TriDolMan (ePub)

When it all came back I was twelve, according to the tank log display and to my historical present. But the tank chronometer was showing Donna that I was only 37 minutes into the session. They were rebuilding my memoires as a baby tsiolnik in a flotation tank down in a secret annex to the main complex, an old biomed plant and space veteran treatment substation, just off Abercrombie. A place known to most at the Institute just as Building 5.
Memory cells regrowth is a slow process, something like drafting and redrafting a brain chart. You constantly have to make corrections, delete what you've done, and adjust to the new path or start again. Like finding your way out of a maze in absolute darkness.
So there I was, daydreaming of Heaven, of the bright purple arcs of the welders glaring in the perfect darkness of outer space. A plume of sparks like diamonds on fire cascading down from the tip of spidery steel limbs. The welders were service mechs, arachnoid maintenance drones clinging to the hull of the space station to perform micro air-leakage checks and other real-time emergency repairs. Machines fixing other machines.
Then it hit me. Hit me harder than ever before.
I interrupted the session abruptly, opened my eyes and found myself strapped to the tank's anti-convulsion frame, unable to move.
I bit the emergency stop button they'd encapsulated into one of my molars, my childhood memories drifting away, the black shining ribs of a docking module gliding past the Tsiolkoski station, fading against the black of outer space.
'What's wrong, Jules?' Donna's ghostly voice was in my head before I realized I knew who she was. Comms were antiquated in the tank, which made her sound really far away. Leftover from suspension experiments in the early thirties.
'Get me out...of here.' I could already feel the first twinges of horror reaching for me. 'Fast!'
'Concentrate on your Liberation Point. You'll be out in no time.' Donna never wasted time asking silly whys and whats. She'd been well trained.
I heard the bolts disengage the tank locks and the liquid being flushed out from all around me, but my jaw was already clenched in the iron grip of terror.
'Presssuuureee...' is all I managed, but she knew what to do before losing me yet again to another seizure. They'd already placed obl414 in all of the strategic spots, so all Donna had to do was press a button and the micro-vesicles depleted their magic chemical cargo directly into my limbic system. Thorazine was also administered to counter the onset of panic. A needle fluidly disengaged from one of the tank's wall sockets, a thin transparent tube trailing behind it, uncoiling like a Brown Snake, finding the right veins in my arm with startling precision. The needle sank into my arm and released the Thorazine.
Obl414 actually can't be administered like that. It needs pre-loaders, nanotechs, due to its highly amphoteric nature.
The drugs started kicking in immediately.
They have a machine to photograph people's aura, on the lowest sublevel of the complex. It disturbed my therapy when I saw it for the first time, so I never go near it now, but if a trained tech had taken a shot of my aura at the moment before Donna hit the switch, you would have seen a red-hot ghost slowly turn to pale blue, then veer to the dark navy of perfect calm.
The last thought I had while chlorpromazine descended on my senses like a huge rubber hammer was the certainty of having to have to go through it again. The whole thing. Another brain chart, then weeks of reconstructions. Then I shut down.