wooden floor there were stools and nothing else but loose papers and some bins for storage.  But facing the end of his bed there was a single oaken door and two windows with nearly transparent blinds, permitting enough sunlight to warm the body, but, thankfully, not enough to score his still adjusting eyes.

His knees did not seem prepared to bear his body; they noticeably quavered beneath him, begging him to return to the bed.  Refusing to fulfill their desire, Josh took two meticulous steps toward the door and grimaced.  Were there millstones tied to his legs?  At this rate, he could trudge his way to the doorknob in an hour.  He decided that he would wait until he had acquired equilibrium before he would attempt to exit this tomblike room.  But what lay outside?  The sun, the light, the antithesis of the absence thereof –that darkness which he had found himself far too familiar with—awaited him beyond.  And was there anything besides?  The world.  My home.  And thus he recalled his location.  He was presently in a small hut in the backyard of his home, designated specifically for its proprietors in times of medical emergency; and his home—difficult to mentally construct in form, but remembered in some vague sense—was one of many in a community.  He could not recollect any communal attributes of his community, however.

The world, he realized, was much more important than his own equilibrium or sense of safety.  He moved forward with brisk intent, when a stabbing pain rose from his left hand.  An IV, pumping the necessary fluids into him to assure his survival, was injected into a large vein on the top of his left hand.  His heart trembled; he feared needles, and so with a haste that astonished him, he tore off an adhesive that kept the IV’s needle in place, and pulled the needle from his skin.  He felt for other adhesives or nodes, especially those commonly connected to EKG monitors; when he found none, he disgustedly decided that someone had planted an EKG chip inside of him, which would accurately deliver his heart palpitations to the monitor from a distance.  Without further hesitation, he lurched unstably in the door’s direction.  The EKG, a persistent alarm clock, screeched in the background as he felt his pulse launch within him.  For a moment he felt the need to vomit, but decided that it would be a terrible sight and feeling, and so he swallowed roughly and continued to sway toward his destination.  The beeping sound, unrepentantly cyclical, abruptly went flat.  He was now out of its range, and was on his own.

The wooden floor beneath him creaked beneath each heavy step, and each sound was magnified and echoed in his scattered mind.  His left leg abruptly rebelled against his will and cast him against the counter, and the wooden edge bit his ribs.  What was going on?  The last that he could remember of walking, it was quite simple when he was sober.  Something quite potent indeed must have caused him such loss of equilibrium, but the gap between his mother scolding him (and him living in this noncommunal community) and wakening to this lonely tomb was one that could not be bridged.  He longed for some visual to construct that bridge, and to push him to some objective; there was nothing that he desired more now than to reach the door and grasp his purpose.  With a grunt he planted his weak hands against the counter’s edge and lifted himself solidly to his feet.  His head throbbed from his short journey, a hardly tolerable drumming that continued the recurring chirp of caution of the dead EKG monitor.

The slick doorknob felt cold to his touch.  The muscles in his face strained awkwardly into a smile, and he took a deep breath as he opened the door.  A light from the heavens, the sun now unobscured by any film, blasted his eyes and caused him to wince.  He cupped his hand over his brow, averted his gaze, and blinked the fogginess away, hoping that he was not partially blinded.  As the world became clear to him, the first color that he noticed was green.  It was the grass of his backyard, horridly unkempt, clawing at his knees.  But it was beautiful to him, for it was life, a growing thing beneath the rays of the father of the sky.  His flesh urged him to collapse in the buttery tendrils, but his heart denied his desire, for he feared to be tackled into the black abyss and lose this beauty forever.  With relief he touched a strand of grass and plucked it from the earth; then he lifted it to his eyes.  It seemed to him that this was his first time that he had actually seen grass, not viewed it carelessly as a part of earth undeserving of laudation.  He could not recall ever spending time looking at this grass, which made him wonder why he had even demanded a piece of the world’s natural beauty to be installed like a machine into his backyard.  But he supposed that everyone had to have a chunk of nature someone in their yard simply to have it.

For some time he did not turn his eyes above ground level, partly because of his fear of being temporarily blinded again, but mostly because of his appreciation for color.  But he eventually looked to his left and noticed dark planks of wood jutting from the grass and pricking the sky.  These were part of his fence surrounding the yard.  The fence was quite nearly black, and was much taller than he.  To see anyone living nearby, one would need to engage in a brief hiking expedition before reaching the crest of the rough wood and peer over.  Nothing remarkable about this fence caught Josh’s eye, but the sky above was like an endlessly sweet treat to him, an immeasurable expanse of color that seemed long removed from his sight.  Its majesty, as bare as it was, captivated him and forced tears from his eyes.  He did not comprehend what had lain between his hardly-perceptible past and his present, but he felt blessed that it had occurred.  Only now could he enjoy the splendor of this world.