CELL

/ TWENTY SIX /

What is life?

More specifically, what is living?

Is it breathing? Walking around? Eating a meal? Is living the ability to carry out the most basic of tasks? Or is it bending down to smell a flower? The feeling you get when you hear a young child giggling their little head off? Is it savouring the flavours of every aspect of that meal? The feel of the wind in your hair or your lover's kiss? The pain of a broken leg? The broken heart from an equally broken relationship?. The devastation of a close relative's death?

Whether good or bad, living isn't simply standing in one spot. It's standing there and being touched by the world around you, physically and emotionally. It's touching that world.

You would still, would you not, require a point of reference? Something inside to experience the outside. You'd need you.

For Ryan, there was no him. Did that mean he was, then, dead?

He was having to reassess his point of view of the world. For one thing, he needed to accept he had one in the first place. He could continue to voice his disapproval at the procedures carried out on him, or he could put them behind him. Whether his current attitude was based on who he'd been before was irrelevant. Now was now. Then was gone.

He felt that, at one time, he would have said being dead on the inside meant you were effectively dead, fully, in all the ways it mattered. Breathing and having a beating heart were incidental side effects of your body not wearing out completely, or not being consumed by a ravaging disease, or not having a car race around a blind corner and break all your bones. Or having a gun fired at your head.

He looked over at the dead Dr Bradley. The blood from her bullet wound had slowed. Her eyes stared upwards, and he had to force himself not to follow her gaze. How could she be there, lifeless, yet beside him and unquestionably alive?

Where there should have been a defined line between the opposing sides of the mortal coin, there was now not. They were merging with each other, enabling the crossing of boundaries that should never be traversed.

Bradley and her father were a Frankensteinian combination that Mary Shelley could never have imagined.

"You're wondering how, aren't you?"

Ryan jumped, startled.

"Yes. Sort of."

"Sort of?"

"Not just how. How the fuck. I mean, just how is like asking how dark do you like your toast. It isn't how come you're there with a bullet through your brain, put there by you, and you're here speaking to me? It doesn't make sense."

"I assure you it does, if you know the details."

"Which I don't."

"Which, true, you do not."

"Look," he said, sighing. "Just stick me back in my cage and prod me through the bars. Throw me scraps of meat and I'll perform all you want."

Bradley laughed and slapped Ryan's knee.

"I do love a sense of humour!" she said. "Look. You're not a performing animal. You're not a test subject. You're doing so much good, you can't comprehend. I promise you."

"But you're promises don't mean shit. I'll still be stuffed back in the cell at your whim. I'm still a... a lost soul in a sea of darkness."

"Very poetic. I like that. Would you like some light in that darkness?"

Well, duh!

"Yes, please."

"I'm afraid I can't give you literal light. That's against the rules. None of you can see or speak to each other. It's part of the process. But I can, and will, give you information. Perhaps that will ease your mind."