Second Paradigm (4 page)

Relativity Synchronization:
The Third Cause

2044: Rude Awakenings

Chris’s eyes fluttered open, the dreamland in his mind evaporated as his pupils adjusted to the waking world.
Where am I?
Scouring his mind, searching for memories, he found only nothingness, a blank slate. He couldn’t remember anything from before the moment he opened his eyes. He knew his name and could recall any number of theories, equations and formulae, but nothing else remained.

No faces, no events, places or objects, just impressions that those things had at one point existed. Only one name endured:
Christopher Nost
.
That’s me
, he thought vaguely, and smiled sardonically to himself.
I know who I am but the rest of the world is gone. Too bad for the rest of the world, I guess.

Chris looked around the windowless room. The walls and floor were piercingly white and a pervasive smell of sterility under laid the pine scent of the air.
Hospital.
The word drifted into his consciousness along with images of faceless people, sick and dying.

Am I dying?
he wondered.

Not far from where he sat on the edge of the bed the numbers ‘14:27’ hovered in the air over a similarly white nightstand. Cautiously, Chris reached out to them. They flickered and remained. The seven shimmered and changed to an eight.
Ah
, Chris thought.
A clock.
For some reason an image of a white disk with numbers around the edge came to mind. And that image brought a cold fear to his gut. He suppressed the thought and looked at the floating numbers again.

Another word drifted through his thoughts.
Hologram.
Once again he passed his hand through the display. This time, he kept his hand there, moving it rapidly back and forth, until the image disappeared entirely. He stopped and a moment later the numbers ‘14:29’ flickered back into existence.

A cough came from behind him. Chris turned to see a woman in a nurse’s uniform standing in the doorway, looking excited and nervous at the same time. “Dr. … Dr. Nost?” she said, her startled gaze never leaving his face.

“Yes? I think so, anyway.” Chris looked into himself and realized where the ‘doctor’ came from.
Ah, PhD in physics. Hence all the math spinning through my brain in place of memories.
Chris shook his head in frustration, trying to jar his memories loose. “Look, maybe you can help me. Where am I? What’s going on? Why can’t I remember anything about my past?”

Her attempt at a reassuring smile faded, but the look of shock in her eyes remained. “Um, I know you have lots of questions, but I can’t really answer them. I’m sorry. The doctors are on the way now and they should be able to take care of everything for you.” She spoke as if to an infant who couldn’t actually understand. That way of speaking tickled something in Chris’s memory, but it fled again before he could grasp it.

“Fine. Can you at least tell me how long I’ve been here? Can you tell me anything about myself?” Chris shook his head in frustration,
that can’t be right;
denial ran through his head.

She walked across the room, tapping on a tablet as she went. She pulled up a stool and sat in front of him, putting down the tablet to pick up a blood pressure cuff. “Well, Dr. Nost, according to your chart you have a doctoral degree in Aerospace Mechanics and another one in Astrophysics. And you’ve been here for 41 years, two months, and five days.” The nurse spoke while she hurried about performing what appeared to Chris to be an ordinary physical.

“What? There must be some sort of mistake. I …” Chris felt the walls in his mind crash. Fear rose in his belly and his only defense kicked in as rage, making his blood pump hot.

The nurse looked flustered and a little frightened, realizing she had said something she hadn’t meant to. “Dr. Nost, I’m sure you’re confused. Please, sit back down until the doctors get here. I’m sure they will have all the answers to your questions.” She backed toward the door, looking scared.

Chris realized he stood, clenching his fists. He swallowed and sat back down on the bed. He took a deep breath and felt the anger drain out of him, revealing his fear and confusion. “I’m sorry. I’ll wait.” The nurse darted back to the bed and grabbed her tablet, then hurried out of the room.

The flicker of the clock shifting times sparked something in Chris’s mind. He raised his hand until he held it in the air before his face. Smooth and strong, the back of his hand had a healthy color.

There must be some sort of mistake. If forty-one years had passed he should be elderly, but he didn’t have the hands of an old man. Even if he had graduated college as a child prodigy, that put him at sixty years old. Yet he had the hands of a young man. He looked around the room for a mirror, but saw nothing. His gaze at once came across the red numbers hovering over the stark white bed stand and he shivered.
There must be some sort of mistake
.

The door opened, revealing a thin-faced man in a white doctor’s coat and wearing a smile that didn’t reach his gray eyes. He looked familiar somehow, but once again the image vanished before it quite materialized. Behind him stood a dozen men and women all wearing the clinical white smocks of medical practitioners.

Enter the legion of the blessed attendants and confused hangers-on …
thought Chris.

“Good afternoon, Dr. Nost. We’re so happy you decided to join us,” said the man standing in the foreground, obvious leader of the legion in white.

Those eyes are like steel. Cold and hard …
Chris looked away.
Why does he seem so familiar?
“Who are you? I mean besides a doctor.” Chris forestalled the man’s speech. “Where do I know you from?”

“My name is Dr. Garret Jameson. I have been your … caretaker for the past eleven years. These—” He gestured to his entourage still crowding the doorway behind him, “—are my associates.”

Chris raised an eyebrow at the word associates. “Are they going to break my kneecaps if I don’t pay up on my gambling debts?”

Doctor Jameson laughed. “They might put casts on your kneecaps should you find them broken. As to the breaking itself, I’m afraid my esteemed colleagues get a bit squeamish if it comes to imparting violence. No, overall we are rather poor enforcers. As to where you know me from I have no idea. I wasn’t born until two years after you went into your coma. Perhaps while you were in your coma you subconsciously became acclimated to my presence. We do have a limited amount of time, so are there any other questions I can answer for you?”

“The nurse said I’ve been asleep for forty-one years. I can’t believe this is true.”

Dr. Jameson sighed. “I know that this is difficult for you to accept, Dr. Nost, but it is indeed true that—”

“How is that possible?” Chris interrupted. “I mean … It doesn’t feel right. I don’t look like I’m in my sixties or seventies.” He looked with wonder at his hands again. They were young hands.

Dr. Jameson handed Chris a mirror. “Yet you are. Seventy-four to be precise, Dr. Nost. You haven’t aged a day since you arrived at this facility over thirty years ago. The only reason that we know your age at all is because of your birth records. As far as I know, you did not age in the prison hospital the twelve years before that, either. Perhaps ironically, it was the lack of aging that saved your life. You see, once the governments fell …” Jameson shrugged.

Chris’s head swam. His earlier fear subsided into the quagmire of utter confusion. “Just a minute. You’re telling me that I was in prison before I got put in this hospital?”

Jameson tapped the tablet he held in his hand. “Well, yes and no. It seems you spent your entire sentence hospitalized and in the exact same state that you were in when we received you. Public record has it on file that you were shot right after you were convicted.”

Chris took a deep breath and tried to center himself. “Do you know what was I convicted of?”

Jameson’s eyes looked to the wall beyond Chris, breaking contact. “First degree murder. Something I recommend avoiding in this society. PolCorp’s policies are to carry out immediate sentencing, including the death sentence, administered by the arresting officer.”

God. A corporation that can legally kill you for any reason they want?
Chris’s mouth went dry. “Why don’t I remember any of this? Is it because of the coma? Do I have some form of partial amnesia?”

Dr. Jameson bit his lower lip. “I doubt that it’s because of the coma. You see, you had a pre-existing condition. When you were …” he flicked at the screen of his tablet, quickly reading through records, “twenty-nine, you began to experience a very unique form of memory loss. Your conceptual memory is seemingly perfect, but as far as anything else is concerned you forget everything after approximately thirteen months. It is a similar condition to that found in some victims of brain damage, though the more common term before total loss is substantially longer.”

Those steel gray eyes once again locked with Chris’s. “Really, you are an all-around mystery to us, Dr. Nost. As I was saying, after your prison term expired, you were transferred here. When the governments fell a few years later they were going to pull the plug. One less expense, you see. My predecessor convinced GeoCorp that you could be an asset worthy of study. Potentially a high profit yield research project if we could unlock your enigma.”

Dr. Jameson smiled. “We can make holographic clocks, Dr. Nost, and even implant computers that interface perfectly with the human brain. But to halt the aging process is a mystery beyond us. It seems that it is something you alone are able to do.”

Chris’s mind rebelled at what he was being told.
Learn about what is happening now … What led to the world you’re going to have to live in. Deal with the rest later …
“Fine. I’m weird. What about everything I missed? What do you mean by ‘when the governments fell’?”

“It was about eighteen years ago. The governments and the global corporations had been feeding off of each other since before your … accident. In the end, the governments got weaker and the companies got stronger until …”

A cough came from Dr. Jameson’s entourage, and he trailed off, glancing at the holo-clock.

Chris knew his time to ask questions ran thin. “So this GeoCorp, it’s the company that runs America now?”

“This part of what used to be America, yes.” Dr. Jameson cleared his throat. Chris saw that he played with what at first looked like a wedding ring, but looking closer he saw closely woven gold fibers imbedded in the man’s finger.

“I apologize, Dr. Nost, but we cannot speak here anymore. Every moment of my time at the hospital is accounted for, you see.” He glanced at the gold ring.

“I truly am sorry. We have grown quite fond of you around here, despite Company policy. Some of the nurses even took up calling you Sleeping Beauty. As it stands, it is good that you woke up when you did—it became increasingly difficult for us to convince GeoCorp to keep you alive with every passing quarter. You were not cheap for the Company, and we could not find anything different about you that would halt the aging process or halt muscular atrophy.”

Chris hadn’t thought of that. He looked down at his body and saw the doctor was right—his muscle tone was the same as a normal thirty-year old. “Not bad for lying in bed for forty-one years,” he said.
This is out of control.
Fighting back tears he tried to control the fear and confusion that were threatening to usurp his rationality.
Just what the Hell am I that I can ignore the effects of time?

“Indeed,” the doctor looked at the hovering clock, a worried expression on his face that still didn’t touch his eyes. He fumbled in his pocket and withdrew a wad of paper Chris recognized as money.

“Here,” Dr. Jameson handed him the wad. “There should be about two hundred and fifty thousand dollars here.”

Chris’s eyes widened as he took the money and the doctor laughed. “Believe me, that’s not quite the same amount it was before you … as it was in your time …”

“I guess it wouldn’t be,” Chris laughed ruefully, trying to cover his growing anxiety. He looked around for somewhere to put the money and realized he still wore only a hospital gown, so he sat there, clutching the wad of bills in his shaking hands. Once again he had to take a deep breath to regain control of his body. “I … where am I supposed to go?”

One of the other doctors pulled some clothes out of a closet in the far end of the room and handed them to Chris. Made of a dull gray material and shaped to an amorphous cut, they didn’t look like his clothes. But then again, he couldn’t remember what he used to wear.

As the group of doctors began to walk away, Jameson leaned towards Chris. “Find a hotel until you can find a job. Stay away from the south side of town. There’s a gang war going on down there and the police have announced that they will no longer be patrolling the area.”

Jameson glanced around the room, then back at Chris. “Look, I’m sorry we can’t be of more help, but I really must be getting back to my rounds. I will already be getting docked for the time I’ve spent with you.” Dr. Jameson handed Chris a card and walked out of the room.

Chris looked at the card. It was not, to his surprise, the doctor’s business card. Rather, it was a card from a local restaurant, with handwriting on the back.

LITTLE PARIS COFFEE COMPANY

1655 N. CHERRY LANE

Chris flipped the card over. On the back the doctor had written in bold, elegant script:

MEET ME HERE ON THURSDAY AT 1500.

AVOID THE COMPANY AND THE HOSPITAL.

YOU DO NOT WANT THE COMPANY TO

CONTINUE THEIR RESEARCH ON YOU.

GOOD LUCK. –G.J.

Chris tossed the card on the nightstand and got dressed in an ill-fitting gray business suit, with a white shirt and long black woolen overcoat. He wondered what time of year it was and swore to himself.
Why should I worry about what season it is? I don’t even know where the hell I am.
Once he was done getting dressed he picked the card back up, along with the cash, and shoved it in a pocket.

As he left the room, he looked around in the hallway for someone to ask, at that moment realizing how little he knew about his circumstances. The hallway seemed deserted; the whirring little cameras that monitored every hallway intersection were the only signs of life.