Lost
On the night when the news was all over the channels, she cried herself to sleep.
The next morning, her best friend from her college arrived at the hospital in her hover car to pick her up, while her frail body slumped into the wheelchair. During the ride, her friend monitored the status of her autonomous car and she just looked out the window, both of them lost in their own thoughts. Eventually, her friend sighed, breaking the faint humming of the air-conditioner, and asked, “are you sure about this?” She pressed a button and the car entered a dark underground parking lot.
“Yes,” she paused for a moment, “I’m sorry.”
“It’s ok. It’s just… I won’t be seeing you again,” her friend said, and parked the car.
“It’ll be all right,” she said, “I’ll see you there. We’ll be happy. I promise.”
Her friend turned off the engine, and the car slowly lowered itself to the ground. Without the background noise of the air-conditioner, the silence was pervasive. When her friend pressed her face against her palms, trying to choke back a sob, she could feel her own tears well up and blur her vision, so she quickly wiped them away and said, “I have to go. Take care.”
That was the last time she saw her friend.
* * *
She used to have nightmares almost daily when she was little. It was always the same dreams, in which she would be eaten alive by her mother’s imposters. She always seemed to know what was going to happen next (her death, for instance), or sometimes the dreams seemed to play out according to her stream of fearful thoughts.
When she grew older, she avoided horror movies to strangle her brain that loved to feed on all kinds of sick ideas. But the dreams, though much less frequent, were becoming more vivid, with gore and lacerated limbs and the rotten smell of death. She would wake up in the middle of the night completely paralyzed, unable to tug her cold bare feet under the cover. In one dream, she plunged uncontrollably into the ocean, where the entire ocean floor, with hills and valleys, were made of piles limbs. She forced herself to wake up when her body began to scrape against the limbs, but she could still feel the texture of cold skin and minced meat on her face and palms after she returned to reality, as if she was really there, under the water.
Sometimes, her reality was filled with déjà vu, as if everything had already happened in the past and she was just reliving it. What was reality then, the present, or some unknown past that she had experienced but forgotten?
In another dream, she was in a parallel universe. Her family lived in a different house. The living room was paved by cold white marble tiles. Under the sofa was a body wrapped in plastic with blood in the creases. Her parents were arguing and blaming each other, saying the other one should get rid of the body.
She had read Gödel, Escher, Bach, in which the author explained Escher’s paintings as infinity represented by a finite loop. The author also brought up the paradox of reality and fantasy—if there was always a higher level of reality and a lower level of fantasy, and if the entire chain formed into a loop, what was real then? It was mind-boggling, but she loved it; what if the reality was just a dream, like all the dreams in other dreams? What if one day she would wake up as a baby in her mother’s arms? She could then start all over again. She would be good, diligent, always on top of her studies. She would tell her parents that she loved them. She would not fall in love with him—no, she should, but she should never break up with him. And, most importantly, she should have gone to her regular health check much earlier.
She had so many regrets.
* * *
She navigated her wheelchair with a controller and positioned herself in front of the oval-shaped elevator, its silver surface reflecting a distorted, bulging image of herself. She looked back but her friend’s car was already gone.
The elevator slid open for her to enter the shell. It descended and came to a halt at underground level B20. A dozen of people lined up outside the company’s meeting room, and when she arrived, some of them turned to look at her. She met their gaze and saw herself in them. All these people here, including her, were just reflections of one another, full of unattainable wishes.
People were called on one by one; most of them came out after a few minutes, but some were never seen again. When people arrived after her, she, like those before her, would turn her head and look at them, and they would look at her, and the introduction was over.
“Why are you interested in our experiment?” The interviewer asked after she wheeled herself into the meeting room.
“Because I’m dying. I’ve got nothing to lose.”
“I’m sure you still have a few months left.”
“That’s not a concern. I just want my contribution to be my legacy,” she lied.
“Sure. You’re in. Any questions?”
She recalled last night’s news that almost sounded like a scam, with the words “parallel universe,” “highly unstable,” and, “death for a potential new life elsewhere.” She asked, “do I get to pick which parallel universe I will be travelling to?”
“Unfortunately, no. We only have had successful results on smaller animals whose consciousness and memory were safely transferred to their own selves living in another random parallel universe. It’s a very unstable technology, which is why we really appreciate your participation.”
She listened. Sometimes life was full of options, like a path forking out into multiple paths, but sometimes—just sometimes—every path would hurt you, one way or another. What if she was sent to a parallel universe where she would be in more pain? She was here for an escape, a release from this reality, a fresh start.
She needed more time to think, so she looked for an excuse to continue the conversation. “You’re saying that I’ll be killing myself from another parallel universe?”
“In a sense, yes.”
“What if I weren’t killed here after the transfer of information? Who would I be, and who would the new me in that parallel universe be? Who’s whose copy?” She asked, feigning horror and confusion.
The interviewer was growing impatient. He said, “don’t worry, you’ll die here.” He landed two fingers on the contract, and pushed it across the table. “Think hard before you sign it.”
* * *
She had been in one and only one relationship. Just like how she was drawn to the damaged antagonists in many movies and fictions, she was irrevocably attracted to the delicate imperfection and loneliness in him.
She knew the risks she would be taking to be with a broken soul, and as expected, he would stop talking to her, but from time to time he would appear out of nowhere, opening up and telling her how much he loved her. Even though she was never a mentally strong person, she persisted, swearing that she would always be there for him.
When the friction between her parents escalated into an ongoing battle, it wasn’t the possibility of divorce that destroyed her. One day after dinner, her father blamed her mother that she had spoiled her, made her lazy and diffident, without ambition and self-control. Her mother screamed in a cracked and anguished voice, “you have no right; you weren’t even here for fuck’s sake.” And her father said, “without me working my ass off every single day, you wouldn’t even have the money to feed her.”
She remembered leaving right in the middle of that heated after-dinner battle. She told herself that every feeling that was bursting inside her wasn’t real, that it was all about the brain, the amygdala, the thalamus, the cingulate gyrus. When she couldn’t hold her tears any longer, she rushed into the bathroom to take a shower so that she couldn’t tell whether she was crying. She ended up curling her naked body as tight as possible and weeping quietly under the sprinkling water.
That day was the day when she needed him the most, and he wasn’t there. She wondered whether men were all the same.
* * *
She broke up with him on her birthday. She was always fickle on her birthdays, but on that particular day, she realized that he had been healed, that he was no longer the confused and cynical boy on the verge of collapsing. Afraid that he wouldn’t need her anymore, she prepared herself for a week or two, planning the new life she would have without him, and left him when she thought she was ready.
He agreed instantly and took off, soaring into the future that awaited him. Two years later, his new girlfriend contacted her and thanked her on her birthday, “he said you were there for him when he was hurt. I cannot thank you more; we’re very happy, and we hope you are, too.”
* * *
She wouldn’t remember anything that happened after she went under anesthesia. Her brain was scanned, and every information about her every brain cell was stored in the computer, which began searching for a possible parallel universe with a brain that was at least a 98%-match for her brain.
When she regained consciousness, she was lying on the cold, white marble tiles in a familiar house. Right in the direction where she was facing, there was a sofa.
She stared at the body under the sofa, and the boy she had once loved stared right back at her. He was wrapped in plastic, where stale blood filled its every crease.
In the background, while her parents were arguing about the crime she had just committed, the television was on, talking about a newly discovered technology that would shock the world.
Wake up, she told herself, wondering when and where she would wake up to if this was really just a dream.