Chapter 1: CHAPTER 1 - AWAKENING

The walls all around were blurry and formless until coming into focus. Depth perception returned. From gray smudges came forms … convex and concave … the repeated geometric shapes of an anechoic chamber. Priya pushed herself off the floor and stumbled to the lock, letting in a tide of quiet light. She fought against it, shut it tight and pressed against the outside wall, sliding down until crouched on the tile. A few minutes passed, and her eyes adjusted. Like rifling through an old family album, the setting of the university lab felt so personal. Its tables and chairs were neatly arranged, and there were flasks half filled with solutions from last week's lecture. "That must have been … a dream. Did I imagine I was a hero?" Priya thought as she looked to her side, and bit her tongue, sucking it until the bitterness thrust more consciousness and uprooted the last of her lethargy. The wide landscape of her memory was mostly undecipherable. Priya giggled for a second and felt like a child that had just spilled a glass of milk, as her memory began to seep back, steadily filling the vessel. Looking down at her hands she could see brown, coffee colored skin, "I'm wearing a white lab coat … I think I'm probably … a scientist". Scenes of the past reasserted themselves at normal intervals, chronological appetizers. Farther and farther they went, pulled by an invisible force like gravity back into time, until arriving at childhood. Two wet, salty beads dropped down her face as she recalled. Her father raised her by himself and was everything. Such a good man, maybe too good for the world. But when he returned from the war, she was fourteen, and he was different. His eyes were never the same. A year later it happened, when he took his own life. Watching the rain fall down onto the smooth, black marble of the gravestone, dwarfed by the canopies of umbrellas, she had wished that she could have found a way to save him. But that was just a silly wish. After that day, she dedicated her life to academia, and then to science. Studying day by day, acknowledging and reading the various opinions on the virus that had brought about her father's end, she had worked tirelessly. Priya got to her feet and waddled over to the nearest lab table. On it was a blue folder, and she flipped it open. "Anechoic Isolation and Sensory Deprivation, A Treatment for FIRE virus … by Priya Echo, PhD. Neuroscience, DGU" she read silently, mouthing the words to herself as the talent of reading found its expression once more. Placing a hand over a throbbing temple, an epiphany cracked open. No mistake that much of the landscape was undecipherable. "Since then I've never really had much of a life. No friends. No boyfriend. My life has been … closed … and every urge I've dropped like an anchor. Never really known anyone, have I? Didn't even grasp the meaning. Oh … I get it now. Then the dream was just a fantasy to fill that emptiness. Lonely Priya. That's what they call me … I hear. No … I'm the Empress Echo, daughter of the Divine Couple, the perfect pair who will be together forever, who's love is beyond the farthest reaches of philosophy. That's my mind's true actress. To find a cure I've sacrificed everything. All the great progress I've made. I feel pride. But my life is … I'm so … pathetic" she reflected.