exercise #13: short scenes

 Topic: Nerves

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"Are you nervous?" the attendant, who had introduced herself as 'Jackie', had said to me. Her green pigtails bounced up and down as she followed me into the room.

"No," I shot back.

"It's normal to be nervous right now," she said sweetly.

"I'm not!" I turned around to her and gestured to the object of my trepidation. "It just looks...creepy."

Jackie turned to look at the NeoLife M and put her hand on her chin, as if assessing a particularly interesting outfit in a store window.

"Hmm..."

The dark surroundings made the object menacingly bright, contrasting it as the focus of the room, which, well...it was. The NeoLife M was a squat, black, box, tall enough to house a metallic, blue chair, but not wide enough to be super comfortable. The acid-washed plastic walls reminded me of one of those disgustingly green port-a-potty's that littered the streets, but this association was belied by the crazy mess of pneumatic tubes piping all manner of colourful liquids and gases into the roof of the structure.

Nothing really screamed 'comfort' - and the faint aroma of nutmeg didn't help either.

"...nah. It seems pretty fun!" Jackie beamed at me. "Didn't you read the material we sent out?"

"Not really..." The pamphlet was probably part of the other 18th birthday cards I had mulched for compost for my little cube apartment's herb garden.

"Would you feel better if I told you that 99.99% of people come out with absolutely no physical or mental side-effects?"

I glared at her sickly grin, "What happened to the others?"

"Who?"

"The 0.01% that did come out with side-effects."

"Oh," Jackie looked up, pondered, and then back to me. "They died."

"Seriously? Aren't you supposed to make me feel better?"

She laughed, "Sure, but either you go through and survive, in which case it didn't matter. Or otherwise, you die, and I don't have that much to clean up." She pointed at the barely-visible hinges in the floor. "Quick and easy."

I sighed, "Great, I feel much better."

"Awesome! Are we ready to have the experience of a lifetime?" I swear there were sparkles that appeared when she said those words.

"Yeah fine - hope I don't break down from the experience and change my hair green or something ridiculous."

Jackie's expression froze in place, her eyes slowly shifting from their designated position on page 5 of the employee handbook, sub-heading 2: 'Manufactured Happiness' to subheading 5: 'Forced Politeness'.

"Just get into the chair, please."

I grinned. Must have hit a nerve.

I made my way over to the chair, thoughts intrusively poking at my psyche in anticipation.

18 years old.

Near death experience.

Nothing to it, right?

No-one who had gone through the experience could talk about it. There was a mental block that was installed after you'd gone through, and each one was super personal anyway. I'm not scared of the dark, but I'm deathly afraid of spiders. 

Maybe it would be spiders?

I hate spiders. 

I shuddered at the thought.

I sat slowly into the chair - was it always so black or was that just my vision blurring? - and sank into the surprisingly comfortable leather. Looked like my perceptions were already being played with. The walls seemed uncomfortably close, but I felt well cocooned in the orange, bee-like honeycombed walls. 

Wait, was it always that colour?

Jackie hummed a tuneless song as she made preparations around the machine.

"Uh..."

"Don't worry - it'll settle down soon," Jackie bounced around to the front of the NeoLife M. "Are you all strapped in?"

"I...sure?" I tried to move but I couldn't. When did I have this seatbelt on? I tried to call out once more, but my throat felt like glue.

"Great!" Jackie moved back, away from my panicked eyes, and pulled down on a lever above the doorway. The heavy, metal doors slowly began to close, and the colours began to pulse from the wiring and tubes in the room.

"Time for the show to begin!," she trilled in a sing-song voice. "See you on the other side..."

And then, I died.