“Of eyes that vainly crave the light, of the objects mean, of the struggle ever renew’d”

The words greet him. An echo, a lighthouse cutting through the night fog, and he follows them to consciousness.

Then...

White.

There is nothing else, just an overwhelming brightness that slowly resolves into the sheetrock of a well constructed ceiling.

Movement out of the corner of his eye becomes a ceiling fan, clocking in at around one revolution per second. He lowers his head, stretching his jaw because something in his mind says that is the best way to clear the ridiculous pressure from his ears, a pressure that threatens to pop his head like one of those tubes of pre-made biscuits.

He pans the room, discovering that he is sitting in a padded steel folding chair, one of around a dozen arranged in a circle. How he hadn’t fallen out of it while he was waking up, he had no idea. Everything is clean, inoffensive, safe. Seated across from him, waiting patiently in a white lab coat, is a woman.

Blonde hair, tan skin. Pretty. She’s wearing a nametag, but he can’t read it because his eyes aren’t operating at peak efficiency yet.

“Hello. My name is Dr. Burrill. I imagine you’re a little disoriented right now, but that will pass. Do you remember your name?”

“Of course, it’s…”

Nothing. Wherever room that information had been stored in his brain, the door was locked.

“I...don’t remember.”

She smiles at him reassuringly, making a quick note on the file opened on her clipboard.

“I thought that might be the case. As I said, you’re probably a little disoriented. But don’t worry, we’re here to help you.”

His eyes narrow.

“Where are we?”

She makes another note. He realizes she is documenting the things he can’t remember.

“Dr. Burrill?”

She finishes her note and looks up.

“Yes?”

“Where am I?”

Her head tilts, contemplative.

“Your name is William. William Kenney.”

William Kenney.

The name clicked into his mind. He instantly knew it was the truth, but her attempt at distracting him did not go unnoticed. He’d circle back around to it in a minute.

“Okay. Are there any more bits of information about my life that you can give me up front? It might make this process go smoother if I get all of the landmarks locked down.”

She lifts her clipboard again, flips a page, and resumes writing. William is about to speak again when she responds without looking up.

“I can’t do that.”

William tilts his head back, giving her a quizzical look.

“Why can’t you? You obviously know who I am.”

Dr. Connell then meets his gaze.

“It’s not about what I do or don’t know. It’s not even about me wanting to tell you, or not.”

William was already tired of the game. Sensing his mutinous mood, she continued needing to be prodded further.

“How much do you know about Amnesia?”

William began looking around the room. If she refused to answer his questions, he’d be damned if he was going to answer any of hers. To her credit, she caught on quickly, and elaborated.

“Fair enough. The reason I can’t simply tell you is that there is a marked difference between knowing a detail and remembering the experiences tied to it. If I list off a sequence of facts about your life, those facts will lack context. How you learn information is often as important as the information itself.”

He cut her off.

“Is there a point to this lesson in cognitive impairment, Doctor?”

She continued on as though he hadn’t interrupted. He let her go, since she appeared dedicated to finishing her thought.

“The human mind is a system of constant information processing, hence the term "stream of consciousness". There is a great deal of research suggesting that the only reason we believe ourselves to be sentient is because we never truly stop taking in information and making decisions, maintaining our singular perspective. That is why I can't simply give you the information, and also there is no way I can truly just hand the information over out of context without altering the person you are. Your mind would take that information and immediately begin constructing narratives and backstory explaining how it could be possible, and shortly thereafter, you convince yourself it all happened in that way. Now, perhaps your mind will remember the truth of those events later on, but like a jury informed they must ignore and outburst in court, that memory never truly goes away.``

William’s eyes narrowed. He hadn’t decided yet if her words felt honest, or if they were part of a larger manipulation.

“So, you have this information, but won’t give it to me because you want me to earn it?”

It was the Doctors turn to look nonplussed.

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“Here’s a bit of information that you may have already pieced together-you are an exceptionally intelligent person, Mr. Kenney. Not having information about your past doesn’t change your intellectual capacity, your ability to draw inferences and deductions from the information around you. And I am not testing you, we have a program already in place to help you regain your lost memories.”

William paused, trying to read the lie in her eyes. She hadn’t lied to him, at least not that he could tell, but something in him hadn’t quite decided if he could trust her yet. Maybe that was a part of who he was. A skeptic.

She continued, “I am not denying you information about yourself, I’m simply asking for you to go through the process we have developed so that you are restored to as complete and well-adjusted a person as can be.”

“And if you give me back these memories without context, you’re worried that I’ll become a different person than I was prior to the memory loss?”

She nodded.

“In short? Yes. We have seen it happen, and once the new personality takes root, it becomes very difficult to change. Memory loss of this sort is often a result of brain trauma, and the brain is wired to make connections, so whatever is given to it, it takes and tries to make a whole from. If you see a half finished sentence, your mind implies the rest, assuming the remainder based on similar passages read in the past.”

It all made sense to William. He still didn’t trust this Doctor, but nothing she had said to him so far felt untrue.

“Alright. Perhaps now is a good time to tell me where we are. Unless I worked here or you and I have slept together in the past, I doubt that information will stunt my recovery too badly.”

The Doctor made another note.

“You are in an experimental medical facility somewhere in Northern New England. Where that facility is located in the country is irrelevant at this point.”

“Irrelevant? How so?”

She smirked, as though what she was about to say would bring her a measure of amusement.

“Tell me this, if I pointed you to our front door and put in the security code myself, where would you go first?”

William opened his mouth to respond, and stopped again. He didn’t even know who he was, so it stood to reason that he didn’t know where home was.

Doctor Burrill nodded.

“You see my point. Releasing you into the world without your memories would constitute medical negligence. Until we are able to make you whole, Mr. Kenney, we are responsible for your safety, and knowing your geographic location only introduces the risk that you will try to leave as soon as you identify a single location from your past, and we need to bring back all of your memories, or at least as many as possible, before we can give you a clean bill of health.”

It all made sense to William, but he couldn’t shake the feeling that she still wasn’t telling him the whole truth.

“Fine. If I can’t leave until I finish this “process”, then what do I need to do?”

Everything around him looked safe and supportive, but beneath it all there was an anxiety about being there that he couldn’t place.

Doctor Burrill grabbed a sheet out of the file, and clipped it to the clipboard. She then handed everything to William, minus the file. There was a pen attached, with a tether so short he could barely reach the bottom of the page with it.

“This is a release. I’d like you to read it in its entirety, and I will answer what I can.”

William began to read. There was a lot of legalese, interspersed with terms such as “cognitive immersion therapy”. At the start of the second paragraph, he came across the sentence, “The patient absolves the facility of any liability in relation to any and all events that take place to their person inside of the simulated environment, including virtual death, virtual rape, torture, and or virtual harm to simulated version of loved ones or other non-player-characters in their presence.”

“Wait...virtual death? Simulated version of loved ones?”

The Doctor nodded again.

“Yes. The process we are developing here at this facility involves a deep dive virtual reality simulation. While in the simulation, you will be placed in environments and situations that almost exactly replicate those from your past. Artificially intelligent non-player characters will take the place of your loved ones, your adult family, and there will also be a suitable number of unrelated people created in the simulation to fill out the environment and make it more believable. Some of them are there to subtly help you along on your path to recovery. They’ll never admit that, if asked, but they will still make every attempt to make sure you’re moving towards where you need to be. You’ll never be alone inside the simulation, not really. The result is a startlingly lifelike world, designed to immerse you in your past and to reaccumulate your memories in an organic and context-appropriate manner.”

William raised his eyebrows, staring at her. She did not give the impression that she was lying.

“So...you created an entire computer generated world, just to help me get my memories back? What kind of insurance do I have? Am I rich?”

She smiled, the first truly genuine smile he’d seen from her in their short history together.

“No. In fact, there are currently 173 other human patients inside of this simulated world at present. It’s possible you’ll even encounter one or two of them, though the realistic nature of the NPC’s make it unlikely that you’ll be able to tell the difference between who is real and who is not.”

“Huh.”

It was all that William could muster. He put the odds of her being completely full of shit at around 50/50, but as he didn’t have any other choice, he decided to ride the dog and pony show all the way to the end.

“Let me get this straight. Once I sign this, you are going to plug me into the Matrix, and I am going to go on a three dimensional walk down memory lane until everything comes back to me?”

“More or less.”

“And then once you put Humpty Dumpty back together again, I get to leave?”

“Once we determine that you are safely made whole again, and aren’t a danger to yourself or others? Of course.”

Not exactly a straight answer, but probably was the best he would get. He signed the name he had been given five minutes prior in penmanship that he assumed was his own. He handed the clipboard back to the Doctor.

“Alright, Morpheus, where’s my blue pill at?”

She stood.

“Right this way, Mr. Kenney.”

She pushed through a set of double doors, and the serene comfort of the sharing room gave way to an efficient, clinical facility. Had he ran from the room upon waking up, the sight of all the polished stainless steel machinery, computer server racks, and vats of shimmering nanofluid connected with large tubes, wires, and hoses that they passed would have convinced him he had already been plugged in to the personal Thirteenth Floor that the good Doctor had promised him.

After a few turns, a short elevator ride down a level, and a dizzying number of security checkpoints, they reached a room not unlike many of the others they had passed. It’s own computerized chemistry set of machines covered one wall, and opposite, a hospital bed with a robotic arm beneath it stood upright.

William pointed at the bed as a nurse walked in and began pressing buttons and pulling IV equipment out of a nearby cabinet.

“For me?”

The Doctor nodded, and William walked over and stood on the plate at the foot of the bed. The nurse touched the earbud at her ear, and the mechanized arm beneath the bed sprang to life, tilting away from the wall and scooping William up. The sensation was not as foreign to him as he would have guessed, and he assumed he had been in a similar bed in the past. Soon, the bed was laying flat, and the plate at the foot of the bed tilted down and away, replaced by a composite rail.

The nurse stepped up with a speed that suggested she had a few dozen more of these procedures to get done before the end of her shift, and she sprayed the crook of his arm with a spray that was cool to the touch.

William spoke to the nurse, trying to displace his nervousness with a joke.

“Be careful, it’s my first time.”

The nurse, not missing a beat, responded as the needle slid into his arm.

“How would you know that?”

William laughed. She had a point.

“Fair enough.”

He turned his head to say something to the Doctor, but the movement blurred his vision, the sedation smudging everything in the room for a moment before everything went completely black.