Someone's In My Head (WATTYS AWARD WINNER 2015)

Chapter Twelve (Pt. 2)

...and I was back in the lab.

"Phil?" It was Lenny. He sounded worried.

"I was dead," muttered Phil, almost to himself. "I should've died. The blast killed all of us. I shouldn't have survived."

"Phil," Lenny began gently. "You were close to the brink of death when they brought you in. Your vitals were failing, and we lost your pulse and breathing before we could even operate on you. However, there was still some traces of neural activity within your brain, which indicated that your consciousness was still possibly alive. Hence, we had to make a split-second decision."

"What decision?" Phil asked, but I'd already made a guess.

"To extract your consciousness and implant them within another human being," Lenny revealed, echoing my thoughts. Lenny leaned closer and gripped Phil's hand with a sudden vigour. "We managed to give you a second chance. A chance at rebirth. Or, more accurately, reincarnation."

Phil's fingers brushed together nervously, obviously digesting the news his friend had just provided him with. At that point I realized I could hear his thoughts; he was mumbling to himself, 'I knew this couldn't be just a coincidence or some religious taradiddle. But wait, something didn't add up. What's with the 15-year hiatus?'

"What took you so long?" Phil uttered abruptly.

Lenny frowned in confusion. "What?"

"You extracted my consciousness in 1999. Why is it that I wake up in 2014?"

"Oh, that." Lenny nodded. "Once we'd managed to extract your consciousness, our next step was to find a suitable body to host your consciousness. We knew that a normal, alive and healthy person wouldn't work; the consciousness present within the healthy host will form some sort of rejection towards a foreign consciousness that is introduced into the body, the same way agglutination happens if incompatible blood groups are mixed together."

"So you decided to what, use a cadaver?"

Lenny shook his head, smiling. "Not exactly. We needed a functioning host body, but with no neural activity whatsoever."

Phil shrugged. "Well, that fits a profile of a brain-dead patient."

"That was exactly what we thought. We began contacting hospitals for brain-dead patients or those who were in a coma. After several...negotiations, we finally managed to convince them send over some of their patients. Before experimenting on the patients, we duplicated your consciousness―"

"You what?"

Lenny ignored him. "―and started introducing them into the patients' bodies. Unfortunately, it didn't work at first. Most of the host bodies rejected your consciousness―they showed no positive signs of neural activities whatsoever. After a few moments, their vital signs deteriorated significantly, and they died."

Sensing Phil wince, Lenny added, "Quite a painless death, I assure you, as there were no neural impulses for them to detect pain at their moment of death.

"Then we found out what was wrong. The patients we experimented on were mainly adults and the aged. As we deepened our research on this, we realized that the rejection of foreign consciousness by the host body had something to do with the age factor."

Lenny pressed a button, and the bed began to incline until Phil was in sitting position. "Excuse me for a sec." Lenny shuffled over to a table nearby and returned with two identical beakers that were filled with a form of red liquid. The only difference was the labels on them, 'A' and 'B'.

Lenny began to speak. "These two beakers have been filled with the same volume of red agar solution. In beaker A, the hot agar solution was filled sixty minutes ago, whereas, in beaker B, it was filled just ten minutes ago. Now we know that the hot agar solution will start to coagulate and solidify once its heat source is removed. But when I do this―"