last part I could clearly hear because it was said excitedly and loudly.
Were they talking about me? It was a long shot, especially because they were so far away from my room. It would also make more sense for the doctors taking care of me to be discussing this, but who knows?
I started straining, trying harder and harder to hear. Of course, I don’t know why I even bothered. It’s not really easy to hear better on command. But suddenly, I could. My hearing became so crystal clear that I could hear rooms 65, 68, 71, 74 and 77 simultaneously. And it was too loud. Too. Loud.
I stumbled backwards and fell into one of the armchairs lining the other wall. I pressed my hands to my temples. “Stop. Stop. Stop. Please, stop.” I whispered, over and over again. And, as miraculously as it came, my hypersensitive hearing faded away. Then, cautiously, I tried to concentrate and listen to only what was coming from the room 71. Waves of sound came to me again; and I had to take a minute to stop it again. It was painful, but exciting. After ten minutes of deliberation, I could switch from room to room.
Other than a heart beating, breathing, and other medical sounds, there was nothing to be heard from either room 74 or room 77. Room 65 housed two heartbeats, but it would seem that they were both sleeping. Both their heartbeats and breathing were constant in pattern. Room 68 was interesting. When listening in at first, I yelped in pain. The patient in room 68 was watching TV, but the patient was not alone. There were two heartbeats in there. They were watching the news, something about a local girl having been arrested for destruction of property, but under extremely odd circumstances. I made a mental note to myself to look it up later. It seemed interesting.
In room 71, the doctors were discussing the patient of room 68. It would seem that he was perfectly fine and healthy, yet the EEG, or as I later found out, the Electroencephalographic scan, showed that he was exhibiting unusual amounts of brain activity. The amount that he was experiencing was so unprecedented that there was a real possibility that he could die, and they didn’t know whether or not to keep him at the hospital. Hm. Poor kid. Although, the fact that all his vitals were normal except his brain reminded me of my own situation. I had half a mind to walk into his room right then and ask him if he had been experiencing some new sensations. I got hearing, maybe he got some weird brain hijack, I don’t know. But right then, Robert called. Time to go.
Lucas
That poor girl. She looked terrified in the news. It had been her birthday also, like me. I can relate to bad things happening on your birthday. It sucks.
I was released from the hospital, but they want me to come in weekly so that they can take my vitals. My instincts tell me that they’re worried I’ll die, but since they can’t come up with a plausible scientific reason that my brain activity is acting so erratic, they feel that they can not try to keep me away from home.
That’s a very detailed first instinct, isn’t it?
I think I can explain why.
When I came home today, my dad apologized and said that he needed to go to work. I understood. He had a lot on his plate already without me going and having my cranium implode.
I sat down at my computer and prepared for a gaming marathon. I wanted an escape from the rest of the world, and Dad hadn’t assigned any work for me to do before he left. Either he wanted me to get some brain rest or he simply forgot. Either way, I was going to be playing some Response Hit: Planetary Aggression.
I started up a game and squirmed deeper into the couch. It was times like this that made me enjoy the comfort of video games. After something terrible, returning to something familiar.
So yes, let it be known that I do not hate video games, thank you very much.
But what happened that day pretty much shattered video games for me for the rest of my life. Not that it was a bad experience. Let me explain.
Response Hit: Planetary Aggression is a tactical game involving two teams. While a lot of people don’t see the mathematics involved in this game, knowing and being able to calculate everything that is going on gives a player a godlike advantage. The thing is, no one except for the world’s best mathematicians could operate on a level high enough to give them that advantage.
So you can imagine my surprise when, once the game started, my brain started taking in so much information from my eyes and ears (surround sound, baby!) that I could actually feel the heat emanating off of my head. But this time, it didn’t hurt at all. In fact, it felt pretty good. I wish I could explain what having your brain process billions of numbers feels like, but I can at least explain the results to the gamers out there.
Effectively, I was playing in slow motion. My brain was operating so fast that although the human brain deliberates on decisions so fast that it is not noticeable already, it was calculating at least ten times faster. Response Hit was no longer a game to me. It was a problem, and it wasn’t waiting to be solved. It was being solved.
Everything in-game was a shape. Every single hitbox changed with movement. Every single pixel counted. I threw smoke grenades with immense precision. Everything became solvable. It was incredible. It was truly like being a god.
And then the game ended. We won, obviously, by a stunning margin. With nothing to pump up the adrenaline in my body, my brain settled back to a normal speed, and left me stunned.
I let my brain rest for a few minutes, and then fired up Firefox (no pun intended). I started intensely researching the brain, and as I did, I could feel it warming up again. Page after page I pulled from the web, and page after page my brain processed. Soon I knew all I ever could’ve imagined about the brain. It didn’t explain anything that I had not known before relating to my condition.
Intrigued, I moved onto the news. Were there reports of other people like me? What could have possibly happened to cause my brain to become this? And then I remembered the girl. Oh, yes, that poor girl. What was her name, Riley? I searched for news stories in the past day that involved the keywords “young”, or “girl” or “teenager”. Let’s see… Young woman talks down a potential suicide attempt… ah! Teenager destroys food court in an astounding fashion. I searched for any photos of the event. The search engine supplied nothing.
My brain was all-powerful now, right? I could finally try what I had been wanting to try since I started watching spy movies. After spending an hour learning about the vulnerabilities of systems, your digital footprint, and college-level C++, I had absorbed information that would have taken years to study. I hacked into the Boston Police Department mainframe, and found the surveillance camera footage of the incident. Additionally, I collected the police report.
What had been damaged? Let’s see, the neon signs that stores love so much to use, the tables that were bolted to the ground prior to the incident… What did all of these things have in common?
They were magnetic. Of course! The tables were bolted to the ground. The legs of the table also contained iron. The chairs, however, were wood. Riley had not even touched any of the chairs. And the neon signs… Why had they stopped working? Not only that, but footage shows the lights dimming over time, even after Riley had been led away. Why had they not just been torn off, thrown to the wind? The police reports say that the neon signs were not unplugged, or broken in any visible way. The storeowners had simply thrown them away and got them replaced.
All the tables in a two foot radius had been affected by Riley, but the closest set of lights had been over twenty feet away. Clearly, her field of influence extended beyond two feet, but perhaps weakened as it went on? If this was true, the force Riley exerted would not have been
