Project Excessus

Part I, Chapter I

“How long was that period of time?” I pressed.

I received no answer for exactly twenty three seconds. “One hundred years and sixty-eight years.”

If I was alive, the room would have been spinning. But at that moment, I could not even hyperventilate. I could not even be allowed the simple task of feeling some sense of humanity.

Taking a deep breath, I looked at my hands that twisted nervously in my lap.

My once golden skin had turned translucent, and almost seemed as though there were a hint of metallic to the hue, as if my blood had also turned into metal. I looked back up at the team of doctors, still staring at me with wide eyes.

“I . . . .” At a loss for words, I took a moment to myself. “My heart doesn’t beat?” I inquired. They all nodded slowly. “How?”

I tried to inconspicuously find a pulse by casually rubbing my neck as I waited for an answer, though to no avail. I just felt the need to prove them wrong, that I was still alive somehow.

“The procedures we have done,” one of them said. “We never predicted you would come back to life.”

“How do you feel?” another of them said, the young woman, and came to my bedside. Her pale blonde hair was pulled into a tight bun, with thick glasses hiding her liquid silver eyes.

“Like I just woke up from a deep sleep,” I replied.

“Well, I am going to safely assume that’s good,” she said with a slight chuckle. “I am going to check all your vitals now . . . . Well, at least all the vitals I can check.” She handed me a small smile.

She began to check different things, pressed a stethoscope to my heart, checked my ears, and so forth, therefore I decided to braid my jet black hair patiently, then impatiently.

It had once been long, but someone had chopped it off just below my ear. Personally, I liked it shorter.

“I do not have to breathe?” I asked the lady once again. She nodded.

“You no longer have the need to,” she clarified. “You can still breathe, though. It’s just not necessary.”

I held my breath, and found I did not become dizzy. “That is . . . interesting,” I responded cautiously, hoping that I would not say something wrong. “What are the other benefits?”

“Improved strength, agility, and speed are just some,” she answered. “However, your body will need to be pumped with the element Thulium once a week. It will give you the energy to survive.” I wondered for a moment how they knew so much about what I would need to do and how I would now live, but then brushed it off.

Pulling myself out of the bed, I tried a back handspring. I landed it easily, and earned a few gasps from the team of doctors.

“How can she do that so soon, without any time for recovery?” one of them asked.

“I did gymnastics in high school, I guess my body still remembers what to do,” I replied, looking at the doctor who’d spoken.

His silver eyes went wide again, and he looked at me in shock.

“What?” I asked, confused by his reaction.

“Did you j- just hear me s- say that?” the man stuttered.

I slowly nodded, still confused.

“I- I was just  th- thinking it, I d- didn’t say it out loud,” he said, still stumbling over his words as he looked at me.

“Think something else,” I demanded.

“Can you hear me now?” he asked hesitantly. I could tell he felt silly by trying to communicate with me through his mind.

“Yes,” I confirmed.

All of a sudden, I could hear everyone talking at once.

“What are they talking about?” someone questioned.

“I wonder what I am having for lunch,” another said lazily.

“This is impossible, I still don’t see how she is alive,” someone else said. “She was dead for so long, she should not be like the others-”

“Shh, I cannot think,” I said. I rubbed my temples in an effort to calm the headache that was sure to come.

“Nobody is talking,” the woman said after a moment. She walked to my side and put a comforting hand on my shoulder.

“Wait . . .” I trailed off, not sure what to say.

“What you can hear is all you,” she said softly. Somehow I knew she was not talking about the possibility of me being insane. A moment later, my brain finally seemed to process this bit of information.

“I can read minds?” I quipped.

“I am assuming that is the case,” she said rather tentatively.

My eyes slowly went wide.

“We messed around with your brain and nerves a little,” she offered sheepishly.

“Oh . . .” I trailed off stupidly.

“I guess we did something right,” she stated with a small, prideful smile.

Or did she think it?

As I tried to tune out everyone’s thoughts, I began to delineate between their thoughts and words. The thoughts seemed to have a buzz behind them, as if it was being heard on an old radio.

“We should run some tests,” one doctor suggested.

“Okay,” I mumbled. They led me to a room with lots of machines and equipment. It smelled faintly of chemicals, as if it had once been a lab many years ago.

After they conducted dozens of different assessments on me, I was allowed to go back to my room.

“This is so weird,” I remembered one of the doctors thinking as he checked my body temperature. They told me it was at fifty-two degrees Fahrenheit. Forty four point six degrees lower than the average human’s.

A sudden realization came to me as I began to comprehend how futuristic all the machines had appeared. “What year is it?” I asked. The young lady who had been with me before was leading me through seemingly endless hallways.

“Twenty-one eighty,” she said absentmindedly.

“Seriously?” I asked, bewildered.

“Yes,” she replied calmly, as if my abrupt awakening did not affect her whatsoever. “You were dead for over a hundred years. That is why we never expected you to come back. You were just an experiment.”

Her words struck me with a great force.

“Oh,” I muttered.

“I feel sorry for the poor thing,” she thought, looking at me with a pitiful frown.

“Don’t,” I whispered to her.

We reached the door to my room and I walked in. She stood in the doorway, her face suddenly turning hard, no more traces of the kindness I had seen just hours before.

“You will be expected to show up in the lab tomorrow at six am. We will be conducting further experiments on you. Cooperate, or there will be consequences.”

My eyes widened slightly in fear of what they could do to me . . . what they would do to me. The woman glanced at me once more before exiting and harshly slamming the door behind herself.

I sat in the small chair they had dragged in for me, pulling my knees up to my chest. I imagined tears running down my face; tears I could no longer produce.

I was alone in this new world, and I didn’t know how I’d gotten there in the first place.