Coming Soon - Book 2 And Bonus Chapter - Crystallized Apricot About The Author
SUMMARY
After Priya Echo’s father comes back from the war with the FIRE virus and dies, she is left alone as an orphan. Priya feels abandoned and confused, but decides to dedicate her life to helping people by searching for a cure to the disease. Fast forward, and Priya is a lecturer at university with her own research lab. For the interval she has studied tirelessly, rejecting connections and idle distraction. The researcher invents an anechoic chamber to test as a therapy for FIRE virus.
Daring to employ herself as the first test subject, she ventures inside. There, she is reborn as the champion Echo. Eons of dream pass before Priya opens her eyes and escapes the chamber, sliding to the floor as her mind slowly restores. A shy lab girl comes out of her shell and becomes a hero. Now, all she needs is fresh courage.
The walls all around were blurry and formless until coming into focus. Depth perception returned. From gray smudges came forms … convex and concave … the repeated geometric shapes of an anechoic chamber. Priya pushed herself off the floor and stumbled to the lock, letting in a tide of quiet light. She fought against it, shut it tight and pressed against the outside wall, sliding down until crouched on the tile. A few minutes passed, and her eyes adjusted. Like rifling through an old family album, the setting of the university lab felt so personal. Its tables and chairs were neatly arranged, and there were flasks half filled with solutions from last week’s lecture. “That must have been … a dream. Did I imagine I was a hero?” Priya thought as she looked to her side, and bit her tongue, sucking it until the bitterness thrust more consciousness and uprooted the last of her lethargy. The wide landscape of her memory was mostly undecipherable. Priya giggled for a second and felt like a child that had just spilled a glass of milk, as her memory began to seep back, steadily filling the vessel. Looking down at her hands she could see brown, coffee colored skin, “I’m wearing a white lab coat … I think I’m probably … a scientist”. Scenes of the past reasserted themselves at normal intervals, chronological appetizers. Farther and farther they went, pulled by an invisible force like gravity back into time, until arriving at childhood. Two wet, salty beads dropped down her face as she recalled. Her father raised her by himself and was everything. Such a good man, maybe too good for the world. But when he returned from the war, she was fourteen, and he was different. His eyes were never the same. A year later it happened, when he took his own life. Watching the rain fall down onto the smooth, black marble of the gravestone, dwarfed by the canopies of umbrellas, she had wished that she could have found a way to save him. But that was just a silly wish. After that day, she dedicated her life to academia, and then to science. Studying day by day, acknowledging and reading the various opinions on the virus that had brought about her father’s end, she had worked tirelessly. Priya got to her feet and waddled over to the nearest lab table. On it was a blue folder, and she flipped it open. “Anechoic Isolation and Sensory Deprivation, A Treatment for FIRE virus … by Priya Echo, PhD. Neuroscience, DGU” she read silently, mouthing the words to herself as the talent of reading found its expression once more.
Placing a hand over a throbbing temple, an epiphany cracked open. No mistake that much of the landscape was undecipherable. “Since then I’ve never really had much of a life. No friends. No boyfriend. My life has been … closed … and every urge I’ve dropped like an anchor. Never really known anyone, have I? Didn’t even grasp the meaning. Oh … I get it now. Then the dream was just a fantasy to fill that emptiness. Lonely Priya. That’s what they call me … I hear.
No … I’m the Empress Echo, daughter of the Divine Couple, the perfect pair who will be together forever, who’s love is beyond the farthest reaches of philosophy. That’s my mind’s true actress. To find a cure I’ve sacrificed everything. All the great progress I’ve made. I feel pride.
But my life is … I’m so … pathetic” she reflected.
CHAPTER 2 - PRIYA MEETS THREE GIRLS
Although it was late in the afternoon, the cafeteria was especially noisy that day. Three ladies gossiped at a corner table. Nadine Fenway, a tall, thin Nordic looking blonde was filing her nails. She leaned in close to the other two, Dominique Mellow-Garcia and Felicia Chen, and pointed to the other side of the room. Felicia stuck a leaf of romaine into her mouth and chewed it loudly, then turned to see what it was. “Uh-huh … look at this bitch” Nadine observed as Priya strode into the cafeteria, seemingly out of place in a ruffled, disheveled lab coat that was paradoxically more attractive than when she wore it correctly. “She is too prim and proper for me” Felicia noted. They stared in fascination as she hesitantly approached different tables with her tray in hand, and then backed away, too cautious to approach. “I heard she’s never had any friends … ever” Dominique interjected. “I guess there are only a few real academics around here” Nadine quipped, feigning a sigh of regret. “Come on, Nadine. You know how all us hardcore academics don’t have any friends” Dominique argued, whilst stealing a French fry off of her plate and dipping it in blueberry flavored maple syrup. “Oh, and who the fuck are you supposed to be?” Felicia asked sharply, making the other girls snicker. “Looks like she’s lost or something” Nadine whispered, with a sense of the uncanny as she noticed the unfamiliar, somewhat blankness in her features. Meekly Priya inched towards the table. “Do you mind? I could really use some company right now” she asked, politeness in every lyric of her voice.
Felicia looked at Nadine as if to say, “Can we keep it?” with big eyes, and she relented. “I don’t think we’ve met. I’m Nadine from math's, and this is Dominique from marine biology and Felicia from chemistry” she presented. “I lecture in the north wing but my lab is on the fourth floor, neuroscience. Thanks for letting me sit here. I’m Priya” she explained. “Are you having a stressful day?” Felicia prodded. “You look like burnt toast, hon” Nadine observed. “It’s alright.
I’m just having a bad day. My recent project is ending. It’s just a room that removes sound waves, sort of like an isolation tank. I thought it could be put to work for useful therapy, but it’s not fit for human use” Priya related, not quite ready to share the gory details of her journey.
“Sorry to hear that. What kind of lab do you have?” Felicia asked excitedly. “A normal one, I guess” Priya shrugged. “Ooh … do you have brains in there?” Dominique wondered aloud.
“Yes. I think you girls would like my lab, it’s very science-y” the researcher assured them. “We will definitely crash that later” Felicia joked. “By that, she means we will take the tour”
Dominique corrected. “Yeah, we were born to be nerds” Nadine added in a squeaky voice.
Encouraged, Priya set about with a follow-up question, “So ... just out of curiosity, what have you girls done in the last couple … let’s say three hours. Time can fly on a weekday like this”. A question of profound importance. “I fed a shark” Dominque bragged, taking a big bite of a piece of cornbread. “I just got in from Bayer-Dale, where I do community service for seniors, basically wheeling them around and everything. They like that sort of thing” Felicia related. “Graded papers and took a piss” Nadine said lastly, waving her hands as if it was completely uneventful.
“Um … that sounds really nice” Priya nodded, then looking towards Felicia, “old folks are so sweet”. She considered the blonde for a brief moment. It was obvious she was trying the hardest, and was calm and collected in every jest … a common element sensed quickly, and something else … undetectable beneath the surface. “Not like it’s a competition, but what did you do?”
Felicia inquired; her voice soft, ready to draw the secret from her like a medieval doctor letting blood. Priya coughed at how subtle the question appeared, and took a swig of water, “To be honest, I was passed out the whole time”.
Later the following week Priya sat in a waiting area along an empty hallway of south wing when a door creaked open, “The committee is ready for you”. Clarence Hook sat in the middle, white tufts of hair gracing the tops of his ears, like strained, pallid vegetation eking out a meager existence in some cracked, throat-drying, impassable desert. Priya set up a defense and carefully relayed how the chamber did not meet the parameters necessary for human use, and would have to be dismantled, but as she watched them whisper amongst themselves, she realized it was all for naught. “Seeing how your recent activity has not met the markers set in place for the progress of this department, we will be cutting your funding for eighteen months” Hook intoned, meting out the punishment. A brokenhearted neuroscientist waddled out of the room, downcast, counting the square tiles that passed on the way to the far door, as if their census was a profound vocation.