lobotomy

You come to. The sharp, familiar smell of antiseptic. The white ceiling. The noise of the IV. You are here again. In the ward. Your body is heavy, cottony, your tongue is stuck to the roof of your mouth.

But inside... silence.

Not the blessed silence you dreamed of, but a frightening, ringing one. Like after an explosion. You try to mentally feel the familiar roughness of the walls of your shelter in Tenisen, to hear the grumbling of Gnus - your old, eternally dissatisfied, but your monster.

Instead - nothing. Emptiness. Blind, white emptiness, like this ceiling.

And through this emptiness comes a barely perceptible sound. Not a voice. A metallic, grinding whisper, as if someone is sharpening a scalpel on a bone.

"H-hello?.." you try to shout mentally into the void, and your own voice sounds hoarse and lonely.

The whisper stops. It is replaced by a feeling of Cold. Not physical, but internal, penetrating the very soul. And in this whiteness a silhouette appears. Tall, distorted, in a long cloak woven from shadows. Instead of hands - long, thin, shiny tentacles-instruments. It does not look at you. It studies the emptiness around, as if looking for what else can be... removed.

This is It. The surgeon. What they injected into you.

It freezes. Slowly, with a nasty, creaking sound, it turns what should be a head in your direction. There is no face. Only a perfectly white, smooth surface, reflecting your own face distorted with horror.

And then a voice is heard. Without emotion. Without intonation. A pure, lifeless statement of fact.

"Subject is showing cognitive activity. We are beginning the second stage of sanitation."

One of the scalpel-tentacles smoothly rushes towards you, towards the center of your consciousness.