Prologue
“Vivi...Vivi… Unnie, unnie, Vivi wake up! Please...”
Tears fall on her face from above.
“Wake up! Can you hear me?”
Static buzzes in a loop, surrounding her with sound.
“Is she going to wake up? What’s happening?”
A heartbeat pulses.
Voices whisper.
“Wake up now, Vivi.”
Vivi opened her eyes to a circle of faces. Her mother...father…her friends
One man in a white coat held a clipboard and his eyes brightened at the sight of his patient finally coming back to the world of the living.
“Oh honey, I was so worried!” Vivi’s mother wrapped her daughter up in her arms as much as the medical equipment surrounding them allowed.
“So cold…” are the only words Vivi managed to shiver out through violently chattering teeth. Her vision began to blacken again, though she reached out her hand to the crying face above her it fell to her side, limp.
As her consciousness quickly faded she heard the doctor assure her mother that she would wake up again soon.
The newest medical phenomenon: Memory Recall Surgery.
A patient suffering from memory loss after some kind of incident was able to, as many headlines claimed, “Recover fully and vividly remember the past as if it happened yesterday!” The procedure had been developed by a mysterious, rich researcher whose father suffered from Alzheimer’s.
The process proceeded as followed:
The patient’s loved ones sat around in a circle with surgical brain equipment resembling oddly de-constructed helmets on each person’s head. The wires sprouted from the top of each of these pieces of equipment and traveled along the ground to connect to a machine in front of the patient’s bed.
It was a cassette player.
A cassette player that contained the memories a patient would relive from the perspective of each of their loved ones eyes. The patient’s brain was able to fill in the blanks from this new information that was implanted.
The room was cold to keep the patient’s blood pressure up as brain activity spiked to dangerous levels, (it being necessary to supply enough oxygen to the brain.)
Memory reconstruction was the future.
And Vivi was now a part of it.