The first thing I notice is the intense bright light behind my closed eyelids, then the constant beeping. I open my eyes slowly, then close them again as I try to adjust to the light. As I open them for the third time, I notice that the beeping gets a bit faster. I then hear a whoosh like an automatic door sliding, followed by footsteps. My eyes are open, but my vision is blurry. As I try to rub my eyes, I feel a pull at my arms, then a sharp sting on my hands. I lower my head and rub my eyes…
That’s when everything stops as my vision becomes clear and sharper. As I open and close my hands, the hands in front of me do the same, opening and closing, but they are too small to be mine… they seem to belong to a toddler. The beeping that I’ve been hearing gets faster and somehow louder. I start to rub my hands, feel my arms, then I see why my arms were being pulled: there is an IV drip line connected to my hand, and the line is caught in something.
Then I remember that I heard footsteps, but no one has spoken. I look around and find a male Asian doctor observing me. When our eyes meet, he smiles.
“Hello, young one, finally awake from your nap?” the doctor asks me in Japanese.
I’m about to say that I don’t speak Japanese but stop because I do understand him…
“Lee? Are you okay? Do you understand what I’m saying?” the doctor asks me again when I don’t respond.
Blood rushes to my head. I feel my heart beat in my ears, drowning out all the sounds around me. Memories flash in front of me… “Lee! That’s my name, Lee Watson, five years old, from a regular family: mother, father, and a three-year-old sister…” As I think, pain explodes in my head, and memories rewind backward like a VCR, starting from this point to the point where my real mother left me with this family. I try to move, but my body refuses; I try to speak, but only choking sounds come out… everything around me moves in extremely slow motion, including the blood in the middle of the air that I just coughed. Then darkness, again.
The doctor sees Lee turn paler. Then, the next instant, blood starts to pour from his ears and nose. The doctor only has time to take a step forward as Lee starts to speak, but only a mouthful of blood comes out. Then Lee faints.
The room explodes into pandemonium, with medics running at the sound of the machinery alarm. The medical equipment display alerts on the light-bluish holographic screens. Lee still has blood pouring from his ears and nose.
“What is wrong with this child?” says a nurse. “First, he spends a week with high fevers and zero neurological activity; now he just wakes up to collapse back down bleeding like this?”
“I know… I’ve read his reports,” says the male doctor from before. “When I walked in, it seemed he had just woken up and was examining his own arms.”
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Gurgling noises start to come from Lee. A young nurse, noticing this, forces Lee onto his side using her arms and tail, and blood comes out from his mouth.
“Well done, Nurse Raxen,” says the doctor to the nurse who turned Lee onto his side, and she only nods.
Lee’s body starts to shake, not like a convulsion, but more like the shake of a body when a winter breeze hits, or when someone is really cold. It continues to shake for half a minute before it goes limp, and the medical alarms stop, then the flow of blood stops… Lee’s breathing becomes smooth and peaceful; blood pressure drops, and heart rate regulates.
The doctor stops and takes a step back. Both nurses look at one another from across the bed and see the same shock and confusion they are feeling on the other's face.
“Nurse Fionna, go and get the caretaker…” commands the doctor. “…The Flumarian one. We will need his telekinetic abilities to lift Lee so the bedding can be made fresh without transferring him to another bed.”
Once the nurse returns, a male Flumarian—an alien with violet skin, one and a half meters tall, with a single row of dorsal spikes used to detect air movement—enters. As he enters, he stops, the spikes on his back vibrating as the metallic smell of blood hits his nose... He then looks at the holographic screen as he asks: “Is this child even alive? Does he have any blood left in him?” He uses Galactones (also known as uni-language), the common language spoken in the galaxy, and mandatory to be known by anyone traveling to other worlds for living or work, for easier communication.
The doctor nods and answers using Galactones, too. “Yes, unbelievable, but yes, he does still live, and with blood in his body.”
The Flumarian shakes his head with a sigh. Then, extending his hands toward Lee, his eyes glow a shade of silver like mercury. Lee’s body lifts off the bed. The bloodied sheets are replaced by clean ones, and Lee is placed back down on the bed, just in time as the Flumarian drops to his knees in exhaustion.
Early the next day, Lee wakes up. The room's lights are on a dim setting. Lee sits up on the bed carefully so the IV line doesn't get caught on anything again. He examines his body as the memories of the past five years resurface, this time slowly and under Lee’s control.
“So I was born in China? Why did I think I couldn’t speak Japanese?” Lee thinks as he looks at his memories. Then he remembers: just before his birth, he was an old man in the UK; the year was two thousand eighty-five. But the memory is foggy, like he is not supposed to remember.
Starting to get a headache, Lee stops trying to remember his past life; instead, he concentrates on this one: the life of Lee Watson. With his eyes closed, the memory of the last time he saw himself in a mirror flashes. He sees himself looking back in the reflection: yellowish skin, typical of an Asian, black hair, dark blue eyes that, at a glance, seem black—a very rare condition. His eyes are not as almond-like as is normal for people from China, but more rounded. His hair also tends to curl up. These are the indications that led him to believe recently that he was adopted.
Now, with the recap of his memory, he knows for sure. But he doesn't see the differences in the woman who gave him away, nor can he remember a reason why she gave him away at the young age of six months.
The lights start to brighten up, and Lee opens his eyes in time to see the doors slide open, and a nurse walks in. Right behind her is a younger nurse, this one with a greenish tone to her skin, almost like body paint that wasn’t properly cleaned, but what Lee notices the most is her tail. At first, he's surprised, then the memory that humans and aliens cohabit this planet among others flashes in his mind, making him smile.
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