The Many Regrets of a Cyborg Werewolf

Tabula Rasa - XXV

Memories are a strange thing. That is what he had always thought. They were strange because they make perfect sense, yet defy all logic. The whole world is a memory. Everything in it is a memory. You're not seeing the world as it is, but as it was microseconds ago. From the time it takes light to travel and reach your eyes, or sound to reach your ears, even the touch from your fingertips along your nervous system and processed as impulses in your brain, said information is woefully out of date. On the scale of the universe, as vast and complex as it is, events happen so quickly, so suddenly, you'd be forgiven for not even noticing that they happened at all. Every human is a historian living the immediate 'before,' the world as it was seconds, minutes, or even years ago. A history that, the farther back it moves, the more abstract it becomes. People can remember the last hour, but hardly recall the last decade in detail. What does that mean for human history? Prehistory? The history before prehistory? Is all record of existence merely opinion? Our best recollection of worlds that no longer exist? What then would that say of history unrecorded? Would that even count as history by its own definition? These are the questions that sit at the core of his mind. If memories are not infallible, if they are simply one person's appraisal of events long gone, how can anything be considered real?

He took the tip of the scalpel, pressing it into his thumb, and watched the blood form. This was how Mercury reminded himself what was real. Not a prick, not a sudden and brief stab of pain, but a slow, memorable one. There was a time where he lived in such slow agony. Every day a piece of his body falling away, succumbing to illness and age, his flesh a cruel reminder of years of deterioration. If memories are the past, he considered his body a comprehensive book on the history of pain. A body he had been trapped in.

Had been. Past tense. As Mercury looked at his thumb, the thin cut producing a line of blood down his palm, he felt an old familiarity. Now the body he had was different. His youth, his vigor, his physicality restored. Overnight he'd gone from an old man decaying in a chair to full of life and promise. It seemed so unbelievable, so miraculous, the pain was the only thing that reminded him it was still real. He needed that reminder, because despite his intellect and perspective of memories... so many were missing. Not the old ones, strangely, but the new ones. He recalled his battle with the woman.

That woman. Erin Broadhead. Collateral that had never been cleaned up. She used Ray's device on herself, somehow, and dealt him critical damage. Mercury recalled the idiot Urchin rescuing him, the hole she put in his stomach, the Compiler in his chest failing on the way back, and the near invincible body of his going with it. It was shameful, enraging, and hopeless all at once. It was an embarrassment that a form designed as the perfect antithesis to a renegade wolfman would be so soundly defeated. Yet the way she fought was different. It was like an actual animal. He recalled how desperate and wild she was. The ferocity. The defeat and humiliation of needing to be rescued. He recalled the pain, the weakness, and being on the operating table. Wintergreen's words, her disappointment, and then... nothing.

Mercury had been told that memory lapses, among other things, were side-effects of the treatment. The doctors assured him he'd simply been under anesthetic, and that was no doubt true, yet he couldn't recall. He never went to sleep, nor did he wake up. There was a primal fear in this. If memories were the world, that means he was missing pieces. His reality, his own self, was incomplete. Even if it were to a minute degree.

"Doctor Alabaster," one of the other medical technicians spoke up, witnessing the act of self-injury.

"I told you," he tossed the bloody scalpel into the sink behind him, "my name is Mercury."

"Apologies, doctor," the tech said, "but we have a few more tests we need to run-"

"Why?" Mercury held his thumb up for the tech to see the wound already healed, "my body is at its peak, all my injuries are completely healed."