Prologue
Agony coursed through her veins as reality crystallized in her mind. A wave of ice and fire surged through her like roots burrowing into the earth, twisting and piercing every inch of her skin. Her eyes remained closed, the darkness beyond her eyelids was impenetrable and absolute.
Deep down, she knew this was her existence now. An endless void of black agony for however long it would persist. She had ceased counting the days; time seemed to blur together. Days stretched into months; hours contracted into minutes. Time was meaningless here, a cruel invention by those who sought to measure extended torment. Every breath was like drowning in acid. Movement was impossible. All she could do was lie there, motionless in blackened suffering.
That was the Vat’s purpose: to sever any grip on reality, slicing it away piece by piece until you were nothing more than a manufactured vessel of damp flesh. It offered no hope other than the solace of a swift death at the end of it all. And that was all she could hope for.
The anesthesia meant to keep her mind and body numb had worn off many agonizing breaths ago. With each inhalation, her lungs filled with a liquid infused with just enough oxygen to keep her alive—oxygen-rich perfluorocarbon, designed to allow air-breathing organisms to breathe while submerged. The process was agonizing on its own, and when laced with the chemicals used to generate perpetual life, the side effects were excruciating.
So, she lay there, static in solitude, though often she thought she could hear faint sounds of conversation beyond her iron prison. The voices, usually muffled by the fluid around her, began to grow clearer. The words and sentences started to become comprehensible. The Vat began to drain, and her first breath of air was met with immediate retching and convulsions as her body desperately tried to expel the fluid from her lungs. Her mind still reeling as she was lifted from the Vat, dripping in solution. A sudden torrent of water struck her, like a thousand tiny needles piercing her skin. When her conscious mind finally grasped the reality forming around her, her eyes opened to see a man in a white coat approaching, forcing a syringe into her neck. In an instant, her mind was plunged back into blackness.
