I'd been going to the local hospital a lot lately.
Something was wrong with me, it turned out. Some freak medical condition not yet observed or catalogued by man.
So. Lots of hospital visits.
I probably should have just been stuck there 24/7, honestly, but some recently ratified laws regarding healthcare costs had made it so that wasn’t an option.
Which was a real shame, considering that I was probably going to die soon without constant care.
Not that any of the doctors seemed to actually know why that was. Just that I was dying. Slowly but surely. At the ripe old age of 29.
That’s why, today, I was visiting the hospital again.
I was scheduled for a new type of brain scan, one that worked on similar principles to an MRI machine, but via slightly different mechanisms. Supposedly that led to a much higher level of observable detail, or something, but I couldn’t say I really understood it.
I walked into the 3rd floor reception, building two, and was directed to one of the many rooms that filled the massive monument to overpriced medical care.
I filled out some paperwork.
I said hello to the doctor who’d be administering my test today. And then I laid down on a curved, hard plastic bed. One that shortly slid into the center of the machine. I closed my eyes and breathed in and out, as instructed.
I found myself in a void of static noise and flashing colors.
Cryptic patterns of strobing lights were all I could see.
I couldn’t feel my skin. Or my body.
I just felt something like pins and needles omnipresent through every part of my being.
Panic and overstimulation warred for the use of every single one of the scant neurons I could muster.
Then my scattered thoughts slowed to crawl.
I felt some small part of me go dark.
Something lost.
The fresh surge of fear that inspired seemed to cause everything to speed up again. Streaks of light, the same color as what you see when you dig your palms into your eyes, surged forth.
The static noise grew louder, and started to attenuate up and down rhythmically.
My nerves were both non-existent and burning with invisible fire all at once.
I felt my consciousness being hit with something again, and it all got slow and quiet once more.
I felt another part of myself, somewhere unidentifiable to me, fall to the void.
Whatever was keeping me sedate decided to hit me again before I could even think to fight back, this time.
Something in the back of my brain was hollowing out. I felt… Me falling away from myself like grains of sand, eroding under the steady pressure of something far larger than myself.
I was forced to sluggishly observe, as names and people and treasured experiences were all peeled from my psyche like bark from a tree.
No, like layers from a…
A thing. A round thing. Brown on the outside? Red? White inside?
What….?
Next thing I knew, I felt my mind unspool outwards, wispy threads of thought and being spreading from a solid, if admittedly quite shaken, core of mind.
I was standing at a podium. Impossibly large eyes peered down from me, forming a ring of judging gazes.
I flipped them all off, nearly on sheer instinct.
I’d already decided that who or whatever had brought me here could go fuck themselves, simply on principle.
Everything went black.
Next thing I knew, I felt my mind unspool outwards-
-Hey wait a fucking second!
My eyes snapped open at once and examined my surroundings. Same podium. Monstrously huge but semi-abstract eyes surrounding me on all sides.
Their very presence somehow seemed to exude scorn.
This did not make me feel any less belligerent.
“Oh, kindly go fuck yourselves.” I said, clearly, calmly, and unignorably.
The eyes all started to shine with an eerie inner light.
I tilted my head back, enjoying the sensation of having a body again after whatever it was that I’d previously experienced.
Some part of me hurt, vaguely, but I couldn’t tell what.
The spectating orbs all stared me down with renewed intensity.
Then everything went black again.
Oh Jesus that smarts, I thought as I came back to consciousness for the third time in as many minutes.
Whatever it was in me that ached before, now was protesting much more vigorously.
I looked around to see that the floating eyes were still doing their whole intimidation routine.
I continued to be unimpressed.
After all, what were they going to do? Kill me?
Death didn’t scare me. I’d been staring down its barrel for months, some defect or unidentifiable poison bringing me closer to it every day.
And the idea of being put in prison didn’t bother me either. Worst they could do was take away my meds, and even then I was pretty sure I could figure something out. I’d gone stretches without my medication before, and weathered it just fine, even if it wasn’t pleasant.
Now, where was I?
The void, it looked like. There were no walls, and everything past the eyes just faded into violet tinted darkness. The skies were pure black.
I looked down.
Wait…
Where the fuck were my tits?
Why were my arms so hairy?
“What…” my voice was wrong too. It was too deep. Rougher. Like the years of vocal training I’d gone through had simply evaporated.
“Fuck!”
They’d managed to find the one thing that could actually scare me.
They’d detransitioned me.
I saw red.
I climbed over the podium in a blind rage to try and claw some of those damned eyes out.
The world went black.
Despite the reset, I still found myself instantly rising to near impossible heights of fury. I had a lifetime of repressed anger in me, and this ultimate insult had finally caused me to snap.
I’d already chosen who I wanted to be. They couldn’t take that away from me, but the fact that they’d even tried to do so meant they all had to die for it.
Violently.
Every single one of them. Whoever it was that had done this. Nothing could justify their continued existence.
I would kill them all.
Never again would I allow someone else to tell me I was something that I was not.
Never. FUCKING. AGAI-
-Another reset.
I tore away from the podium at top speed.
Some motherfuckers still had to die, after all.
Then it felt like some sort of hammer came down on my entire body at once.
Something between an electric shock, medical grade anesthesia, and the impact of a car crash.
I felt myself fade, hewing closer to oblivion…
…
And then I forced myself back on my feet anyway. I would kill them all even if I had to die to do it.
One of the implaccable spherical observers near me backed away, reacting to my actions with something other than simple disdain, for once.
The other eyes surrounding it turned to look at the cowardly one, their ire temporarily redirected.
The single cautious eye seemed to remember something, at that point, before lightly shaking itself and then floating back into position.
I ran towards it and punched it right in its oversized pupil.
It remained perfectly still as my arm phased through it harmlessly.
Still overcome with a level of anger that is near impossible to overstate, I punched it again.
Same result.
I tried a couple more times anyway, kicking and clawing fruitlessly.
This only made me angrier.
They couldn’t get away with this.
Nobody who was willing to fundamentally violate somebody like this should go unpunished.
No matter what any government, corporation, king, or God themself may say. This was a truth I held at my very core. I would never be anything other than myself.
I’d killed before to defend that belief, and I would do so again.
Another heavy blow on my body and mind hit me after a few more seconds of struggling.
I felt myself fall. I tried to get up again.
They hit me again.
I was at the podium again. This time wrapped in restraints that shocked me every time I even thought of moving.
I struggled anyway.
Pain didn’t matter. Not in the face of this.
But even with shocks wracking my body, muscles jerking and straining far past the point of tearing, my bonds held.
An indescribably holier-than-thou voice came down from above.
I told it to go fuck itself through clenched teeth before it could even finish it’s first arrogant utterance.
And then, to put a long story short, I continued to resist the whole way, as some hazy humanoid figure descended from the sky and handed me a sentence for a bunch of crimes I never committed as well as a few that I definitely did.
I don’t really remember the details.
I wasn’t in the best state, at the time.
When next I woke, it was on a picturesque beach of pale sand, waves lapping gently at the shore.
I was reclined in an almost impossibly comfortable lawn chair, and dressed in a simple set of swim trunks and a t-shirt.
My body was still wrong.
I stared straight up at the sun as I took a moment to gather myself.
The rage had quieted somewhat, but it was still there.
I couldn’t let it control me.
It had made me dumb. Even now I could think of several other things I could have tried back there, all of them probably more effective than blindly lashing out as I had.
Not that I blamed myself for that.
Making me look like this again was definitionally the worst thing they could have done to me.
And I would still make them pay.
Whoever they were.
I just needed to pull myself back together first.