Fragment #11 - Lab Rat, or worse.

Now I know what it feels like to live under a magnifying glass. I’ve also had to be extremely careful. I just know the doctors have seen something; I just don’t know what.

What’s happened? I would say, “I wish I knew,” but after losing so many teeth in that ‘accident’ some weeks back the doctors keep finding a reason to keep me around for study, despite my obvious inability to pay for any of this ‘free’ room and board I’ve been enjoying. What’s worse, they helicoptered me out of the hospital in Fayence (I finally learned the name as they were hauling me out) and into a specialized research hospital just within sight of the Eiffel Tower. The reason for the move? My teeth grew back.

That’s right, all the teeth I lost in the accident have regrown and are in perfect condition, not even the decay and cavities that once required filling. They almost look false when compared to the teeth I didn’t lose; bright white and perfect in every way. Maybe I should just ask the doctors to pull the rest of my old teeth and see if those will regrow too. Problem is, they’d probably do it. All my other injuries have healed as well. X-ray and MRI scans show no indication that I had ever been injured. Not in the last two months; not in the last two lifetimes. They’re baffled and I really don’t want to believe the truth. But as Sherlock Holmes once said, “If you have eliminated all other possibilities, then what remains, no matter how improbable, must be the truth.” You can imagine what the doctors would say if they saw me turn into Antoinette, or Tigresse, or -- of all people -- Tracker. I’m not sure I really do, but how else do you explain what’s been happening to me?

But that raises the question of why? Why did that car run me off the road? Why are these things happening to me? Why, now, am I even here? I don’t believe I’m merely shapechanging. Logically that’s impossible, and even if I were, wouldn’t I remember what I did in that other body? Am I truly Schizophrenic? But if that were true, how are the different personalities actually changing my body as well. I’m a late-middle-aged human male. Antoinette is an early-20s female; or an equivalent-aged tigress weighing four to five times as much. Tracker? A 22-year-old male... humanoid fox; call him alien. Isan-ira and Shal-ir? Closer to my age, but again, alien, and one female. And finally Rhiann, not even related to the others by the same storyline but a 17-year-old female humanoid fox, with hawks’ wings. I don’t think they’ve all come forward yet, but if any of them have and my body truly changed to match their appearance, how is it happening?

Robert A. Heinlein once wrote up a concept in “The Number of the Beast,” that once imagined, a Universe splits off of our own to match that imagining. In his novel, the mere creation of a story created a world; a world that, through science or magic (or the science of magic) could be entered and experienced as we experience our own world. Does that mean they can enter our world in the same manner? Have I, in destroying the world as we know it in thirty-five years, permitted the event to truly occur? Have I somehow truly invented the Valini Empire? The world of Sau’du? (Is Hsaarra hiding somewhere in my head, too?)

I’ve got to encode all my writing before someone reads it and begins believing it. It’s hard enough for me to believe; if someone else reads this and thinks that I do believe it, I’ll be stuck in a sanatarium for the rest of my life with no way to express the stories that run constantly through my head. Am I insane, or unsane?