Here’s a thing! It’s heavily inspired by Junji Ito’s classic short story Nagai Yume, but is also sort of its own deal. I wanted to do some true Lovecraft horror and I like to think I did a good job. Enjoy! (if you want to) (no pressure) (aaaa)
“He was in my room again last night.”
She shudders. Her room smells strange, a smell he does not want to investigate. She looks scared, scared for her life even though there is nothing in the room that actively poses her harm. The man sighs. For the past two days, this strange person has entered this woman’s room, screaming that he was her husband, that he remembered her from a dream. The man knows she is right, but for the time being feels an irrepressible desire to tell her she must have been hallucinating.
“Ms. Doyle, we have proof that Mr. Byron was in your room two nights ago. Last night…we haven’t checked the cameras, but are you sure this wasn’t a hallucination or…” He didn’t want to say the word, with the present connotations it held. “…A dream?”
Doyle sighs and rests her head in her hands. “Yes. I was awake for the entire experience. I was very much aware of my surroundings and can confirm that Byron- that Byron approached me, saying things that just weren’t true…”
The man sighs, and marks something down in a spiral bound notebook.
“And what did he say?”
“He said he had met me in a dream…he said that he had seen me die, that he was terrified…verbatim, he said ‘It’s a horrifying thing, seeing your beloved spouse get killed…’”
“And you have never seen Byron before two nights ago?”
“I said this yesterday…we glimpsed each other briefly in the cafeteria, before he had his privileges there revoked. He was…he looked so much different then…”
The man flips to another page of the notebook. He is not writing anything, just scribbling words to appeal to some sense of professionalism.
“Listen, Ms. Doyle, whether or not Byron approached you last night…for all intents and purposes, he did not disagree with your complaint…did not deny that he entered your room…anyways, Byron is a very sick man. I have watched his condition worsen over the past three months and you must realize he can do nothing to hurt you, Ms. Doyle. He is confused, and afraid, and regrettably at this moment you are the patient he has decided to fixate upon.”
Doyle is still shaking, sweat pooling on her sheets. She suppresses a pointless, gasping swallow.
“I think…I don’t think that’s Byron anymore…he…I saw him, doctor, I saw him with my own two eyes and two nights ago he could pass for human but last night he was something else. No malnourishment will do that to you. He…he wasn’t Byron, he wasn’t human, he was…he was something else…”
The man stifles an aggravated groan.
“What was he then, if not Byron? If not a human man?”
She slinks backwards, still looking mortified.
“What was he, Ms. Doyle?”
She pauses, evidently finding the words to express her feelings.
“Death.”
The man looks at her. She looks at him. For some reason, the simplicity of her answer terrifies him. Looking down at the notepad, he jots down her answer. It is the only relevant word he has scrawled upon the paper. He looks up at the ceiling, sighs once more, and leaves. As he opens the door, sweat accumulating at his temple, he can swear he hears her whisper something.
“This is just how it starts.”
***
Patient Analysis: SAMUEL BYRON
Date admitted: 9/10/81
Date written: 11/10/81
Posted to the patient information registry three months ago
Patient admitted himself to hospital two days ago, proclaiming his dreams had lengthened substantially. Patient seemed to be experiencing immense emotional distress, and explained that he had difficulty remembering the events of the previous day. Patient stated that the previous night’s dream felt over three years long, and he struggled immensely remembering the events of the previous day.
The patient, an accomplished neurosurgeon, had worked on cases at Kolbert Hospital two months before, assisting patient Tetsuo Mukoda. Despite this, the patient did not recognize James Pryor, the man who interviewed him regarding his condition, despite having performed an operation alongside him two months prior. This serves as our most circumstantial evidence insofar that the patient is genuinely incapable of remembering the previous day’s events.
Despite initial reluctance, the patient willingly went to sleep to be professionally observed. At this point several of the doctors on the case (Horace Albertson, Mae Oswald, Charlie Simmons, and Micheal Wunberg) all dismissed the patient’s condition as a mere hallucination, perhaps as some sort of publicity stunt, but Pryor (who knew the patient informally) claimed that the patient “had no sarcasm or even capacity to lie whatsoever…even if he was fooling us, it would all be for some greater goal”.
The patient was hooked up to an EEG machine, so as to monitor his brainwaves and detect any irregular activity during the night. By the patient’s own admission, the actual time he spent sleeping had not changed whatsoever, and he still slept for eight hours every night as per usual.
The patient slept restfully for about five hours. He was almost completely still, occasionally turning over or snoring, behavior completely normal for a forty-six year old man. However, six hours after the patient entered deep sleep, he entered a brief period of REM. This is now widely believed to be when the patient’s “long dreams” take place. During the thirty second period of REM the patient experienced, the following paradoxical abnormalities also manifested:
Patient’s arms and legs began to move in a bizarre pattern resembling a heart rate monitor’s display, getting progressively faster. By the end of the thirty second period, the patient’s arms were thrashing around and ripped open the room’s pillow.
Patient’s pupils began to dart to the four corners of his sclerae, at a speed and pattern abnormal even for REM sleep. The patient burst a blood vessel in his eye from the strain of the experience.
Patient’s brainwaves became rapid and irregular, moving so rapidly the computer program being used to monitor them shut down from the stress of keeping track.
Patient began to gutturally whisper and moan, at one point speaking what appeared to be his own name.
The patient is now designated a high priority case. Upon waking up, he was met by Doctor Pryor, who he failed to recognize to any extent.
***
The man strolls down the hall, sighing. The words Doyle spoke to him, the words she said, the way she phrased her experience, they all created a visceral paranoia deep in his chest. Something strange was happening. He could no longer deny that the Byron case defied science, especially with the developments in the past few days.
He turns the corner and heads to the cafeteria. Last night, he had a dream as well. He was in a large multifloor bookstore, connected by elevators and staircases. His mother was there, and he was looking for her (he could not for the life of him recall if he was a child in the dream, at one point he saw his wife sitting in a large armchair on one of the bookstore’s many floors, but she did not appear to recognize him). As he wandered around the bookstore, he slowly became aware something was pursuing him. He could not fully comprehend what the thing in question was- he was constantly glimpsing it through his peripheral vision, catching flashes of yellow and at one point what appeared to be a birdlike shape, but never saw the full extent of it, not even fully discerning whether the creature was human.
He had woken up before anything else happened in the dream. Just ages and ages of mindless pursuit- not even fearful pursuit, in the dream he had felt like running from this creature in a place that was not his home was as natural as breathing, just an aspect of human life.
He imagined what having a dream like that for millenia would feel like. Byron had told him that the dreams never changed midway through. It was always the same thing, repeated eternally. “I’m often not lucid,” he said, in his awful, accent-less monotone. “I never really properly discern that I’m in a dream. Sometimes I do, and those ones are the worst of all, because at that point I just have to wait, knowing that what’s happening to me isn’t natural.”
Byron had said that a month ago. He feels like if he asked him the question today, his answer would be much different.
Suddenly, the man heard dashing footsteps plodding down the hallway after him. “Doctor Pryor! Doctor Pryor!” It was the voice of Charlie Simmons. Simmons was in his mid-thirties, but still resembled a child and was almost as optimistic as one. The man didn’t dislike being Simmons’ mentor, but found something very perplexing about how happy he was to do his job. You don’t succeed much in this business if you love your work, that was the man’s motto. A big part of being a neurosurgeon is hating the diseases that afflict your patients, and wanting to do anything in your power to wipe them out. You approach it with a morbid fascination, not a joyful one.
Simmons ran around to face Byron and began gleefully fidgeting in front of him. “How’s the Byron case going?” The man sighs. “It’s fine. I was just going to see him now. He approached Doyle in her room last night, did you hear anything about that?” Simmons cocked his head quizzically, like a small dog. “Doyle? Who’s she again?”
“Sarah Doyle. She was admitted here around the same time as Byron, suffering from a benign tumor. She’s terrified all the time…was diagnosed a long time ago with severe necrophobia…death is, by all means, a horrific thing for her. She’s harbored this fear for a long time, but it’s grown substantially worse recently. She sometimes becomes violent, attacks things…she was admitted here for a reason…”
Simmons pauses. “That sounds awful…and Byron is fixated on her for what reason?”
The man turns over the facts in his head. “By her own admission, he apparently had a dream in which they were married…since Byron’s memory is now localized entirely to his dreams, he woke up and exclusively perceived her as his wife…understandably, the whole situation terrified her…she seems to have become fixated on the concept that Byron is some sort of…personification of death, or something along those lines…it’s…god, Simmons, this case might be revolutionary but I fundamentally DISLIKE working on it…”
Simmons is still smiling a cheery grin, perhaps unaware of the man’s decently well-masked plight.
“Can I accompany you to his room?” His face is small and boyish, but the man sort of absentmindedly realizes that his teeth are disgusting.
The man turns around, breathing a sort of gasping breath. “You just want to see him for yourself.”
Simmons’ smile grew wider and the man sighed. “It’s true,” Simmons says, his smile growing increasingly wider and slowly, ever so slowly, working its way into a cartoonish yet terrifying frown. “We all know the Byron case defies science, there’s no point in denying it. I know what you’re trying to do, parading around your status as Byron’s old college friend so you’re the only one who can work with him…the only one who gets the credit…when all this is said and done the media hounds will be all over you, interviewing you, asking if this man’s condition will be called ‘Pryorvirus’…when all this is over I want my name back on the report too, you selfish BASTARD.”
The man looks at Simmons, whose face suddenly goes from a horrific grimace to a cheery smirk. “Now let’s go see this man! There’s a patient who needs our help!”
The man looks in barely-disguised fear as Simmons parades down the hall, clapping other doctors on the back as he goes. The man is frozen still, watching, knowing he must follow him. Simmons wasn’t wrong, and that was the worst part.
***
They turn the corner of the mazelike building and eventually stand looking at Byron’s door. A frame directly beneath Byron’s room number and name contained a paper with small patches of text on it.
ROOM 657
SAMUEL BYRON
High priority case. Do not engage unless explicitly requested by superiors.
It is recommended that all visitors wear the provided apparel.
The patient has been marked extremely dangerous and psychologically unwell. It is recommended that any visitors disguise their faces completely from the patient, mask their voices, and do not reveal their names (easily accomplished by wearing the provided apparel) so as to prevent him from fixating obsessively on them. Patient has gained various physical abnormalities, do not react excessively.
DO NOT REVEAL TO THE PATIENT ANY DETAILS ABOUT YOUR PERSONAL LIFE.
Simmons walks over to a nearby rack and grabs a gas mask, the kind for protecting oneself from toxins. While it was never confirmed, it was theorized by some professionals that Byron’s breath may contain neurotoxins that would spread his condition to others. In the meantime, the mask also served as a useful tool for preventing Byron from seeing his visitors’ faces.
The man sighed, and opened the door.
Byron’s room smelled even worse than Doyle’s. The bed was coated in uncomfortable plastic sheets, and was covered in strands of hair. The clock was covered up, and the walls were covered with tape- Byron could not know when night approached. The cupboard was kept far, far away from his bed. Byron was sitting, a withered husk shriveled up, his hands arranged resting over his clavicle like a corpse. His eyes were glassy, his head covered in pallid blue patches. He was now almost completely bald. His teeth were rotting, his gums horrifically deformed, his nose receding to an almost skullish degree. His fingers were long, his fingernails covered in a thick black gunk. His head seemed slightly more elongated than the previous day.
From an objective perspective, he was no longer human.
“Pryor. PRYOR. Good…good day. I want to eat cheese, Pryor.”
Basic science dictated that one had less vivid dreams if they ate any food that didn’t have tryptophan, or by that logic anything with a high level of spice. Byron had been eating granola bars in between being hooked up to an IV drip for just over a month now, and yet the specific diet seemed to be having no effect. He hadn’t eaten anything even remotely cheese-adjacent for a significant amount of time.
“Pryor. Pryor. Pryor. Silly name. Pryor, Pryor, Pryor. You know, I’ve never had a dream about you.”
“It’s…it’s not Pryor, Byron. You know it’s not.” The man hoped his voice was sufficiently muffled.
Byron perked up, sniffing the air like a dog.
“And is that SIMMONS!? My god Simmons, I haven’t seen you since we served in Vietnam together!”
Simmons audibly gulped. It would have been funny under any other circumstances. “You were born after Vietnam, Byron. And I’m not Simmons. No one works at this hospital with the name Simmons-”
“You’re a damn liar, and a damn fool, and above all a little fu-”
“BYRON!” The man disliked Simmons, but he couldn’t stand to hear a coworker disrespected.
“Calm down. Calm down. Calm down. Am I talking to myself, or you?”
There was a moment of silence.
“Tell me about the world. Tell me what’s happening out there. Is hydroprofic syndrome…is that still a problem…do people still lose their skin in those little spinning doors?”
Simmons turned over and whispered into the man’s ear. “Hydroprofic syndrome? What’s he talking about? That’s not…not a medical…”
The man leaned over and tried to disguise his voice. “This is just a hypothesis, and maybe an impossible one, but some of the doctors here think that Byron is now perceiving things like someone from centuries in the future. Of course, it’s infinitely more possible that he’s just babbling dream nonsense, but maybe hydroprofic syndrome is a very real thing millennia from-”
“Pryooooor, I can hear you Pryor, you’re a goddamn squealing child…a goddamn little weasel rat…do you want…do you want to hear my dream? The dream I had last night? My best dream of all?”
The man sits down three meters from Byron, in one of the little blue chairs pushed up haphazardly against the wall. He motioned for Simmons to do the same, and he did so reluctantly. “By all means,” he says, trying to put up a front of sarcasm.
“Last night…last night, I dreamed an entire lifetime. Some dreams are more focused than others, but this one actually felt real. I was born, came screaming out of the womb, grew up, fell in love, received an education, and I remember every second of it…you’ve told me yourself! This would otherwise be an impossibly focused dream to have, but I slept and I woke and I perceived reality within the dream, dreamed within the dream, SCHRODINGER’S BUTTERFLY, PRYOR, AM I AN INSECT THAT DREAMED HE WAS A MAN OR-”
“Get to the point,” the man mutters harshly.
“I lived. I lived and I lived and I lived and I lived. I went and I went along with my little life and my little aspirations and I grew old, grew old with my beautiful wife and my lovely little children, and then I passed away in my own home- I saw Doyle die, she went out before me…my beloved Sarah…and then I died, I said that already, didn’t I? I died. And the dream didn’t stop. It kept going. And the dream had been so real so far that I knew anything that happened now was something that could, no, should happen in our real, breathing living breathing living world…and I saw what was after death.”
Simmons quietly stood up and left the room. “He’s an idiot. He’s faking it. I’ll let you do the rest.”
It was just Byron and the man.
“Do you want to know what there is after death, Pryor?”
“I’m not Pryor.”
“Do you want to know?”
“No. You’d lie anyways. You really aren’t Byron, huh? Doyle is right. I always said, Byron would never do something like this unless he had a purpose behind it, but you don’t. You’re…you’re a goddamn imposter…” He tries to stand up but is suddenly and forcefully pushed back down to the chair by something–
“There is a god, Pryor.”
“No. No, you’re a liar. You aren’t BYRON-”
“He is cruel and impartial. He does not care about us. Is it not frightening, Byron? That this is the man in charge?”
“Go away.”
“I see you, Pryor. Under that silly little mask.”
The man has his eyes clamped shut, but he hears something in front of him, cables snapping and disconnecting, footsteps coming towards him. He opens his eyes and sees Byron is still sitting in bed, stock still.
He blinks and Byron is right in front of him.
“I do wonder, Pryor. I wonder I wonder I wonder. What happens if I have an eternal dream?”
“Nothing. Nothing happens because this isn’t real.”
Byron takes his hands and places them on the sides of the man’s mask. The man cannot move. The mask slowly, slowly unclasps from his face and the man is exposed to the world. Byron’s hands are cold and clammy and they feel like a fetus and they smell like defecate. He is smiling, laughing. He knows he will never die.
“I’ll see you tomorrow, Pryor. Go home and kiss your wife.”
The man stands up. He blinks and Byron is back in his bed, sleeping. He looks at his watch and notices with a glum perturbedness that it is 2:00 in the morning. It has been twelve hours since he entered Byron’s room. He steps outside, looking back and realizing that Byron is sleeping, sleeping like a child.
That morning, the corpse of doctor Charlie Simmons was found with its arms removed and its face horrifically mutilated. No fingerprints were located on the body.
***
He wakes up and drinks a cup of coffee and wonders why his wife has not joined him. He pulls out his phone and looks at the news. A plane fell out of the sky and hit an orphanage, killing sixty-five children. It is without a doubt the funniest thing he has ever read.
He gets in his car and begins driving. He turns on the radio and begins flicking through the stations, flicking rapidly, listening to every song for two seconds, consuming all he can. There is a big wide smile on his face. A cop pulls him over for speeding and he looks behind him and sees the damage, sees the pile up of wrecked cars and mangled bodies. “Sir?” He looks at the cop. The cop looks at him. He smiles again. He will never die.
***
He sits in the car and runs his hands through his hair, snow falling gently outside the window. He realizes with a kind of numb dullness that there is warm blood on his face. He wipes it off, glancing around, smiling again.
He steps inside the building and checks in. The woman looks at him. A few people glance as he walks by, some greet him, not realizing what they are speaking to.
There is hushed discussion of Simmons, the doctor, the man who wanted his name on the report. “His face, did you see what happened to it?” “The lips, did you see what they did? They ******************* him, *********** until he couldn’t breathe-”
He feels a sort of creeping satisfaction, knowing that if he wanted he could answer their questions. There’s so much more he knows now, so many things kept secret from him in the past, and yet some things that once felt so simple are now clouded in his mind. You can’t remember pointless factoids when you’re sleebfu4uufgu4obuo, he guesses. I suppose I’m something a bit more than that now.
The woman is sitting at the intensive care ward check in. Scrolling through something on her phone. She looks at him and looks appalled. “Sir, are you-”
“Shut up.”
“Excuse me.”
“I need to see Byron.”
“Sir, are you well-”
“BYRON. I NEED TO SEE HIM.”
“Sir, Byron cannot be visited until 2:00, same as all the other patients in intensive care-”
“I need to see him.”
“Sir, I don’t care what position you hold in this building, you cannot just disregard our rules for your own benefit-”
“NO!”
“Sir, did you have any disagreements with Doctor Simmons prior to his death? You were the last person to talk to him, sir-”
“Are you-”
“I’m not trying to suggest anything, sir.”
There was a pause.
“I’m so tired.”
***
“I saw this coming, you know.”
He is sitting across the room from Byron. Byron’s skin has now begun flaking off in droves, exposing the bright red muscle underneath. He did not seem hindered by this at all.
“I can see forever, far ahead. I know everything that will ever possibly feasibly happen for the next fifteen millennia until the end of time. Some might worry for me, worry about the stress, but having all this information in my head is amazing, makes me feel so free, can you hear me? It’s beautiful! It’s beautiful! Tonight! Tonight I have an eternal dream!”
He grumbles under his breath and struggles to gain his composure.
“You made me do that. You made me! I’m not your puppet to control, not your-”
“Are you sure? Are you sure you’re not the psycho here? I am in many ways the most knowledgeable person on the premises. I have seen beyond death and lived. I have experienced countless lifetimes. Do you want to hear my dreams?”
“I don’t give a sh-”
“There was one- a particularly glorious one in my opinion…in which I was running through this pristine complex, surrounded by doors even in places where they didn’t make sense. There were these little mechanical spiders coming after me, with little white masks instead of faces. I knew subconsciously that in ten years, the setting of my dream would be easily recognizable as a local convenience store…”
“You’re an idiot.”
“There was another- I woke up in a trench, heard gunshots, found the military gear on my body, running around killing people haphazardly…and it felt wonderful. I think you- the people you call your breed, your species you love that little glimpse of state-sponsored depravity…a war that lasts hundreds upon thousands and it was heaven-”
“You’re a monster! You…you don’t deserve to live!”
“Keep telling yourself that! You! I! We’re the same, Pryor. And it’s really quite embarrassing that I’ve had to go this far to make you understand, make you realize that we can all be like this! In fact, when I properly think about it, the dreams were my life. They made more sense than anything in reality proper. Whenever I was in the hospital, that was just a faint, brief glimpse into another world. Do you know how special that is? To have the waking world feel like a dream? DO YOU KNOW? DO YOU?”
Byron screams, presumably for no reason. His pallid cheek rips open, and the man realizes he is barely solid, barely made of anything that can be called flesh.
“This is the natural state of human evolution, Pryor. This is what you get when you survive beyond death, achieve a second state, become something MORE! By god, Pryor, there’s a way. Some people, all you goddamn fundamentalists, will hate the change, but you’ll see! YOU’LL SEE! PRYOR! YOU’LL SEE! There is a way! THERE IS A LIGHT, DEEP INSIDE US!”
“Stop it-”
“WE ARE ALL GOD!!!”
“You’re an idiot-”
“PRYORRRRRRRRRRRRRRRRRRRRRR!!!!!!!!!!”
He grabs a sledgehammer he has placed up against the wall (though he can’t really remember putting it there). and slams it into Byron’s face. The thing makes a little “–aaaaa” sound and is gone. There is no blood in Byron’s body, just dust. He is stuffed full of dust like a doll full of stuffing, and that is all there is. Byron’s body begins twitching in its death throes and rolls around, almost falling out of the small cot. He takes the sledgehammer again and brings it into the creature’s chest, a veritable fountain of dust erupting from the wound, like sand poured vertically out of a funnel. He smashes the legs and the cot collapses and the dust spills on the ground, and pools in little piles and he stomps on it and kicks it and yells like a primal primordial inhuman thing, so happy that it’s over.
A scream comes from somewhere, maybe out of the dust, and he smiles. He knows he has made the right choice.
Byron is gone. He is gone and he is freeeeeee
***
A firm hand comes to rest on its shoulders. It looks up and realizes it is staring into the face of Simmons, who is still smiling. His teeth are straight, white, perfect.
“Pryor? Pryor, buddy, you fell asleep. You just came into this empty room and sat down and…there was no one here, Pryor. Have you been sleeping well?”
“Pryor…Pryor…” Simmons smirks. “That’s your name, buddy.”
Simmons glances around and his eyes settle on the bed. It realizes he is looking at what once remained of his old body. “Geez, Pryor, what is this?”
Simmons scoops up a handful of the coarse material and turns it over in his hands. “It’s like…sand…Pryor, did you have anything to do with this?”
It doesn’t feel comfortable being called by the man’s name, but it sighs and accepts it. It looks around the room, realizing with a vague happiness that it is now capable of a wide range of movement.
“Simmons…do we…do we have any cheese in the building?”
Simmons, who had spent about three minutes observing the dust and sand, spins his head around and looks at it. “Cheese? Uh, yeah…I think we have some cheese strings in the caf…pretty out of pocket request, though…”
It stares at him. “Can you get me one?”
The smirk returns to Simmons’ face, replacing his former confused expression. “Are you sure you’ve been getting enough sleep? Do you have, like, a cold or something? Your voice is so hoarse…”
“GO,” he whispers under his breath, and Simmons nods and leaves the room. “Submissive little fool,” it mutters quietly, laughing slightly.
With only a slight hint of nervousness barely perceptible in its movements, it collects the dust. It sweeps it up in big armfuls, trundles over to a nearby cupboard, and takes out a pill bottle before dumping the bottle’s contents into the trash. It takes the dust, and pours it into the bottle, smiling and giggling and chuckling and every other possible word, every emotion under the sun.
It has won.
***
How are you feeling, Ms. Doyle?
Good. Great, even.
Even at a cursory glance you seem much calmer. Is the new medication working?
Yes! It’s…god, it’s perfect…where do you get this stuff?
It’s relatively new…some of the doctors here at Kolbert aren’t even aware of its existence.
Really? Am I…sir, am I the first person you’ve tested this on?
No. There have been other subjects…in the past…
Ms. Doyle, you do realize that the medication is a placebo, correct?
What?
A placebo. The effects-
No, I know what a placebo is. I assumed as much, actually. No, the condition itself doesn’t feel like it’s changed-
You’re very perceptive.
Was there anything in the medication, though? I mean, the condition feels like it’s unchanged, but everything else is essentially the same-
There are some traces of anti-anxiety medication in the mix. I assume it’s effective?
Yeah, yeah, it really is…I guess stress was the problem the whole time, huh?
Ms. Doyle-
Call me Sarah, doctor. We’ve worked together for so long anyways.
Sarah, can you explain what exactly was frightening you so much?
Well, I suppose the proper term for it is necrophobia. I mean, I live a very privileged life- my grandmother died before I was born, my child is alive and well, my husband is perfectly fine, awaiting the day I come home- when death never has a presence in your life, the concept that you could be the one to die is terrifying…and so when the tumor appeared, I guess I…I just felt scared, I guess…It was all so pointless, retrospectively.
Sarah, are there any other side effects you have noticed, after we put you on the medication?
I mean….this is going to sound silly, but I feel like my dreams…they’ve become slightly longer, somehow? The day before always feels a little bit fainter when I wake up…memory is becoming more complicated, I suppose, but-
Are the dreams pleasant?
Oh, yes. They’re wonderful…in fact, I think the reason so much of my stress is gone is because I always have something lovely to look forward to at the end of the day…
Hmm.
Please don’t mark it down, though. There’s no medication in the world that has that effect.
Sarah, you must realize it’s a doctor’s place to keep note of everything!
Ha, yeah, I suppose…
Sarah…you do realize you will never die, correct?
What?
Keep taking the medicine. You will never die. Simple as that…
Doctor- doctor, what do you-
It’s as simple as that, Sarah.
Doctor!
Sarah, I would never do something like this unless there was a purpose behind it, a greater goal. You will live forever, Sarah. In a perfect little dream.
Doctor, you can’t-
Goodbye, Ms. Doyle.
Doctor! Doctor, wait-
Doctor?
Doctor, why are you smiling?