Loaded Secrets (ONC 2023)

Chapter Eleven: A Farewell

Aria's eyelids felt glued shut when she tried to pry them open. She must have been floating in the sea of darkness for what felt like hours. The endless waves of nothingness pulled at her body and kept her from moving her limbs. She felt intermittently heavy and completely non-existent. Her mind was in a disarray, scrambled and unfocused. Aria was unable to grasp at any of the distant and recent fragments of memories that drifted below the surface. Somehow, she knew that she should be feeling pain. She could not recall why, yet she was surprised by its absence.

"Aria!" she heard someone call out in the distance, as if from behind a thick brick wall, "Aria!"

Aria wanted to respond, to find a door between her and the person on the other side, but her lips wouldn't move, and no noise could have passed through her dry throat.

"Aria, can you hear me?" the voice became more insistent, coming into focus, breaching the barrier between Aria and the outside world. Aria thought she managed a grunt, but she could not be sure. She applied every ounce of strength she still had to opening her eyes. The world came rushing in, bright and blurry.

"Aria, you're awake," Epson greeted her, in his usual hollow and mechanical voice.

Aria tried to focus her eyes on him, but his figure appeared only as a hazy outline in a pool of white light. Were they back in the laboratory again? She tried to speak, but managed only a barely audible croak.

"I hope you can hear me," Epson's voice became softer. Aria tried to blink at him, to indicate that she could.

"Listen, Aria," Epson's voice became quieter, "you were seriously wounded. Do you remember what happened?"

Aria tried to wade through the fog in her mind as images of a dark musty shack and a dishevelled woman mad with rage training a weapon on her emerged. And then she remembered the unimaginable pain she felt. And finally, it all came back to Aria, washing over her like a flood. The investigation, the breakthrough, Aria's own inadequate, slow reaction when Tina dashed to her weapon.

Once again, Aria searched for the pain, which she knew she should be feeling, but she couldn't find it.

"Epson..." She managed, after a long pause, her voice wouldn't let her continue with the sentence.

"Aria, I am very sorry to inform you that you are unlikely to survive your injury. Many medical advances took place between your time and ours, but they are still not sufficient to keep you alive for much longer. This is truly a shame, and I am sincerely very sorry."

Aria was too exhausted to process whether he sounded sincere, let alone the meaning of his words. This was the end for her. She knew she should have been scared, shocked, and fighting against her fate, but her emotions were dulled, like a well that had run dry. She momentarily wondered if her consciousness too would be uploaded into the virtual universe, only to be erased within a few days. But she remembered that her death had a known cause. There was no mystery to solve, no investigation to conduct. And if any of it needed to be examined, they could readily access the living, and near-impeccable memory of Epson, who witnessed the entire event and no doubt stored it in his database.

"This is my fault. I should have never let you continue with your ridiculous investigation," Epson said. Was he apologising or merely stating what he considered to be fact?

"Not... your... fault..." Aria managed. "It is my job. I was doing... doing my job."

"Not quite," now Epson did sound apologetic.

"What... what do you mean?" Aria asked. She wondered if whatever drugs were now flooding her system made her too confused to comprehend Epson's words.

"Aria, I know I put you in charge of this investigation, and made you believe that you were making a contribution to our team. However, and I truly regret to inform you of this, you were not, in the strict sense, needed for it at all. Ayden Turner's murder didn't need to be solved. We just determined that your quality of life would have been better if you had the sense that you had a purpose. Humans are peculiar this way."