Meanwhile in the Lab

by angerbda

"Nothing is so painful to the human mind as a great and sudden change."
― Mary Wollstonecraft Shelley, Frankenstein

"You are doing pretty well!" The man in the white lab coat looked quite satisfied as he observed on Vic's recovery. It was his third visit since he left the hospital, a month ago. He was feeling better, as a matter of fact.

"What about the dreams?" The doctor intensely looked at him, attentive to even the smallest hint of discomfort, the tiniest sign that would betray him.

"It's getting better, doc." Vic kept a blank face, devoid of emotion. He had become quite good at it since he had woken up on the bumpy bed, in the empty ward.

The other man looked at him, espying his features. After a moment, as his patient was not reacting to the oppressive silent, he sighed. "In this case, you can go. Get sure to book your next appointment, in two weeks' time. I will let you know if anything comes out of your blood results. Though I do not believe it will be necessary..."

Vic did not wait to leave the room. Since his release of the hospital, he abhorred coming near this place. He never had been a fan of the medical corps, anyway.

He felt strange and out of place, as he walked away from the doctor's office. He was used to people giving him side glances due to his seven feet of a bulky frame. This time, however, the gazes he received seemed frightened, as if the people around him knew what his body hosted.

His slight limp, on his way to his small, but cosy, apartment, reminded him of the events that followed his accident. He had thought he would die over there, in the white and icy inferno of Europa's minefields. The life of an ice-gas miner was not without risk, which explained the high pay-check he received on the seven of each month.

Would he be able to go back to work? He wondered. The chance was that the company had already prepared his termination letter. He dreaded looking at his mail for this simple reason. He even avoided answering the mailman when the man in uniform and cap would ring his doorbell.

Europa and its eternal icy landscape was all he ever wanted in his life. It was cold and deadly, but he felt at home in this place. Now, back on Earth, in his natal Scandinavia, he felt lost. Without any purpose.

He had learned in school that the place his ancestors, his family, himself, came from used to be a land of snow and cold. It was hard to imagine, though, seeing the luxuriant vegetation, feeling the warmth of the bi-annual sun, listening to the soothing songs of colourful birds.

He could not understand what his history teachers used to explain, that the northerner and southerner part of the globe used to be the coldest on Earth. It sounded weird, almost hallucinatory. Everyone knew the temperate zones where life was thriving was where he lived. Anything between the two poles, and the worse, nearer the equator, was pure Hell on Earth. The Inferno.

His limp was getting worse, he thought, though he felt no real pain. Just a slow in his movement. He tried to accelerate, his home being near now. He had been told by his physiotherapist that he needed the exercise for his reconstructed members. This thought led him to the next one, he dreaded the torture the lady imposed him three times a week. His next appointment with Rinda was scheduled in a couple of hour. He still needed to get back home and eat some food. His fridge was empty, he knew, except for some tofu and green leaves. He had no time, though, to stop by the market for some juicy meat. The detour would cost him a delay in his next session, and, surely, sorer limbs than he could endure.

The tofu was bland. The green leaves, soppy. Vic still wondered when he would be able to go back to Europa. The life in Scandinavia was great, sure, but he missed the cold and the quiet. With his bad leg coming to the front of his mind, the discomfort growing stronger than he would have liked, he could not stop thinking of the accident. The mistake.

The mistake had not been his, but he ended up being the one losing the most in this affair. They had been on a new mine, working on the pit. They didn't know this area had pockets of warm gas. The warmth was relative on Europa, and Vic never really believed in those possible bubbles of warm ice-gas. He had always thought it was a story from the corporation to get authorisation to place their muscle-men on the sites. With these guys, pseudo-militia, the big bosses ensured no one would adventure in some of the most closed and secret parts of Europa. The rumour mill had it that ore could be found down there, not just water and vapours.

It had been late in the day, in the week even, so Vic and his teammates had felt the weight of long hours of work. One of the men lost the control of his drill. The pressure behind the ice wall had come out in a deflagration, propelling the men against the pit iced-face.

He lost consciousness on impact, the medical team and his boss giving him later an explanation and the description for what had happened while he had been under. The more he thought about it, the more he was certain. He did not only lose consciousness at the time, he also lost part of his mind. Of his memories.

The old doc had been insistent in having Vic talking about what he remembered of the incident. He also had hinted more than once about the miners past, older memories of childhood and family.

With the discomfort of his legs, the one in his mind grew higher. Vic's memories had been more than blurry in the recent days. Some mornings, he woke up disoriented, looking for something in his place that looked odd and inauspicious.

***

"So..." Rinda was looking at Vic with inquisitive eyes. "How's this leg going?"

The man hesitated to answer. Not that he did not know what to say. He just hesitated between cynicism and honesty. The woman was aware of the stiffness in the leg, and she could see the slightly twisted face he made. So, she was conscious of his discomfort, knowing that he felt no pain.

"Looks good anyway," she continued before he could give his response. "The arm also seems okay. It's the good point of these new cyber-limbs. They integrate quite well with the rest of the body."

Vic was reminded, one more time, of what he lost during the dreadful events in Europa. Adding to, probably, his job, more recently, part of his memories, and surely part of his mind, he had lost, at first, a leg and an arm. To frostbite. Nothing could have been salvaged, he had been told, due to the extreme cold and the rip on his gear after the impact, his members had been exposed to sub-zero hellish temperature and they almost stayed stuck to the pit walls.

The man had to learn how to live with metal parts on his body now. His new appendages seemed to work properly. He did not find any issue moving them around, and the response time between his command and the motion was almost instantaneous. As if the new limbs were part of the original body.

"I'm okay, Rin," Vic answered flatly, "I'm getting used to it, and it doesn't make too much difference compared to before... It's just a bit stiff, a bit of discomfort, but I still can walk and stuff..." After saying those words, he went back, in his mind, to this little square of snow and ice he was found off, tuning down everything around him.

The session ended faster than he imagined. Not that he had been aware of the time passing, basking in the cold field of his imagination. He rushed back home, feeling overwhelmed by his surroundings. He wanted to get back to the frosted landscape in his mind, to the comfort of the glacial environment.

The following two weeks passed in a blurry motion for Vic. Every morning, he woke up feeling down. He was missing something he could not really identify. It was like he could see it at the corner of his vision, though, when turning the head, it disappeared.

His nights were populated with dreams of vast icy lands, of merry chase in the white fluff, of piercing, numbing cold. He thirsted this, like a dying man in desert, dreaming of water.

He was soon back on the doc's couch, the older man's eyes pining him with intensity and expectation. What he was looking for, Vic wondered.

"So... any changes since last time we met? New dreams perhaps?"

Remaining stoic at the doc's question was more and more difficult for the younger man. The dreams had felt real, as if he experienced them in the past. Although he had had experience of snow run on Europa, the sights of his nightly visits were different. For once, the clothes he wore were different, foreign, and yet, the pelts and furs felt natural to him. There was also the case of the pointy metal parts he had in his hands during his nocturnal activities, though he kept this on the back of his mind, not wanting to try and interpret what it could mean.

"I had some new dreams, indeed," he responded to the doctor's question. "I started reading a story about a strange journey in a stranger snow country... This gave me some weird dreams..." He was trying to rationalise his wandering mind images as much as he answered the old man.

Vic felt he was losing his mind. Explaining the dreams with a fertile imagination after a good read was his way to cope and try gaining back a form of control on his life. He needed it as much as the cold.

The doctor continued to ask him questions about his time on Europa, his colleagues and the mining. Then he came to his past, his family, his memories. The questions flew rapidly, letting him almost no time to think and he started to doubt his answers. His mind became so foggy, he almost could not understand what he older man was saying. Vic was falling apart, slowly, but surely.

A month later, Vic's mental health was going downward rapidly.

At first, he had felt slightly disturbed by his dreams. The accident had taken a huge part in it, mixed with images of hunting elusive preys in snowstorms and blizzard. Every night, he relived the same sequence of events. A merry walk on the icy plains, some joke exchanged with a colleague or two, then the descent in the pit. Finally the explosion.

After a week, the glacial sights shadowed by Jupiter's mass transformed into snowy landscape lighted by a strange ribbon of green and gold light. The joke sounded like primitive gargle. The decent in the pit, a slide along a deep slope. Then, the darkness.

Every morning, Vic woke up in shiver. It took longer for him to recover a semblance of control over his shaky members, as the days passed. The line between imagination and fact became blurrier, also.

The man turned into a recluse, getting confused with any aspects of his daily life. When the fog settled low on his mind, he could almost not understand what was said on the tele.

He had received numerous calls from the Doc and Rinda. He did not follow with his appointments. He stopped taking his medication, the one supposed to ensure his body would not reject the cybernetic additions. Or so, they said.

***

"Open the door!" The banging was incessant. Irritating and frightening.

"We're coming in!" The door opened. The Doc was there, with another man, a tool of sort in his hands.

"Vic, what happened?" The stern voice of the older man had a hint of shock in it. Taking in the look of the pseudo hermit, he tried not to frighten him more, acting and talking as one would with a wild animal, or a hurt one.

An animal, Vic resembled, indeed. Dishevelled, a few-weeks-old beard, crumpled clothes that he obviously did not change for quite some time. The situation in the room was similar as the man's. Table overturned, TV broken, the lights were off and the curtained tightly drawn on the windows. The younger man was obviously in a state of advanced depression.

Soon enough, the doctor realised he would not be able to approach and reason with the other man easily. Taking of his phone, he hit a key and exchanged few words when the person on the other side answered.

Vic was worried of these men who appeared in his room. He seemed to remember the older one, the fog in his head dissolving slightly. Huddled in a corner, he observed anxiously his surroundings. The older man was talking to a strange contraption in his hand, words lost to him. The other one had left the room.

After a moment, a newcomer made her appearance. The woman looked familiar to the frightened man. As she spoke to him, her words made way to his confused spirit.

"What's happening, Rinda?" Vic realised his handle on reality was slim. "Am I getting crazy? It feels like I don't remember things, most of the time. All seems foreign... And my leg bothers me to no end. It feels like it doesn't belong..."

It was the first time the man talked so much, his control over his feature and speech flown out the windows. It was a sure sign for him that he was losing it. The more he thought about it, all started after the incident in the mine on Europa. The doctor explained it was probably some post traumatic syndrome disorder, something he needed to learn to control and overcome. He was in a dire situation, though nothing irreversible if he worked on it.

His predicament, Vic was certain, arose with the cybernetic implant he had received.

The time passing was of no help for him. The Doc and Rinda had tried to help him getting grasp on his emotions, he was not able to recover control. He lost first to his dreams. His nights had been the scene of wild snowy hunts and primitive wars, wearing crude furs and handling with mastery heavy metallic weapons.

His days had slowly, though surely, drowned the rest of his sanity. Anything he heard was alien language. Anything he saw, strange and incomprehensible devices.

In his ransacked apartment, Vic was losing ground on reality.

***

In the shadows, silent men circled the place, some surrounding the door, others on the balcony. The man inside was curled on the floor, covered by layers of sheets and bedspread, hiding from anything and everything.

The sliding door on the gallery opened with a mute woosh. The frightened man dared a gaze and became paralysed by fear.

The jötnar had come for him.

Meanwhile, in the lab, Doc and Rinda were discussing his case.

"He lost all control. We could not afford to let him continue this way." The doctor's voice had a sadness he could not understand. Vic was not the first patient he tried to help after what he experienced, though he had become attached to this one.

"He is still sedated. Do you want to proceed now?" The woman was looking dismally at a monitor. She had been sure this one would have been successful

On the screen, a man was lying on a hospital bed, sound asleep. He looked peaceful. It was but apparent if the readings on the machine was to be believed. His brain activity denoted a grave agitation. Probably a nightmare.

As if getting out of a trance, the doctor looked at the woman and exited the room. Rinda followed him throw the dim-lighted corridors to the vault. This area, hidden in the depth of the facility, always gave her shivers. Although, the cold temperature of the chambers was not always the reason.

"We will prepare him for the cryogenic tank," the doctor interrupted her wandering mind about the glacial hell that she was entering.

"What about the body?" The woman looked at him inquisitively.

Passing a metallic door, the two scientists entered a small room lined up with racks of protective clothing. They went through a routine of decontamination before opening another gate on the opposite wall. The frozen atmosphere reminded Rinda of those classic horror stories, where a mad scientist awaited the reader around the page.

The doctor activated some levers on a console near the entrance. The light spread over the equipment. On a side, the wall seemed to advance towards the middle of the room. Lines of storage shelves expended, providing an easy access to each of them.

A compartment opened in the moving structure, displaying a glass cylinder, the size of a five gallon water bottle. Inside rested a metal ball covered in cables and tubes.

The woman observed the rack with cylinders stored in line. Tags were displayed on the top of each container. Her eyes roamed some of them, "Otzi (-34)", "Doncella (16)", "Juanita (15)"... many names and numbers attached to many cylinders.

A younger man in a white robe entered the room, holding a small box in his hand, fumes coming out of it. The doctor directed him to the aisle where Rinda was observing the tubes. The newcomer opened the cylinder, taking out the metal ball. Working fast, he took with grave concentration the content of the box, settling it in the centre of the ball and connecting the cables. As he was putting the contraption inside the cylinder and closing the compartment, the woman looked at the conductive goo filled the tank, a certain sadness invading her.

"The body has been sent to the cybernetic team, as you asked," the man called in direction of the doctor while getting a tag from his pocket. Turning to the cylinder, he added it at the top.

"King (13)", Rinda read the nameplate. "Have pleasant dreams of your snowy plains, mister Vic King. I hope to see you soon..."