Barely Surviving // TWD // Daryl Dixon #Wattys2016

Chapter 6 -- Countdown

"Doctor, I don't mean to slam you with questions first thing," Dale started.

"But you will anyway."

"We didn't come here for the eggs," Dale said simply.

After we were done with our breakfast Jenner led us to another room full of computers and specialised machines. I stayed next to Sophia the whole time. Carl stood next to us.

"Give me playback of TS-19," Jenner said to VI. "Few people ever got a chance to see this. Very few."

Suddenly a screen was on. It had a computerized version of a person's head, their brain was a bit brighter than the rest of the body.

"Is that a brain?" Carl asked.

"An extraordinary one," Jenner replied. "Not that it matters in the end. Take us in for E.I.V..

Then we saw the brain with more details and even inside of it, nerves working, or that's what I assumed I was seeing as several blue lights stared to flash in it very fast.

"What are those lights?" Shane asked.

"It's a person's life – experiences, memories. It's everything. Somewhere in all that organic wiring, all those ripples of light, is you. The thing that makes you unique and human."

"You don't make sense ever?" Daryl said, obviously not understanding anything of what he said. "Those are synapses, electric impulses in the brain that carry all the messages. They determine everything a person says does or thinks from the moment of birth to the moment of death."

"Death? That's what this is, a vigil?" Rick said, taking a few steps forward.

"Yes," Jenner said nodding. "Or rather the playback of the vigil."

"This person died?" I couldn't help but ask.

"This person was bitten and infected and volunteered to have us record the process. VI, scan forward to the first event."

Then we saw how the computerized brain started to turn a bit black and how these new 'lights' but from other colour, got into the brain.

"What is that?" Glenn asked.

"It invades the brain like meningitis. The adrenal glands haemorrhage, the brain goes into shutdown, then the major organs," Jenner said as the brain went completely black and apparently lifeless. "Then death. Everything you ever were or ever will be... Gone."

"Is that what happened to Jim?" Sophia asked me.

"Yes," I said nodding.

Then Andrea's eyes started to fill with tears. Lori told Jenner she had just lost her sister a few days ago. He nodded sadly.

"I lost somebody too. I know how devastating it is," he told her. "Scan to the second event."

I turned to look from Andrea and Jenner to Daryl, who was already looking at me. He looked away quickly and pretended he wasn't looking at me. He had been weird since breakfast, I couldn't believe he was avoiding me and if he was, why would he? We were okay last night, yeah we had a little argument but then he carried me all the way to the room. What's his problem?

"The resurrection times vary wildly. We had reports of it happening in as little as three minutes. The longest we heard of was eight hours. In the case of this patient, it was two hours, one minute, seven seconds."

In the lifeless and black brain some red faint glows started to appear but they were only in the lower part of the brain.

"It restarts the brain?" Lori asked.