“You cut my brain?” she wailed.
“Serious problems after a corpus callosotomy are rare,” said McGreen with a shrug, passively mocking her.
The Doctor’s partner, a blonde neurologist, heavy brow ridged and beautiful, took Ophelia’s hand.
“My dear, we completed the procedure to separate your left and right brain thirty-three months ago. The unexpected side-effect is a mystery to modern medicine; every day, you wake with no memory of the previous day,” said Doctor Eileen.
For science, something inspired me to make a too-deep cut into the patient’s grey matter.
“You cut my brain?” said Ophelia in stunned disbelief.
McGreen was losing his patience. Every day, the same wail.
“This surgery was needed to stop your seizures, and you approved the procedure. That is your signature on the form, is it not?”
“Your fits have stopped,” said both doctors in a grand-mal lie.
The scale and scope of the lie did not matter, for the patient would not recall this day, as she did not recall the extensive shock treatments and blood donor sales.
Later, after Ophelia had calmed down, the tests began again.
“Disconnection syndrome is the most common issue after corpus callosotomy surgery,” explained the blond neurologist, talking as she moved about the room.
The male hospital staff tracked the blonde neurologist as if they were hounds on a hunt despite her unusual brow ridges, sloping forehead, and near lack of chin.
“With your eyes closed, the two sides of your brain can no longer cooperate for simple tasks. The right and left sides of your body are moving, are dreaming in conflict with the other.”
Ophelia began to weep again, and Doctor Eileen touched her shoulder.
Eileen wanted to scream in frustration. The fact that Ophelia could not and would never recall their feelings for each other was frustrating to the point of pain. There could never be fulfillment and a successful relationship with Ophelia until she could remember.
“Remember love?” asked the blonde woman.
Like an emerald praying mantis, McGreen watched them both, holding statue-still ready with the camera record button. No smallest detail escaped McGreen. He knew. The bastard and his medical science recordings.
“Your right brain, left brain separation has controlled your seizures but has unique side effects,” said Eileen. “Close one eye and describe the room; you are here with us. Close both eyes and, well, you are seeing your dreams.”
“No,” interrupted Doctor McGreen in frustration, feelings that he would not admit; the feelings could be jealousy.
“When you close both eyes, you suffer hallucinations based upon a damaged brain. The result of decades of seizures. The hallucinations are on a scale as if you have ingested CIA-powerful LSD and think you are someone else,” said McGreen. “Here, let me play yesterday’s fantasy recording.”
The Tandy computer flickered on to show Ophelia sitting on a carmine-red couch, speaking with her eyes closed, talking nonsense that felt correct. Impossibly true nonsense.
“Marcus, the demon, flicked from timeline to timeline, searching for wars and plagues.
The usual randomness was tainted as he somehow connected to other travelers, an anchor or home base during the timeline travel, but his journeys seemed to focus on three or four of the same people. The sense of their names made little sense: Wife, Lover, and Father-un-demon-like concepts. The timelines were random, and there should be no anchor to others. Things have changed.
His self-imposed exile on the island had left him like a baby jinn in a lamp; things had changed, had been learned, and had evolved, things like the AI, the DNA hybrids, and the pull of rockets.
Why fool myself? The timelines were pleasantly leaking.
Nonetheless, because of his time on Red Island near what the mortals called Kennedy, he was still attracted to the launch of rockets. He did not understand them, but their pull on the heliosphere was pleasant, and timeline jumps and slides were easier after rocket launches.
Better yet, sometimes, the rockets destroyed themselves in pleasant demonstrations of light shows and death.
The pantheon of rockets varied in names and sizes: Saturn and Soyuz, Atas, Vulcan, Pegasus, Pershings and Deltas, Falcons, Falcon-heavys, SLS, and Redstones. ICBMs with multiple-entry warheads were almost sexy! Kh-101 cruise missiles were invigorating like sipping a warm mead.
He was a demon, so it did not disturb him when some of his jump anchor points were no longer human or, rather, not full-blooded in the genus Homo. The double helix had been shattered and twisted in an enjoyable demon-like manner.
Marcus the Demon jumped into a new timeline, his nails scratched across a polished slate floor, creating a scratching-squeal and involuntary awaking by the sleeping woman.
It was the cinnamon-haired woman of the other timelines, yet she was different; she had been improved or diluted and was a hybrid.
Her wings folded in coy grace, sonar modulated to feral rhythm, echolocation suffused loveliness, a coquetting Chiroptera beauty, marred only by the tattoos of her creators who had broken the double helix. One tattoo stenciled lengthwise along a wing read, “NASA.”
“Please,” begged Ophelia upon seeing the demon who disturbed her dreams of hyper-sleep.
Ophelia murmured in poetic thrall her words of power and control; the human normals who cleaned and fed her all wore double hearing protection or were DNA-mods lacking ears.
The new visitor standing outside of her cage lacked hearing protection from her words of charm and desire.
Marcus the demon reached out and tasted the salt on the woman’s furred cheeks, her lips with sheathed fangs, and touched her tramp stamp tattoo burned in archaic English, “Exploration Systems Development Mission Directorate.”
“Please free me,” begged Ophelia, her soft breath caressing Marcus’s taloned hands.
Marcus snickered at the scent of her release of pheromones.
“He calls for help, my Marcus of the other, my Marcus needs me.”
Ophelia blinked at the demon Marcus before her.
Somewhere, other Marcus’s in other timelines uttered cries of help, be it a cave bear, cannibalistic coven, or space shuttle shooting across the sky in disintegration.
“World of witchery!” snarled Marcus, the demon, because he could see weaker versions of himself in the woman’s dreams, and some spell of conjure or magnetism pulled at his frozen demon pea-sized heart.
Marcus, the demon, savored her association, pheromones, and the winged woman’s stunningly attractive morphological characteristics. Marcus, the demon, possibly in love, set her free, shattering the AI-controlled electronic bars.
Somewhere in a vault under the Kennedy Space Center Vehicle Assembly Building, Fred, the AI, snarled and unlocked the configuration freeze on a launch platform orbiting in the cold vacuum of space. Then, with coy grace, the start sequence was modulated to launch a non-OSHA-approved nuke missile at the Kennedy Space Center.
“Demon-spawn,” muttered Fred.
Ophelia the Chimera, freed from her electron cage in the VAB, took flight on graceful frigate-like wings, singing with joy, her echolocation bouncing off clouds.
“Marcus, I come to you!” soaring into the deterministic chaos, seeking a burning space shuttle existing in another timeline.
Her eyes flashed carmine as she spiraled upwards to save the astronaut she loved.
A mushroom cloud erupted below her on the blue-green planet, tearing and destroying a category-five hurricane to spread pearl-grey radiation.
“Oh shit!” said Fred across the miles of copper and fiber optic cables, too late realizing his mistake, as the electromagnetic pulse rendered Fred into disassociated electrons. The pulse was followed by the fireball scorching into the tunnel holding the Tandy computer housing the original Fred.
Puma the Barghast hiding under the biker persona inside the Fred AI slipped into another timeline, another Kennedy Space Center.
Suddenly, Ophelia’s wings went rigid, her eyes carmine in a programmed seizure, and she spiraled in uncontrolled graceful curves back to the earth and into the tumultuous inferno once known as Kennedy Space Center.
Paradoxically correlated, Marcus, the demon, was blinded by the nuclear explosion, even as the fire and radiation harmless to his armored body washed over him.
His mandibles and pincer-like teeth opened and snapped shut. The sound of demon rage came out in a roar louder than the nuclear explosion, as “Fredddddddddd……..”. in a guttural remarkable consecrated moan-roar that leaked between the timelines like a solar nova.
The tender idleness of the hours of his island self-banishment faded with his outer skin melting away.
Marcus’s translucent beauty, exquisite charm, and rage were bright enough to choke off star formations in distant galaxies. No two passions more resembled each other than the hunt and glorious revenge.
Marcus, the demon, undeniably beautiful in the radiation wash, refracted and diffused light in the inferno, changing his pearl-blue and silver-black body scales to the shifting reds and yellows colors of the radiation spectrum.
Fine, blue, laughing eyes reborn opened.
Marcus, once known as Horus, had not spared his demon-spawn uncle Seth in their war on the delta, and he would not spare this ghost-electron hybrid.
Building pressure within his abdomen released as a neck extension launched from his shoulders, the clacking poisonous maxillae hidden by iridescent blue feather-like fur to clamp onto a newborn demon spun off by the explosion. The new demon wailed in surprise, pain, and extinction.
“Fred! Fred! of the electrons and Barghast mounds! A reckoning is due,” swore Marcus, the demon.
He could feel the beginning of a hawk or falcon’s head growing around his repaired eyes as he twisted the nuke demon’s exoskeleton into a long spear decorated as if ivy had once twined on the shaft.
“The long shadow from my spear, Puma,” said Marcus, the demon, slipping into another timeline.
“What I do not understand?” said Ophelia when the recording of her dream hallucination ended.
The two doctors smoked in silence, the weed from the south creating intricate patterns that matched the designs on Horus’s spear.
If the doctors closed their eyes like Ophelia’s, the smoke allowed them to see their patients’ dreams of strange tales or fearful dark decrees in full glory or pain, and that is why Ophelia would never be set free.
“What?” she moaned.
Fearful dark decrees of vengeance, followed by the sounds of mandibles clicking together, were unseen in the shadows of the doctor’s dreams.
