Linda Reyman

11:30 PM

Age had won the race. It had finally begun to show itself in the crevices that drew epidermal streets on her once unblemished face. Time had shown her repeatedly who the winner ultimately was. Tonight, it just seemed obvious as she stared at her sullen, pale face in the bathroom mirror under the white light she avoided turning on. She looked at someone she could not recognize anymore. Lines marked the corners of her eyes & the grey bags underneath seemed to hold them in place as her eyes tried to sink inside the cavity trying to hide from the world like she did.

“Linda Reyman, what have you done to yourself? There is literally a town being built on your face with interconnecting pathways. The last time you looked at your reflection, you seemed exactly like your age. Is this the beginning of your end?”, the thought dissolved as she spat the mouth freshener into the sink and wiped her mouth with her lavender colored face towel. It always had to be lavender or lilac- the color of the last object to make physical contact with her. Only lavender or lilac; to put her at ease and chase away the nocturnal monsters hiding under her cerebral lobes. She turned off the bathroom light and walked to her bed. She sat the edge of the bed, popped in the Amitriptyline pill, laid back and sank her head into the pillow awaiting the angel of slumber to take her away from reality and into the world of surreal dreams where she’d rather be.

“Think good thoughts, visualize where you want to be, and it will come to you.”

“Oh for fuck’s sake! Enough with this fake self-therapy crap. Just calm your damn nerves down and go to sleep.”

“Listen, you go back to your hiding spot and don’t interrupt me. If anything, I was the one who rescued her from the shit you put her in, in the first place.”

“Oh yeah? Then where were you when I was putting her in the so- called ‘shit’ you keep talking about?”

“Don’t get me started on where I was. You think I didn’t try to escape those neurons you sent to imprison me?”

“She needs to grow alright. She needs to face the worst. And so what? Hasn’t she come out of it all? She’s a warrior and warriors deserve to fight.”

“Oh justify yourself all you want. She is only 32 for crying out loud! She is where she is today only because of you and there is no other faculty of the mind that will take responsibility for this. You are remorseless.”

“Great, now she’s moving around to vanquish us. You and your loud mouth.”

And so, the voices in her head were silenced as she shifted into the perfect spot under her soft comforter. She slipped into a tranquilizing stupor so deep that it sent her eyes rolling back behind shut eyelids and her mind into a dark vacuum of nothingness. She lay sprawled on her stomach with her left knee bent. Her neck held her head as her right cheek sank into the pillow. Her right hand melted into the warmth of her bosom while she buried her left palm under the soft pillow.

She had finally drifted into that world. The world where time waited for her to start off from where she had left the last time she was there.

03:03 AM

Tears rolled down flooding the newly formed lanes of “Crow’s Feet” town at the edge of her eyes while her body trembled to extract her from the other world and bring her back to reality. Her paralyzed mind shot out the disaster neurons to revive motor function and bring her back to reality. Her body shook as she whimpered to consciousness. It took her a while to traverse the planes of existence and finally land in her physical reality.

“What a bloody mess. Tonight’s trip to the other world was counter productive. Why on earth would she witness there all those terrible things she witnessed here?”

“Memory is interfering again. We need to re-assess our security measures.”

She sat up and drank some water to ease her parched mouth. Still lingering in the after effects of the nightmare, sleep had evaded her. She lifted herself off the bed and dragged herself to the chair by the window as she lit a cigarette and looked out at the languid street ending in a cul de sac. A lone street lamp struggled to light the street with its halogen illumination. She had not seen this place before. It was alien to her. How time makes things look different. One thing at day and the converse at night. She looked at a world that was calm and dead. It was unsettling. She fixated her eyes on the red bricked house with the pretty white fence on the right side of the street lamp, hoping to see something of interest there. She blew a puff of smoke as she noticed Tabby, the dominant tom cat of the street stalk the road; alert on his feet.  

“The night crawler. Prowler in the dark. Phantom of darkness.”

“Enough with the verbal gobbledygook”

Tabby stopped opposite the street lamp, staring at something across the lane. He walked ahead a few steps and stopped, the fur on his back and tail raised like he had been electrocuted. He stood there motionless staring at something she could not see because the size of the window permitted her to only see that much. She ashed the cigarette on the tray and lit another one. She took the first drag and looked out. Tabby had disappeared.

She looked again at the street flanked by villas on both sides and wondered if there was another gerascophobia plagued, paranoid insomniac sitting and looking out at the street like her. How terribly unfair was it that people get to rest their minds by sleeping well while she had to traverse different worlds to rest hers.

Tabby appeared again. He walked covertly as if he knew he was being watched. He stopped again opposite the street lamp and stared at something across the lane out of her sight. The fur on his back was up again and remained so still, he seemed inanimate.

She ashed the cigarette and lit another one. As she brought her fingers to draw it away from her mouth, she saw it happen. Tabby disappeared as he suddenly became invisible to Linda.

“Something is not right. This doesn’t feel real.”

“Code Blue! Grey cells intrusion. Abort synergy. Abort synergy!”

She dragged a puff and blew the smoke out. Tabby was back again, walking on the street.

“Memory lapse. Neuron leakage detected! Freeze the synapses!”

“Fire electrochemical pulse! Destabilize motor function!”

Linda writhed as she fell off the chair, squirming like an earthworm. Her hands and legs convulsed as she faded into nothingness.

“Time advancement initiated. Fast forwarding now.”

7:07 AM

Linda grunted as she woke up to the sunlight hitting her eyes. A small ray of beautiful glistening sun that made her smile despite being mad at it for waking her up.

As she made her way out of bed, she slipped into her flip flops and looked out of the window. How elated she was when her eyes soaked in the green meadows that lay ahead.

“Life is so beautiful. I couldn’t be happier that I’m a part of this epic journey called life.”

She went to the bathroom and as she brushed her teeth, she looked at her reflection in the mirror.

“Time has been so kind to you. You look younger each day.”

“Train. Fit. Test. Loop in this algorithm till memory pervasion is completely blocked”, Fraser asserted while Hank stared at the screen trying to pick the best shade of blue for the sky.

“Keep the affirmations going. I want the Linda Reyman case study by Thursday. Chief of Technology is furious with this undetected bug and the glitch it caused. We are a human- machine intelligence synergy research organization. I hope you guys remember that”, barked Boris the bald- headed pale Head of Cognitive Integration at Humachine Corp.

“Do you realize you are playing a dangerous game with this discovery? This is not your conventional video game of Gen Z era. A technical glitch related to a stupid cat? Totally unacceptable. Evolution has always favoured the living. If you cannot boost security to override human cognition interference, Linda can no longer be a prototype. She is the superior resilience sampling from the test group. Eliminate her from the study. We cannot run the risk of exposure.”

Fraser squinted as he sized up the bulk of Boris Hannigan. His bald head shimmering like a mirage under the intense white light of the simulation modelling room. Hank threw his hands up exasperated, “Boris, you do understand the superior resilience race needs to be a part of our synergy analysis. We cannot eliminate them completely from the study. We are yet to ascertain the dominance of human cognitive function over artificial intelligence in the human- machine integration domain!”

“We cannot run the risk of independent interaction through subliminal pathways between the human and AI elements. We will have to preserve Linda for another related study. The last thing we need is a concoction of human nerve cells interacting with some damn silicon android parts evading our interception”, Boris asserted as he straightened himself up to leave the modelling room.

“Linda Reyman. Specimen 310. A case study of the effect of peripheral stimulus aberration on human cognition dominance. The first study of its kind,” typed Fraser as he punched in the keys to close yet another unsuccessful attempt at human- artificial intelligence synergy.