Eternal Mind

I said I was ready. A year ago I was broke and signed up for a scientific trial. At first it was just for the money until it became more than just the money. I became a family with everyone else who was part of the trial and we all had our own accommodations in the facility we were being tested at. Everyday I woke up and everyday I went though wellbeing classes. I had to make my body fit. For what? I was never told. Me and several others competed in tests of mental strength and bodily strength to see how long we could go without eating, breathing, sleeping. We were never told why. At some point one by one we were all called for the trial till I was last. It wasn't until the day the scientists and doctors in their lab coats told me it was my turn that they admitted to me what they had been researching. Cryogenic freezing. At first I was shocked this whole time everyone before me were just test subjects. They hadn't been released from the trial like I had once thought instead they were killed, tortured and tormented. They weren't strong enough to last. I was told that one by one the others were put into the contaminants at first to see which would work best then to see who would last longer. I was one of the lucky few who were tested on in my sleep, though I have no remembrance of it. Apparently I was also the only one who was able to survive. Everyone else in the trials body were not able to handle the freezing process or for many they did but they were still conscious and there was no air for them to breathe. The thing that hurt most about this was that we were all from the street. We had no family, no lovers, no one who would remember us or even look for us once we were gone. It took some time for me to come to terms with this over the years but it's ok now it's all in the past not sure how long that past is but it's the past now. The scientist gave me one last meal of my choice before entering the Cryogenic freezing tube, I choose sushi. The cryogenic freezing machine was basically a large pill that froze my body. I was connected to tubes that kept my blood circulating and oxygen pumping and before I entered they made me breath in some strawberry scented air that was meant to make me fall asleep. Fun Fact it didn't and now i'm here. The first functioning Cryogenic Freezing machine that can keep a human 100 percent alive for as long as whoever on the outside wishes. The doctors never told me how long I would be in there because they just assumed I would either die or wake up in the future but what they didn't know was that I was fully conscious with no way of telling the doctors that they just trapped me in my own body for the next 500 years. Each day the doctors walked by taking notes on clipboards checking my vitals and the temp of the machine. Sometimes doctors and scientists would come to me and just talk about the good times, the bad, there weddings and other prodjects that they were working on. I think they figured they could talk to me as if I was a person who would just listen and not say anything not like I could. Overtime I faded into the background of their daily lives, some still visiting only to check if I had died yet. Darrel was the name of the man who checked in everyday he looked like a kind man he had a wife and 3 kids and and every day he talked to me. I watched overtime as he slowly got older the hunch in his back more prominent the silver streaking his hair till it was all one solid shade the wrinkles that grew more and more obvious, I watched as he wasted away doing the same thing everyday for his entire life till one day he stopped showing up and someone new started taking my vitals. I think Darrel died but how was I to know he hadn't just retired. Guess I'll never know. The new guy wasn't as kind looking as Darrel and he never even bothered to introduce himself. Maybe he thought it was pointless to talk to someone who couldn't reply but it was nice when Darrel talked to me. I wished this new guy would but he never did. And just like Darrel I watched him grow old and one day get replaced. It went on like this for a while before they all just started to fade away into the background. I realized I was going to be here for a while and so I waited, I counted the seconds... the mechanical breaths I took. The thoughts I thought, I was patient and at some point I became patience itself. After all, what could I do trapped in this ice box? You get to know your mind pretty well within the first hundred years or so but who's counting right. Surely not me. Your mind starts to turn on you after you've thought about things for a while and you realize how dark it gets and how lonely it makes you feel. For a while I just wished I could cry. I missed the feeling of hot water running down my body when I showered the sound of birds and rain falling, the smell of the air as autumn rolled around. My mind became an endless chasm, filled with limitless flaws. Every faucet of my mind under one perfect scrutiny. No distraction to halt the perfection it was creating within my own head. Every night and day that passes I could hear the endless clicking of a clock in the distance and shoes on perfectly cleaned floors. I think after a while everyone forgot I existed because at some point people stopped coming by completely. There was no one though I knew they were still around. It's not like I couldn't hear them walking in the distance. I could never tell if they were close or far though. Eventually I was able to learn how to silence my mind and even though I couldn't sleep I was able to find a way that was like sleeping but not. I was able to block out the light of the room I was in and the sounds it carried that reminded me of open caves with dripping water... drip drip drip. It was like sleeping in a complete darkness where you had no ability to move. Like when you were stuck in a sleep paralysis state unable to move as the demons got closer and closer to you. The only difference is my demons were real and those were just a form of lucid dreaming. There was a time when someone would come by just to fix something but that never happened anymore. I tried to push the thoughts away but when you're stuck here like I was you let your mind convince you that what it thinks is true partly because it's your only friend, but that doesn't matter. Right? Just sitting here alone, your mind telling you they're not coming back, they never will. When you entered this state the earth was already dying while wars were only making it worse. It wouldn't have been a surprise if there had been some sort of nuclear fall out and I'm the only one left but what are the chances of that? It's only something from bad dreams and games. Right? I'll never know I am stuck here. What if they just forgot or what if there wasn't any reason to check up on me. Maybe the earth was perfectly fine and there was no need for cryogenic freezing. Maybe just maybe the future was already here and everything was perfect outside of this shell I'm in. These thoughts hunted but kept me going for the longest time and I was never really sure why. Is time as lost for you as it is for me. Then a thought arose briefly almost like seeing something beautiful out of the corner of your but just barely so you ignored it except this was the opposite it was horrifying and even though it came across my mind barely escaping at the speed of light something clicked and I brought it to the front. What if only hours had passed? What if this eternity I was trapped in was nothing but a full 8 hour day like being at school that lasted an eternity and brought the worst and best out of me. What if everything was just a dream that was playing while I was asleep and none of this was real. If I wasn't trapped, and locked away and slowly losing the light within in the ever so consuming darkness that takes over. What if.... ? I know though it was too good to be true, something like this isn't just a dream this is reality and there is nothing that could change the reality that I have gotten myself stuck in a never ending life of losing myself to my mind. A mind that is way beyond human existence and life and is now more then god and more then the power of life itself it is creation itself being stuck here it has grown and mutated beyond the physical world it now lives in the earth around me breathing with the rise and fall of mountains and push and pull on the oceans waves. My memories replayed in my head leading up to the moment I lost everything, the reason I was so desperate to join this "trial". I was running out of thoughts and the voice in my head was running out of breaths. It could have been years or maybe minutes. Madness became enlightenment and then back to madness as my mind would spiral out of control before coming together again repeatedly for eternity. The world around slowly started to change. Once clean floors started to become sickly gross the walls began to crumble and at some point it all fell away and I was left watching nature. Except it was different, these mountains were not familiar to me. They were larger and more beautiful than anything I had ever seen, the color of the leaves and grass, the strange animals I saw moving around me. Maybe this was because I hadn't seen what the earth looked like for years. Maybe it really had changed in the way I hoped it wouldn't. It was obvious something had occurred while I was here and the earth was able to recreate itself in a new way. It was beautiful. I am writing, well the correct term is thinking this because I am conscious. I have accepted that I can't move. I've made peace with myself at least I think I have. Is this the future I thought I would find myself in when I dreamed of being an astronaut standing on the moon or when I pretended to be a dinosaur devouring cities in my backyard with my parents. Oh how I missed my parents. Being in their arms and having them hold me close kiss my wounds to make the ouchies go away. They were amazing parents and I love them. They're probably dead too. I wish I had been able to speak to them before I entered this icebox of never ending thought. I guess I'm ok... I think. The world is pretty. When can I come out? I miss the world I really really do. Sometimes I think I can hear a piano playing and I'm teleported into a world where I'm the richest person with the biggest house and a ballroom filled with people of all time periods dancing elegantly to the best of the best historic music dressed in the most magnificent dresses and enchating suits everyone wearing masks as if its a masquerade. It's all fun until someone falls and there mask slips then you realize there all faceless and croud of gasping faceless beings crowding around the one person who couldn't keep it together the one person who fell apart who couldn't be part of the group the one that stood out and I watched in horror as my mind turned a once beautiful place within it into a gruesome scene from horror movie as every being in the party ripped and teared the one person who was different apart only for a common mistake. This was the reality of being stuck in your mind day after day season after season minute after second after time. I fell more and more into a madness that only for brief seconds was intervened by a fancy moment in time that isn't real. Nothing is real. Nothing ever will be. It hasn't been real from the start. Why couldn't I have been set free before the world fell apart. Why couldn't they just kill me and end this everlasting torment I feel being trapped in my own head. Is it even mine anymore. Sometimes I'm so lost I think that the body I was once able to interact with doesn't exist anymore. I can't see it, so how do I know it's still there? It probably isn't. Iv probably been dead for years at least in body while my mind has been glued to this place I will never be able to leave. But maybe... just maybe I was able to peel my mind from this place. Become a part of the earth and see and feel everything and all the wonders it has to share. Time is an endless and never fleeting thing that lives on for eternity with my mind being trapped within it. I feel myself pulling away peeling from the body that I was part of. There's no looking back. I'm about to be free. Just let me be free. I can't be stuck here in this time pocket forever. No more just let me be free from the pain that won't stop. The light that I begged for for so long now comes directly at me as I'm pulling the last parts of my mind free. I'm free. IM FREEEEEEEE

"I'm free" I feel my lips move as my body starts to warm up from my everlasting conscious slumber.

I hear the faint mumbling of people's voices but I can't make anything out. I can't see anything. It's all too fuzzy. Then I hear the sound I'm ever so familiar to from all those doctor shows I once watched when I was younger. I've been set free and there's was nothing anyone could do to bring me back to the body that tortured me for so long. I turn to look once more at my demise, a machine far too advanced for this timeline staring back at me. I turn to leave, stopping to make out the last words of my good friend Darrel. "Subject 24834, time of death 11:59 pm January 1st 2021. Initial trial started 12:00 pm of December 31st".

My last thought was a simple one. My torture that dragged on and felt as though it was lasting forever hadn't even been a full day. I turned to leave, hearing the clock strike 12 and the last note of Beethoven's Sonata .14 "Moonlight" ring out...