Sitting in my living room trying to come up with a good idea for a scary story. I love a good scary story, so I thought it should be relatively easy to write one, but here I sit with a complete mental block. I decided to just give up and put on the TV instead when I felt sudden sharp pain in my head, like an ice pick was digging into my brain. Then I heard it…. A woman’s voice coming from nowhere.
“Adam, come look at this!” She exclaimed.
I continued to listen as the disembodied female voice spoke to the man she called Adam.
“Look at the monitor! I’ve never seen activity like this!” She said excitedly.
“Oh shit…” I heard a surprised male voice say. “We need to alert the rest of the team.”
“Wait, just wait a second, I want to see what happens if I do it again.” She said.
I could hear what sounded like typing… and then BAM, shooting ice pick pain in my head again. This time it was so bad my vision went completely white and my ears began ringing so loud I feared it would never stop.
“Oh my god…” The man’s voice nearly shouted. “I’ve never seen that happen either! What did you do Marra?”
“This one still dreams, as far as I know it is the only one that does. When it dreams it’s auditory cortex spikes, much more than they usually do, as if it’s actually trying to listen to something in the real world. I thought maybe if I tried to trigger the same effect we would see a response…. And look! It’s acting as if it’s listening to something!” Marra was speaking a mile a minute, clearly excited about what she had discovered.
I jumped off the couch in a panic.
“Hello!? Who’s there?,” I began shouting.
“Adam look at this, another spike! It looks like it’s trying to communicate with us!” Marra cried out.
“What the fuck is going on!?”, I cried out to the empty room. I tried to cover my ears but nothing changed.
“Ummm hi there…. If you can hear me think of a happy memory, okay?” Marra asked.
I did as instructed, too shocked not to simply comply.
“Very good! Look Adam, look at her hippocampus now!” Marra was so excited now her voice was an octave higher than before.
“Marra come on, this is impossible. It can’t possibly hear you. It doesn’t even have ears!” Adam said.
“Then maybe there is more too all of this than science can explain,” Marra snapped back. “Maybe this is proof of consciousness beyond that of the senses. Maybe our bodies just use our 5 senses as a way to filter out extraneous information in our waking lives!” She was practically shouting at him now.
“Been working on that theory for a while now huh Marra?” Adam asked her sounding half condescending and half intrigued.
“Ummm HELLO!!!” I shouted. “Can someone please tell me what the fuck is going on?” I screamed to the voices.
“Adam look at the monitor!, it is trying to communicate with us! These spikes are much stronger than the usual ones we’ve seen from the other subjects. She’s not simply interacting with the program. She’s actually becoming aware! This has never happened before!” Marra cried.
“It, Marra… it’s not a “she” anymore. This is unusual, I’ll give you that. But don’t let yourself get too invested in this. It could just be a fluke.” Adam said.
“A FLUKE? Really, are you not seeing what I’m seeing here Adam?” She asked him.
Absolutely freaking out now, I felt compelled to run. I ran outside and kept running as fast as I could. I could still hear some woman named Marra asking me to think of certain memories, and some guy named Adam arguing with her but this time I ignored her requests and just continued to run.
I ran until I noticed something that stopped me dead in my tracks. I watched as a massive tree began to glitch in and out of existence, and then it was just gone.
I watched as the entire world around me glitched in and out of existence until I was left in complete darkness.
“Hello!?” I cried out.
Nothing. I could no longer hear the two voices. I was alone in a pitch black, empty void. I cannot describe to you the panic I felt in that moment.
“What on earth!?” I finally heard another voice say.
“Oh my god, she disconnected from the program!” This time it was Marra’s voice that spoke again.
“How is this possible?” Said the new voice I didn’t recognize.
I listened in the darkness as Marra tried to explain the experiment she had been working on, the one that had allowed me to “hear” their voices.
“But it doesn’t have ears, it’s just a brain in a fucking box.” The man said.
As the overlapping voices continued I realized the horrific truth. Having been “disconnected from the program” as Marra had stated; I began to remember the horrific truth. There was a catastrophic event on earth that had wiped out most of humanity. The minds of those whose bodies were dying were harvested and placed into boxes filled with cerebral spinal fluid to keep them “alive.”
There were only a few ships capable of deep space travel at the time. Even if they found a planet to colonize, most of the people left alive would be too old to repopulate. Apparently there were not enough resources on the ships to begin the process of repopulation until they found a suitable planet.
They were keeping our minds alive hooked into a virtual reality, a simulation of the planet before it was destroyed. They were attempting to regrow human bodies, hoping to use them as hosts for the living minds once they reached a safe planet.
Apparently I was the first to become aware of this…. Or to remember this, I should say. That I am nothing but a brain inside a box, waiting.
I don’t know why I didn’t remember any of this. Or what they did to me to make me forget. Unfortunately it seems I cannot forget again. I wish I could.
My connection to the simulation was reestablished and I found myself back on the couch with the first few lines of a story written on my computer. At least that cured my mental block as I wrote this story fast as my fingers could type it.
I wonder if there’s anyone out there who knows the truth. That this world is a recreated simulation of the one we knew. That we are simply brains in a box; just waiting to be whole again.
What happens if they don’t find a new planet in time? What happens if the rest of the living humans die before we can be given new bodies? What happens if there is no one left to keep the simulation running? Will we be left floating through space indefinitely? Trapped alone inside that void of blackness?
Please…. I need to know, does anyone else remember?