Redshift by Ashlynn Chantrea (love books to read txt) 📖

The burning. The horrible, all consuming, charring, biting, excruciating burning. With every scream I thought some relief might follow and with every scream the agony only intensified. I was being cremated, I had to be. It was the only explanation for this incendiary anguish. Nothing else made sense. But I could still breathe. I shouldn’t be able to breathe in flames this intense. But I could.

I don’t know how long I squirmed and shrieked, in that moment, time had no meaning for me. It added to the theory of time being a made up construct. This pain was infinite.

But then something changed. I felt barriers in my mind collapsing, burned down by the flames until nothing remained but ash and wide open space. My mind began to take flight. Suddenly there wasn’t anything I couldn’t understand. I could not only see but understand the vastness of space, the structure of the universe, everything.

I was a scientist once upon a time, before I was bitten, before I was thrown into a pit and left to die. The burning continued, still somehow intensifying. But somehow that wasn’t the most important thing anymore. I thought back to my life, my work. Back when I thought that was all there was in the world. Science. It was my one true love, my inspiration, my meaning for this seemingly pointless mortal existence. I thrived on the search for knowledge, the understanding of truth, to find answers to questions some didn’t even know to ask. My mind fell back on the familiar pattern of thought, the comforting structure of how I always used to find answers. Theorize, hypothesize, experiment and come to a conclusion. But where to start?

Why was I burning? I stopped screaming and took a deep breath. The air didn’t hurt, I did. I moved my fingers, clenching my fists and loosening, over and over. My skin wasn’t charred or blistered as I thought it should be based on the whole body scorching I was feeling. My skin wasn’t quite the same either. It felt stiffer, like it was hardening. Whatever was happening, it was physical but it was also internal.

I could work with that.

I felt the rest of my body, studying the feel of each muscle as I tensed and released it. Everything hurt, everything. I groaned.

No! Concentrate!

As each muscle flexed and relaxed, the pain remained the same. I felt my heart pounding hard in my chest. I was breathing fast and shallow. I couldn’t help it. The burning---No! Cant’ think like that!

I searched my mind. Trying to understand this horrible pain. I had no name for the change taking place in my body. Randomly, I wondered if caterpillars hurt this much during metamorphosis. Then I understood.

I was changing. How? I wasn’t sure, too many unknown variables. But my mind couldn’t process this change. Every cell was morphing or mutating somehow and my mind could only process this transition as pain. But other than the agony, nothing felt amiss. I wasn’t actually burning, I was sure. My body was in a dark, dank hole, no fire, no significant outside heat.

I thought about my brain, remembering back to biology classes in college. I had been a prodigy back then. I thirsted for knowledge without direction. The idea of becoming a medical doctor had entered my mind at one point and I had started taking the required classes. I had changed my mind before completing the degree but I could remember the anatomy class as clearly as if I had taken it yesterday.

The brainstem, keeps control of the body, regulates temperature and other such functions. I still had control over my body but it was difficult to move efficiently with the agony clogging the neural pathways. Next step, the pain matrix. Unfortunately there isn’t one single part of the brain that controls and interprets pain. I had to go through each node one by one and turn off the pain. The most important part would be the frontal lobe. It connects an emotional response to the pain, normally important for survival and learning but in this case, useless.

It took a few seconds but I cut off the emotional response and suddenly the pain was meaningless. It was still there and I could feel it just as intensely as before but it didn’t matter to me. I could move more fluidly.

I lifted my arm experimentally. It didn’t feel right. I moved quickly, far faster than normal but it wasn’t quite right. The metamorphosis wasn’t complete. I put my arm down, opting to wait for the change to be complete before I tried moving around.

I kept my eyes closed, best to wait before trying to focus my eyes. I could hear so much. The sound of the air flowing down hallways, brushing against walls and other objects, the sound of voices, lots of voices speaking all at the same time filled my ears. They were speaking too softly for me to hear them distinctly but I could hear them.

Time took on a new meaning as infinite anguish turned into infinite boredom. I noticed that as the seconds ticked by (which I started to count when the soft ticking of a clock reached my ears) my senses became increasingly sensitive. I could hear individual voices whispering, light footsteps brushing almost noiselessly across the stone floor, the sound of breathing and sniffing. Conversations didn’t interest me, I didn’t really understand what they were talking about and I figured, like most things social, you have to be a part of it to really understand it.

Part of my brain analyzed the sounds I was hearing, trying to gauge distance and clarity. Another part of my brain kept count of the seconds ticking by and translated that into minutes then hours. In an uncharacteristic moment of sentimentality which I partially blame on the boredom, I sifted through my old memories, thinking of friends and family, remembering every part of my life with perfect clarity.

Sifting through the memories of my life was somewhat unimpressive. So much had held deep meaning then and now all I could see was what I had missed. I saw the girl in my eighth grade class that I had never had the courage to speak to. I saw the fliers hung up and down the school hallways for dances I never attended. I saw missed opportunities and regrets that I would never get the chance to make right. I was suddenly overcome with a sense of loss. The feeling was fleeting though.

While I wallowed in self-pity over my past mistakes or lack thereof, I also kept track of how my body was functioning, analyzing the speed at which my heart was beating and how fast I was breathing. I didn’t try to alter any of it, it felt natural the way it was but I noted casually that I should have had a heart attack by now. But my main focus was above me, waiting for whoever had done this to me to come back.

Then I heard a conversation that was worth pushing to the forefront of my focus. New voices speaking slightly louder than all the others had been. As soon as the slightly familiar trill of a young female voice spoke, all other whispers went quiet.

“How long has he been silent?” She asked. Randomly, I wondered why she even asked, she sounded completely disinterested. I knew they must be talking about me.

“Nearly twelve hours.” A young male voice answered.

More like ten by my count, I thought.

“Why has he been quiet for so long?” Her reply was slow and bored.

“Maybe he didn’t survive.” He offered. Then he groaned and a thump followed. He had fallen to the ground and continued to groan in pain.

I counted thirty seconds before he stopped grunting and writhing against the stone floor.

“How do you explain his heartbeat if he did not survive?” Again her voice was monotone, indifferent.

“Idiot!” Another slightly deeper male voice snapped.

Silence. There wasn’t a sound other than the movement of air and my own heart and lungs. All the voices I had heard before were completely silent. No one was even breathing.

She sighed, exasperated. Then there was the muted shuffling of cloth and feet quickly brushing against the floor. The sound was getting louder. Whoever it was, he was heading in my direction.

I disliked the idea of opening my eyes but I thought I probably should see what was going on. I lay on my back, arms by my sides, staring up to the dark ceiling from the bottom of the pit.

My sight had changed. When I had been dropped down here it had been completely black. Now the space around me was shades of purple and blue. I could see dust and various other particles dancing in the air above me. Then a young boy’s head appeared over the edge of the pit. He was twenty feet above me, staring down with wide eyes. He looked so young, possibly fifteen or sixteen years old. He was pale, even in the dim light I could tell he was far whiter than the average person. His shaggy, sandy blond hair fell to just above his crimson colored eyes.

I focused on his bright red eyes. That wasn’t possible. He couldn’t have red eyes. My sight must still be in the process of changing, skewing the color.

“Are you done already?” He asked in hushed awe. His voice was barely a whisper but I heard him like he had called down to me.

I thought about that, analyzing how I felt. The pain had shifted slightly, fading from my extremities but was still present.

“No.” I answered confidently.

His brow furrowed and his mouth twisted into a look of confusion accompanied by stress.

“Why aren’t you crying anymore?”

I shrugged, “I don’t feel the need to.”

“You aren’t burning anymore?” He shuddered once and gazed down, awestruck.

“No, I’m still burning. That’s how I know I’m not finished changing.” I replied casually.

“How?” Was all he could manage to say.

I thought of how to word my reply. How would I tell him that I could feel the impulses of my brain as signals were transmitted? Would he understand if I told him I could navigate my neural pathways, sending incoming signals to other parts of the brain, deviating messages like pain so they ended up not effecting certain parts of my brain while I could still analyze and process them in other areas. I knew I was in pain but it wasn’t affecting my body the way pain normally would. I looked into his eyes and couldn’t identify any signs of significant intelligence. Odds were, he wouldn’t understand no matter how much I dumbed it down, “I couldn’t explain it in a way you would understand.” I told him flatly.

His lips pulled back from his teeth as he hissed. He thought I was insulting him. I guess in a sense I might have been. He might actually be smart enough to understand the basics if I decided to explain it to him but based on the previous conversation I had overheard, I thought the evidence pointed to a below average intelligence.

After he hissed, he vanished from my view. I heard him run quietly back to the two he had been speaking to before and tell them I definitely had a talent. He said I didn’t feel pain.

I sighed. That wasn’t entirely true. I could feel it, I knew it was there, it just didn’t drive a response.

The seconds ticked by creating hours of uninterrupted boredom where I occupied my time contemplating complex mathematical proofs that I would never get to publish, fantasies of futures I would never have, wondering if I had chosen differently in the past, would I be here now? All the while I monitored the change in the pain I was feeling. My heart began