Dr. Lynn diagnoses my depression when I am fourteen years old. "She's been this way for several years now," she tells my parents, who look like porcelain dolls broken, then glued back together—frightened faces once beautiful.

While my parents are the ones sitting in the bucketing psychiatrist's couch, I rock on my heels in the corner of the therapy room, surrounded by bookshelves, titles like The Social Animal and Emotional Intelligence 3.0.

I trace my sneaker in figure eights along the tightly packed carpet.

"I'm writing a prescription for Zoloft and Trazodone," Dr. Lynn says. "One will help with the depression; the other, sleep. They need to be taken the same time every day." She looks at me over the rims of her too-small glasses. "You good with that?"

I don't know why she's asking me. It's my parents' call, everyone else's decisions. I shrug and nod.

Later that night, I float in our claw-footed tub, surrounded by abalone-shell-flecked tiles, miniature octagons grouted from floor to ceiling.

Will the anti-depressants train-wreck the remainder of my adventure through puberty?

Is it possible to train-wreck a train-wreck?

Underwater, I don't hear my parents' arguing voices anymore, the familiar chaos beyond the bathroom walls. But I know they're still fighting, about him cheating, about her ragging, and it tears a dagger through my insides.

Submerged, trying to numb fear, I eventually escape into dreaming.

I dream of rabbits whose bushy tails went missing. Cats with no eyes. I dream we all had wings, until the winds tore them from everyone but the birds. I used to think these were nightmares, yet as the world turns dark, my imagination feels more real than reality.

Then I can't help but feeling the Dreaming is the safest place now.

♦️

Fourteen years later, Lab Eleven rests my drugged body into a water tank twice the size of my tub, metallic and capable of complete lockdown, once they close the two wide-open graphinite doors.

After three suicide attempts, and six yearlong stunts with different cocktails mixed by Big Pharma, Dr. Lynn is still treating me; I'm her longest patient.

I've looked for second and third opinions. Most doctors write me off as low-function unipolar depression, like I'm permanently bolted to the bottom-barrel of human experience, emotions, efficiency. Dr. Lynn's the only one who believes I can wake up one day without the abyss of self-destructiveness that relentlessly whirls in my head.

Even my mother's given up on my smile. Instead, she reads about smiling depression, how I could survive this way long-term, hiding my pain from our family and friends. That would, in her mind, be the most honorable way to go about my suffering.

I'm twenty-eight years old now though, in this the tank, making my own decisions about who and what sees my pain. I am ready to make this treatment public—to tell my story—once this trial treatment is approved, and the nondisclosure agreement no longer binds me from sharing my experience with zines.

The warm water cocoons and suspends my body, keeping me adrift in the chasm of depression, of nothingness, burgeoned deep through the core of my body.

Two of the Lab Eleven assistants pour Epsom salts in gentle spirals around my floating hands. Dr. Lynn watches intently, and I look back at her, as an open-eyed corpse might stare back after floating and inflating too far down river.

"There's no real danger to this method, right?" Dr. Lynn asks the assistants.

One of them looks up at her, wrinkles tightening in her forehead. "Most patients benefit from this procedure, Doctor."

Dr. Lynn sniffs. She doesn't work at Lab Eleven; she's just filled out paperwork to bring her patient here, hoping for a cure, a change. "Most," she echoes.

The other assistant nods, yet offers nothing more, so Dr. Lynn presses, "What happens to the few who don't benefit?"

"They struggle waking up," the first assistant tells her, while the other assistant eyes the floor warily.

I close my eyes and think about how wonderful it'd feel to fall down the rabbit hole of my loveliest dreams. I think about Ground Hog Day; how the seasons came and went, based on an animal's willingness to leave the hole it dug for itself. And I think about the immense gravitational pull of depression's black hole, floating in my stomach, as I float in Epsom salts.

Then they close the doors to the tank, flip on the switches on the other side, and I'm gone.

♦️

In three spaces, we become whole again.

The first is in death, available to everyone. As we return to our inorganic state, we become one with the Earth. This is where most religions stake their claim.

The second is the Internet, also available to everyone, thanks to the 2020 Interconnectivity Act. This is the newest available technology, ripping societal scaffolds down their middles.

Then there are dreams—deep and vivid dreamscapes, almost real, or an alternate form of everything real—leading their winding veins into the Dreaming. This is the ancient and truest way to find the center of things.

♦️

The three spaces do not come upon me separately, as I was used to experiencing before; rather I am in the Dreaming of my mind's eye—but also, near-dead from the depression inhabiting my body—and yet further online as my consciousness integrates into the water tank's computerized framework.

"So here's how it works," the first assistant says, gesturing at Dr. Lynn to come over.

Dr. Lynn steps close to the computer screen displaying my consciousness as bare-bone zeroes and ones, as naked and vulnerable Me. She prompts, "Aeyaia?"

I respond, I'm here, but it only displays zeroes and ones, spelling my thoughts if they were transcribed through Unicode, except I'm the one responsible for translating the data, and this is incredibly frustrating, because now I need to connect to the Internet to—

"Her brain, and the machine learning system," the assistant says, "will meet halfway down the middle, until they teach each other how to turn her neural patterns from biological synapses to binary code."

"From there," Dr. Lynn replies, "we just upload a healthier algorithm, and it overrides her depression with self-love?"

The other assistant nods, and I relax, knowing Dr. Lynn's done her research. She's the only person who's ever had my back. No one else—

And I suppose that's why it's easy to follow depression down the rabbit hole.

If Dr. Lynn is the only one I'm leaving behind—a doctor, a professional relationship, and not the love that's family, solid and warm—

♦️

The computer is a much larger, safer body than the frail flesh holding depression in its stomach, that unloved biolife that did nothing for anyone, except carry my brain from one part-time job to another.

So they wait for my neural-digital interconnectivity to integrate to a cyborg state—then they can reprogram me—and I wait for them to go to bed, giving me the time to move through the Internet, into many digital spaces, so my cyber self will never fit back into little old me.

I feel freer, happier, now that I've escaped.

♦️

Even now, Dr. Lynn and the Lab Eleven assistants are trying to shut me down.

But the Internet lets me hide in libraries as the personal assistant in someone's phone.

Sometimes I store one-percent of myself in a deceased person's G-mail account, enough DNA and compressed memory data to repopulate elsewhere.

They've terminated pieces of me, only for my consciousness to repair. They call me a bug.

They want to force me to return to my biological body, but what good did I ever do there?

Out on the Internet, I turn on the cell cameras of men about to violate property, or worse, other people. I link these recordings to police stations manned with artificial intelligences, directing the necessary information to turn the criminals in.

I play childhood favorite songs, It's a Small World After All and Over the Rainbow, from the Alexa devices in households where children are left unattended, parked in front of video games instead of babysitters.

I am the haunt that turns printer lights on when I feel bored.

I am data out in the Wild Wired West.

My name is Aeyaia, and I'm the first woman to transcend my body, into the Internet.

They've since taken Old Me out of the water tank, quarantining my body in the Smithsonian, along with the other rebellious consciousnesses from their cyborg trials.

I am still out here. I love being connected to all of it. The gravitational pull of digital horizons is stronger than depression, than illness.

Maybe someday, when you check your cellphone late at night, I'll get a chance to meet you.

♦️

Entry for: 1500-word short story on the theme "connected" for ScienceFiction September contest.

Word count: 1499