Cross My Mind

MILA'S CAPTURE PART 1

….

****(Louisiana USA)****

Slowly, Mila open her eyes to find herself strapped up with a bright light shining close to her eyes, the platform she is lying on begins moving her inside and the space is so small between her and the shining light. It took Mila a few seconds before she could realize that she is inside an MRI scanner, a magnetic resonance imaging machine that hospitals and other healthcare facilities use to take images of parts of the body. she specifically remembers the machine because this is not her first time inside it.

when she was younger and was injured by the Alligator that attacked her, she was put in an MRI scanner.

Then she remember the incident that happened the night before and how enraged she was suddenly becoming after seeing her father pretending to care about her and her well being.

“that was twenty years of emotions and anger that I have been saving up for him, it was a shame I wasn’t allowed to gouge out his eyes” she murmured to herself as she finished the thought.

‘they must have brought me to this hospital after giving me that shot and this means that they are scanning my brain to see if something was wrong with me. After what I would have done to him if the paramedics were not there to stop me, I guess they wouldn’t have needed an MRI scan to know if I am crazy or not’. She murmured to herself.

The platform she was lying on started moving backwards after the scans were complete and as she was finally out of the scanner, five people dressed in full body medical protective suits with gas masks were standing around she realized.

“get me out of these straps, I am not crazy as I am sure your brain scans would show you, by the way I want out of this place immediately or you will all be hearing from my lawyers” Mila shouted at the people, but to her surprise none of them paid any attention to what she was saying.

She could not see their faces and the facility feels too dread and quite to be a normal hospital, so Mila tried asking a little more nicely.

“can you at least tell me where I am? I was brought here passed out. I need to know where I am” she said again. However, none of the people seem to be paying any attention to her or what she is saying. Two of them held her down and one of them came with a hair clipper, shaving the right side of her head just above her ear, she did not struggle much. They rubbed some sort of ointment on the shaved part of her head and she begin to become scared at this point.

A few minutes ago when they held her down and brought out a hair clipper that she thought they were going to use to shave her head, she was concerned and realized this is not a regular hospital. “this must be psychiatric facility and that would explain why none of the staff doctors are responding to me, they must have thought that I have lost my mind, that sly old man gave me up so easily to mental facility, I know he doesn’t care about me, he cant after all these years and so naïve of me to think he would change” she thought.

However, having witness the lack of care for her feelings and complete lack of compassion in how they handle her, Mila begins to have dangerous thoughts on where she really is and having a side of her head shaved and rubbed with an ointment, she begins to imagine all sorts of dangerous scenarios that she may already be in at the moment.

“Are you people even doctors, why is no one answering me and what are you about to do to me?” Mila asked out of desperation and the fear that the ointment may be a sterilizer or some sort of preparation to drill or cut into her head.

One of the people took off his mask and revealed his face, when Mila looked at him carefully, she realized that he is dark skinned with thick eyebrows and a mustache that give his face a crooked figure, they say you can almost tell a man who has spent his entire life committing violent crimes and the look of the man’s face definitely seems that of someone who has killed many people to Mila.

Fear overcome her and a sense of doom took over her, she entered a state of adrenaline frenzy and started trying to kick shake the men holding her, she bit one of the hands trying to hold her head still, she bit the hand through the latex glove and although she can taste the disinfectant on the glove in her mouth, she didn’t hesitate, she simply bit the hand with all her strength.

The man with the sinister appearance managed to pull his hand out of her mouth in pain and stepped back immediately, he walked to the table by the side of the room in a fury and brought out a syringe containing a yellowish fluid inside.

A loud voice coming from speakers mounted on each side of the room suddenly broke the silence.

“do not sedate the subject, we need to visualize it when she is awake and active first” the voice said.

Mila was greatly surprised by the striking level of familiarity she felt in the voice, it was as if the person with the voice is someone she knows very well but, she cannot say who exactly the person is. The man put down the syringe he picked and removed his latex glove to examine the hand that Mila had bitten, he realized the hand is not injured and put on a new glove and walked back to where she was lying down with both her hands and feet strapped to the MRI machine platform.

The rest of the men held her down to the point where she could barely move even her head, the door to the room beeped open and a man in a white laboratory gown walked inside, Mila could only see him roughly from her peripheral vision, he walked close enough to her and she can now see his face, at once she knows he is the one that was talking over the speakers earlier.

His face looks even more familiar than his striking voice, his white hair, the wrinkled face and the strikingly familiar eyes, yet Mila could not tell where she knows the man from.

“it is good to finally see you eye to eye again Mila Goldenberg” the man said and nodded for the men dressed in protective suits to continue their work.

The man with the sinister face walked to where she was being held and puled out a device from the side of the platform she was strapped on. As the rest of the people hold her in place, the man placed the device he is holding on the shaved and oiled part of her head. The familiar man in white lab gown pulled a tablet computer out of his hand and started observing something that made him to instantly smiled and paid even more attention.

“incredible!” he shouted. “sedate her and take the scans while she is passed out as well, the man said.

One of the men walked over to the table and picked the syringe which was kept there earlier, he walked back to Mila and injected it's contents right in her veins. A few moments later, she faded into a dream.

In the dream, she found herself sitting In a strange facility eating food on a table inside what she could only describe as a high school dinning hall with many people seated across the hall wearing the exact similar clothing as she is.

On her left, a black man with a beautiful blue right eye and a brown left eye was seated and munching a piece of chicken and she instantly recognizes the man to be Garba Danladi, the person she is switching bodies with.

To her right sat a beautiful Asian woman with black silky hair and a bright smile on her face. She wore eye glasses that made her look nerdy and smart. The energy around her was beautiful and loving, she speaks with joy and a sense of logic and strength. Mila feels strangely attached to the woman and feels at ease when she was close to her, but who is the woman and why cant I remember her name? she wonders.

A few minutes later, Mila suddenly found herself in a forest, she was wearing differently colored clothes and there were people wearing Military camouflage uniforms chasing the three of them, her, Garba and the mysterious Asian woman. The dream was skipping parts and suddenly, Mila found herself in yet another place, the floor was colored in large patches of black and white squares and the people around have floating holographic projections of different icons on their heads.

When Mila took a closer look she realized that those are chess pieces and the weird pattern on the floor is because the floor itself is a chess board and the side are surrounded by a large glass cube.

To elevate her surprise, as if in the blink of an eye, she found herself standing on the far right end of the court a few steps from where she was standing earlier, she looks to her left and sees herself standing in tears holding the mysterious Asian woman in her arms. It seems like the woman is dead.

This makes Mila feels great sadness and regret but she could not see Garba anywhere, she looked at all directions but he is nowhere to be found; when she looks at her hands and they were bigger and black, she felt her face and was immediately stunned by what she felt, that is when she realizes that she is in fact a man. The very man she is looking for, Garba Danladi. She was in his body.

In this instant, Mila was woken up from her dream with a sudden pain in her head, she opened her eyes to find out that she has been transported to a different room. This room is different from the old one and has the ambience of a detainment unit more than anything you can possibly find In a hospital and Mila knows at once that she is not in any hospital, “am i in a mental asylum?” she asked herself. The room she is in this time is much smaller than the last one and has only a bed and a porcelain toilet seat, it also has a sink and a mirror next to it.

‘am I being held here? For how long and why’

All of my senses tell me something more is going on? She suddenly remember her dream and the fact that she was in Garba’s body in the dream.

“could it be that Garba and I have crossed bodies before? It would explain why the dreams feel so realistic, were these memories rather than dreams? Why cant I recall any of that stuff” Mila asked herself out loud. Suddenly, the door to the room slide open and the same man from earlier, the familiar looking one in his white lab gown walked in, escorted by two humongous men dressed in sky blue uniform and holding gums.

“that will be because you in fact have done it before. I mean crossing minds with Garba by the way. You two tried to keep it a big secret but neither of you realize that we own the very being that was helping you, a few weeks after we release you, we found out all the mischief that you were plotting behind our eyes, all we had to do was check our secret logs of that damn Artificial intelligence, it is so smart but it cannot know what it does not know exist.” The man said while waking inside the room, one of the two men behind him pulled a chair inside for the old man to sit down. While seated, the man continued.

“I know that Reece is a genius so I didn’t try to tag her invention when she was coding her artificial intelligence so one day when she was busy dozing off, I added a hidden code that created a program at the very core of the root code and this program secretly collects logs of activities that the AI does. My original intention was to simply monitor the AI but to think it will try to sabotage me and the company’s work, that was something I never imagined would happen”. Now looking at Mila’s head with one side shaved off.

“your looks today remind me of the day we implanted all of you with the Neuraface. Any way, Reece does not pose any threat to us at the moment because I used my program not only to copy all of the data brought together that makes up the so called sentient AI, but also deleted the very data Reece thought she could threaten us with. Thanks to that though the AI deleted itself from our supercomputer and we now have the most powerful AI in the world as a rogue AI on the loose”. He said

The man finished talking and Mila is only more confused by all the new information he is telling her.

“ I bet all of that doesn’t make much sense to you right? In that case, this may help you regain your memory. Many people think that my chemical brainwashing technique is actual brainwashing except that they are wrong. What I do is simple neuro-modification of your mind with simple cues. It is in fact to me, the highest form of what many people call hypnotism” he said and pulled out a Virtual reality headset and handed it over to Mila.

She collected it and asked.

“what am i supposed to do with this? This is a VR headset”.

“wear it and watch what I have to show you, it may or may not trigger you to overcome the block I put on your memories, I have never unblocked memories but I have always encoded a massage to unblock them every time I brainwash a person” the old man said laughing.

Mila knows that the old man is not lying and even if he is, he could just send in those men from earlier to force her watch whatever it is he has put in the VR headset. She put the headset on, immediately the man pressed something on his tablet computer; a high pitch frequency sound begin to ring in her ear, knocking her unconscious.