CELL

/ TWENTY ONE /

Memories, eh?

Who needs 'em? Who wants 'em?

Memories can bring tears. An aching heart. Debilitating pain. Thoughts of death, your own or another's, whose death you'd like to bring about. Thoughts don't necessarily imply intent, but when the memories wash over you, eradicating the hope that had managed to take root and blossom within you, thoughts are all you have.

Does the eradication of the memories themselves allow hope to grow? No. The barren wasteland remaining is no longer suitable for either germination or growth.

There can be happy memories, undoubtedly, but their darker siblings are like mental Hydras. When the head of a single unhappy one is cut off by a something good, two erupt from the severed neck.

So, who would want them? Not I, said the fly while it spit in my eye, making me want to die.

His mind was wandering. More than that, it was fleeing. He could feel reason's fingers slipping and drifting off into the abyss that seemed to envelop him, and he was tempted to allow it to go. He could remember nothing, and he seemed to be surrounded by that same nothing. It gave him the impression he was potentially not even real.

How could he be, when he wasn't sure if he actually existed?

To exist, mustn't there be a sense of self? An identity? Didn't there have to be substance of some sort?

If he wasn't real, then what was he?

Perhaps...

What happened to thoughts when they were done with? Were they discarded, doomed to float in an endless darkness, such as that which faced him now, for eternity? Once they had fulfilled their purpose in entering a person's mind and linking other thoughts together like a formation skydiving team plummeting towards the Earth, did they continue to exist in a mental Limbo? Did they then become self-aware and begin to wonder if they were real?

He asked the question:

"Am I real?"

"You soon won't be, if you don't shut the fuck up!"

And then, in a flash that was all shock and no illumination, he remembered.

He remembered that he, Ryan, couldn't remember, apart from his cell and the twins and Dr Fiona Bradley. And a strange, impossible girl.

Bradley was his tormentor. The thief of his life, in so many ways. She had stolen his memories. She had stolen...

No, not stolen.

It was clear to him now, something that had eluded him. Jarvis, Bradley and her assistant Pedra had spoken about 'cycling'. Why he'd not realised before, he didn't know. Or, rather, he did and had avoided the truth. It was madness, but he was a testament to the insanity. He was its proof.

He'd seen Bradley shoot somebody. The flash of the muzzle and the echoing blast of the bullet leaving the barrel to blast the brains from the skull of the target. That was one aspect of this cycling.

Just as the scalpel she'd held had cut through his neck.

He could still feel it entering his throat and slicing through all that hid beneath the flesh. The world had faded, swirling away in a sickening, encroaching emptiness.

Bradley had murdered him, yet here he was, contemplating the corporeality of thought.

Bradley

Had

Murdered

Him.

He'd died, and he couldn't help thinking it had happened multiple times. This was cycling. Kill and, somehow, resurrect. And kill. And resurrect.