Era of Rebirth. Year 50. October 10.
Painfully slowly, as if I'd just come out from under anesthesia, I raise my left eyelid. The pupil, like a periscope, emerges from somewhere in the posterior hemisphere of the retina into the light of day, but... I can't see shit. Wait—no! There—something dark is whitening right under my back, which is lying on something damp, cold, and... stinking.
I try to focus, but the vomit sludge in my throat won't let me. The smell of a persistent dust suspension, burned flesh, and shit brazenly screws into my nostrils. I turn my head to the side, open my mouth, and my body cleanses itself. Sparks of photopsia pound into my eye sockets, but visibility is still zero.
My whole body screams in pain, as if I've surfaced from a pit where terminators are melting. Definitely thermal burns. Second, maybe even third-degree.
Eh, if only I had a "Surprise Box" (strong painkillers) for withdrawal, or at worst Anna Dmitrievna (Analgin with Dimedrol). Fuck it. Tolerable.
I close my eyelid, distancing myself from the situation and suppressing the new call of the duodenal Cthulhu.
Bitch. Gotta get used to the "paradise" aromas of reality. I breathe very slowly through my nostrils. Four, nine... the twenty-first heartbeat makes me recall my favorite mantra. I immerse myself in it mentally: Om mani padme hum. Once more. And again. And... darkness comes.
I wake up from a throbbing pain in my temples and the rest of my bones. By internal sensations, a few hours have passed. Around me is Egyptian darkness. My right eye still doesn't register. But I'm persistent, so I add pressure to the left optic nerve. Eee-yeah! The picture expands sharply, in all directions at once!!!
"This... how?" My mouth exhaled a gasp of shock through cracked lips.
"Am I reincarnated as a talking fish? Nah, those have lateral vision. Pfft. What nonsense am I spouting? Fish have monocular vision, but here, damn it... SPHERICAL?"
A 360-degree attraction of contrasty black-and-white video. It poured into my brain in a mad stream of real-time info. And let me tell you, that was very unpleasant. Like you're in an extremely cramped—two by two meters—spherical glass room and... from all sides, eye-searingly, someone scratches it with a nail. Slowly and for show, with sadistic pleasure.
"How many of you there are! And all you fuckers are chekhildze? (deceased patients)?" I muttered, realizing I was underground, in a collapsed room, amid a pile (literally) of unidentified mysterious corpses. "How can this be? Why is the fibrinolyzed blood of this improvised morgue's clients not right?"
"They're dead? Their hearts aren't beating? Definitely—corpses. Half have even relaxed their sphincters. And the blood, it's... no mistake here, the venous-arterial flow isn't moving!"
"Stop! Holy cat! Am I seeing organs and bones? And blood intravenously? With X-ray vision? And some kind of subcutaneous, self-glowing, and branched throughout the body... I'll call it... 'energy network'?" As soon as I focused harder on the internal organs of the nearest stiff, the radius of the outside world's view instantly shrank. No, it just went out, like turning off a lightbulb. But the X-ray info from the corpse I was staring into its guts—the stream of that surged manifold! "Holy shit, how interesting and... ow... painful! Ow-ow-ow. Alright, I'll close my left eye. Damn! It can't be, from overexertion, such intense pain in the vitreous body of the eye?!"
Turns out—it can!
"Closed it. Doesn't help. What the hell is going on? Think, head, think."
"Corpses, energy, X-ray—how to make sense of this? Who are these people? Was it an earthquake? And where are we?"
"Who... am I?" Suddenly, my lips asked the question and immediately answered themselves. "I. Don't. Remember! This can't be!" And then, again, stupid to the point of insanity but important question. "And this body—is it mine or?!"
"..."
"... And... Ichiro Hyuga?! That's—me?"
"Your mother. Do I have a split personality?!"
***
Read the story months ahead of the public release — early chapters are available on my Patreon: patreon.com/Granulan