Author’s Note: Hey everyone! Here is the Work in Progress for Chapter 171 I hope you guys enjoy! :D
Thacea
“I don’t know how much of this is true. I don’t even know if any of this was even real. It could’ve just been a complete fabrication, my prefrontal cortex’s vain and vapid attempts at interpreting the random strings of nonsensical electrical discharges from my brain’s ure. That’s what the evidence would lead me to believe, that’s what was most logically happening, if we were to shear this whole thing using Occam's razor.”
My eyes narrowed at that latter allusion, a fact that Emma noticed, but something that I managed to discern on my own through context clues.
With a wordless nod, she continued.
“It started, ironically, like a lot of pre-seizure auras do — with a sense of creeping dread.” Emma sighed out. “But then… the chimes returned. This… this one vital detail is what’s keeping the start of this theory together, Thacea. Because if you recall—”
“You’ve reported these chimes before, a sort of… prelude to your exposure to taint.” I reasoned, before my eyes widened once more with a sense of looming realization. “The ‘alarm’ your people spoke of during this communique. Could it be—”
“The same thing, yeah.” Emma nodded vehemently. “That’s… that’s what I assumed too, but I couldn’t interrupt to ask. There was just so much going on that I completely disregarded it and—” She stopped herself, taking a breath, and steadying herself once again. “There is… a non-zero chance that they experienced what I did. Though the interesting thing I noticed was that not everyone was affected. But… that’s neither here nor there. I’m not here to speculate on things on earth’s end. I just… I just needed to make mention of the chimes.”
“As you should.” I acknowledged. “The patterns at play are… difficult to ignore; making your case all the more compelling.”
“Thanks for the vote of confidence, Thacea.” Emma spoke with a renewed sense of confidence, a much needed reprieve for what was to come next. “Anyways, yeah, I heard the chimes, then… nothing. Silence, and not the sort of silence you’d experience in one of those anechoic chambers either. It was… more like a lack of the sense of hearing altogether. The same applied to sight, smell, touch, proprioception, everything. It was like I was floating in space, or one of those sensory deprivation tanks, but taken to its logical extreme.”
I felt, for a brief moment, the spell of Emma’s lackadaisical remarks taking hold of my faculties once more.
Sensory deprivation tanks…
There was… an unfathomable — and frankly distressing — amount to address in that one simple aside alone.
And yet, this wouldn’t be the fullest extent of these — what I’d elected to refer to as — Allusionary Shadows. Or more poetically, the Shadows Left in Emma’s Wake.
“If I were to take a page out of the worst of the corpo handbooks, I’d even liken it to one of those complete Cerebro-Cortical Ex Situ Translocation experiments, but one where the brain’s literally taken out without connecting it to any dedicated sensory prostheses.”
I blinked, choosing now to stare blankly at Emma, while she awoke to the terror she’d wrought in her wake.
“Oh, er, sorry, I was using too many context-dependent metaphors as a crutch there.” She apologized, raising a hand to rub the back of her head in abashment. “But my point still stands. It felt… like I was just a floating consciousness, disconnected from everything. My mind was panicking of course… or at least, one part of my mind was. The other just felt too… I don’t know how to say this — calm? It felt at peace almost? It was weird, like two diametrically opposed mentalities operating on entirely different frequencies that just couldn’t be reconciled. But after a while, after literally stewing in my own thoughts, the world started to suddenly come into focus. It’s difficult to describe but it sorta felt like everything just started… coming into frame, all at once, with faint and starry ‘skies’ above me, a horizon in the distance, and weirdest of all — a reflective surface beneath me. Sort of like a pool but not. Since my footsteps didn’t really make waves in it or anything.”
I listened, intently, Emma’s accounts resonating with something, a wisp of a memory that I scarcely remembered; one that I hardly had a reason to remember.
“I don’t know why, but I think I was weirdly enamored by the reflection. Now, I know I’m definitely good looking—” Emma paused, once again interjecting that absurdist earthrealm humor into the fray with a faux flex of both arms. “—but I’m nowhere near narcissistic enough to be that enamored by my looks.” She chuckled fitfully, clearing her throat before continuing. “In any case, things really escalated from here on out. Thalmin’s voice somehow broke through the overwhelming nothingness, breaking me out of my weird… fugue, and bringing my rational mind back front and center. From there, I ran. With no real sense of direction, and no visual markers, I just… booked it. I didn’t know for how long, or how far, but the only change I noticed was my reflection.”
I leaned in closer, Emma taking a moment to catch her breath.
“Because as I ran, I noticed the reflection suddenly refusing to follow. It was dragged along alright, but it didn’t match my motions. You’d think this was weird enough, but no.” Emma mirrored my motions, leaning in closer to bridge the gap. “It broke through the reflective surface, the water, and it grabbed my ankle.”
A deep sense of unease manifested across my features, as I held my breath for what was inevitably to come.
“But that was it. That… was all it did. I looked down and it just stared at me blankly, with eyes that were completely pitch black. It let go, eventually, but not after I felt this weird sense of… serenity, taking over. And after a while… a long, long while of staring down to watch this doppleganger, it decided to point at the skies above, tapping the now-hardened reflective surface incessantly.”
“And what did you see?” I urged.
“Color. An explosion of color as far as the eye could see. I saw stars, nebulae, plumes of interstellar gas and the twinkle of a trillion stars held within. But in the midst of it all, contrasting starkly with the brilliance of the birth of a universe, was a lingering splotch of dark. If… if I recall correctly, the doppleganger tapped harder at that point, and well, that’s about it. I woke up the next day afterwards and quickly wrote all of this down. I… I really wish I had a camera with me, I could’ve taken a snapshot of the stars and had it cross referenced with known stellar charts and—”
“Emma.” I interjected, reflexively, without a moment’s hesitation. “Have you checked your ankle?”
The human stopped.
Her entire form suddenly lost all of the enthusiasm present just a second ago.
“W-what do you mean, Thacea?” She responded plainly. All of the grand sweeping monologues, all of the vivid and detailed accounts, all of it, reduced to this mortified girl who understood well what I was suggesting.
“Have you or have you not checked for any marks where the entity touched you?”
“I wasn’t—” Emma responded, before clearing her throat. “No.” She corrected darkly, before immediately getting up from the armchair.