Heroes Wanted

A couple scenes in this were inspired by a quite fantastic audio recording titled "Sehnsucht" by user feurlilie on SoundCloud, as well as the X-Art video "Farewell." I encourage everyone to check out both.

*****

"Wh... where am I?"

The room was dark, or was it her eyes that were failing her? She could hear noises, but everything sounded like her ears were plugged with cotton - muffled, indistinct.

"Samantha, can you hear me?" a voice, muffled and distant as it was, cut through the other sounds. "Samantha?"

"Yes... yes, I can hear you. Are you there? Where am I? What's happening?"

"Yes, I'm here."

She felt a squeeze on her left hand, and instinctively she squeezed back, seeking something to tether her to the world in the midst of the darkness.

"Your grip strength seems to be normal, so that's a good sign," the voice said.

"Why can't I see? And my legs, I can't feel..."

"It's okay, Samantha. This is normal. You've been in an accident, and you're being treated at a medical facility. My name is Dr. Cho, I'll be monitoring your recovery."

She realized that although Dr. Cho kept calling her Samantha, the name didn't feel familiar.

"I'm not Samantha," she murmured. "My name is... my name is..."

Panic started to set in as she realized she couldn't remember her name. Or anything else about herself.

"I can't remember. Why can't I remember?"

Alarms started to beep and blare as her heart rate surged and she began to thrash and flail the parts of her body within her control.

"I need a hand here!" Dr. Cho's voice called out.

Several sets of hands took hold of her body and held her to the bed, and then she heard Dr. Cho speaking to her in a low voice.

"Samantha, I need you to calm down. We'll explain everything to you in due time, but right now if you don't stop fighting, you're going to make your injuries worse."

She felt a heaviness start to overtake her body.

"I'm giving you a sedative," Dr. Cho explained. "To help you relax. Your body needs time to recover. Once you're a little farther along, we'll talk more."

The noises in the room started to fade into the silence as the sedative took hold.

When she awoke again, Samantha was pleasantly surprised to find that the world was no longer black to her eyes. She looked around, taking in the small room with concrete walls, lined with monitoring devices and medical equipment. An IV line was attached to her right arm, feeding her a steady supply of an unknown clear liquid. In one corner of the room, facing away from her, an Asian woman in a white lab coat was speaking in hushed tones with another woman whose face Samantha could not see.

"Dr. Cho?" she asked hesitantly, barely finding her voice, her throat parched and scratchy.

The Asian doctor turned and smiled.

"Ah, someone's awake," she said, and both women approached the side of her bed. "And I take it your eyes are back to normal?"

Samantha nodded, and Dr. Cho immediately began making notes.

"As you've already guessed, I'm Dr. Cho. You can call me Janice if you like." She gestured to the professionally dressed, mocha-skinned woman behind her. "And this is Dr. Elise Yates, our facility counselor."

"Hello, Samantha," Dr. Yates said, her voice carrying a hint of a British accent.

"I... I still don't think that's my name," Samantha insisted. "I don't know what is, but that just doesn't feel like it."

"Memory loss is common in cases like yours," Elise explained. "And the treatment sometimes exacerbates it. But from everything we have been able to determine, your name is Samantha Sutherland. Maybe you went by a nickname? Sam, perhaps?"

"Sam... Sam..." she repeated, trying on the shortened version. "Maybe. It feels a little better, but I'm still not sure. What did you mean when you said cases like mine?"

"Sam, do you remember anything about what happened to you before you woke up here?" Janice asked.

Sam shook her head. "Nothing at all. It's like waking up from a dream you know you had, but you can't piece together any of it."

"Well, there's no easy way to explain this, Sam - you were in a terrible car accident. The other driver was drunk and blew a red light going 40 above the speed limit. You suffered extensive tissue and organ damage, and severe spinal and brain trauma. Given that, it's not surprising that your memory has taken quite a blow."

"Is it going to be permanent? The memory loss, I mean."

"With luck, no," Janice explained. "You've been brought to a special facility where we're testing a new treatment for survivors of traumatic injury. It has shown great promise for repairing even the most severe injuries, and may be able to reverse paralysis, brain damage, and many other conditions that would otherwise be lifelong."

"I still can't feel my legs," Sam said. "Will that get better too?"

"Before we brought you here, the doctors at the hospital thought you were going to be in a vegetative state, breathing through a machine for the rest of your life," Janice said with a comforting smile. "It's only been a week, and you're already doing much better than that. I can't make any promises, but my hope is that your legs will regain full function if you continue with your treatments."

"How long will I have to stay here?"

"We... don't have any sort of release timeline," Elise interjected. "We can discuss it more as your recovery progresses, but for now, you should plan to be here for the foreseeable future."

"It's also a medical concern," Janice explained. "The treatment you're receiving is experimental, and highly confidential at this point. If we released you, or transferred you out to another facility, and your condition deteriorated, the doctors there would have no idea what to do. This isn't exactly something you take two Advil for and see if you feel better in the morning. It's safest for you now to remain here with us."

"Does my family know that I'm here? I mean, I assume I have family. Or a job? Work?"

"Sam, we did a thorough search for next of kin and didn't find any. Your mother passed away several years ago. There was no father listed on your birth certificate. Your mother was an only child and wasn't married when she passed. Her parents are both deceased as well."

Sam felt a sudden chill in her bones.

"So I'm all alone?"

"Not at all," Elise assured her. "Janice and I will be here with you every step of the way. This is a scary process, and we want to make sure you have someone to support you. You'll be seeing a lot of us as you recover, and will probably get tired of us before you know it. For now, I think Janice has some tests she has to run."

Janice walked Sam through a battery of basic tests - following a pen light with her eyes, wiggling her fingers, testing her reflexes, that sort of thing. With the exception of her legs, which still were completely non-responsive, Sam thought she did quite well on all of them. If what she'd been told about her injuries was true, whatever they were pumping into her must have been some kind of miracle cure. After Janice was done, she was given a light sedative again so that she could sleep some more, with the promise that both doctors would be back to see her the next day.

The first few days after that were not much different for Sam. Janice and Elise came to see her daily, making small talk while Janice made notes, looked at readings from the various instruments and monitors, and had Sam perform various small tasks to check the pace of her recovery. Though she felt more energetic and seemed very much in control of her upper body, she still couldn't use her legs.

All that changed late one night, when Sam awoke with a mild burning sensation in her left calf. She mentioned it to the night shift nurse, who pulled back the sheets to examine her leg. It was only then that Sam noticed the toes on her left foot slightly wiggling back and forth. Dr. Cho was paged in to examine her immediately, and she confirmed to Sam's excitement that she did appear to be regaining function in her left leg.

Sam was ecstatic, but Janice was more reserved. Within a few hours, Sam began to understand why. The mild burning that had started in her left calf soon spread upward into her quads and hamstrings, with a similar pain building in her right leg. By morning, the pain had intensified and spread throughout her torso, rendering her a quivering ball of flesh and sweat, moaning in intense pain as she huddled in a fetal position while every muscle fiber in her body felt as if it had been dipped in acid. Janice did what she could to alleviate her pain, but even the most powerful pain medication seemed to barely take the edge off, and the pain tormented her even through the deepest sedative-induced sleep. This was a normal part of the healing process, Janice explained, as the treatment reconstructed her damaged tissues. It was of little comfort to Sam, who at that particular moment wished she had just been left to die on the side of the road.

After nearly a full day of excruciating discomfort, which felt like an eternity, the intensity finally started to decrease, ever so gradually. Eventually, by the end of the week, her muscles felt as if they were back to normal, although extremely weakened from her painful ordeal. After a solid night's sleep and a good meal, however, she woke again feeling refreshed and hopeful. Janice, too, seemed optimistic that the worst had passed.

"It's different for everyone," she said, "but usually after the pain you just experienced, which correlates with a rapid healing phase triggered by the treatment, most patients don't go through it again."

"God, I hope not," Sam replied. "It was... awful. Just awful. I don't even know the words to describe it."

"That's what I've been told by everyone who made it this far. But you know what this means?"

The Asian doctor stood by the side of Sam's bed and offered her arm with a smile.

"You get to test out your legs today."

The notion was both exciting and terrifying to Sam. She felt like she had been laid up in bed so long that she might not remember how to stand anymore. Plus, Janice had told her that both her legs had been shattered in multiple places during the accident. What if they couldn't support her? She feared that what little fight she had left in her would be utterly crushed if she tried to walk but failed.

As if reading her mind, Elise approached and stood beside Janice.

"Don't worry," she assured in her smooth, polished voice. "Nobody knows this recovery process better than Janice. She wouldn't let you do this if you weren't ready. We'll take it nice and slow."

Carefully and hesitantly, Sam swung one leg off the bed and touched her toes to the floor. The other leg followed shortly thereafter, and then, leaning on both Janice and Elise for support, she gingerly began to shift her body weight onto her shaky legs. Her knees buckled and trembled slightly and she wobbled a bit at her ankles, but eventually she found herself standing fully upright.

"Oh my god," she said softly, taking a few small steps under the guidance of her doctors. "This isn't as bad as I thought it would be."

"You're doing quite well," Janice encouraged. "Some patients have trouble just getting up at all."

Sam afforded herself a small giggle of delight as she took a few more steps, then some more, until she found herself standing in front of a full-length mirror at the opposite side of the room. She blinked once or twice, fixated on the unfamiliar face staring back at her. Absently, she raised one hand to her cheek and touched it, the reflection in the mirror confirming that the stranger's image was, in fact, her own.

"Janice, Elise... do you mind if I have a few moments alone?"

After looking to one another for objections, both women agreed.

"We'll be right outside the door if you need anything," Janice said on their way out. "Don't strain yourself too much."

Once she was alone, Sam turned back to the mirror, staring fixedly at her own reflection. She'd thought that she would at least recognize some trace of herself or have some memory of her own appearance, but the person looking back at her in the mirror just seemed so utterly foreign. Her doctors had made no mention of any reconstructive surgery, so she assumed that her inability to recognize herself was the result of her memory loss. She ran her palm over the top of her head, realizing for the first time since waking up in the facility that she had no hair. Or rather, what she had was a thin layer of fuzz, proof that she'd once had hair but that it had been shorn at some point in the recent past. Probably when she was being treated at the hospital, she reasoned.

"Hello, Sam," she said to her reflection.

She took in the contours of her face, trying to become familiar with her own appearance. The bones of her face were generally round, but tapered to a narrow chin, giving her face overall a heart-shaped appearance. Her eyes were a piercing blue that seemed to mesmerize her every time she looked at them, though she assumed that if she'd had memories of looking at her reflection all her life, they would have been far less interesting to her. She traced the curve of her jawbone and down the lines of her neck with her fingertips, until she reached the top hem of the hospital gown she was wearing. Curious to see what lay underneath, she quickly untied the strings holding the gown together at the back and allowed it to slip off one shoulder, and then the other, exposing her chest.

Holding the gown up underneath her breasts, she sized herself up.

"C-cup, maybe?" she said under her breath. "D, if I'm lucky."

Letting the gown slip down further, she took in her stomach and hips, and felt a nagging in the back of her mind. Not a memory, per se, but definitely something remembered. More like a feeling, a sense that this was not the first time she was standing in front of a mirror evaluating herself.

Dissatisfaction.

Her stomach seemed too soft and flabby, her hipbones just a little too wide. And as the gown dropped further, her thighs too thick. Not enough gap between them.

"I can't even remember who I am, but of course I remember just enough to be unhappy with my body," she lamented. "Just great."

Setting the crumpled gown aside on a nearby chair, she assessed her nude body as a whole, unable to shake the lingering dissatisfaction with her image. She absently ran her fingers through the unruly bush of hair on her mound, which had clearly gone unmanaged in the time that she was confined to bed. Again unsure of why, she felt that perhaps a trim or shave might help improve her outlook on her body. She made a mental note to ask Janice if that might be a possibility. She returned her gaze to the fuzz on her scalp, and wondered how long it would be before she had a full head of hair again. Guessing from her eyebrows and pubic hair, she figured it would be a medium to dark brown, and tried to picture herself with various lengths of hair, but nothing her imagination could come up with seemed familiar.

Janice and Elise returned as Sam was tying her gown back up.

"Hey Sam, you doing okay in here?" Elise asked, clearly attuned to her patient's shift in mood.

"I guess," Sam sighed. "I was hoping that I would see something I recognized of myself, but so far... nothing."

"I know, dear. It takes time. Maybe the best thing you can do for yourself right now is get to know the you that's here. With memory loss, it can be hard to tell when things will return."

"On the bright side," Janice added, "now that your legs are on the mend, we should be able to move you out of this room into the longer term recovery units here in the facility. They're a lot less like a hospital room and more like a studio. More privacy, better amenities."

"I'd like that," Sam said with a smile. She was looking forward to being able to go to bed without the presence of all the machines and the night nurse.

"We'll just keep you here a few more days to make sure things continue to progress, and if everything looks good, we'll get you moved. We'll also get you started on some basic physical therapy to make sure your muscles recover correctly, but from what I've seen so far, it looks like the treatment has done most of the heavy lifting for you."

As promised, a few days later, Sam found herself walking down the hallways with Janice and Elise, leaving the medical wing and headed toward the residence units. As they walked, she got the sense that the facility was much bigger than what she had seen so far, and also noticed that all of the walls, like those in the medical room she had occupied for the weeks before, appeared to be solid concrete.

"Are we... underground?" she asked. "I don't think I've seen a window yet."

"Very astute," Elise said, raising an eyebrow in surprise. "A lot of people don't notice until they've been in their residences for awhile. The answer is yes, we are underground. This entire research project is heavily backed by the government, and because of the potential ramifications, they take secrecy very seriously. We're occupying an old underground military installation."

"What happens if people want to go outside? Get some air?"

"Unfortunately, we don't allow that until patients are... further along," Elise explained. "But we make every effort to balance the lighting and environmental conditions in the facility to make them comfortable."

For Sam, it was enough just to be out of her hospital bed and moving about, so she didn't push further. She did make a note to bring it up at a later time, though.

When they arrived at her residence unit, she was impressed by just how much it did resemble a studio apartment, as Janice had promised, despite the lack of windows. The unit was fully furnished with surprisingly updated and contemporary furniture, and sported a generously sized bathroom with a bathtub and separate shower. The kitchen was fully stocked, and the wardrobe contained a full supply of basic clothing items. Nothing fancy, but more than enough to get by on. After leaving her with directions to get back to medical and instructions for reaching medical staff in case of an emergency, the doctors left Sam to get settled in.

Her first course of business was to take a long, hot shower, during which time she also took the opportunity to shave her underarms, legs, and pubic hair. She had initially planned to just trim around the edges of her bikini line, but she began to shave off progressively more and more hair trying to find a pattern that suited her liking, eventually settling on leaving behind just a thin strip of hair down the center of her mound. Afterward, wrapped up in a white, fuzzy robe, she availed herself to some of the food and drink in the kitchen before turning on the television. The channel selection was extremely limited - perhaps because they were underground, or perhaps because the government didn't want to pay for better service - but she was able to find some old shows to serve as white noise while she pondered what was next for her. She was lucky just to be alive, from all that she had been told, but she couldn't help but wonder what the exchange would be for her life. She wanted to believe that this was all just a medical trial that she had been fortunate enough to fall into, but was that really it?

*****

Over the next few weeks, Sam's life settled into a routine of medical checkups and physical therapy. Janice seemed pleased with her recovery overall, and her physical therapists seemed impressed as well by how quickly she was regaining her strength. Her hair also grew back more quickly than she had expected, and it wasn't long before she was sporting shoulder-length, medium brown locks with occasional streaks of dirty blonde. With the exception of her memory, which had not returned beyond occasional flashes of past events, everything seemed to be getting back to normal, until one day during a routine blood draw, the needle that Janice pressed to the vein in Sam's right arm flexed and bent, instead of breaking her skin.