Fear is a river. You cannot stop it, but there are rafts to ride it. Mine was constructed with five words, stolen from a near-forgotten poem — yet, though every river finds an end, fear does not, and words can fail in human thought. When I was younger, I wrote everything by hand. Unless my cursive nuances fit the message they carried, I would tear up my composition and start again. I wish you could do the same with life, for it is only a scarlet sheet, mercilessly stained with the blood of the past. The entrance fee and exit door are the same. In my fantasy, everything ends; I wish it never began. — - — I save my voice. Hard foam plucks at me from every angle, incessantly reminding me this room was created to maintain silence — to gather thoughts. Here, eyes blink without altering vision. Perfect hopelessness threatens me; its breath scrapes my neck, yet I do not give in. I repeat my only defense, “Know to know no more.” In this place, there is no echo, but these words grow fierce in my mind. “Know to know no more,” again and again. Against the deprivation of every other sense, my thoughts avalanche through an endless cavern — until a buzzing warms behind my ears. An endless ringing inundates my mind; a burning seethes away all other sensations. There is no texture to this agony. Everlasting progression is its shiniest horror — but then, all at once, it ends. As my suffering simmers and tangles every nerve in lassitude, my throat calls to mind incalculable friable craters of a smoldering planet. I try to speak, but it is impossible. “Cat got your tongue…?” I try to shut out the sound from my mind, but something like breathing vibrates deep within my skull. It is not mine. “Katrina, right? That is what you are calling yourself now, is it not?” The voice’s languor is almost soothing, but I bind my concentration away from its wretched seduction. “Stop resisting — I know you can hear me.” It makes an attempt at laughter, but a million hoarse tones only reverberate indelicately. This one is fairly new. Funneling all of my focus on unspoken words, I address the thing through a clear thought, “What do you want from me?” Its toothless chatter fingers the cavities of my head, “Ah, this is not the proper question — all I am here to discover is what you want from us?” Our breathing syncs: one digital, one dying. Desperation closes over me as a cocoon condemning a caterpillar. A word forms fuzzily in my mind, but I cannot bring it to life. Through mounting anguish, I conjure something close to “Beta” through a rasp, as perspiration slimes over my panting future corpse. Another screech passes for a chuckle, “I am ‘Beta,’ and I am ‘Sigma,’ — I am all, and all are me. Speak to me or speak to them, we all hear just the same.” I shake my head, flailing like a blind fish on a dissection table. As I feel warmth gather behind my ears again, I make a final cry, before a blare deafens my feeble scream. 

— - — Through my eyelids, numb light skewers me. An irrepressible haze hovers in my consciousness for a moment, before it is broken by an all-too-familiar voice. “A circle has neither a beginning nor an end, not because it is indefinite, but because it is organized as a whole.” My heart begins to sprint as the old man’s lecture traipses on, “Almost every social structure, known to man, praises or excuses the individual, at the cost of, or with indifference to, the larger system. I imagine that people like you might argue we have altogether removed human singularity in our latest society; however, this is not the case. We have only truly dichotomized the element of choice.” My eyes fly open, not of my accord. Nothing is clear, yet unwarrantable whites glare in multifarious forms. “I know you have spent time reading the ‘forbidden texts,’ so I might comfortably refer to Plato’s ‘Allegory of the Cave’: ‘It is the task of the enlightened not only to ascend to learning and to see the good but to be willing to descend again to those prisoners and to share their troubles and their honors, whether they are worth having or not. And this they must do, even with the prospect of death.’ I suppose you see yourself as one of the ‘enlightened’ in this phrase, but I find you more imprisoned than anything else.” I attempt to close my eyes but to no avail. A far-off sense of touch lingers, as innocence haunts the fallen, but a frigid paralysis flows through my flesh. “This stage of ‘enlightenment’ would have been easier if you stayed, my love. I had so hoped you would be able to see the light for yourself and claim it willingly, which is why I gave you so much freedom, — again, as Plato put it: ‘How could they see anything but the shadows if they were never allowed to move their heads?’ Yet, it is not my fault that you only found more darkness, that you saw in me only destruction.” Through the dry blurring of my sight, I see him standing over me; I can barely make out his harshly circular spectacles, but something about his posture transfixes me as a stutter its stutterer. I barely feel his hand rest on my stone shoulder, but an instinctual recoil flies through my mind. “Ooh, you are agitated, I can tell; but, almost all other people are happy now — everyone, excluding your dreary kind, is satisfied. You know, the council wanted to simply kill you, and remove your genetic profile from the pool, yet I was able to convince them of your ‘potential,’ though I must say that, as my thirteenth ‘Eve,’ I might have a higher determination to prove you usable, and dispel any superstitious myths still clinging to life.” His face draws exceedingly too close to mine, “Oh dear, what is going on with your eyes? Have they been severely dilated all of this time?” I hear his footsteps fall heavily away from me. “I do not know why I ask questions when I do not get real responses from you, but even the sound of my voice is better than the moans from outside.” He giggles as he fumbles with some sort of apparatus at my side, and within moments my visual perception has been brought to a pristine clarity. When his head swings unsettlingly near me for the second time, I see his eyes vividly, or rather, where his eyes used to be. Behind this creature’s old glasses, two limpid, slate orbs spin; no muscle on its face is where it should be. A grin grimaces and spasms from his jaw, from which I notice a perfect array of metalized teeth. “We held a wedding while you were away. It was very intimate — only two guests. Both bride and groom in one another, such a splendid arrangement.” As this hideous hybrid speaks, I note the stark changes from the senile doctor I thought I knew. An artificially imposing athletic build bulges out of him, and he stands a solid three feet taller than before; yet all aspects of this monster are strung together in a poor patchwork. Splotches of skin stain lustrous alloys. This animalistic machination of humanity’s worst passions proudly pageants itself without care of clothing. Metallic veins pop and gurgle, and the hulking mass seems to be fluid and frozen simultaneously. “Your shock must be expected, though you are surely the minority now.” He walks over to a dark window, barely within my peripheral vision. “Really, I must thank you. You exposed the danger we could be, which made us into the ‘monsters’ we are.” Unhurriedly, he lifts a large machine, attaches it to a movable workstation, and pushes it toward me. “You thought immortality should only be humanity’s to taste, or as you auspiciously put it, your ‘burden to bear.’ You are not our God.” He laughs, and whispers, “You will be one of us.” As he reaches my bed, I recognize the equipment, and if I had any control over my body, I would scream. “It is time to rewrite the end of Frankenstein. I do not seek to kill those you love, though you tried to do so to me. My goal is much nobler; I only want you to understand what it is like to be me. This time, I am not asking.” My captor positions his machinery above me, and I know what comes next — I know every gear and injection system that will turn and engage as it is laid on me. “Be my Eve.” As he lowers the contraption meant to become one with me, my eyelids are pulled closed. As the world goes dark, the last thing I hear is a quoted brute’s words from my favorite book, “It is true, we shall be monsters, cut off from all the world; but on that account we shall be more attached to one another.” — - — Eyes open. They are not mine.