The Cage
The light was a physical weight, pressing on undeveloped optic nerves that reported only a blinding, milky white. The air was an acid, scraping raw a pair of lungs he didn't know how to command.
He had a single thought, crystalline and pure, from his old life: I am dead.
And a second, new, terrifying reality: I am not.
He was a prisoner. A mind that had grasped the axioms of the multiverse was now locked in a four-kilogram cage of wet, uncoordinated meat. He tried to speak—to scream "Where am I?"—and all that escaped was a thin, gurgling wail. The sound disgusted him. It was animal. It was the first, definitive proof of his imprisonment. His mind had sent a command, and the flesh had betrayed him with a primitive squawk.
"Shh, shh, my sweet boy. It's okay. Mama's here."
A face swam into his blurry, unfocused vision. A giant.
He tried to focus, to force the weak lenses of his new eyes to work. He could make out... colors. A cascade of dark, wavy hair, plastered to a pale, sweat-sheened forehead. Her eyes—he couldn't make out the color, just that they were wide and glistening with exhaustion. She had a full mouth and a small, straight nose. She was, he processed with detached clarity, a beautiful woman. She was his mother.
She lifted him. He felt an overwhelming, primal instinct to press against her warmth, to seek the rhythm of her heartbeat. His intellect recoiled, diagnosing it as a dangerous synaptic misfiring, a vulnerability algorithm written into the base code of this new form. He was being hardwired to a stranger. And against all logic, the algorithm was winning.
"He's beautiful, Elara."
A new voice. Deeper. A second face joined the first, looming over him from the other side. This one was broader, with a strong jaw and short-cropped blond hair. His eyes were a clear, sharp blue, crinkled at the corners with a relief so profound it was almost painful to see. This was Marcus. His father.
"Oh, Marcus..." Elara's voice was a ragged sigh. "He's... perfect."
Marcus didn't look at Aris. His gaze was fixed on Elara. He reached out a large, calloused hand—a working man's hand—and brushed the damp hair from her forehead. "You were perfect, El. You were incredible."
"We're... we're a family," she whispered, and a tear finally broke, tracing a wet path down her cheek.
Aris watched, a silent observer to this profound, emotional exchange. He was just a thing to them. A product. A... son.
A nurse, a blurry figure in scrubs, was saying something. The words were distorted, like he was listening underwater. "...healthy. Apgar is nine. He's a strong one."
He was swaddled in a rough, starchy blanket and placed in a plastic bassinet. The lights of the hospital room were too bright. The smell of antiseptic and... blood... filled his new, sensitive nostrils. He was an audience to his own body's functions. He felt a wave of cold. He felt a twitch in his new, alien limbs.
And then he felt an all-consuming fog.
His mind, the mind that had wrestled with string theory, was being pulled under by the crude, overwhelming need of an infant's brain. Fatigue. It was a grey, inescapable tide. He tried to fight it. He had to think. He had to plan. He began to run a diagnostic: Sensory input: Overloaded. Motor control: Non-functional. Memory partition:... The diagnostic crashed. The new brain chemistry was too strong. The grey tide swept the blackboard of his mind clean. He was, in the end, just a baby.
His last conscious act was to force his eyes open one more time. He saw the blond man, Marcus, kissing the dark-haired woman, Elara, as they both looked at him.
His intellect surrendered to the biological imperative. He slept.