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DOOM MAGNETIC!! - CHAPTER SIX:
THE FIX
William Pauley III
I seem to remember reading something, some article sometime long ago, about consciousness and out of body experiences. I had always thought, assumed, that scientists didn’t know much about the phenomenon, that this was the one thing that religious psychos could actually hold above our heads to prove that humans really did have souls, or something spiritual inside us. That our bodies are just our shell, and who we are has nothing to do with our genetic makeup or heredity or families or any of that. We are all individual souls, and we roam the planet in and out of our bodies for all eternity, sometimes entering the bodies of others and living “life” many times over in various forms.
But it turns out that I had assumed wrong.
In fact, scientists know quite a bit about it now. They even know how to trigger it. For years scientists poked and prodded hundreds of thousands of brains trying to make sense of this grey mass of nerves that’s responsible for every function, for every voluntary and involuntary movement our bodies make. In the process, they learned quite a bit about it, including the exact location and precisely how deep they must penetrate for out of body experiences to occur.
I can only assume that that is what I am experiencing right at this very moment.
I am standing at the foot of an operating table watching a team of doctors and nurses literally ripping my physical body apart and tossing limbs through a miniature basketball hoop fastened above a waste container. The nurses dig their fingers into a hole where the lower half of my arachnid body used to be, pulling out long strings of meat and piling them up on a small table next to an assortment of strange medical tools. The doctors, there are three of them, are all huddled around the top of my skull, well, at least where the top of my skull used to be. They’ve apparently sawed off and removed the top of it to access that mysterious grey matter nerve ball that lay underneath. Needles, knives, poking, prodding, invading.
This must be why I’m having this experience now. They must have accidentally triggered the out of body function during the operation.
There’s shouting somewhere in the distance, down the hallway. Gusto bursts through the swinging doors, into the room, complete with scrubs, a hairnet, and rubber gloves. He’s holding a goddamn cue-ball in his hands.
“Hey,” he shouts. “Hey, nurse! Don’t forget this, okay? My friend here made a special request to have this replaced. It’s already been sanitized and shit, so just get it back in there any way you can, alright?”
I try to interject, but no one seems to be able to hear me. I don’t want that goddamn thing to be a part of me again.
“It’s pretty hot, ain’t it, ladies?” he asks, holding the cue-ball up to my empty eye socket. He hands it to one of them, pounds fists with one of the doctors, and exits the room.
“Goddamn, Gusto,” I mutter under my breath.
“Could be worse, you know,” a voice responds, but not just any voice…my voice. I look up and see another ethereal version of me staring directly at me, and behind him are several others.
All of them, me.
Paid subscribers! The next chapter of this story will be posted on March 14th! Stay tuned for Doom Control.
The Fix
© William Pauley III, 2011
All rights reserved.
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