THE TITAN EXPERIMENT

CHAPTER 31 - Awake and Alive (The Woman)

The woman sensed nothing.

She had no sight. No sound. No hint of smell or other feelings, or any general awareness of being alive. It was like being under anesthesia. A dreamless state of nonexistence in which she was not present and accounted for in the universe. From nowhere, a sea of blackness engulfed her consciousness, and a low mechanical hum permeated the darkness. She floated down an empty tunnel toward a brilliant light, leaving the shadows behind. In a moment, in the twinkling of an eye, the light surrounded her and encompassed her entire being. She couldn't explain what was happening, but a miraculous power flooded her soul with the pure essence of life.

She was alive, and she knew it.

An array of rainbow colors swirled around the outer edges of her vision and materialized into images. Memories. She watched the scene unfold like an out-of-body experience. Someone she knew—Phoenix—said something and smiled and then pulled a breathing mask over his face. With a speargun in his hand, he leaped from the boat and splashed into the sea, waves sloshing over his head as he disappeared from sight.

She donned her own dive mask, stepped off the edge of the gunwale and plunged beneath the surface. Her ears gurgled and her vision darkened to a greenish blue.

Phoenix swam, his fins swishing in the salty water.

Callisto, a friend, appeared from her peripheral vision, kicking toward the bottom. She remembered this day vividly. Like a scene from a TV show she had watched a thousand times, the events unfolding before her eyes.

They were swimming around a sunken fishing trawler. Phoenix and Callisto fired their spearguns and killed a large grouper. Normally, a catch like this would ramp up her excitement and make her happy, but she felt a raw fear creeping in around her instead.

Blood clouded the water, and a giant shadow passed over them. She didn't know why, but her heart spasmed like a marine engine, throwing a rod and seizing on dirty oil. For a moment, she thought her heart had stopped altogether, but then it started again with a tingling jolt.

A predator was in their midst. A great white shark.

The memory skipped ahead like someone erased a critical part, a traumatic event cleansed from her mind. 

They were swimming, chugging to the surface in a frantic wash of foam and froth. Out of the blue, something crashed into them, and the waves rolled around them.

The memory melted into a whiplash of blue, indigo, and red. Blood red. Then it all faded to a harsh black nothingness. The events had occurred. She had seen it and felt it because she lived it. Then it vanished, like it never happened, like an intense dream she had before waking but couldn't remember. Her heart pounded as her chest squeezed around it. She was short of breath and an electrical spark of pain raced through her extremities.

The terror and anxiety associated with the dreamlike memory dematerialized like the remnants of a ghost. Traces of what once was, but now wasn't. Gone. Lost in a matrix of short-circuiting synapses in her brain.

She gasped for air, her lungs coming to life with a sharp intake of oxygen.

That felt better. Much better. No terror. No anxiety. No pain. No sense of loss. No grief.

She remembered nothing.

Clean.

Pure.

Peaceful.

The humming sound intensified, and she noticed a sterile smell similar to a hospital.

Her eyes fluttered open.