Chapter 12b
It's been more than a year since that warm summer day when Erwin Packard started showing signs. People almost cared for a moment. He's been gone so long, they think, and that's fucking interesting. Their concern is, of course, only surface level. None of them know him. Nobody does. Nobody has for the last 9,131 days, give or take a hundred.
It is for this reason that the next set of changes snuck in so innocuously. His twitches became spasms, still small given his atrophied muscles but prominent. He began to look around the room. His conscious mind had no concept of it but his eyes seemed to focus. Although nobody noticed at the time, he had changed from a breathing corpse to a two-hundred year old living person. It's not a huge change, exactly, but it is the difference between life and death. To any doctors who might have noticed it would have been the difference between a coma and lesser vegetative state.
That was when mind and body finally struck a chord of unison within Erwin and decided that he should be alive. His bodily functions went into overdrive on that day. He began to function almost as if he were a real person, maybe even a living person.
Nobody noticed. He was insignificant and small, a hopeless case that got no more attention than it needed to survive. So what if he started moving some? Nobody cared enough to watch. Nobody cared enough to observe his restlessness and, with no observers, we can't say for certain that it even happened, much less that it mattered.
That being said, it did matter. Only a few days later Packard awoke to a world that was so unlike his own that he could make neither heads nor tails of it.
But this is the story of before he work. Before he woke there was nothing. There was only his body lying in a random bed in a random long term care facility. He didn't know where it was or why it was there (most people didn't know either of those things) or even what it was. He didn't even know he was there. What he knew was the sensation of human lips pressed against his own. He knew the comfort of speaking with an intimate friend. He knew that something had gone wrong. He knew beauty and fear and pain and all the other basic human emotions but could not associate them with anything. He had no memory of pain. He remember being afraid, sure, but why? What had he ever been afraid of?
He didn't know the answers, didn't really even know that he had asked any questions, but he would soon learn. Soon the room would light up and will with people waiting to take credit. There would be loved ones he'd never known and friends he'd abandoned in grade school and they would all be enigmas because, even with the answer provided to him, Packard didn't know what the question was.
Besides, he wasn't altogether there enough to really know or notice much of anything. Not yet, at least, although those little signs that had hardly been noticed did pertain to something more than stasis. To say whether they meant he would soon be either alive or dead might be a stretch but they certainly meant some change from his current state.