Daughter of Time 1: Reader Read Online Free PDF Page B

obsessed with the past that I ended up blocking out nearly all possible future visions. Amazingly stupid, I know, considering how useful future visions might have been. Even worse, I never sought out the history of this place, these people, what and who they were, why they were acting as they did. How much I could have learned, perhaps to help me cope, even escape this terrible place. I don’t know how to explain my inability to realize these things except to say that I had nearly fallen into a black hole of hopelessness, and through the exploration of the past I had found beauty, hope, and light. It saved me, carried me through the experiments, the surgeries, the inhumanity of the place. I needed this different world too much. I guess that maybe part of me purposefully ignored things closer at hand, however useful they might have been. The other things were more useful. They kept me sane in an insane life.

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I took it up, and held it in my hand. I was a trembling, because I'd got to decide, forever, betwixt two things, and I knowed it. I studied a minute, sort of holding my breath, and then says to myself: "All right, then, I'll go to hell" and tore it up.  —Mark Twain
     
     
    They were all happy, happy voices in the glass room.
    The giant helmet came off, and the sounds of the place washed over me once more—the faster flits of motion of the team working with me, their excitement in their motions, breaths, and vocal tones. It was strange – as time went on, as I became better and better at their silly games. It became easier and easier for me, and boredom set in, even as their excitement grew. At first it was such relief to know I was pleasing them so much, and I looked forward to each new session. How quickly it all changed when I think back on it.
    It became clear that this device they placed on my head had something to do with stimulating the world of my visions. Strap me in, turn it on, and I could “see” things created in front of me, like some magic laser-disco ball in front of a sighted person. A small child is in awe of the disco ball. In a few years it might seem interesting for a few minutes. If you saw it several times a week as a young teen, well, its secrets were all gone.
    Their secrets faded fast. As I approached my fifteenth birthday, it had been almost two years and six surgeries —a surgery almost every four months—and a lot of time growing into my new abilities. By now the tumor was as big as a squashed softball, and my head had expanded at the back and top so that even the Red Sox hat barely fit with the strap totally open, even though I had torn the stitching to make more room. At least my hair could finally grow back in all the way. I vowed to myself never to cut it again—in the dream place where I had such control over my life.
    My whitecoat entourage had grown to a team of at least ten, headed by Dr. Talkative. He loved to tell me how big the tumor was, updating me on its slowing growth, its stabilization within my brain. He was bragging, boasting of his pet project that he had guided, boasting of my achievements with their stupid, limited little manipulations as if he had achieved them.
    I had learned over time that, whatever it was that they were doing, they didn’t understand much about it. They could set it up, read the output, and know if I was succeeding or not. But they understood nothing beyond that, like people who use a microwave and have no idea what it’s all about inside. They didn’t know what I was seeing, how simple it was all becoming, and how I was realizing that there was a much, much greater world to be perceived by this dramatic new sense I was developing. They made me into this freak, but they didn’t know what they had made.
    As I outgrew their disco ball, I was better able to ace those little tests with it. Soon, it became something I could do in the background, while I thought about other things or even explored the past as had become my obsession.