Sam wakes up

Sam woke up… The gentle breeze and dappled sunshine of a late spring day gently rousing her from slumber. She felt alive and awake and refreshed. As if she’d just had the most deep and cleansing night’s sleep she’d ever experienced. A leftover effect from the , the teen guessed… She’d certainly felt groggy enough as Jen had helped her into the car and driven her home. They’d snuck in the backdoor and tiptoed clumsily up the stairs, her bestie half dragging Sam into the bedroom to dump unceremoniously upon her own bed.

So now, here she was… alone in the late hours of a Sunday morning. Filled with excitement at the prospect of seeing if it had worked! If she could now link herself up with all the vastness of the world wide web… with just a thought in that direction. With bated breath she held onto the first word that popped into her head and let it settle into a sort of commanding instruction: ‘Reddit’.

Without a moment’s hesitation… The scrolling front page she knew so well did indeed pop up across her vision, superimposed rather strangely across her still horizontal view of her bedroom. It took a certain amount of strange focus to adjust to that awkward sort of double-vison, but Sam was sure she’d get used to it in time. Meanwhile the teen was mesmerised by the way she could flick from post to post, gif to jpg… just with the tiniest change of thought. It really was just about the coolest thing she could ever have imagined. Lying there, flicking through page after page of… admittedly the same pointless nonsense that there ever was… but without having to even touch a piece of electronic equipment!

So engrossed was the eighteen year old with her new toy… that she remained absolutely motionless in her bed for a good half-hour, unwilling to notice anything else. Eventually however, growing complaints from her bladder began to demand attention. An itch upon her right thigh also needed scratching… before it drove her quite mad with frustration. Sighing internally, the girl dragged her mind away from the depths of the internet’s self-proclaimed front page, and went to move her arm.

Only… the arm in question did not move. Her brain was sending all the right signals… but the corresponding action simply did not occur. Had she slept on it funny? Had it gone numb? Sam’s mind raced through possibilities as she tried to lift herself up on the other arm to assess the situation.

That did not occur either. Her opposite limb remained exactly where it was, relaxed and immobile. The pure, sudden, sickening terror that she might be paralysed crashed over Sam like a wave. Dark, bottomless fear and roaring guilt at having handed herself over for a botched medical procedure threatened to drown out everything else in an unfathomable surge of inescapable terror!

Except, at that very moment… Her body did move. It quite nimbly and lightly threw the covers aside, got up, and stood calmly in the middle of the room. Sam was left disorientated, looking at her pyjama clad form in her own full-length mirror. She looked absolutely normal. Her skinny, teenage form as pale and hair as dishevelled as it ever was, first thing after getting up. Her point of view was completely normal, the same sights she had seen a thousand-thousand times. Yet the sickening surety that the movements it had taken to get here were not at her own behest… was churning her stomach beyond all belief.