The Doctor is In
Carl woke with a start in his bed. The night before…he couldn’t remember what he’d done the night before, or the night before that. He was always having these blackouts, but recently they seemed to be getting worse. He wanted to talk to someone about it…but he didn’t know who to call.
He could go back to the doctor his mom had taken him to, but then, that would be admitting that he needed to be drugged again, and the drugs had really messed him up. He could remember times when he’d been able to see behind him, or when his appearance had changed. The doctor, who’s face he couldn’t quite remember, had said it was just hallucination. He could talk to Dr. Moore…he had a strange thought that maybe he’d met Dr. Moore before the night of the party at his parent’s house.
He wanted to talk to Cassandra, but she had exploded on him the last time he’d called, and told him some confusing things. Why did adult life have to be so complicated?
The dream he’d had the night before had been even more strange. He had been standing on top of a cliff. The Beast, one of the superheroes of Century Station had been holding a Tron version of Carl over the edge while Carl, the real Carl, had been standing at the back of a small group.
The details were fuzzy, even now, but he remembered something about judgement, something…not altogether bad about killing the Tron-Carl. A centaur and Alice, from assassin dolls had been there as well…
Carl got up and went to his computer and began doing searches. There had been a number of cons in CS over the last few years. For some strange reason, Carl had missed all of them. Carl used to always go to cons, but he kept missing them recently. It started about the time his blackouts started getting more regular. About the time he stopped taking the medicine his mother had given him in the past.
He found pictures of an alice who was so uncannily close to the Alice from the cartoons, it looked like the inspiration for the character. Like a model for the character. If she were twelve instead of eight.
Going back in time, to earlier cons, Carl kept finding the same Alice. Four years ago, she had been eight. Now she was twelve. Only…she couldn’t have been the original model, since the show was more than ten years old now.
This was getting creepy, though, because the older Alice didn’t just have pictures from the cons. There was a twitter account @TheRealAssassinAlice that was posting pictures from around CS of her in crime fighting attire, just like she had been in my dream. The only problem was, I couldn’t have seen these, because I hadn’t gotten into the anime culture in years.
Her pictures were associated with S.A.V.I.O.R. or at least the other members of S.A.V.I.O.R. sometimes appeared in them. If she was a member of S.A.V.I.O.R., how come I’d never met her. Or the centaur, who I now saw occasionally appeared with them as well.
The Beast sometimes appeared with S.A.V.I.O.R. too.
The more I went down this rabbit hole, the more I felt a pounding in my head, and the tighter my chest felt. I needed to fix this…but how could this be wrong?
A closeup of Trip’s face told me all I needed to know, because I vividly remembered seeing that face in the mirror one morning. I had to search around for my black box for an hour or so, and never found it. Then, it took another thirty minutes to find, charge, and power up my old phone because the black-box was missing.
“Br. Moore? Hi, this is Carl Weisman. So…can I come talk to you about something? I think I might be going insane. I think…I don’t know…I’ve been having these blackouts…”
7 Replies to “The Doctor is In”
If Moore doesn’t help, maybe Dr Erikson could be called…
This whole thing is getting even more interesting.
Reminder from the past:
https://www.heroesofthecentury.com/chronicle/a-dream/
Also, he showed up at the Sunday dinner from a LONG time ago.
Meanwhile, in the background unnoticed by Carl, a command prompt window opened on the idle computer screen. The words “Execute Phoenix (Y/N)?” appeared. After a few moments of the blinking cursor waiting for an input, the window closed.
From reading this log alone, I don’t like Dr. Moore. We should all go to him and find out why he experimented on Carl and gave him DID with a slew of super powers. Or at least why Carl remembers him in the way he remembers being Beast, Trip, and Alice.
I like this plan it sounds like Carl has been someone’s bitch most of his life, poor guy.
Did you read the earlier interactions? Not just the dream log, but also their interaction at the dinner party? Wait, was that made into a public log? I can’t remember now.
No, I skipped over most of what happened before I joined. It’s added a kernel if realism in Cai’s lack of knowledge.