A Machine of Grander Design

You've already been introduced, but I don't think you have a firm grasp of what's about to happen, something that will blow the dust of inactivity from the deepest crevices of your mind.

You'll be forced to think about things.

The first thing I felt was my legs. I was on my right side, with my legs crossed under me. There were a few minutes where I could feel the ground pressing up at me, but then like a tidal wave of pain crashing down upon me I could feel the weight of the world on my legs. They were broken, I was sure of it. It’s a strange feeling to be conscious of a dramatic failure in the structural integrity of your own body. Before the numbing pain, the wash of emotions that blocks out everything else, like a solar eclipse, comes this surreal out-of-body experience. At least it did with me, laying there on the ground that day. I could feel my body helplessly broken, my mind, partitioned itself into a secure corner, safe from the havoc being wreaked upon every sense, exhibiting supreme triage over my synapses, choosing with extreme discrimination what it deemed I was ready to feel. Such a simple thing as a pair of broken legs and stripped everything away until my core lay bare, there on the ground next to me, blistering in the sun, reverting to the most basic of instincts in order to secure the survival. There on the ground next to me. For a second I thought I could see it…

I wasn’t able to see that first day. Whether it was a failing of the corneal or retinal machinery surrounding those delicate lumps of tissue, or something of a more profound nature, I do not know. I do know that it was over a day because I heard the alarm on my watch ringing twice, set to ring every twelve hours by me in some other world. I remember the watch, I remember setting the alarm. I don’t remember anything else. The first time the alarm range out, the sound carried across the ringing in my ears like a jet engine cutting across the noisy atmosphere of an airport tarmac. It rang and I thought my ears would explode from the noise. It cut through the air like a scalpel, drilling into my brain with violent precision. I tried to cry out, but realized I could not. My brain had long ago severed ties with such an inconsequential peripheral as my vocal mechanism. But that first time I heard my watch was wondrous. I added hearing to my list of operative senses. Two down, three to go.