Work Text:
“Halt, dastardly fiend!”
Max’s cry was clear and powerful. People cheered, flashbulbs popped, children stared in rapt wonder. Bibi stuck out her tongue and raised her hands.
“Why don’t you make me!” Bibi’s peals of laughter were at once haughty and kind - at once a warning to stay away, a dare to draw closer. Max felt invigorated every time she heard it. She took another drink from her can, deeply, then crunched the can up in her hand and tossed it onto the ground behind her.
“Why don’t I just!” Max jumped down from the stoop on which which she’d been crouching. “Why don’t I jus- wh- wh - WHOOAAGH!”
A piece of paper, no bigger than a postcard, had gotten under her feet somehow, borne on the wind - and where she expected to find firm footing between her rubber soles and solid concrete ground, she instead found a floor that shot out from under her, taking her legs with it - sending her stumbling forwards and off the stage.
The crowded parted like a Biblical event and Max landed on the ground with a bone-crunching thud and a hot jolt of pain so powerful that it felt like she’d been set on fire. Something deep inside her brain prevented her from crying out, but people still gasped and Bibi had stopped running away to draw closer and someone was yelling about 911.
Max’s breath rattled inside her chest - the mere action of drawing in sending lightning-like waves of raw hurt pulsing through her body. Tears leaked from her face, staining the pavement, running into a darker, redder pool oozing from the leg crumpled up beneath her body.
She felt like she was in a daze, with people staring down and camera flashes and a sudden high-pitched wailing in the background.
“Ladies and gentlemen, please step back for our crisis team,” a bullhorn’s voice blared. “Unfortunately, the Super City exhibitions must be temporarily closed for your safety. Please file towards the exit in an orderly fashion. If you would like a refund or some other form of compensation, please speak with the clerks out our Ticketing Office. Thank you.”
The people that had been surrounding her stepped back a bit, and the hot sun beat down on her helmet. Hot breaths fogged the eye lenses and everything - everything hurt.
Max was crying and she wanted to scream, but she couldn’t - she physically couldn’t. Her mouth gaped, but only breathy groans came out. Everything felt like it was rocking back and forth and she retched, her stomach twisting into knots and out onto the pavement.
Someone’s hand touched her and she flinched, looking up.
Dizzily she saw a person standing over her, with a white shirt and dark sunglasses... latex gloves were on her skin. The shirt was stitched with ‘Starr Park Emergency Response Team’.
“Don’t worry,” the man said calmly. “‘I’m here to help you feel better.” He held up an oxygen mask. “Let’s get this on you.”
He reached under her chin and unfastened the helmet, pulling it off and Max gasped for breath as he did so. Then, very gently, placed the mask over her mouth and nose. A thick tube came off of it, snaking off into some kind of canister standing behind him. Something was hissing - a thick, choking sensation - something that smelled like caffeine and Surge’s smiles and the Bibi’s hugs and energy drinks and...
… and she slept.
When Max awoke, she knew only that her head hurt, her leg itched, and something else - something indescribable - was wrong.
She was lying in a bed of some kind, which was admittedly comfortable - though that may also have been influenced by the fact that she was so tired - so tired she could barely move at all.
Actually, she couldn’t move, but the tiredness was only part of that - something tickled at her wrists and one of her legs and pulling at them didn’t work. The oxygen mask was still taped firmly over her face, but she could still raise her head to look down, and as her vision cleared she realized that her wrists and one leg had been strapped to the rails on either side of the bed with thick, intimidating black strips.
The other leg was encased from hip to toe in a huge, bulky white cast - and it was also strapped, even though she couldn’t feel that fourth one through the heavy plaster.
Now she began to panic. “H-hello?!” she called out, her voice odd and distorted beneath the oxygen mask. The machine next to her bedside - the little green line on a TV screen - began to spike up and down. “Hello?”
Her head was hurting, and she wanted a drink. The room was small and brightly lit with a single harsh white strip mounted on the ceiling, boring down on her almost like a spotlight.
“Please!” she cried out. The door opened. “S-surge?”
A cluster of nondescript figures in labcoats entered. One of them adjusted a pair of glasses. “Oh, it’s awake. Hang on.”
People were surrounding the bedside and somebody was touching the screen to the side and Max blinked back tears and begged them for help, for explanation - maybe she should’ve been angry instead, but her body was throbbing with pain and soreness and her head pounded and how long had been since she’d had a drink?
There was a hissing sound and the oxygen mask was filling with a thick, heavy gas, clinging to the insides of her nose and throat. Max coughed on it, and her struggling against the straps became languid and slow.
“P-please-” she slurred. Where was Bibi? Was she okay? Everything was starting to go dark, an encroaching void that swallowed up the surroundings of her bedside bit by bit, creeping closer and closer - towards where she was strapped down, unable to flee.
She tried to speak again but no words came out. There was only that void and she was one with it.
It took the raging headache, even worse than before, to rouse her from the dead of sleep. The room was unchanged, save for the table by her side being more cluttered with several empty plastic cups, a bedpan, and a box of rubber gloves. Several new tubes and wires slid down from a rack and into her arm, vanishing underneath bandages.
Max’s entire body ached, and her skin was clammy and cold. She gasped at the pounding behind her eyes. Sweat was beaded on her skin, soaking into the pillow behind her head, the sheets - the mattress ...
She groaned desperately, waves of nausea appearing rapidly and each one feeling like a physical blow into the pit of her stomach. Her fingers twitched and only the straps holding her to bedframe kept her from violently convulsing where she lay.
She hadn’t even noticed that she wasn’t alone until now. The low voices and rustling of papers was too low to be heard over the buzzing her head, the ringing in her ears, the white noise fuzzing her brain like a constant scream.
“Okay. She’s awake.”
“Good, good. This one’s not salvageable?”
“No. It would take months for that fracture to heal. The hiring team has already got their eye on a replacement, so we should be back to normal up top in just a few days.”
“Mmm. Okay, roll it into the MRI room. Everything else is prepped.”
“Yes, ma’am.”
“I - I... “ Max was struggling to enunciate the words. Her voice sounded raspy and strange and her throat was hot and scratchy. “Drink.”
She was moving. It made her want to throw up, watching the lights overhead scroll by, their bulbs painfully bright, searing down into her eyes.
Someone was walking next to her. “What’s your name?”
The words sounded so distant, hollow. She was struggling to focus her eyes at all.
Fingers snapped, a sound so painfully loud in reverberation that she cried out, tugging languidly at the straps on her limbs.
“What’s your name?”
“I-” Max realized slowly that she was being addressed. “Dr - drink. Th-thirst-t-ty.”
“Your name .”
She blinked, the sensation feeling like she was dragging sandpaper over her eyes. “M-m-max.”
“Finally.” A pencil scratched luridly at a paper, then flashed in front of her eyes faster than she could follow. Maybe she tried, maybe she didn’t - she honestly couldn’t tell .
The lights overhead seemed to morph and split into two, the bigger one above and a smaller, brighter one - a burning hot pinprick of light and pressed itself almost against her eye and she cried out and tried to pull away as red and stringy veins flashed into her vision.
The flashlight bore down into her eyes until it clicked off.
“Almost no pupil response. She’s in withdrawal something fierce, but the program still seems relatively intact. We’ll see how that develops over time. Brady, no more oxytocin formula. Give her the methohexital instead.”
“Yes, ma’am.”
Her nose was running. For some reason, this was the sensation that rose to the forefront of her mind, and there was no explanation why. Everything else just felt like it was moving too fast, too all at once and everything else hurt and she was both hot and cold and everything in between - her hair was standing on end in every direction, crying out for help, begging for a drink, desperate for the friends whose names she could not recall, but she had had some, right?
Right?
Was there anything outside this bed, this room?
Max struggled to remember. It was all so hazy, so unclear.
A bright light flashed and something roared around her as she was rolled inside a tight tube, a gaping maw that swallowed her up whole and drowned out her cries and her pleas. She didn’t know how long or short a time she’d been in there. Time… what was it?
Everything was happening all at once anyway, and so loudly in her burning brain. Fever raged behind her eyes.
Until, like a light switch, everything went black.
When her eyes opened again, the headache was there to greet her.
Her stomach felt hollow and empty, as if a collapsed balloon inside her, crumpled into the tiniest of balls. Max wanted to scream, but there just wasn’t any energy to do anything but sweat and cry and make pathetic whimpers that barely left her lips.
There was nothing - nothing except her and the bed and the pain and the darkness… the edges of her vision were dangerously close to the center, dark and fuzzy, but refusing to close in, to give her the blessed reprise of unconsciousness.
There was only suffering.
Her lungs burned and hissed with every single forced breath, every single puff of air forced down her throat by the oblong metal tube that pumped them down. The walls of the room were plastered with pictures and diagrams now, all of them depicting ghastly images of death - a skeleton, as if lit up by an X-ray, the inside of someone’s head, split open by a computer, somehow. A large, glowing clock sat on the table next to the bedpan.
189:07:10 it read, counting steadily every second. Max couldn’t look at it for long - the glowing numbers imprinted themselves painfully into her eyeballs, burning like a fire, and she struggled weakly to roll her head to the other side inside. The metal tube inside her throat kept her from going too far.
The bed burned her skin somehow, when she tried to move, anyway. It just hurt. Everything did.
Someone came in at some point, messing around with the rack that the wires from her arm fed into, taking away empty plastic bags and hanging up new ones. She tried to speak, to say anything, but could not. Her entire body seemed to defy her desperate will.
The only sound she could make was a low-pitched moan deep in the back of her voice box, one that could scarcely be heard even by herself - certainly not over the noise of the machine that pumped air inside her with every artificial breath. Maybe it was just as well that the only feeling that she could even comprehend anymore was the pure exhaustion that poured over her like a lead blanket, pressing her back into the pain, forcing her to remain still and all but motionless.
Maybe it was for the best. What was the best? What was anything ?
Anything was just this tiny room and this tiny bed and the massive metal tube that reached down into her lungs, the only things that had managed to remain lodging into her addled mind.
There was no rest to be had anywhere.
572:48:03
She felt like she’d been drifting in and out of lucidity forever, with neither a beginning nor an end. Sometimes there were people there, sometimes there were not. Sometimes they touched her, and sometimes they did not. Sometimes they spoke, and sometimes they did not.
She couldn’t understand what they were saying anyway, couldn’t comprehend what they were doing.
All she knew was that .. sometimes, they were there.
And sometimes they were not.
Sometimes there was no one. Sometimes there was nothing. Except her. Except...
Flickers of conversation, snatches of words, like butterflies flitting by were all she got, now and then, clinging to them for a brief moment before they passed on and were lost forever. Her head continued to ache, but the ache felt… duller, now, somehow, deep in the back of her head, a pounding drum, slow and powerful, but distant.
“It still shows no response to light. Aren’t you worried about death?”
“Stevenson, she’s not an ‘it’. She’s a person… there’s a human brain in there. That’s what makes all this research so groundbreaking. We’re doing things that weren’t thought possible not so long ago.”
“Yes, sir.”
“And, no, I’m not worried. Give her a while.”
“Yes, sir.”
Her throat burned with an unholy fire. Air rattled through her mouth and lungs for what had to be the first time in forever, and she could close her mouth for the first time that she could physically remember.
“How are you feeling today?”
Her eyes moved slowly to the woman’s face. It was completely impassive and unreadable. Her mouth was empty, and it felt wrong - but even so, even despite the emptiness, she could not speak. Words would not come. It was as if everything had just collapsed in on itself.
“Well, you can hear me.” The woman looked down and a pen scratched against paper. “Do you know your name?”
She blinked. Her name - her... a tattered clump of memories stirred in a broken mess inside her brain, but none of them meshed together, and none of them made any sense. She vaguely could picture only … streets. Someone named Doug. A baseball bat? Was her name Doug ? Maybe. There was a computer - no, it was a stenography machine. What time was it? Where was… she? Who was she?
A hot bolt of panic coursed through her mind like a knife shearing through a stick of butter. She pulled desperately at her arms but they refused yet to come. She felt sicker, even sicker than before. There was nothing - nothing in her stomach to vomit but it twisted inside her and she could feel boiling acid churning at the base of her throat. The tubes taped into her arm tugged gently at her.
Her mouth hung open but only a low rumbling expression of raw fear came out.
“Don’t worry about it,” the woman’s voice rejoined. “It doesn’t matter.”
She blinked. Did it not... matter? Who...
“Let me ask you something else instead. Do you know who’s President of the United States? Maybe try to answer this one out loud if you can.”
She blinked again. The questions were baffling and hurt her brain. She forced her mouth open, trying to answer audibly. At least words came this time, though they were so broken and scratchy that it was a wonder that anyone could understand them at all. “R-ronald Reagan?”
“Mmm, of course.” The woman nodded. “Okay. I’m going to shine this flashlight into your eyes. I want you to look at me, okay?”
There wasn’t really any way she could fight it.
There wasn’t really any way she could fight anything.
There was a lot of time to think when you were strapped to a hospital bed in a tiny room. There were no windows in the small room, and no light from under or around the door - only the faint rumbling through the wall sometimes to keep her company.
She was almost permanently exhausted, and so, in some strange kind of way, she almost didn’t mind. The bed was her constant companion, and she was never moved from it, not for anything. Maybe she didn’t even remember how to walk anymore - really, it was only because the people walked into and out of the room she was that she still clung to some semblance of it in theory.
The clock that ticked on her table had almost reached 1,000 in the first number. She thought maybe that was significant, somehow, and spent a lot of time staring at it, because when there was no one else in the room, then nothing else moved at all and her eyes ached to rest on something that did.
Sometimes the people who came in spoke to her, and sometimes they didn’t. Sometimes they spoke to each other. Sometimes they asked her questions that she didn’t understand. A lot of times they asked about who she thought she was.
She still wasn’t sure. If she thought too much about it, it made her confused and feel sick to her stomach. There was just… her. The other people had names, but the jumble of images in her own brain made no sense and so she didn’t bother to try and sort them out anymore. It was easier to not think about it. She had so many mixed-up things inside her! She felt like there was this person called Bibi, but now she had only a name and didn’t know if that was her own name or someone else’s… and she didn’t know if it mattered either way.
Sarah... there was that name that floated out of the slur of memories sometimes, and there was something particularly sticky about it, but for the life of her she couldn’t understand why. When she spoke of it to the people who spoke to her, they nodded and spoked to each other in private and she’d never figured out if that was good or bad.
The straps on the bedframe that held her down were comfortable more than anything. As long as they were there, she knew that nothing else mattered. Everything else was taken care of, right down to being fed and having sheets rotated out from underneath her.
Sometimes the people who came into the room to stare at her and talk amongst themselves spoke quietly of “disconnect from reality” and “major episodes”, but it was never spoken of in a judgmental tone… so maybe it was good?
Then at some point, a man came in and sat down next to her bed in a chair. “How’re you feeling today?”
“Fine.”
“Good, good.” He coughed and flipped pages over on his clipboard. “Do you remember your name today?”
“No.”
“That’s just fine.” He drummed his fingers rapidly. “Well. It’s been quite a while now, and I think the lab boys have gotten all the data they can get from you. This isn’t quite analogous to a proper program malfunction, of course, because in here you have no source of conflicting data, so it just sort of… sits there in your noggin, you know?”
She frowned. “Oh.”
“It’s still good data to have, though. I hear the next patch to the program is going to be better than ever because of this. Well, anyway... “ He cleared his throat. “It looks like it’s time to get rid of you now. We’ve gotten everything we can, they think.”
“Get… rid? What does that mean?”
“Don’t bother yourself with that. You won’t remember anything I might say anyway. Just lay there like a good subject, okay? I’m going to wheel you into the primary programming suite and we’ll just take it from there.”
She hesitated briefly, but nodded at last, falling back onto the bed. “Okay.”
“Good, good.”
She caught one last glimpse of the clock as the bed was wheeled out the door and clicked shut behind them: 1001:39:24 .
She smiled faintly.
The next room they entered was somehow trembling with energy from the very air, as if someone had dropped a bottle of lightning on the floor.
She hadn’t seen another room in… a while. Maybe for a long while. The tubes attached to her arm had been taken out, and it felt… maybe a little bit funny to be away from her constant companions. She felt a little bit tired, maybe... but she wanted to stay awake to see the new things. She didn’t see new things,so she stayed awake despite the fatigue and took everything with the last remaining spark in her dull eyes, half-lidded by exhaustion.
A large metal… thing reached down from the ceiling where she was rolled, into the middle of the room. She had no words to describe it, only that it looked vaguely intimidating in a distant sort of way as it hovered over her.
“This isn’t going to hurt a bit,” the man said. “Just you hold still, okay?”
She nodded gently. More straps were applied to her regardless, holding her head very still in the center of the pillow, looking straight upwards, straight at the tip of the hanging machine.
He moved it gently, bringing the blunted point of it to rest against her forehead. It was cold and though she couldn’t move in response to it, she felt it, deep inside.
“Okay,” the man said, but she instinctively knew that he wasn’t speaking to her anymore. “Everything’s in position. Let’s wrap this one up.” He was still standing over her, looking down, as he snapped the manila folder in his hands closed.
“Got it,” a second voice replied. “We’re on.”
The machine pressed against her hummed gently and grew warm.
There was an odd sense of pressure, not from the outside, but from within - like the opposite of the way that the straps pressed against her arms. Her head could not move, but she could feel it, a sense that she might burst where she lay - a weak cough mustered from her lungs, her ears popping.
Her brain was at once filled to the brim with… things. With nothing. With nonsense. A blank wall of static, filling every sense, replacing every instinct, every memory, every learned behavior. It was… it was… it was ...
There was only the garbled static. The body on the bed did not move, did not twitch, did not breathe. Every bit of encoding to do these things written over, replaced, deleted. The brain slowly grew darker, slower, the one final breath fading away, and there was no knowledge how to draw another, no instinct that it was important.
Only static slowly growing dimmer.
A TV screen blinked out, and everything was calm. The last remaining spark was gone.