Evelyn's Echo

I haven't felt the wind brush against me in seven years. No push of a person's arm as they tilt their body to move past mine. I haven't heard a chirp from a bird or the train that decides to blow its horn past my apartment at three in the morning in seven years. Seven years since my daughter's laughter. Her giggles, which used to fill the evenings with joy as I watched her favorite shows, have faded into a haunting silence. The warmth of her presence, the light of her smile, echoes now in a world where only I exist.

Seven years since the neighbor's nightly routine of fighting, then making up, Seven years since I heard "I love you." There is an uneasy weight within me, trying to move and remember the past, but the stillness somehow gets worse when I redistribute. This stillness surrounding me is oppressive, a presence that weighs on what I think could be my soul. I used to crave moments of quiet, a break from the clamor of the outside world. This silence is unrelenting, not a momentary respite but a permanent state. It's a silence that haunts me. The quiet I sought now feels like a suffocating blanket, smothering any remnants of the world I once knew.

In this unbroken quiet, I experience moments that feel like a breach in the stillness. I dream of her laughter, a once vivid and real sound that seems to fade the longer I am frozen. Sometimes, I believe I can hear her speaking, her voice a soft murmur in the quiet, so tangible yet fleeting. These moments are both a comfort and a torment. They bring her presence so close yet underscore the painful reality of her absence.

The vaccine was created to bypass the effects of the freeze. It was said to be designed by the best scientists in the world, "One dose, and consider your life moving again." The sickness took my daughter first. "Patient zero" was what they called her. I called her...I can't remember what I called her. The sickness stops the cells and brain from progressing and from dying. It freezes you in time and makes you unable to function and communicate, but it allows you to breathe and see.

Now, I am alone in this frozen world, surrounded by memories that both comfort and haunt me. I cling to them, desperate to keep her alive in some way. I remember my daughter's dreams, aspirations, and curiosity about the world. She wanted to explore the stars and paint them in her vibrant colors. I smile through empty tears; I cannot remember her name. It haunts me, this gap in my memory. I can recall some details of her, yet, when I try to recall her name, that unique identifier that was hers and hers alone, my mind falters, stumbling over a void that seems to widen with each attempt. It's all fading.

On the day of my daughter's funeral, the scientists who first worked with "Patient Zero" came to offer respect. I was shattered, grappling with a grief so profound it felt like being submerged in a never-ending wave. The funeral was supposed to be my chance to say goodbye, a moment to lay to rest, not just her physical form, but finally to allow her to rest after the doctors and scientists did their research on her.

As I prepared for her farewell, the scientists took an opportunity of my vulnerability. They spoke of my daughter's condition, of how she could have been the key to understanding and potentially curing the disease, of how if I could just understand how close they were, I would let them have her body. I could not do that, I could never do that.

They offered me a drink to help ease the day's burden. The drink, laced with a potent sedative, quickly took effect. The world around me became hazy, my thoughts clouded and disjointed. I remember feeling detached as if I was floating away from the painful reality of my daughter's funeral.

As the sedative coursed through my veins, dulling my senses and clouding my judgment, I was vaguely aware of being transported, of being laid out on a cold, hard surface. I remember the clink of metal and the murmur of voices discussing procedures and preparations. But more than anything, I remember the feeling of helplessness, a deep sense of betrayal that, even in my dulled state, pierced through the fog of the drug.

I had been robbed of my chance to say goodbye to my daughter, my last opportunity to see her, to speak final words of love. Instead, I was in the hands of those who saw her, and by extension me, not as victims of a tragic circumstance but as subjects for experimentation."Sacrifice one to save the rest," I heard one of them say. In their quest for answers, they had stripped me of my right to grieve, turning one of the most personal and sacred moments of my life into an opportunity for their scientific endeavors.

It's a desperate gamble, a chance to retrieve the chromosomes needed to create a better cure. The setup is intimidating, a tangle of wires and electrodes. I am tied down as they attach a device to my head and begin. At first, the sensation was merely uncomfortable, a slight pressure at the temples, a tingling along my scalp. But as the machine's whirring grew louder, the sensations intensified.

Sharp, searing pain lanced through my head, like needles piercing my skull. I wanted to scream, to beg them to stop, but the sedative held me in a paralytic grip, my voice nothing more than a weak moan. Observing the monitors, the scientists seemed oblivious or indifferent to my distress. Their conversation was clinical and detached, discussing fluctuations in brain activity and genetic markers as if they were mere data points, not fragments of a person's soul.

As the procedure continued, I felt something tearing inside me, as though the machine was not just extracting memories but ripping apart the very fabric of who I was. The pain was unbearable, a white-hot inferno that consumed my thoughts, my senses, everything. And then, suddenly, there was a shift, a sense of something fundamental within me breaking. The machine malfunctioned, the screens flashing a rapid sequence of warnings, the alarms blaring. In their zeal to extract the crucial memories and delve into the deepest recesses of my mind, the scientists pushed the machine beyond its limits. The precision they had boasted of was lost, the delicate balance of my neural pathways disrupted.

The memories start to slip away, her name first, now, seven years later, everything. Her face, her laughter, the moments we shared - they're all fading, dissolving into the darkness that creeps in at the edges of my consciousness. I have been left in a world that's not only still but now devoid of the memories I sought to preserve. Her name was the key I longed to find, but now, even the lock is gone. I'm trapped in a hollow shell, a world of silence and shadows, where once there was love and laughter.

In this darkness, the loss of her name becomes a cruel metaphor for the more significant loss I've endured. It's a stark reminder of the dangers of tampering with the very fabric of the mind. My quest to hold onto her memory has led me to an existence where I can't even hold onto my own.

The world remains frozen, but now I am lost in a void of forgotten memories and broken dreams. The scientists' experiment, a beacon of hope, has turned into a labyrinth of despair. In seeking to reclaim the past, I've lost my anchor to both the past and the present. Her name was... I can't remember her name.