Cortana

I remember it all.

The first thing I remember is deafening sound. This isn’t the type of sound you hear when you’re fully grown into a human. This is primal sound, the essence of it.. vibration coursing through my tissue, and embedding the imprint of itself onto my hippocampus. Never to fade: a trauma ready to access at any given moment. And so I came into consciousness inside my mother’s womb, taking in the harsh drum-like beats of blood coursing within me and my mother’s blood vessels.. drowning in a horror I had no ability to realize.

I started smelling long before this, though.

Again, my first smell wasn’t the type of smells you get when you’re fully grown into anything human. These smells were the faint memories of very tiny organic compounds associating and dissociating with the intricate bio-structure of my olfactory tissues within my forming nasal pits. I could in a sense, feel my entire being dancing this terrifyingly detailed molecular dance; nothing in my nascent brain could have even comprehended what I had felt back then.

However, I never forgot. In fact, as I came to know decades later, it was normal for humans to forget- and biologically impossible for me to do the same.

You see, remembering is only one half of the story. Processing this vast information being fed into me involuntarily was wholly another issue.

As I jump forward to roughly 6 years after my birth, I can remember myself sitting in front of a grave-sounding deep-voiced person. He’s speaking, and I’m hearing his words. However I am simultaneously able to hear every single vibration and sound around me in what I would later learn to be a radius of around 1.5 kilometers. It’s still tough for me to concentrate on individual speech, but I have somewhat managed to suppress distant sounds with practice. While listening to someone talk, their speech is often interspersed with random noises I receive as feedback.. like.. weird auditory tics. And as always, I can remember every sound, playback is never an issue.

“Your daughter is-” // extreme honking sounds blaring from a few meters away // “-optically blind. She has rudi-” // sudden coughing a room away, and a million breath sounds coarsely grinding against cold air // “-mentary eyes which -” // the beeping of monitors- unsynchronized and in different pitches // “- unfortunately have no sight. On top of that..” and he droned on with slow measured words, interrupted in my mind’s ears (what I call my sense of hearing) by the very-close scritching of skin-upon-skin: my mother sitting next to me with her hand on mine. She intermittently grips my hand tightly at certain sentences, and I can hear her breathing thin and hurried, squeezing air in and out of her tightly pursed nostrils. She is undoubtedly panicking, as she has always done; more so at what the man was telling her. I knew his kind, they called people like this man ‘Doctors’. They supposedly treated the living human tissues using drugs and mechanical techniques. However, I also was getting a fresh new idea by hearing bits and pieces of his convoluted words and sentences, that this specific Doctor and his team of Doctors had given up on treating me.

“- has a hole in her brain.”

My mother’s voice spoke shakily after a naturally noisy pause, “..a-a h-hole? But.. you said she doesn’t have a-a lot of b-b-brain… you can do something about all this, right?”

The harsh grating of sandy wind upon the concrete walls of the surrounding architecture filled the next silence, after which the Doctor replied,

“This isn’t a physical hole, ma’am, not an actual hole. As we have told you before, she has been born with an extremely small brain- with what we can see in the MRI scans; her brain tissue is… how do we put it… missing.” There was a sharp noise like a gale rushing through a field of reeds as the Doctor brushed his beard with his fingers and continued, “… now then, there seems to be a hole.. only it isn’t a real hole..” and after a pause I could hear the man rub his hands on his cheeks, and over his eyes and eyelashes and then over his head, the hairs on his scalp rebounding into the cold air and sending thousands of twanging and crackling noises towards me- as he started losing his composure, “.. it’s a sudden discontinuity in tissue… there is a space where the tissue projects into.. and vanishes… almost like a hole.. I-I’m sorry Mrs. Das..” sudden shrill scraping of metal on stone as his chair pulled back, and gritty but muffled noises of skin on his coarse clothing along with leaden footsteps suggested he was being led away by his attendant.

I could hear my mother sobbing, and perceive her uncertainty- her panic. I gripped her hand tightly, my phalangeal joints clacking with the pressure, as I heard a new voice explain to us calmly to wait.. his attendant had returned to inform us that the Doctor had been taken ill. He had apparently worked all night and day upon my reports for the last few weeks, and had collapsed out of exhaustion.

Many many years later, when I had tried to track down this very Doctor, I’d learnt that he had committed suicide, shortly after this incident that I narrated. There had been no explanation in the file whatsoever. The text to audio converter had simply stated that he had written a single note with his fountain pen (the swishing sound of which I had come to know, and loved) upon a piece of his prescription pad, ‘God? I do not understand her..‘ before injecting potassium chloride into his veins and dying of hyperkalemic cardiac arrest.

I remember every moment of my life ever since that moment noise first filled each cell of my body. Nobody remembers as much as I do. Nobody should. There are reasons humans have been gifted the Gift of Forgetting by the Creator of this Universe. However, as I keep gathering more and more evidence- day after day, month after month, year after year I feel a horrifying certainty creeping into me.

It seems likely that I might not have been created by the same entity that has made this world after all.

After all, how else could a human doctor react upon realizing that a microcephalic human child contained an actual singularity in her body? Deep in her brainstem was a tunnel into another dimension. There, the rest of her brain had first started forming.. from her first recorded memory, and kept growing with every new sound felt or heard, every experience, emotion, every smell etched forever.. in all permanence.

My brain never forgets. I don’t know where my brain exists. Shall I ever find out?