"Give me playback of TS-19," Dr. Jenner commands Vi after he set is coffee cup down. The screen lights up and shows a loading screen before showing 5 five different images, four smaller ones showing different angles of a brain scan, and one bigger one of a blue undetailed face.
"Playback of TS-19," Vi repeated.
"Few people ever got a chance to see this. Very few," Jenner said sadly.
"Is that a brain?" Carl asked Jenner.
"An extraordinary one," He turned playfully to face Carl head on, before his face fell and he looked back up at the screen, "Not that it matters in the end. Vi, take us into E.I.V,"
"Enhanced internal view," Vi said as I stand next to Jenner, I glance around the room, Rick, Lori, and Carl are on the far side, Glenn, T-dog, Jacqui, Dale, and Andrea, behind Jenner. Sofia and Carol are to my left, and just past them is Daryl, who glances at me before looking back at the screen. The biggest image tilts and zooms in so you could see all of the neuron's firing.
"What are those lights?" Shane asks from somewhere behind me and fear spikes in my chest. I force myself to calm down, he's twenty feet away, there was no way he could get to me before anyone else would notice.
"It's a person's life—experiences, memories." Jenner turns around to face everyone pointing up to the screen like he was teaching children, "It's everything. Somewhere in all that organic wiring, all those ripples of light, is you" He points at me before continuing, "—the thing that makes you unique and human," Jenner says looking up at the screen with awe.
"Don't you ever make sense?" Daryl retorts with his hands tucked under his armpits, a comforting habit, I noted. I huff a laugh, and he glances at me.
"They're neurons," I answer, looking away from him to check how accurate I was. Jenner nodded.
"And synapses. Electric impulses in the brain that carry all the messages. They determine everything a person says, does or thinks from the moment of birth to the moment of death," Dr. Jenner finishes, looking up at the screen with awe.
"Death? That's what this is, a vigil?" Rick says, walking closer to Jenner.
"Yes," He pauses for a moment, "or rather the playback of the vigil."
"This person died? Who?" Andrea asked shifting on her feet, her eyes never leaving the screen.
"Test subject 19. Someone who was bitten and infected... and volunteered to have us record the process," Jenner looked down at his feet for a moment, "Vi, scan forward to the first event."
"Scanning to first event." The screens beep and the playback speeds up. The test subject moves around like they were trying to stop what was happening to them. The brainstem turned dark, but the small roots around it were still on.
"What is that?" Glenn was the first one to speak.
"It invades the brain like meningitis. The adrenal glands hemorrhage, the brain goes into shut down, then the major organs." The movement on the screen sped up before all movement ceased, and the rest of the brain goes dark "Then death. Everything you ever were or ever will be...gone," Jenner explains.
It all made sense. When it comes to Jim, the hallucinations could be from a mix of rapidly developed PTSD, his brain shutting itself down, and the trauma to his adrenal glands.
I stood there not listening to anyone for a moment, stuck in my head. There was no way to prevent this death. Adrenal trauma already has a 15% death rate without treatment. Paired with the infection of a bite... with normal healthy people the infection is already very likely to happen, but when they've been dead for god knows how long?
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His Everything
Terror"Stop lookin' at me like that," Daryl whispers, inches away from Abby's face. "Like what?" She asked running her hands through the hair at the nape of his neck. "Like- nevermind," Daryl whispered, and closed the distance between them. Meet Abb...
