Chapter Eleven

After breakfast we made our way to the room where we'd had our meeting the day before. Dr. Crimm was already inside, our chairs still circled up like we'd left them. She smiled at each of us as we walked in and took a seat. Aideen was still sick—she'd been up many times before the sun rose making trips to the bathroom and alternating between wrapping up in the covers and kicking them off. She looked miserable, but I had learned she was a fighter.

"So everyone has had a chance to consider the medication?" Dr. Crimm asked as she scanned the group, waiting for each of us to nod in agreement. "Shima, are you still willing to give it a try?"

Shima, pale and thin, twisted her hair over her shoulder and looked to Aideen. I got the feeling she wasn't going to agree just to benefit herself. "Yes. I'll try it," she agreed.

Aideen mustered a shaky smile and nodded. "Me, too. I'm ready to try it." No one else spoke up, and I pulled my feet up to my chair and watched as Shima continued to twist her hair nervously.

"How is everyone else feeling about being present while Shima and Aideen undergo this treatment?" Would it be traumatic to watch our peers struggle through their hallucinations?We were told there was nothing anyone could do for each other once the medication was administered but sit back and be there for the patient when they finally returned. "It might not be easy to watch," the doctor reminded us.

The group was silent as we thought about what the doctor was saying. Marco seemed nervous. He adjusted his position in his chair and kept his gaze locked onto the floor near his feet. If it were as simple as watching someone get high, there's no way Dr. Crimm would be so cautious about our involvement today. Any reasonable adult knew that by eighteen it wasn't uncommon to have seen someone do drugs. It happened all the time at parties, and sometime even in the bathrooms at school.

In his wheelchair, Ken seemed more vulnerable than any of us. We could get up and flee if we wanted to, but his escape would be a little more difficult to manage. On the football field he was probably one of the biggest guys, but here in this meeting he was our equal. His disability physically handicapped him while mine emotionally handicapped me. He'd made a plan and even executed it, but in the end he'd failed and now he was left basically unable to care for himself. When Dr. Crimm looked at him, he hesitated a minute, then nodded in acknowledgment of her warning.

"Koralee?" Dr. Crimm turned to me. I realized then that I was rocking slowly in my chair. She wanted to know if I was sure I could handle what I was about to see. I took a moment to think about how to phrase my response.

"Where will the rest of us be when they're out of it? Will we talk about what's happening?" Would we all sit in judgement?

"Those are excellent questions." Dr. Crimm straightened the tablet in her lap and offered me a warm, encouraging smile. "You will be in the same room, and I'll be here with all of you the entire time. I guarantee you will be safe and we will all be looking out for each other. I'll be guiding the subjects verbally, but you might be moved to speak without even knowing it's happening." My hands trembled as I wrapped my arms around my stomach and nodded. "I hope you'll have the courage to follow through with the treatment. If you decline and choose a more traditional route, your improvement will be far slower and possibly more painful. It will be the equivalent of slowly pulling tape from a wound, the adhesive tearing the skin cells away from each other one by one. This treatment, on the other hand, yanks the tape quickly—a deep, sharp pain and then it's over."

I wasn't sure how comfortable I felt with ripping anything away. We both knew this treatment would be my last. If it didn't change my suicidal thoughts, I wouldn't be around long enough to try a different type of therapy. This was the end of the road.

"We'll start with Shima and Aideen." Dr. Crimm stood. She moved to the back of the room where the stark white wall seemed out of place beside a large wooden door. She pressed in a code on a small keypad mounted near the handle. A s all click could be heard before she was able to test the knob and push the door, opening up a secret room. Two metal chairs sat side by side with an expansive black wall behind them.

I trained my gaze on one of the chairs. It was high-tech, sleek, and reclined at a forty-five-degree angle. It was simple in form and on the tray beside it rested a shiny black box easily recognizable as the SmartLens holder for virtual reality software. VR had come a long way since its beginning, and now even the poorest of families owned at least one system. My family had four.

"If everyone else could please set their chairs up in front of these two? I think it's best when we transition from one member to the next fluidly. Having someone beside you up here also takes some pressure off. Give the girls some space though, as they will need to lie back for safety reasons."

Damien looked to Ken as if to ask, "What the hell?" Ken only shrugged and maneuvered his wheelchair to the outer edge.

Shima and Aideen sat next to each other in the special chairs as Dr. Crimm checked their vitals and made notes on her tablet. No one said a word to each other. I hated the quiet as it left me with nothing to focus on but my own thoughts. I narrowed my eyes at the wounds on Shima's wrist. Maybe if I focused on those, the twisted thoughts in my head would fade away.

"Try to remain quiet during the treatment," Dr. Crimm advised us. "You are here to support the subject, but not interfere. At first it will be like they are sleeping, but as the medication breaks down inside them, it might cause a temporary fever or chills. Sometimes, the body isn't fully under and can jerk or reach out as it struggles to distinguish what is real and what's imagined. Once they are fully under the drug's influence, the effects should be less dramatic." Dr. Crimm stepped between the two chairs and addressed Shima and Aideen.

"Don't fight it. It might feel like hours or even days, but out here it's only a half hour. Don't try to make sense of the absurd. Just like in our dreams, things appear from our unconscious minds. Just let it happen." She removed a labeled pill jar from her pocket, twisted off the top and let the single capsule inside fall onto her palm. "You get one chance at this. Shima, I've already customized this dosage to match your unique chemistry." With her palm extended between the chairs, she waited for Shima to capture the capsule and hold it between her fingers.

"Why is she going first?" Aideen asked.

"I've reviewed your files extensively. I believe Shima is the best candidate to get us started. We'll save you for last today, Aideen, in case there is a reaction with this medication and your current medical situation. It's going to cause a lot of similar experiences and you could potentially crash."

"What the actual fuck?" Ken wondered aloud, but Dr. Crimm didn't acknowledge him. He shook his head and adjusted himself uncomfortably in his wheelchair. "And we're the fucking crazy ones," he added.

Dr. Crimm set her tablet at the edge of one of the chairs and leaned down to reach for small refrigerator. She retrieved two bottles of water and handed them to the girls. 

Next, Dr. Crimm used a remote to lower a blank screen behind the girls. It  was smaller than a movie screen, but large enough to take up most of the wall. The version of the Virtual Now gear beside them was far more advanced than any I'd ever seen. Dr. Crimm  opened the SmartLens box at Aideen's side and extended it to her, waiting as Aideen easily and quickly placed the contact lenses in her eyes. Next, she did the same for Shima. With a few blinks, the screen behind the girls flickered on.

"This system is different than you're used to at home. With your home consoles you are able to play in a world created by someone in a studio. None of it is real and the communication with the game system only captures your movements. Here it will receive brain-wave information, as well. It will read the waves and create a world in real time based on your memories." She turned and faced us.

The tension in the room grew thick. She'd never mentioned anyone else being a part of our treatment. Whose memories would this console have access to? I looked to Marco quickly and found his eyes staring into mine in disbelief.

"Don't panic," she told us. "The extensive research we conduct at this facility is done in conjunction with some of the best universities in the world. There are still many functions of the brain that we have yet to discover. Here at R2L, we have tapped into one area that has been a mystery until now. Have you ever got the feeling something wasn't right? Have you been able to tell something has happened with a friend before they even share the story with you?"

We sat quietly as she moved her hand in front of us. "It's been called many things before: intuition, a sixth sense, a premonition, a feeling, or psychic ability." She slowly shook her head. "It doesn't come from a god or a spirit or any other paranormal force. It comes from within your own brain. We have been studying our ability to read expressions in others and the unconscious reactions to them. We know about reflective cells in the brain and how they work to communicate the feelings of others to us. Imagine if that was only the tip of the iceberg when it came to the way we gather information from our peers and from the environment around us.

 "Right now, your brain knows who in this room is looking at you," she continued. "It can tell you within seconds whether or not this person might be a threat. We used to think it was based on our own prejudices, but now we know it runs so much deeper."

"What are you saying?" Damien asked.

"We've found the portion of your brain where very specific information is stored. Until now, this information was fed in a convoluted way to your conscious mind. An eerie feeling, our reaction to a smile, or our ability to know what a friend is thinking before it's ever expressed. Cryptomnesia, déjà vu, déjà vécu. We have opened up the channel of information from a trickle to a flood. Your brain doesn't forget like we used to believe. It stores every piece of information it's ever been given. Conversations taking place in the same room as you, a whispered threat or promise, the smell of a morning from twelve years ago—it's all inside. Even a quick glance at text you never thought you read is captured like a snapshot and could potentially be used later when we access it correctly." Dr. Crimm turned around and put her hands on Shima's and Aideen's shoulders. "When you swallow that pill, you will open up that place in your brain, and you will see the world from an enhanced perspective using all the information your brain has about the subject. The answers have been there all along, we're just giving you the key to the box they're kept in."

"Why the virtual reality then?" Shima asked.

Dr. Crimm answered, "It will help you recreate the world in which your trauma has happened, and it will allow me to watch and see what you've been through, and help you make sense of it."

"What makes you so sure you'll get into that event? What if I want to take you somewhere else?" Aideen's voice sounded defiant.

"Our minds, our souls if you like, want to be healed, the same way our bones and our flesh work to knit themselves back together when they are injured. That's why painful memories fade, we block out bad times, and we dream about our experiences over and over again until we are no longer affected the way we were the day they happened." She lifted her hands and spun around again. "Maybe you'll be the first person who doesn't go directly to your trauma, but I would be very surprised. I'm going to lead you there, but you'll have to walk the path. This process has been repeated many times and while I'm always surprised to see the story told through a different perspective, I'm never surprised at where the trauma starts."

Aideen was gripping the armrests on her chair so tightly her knuckles were white. Her chest rose and fell quickly, a dead giveaway that she was nervous about letting us in. I understood that. I didn't want to let anyone in, either. The parts of my brain that had seemed to work just fine were already driving me to the brink of madness. What would happen if I opened the floodgates to allow more information to come pouring in to my consciousness? Wasn't it better to leave some things alone?

"Are you ready?" Dr. Crimm asked. Shima nodded. "Then please swallow your pill."

Her hand shook as she moved the capsule toward her mouth. It fell onto her tongue rather unceremoniously and she closed her eyes as she rinsed it down her throat with the water the doctor had given her. I imagined her heart must be beating wildly in her chest—mine would be. But would it be from the fear of what might be coming, or the excitement of escaping her life again, if even just for a moment?