"Protolye? Are you alright?" someone asked. The voice sounded familiar, but she couldn't tell whose it was.
"I think she's conscious. Give it time."
Protolye woke up to see herself again hooked up to a bunch of tubes. In front of her was Kepler and Copernicus.
"What happened?"
"We don't exactly know... short version or long version?" Asked Copernicus.
"Short version, please." Protolye responded.
"You had a severe fever, started screaming, and we almost thought you were dead."
"Oh my gosh!" Protolye exclaimed. "Do you know what caused it?"
"No. What happened?"
Protolye didn't know what to say. She didn't trust Copernicus enough to tell him about Hypatia and the lucid dreams, or about the flood of memories and the burning fever that accompanied it.
"I... was asleep!" It was partially true. "I don't know!"
"Tell us if you have more information." Copernicus then left.
Kepler, however stayed. "Are you OK? I mean, people thought you were going to die. Do you feel any pain at all?"
"I'm fine, really!" responded Protolye.
"Ok. Just making sure." He had a piece of paper in his hand, as well as one of those cool new erasable laser pens. "Sign on the line."
Before she thought about it, she picked up the laser pen and signed her name. Then she dropped the pen in shock. "How did I sign? What did I sign? I don't know what my name is! What is going on?"
Kepler explained. "There are three types of memory. Specifically, your skill set, muscle memories, or everyday actions your hands perform, and the last memory, every experience you ever had. You lost the last ones, but the other memory types are still intact, evidenced by your advanced astronomy."
"This is realevant because..." Protolye asked.
"Don't you see! You still have the other memory types, so even though you didn't know your name, you had signed your name so many times before that you didn't even think before signing the paper I gave you-"
"Which could lead to me recovering memories! I see it now! Let's hope I can read my own signature." Protolye squinted at the laser pen signature.
She pointed at the first letter "That looks like an S.. no, it's a Z. That looks like an O, than an E, so... my real name is Zoe?"
Kepler looked at the last name. "All I can read off this last name is an H."
Protolye sighed. "Well, I guess Zoe H is as good as any name. Thanks for trying to help. I just wish I knew what happened to me. Why don't I remember?"
"Hey, you'll figure out why eventually." Kepler tried to comfort her.
"And the fevers... just as I was trying to remember..."
"Wait. You remember something?"
She told Kepler about the lucid dreams and Hypatia. About the flashback and Imi and how the memory burned.
"So... you've been having these memory sessions with the octopus woman and you just started to remember this?"
She nodded. "I wonder what happened."
"Well, maybe you'll uncover more when you have the next session."
"Oh, I dread it with all my heart. I'll never forget that burning sensation... my head just became so hot... I just wanted to scream." Zoe responded.
"Well, as of now, it's the only way you seem to be getting any decent information. I think you should keep trying to uncover more."
A couple hours later, she did. In yet another dream with Hypatia.
"Let us begin, shall we?" Asked Hypatia. "Zoe H?"
"How do you know what I figured out this morning?"
"If you think it, I know about it."
"Ok... that's creepy. How can you do that?"
"This is about you, not me, Zoe. Focus."
"On what? I don't see anything showing on the Dreamatorium."
"Well then." said Hypatia. "It looks like we'll have to take the long way around."
"Long way around what?"
Hypatia did not answer this question. Instead, she asked a totally unrelated question. "Your father. Do you miss him?"
"Yes." she responded.
"Why is that, exactly? Based on the previously uncovered memories, he was... a little unpredictable and was too busy mourning your mother to care about you? So why do you miss him? Or..." she paused before saying "did something happen? Something bad, that your father wasn't involved in?"
"Well, I don't know."
"The Vanishers, Zoe. What ever happened to them? What happened in Imi with the Vanishers?"
She tried to think about the Vanishers, Imi, and her father. Nothing came up. "Nothing's coming back to me. I need something fresh. Something I haven't looked at before. Preferably on the Dreamatorium, accompanied by exploding tennis balls?"
"A quaint request, but I will grant it." said Hypatia. As usual, she threw up the tennis ball, and as it peacefully levitated in the air, she clapped her hands, and the explosion was triggered. This time, instead of an image of Imi or a cosmic image of the universe and outer space, there was an image of a young girl, nine or ten as far as Zoe could tell. It was herself, of course, playing on one of Imi's white sanded beaches. Two shadowy figures were behind her. And then another flood of memories came. And yet again they burned in her mind.
Zoe was ten years old when it happened. She was playing on the white sand beaches of the crumbling city of Imi. Her father hadn't paid any attention, instead looking up at the sky and popcorn shaped clouds with a sad, bewildered look on his face.
That's when they came for her. Two shadowy, humanoid creatures stealthily snached her off the beach. She tried to call out attention to her father. It didn't work. They had taken her. The Vanishers had finally taken her.
In the first minutes of her kidnapping, she tried to think of all the possible things that would happen to her. Would she be mentally traumatized by the terrors she would see in the next few minutes? Would she revert to a toddler like stage? Or, would she be one of the rare ones that ended up as a lifeless carcass on the ocean? All of them sounded equally horrifying to her.
The Vanishers revealed themselves to Zoe. One of them was a woman, no older than 35, with red hair in a ponytail held together in a bubblegum pink band and a small hazel eyes. The other was a man, a little younger, with brunette hair, squarish glasses, and a frosty white coat.
The man tried to comfort her in a gentle tone of voice. "Please, don't cry! We're not bad people, were really not! We had to take you! You'll understand why soon. You've got to help us."
Zoe at first wouldn't believe him. "You're the Vanishers! You kidnapped me, and the other kids, too! Bad things happen to them! What's going to happen to me?"
"We never wanted those things to happen to them... we never wanted any of that." The woman said to her.
"We'll explain it all when we get there, I promise you." said the man. "What's your name, child?"
"Zoe. Zoe Avnath."
The woman introduced herself first. "I'm Xalyssa, and this is Dariux." Dariux waved.
"Where are you taking me?" asked Zoe.
"To a... sort of clinic." Xalyssa responded.
It wasn't really a clinic. It was more of a laboratory. At first it scared her. After all, a laboratory is where they run experiments. What experiments were they going to run on her? But time and time again, she turned and saw Dariux and Xalyssa. How bad could they be?
She was lead through a large hallway into a room, the heart of the laboratory. There were all sorts of interesting objects here, including small machines, beakers and chemicals, and squiggly things in jars. But there was also a prominent scientist in the room.
Dariux introduced Zoe to her. "Zoe, I'd like you to meet Viola Simmons."
Viola Simmons was an astrophysicist. And a prominent one at that. She had inherited a small fortune from some distant relatives and used it to pursue her dreams of a higher education. From there, she had developed the Simmonwave, the most efficient way of intergalactic communication, and figured out how the mysterious floating cylinders were supposed to work. But even she couldn't avoid old age.
They had a long chat, and the two had more similarities than Zoe had realised at first. They both really enjoyed math, and both believed the key to everything was in astronomy. To Zoe, it was like talking to a reflection of herself.
Eventually, Viola Simmons left Zoe to think about their conversation. But she heard a small fragment of dialogue between Xalyssa and Viola.
"I'm surprised that you want us to go through with the operation. From what it sounded like, you really liked the girl."
"I do really like her." Viola explained. "And I think that may be the missing link."
Her mind an inferno, Zoe H, with more revalation as to her life, passed out again. Why?