Anguish Contained

“Well, hello Bella. It seems today’s the day! How are you feeling?”

Bella shifted excitedly in her seat, pushing out words joyously through a large grin.

“I’m excited, I really hope it works.”

“It definitely should. Dr. Biagi has full confidence. She had mentioned to me that it may have been a more intensive year than you both had anticipated, but she says your results are perfect now. You’ll finally get to take that head band off!”

Bella ran her fingers down her smooth scalp and across the glistening platinum band that had replaced her hair. Its function still confused her, but she knew it worked. However the headband did it, her mind was empty of the crippling sadness that had her seek out such an experimental cure.

“I don’t know, Riko, I’ve grown fond of it. Don’t know if I will be able to let it go,” she joked.

Riko chuckled, opening the latches of a briefcase dramatically, and spinning it around slowly revealing a flowing, fluorescent pink glow contained within. Bella got up and walked towards it, her heart beating loudly as she stared down her tormenter. The love, the loss, the despair that pierced her so deeply, captured in a glowing orb, awaiting its return to her mind.

“I still just don’t quite understand it,” Bella said. “May I?”

“Of course.”

He grabbed the orb gingerly and placed it in Bella’s opened palm. She held it tenderly knowing of the emotion it contained but with no remembrance of how it felt.

“I’ve been doing this trial for so long that I seem to have forgotten what drove me here. Looking at my sadness like this, it doesn’t seem so big.”

Riko removed the orb from her hand and tapped a button on the table in front of him. A soft light on a transparent screen to his left flickered in understanding. The chair that Bella had been sitting in smoothly made its way behind her. She took a seat and pulled it closer. With another tap, the table lowered itself so she could comfortably rest her hands upon it. The surface melted away into two portions, leaving behind a soft indent of a hand and a round recession for her sadness to sit in next to it.

“Don’t let its size fool you. Your feelings were big, but now, after this past year of your training with Dr. Biagi, your mind will be fortified. What once was big will now seem small. Do you want to get started?”

Bella nodded eagerly.

“Great. Place your right hand in the imprint and I’ll place your emotion next to it. Once you’re ready, I will initiate the connection and the secret key stored within this orb will start the sequence of removing the synapse blockers, effectively transferring those encapsulated emotions back into your mind. We’ll do this once or twice to get a good summary of your mind’s and your body’s response. Dr. Biagi will look over them then later this week before we do the full emotion reinstatement.”

Bella nodded, slowly placing her hand on the table. The impression was warm and fit her hand perfectly. Slowly, the table receded, burying her fingertips within it. She felt a cool pulling force upon them.

“Is it uncomfortable at all?” Riko asked.

She shook her head.

“Alright, I am going to begin.”

Riko tapped a few commands into the table and charts detailing the vitals of her mind and heart appeared on the screen besides him. As he brought the orb closer to its spot, her heartbeat increased. He placed it down and it was pulled partially into the table.

“Ready?”

“Yes.”

He initiated the emotion transfer. As the synapses were released, the fluorescent color was drained from the orbs so that the flowing fluid became a dull gray.

“How do you feel?”

“Like myself again.”

“Give it one moment, I am going to collect some data on your response and… done.”

He turned off the decoder and the orb slowly returned to its previous color. Bella’s heart rate dropped significantly once blockers were reinstated. The table released her hand and the orb. Bella picked up her encapsulated sadness and felt how its weight had increased in her hand.

“If I remember correctly, you have a backup copy of my emotion. Is it possible to use it for the second run? I want to make sure there was no corruption between the copies.”

“Oh, of course, Bella. For security reasons we keep them in a secured vault. It does hold the biometric mapping of your mind after all. Let me go speak with someone to go bring it up for us. If you don’t mind, I’ll be right back.”

“I don’t mind.”

Riko chuckled uneasily, it was not a request he had received before.

“I’ll only be a moment,” he said, leaving the room.

Bella sat motionlessly, lost in thought, the entire time he was gone. Her eyes burning from an invisible heat that emanated from her captured emotions within the orb. She was uneasy and questioned the success of her last year’s endurance.

“Sorry for the wait,” Riko said as he returned to the room, holding another briefcase.

Bella responded with a smile but no words. She had not realized any time had passed. Her mind was lost in wonder and hope that the second orb would return her to the same peace she currently felt with the blockers activated. She was convinced that the first orb must have been corrupted in some way, an inaccurate mapping of her mind and thus a rotten encapsulation of her sadness. This, to her, was the only explanation for the returned anguish she felt upon the previous connection.

Off put by her sudden silence, Riko presented the second orb much less dramatically than the first.

“Let’s get right to it. It’ll go the same way. Do you need me to repeat the procedure?”

Bella shook her head, allowing her right hand to be reabsorbed into the table. Riko made haste to place the second orb in its spot and initiated the decoding. The color faded slowly, and her mind felt identical to the first orb. The monitor showed a even greater heart rate and mental activation than the first time, concerning Riko.

“Are you alright?” He asked.

“Yeah… sorry… I’m just shocked for the trial to already be over.”

“Yeah, even when it runs longer than expected it always feels rewarding to conclude.”

Riko tapped his foot nervously glancing between the blank expression on Bella’s face and the screaming graphs of her internal excitation.

“This technology still boggles my mind,” she said.

“We sure do have some geniuses who work here. Wish I could take some credit, but I just do the easy part of running this test.”

“The important part,” she said. “But you still have some understanding, right?”

“Yes.”

“So, this orb that stored my sadness, its connected directly to my mind right now?”

“Through that headband and your hand, yes.”

“And even now, it’s connected to the receptors reversing the blocking that was done at the start of the trial?”

“Sounds right as far as I know.”

“And these are the only two orbs of my sadness that have the key to reversing the blocking.”

“Of course, M.A.T.A.L. always puts the privacy of its clients first and foremost.”

“And if they were destroyed the secret key goes with them? After, we finish, of course.”

“Yes, we keep no other records. If you wanted to restart, we would have to do so from the beginning.”

Riko reached forward to remove the orb and end the connection but was blocked by Bella.

“Why don’t we end this run,” he insisted, confused at her response. “We should wait to see what Dr. Biagi thinks of the charts we’ve gathered before going any further.”

“Mmhm, just a second. So, if they were destroyed, there would be no way to decode the synapse blockers… The sadness would stay removed?”

“Well… yeah, I guess so... but your mind would be incomplete. You would lose your emotion, your sadness, your ‘you.’ You would be incomplete.”

“Hmm, interesting.”

An odd tension hung in the air as Riko watched her curiously. His eyes darted back and forth between her and the monitor as the increasing unrest shown on her charts were not reflected by her expression. Bella rotated the first orb silently in her left hand, watching it closely.

The experiment had failed. The bliss she felt from the blockers alone, the experimental therapy she went through had no impact on her returned emotions. The sadness was no less blunted than when it was originally extracted. In that moment her misery escalated to anger as she desperately wanted the peace she had felt just moments before when the orb was placed. With the final words of Riko replaying in her mind, she knew what she had to do.

In a violent and repeated motion, Bella bashed the orb she held repeatedly into the one that was connected to the table, destroying them both and lacerating her hands as their shattered mess combined into one. The abrupt destruction of the orb sent a burst of energy through the system, frying her synapses where the band had connections, sending her into a seizing fit.

“Oh, God! That’s not what I meant!” Riko screamed.

He jumped across the table, ripped her hand from the table and laid her onto the ground, holding her head steady.

“Help! I need help!” He yelled at the closed door.

In a moment it was thrown open and a nearby doctor quickly entered, sedating her with a quick injection.

“What happened?”

“She destroyed the orb while still connected to it,” Riko said, frantically.

The doctor pressed a button on her appellate and called for a stretcher and a room to be prepared. She talked calmly and directly at Bella, trying to keep her attention until greater help could arrive, but it was no use.

Riko and the doctor slowly faded into a blur in Bella’s eyes, her thoughts going with her vision. In one final gasp of control, tears of joy began to stream down her face. No sadness, no anguish, no loss. At last, her mind was free.