My Love; My Life: Slipping Through My Fingers

The Project

Setting: October 2042, place still unknown; Hyla's room...

"Get. Up," someone says like they do every morning, "now."

     She says nothing as she gets up, follows them out of the room, down the halls & into a new room she's never been to before; a room that's set up to look like her cousins auto shop. The only difference between the shop & the room is that the shop is by far cleaner & doesn't look or feel like a cage as this place does. There's a work bench, two stools, a bunch of tool & a bunch of odds & ends-no clock, but this time she has a window & one giant ceiling light above....

"?" She just silently looks to them in question

"As the former president and record holder for smartest woman in the world," a superior tells her, "then you shouldn't have any problems being the first person to invite the world's first working time machine for secret service, agent H."

"..." she glares at them, "..."

"What was that Agent H?"

"I said that my name is Hyla."

"Hyla Cooper is dead," they tell her, "erased from existence. You are Agent H, that is your identity now."

"I'M HYLA CONSTANCE COOPER!" She names then screams, "THAT'S WHO I AM N AIN'T NOBODY CAN TAKE THAT FROM ME-I WON'T LET THEM!"

Crack!

     Having been  knocked to the floor by a sharp slap to the face, they kick her in the sides multiple times over has she tries to pick herself up & they do this for a long while until they finally stop. She doesn't try to move anymore, she just lies their motionless on the floor as if she has lost the will-her drive to fight back, like she had completely lost her backbone & her voice. Only when the superiors were gone did she dare to move from the floor & comply to the new found identity & place they gave her. She limps her way to the bench, forces herself onto the stool & looks about the materials left for her to use in order to build this time machine that they want. Her mind a blank, she grabs a pencil she found in the mess of scrap metal & starts to sketch out designs for this project on top of wooden work bench-left with only the work & her own thoughts...

'I don't exist anymore...I'll never see my family again'

As her time sketching turns to building a model of how it she wants it to look; as she works, her mind stays focused between what she's doing & her various thoughts. Her thoughts become dark over time as she has no one to talk to about anything & due to this, she develops the habit of talking-and eventually answering herself. Due to this, she has come to dub herself to be 'mader than the hatter' or to be 'the hatter's wife' (expansion on this to come at en of chapter). With how frequent talking & answer herself became, she started changing her voice so it seemed like she was actually talking to someone else & even gave the different voiced versions of her names...

"All the voices in my head will be quiet once I'm dead," she sings to hers from time to time as she works while the other people she mentally made up to talk, imaginarily argue around her (all in her mind), "all the voices in my head will be quiet once I'm dead," she repeatedly sings to herself as 'Rumplestilitskin' from 'ONCE UPON A TIME: had, "all the voices in my head will be quiet once I'm dead."

     The only time Hyla finds moments of sanity where when the superiors came boarding in to check on her progress & she'd lose that sanity once they were gone. Unbeknownst to her, the people whom stole her life & identity from her are well aware of what's happening to her due to secretly watching her over video/audio recording. They monitor her progress as she works, talks to/argues with herself in different voices, & as she's sings the creepy song over & over again like it's an actual song set to endless replay. Eventually her superiors stop monitoring her twenty four seven, instead only checking the feed every now & again to find that things either haven't changed or have gotten worse. Hyla had already lost her sense of time during her first week in captivity, so being given a window in the work shop didn't make much difference...