[Perspective switch: Everyone Else]

    They did the CAT scan and wheeled me back to my room.
    "You know you have physical therapy today, are you feeling all right?" John asked.
    I nodded.
    "Ready to get up, get moving, start using all those muscles again?"
    Another nod. We passed a window. I caught a split-second glimpse of orange and silver out in the garden.
    From there I was taken to Dr. Smith's office. I think that by this point there was a certain light of paranoia in my eyes, but he didn't remark on it. My posture was tight and tense as well, not quite to the point of shivering, and no amount of effort sufficed to force relaxation.
    "Why don't we start from the beginning," he said pleasantly, taking up a pen. I sat in the wheelchair and looked at him across the cluttered desk. "Do you remember anything about the original incident?"
    "No. Why don't you tell me about it?" I could have sworn he checked something off a list in front of him.
    He didn't tell me much that I hadn't already heard, and went on, "I understand from the incident last night that you're still experiencing hallucinations. Do you want to describe them?"
    "Not really."
    Another note. "I don't want to sound too stringent here, but you need to understand the seriousness of your current circumstances," he said gravely.
    "I do, trust me."
    Note. "If you're still experiencing these problems, we need to deal with them before we can begin to deal with any of the other effects that Rogers' Syndrome can have on your system. It always carries both physical and psychological modifications. Can you please tell me what you remember about the hallucination?"
    I took a shaky breath. "Tell you what. Convince me that I'm not hallucinating this conversation." The memory of the dream seemed exactly as real as this moment. did.
    He sighed and gave me a patient look. "Are we going to get into one of these? Where no matter what I do you're going to say I hallucinated that in my dreams, too? What kind of proof? Whether I'm real, you're real?"
    "Either one would do for starters."
    The window behind him began to open slowly. I looked away from it, concentrating on him.
    "You can feel your body," he offered. "You can feel yourself in the chair, you're aware of everything that's happening to you. Of course, you're also aware of all that in your hallucinations, too."
    I nodded.
    "I'm willing to bet that in the hallucinations you've had in the past, there was a high degree of, shall we say, improbable circumstances?"
    That was one way to describe my life as I had known it.
    "You're probably suffering from common ailments. Feelings of paranoia, being hunted, explosions are a common theme, moments of claustrophobia, feeling like you're inside something that's collapsing?"
    I was having that feeling right now.
    "You also probably feel like you can fly. Now I know that we live in an amazing world, and these things might be possible if we can ever get your variance under control."
    There were bars on this window, too. Hands grasped them, wearing orange gloves, working the bars free somewhat, and then somehow, silently, snapping them.
    I closed my eyes.
    "Am I close on these?" he prodded. "Flight, feelings of claustrophobia, collapsing structures, explosions, one or two giant monsters?"
    "There's no point in even talking about this," I stated in monotone.
    "There's no point in even talking about them?"
    "No, not really. What good is it going to do?" I opened my eyes and looked at him as steadily as I could. Either I was right and this was all some kind of setup to get me back on their side, or I really was losing my mind; either way, having a conversation about it wasn't going to get us anywhere.
    "The good that it will do is that hopefully we'll be able to get you past these feelings of paranoia that you're currently experiencing," he replied. "You'll stop having these hallucinations. As long as you're having these dreams, you'll never be able to be in society. Even if we were to let you out before we deal with these circumstances, which would be almost criminal negligence on our part, letting even a low-end variant out with these sorts of problems, how would you be able to interact? Everyone's working against you? The world that you're in right now is incorrect, everything's a hallucination? You have to work with me here."
    "By believing everything you say." My breath was a little too fast, too tight.
    "Can you explain to me the reverse? Why should all of this be a hallucination?"
    "You keep telling me I'm having hallucinations," I riposted as Phoenix Talon slipped into the room through the window. Dr. Smith noticed my glance and turned around. There was no one there.
    He sighed. "I can see that we're going to have our work cut out for us. Hopefully physical therapy will help. It's actually common once you get the blood sugars moving again, once your body actually becomes more accustomed to the nature of reality, the hallucinations will start to fade. They're coming in short bursts? Or, if you want to believe, they're constant and you're still in a coma? Is that what you're thinking? Or is the hallucination world real and you've been tossed into what would seemingly be this Kafkaesque nightmare?"
    I stared at him wordlessly, hopelessly, for a moment. "Give me a rational basis to choose between the options you've just presented, and we'll have a point of departure for discussion." I meant it.
    "What would it take to prove to you that this is real?"
    "If I could think of what that thing was, I'd let you know." One way or another I would have to discount large parts of my memory. If I couldn't believe that the past I remembered so clearly had really happened, how could I believe anything?
    This is the World Crime League and they're trying to break you, muttered the paranoid half.
    Fine. Prove it, said the other, which has upon occasion wondered if I might actually have been shot in the head at the airport and all that followed has been like that Stephen Crane story. Which I dimly remember reading in high school, which just goes to prove the point a little further.
    "Having your parents show up, talking to them, that wouldn't prove it?"
    I shook my head slightly.
    "Going out, visiting the crowds, seeing the outside world, that wouldn't do it. Long-term physical therapy, overcoming the original effects of the problem, that wouldn't do it, what would we have to do?" He sounded somewhat frustrated beneath the gentle patience. "Have every person you've ever met come up and shake your hand?"
    "That wouldn't work either." I thought fleetingly of Travis. If I met him again, which one would it be? Which one was real?
    "At some point I'd like to go into more detail as to exactly what you were dreaming about. You seem to have a very well-constructed fantasy world. How complete the delusion is, that it doesn't require a shred of physical evidence."
    "It's actually destroyed the credibility of all physical evidence," I corrected him. And it's your own damn fault, too, for doing such a good job on my memory. Unless I dreamed that part, of course, in which case I was using a hallucination to back up my stubborn, paranoid refusal to believe that it had been a hallucination....

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