Dark of the Woods

Not just silence: quieter than that.

Not just total blackness: darker.

Not just odorless, antiseptic, clean: much purer than any words.

It was an aching, senseless void, a pit without matter, a pit without nonmatter, without walls or ceiling or floor, without air or wind, without anything the senses could distinguish, a limitless eternal stretch of absolute nothingness…

… and then there was light.

At first, there was an almost intangible brightening of the nothingness. Then the indescribable blackness became pitch. Then just black. Then just dark. The light came by degrees, and in a millennium it was as bright as a moonlit night, though there were no features about him.

He became aware of sounds next.

Clickings…

Whirrings…

The sound of tapes spooling and unspooling…

All the noises of a complex and busy machine doing whatever it was its makers had created it to do. As he thought of the word “machines,” the first concrete concept which had occurred to him in this slow awakening, other solid thoughts and questions arose in his mind.

Where was he? His mind danced over that question, aware that a man who had no idea where he was was either intoxicated or insane or had been abducted by someone, perhaps under drugs. Yes, yes, all the cliches of the historical novel rushed back to him in bulk. But as he considered each of them and rejected them, he found there was no comfort in cliches. Where in the devil was he?

He could feel a chair beneath him. No, not exactly a chair, either. It was more like a plushly padded automatic couch which had now folded — and changed position-elevation to get him into a sitting posture. The thing was so well padded, in fact, that it bordered on the uncomfortable at first, though he found himself rapidly adapting to it

Why couldn't he open his eyes?

Not yet, a smooth voice-tape whispered into the auditory nerves of his head. The words were not heard so much as experienced, and he knew there was a tap directly to his brain.

Where am I? he thought-asked of the machine.

Not yet.

He was still, trying to perceive what else lay about him in this weird world of gray light as soft as mouse fur — and without any form whatsoever. He could feel a fabric restraining belt around his waist, similar straps holding down his hands at the sides of the couch. He wiggled one hand and discovered something in the feeling of it that terrified him like nothing he had ever feared before. It was as if he had willed the hand to move and had discovered it was not his but someone else's hand — but that it had obeyed him and he had been able to feel through it!

Relax, the voice-tape prompted.

He moved the fingers again. He rubbed them back and forth against each other. There was a smooth, quick sensation of flesh on flesh. The problem, the thing that terrified him again, was that it was too smooth andtoo quick. It felt much like the amplified, unreal tactile effects of a senso-theater film wherein everything was somewhat larger and better than life (not because the senso-theaters meant it to be, but because no one had ever been able to approximate true human sensations exactly enough — and patrons would pay more for overcompensation than for inadequacy).

He tried to speak.

He could not.

His face, straining in the normal expression to form the words he wanted to use, felt wrong. It felt like someone else's face.

He felt like screaming.

Whose body am I in? he asked the machine.

Yours.

No!

Yours.

Please. Whose body am I in? It is your body.

Tell me why—

Not yet.

When?

Wait.

He tried to decipher the mystery of his whereabouts by inhaling and savoring the air. But it was antiseptic air, tangy with disinfectants, nothing more. A hospital, then?

We will test now, the voice said.

What do you mean?

Speak.

I can't speak.

Speak.

“Dammit, I can't speak!” he roared, then realized the words had been formed and thrust forth, given birth by vocal cords and tongue and lips and teeth. It seemed, almost, like a miracle.

That is enough, the voice-tape said.

“Where am I? What has been done to me?” He hissed it out in such a tense, shallow whisper that it almost seemed as if he had communicated the thought without using has new-found voice.

The voice…

“This isn't my voice,” he said. The tone was too high, not at all the deep and manly baritone he was accustomed to hear issuing from his own throat.

It is your voice.

“No. I—”

Wait. If it isn't your voice, who are you, and what should your voice sound like?

He realized, with horror, that he not only didn't know who or what had him and where they or them were keeping him, but he was equally ignorant of his own identity. Meekly, he asked, “Who am I?”

I will restore the majority of your memory banks shortly. The nerves to them had been momentarily disconnected. Patience. Wait.

“But—”

The tests come first. After the tests, you will know.

He obliged its requests to move feet, hands, arms. It released his hands and legs of the straps, but only one at a time, so there was no possibility of him jumping and running. Which was unlikely, he thought, considering he was blind and nearly mindless in a world he didn't know. His olfactory nerves were tested with a long series of odors he often did not recognize — not because he couldn't smell them, but because they were not the spices commonly used by citizens of — Of what? He forgot.

Now, a short sleep — the voice-tape began.

“My memory!” he shouted.

But then there was sleep…

Yellow…

What is the color? he was asked.

“Yellow.”

This one?

There was nothing before his eyes, in any direction, but shimmering blue the color of an Earth sky. He named the hue for the machine.

This?

“Purple.”