So, about those zombies… yeah, today in kickboxing, we were discussing how important it was to keep active and really master those roundhouses, in case of the Zombie Apocalypse and all. Which of course, sent me on an A.D.D. binge, thinking about the dystopian society novel I have in the works for an early 2015 release. My brain just won’t turn off, people, I’m telling you… Having said that, maybe someday in the near future I’ll give you a little teaser of said Zombie novel 😉 Until then, have fun reading this excerpt from the “Now I Sleep” series Book 2. Enjoy!
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It’s been three days since I woke up.
Three days since my life came to an end. Three days since my life began.
Three days of loss, anger, confusion and agony that I’ve had to endure all by myself – alone. There’s not a soul alive on this earth that could understand what I’m going through – or even pretend to.
Only a short seventy-two hours ago, every person I had ever loved and held dear to my heart was taken from me, every thing I had loved in this world, destroyed. A new life was fabricated for me, although everyone else would say it had been my real life all along – I had just never known it.
Whatever. Delylah Rose Edward no longer existed. I was Sadie now. Sadie Hollander – daughter of Jerry and Leah, sister to Levi and Nolan – the polar opposite of who I had been in my other life. My real life, according to my memories – but only to me.
After countless minutes of fighting with the doctor about my identity, I finally shut up and quit struggling long enough to hear them out – Dr. Royer and the other four family members who were in the room. They affirmed that I wasn’t completely nuts, that I had been Delylah Edward, in a way. I wasn’t mentally ill and hadn’t been having delusions of grandeur as a result of some addiction to drugs. The person I thought I had been, was the person I had been, for the past fourteen years.
What I came to find out was that Delylah Rose was another person from another time period – another world, to them. Reality was – apparently – over one hundred twenty-five years in the future from what I thought it had been.
Crazy, right? Yeah, I thought so, too. It was at that point that I began fighting with them again, demanding to talk to my father – the Senator – and my mother – the Socialite. But there was no arguing – they all had the same story and they all stuck to it no matter what obscenities I yelled. I had not been born Delylah and in fact she had been a figment of my imagination. Sort of.
See, when I had been Delylah I’d had these crazy dreams for as long as I could remember. It was of another little girl, someone that had looked nothing like me – or at least, I thought she had looked nothing like me, but in reality she just hadn’t look like Delylah. She was actually me – Sadie Hollander. My dreams, they’d always end the same – the little girl would fall down the stairs, at which point everything would go black.
So, after an hour of discussion with the doctor and these people who called themselves family, I figured out that this recurring dream I’d had as Delylah, had in fact been the last memory I’d had as Sadie – as a little girl. Sadie had fallen into a coma as a result of that fall. And she – I – had stayed that way for the past fourteen years. And since we’re a good number of years in the future from Delylah’s life, there was a part of the medical world I had yet to learn, before I’d be able understand exactly what had happened to me.
So I listened. I listened and learned.
I learned that sometime in the duration of Delylah’s life, medical science had made an incredible breakthrough. Something that no scientist anywhere on earth had ever thought to accomplish, ever – had been accomplished. With the lightning speed progression of Information Technology, the medical world had discovered a way to separate the thoughts and memories of a person, from that of their body. Meaning, they’d found a way to load a person’s every reflection – every memory – onto a jump drive of sorts. At least that’s what it looked like to me, when the doctor had pulled one out. Somewhere along the way, a brilliant scientist had figured out how to take the very essence of a human being – their memories – and save them – or download them – onto a piece of plastic and metal, only to later retrieve that data and then have the ability to relive that life again.
Sounds insane, I agree, but I learned that it wasn’t done just for the sake of preserving someone’s memories for nostalgias sake. See, scientists had been seeking to discover if access to active memories – a life that had already been lived – could connect with the minds of those that had become separated from their own – an illness or traumatic event that had resulted in that person having a mental break.
They’d eventually found it effective to use this technology on those who’d suffered from a stroke or Alzheimer’s, even during surgery or – as in my case – on someone who had slipped into a coma.
Apparently, that little fall had put me out – like, out out. In fact, the doctor didn’t see me coming out of the coma, ever. My parents – Sadie’s parents, it was so strange to call them my own – had very few choices. It was either to watch me remain in a sleep-like state – likely for life – or to try this. The doctor’s had success with other coma cases throughout the years and their hope was that they could keep my brain in an active enough state that when I woke up, I would not suffer from the side effects that many other coma victims suffered. Their hope was that I would wake up and be able to jump right back into life as if I hadn’t missed a day.
Except you see, their plan had worked, and that was a problem. The technology that they’d connected to my brain really had kept it active and busy, in just the right way. And when I woke up, they found I really could jump right back in. But the question was – into what? Whose life was I supposed to jump right back into? Certainly not Sadie’s – she’d been sleeping since she was four years old. And Delylah didn’t exist – not in this world, anyway. Every single person I’d ever known in my life was gone, vanished over night, like a ghost.
So that left me – where? With a mother and father who were not my own? With having gone from an only child to a sibling of three? I knew nothing of this world and this world knew nothing of me.
And I hated it. I hated them. I just wanted to go back.
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Want to know more? Download your free copy of the first book in the series now! https://www.smashwords.com/books/view/433733
Look for the official publication of Book 2 coming this Monday, May 26!
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