Velvet Dogma

chapter 28



Her head felt miles away. Memories had taken a taxi and never come back. Commands waited their turn. A needle-pain lingered behind her eyes.

Where was she?

Who was she?

She cracked open her eyelids. A wall made of rough hewn basalt was her horizon. Shadows moved upon it, sometimes interacting with other shadows, sometimes remaining alone. From edge to edge, the shadows played upon the basalt wall. The longer she watched, the more the forms took shape. Cars. People. Animals. A colorless movie was being played out before her.

She suddenly felt the weight of her head. As she brought her hands to it, she realized she was hanging upside down, her arms dangling. She examined the floor not more than five feet beneath her. Twisting, she looked up. The chain that was wrapped around her legs descended several feet from where it was wrapped around a stalactite. Blood had long ago crusted on the chain's links, giving them a dull, rust-colored patina.

And she wasn't alone. She couldn't see the others, but she knew as a person knows there's someone in the closet next to them that she wasn't alone. She felt other bodies around her, all hanging, all watching the wall. What was it? Why were they there?

A light suddenly flared and the shadows deepened on the wall. A monster with slit eyes lurched towards her out of the basalt. She bit her lip to fight back a scream. Another monster joined the first and rushed toward her. She tried to close her eyes but lacked the control. A third joined the two. This one spoke to her, its voice deep and mean.

"Beccawakeup."

She screamed.

"Beccawakeup!"





A hand pushed against her mouth, then her forehead. The wall vanished and





in its place were three men kneeling beside her.

"Howareyoufeeling?"

She struggled to focus, to concentrate on what they were saying. She knew it was important. She just didn't have the ability to understand.

One of the men reached towards the top of her head, fiddled with something, then stood back.

"ThereIthinkthatwasit."

"Howlongwillittake?"

"Only a few seconds and then she should have enough temporary memory to function."

"Andy?"

One of the figures turned and leaned in close. He kissed her and as he did, Rebecca remembered his face. "Becca? How do you feel?"

" Everything is fuzzy. I can't feel my fingers. I can't feel my toes." Her voice sounded like it came from the end of a long windowless hall. "What's happened to me?"

Andy glanced over his shoulder, shook his head at someone, then turned back to her. "You've reached Velvet Dogma. You're here." He grinned, but there was something missing in it.

She tried to sit up to see, but her body refused to answer her call. "What's happened to me? I can't move. I can't think straight. And I feel so cold." She shivered.

Andy turned to the man behind him. "Why does she feel cold?"

"She doesn't. It's a sense memory. We can't filter them all and for the life of me, I can't figure out why they keep coming."

She recognized the cadence of the man's speech. "Panchet? Is that you?"

"Yes, Rebecca."

"We thought you were dead. Didn't we, Andy?"

"Remember Becca, we made that up to fool the police. Panchet never died." Andy stroked her forehead.

"Oh yeah." She crinkled her eyes as she tried to remember more. "Why am I like this? I can remember when things weren't this way." Her voice caught. "Andy—Andy, my mother's dead!" She broke into tears, sobbing as the memory surfaced. She knew that she'd known it before, but this memory was so fresh and raw, it was like a rake on her emotions.

Suddenly Andy began to cry along with her. "I can't do this," he sobbed. "I just can't!" He stood and staggered away.

Panchet and a tall African-American remained at her side. Panchet punched up his hoverBoard until he'd moved near her head, then leaned over and grasped her hand.

"Rebecca, I need to tell you something." Panchet took her hand, kissed it softly, then moved it on top of her own head. Instead of hair, she felt the cool smoothness of plastic. "This is a placeholder. They stole your hippocampi ten hours ago and left you to die. They put this on you as a bad joke, knowing that you'd stay alive until the organ allocation squads arrived. Only the squads can't get here. We're behind ten inch EMP threshold doors and inside a mountain. Their joke still stands, though. There's nothing we can do."

"They stole my..." Rebecca remembered like a computer, unfiltered by emotion, experience and the chaff of other thoughts. Hippocampus. Both of them. The critical part of the limbic system responsible for transferring information to memory. Also responsible for spatial memory and navigation.

"How?"

"Andy and I came up with a bridge. On the input side of each hippocampus we placed a chip that records incoming neuron activity. On the output side we placed a receptor that broadcasts a mirror of the same activity. Instead of stopping, the thoughts are bridged across the gap."

Alzheimer's. Anteretograde amnesia. Epilepsy. Schizophrenia. Bi-polar disorder. All these found place or need in the hippocampus. Humans have two, one on either side of the brain. Words and definitions flew through her mind as if she'd just learned them. Unfettered by discourse and emotion, she was able to access memory with the one-sided efficiency of a computer.

"How long..."

"Less than thirty hours."

They'd killed her. Less than thirty hours. A little more than one day. What could she do in that time? What did it matter? Then another memory came unfiltered and perfect, as another option opened to her.

"Velvet Dogma."

"Yes. Do you still want to do it?"

"Definitely." The memory of her first night in solitary confinement erased her thought string. She shivered and called for her grandma. Her thumb went to her mouth as she began to rock back and forth. A song from her childhood welled up and she mumbled words like a drunkard. "Go tell Aunt Rosie, go tell Aunt Ros-o-sie, go tell Aunt Rosie, the old grey goose is dead."

"Rebecca, please, come back to us. Tell us how. Tell us the password."

Through chattering teeth she managed two words before she found herself lost in the darkness of the cell in the prison, with only the feel of the rough-hewn walls and the shadows in the darkness to keep her sane.

"Cody Larkins," Rebecca said, then she was silent.