The Creative Sponge

  Chapter 15

  Two weeks ago

  It is a strange sensation when one knows the end is near. Everything is suddenly more vibrant, more vivid: smells are stronger, sounds are louder, lights are brighter. Time seems to slow down and every experience is sweeter.

  You count down to the end. You note everything: your last glimpse of sunlight; your last smell of a rose; the last time you will ever feel the breeze on your skin. Each of these sensations is invaluable and tastes better than it has ever tasted before in your life, and you wonder why you have never appreciated it so before.

  This is how Kathy was experiencing her world now. Presently she was in a dark, unlit corridor being more or less dragged along by an unfeeling man with a painful grip on her arm. Yet she was at peace. She knew her fate: to be hooked up to one of Cybertech’s machines, plugged into the Cortical Manipulation Matrix and robbed of her identity. There was nothing she could do to change this or stop this. So, she merely put her utmost effort into enjoying her last moment of being Kathy- for who knew what identity she would gain in five minutes, when her soul was sent flying through time and space into another person’s head?

  Of course, part of her mind was preoccupied with the death of her friend. She had come to know Ruth quite well during her time in the cage and they had become good friends. What she had learned about Cybertech and her arch-nemesis Doctor Jones was fascinating, but it would unfortunately not be able to release her arm from the grip of a mindless goon or show her the way out of here.

  She loved her body. She did not know why she thought this, or why she had never thought it before, but in this moment her mind was clinging on passionately, desperately to her reality and the vehicle that carried her through it. After all, hadn’t her body treated her well? It had taken her everywhere she had ever asked it to; it had breathed for her, pumped blood for her, digested food for her and cleaned out toxins for her. It was a beautiful body. She would miss it when she left it.

  And in this moment she loved every bit of it: every freckle, every mole, every pimple, every dimple, every little bit of unwanted fat that she had ever complained about- it was all lovely, beautiful, useful and helpful.

  Her feet walked. Her left foot stepped forward, then her right, then her left once more… she remembered hearing that the feet contain the most nerves in the body and she used them to enjoy the feel of the fabric of her sock and the leather of her shoe. What genius, what craftsmanship must have gone into those items! She had never thought about it before, but how exactly does one make a sock or a shoe? In that moment, she felt infinite gratitude for the people who had worked so hard to ensure that her feet would not be impaled on a piece of glass or scratched by stones and gravel.

  And her clothes, and her jewellery, and her hats, and her furniture, and everything in the world she owned or had ever owned! She thanked every one of them, and every person who had ever worked on them. In this moment, when she should have felt despair and fear, there was only peace running through her mind and a sense of infinite interconnectedness with the world.

  The pair of them- guard and prisoner- reached the elevator, and she almost gasped as the door opened. Had it always been so… so bright, so shiny, so dazzling? Her eyes scanned every detail of her current location. The walls were so fantastically smooth and the lights on the keypad, where one would key in which floor to go to, were so colourful. How had she not seen this before? It was as if some faculty of her brain, which had never before been accessed, had turned itself on to bid farewell to this world with a bang, with a firework show of perception and lights.

  She found her free arm stroking the side of the lift in wonder, and wondered herself if she had been secretly put on some mystery drugs. Her guard eyed her up suspiciously and gave her a slap to stop her weird behaviour. Nevertheless, he could not rid her of her feeling of peace.

  The journey was short and the lift soon reached the fifth floor. Her guard marched her out of the elevator and, as she neared the last room she would ever see, her peace of mind began to fragment as reality struck in. Fear and panic began to build; anger and despair and frustration soon followed. She began to struggle against her captor, to want to run and flee and escape, but a sharp slap on her right cheek reminded her of just who had the power in this situation. She was entirely at her guard’s mercy.

  They stopped outside room seventeen. Before they could enter, however, the door burst open and a handsome middle aged doctor came rushing out, his white coat hanging loosely behind him as he strode away briskly. A magazine was visible in his hand, though its title was obscured by his fingers. A moment later the familiar face of Doctor Jones appeared from behind the still swinging door and glared after the man who was leaving. The first man froze for a second to glance back, and in that moment the two men shared a look of barely concealed loathing. The new arrivals had evidently caught the tail end of a bitter quarrel.

  “We have to take this seriously, you know,” uttered the first man, holding up the magazine. “We can’t just brush a leak like this under the carpet. You’ve got a great mind, Earnest, but sometimes you have a knack for burying your head in the sand.”

  “Oh, go away, Curtis,” shouted Jones crossly. “You tell me you’ve plugged the leak, anyway.”

  “I have,” Curtis replied. “But we need to do more.”

  With that, the handsome doctor departed and Jones regained his composure to greet Kathy.

  “Ah, hello again,” he grinned. “Are you ready?”

  She did not answer with words but with her feet. They began to kick and push against the ground like when a horse can sense the farmer’s gun and begins to fight with all its might for freedom. Nevertheless, Kathy’s efforts were without success- and did she ever think they wouldn’t be? Gregory, who was at least five times her strength, had not managed to struggle free from his captor’s grip. She suddenly noticed just how fantastically bulky the chest and arms of her escort were.

  “Now, don’t struggle,” urged Doctor Jones. “I promise you, you won’t feel a thing. In a short while you won’t even remember who you are.”

  A second guard appeared as if from nowhere and grabbed her legs. With the first now holding her arms, the pair of them carried her effortlessly into the awaiting bed and strapped her in. The straps allowed her enough freedom to wriggle about, but this was cruel for it offered her the illusion of escape, a false hope which proved only to increase her despair and anguish.

  The guards retreated to the door while Jones walked behind Kathy and began attaching chemical drips to her arms and electrodes to her head. She winced with every injection.

  Her eyes darted around the room, but confirmed that escape would not be an option. Even if by some miracle she could release herself from the restraints on the bed, there stood between her and the corridor two huge men who would simply return her to the bed if she ran away and the procedure would start again. Her fate was sealed.

  But maybe Ruth’s was not. From what Ruth had told her, Earnest loved her. He was also a very influential man within the organisation. To Kathy, this man, the “famous Doctor Jones”, was a vile, evil human being who was going to steal her identity and subject her to inhuman treatment. Yet to Ruth, he may yet be her salvation.

  “Ruth!” she suddenly blurted out. Her eyes bulged with urgency as she looked up, trying to see the face of her tormentor.

  The angle of the bed meant that she could not. He was presently behind her inserting yet another electrode into her skull. Yet her exclamation must have affected him for he suddenly stopped messing about with the wire and moved his face uncomfortably close to Kathy’s, as if inspecting her. His cheeks had turned red and his eyes betrayed a hidden longing.

  “Ruth? Why did you say Ruth?” he demanded. He was trying to sound annoyed, authoritative, important- but a quiver in his voice gave away a little too much. She had his interest.

  “I met her in the cells. She told me that you thought she was cheating on you, but she wasn’t. She told
me the truth: that she had found out about your experiments, like the one you’re trying to do to me. It tore her apart. She knew it was wrong and started to work with TGN. When security found out they took her to the basement. She loves you, but she hates what you’re doing and what you’ve become. When one guard dragged me up here, the other took her for execution.”

  The words tumbled out of her mouth almost too quickly to comprehend, but Jones understood them all. His reddened cheeks became deathly pale and he seemed to age ten years. Fear, regret, sorrow and sadness all appeared in his expression at once.

  For a second he seemed unsure how to react. This was one of his patients, after all. She did not want to be restrained in here and would say anything to escape or buy a little extra time. For all he knew, she could have heard of Ruth and his relationship to her and simply made this story up to distract him or to get him to release her.

  “Prove it,” he ordered. “Prove that you met Ruth. Tell me something to show me you’re not making this up.” He was almost pleading with her, half wanting her words to be true and half wanting her to be lying. In truth, he did not know what he wanted.

  Kathy thought for a second. She had spent three days in a cage with this woman, and had spent practically all of that time listening to her talking about herself and her relationship with the man she knew as Earnest. A detail to prove the truth of her account should be easy.

  “She told me about your first date,” Kathy remembered. “You took her to a fancy Japanese restaurant called Mount Fuji. You turned up in a pinstripe suit carrying carnations, because you remembered those were her favourite flowers.”

  That was enough detail for Doctor Jones. At the very least, he was convinced that this was a woman who knew Ruth very well. With ashen face and eyes widening in terror, he fled from the room in a desperate attempt to rescue the woman he loved.

  He pushed past the two guards and disappeared. Kathy looked at her two minders and they looked back with bemused faces. They were clearly unsure how to act in such a situation: matters of the heart were not their speciality and had not arisen before. Staff had always acted with utmost professional conduct and had never abandoned a patient in mid-procedure. Nevertheless, the pair of them maintained their posts by the door, just in case Kathy might untie herself and try to leave.

  She pleaded with them to let her free, but they would not listen. She invoked human dignity and human rights; threatened to sue them for false imprisonment; asked them how they would feel if they were in her position. She groped around in the back of her mind and tried to use psychological mind-tricks she had learned from half-forgotten films and documentaries. It was all to no avail. The two guards did not even acknowledge her. They may as well have been statues, although she knew that if she did manage to release herself from her bonds they would suddenly find enough life within themselves to restrain her once more.

  She hated those two men now. All brawn and no brain, they clearly lacked the capacity to think for themselves or do a selfless deed. How much human sentiment was required to realise that Kathy’s treatment was inhuman? Was it possible that they were really so devout in their loyalty, or cruel in their apathy, that there was no doubt whatsoever in their minds about the morality of this procedure?

  All she could do was struggle, and struggle she did. Yet she knew the bonds would not break. She shouted and screamed, even though no-one who could hear her would have any sympathy. At times like this instinct takes over and there is little separating man from wild animals in how he responds to danger. Her rational mind sat in the back of her skull in depressed knowledge that the end was near and inevitable, and it watched with dark amusement while her body moved and lurched so violently and yet in futility.

  Kathy spent a full half an hour like this before Doctor Jones returned. His face was as ashen as before and Kathy could tell that his mission had not been a success. Either he had failed to stop the execution, or Ruth was already dead. Sorrow and mourning adorned his face, yet as he turned on Kathy it became pure rage as if she were somehow responsible for the death of his beloved. She feared what he would do next.

  As it turned out, he was not such a threat and more of a puzzle. He simply glared at Kathy for several minutes with a gaze that burned like fire before retreating to one of the chairs in the corners of the room, sitting down with his head in his hands. He looked at Kathy once more before dismissing the guards and locking the door.

  His appearance began to change. He sat there for a good few minutes and as he did so, the fire in his gaze was gradually doused out by the well of his loss until it had become mere ash and embers. When the last spark had died, his body slumped and his face collapsed.

  “I just went down to the basement. She’s… dead. I was too late.” He announced this to Kathy as if speaking to an old friend confessing a deep personal secret. The man before her was now open, vulnerable, and the change was remarkable: aside from wearing the same clothes, the same skin and the same hair, he seemed a different person altogether.

  “You were right,” he said absent-mindedly. It was unclear who he was talking to: although only Kathy was in the room, he seemed to be staring into space as he spoke, as if speaking to an apparition. As fresh tears began to well up in his eyes, he hid his face. Kathy’s mouth was agape: moments before, this man had been a heartless, uncaring man who stole people’s minds for a living. Now, the one thing in the world he cared about had been taken from him and he was like a tortoise without its shell. His steely surface was gone and the soft underbelly was exposed.

  He turned back to Kathy with iron gaze and quivering lip. “She saw that I had become a monster, but she still loved me. But she’s right. I have become a monster. And this machine, this brilliant invention of mine, is evil.” He stood and ran up to the machine to Kathy’s left and kicked it with all his might. From the sound it made, he may well have broken a toe- but he seemed not to care.

  “I want to free you,” he suddenly announced, and Kathy’s heart leapt. “What I’m doing here is evil, and I want to undo it.”

  Kathy’s heart began to pulse gradually faster, as if taking gentle steps, scarcely believing its luck, before edging up into a full-paced joyful sprint. Could this really be happening? Could the vast tragedy that had been her recent life be about to take an unexpected turn for the better? Reality took on a timeless quality as she watched Jones walk behind her, as if in slow motion, and begin to pull out the electrodes from her skull. As each electrode was pulled out, a tiny, imperceptible rush of air greeted the previously pierced skin and it felt like a cool sea breeze, refreshing her tired mind with hope.

  She loved this man now, she really did. He had so recently been her nemesis; now he was her salvation. With each needle removed, she felt ever closer to freedom, to returning to some measure of normal life.

  All along, it was Jones who had been her tormentor. She understood that now. It was he who had manipulated her reality and given her hallucinations. It was he who had wiped all memory of her from the earth. He had admitted it, even boasted of it before hundreds of people. And, no doubt, it was he who had been responsible for Thomas’ identity crisis. Now that he had repented, now that morality had won out in his rotten heart, all would be well.

  She could picture it now: Kathy Turner, walking out into the world and being recognised once more. Going home. Seeing the paintings in Agnes’ alcove not talking to her. Thomas being Thomas again, and Gregory freed. With Jones having seen the light, all would be undone: the sacrifice of one innocent would not have been in vain, for it would have led to the release of many.

  “Unless…”

  Her dream came to a sudden halt and the world stood still as she was pulled rudely back into reality. Her hope was suspended as the meaning in that word became apparent to her: “Unless...” That is what Doctor Jones had said, and as he said it, he had stopped removing Kathy’s electrodes. That one word showed doubt in Jones’ mind. It showed her that he was not so sure after all about letting her
free. Her escape, seconds ago within grasp, was now on hold.

  “What are you doing?” she demanded, half-authoritatively and half-desperately.

  He did not answer straight-away. Rather, he circled round in front of her, re-entering her field of vision. His face was mournful. That was understandable. Yet Kathy perceived something more than the loss of a loved one. She saw also a sorrow for something which was to come; long and drawn-out, its conclusion not yet reached.

  “How did this all begin, for you?” he asked her. His voice was thick and slow.

  “What do you mean?”

  “I mean, why did TGN send you here?”

  “It wasn’t by choice,” said Kathy. In the absence of any other hypothesis, she speculated that Jones was about to punish her for being associated with his company’s apparent enemy. She feared his repentance may have been short-lived, for emotions in the mind of a man who has lost his beloved are rarely stable. “They forced me.”

  “So how did they find you?”

  “I infiltrated their offices. I wanted to know how they were linked to Thomas. I swear I didn’t work with them by choice. I am their captive, not their agent.”

  “What happened just before you decided to enter their offices?”

  Kathy looked at Jones strangely. It was now clear that his line of questioning had nothing to do with TGN. In fact, she could not fathom its direction.

  “Thomas, Gregory and I decided to work together,” she said meekly, before realising his question was referring to something else. “I mean, erm, Thomas came back to life. I had found him the night before, and he died. I was the chief suspect in his murder.”

  “And how did you find him?”

  “A stranger gave me a tip-off. Told me to go to 16 Oxford Street at 9:13 p.m. I went, and there I found Thomas.”

  Doctor Jones sighed, as if Kathy’s words had confirmed something regrettable to him.

  “How would you describe the stranger?” he asked in an oddly resigned manner.

  “Odd,” she replied. “He wore a pinstripe suit. Looked like a gentleman. He simply stood there in silence for a bit and then sat beside me. He didn’t say a lot, but it was okay. It felt comfortable. He…”

  Kathy stopped, mid-sentence. She had been about to say that he had been copying her mannerisms exactly- in fact, almost mimicking her- before she realised what Jones must have understood when he stopped unplugging her electrodes. No words were said, but an air of understanding passed between them. She heard his feet move briskly towards the screen behind her and although she could not see what he was doing, his fingers began tapping away busily. After finding what he was looking for, he uttered a defeated sigh once more and Kathy knew that escape would not be coming her way.

  “I can’t free you. I’m sorry,” he announced, and Kathy’s heart sank. All hope was now confirmed gone and she felt like the tragic hero of fairytales, where the main character has no choice but to accept her fate, despite its implications.

  “This machine doesn’t just move your mind into another person’s head,” he continued. “It can also send your mind through time, to a limited degree. The person who sat next to you and told you precisely when and where to find Thomas was you.”

  She had realised it already, but the confirmation choked her. She had already placed the noose around her neck and Jones’ words kicked out the stop from beneath her feet; she felt her body hang in despair and bitter defeat, and could find no motivation or strength to resist.

  “I have no choice but to continue the procedure. Your mind was in that stranger’s head. It is a matter of fact- the Matrix confirms it,” he explained with heavy heart. Evidently that was what he had been checking when his fingers had been busy on the Wall. “If I don’t do this procedure, then we create a paradox. What has happened already must happen once more.”

  “Why?” Kathy uttered weakly. The word barely left her throat, such was her weakness now, and it was barely a whisper. Nevertheless, he could hear her. He spoke compassionately when he replied.

  “The fact that it has happened shows that it must happen. We’re playing with a weird form of causality here. Every effect must have a cause. That man telling you where to find Thomas- that was the effect. This procedure, here, today, is the cause.”

  Her mind probed his argument. Her thoughts were weak and it took all her effort to push her neurons into action, to find a counter-argument to win her freedom. The best she could come up with was:

  “We could rewrite history.”

  “So that you were never told where to find Thomas, and you never end up here?” He smiled sadly. “It doesn’t work like that I’m afraid. Time doesn’t get rewritten.”

  “This situation isn’t without hope, though,” he said, suddenly with a lift to his voice. “I take it TGN didn’t send you here with nothing? No?” He smiled as Kathy shook her head. “What was it?” he asked.

  “Contact lens cameras,” she said drily. She was once more astonished by her voice and just how hollow it sounded now.

  “With a live video link, I’m guessing,” smiled Jones. “Good. Then they know what we’re doing here at Cybertech. I don’t know what they can do with that information, but hopefully they can do something. Bring down this infernal system.” He kicked the machine in the corner once more and allowed a solitary tear to fall from his eye.

  “I’m sorry, I really am,” he continued. “But I have to continue setting up the machine, and then I have to turn it on. I’ll send your mind into the head of that stranger and you have to do and say exactly what you remember seeing him do and say, understand?”

  Kathy bit her lip and nodded. She suddenly remembered something, though. The suited man had told her to go to 16 Oxford Street at 9:13 p.m., but then something had happened to him. There had been two men with a remote control who had made the man change, return to his previous identity. He had feared that they might do something, but had refused to say who ‘they’ were. Was that what fate had in store for her? Kathy Turner, forgotten first by the world and then even by herself, as if she had never existed?

  She posed this question to Doctor Jones, who responded obligingly. There was some sort of rapport growing between them now: the man who had once been her nemesis was now a changed man, and one whom she was beginning to feel she could trust.

  “I’m afraid I cannot explain that,” he replied, puzzled. “My only guess is that those two men were from TGN. They have, apparently, been watching us here for some time. Clearly they have some grasp of our technology and know how to disrupt it. They must have reset your mind to that of your future host body; presumably to prevent your younger self from interrupting what they were doing with Thomas. Of course, they could not prevent the inevitable.”

  “And, of course, because you now know this, you will be fearing that they are after you. But you must not tell your younger self any of this.”

  That was the most heart-wrenching part for Kathy. If she were able, she would have explained everything to her past self to prevent her from having to live in this terrible, terrible time loop. But she could not. She understood well the need to avoid a paradox.

  One question remained, however. A question which had remained unanswered since the very beginning, which had at the start been the most crucial mystery of this whole case.

  “Doctor Jones,” asked Kathy. “Who exactly are TGN? I’ve investigated them and gone undercover for them, but I still don’t know.”

  He looked at Kathy as an executioner would look at his innocent victim: with pity, ready to oblige her every request for he knows she is innocent. He bit his lip in thought and answered her.

  “Honestly, we don’t know fully,” he admitted. “They are a private investigation firm and a rival of ours. They have been developing a similar technology to us, but using it for different purposes. Our patients”- he said the word with utter disgust and vehemence, now horrified by the procedure he had created- “have their minds sent into other people’s bodies. When that happen
s, they take on the identity of their host body and start to believe that they are their host. Recently- very recently, actually; Thomas was the first case- TGN has started to disrupt our signals so that they remember who they truly are, probably in the hope that, armed with that knowledge, the truth about what is happening here will get out.”

  “Who knows? Maybe they’ll be successful,” Jones mused, with more than a hint of hope.

  He went back to setting up the procedure. He began once more inserting drips and electrodes into her body. She scrunched up her face in pain whenever one of these penetrated her skin, but she made no noise. The pair of them, in fact, continued in utter silence: Doctor Jones contemplating the awful things he was responsible for, and Kathy thinking over the terrible fate that lay before her.

  “I’m done,” said Doctor Jones presently. “All I need to do now is inject you with this needle and you’ll be on your way.”

  Kathy looked at him imploringly, but she knew that she could not escape her fate. Yet she was not done with this reality yet.

  “Before you do that,” she asked, “could you tell me what happened to Thomas and Gregory?”

  Doctor Jones looked pained at this request. Understandably so, for Gregory had been his last patient. He had fully repented of his ways now but when he had administered the injection to Gregory he had been his previous, evil self. Talking about it reminded him of the monster he had become and the love he had lost.

  Nevertheless, he obliged Kathy her last request.