"'..and I cant stop what has begun..'"

"A..new life. A Second Life, if you will.."

"'When everything is said and done..'"

I shudder. I nod.

"'And there is no place left to run..'"

"The process will be painful. You are warned."

"'I could have been someone..'"

"I want to remember nothing."

"'Now I just stare into the Sun..'"

 

"We grant you this. However, there will be traces of your former self. Echoes."

I laughed out loud at the beautiful creature before me, or I did, after my own fashion. Laughing without a tongue had always been difficult. I kept right on laughing through the procedure, through the pain of the wires and tubes being reinserted into my body. Tears of mirth streamed down my ruined cheeks and my hysteria did not abate, even as the feeding apparatus was forced down my throat. I remember shaking, crying, laughing against the tang of metal and rubber. I fluttered my eyes open, greeting the slimy, pinkish liquid filling my pod and gagged and laughed.

There will be echoes, he said...it was hysterical, appropriate, perverse. Echoes. Shadows. Fygments of my imagination. I kept my eyes open as long as I could, gagging and laughing, opening up to the blinding white light of a real Sun.

------------------------------------------------------

Lilly woke up in a hospital bed somewhere in the International district. Alarms and buzzers wailed and a platoon of white-coated doctors and flowery-garbed nurses rushed into the small sterile room.

They asked her questions, they shouted over the alarms, they tried to restrain her, they shot her up with some morphine to calm her racing heart, they dabbed the droplets of blood and spittle from her mouth and chin.

Through it all she laughed a high-pitched, hearty, belly-rumbling blast of mirth.

She laughed like a madwoman, tears streaking down her cheeks.

She laughed hard enough to tear her throat.

She laughed until she turned blue.

She laughed and did not know why.

She laughed like a person who had lived a lifetime of agony first tasting the bliss of freedom.

 

(Lyrics from Sunspots, Nine Inch Nails)