Project 269 – Exploration 3 -
Synaptic transfer test three: inconclusive.
At precisely 15:05, it was my great displeasure to pronounce little Peter Thomas Bishop officially dead. As a boy of science, perhaps involuntarily so, he had served our work well. But it seemed a hollow victory that the world in which we opened up to him should claim him back with full force.
Walter interrupted the transferring of memories from our carcass to the child when he stopped responding to the voice that was meant to be guiding him through his dreamscape. Pulling him out of the tank and detaching the electrodes wasn't an altogether foolish thing, but the child couldn't be revived regardless.
We tried the obvious: laying him out on the now wet tiles and beating hopelessly against his chest whilst Walter could perform mouth to mouth. But I suspect that he took his last breath at least one minute before he was in his father's arms.
Drawing a syringe to calm Walter, William insisted that we push forward. The subject's passing was a minor hiccup, and I still stand by Mr Bell's decision to have us prep Walter instead for the exam.
The puzzle is one of recursion: the linking of the brain to itself. What happens when a person goes through his own portal? Herein lies the danger of a strange loop, an endless spiral of meta-realities, each gazing into a Yet deeper self. The experience could lead to the destruction of identitY. Or perhaps its affirmation – for what is self but an endless recursion, looking at oneself in a mirror within a mirror within a mirror...
The defibrillator managed to kick-start the subject's heart after a further three minutes of lifelessness, something that isn't entirely extraordinary even within regular hospitals today. When we were satisfied with the weak breaths he was managing, but barely, I would have preferred that we hook him up to some sort of respirator but placing the formerly dead boy back into the tank was a risk that William seemed content on taking.
He posited that whatever had caused our subject's lapse was because he had gone too far into himself and didn't know how to come back to the reality outside of his drug-induced coma. We knew that reconnecting him mentally with Walter was reversing today's precautionary measures. It was a semi-practised theory: the practise being that the corpse was the carcass itself and Peter was the test subject, the translator.
To use Walter as the reader and Peter as the temporary corpse wasn't something I was confident about. If the child were to stop breathing again inside of the tank then his memories could transfer into Walter's mindset and our subject would be psychologically free to pass from our world to the next.
Furthermore, if we were to misplace his stream of consciousness again, it wouldn't just jeopardise our findings but without an immediate reader it would destroy any future explorations into communicating between the living and the dead.
* Walter successfully guided test subject through his own dreamscape. No further seizures but child was brought to hospital on the grounds of an asthma attack.