Artifact Read Free Page A

feeding tube connected to a valve above my collarbone, which reduced solid waste, so I wasn’t even able to measure time by how often I used the bathroom. I had no way of knowing how long I had been there, and every square centimeter of my body ached. When I could finally open my eyes, reality seeped into focus.
    I recognized immediately that I was in a hospital – the room decor was for long term patient occupancy, with walls of institutional beige and comfortable furniture for visitors. There was a wall–screen above my bed, which was basically a hard padded mattress with wire–and–plastic straps tucked under the sheets, and on either side were cold cylindrical rails of collapsible stainless steel. There was another wall–screen by the door, next to a laser stylus used for cleaning. I could also see natural light coming from the large window to my right, and the shadow of the pink stuffed animal sitting on the sill, stretching across the floor and my bed. Beside the bed, there was a console with a screen connected to an IV stand with a few bags of morphine solution.
    It was hard at first to accept that I had in fact survived whatever happened in the Clean Room.
    It was a foggy realization but a serious one, because I knew then that I probably should have died. The shock was powerful enough – some kind of electrical nimiety that lit me up like a flash–bulb. But the voice in my head kept repeating, you survived. You survived. You survived , until I allowed myself to trust it.
    The room was warm and dim. Chemicals pricked my sinuses, and the sound of air–conditioning pulled me out of the warm depth of half–forgotten dreams. I lay on my side breathing slowly, contorted and stiff, and my head pulsated like milk spilling from a jug. Thinking came slow as everything blurred out of focus, and all endeavors to put together exactly what went wrong inflated my headache beyond reason. I remembered my visor cracking and–
    –Nothing. The concussion. I found that shapes eluded my train of thought, until reality pulled back like a hangman’s rope. I fought with consciousness, desperately holding that clouded space before the darkness could take me again. Sitting up didn’t feel right, so I tried rolling onto my back. But I couldn’t move. I tried again, and nothing.
    I was frozen in a rictus, unable to blink – unable to will my body into action. Paralyzed.
    Panicking, my mind raced to a ventilation duct that spilled the sound of boiling water into the room. As the vent hummed, something else was building behind the walls – a distant sound of super–heated alloy cooling too fast, faint but getting close. And then, like a switch, the physics in the room suddenly changed. There was a wooden thok , and my muscles instantly relaxed.
    I rolled over the guard-rails and sprawled onto the warm linoleum. I stayed there for a minute sucking air, naked except for a thin hospital gown that was open in the back – the IV and feeding tube pulled like a stitch. I got to my feet and peeled the tape off of my genitals, then gently removed the catheter. There was a slight resonance of pain in my chest, like healed sunburn, but it was fading fast. I picked up my IV stand and cautiously walked out of the room, my legs trembling through the atrophy.
    I felt my unease grow while moving into the hallway, noting that the entire hospital looked as if it had been recently abandoned. Papers were strewn across the floor. Vacant wheelchairs were carelessly pushed into corners, and there was a maintenance cart spilling rolls of toilet–paper down the hall. A stretcher propped open an elevator as it endlessly tried closing itself. Distant blue sunlight from the adjacent rooms cast the deserted hospital into a milieu of dark shadows.
    “Hello?” My vocal cords burned from lack of use. To my right, the hallway ended at a darker room with a single florescent bulb blinking itself asleep. To my left, the corridor forked in opposite directions.