Short Story: Reboot

Everything came to a standstill, even the air seemed to stop circulating, making it difficult for me to catch my breath. It immediately reminded me of the time I was trapped in an elevator for seven hours in an almost dilapidated building in what can be considered the ‘bad side of town’. The same choking sensation, the same feeling of helplessness and the same ominous thoughts of confusion and my imminent death. The only difference was that this time the world around me was trapped. Everything and everyone were frozen in the exact positions they were in just a minute ago. Everything, except for me.

The silence was deafening. I looked around me, trying to make sense of what was going on. The postman stood still in the lawn of a house on the street, his left foot in front of his right, his lips still puckered from a moment ago when he had been whistling. The middle-aged woman who had been standing on the corner of the sidewalk was frozen at the moment she had been checking her watch, so her arm remained raised in that position. The children running down the street were stuck with their hair still flying backwards, their mouths open in toothy wide grins. The teenager who had been crossing the street was now perilously standing still in the middle of the road, but the cars going down the street were frozen too, so she was not in any real danger right now. The newspaper tossed by the paper boy was stuck in mid-air. There was something comical about the entire scenario and if I wasn’t scared witless, I might have even laughed.

A thousand questions pounded against the walls of my brain. Was I the only one who wasn’t stuck like this? What happened to my parents? My friends? Why was I spared from this reckoning? Was it all just a vivid dream? I did not make a sound in fear that I would break the spell of my surroundings. I took tentative steps forwards, careful not to touch any of the frozen people, as if my touch would cause them to shatter. I agree it was an irrational fear, but it was quite an irrational situation. I walked over to the woman on the corner who had been looking at her watch. I examined her closely to see if there were any signs of even the slightest movement. I wondered if all these people could still hear and see the things happening around them but could not move any part of their bodies in response, like those coma patients who can hear everything even though they could not make their bodies respond or perform any task. The thought that scared me the most was that I was all alone and abandoned.

It had been midday when it happened, which meant my father would have been home for lunch as my parents always had lunch together. When I entered my house, I saw my parents sitting still across the table to each other in the kitchen, with their mouths open in silent conversation. Seeing them like this, knowing that I could not do anything to help them was one of the worst feelings in the world. I went over and hugged my mother, crying helplessly. As I continued to hold her, she seemed to crumble underneath my touch. I opened my eyes to see that my mother was glitching like a hologram. I stepped back, aghast at what was happening in front of my eyes. Just then, a loud sharp pain shot across my forehead, ripping my head apart. The pain made me fall to the floor, cringing in agony. As I looked up, I saw that my mother was still glitching, disappearing and reappearing momentarily. I gathered my wits and ran from the house, the headache throwing me off and causing me to lose my balance and bump into frozen strangers on the street. As soon as I touched these people, they would start glitching just like my mother had. My brain was on fire and I realized that I could not run anymore. The world around me was gradually disappearing, leaving empty black spaces in different areas of my vision. I dropped to my knees in the middle of the road, everything slowly becoming dark.

Voices. I could hear people whispering around me. A bright flash of light. My eyelids felt as heavy as lead and it took some effort to open them to see what was happening. I was in a minimally furnished room with almost nothing around me. The walls were painted a pristine white and I was strapped onto some sort of chair. A helmet type device on my head was attached to an odd-looking machine beside me which was humming steadily while an IV drip was connected to my left arm. My hands and feet were bound by padlocked leather straps and I quickly realized I could not move out of the chair. Looks like I was the one who was trapped all along.

The whispers turned into concerned shouts as I began to thrash and move about in attempts to loosen the cuffs. I could hear them yelling ‘How did she wake up?’ and ‘Reboot her again, Attempt 346 is a failure’ among various others. The whirring of the machine started to get louder as numerous men wearing lab coats burst into the room and tried to restrain me. Memories came flooding back at such a rapid speed that it was becoming too overwhelming for my brain to handle such a large load of information. In between trying to fend off the scientists, I was seeing flashes of my life, my real life. I saw the faces of my real parents and how they were murdered before me because they would not let these people take me away for their experiments, and I saw the inhumane torture that had been inflicted on me for the last seven years, all in the name of the greater good. I remembered all the times I would be rebooted over and over again, and my consciousness trapped in different virtual worlds just to suffer and be killed. My brain was on fire again, but this time it was because of the anger I was feeling. I felt a sharp pain on my neck as I got stabbed with a syringe. My head began to grow fuzzy and the world started to spin around me. Everything became dark once again.

‘Wake up or you’ll be late for school again.’

I woke up to the voice of my mother. Another vivid dream around the same premise. Definitely weird but nothing to be concerned about, I thought to myself. I got up from bed and started to get ready for school, following the same boring routine I had for the last twelve years. Nothing out of the blue and nothing to worry about. It almost felt like I was trying to convince myself now. I stared at my reflection in the bathroom mirror. ‘Everything is normal’, I said out loud. It was just a dream. I came downstairs and sat down at my usual seat on the dinner table. As my mother handed me an apple, I grabbed her hand and thanked her. She glitched slightly, just as I had suspected. I couldn’t help but chuckle slightly at my small but significant success. In the haste that ensued after I had attempted to break free the last time, they had forgotten to erase my memories. They had forgotten to reboot me. This time, I remembered everything, and I was ready for revenge.