I wasn't supposed to be awake but I was.
Something that I thought I would never be, and at the moment I wasn't sure if I was grateful or disappointed just yet.
I don't know for how long I have been asleep or dead, but it felt as though I simply closed my eyes and opened them right after. Though I could tell that this was different from when I woke up the first time after my death. There were other voices out there in the silence, previously it had been just me, but now I can hear others there even though I couldn't see them.
"Welcome Ravana Azurine." A sultry voice called out to me.
"Who are you?" I responded, or at least I tried to but I realized I couldn't speak. I could see and sense things around me in whatever state I was not in, but I couldn't communicate or interact with everything.
It was like being behind a giant screen and watching everything, being able to hear and see but not touch or change the course of anything.
"Subject 9 is online, accessing data." In the same breath my memories started popping up one after the other. Things from my birth right up until I died, but the sick part was that they appeared in the same mandala patterns that haunted me when I was alive day and night. I always knew that there was something to figure out if I looked long enough but the damn thing was like a kaleidoscope, if you didn't know exactly what to look for you'd get last in it.
Considering that I was supposed to be dead, it could only mean that I wasn't supposed to be seeing this. Not to mention that thing just called me subject 9, so there was definitely a relation to the virus I had contracted before I died.
If I was to guess it would be something with the third phase I was going through when I died. The man from the projection had mentioned that I was supposed to have another month of that hell, but I never did make it through that month and ended up dying shortly after that message.
In case that this must be my subconscious and that's why I couldn't interact with anything. That in itself was weird considering I was firstly supposed to be dead and secondly supposed to be unable to access this part of my brain.
"Prepare today's alterations." The voice echoed again, and I could see a specific memory pull up. A mundane day of me just going to classes back when I was in college, then the changes started happening, small alterations like the color of my shirt changing from blue to purple, my shoes changing from sneakers to sandals, minor changes in every environment that I had come across in that day.
Suddenly everything made sense, every day while I suffered it was because my memories were being rewritten the entire time, that would explain the notes that appeared as well, pieces of my memories that seemed to have a gap in them, not remembering entire hours of my day.
If this is what has been happening, every time I was subjected to those patterns, then how much of my memories had already been altered?
"Syncing adaptions." The command came again.
So, this is really what happened, a random memory was selected and while I was there losing my mind, the changes were still being made and my memories were slowly being changed, but why?
If whoever orchestrated this whole thing, went through a process this extensive and made technology this advanced, why would they make such miniscule changes to the brain. It made no sense to change the smaller things instead of doing a complete memory wipe and just leaving the memories they wanted there.
That way they could just have controlled the subjects as they pleased. Wouldn't that be easier and more time efficient than doing these miniscule changes every day?
Unless there was some sort of issue with that. If the tech wasn't strong enough to carry out that function or could be too strenuous on the host and could have adverse side effects. A number of possibilities popped up in my head, considering that while I was watching it, this was still something I would've thought impossible had I not seen.
I had initially just thought that I was crazy or losing my damn mind all while my literal memories were being manipulated at random.
"Syncing is complete, pulling Rav..n..Azu..ine offl..ne." The system crashed before it was able to pull me offline. That could be due to the fact that I was dead and not 'online' to begin with. It would make sense, but it still made no sense that the attempt was being made on my memories if I was dead.
The only upside I could see from this was that I was seeing the alterations that were attempted on my memories and could still recall the originals and the copies. That would also mean however that I was not dead.
While I am sure that my physical body had stopped moving, my consciousness was still very much awake, allowing the experiment to continue. Which means in a month it would be complete then.
My worry then was for what would happen after the one month had passed, would I fully die this time, would I be stuck in this state forever or would I wake up?
Those are the three most plausible cases for me, but unfortunately there is nothing that could be done at the moment, considering that I wasn't able to interact with this system, I couldn't find out anything more than what it was programmed to do.
I would have to watch day after day and patiently wait as it tried to rewrite most, if not all of my memories while doing nothing. It seems that the system, however, was not perfect and that raised some concern for me because if it could not complete the phase in its incomplete state, I had no idea what would happen to me or my consciousness.
Well, I was already dead so it's not like anything worse could happen.
Figuring that I was going to be stuck here for a while, I just watched and waited and thought. That's really all I could do, and I know that these episodes were happening more frequently while I was alive so I should be experiencing another act of the system anytime soon.
I was unaware of how much time had passed before another episode had indeed started just as I suspected. With the system again trying to rewrite another memory of mine. I had come to realize that the voices I had originally heard were of my own memories overlapping each other.
It was another worldly experience to literally watch my life flash before my eyes, in so many different angles too. Living through each memory good and bad all over again, while unironically being dead myself.
Every time the system tried to say my name it would glitch, as if there were an issue. I still wonder if that was because I was dead or if there was something else. Furthermore, who even created something so advanced that would work even after death. I wonder if they even knew how powerful their technology was.
It must have been implanted at the same time that I contracted the 'virus', while me being sick was used as a guise for them to conduct experiments on me.
All the nights in agony, days lost in hallucination after hallucination, journaling every little detail to feel just a tad less crazy and all for what, just so they could change my memories?
There had to be something else that they were after, that in and of itself is truly impressive but the greed of man knows no bounds and with an advancement of this caliber in scientific research, there must've been something else that they wanted.
For now though, I could only speculate and see what the next month would bring me. After that, whatever happened is whatever my new reality would be. I didn't see myself waking back up given that my physical body was dead, after a few days it would start deteriorating and my organs would not be functional at all. My best guess is that I would die, well again. I really could not see that as an issue because well, I was already dead and this is what I had wanted.
My memories kept playing as yet another scene was attempted to be altered, this one however was from my time locked up. To my surprise, the system erased the scene completely, where the nurse had slipped up and called me subject 9.
Until now I had only seen the system make minor changes such as the color or a particular object in a scene, never had I seen a part of it removed completely. If it is possible to remove scenes completely then could the memory gaps be parts of my memory that were missing rather than changed?
It seems they only erased parts that they did not want the subject to know. I often had large memory gaps, nothing of which I would know or could recover now, meaning I would have had to figure out quite a bit to have those spaces in my memories.
What the hell did I even find out to make them take so much of my memories away?
Now I was sure I wanted to wake up because my curiosity to know what happened to me was greater than my need for peace.
I had slept long enough; it was time to awake properly this time.