When I sleep my neurons play odd games XXV...
What the hell, neurons? This is weird, even for my brain.
I was at university, living on campus (most of which was below ground). I was studying German and Art which is a weird combination, but I wasn't me, I was a slightly emo looking boy with dark hair.
Everyone on campus started to behave very oddly: they wore random clothes, they talked nonsense, they forgot where rooms were. Some people tried to make themselves tea in a corridoor or tried to treat a lever-arch file like an ipad and everyone grew increasingly confused and frustrated when everything went wrong. I and a few friends went outside to try to escape the chaos, only to nearly be run down by a squad of jeeps and tanks: armed soldiers had turned up.
Whilst evading the soldiers, I saw a girl behaving like a zombie - shambling, unblinking, feral noises, no regard for herself or her surroundings. Bloody students! I thought. Very sodding funny - does she want some squaddie to shoot her? I told her to stop being an idiot; she flailed her arms and managed to scratch me - the world went a bit misty and weird after that. When it came back into focus, I was hiding out in a storeroom that a bunch of the students had barricaded themselves into. Apparently we'd been in there for a day or more. I felt strange; my voice no longer worked - or I no longer knew how to work it. My thoughts were few and my body felt as if it scarcely belonged to me.
One of the other students was making the rounds with a flashlight which he shone in my eyes. "Oh, for fuck's sake," he muttered. "Not you as well." He took me by the arm to a far corner of the storeroom where he lifted up a metal grille in the floor. "You go down there." 'Down there' was a sort of flooded sub-floor oubliette: it was filled with zombies, floating like dead fish in the filthy water. I shook my head desperately and tried to back away. The student seemed to reconsider. "Huh, you still in there then? I suppose you've got a little while before you turn. Could smuggle you out to take your chance with the soldiers?" I nodded - anything other than being crammed in with corpses, all unable to swim but unable to drown. He fetched a coat and hat, dressing me since my limbs didn't seem to work very well anymore.
There was a huge commotion at the door: the barricade had been breached, soldiers swarmed in, shouting and threatening with their rifles - shooting some of the students including the one who'd been helping me. The commander reported over his radio that they'd found a promising specimen, and to bring Eve in to look at it. Eve turned out to be a girl of about 13; she had a cleft lip and her left hand and arm was marred with what looked like hardened blisters. She was very pleased to see me. "But he's perfect! You'll be able to cultivate the anti-strain and I'll be cured."
"Knew if we exposed the whole place one of them would take to it properly, Miss Eve." The commander spoke into his radio, giving the order - "Purge the excess, we've got the one we need." As the gunfire started, I fell to my knees, tears streaming down my face. My mind and sense of self was fading minute by minute, the whole university campus had been similarly infected and was now being exterminated - and all for one girl? One of the soldiers jabbed me with a syringe; I fell into darkness.
I woke up strapped to a hospital bed: two doctors were checking the monitors I was hooked up to and noting things on a chart. From the way they spoke it was clear I was their new favourite toy for science. "Looks a bit peaky," the male doctor noted. "Better get some of the cerebra-protein down him." The female doctor began to set up a feeding tube so that the contents of a plasma-bag could be poured into my stomach. I went ballistic, thrashing and spitting and trying to break the restraints: I was terrified they were actually about to force feed me liquified brains. In the midst of my fit and the medico's swearing, I felt the spike of a needle at my hip: spreading out from there every cell in my body seemed to be melting, and I away with it.
I was barely conscious, and whatever bit of me was conscious was incapable of worrying or even caring what happened. It felt as if I watched from very far away as they fed a cloudy visceral liquid to a young man who was strapped to a bed. Much to the doctor's displeasure, the young man vomited most of the stuff up again as soon as the feeding tube was removed. "For goodness sake," the male medico complained. "Get a cloth and clean him up - Eve will be visiting soon. I'll fetch a couple of Harris's men to keep an eye for when the restraints come off."
Two soldiers stood with their rifles at the ready whilst the restraints were undone; the female doctor and two orderlies stripped the bed from beneath the young man and remade it, cleaning the vestiges of the rejected protein from his face and shoulder as they worked.
I was aware, dimly, that the restraints had been replaced around my wrists, but the others had been left off; it didn't matter, I couldn't move my limbs any more than I could an entire lake with my bare hands. I could feel the female doctor was fussing with my hair, smoothing it back from my forehead, fussing too with the blanket and the angle of my hands upon it. Somewhere in the furthest corner of my heart an emotion awoke: disgust. I was a lab rat and a prisoner and some scientist with the morals of ebola was trying to pretty me up - make it seem as if I was a student recovering form appendicitis? I heard the soldiers stand to attention, heard small footsteps enter and the medico say politely, "Good morning, Miss Eve."
I didn't want to open my eyes, but that dreamy lake my body had been was evaporating, leaving me blank and beached and aware.
The small footsteps came closer. "Is he awake?"
I opened my eyes.
I was at university, living on campus (most of which was below ground). I was studying German and Art which is a weird combination, but I wasn't me, I was a slightly emo looking boy with dark hair.
Everyone on campus started to behave very oddly: they wore random clothes, they talked nonsense, they forgot where rooms were. Some people tried to make themselves tea in a corridoor or tried to treat a lever-arch file like an ipad and everyone grew increasingly confused and frustrated when everything went wrong. I and a few friends went outside to try to escape the chaos, only to nearly be run down by a squad of jeeps and tanks: armed soldiers had turned up.
Whilst evading the soldiers, I saw a girl behaving like a zombie - shambling, unblinking, feral noises, no regard for herself or her surroundings. Bloody students! I thought. Very sodding funny - does she want some squaddie to shoot her? I told her to stop being an idiot; she flailed her arms and managed to scratch me - the world went a bit misty and weird after that. When it came back into focus, I was hiding out in a storeroom that a bunch of the students had barricaded themselves into. Apparently we'd been in there for a day or more. I felt strange; my voice no longer worked - or I no longer knew how to work it. My thoughts were few and my body felt as if it scarcely belonged to me.
One of the other students was making the rounds with a flashlight which he shone in my eyes. "Oh, for fuck's sake," he muttered. "Not you as well." He took me by the arm to a far corner of the storeroom where he lifted up a metal grille in the floor. "You go down there." 'Down there' was a sort of flooded sub-floor oubliette: it was filled with zombies, floating like dead fish in the filthy water. I shook my head desperately and tried to back away. The student seemed to reconsider. "Huh, you still in there then? I suppose you've got a little while before you turn. Could smuggle you out to take your chance with the soldiers?" I nodded - anything other than being crammed in with corpses, all unable to swim but unable to drown. He fetched a coat and hat, dressing me since my limbs didn't seem to work very well anymore.
There was a huge commotion at the door: the barricade had been breached, soldiers swarmed in, shouting and threatening with their rifles - shooting some of the students including the one who'd been helping me. The commander reported over his radio that they'd found a promising specimen, and to bring Eve in to look at it. Eve turned out to be a girl of about 13; she had a cleft lip and her left hand and arm was marred with what looked like hardened blisters. She was very pleased to see me. "But he's perfect! You'll be able to cultivate the anti-strain and I'll be cured."
"Knew if we exposed the whole place one of them would take to it properly, Miss Eve." The commander spoke into his radio, giving the order - "Purge the excess, we've got the one we need." As the gunfire started, I fell to my knees, tears streaming down my face. My mind and sense of self was fading minute by minute, the whole university campus had been similarly infected and was now being exterminated - and all for one girl? One of the soldiers jabbed me with a syringe; I fell into darkness.
I woke up strapped to a hospital bed: two doctors were checking the monitors I was hooked up to and noting things on a chart. From the way they spoke it was clear I was their new favourite toy for science. "Looks a bit peaky," the male doctor noted. "Better get some of the cerebra-protein down him." The female doctor began to set up a feeding tube so that the contents of a plasma-bag could be poured into my stomach. I went ballistic, thrashing and spitting and trying to break the restraints: I was terrified they were actually about to force feed me liquified brains. In the midst of my fit and the medico's swearing, I felt the spike of a needle at my hip: spreading out from there every cell in my body seemed to be melting, and I away with it.
I was barely conscious, and whatever bit of me was conscious was incapable of worrying or even caring what happened. It felt as if I watched from very far away as they fed a cloudy visceral liquid to a young man who was strapped to a bed. Much to the doctor's displeasure, the young man vomited most of the stuff up again as soon as the feeding tube was removed. "For goodness sake," the male medico complained. "Get a cloth and clean him up - Eve will be visiting soon. I'll fetch a couple of Harris's men to keep an eye for when the restraints come off."
Two soldiers stood with their rifles at the ready whilst the restraints were undone; the female doctor and two orderlies stripped the bed from beneath the young man and remade it, cleaning the vestiges of the rejected protein from his face and shoulder as they worked.
I was aware, dimly, that the restraints had been replaced around my wrists, but the others had been left off; it didn't matter, I couldn't move my limbs any more than I could an entire lake with my bare hands. I could feel the female doctor was fussing with my hair, smoothing it back from my forehead, fussing too with the blanket and the angle of my hands upon it. Somewhere in the furthest corner of my heart an emotion awoke: disgust. I was a lab rat and a prisoner and some scientist with the morals of ebola was trying to pretty me up - make it seem as if I was a student recovering form appendicitis? I heard the soldiers stand to attention, heard small footsteps enter and the medico say politely, "Good morning, Miss Eve."
I didn't want to open my eyes, but that dreamy lake my body had been was evaporating, leaving me blank and beached and aware.
The small footsteps came closer. "Is he awake?"
I opened my eyes.