When Michael surfaced from sleep, pain didn’t greet him.

  Absence did. Everything felt normal.

  Normal as in alive. Drowsy, heavy, thoughts lagging like they waded through thick—yet alive. His skin felt intact. His bones sat where they belonged. Pain stayed distant, muted.

  Warmth met him instead—thick, humid warmth—and a soft cradle beneath his back.

  Faint, clean herbs threaded the air. Lavender, maybe. Sun-warmed dried grass.

  Awareness drifted in and out through heavy fog. He was awake, yet the world reached him muted, as though someone had wrapped his senses in wool.

  I fell asleep.

  The last thing he remembered followed: cold air tearing into too-small lungs, a raw, involuntary wail, hands lifting him, a voice he couldn’t understand.

  So this wasn’t an operating theater. A hospital recovery bay.

  This was the after of… whatever that had been.

  His mind reached for routine—inventory, model, hypothesize.

  Even that misfired. Thoughts came clear while his body stayed distant.

  He tried to move.

  Left hand, lift.

  Something twitched. His limbs answered a beat late, stripped of fine control.

  He tried again, forcing more will into it.

  A small jerk. Skin scraped cloth.

  His chest tightened.

  I feel the bed. I feel heat. Sensation works.

  He tried to turn his head. His neck shook with the effort, weak as unused muscle.

  Panic cut through the fog.

  Paralysis failed to explain it.

  A worse answer fit.

  I’m in the wrong body.

  His breath hitched—thin, shallow—and the sound that escaped him wasn’t a curse or a demand.

  A high, thin wail tore from his throat.

  For a second he didn’t recognize it as his. It startled him, raw and animal, a sound meant for someone small and helpless.

  Light, quick footsteps came from his right. A shape slid into the edge of his blurred vision.

  A woman leaned over him.

  Blonde hair fell forward in a soft wave, catching the ambient glow until it turned honey-bright. Slim, delicate-faced, gentle-featured—fine nose, full lips, eyes the color of clear sky.

  Concern softened her expression.

  She spoke.

  Michael clung to the sounds, hungry for meaning.

  Nothing resolved.

  It wasn’t English. It wasn’t French. It wasn’t German or Italian or anything he’d heard in conference corridors or airport terminals. The cadence felt familiar in its bones—Germanic and Latin braided together—yet the words slid past comprehension.

  He tried to answer.

  Jaw moving, lips shaping—

  Language refused to assemble.

  Another thin wail came out.

  The woman smiled as if to soothe him and kept talking, voice soft and melodic.

  Michael stared up.

  A pale ceiling filled his vision, smooth and pearly, like polished stone dusted with milk-glass. Light came from nowhere he could see.

  It simply existed—an even, gentle glow—as if the air itself luminesced.

  Where am I?

  CERN? Switzerland?

  He dragged the last coherent moment into focus: controlled access doors, the hum of machinery, sterile angles. An accident would mean a bed with monitors, disinfectant, people speaking German.

  This place offered carved wood and herb-sweet air.

  The woman brushed fingers over his forehead, as if checking for fever.

  Warm. Real.

  His gaze—automatic, traitorous—dropped.

  Her chest drew the eye. Large, out of proportion with her slender frame, like the exaggerated curve from an idealized painting.

  He tried to look away, mortified, and caught a detail that made his mind stutter.

  Moisture darkened the fabric at her breasts.

  Milk.

  A thin wet line clung where cloth met skin, as if her body had leaked when she rushed to him.

  What the hell…?

  Her clothing matched no nurse’s uniform. She wore a robe-dress of layered fabric fitted at the waist, sleeves flaring at the wrists.

  Unauthorized usage: this tale is on Amazon without the author's consent. Report any sightings.

  Old-fashioned. Almost Renaissance.

  Yet the cloth shimmered, as if it caught light from a source he couldn’t locate.

  More than that, light seemed to cling to her—a faint aura that cleaned her edges, sharpened her outline without harsh shadows.

  His brain, still half sunk in fog, reached for anything familiar.

  Experimental gear. Optical effect. Hallucination.

  Nothing settled.

  His eyes darted around the room.

  Small. Quiet. Pale walls, smooth and faintly luminous like the ceiling. A bedside table of carved wood, patterns delicate enough for a museum.

  No monitors. No IV stand. No tubes. No cables. No LED readouts.

  Only the soft glow in the air and the herbs.

  His pulse sped.

  A coma? How long?

  He tried to rebuild a timeline.

  Explosion. Weightlessness. Roar.

  Black.

  Light.

  Then—cold air. Crying. Hands.

  He swallowed, clumsy, as if even the reflex needed instruction.

  The woman kept speaking, calm.

  Michael fixed on her mouth, the shapes her lips made.

  Hard consonants, open vowels—Germanic-Latin again. Alien vocabulary.

  He reached for a simple word, an anchor.

  “Help,” he tried.

  A high, thin sound escaped him, less controlled than before.

  His breath caught.

  The woman’s brows knit. She leaned closer, listening. Her eyes flicked over his face, measuring awareness.

  Decision settled on her. She turned her head and called toward someone beyond his line of sight.

  The words came sharper, clipped—a summons.

  Another set of footsteps answered.

  A man entered the edge of Michael’s vision, and the room seemed to adjust around him, as though the atmosphere acknowledged his presence.

  Handsome. Slim but well built. A posture shaped by obedience from others. Confidence sat on him like armor, with rough ease beneath it—someone who could brawl as readily as he could hold court.

  His hair ran darker than the woman’s and far from dull: a deep, impossible red, shimmering like molten copper.

  He smiled broadly down at Michael.

  He laughed.

  Delighted thunder filled the small room. In a hospital it would have been obscene; here it fit the air.

  He said something—still that incomprehensible tongue—and the woman replied, rolling her eyes with unmistakable humanity.

  He muttered a half-hearted defense.

  The woman cut him off.

  They bickered.

  Domestic, absurd: a couple’s argument played out over Michael’s body as if he were furniture.

  The woman gestured sharply—toward Michael, toward the man, toward the room—brows drawn down. The man raised his palms, expression wounded and meek.

  Michael stared, pinned between disbelief and dread.

  Why were they fighting?

  Why had the man tried to touch him?

  If they were attendants—nurses, doctors—why this familiarity? Why the old-fashioned clothing? Why the glow? Why did their words refuse to connect to anything he knew?

  He tried again, to force the question out.

  “What—where—”

  A high wail answered for him.

  The woman turned back at last. Her expression softened, as if she’d remembered he was frightened.

  She touched his cheek.

  He flinched.

  She spoke gently, then looked over her shoulder and added a sentence to the man that sounded like a warning.

  The man lifted both hands in surrender.

  Stepping back, he kept watching Michael with open curiosity—amusement even—as though Michael were a novelty, a miracle, a solved problem.

  After a moment of murmured argument, the man eased out of the room. The woman lingered, eyes on Michael, then followed.

  The door closed.

  Silence settled like a humming blanket.

  Michael lay still, breathing in short, unfamiliar pulls.

  Okay. Think.

  Drowsiness pressed at his mind, thick as syrup, tugging him under.

  He fought it.

  This body wanted sleep. It wanted to cry. It wanted to stop computing.

  The room blurred.

  Darkness lapped at the edges of his awareness.

  Then it took him.

  He woke again with his cheek damp and his mouth tasting faintly of milk.

  Time stayed guesswork without clocks, but his mind kept arranging it: darkness, a flare of waking, darkness again.

  This time the fog thinned.

  He could move.

  Clumsy, ungraceful movement, but directed.

  As he adjusted, something else surfaced—something that refused every explanation he reached for.

  His senses sharpened.

  Sharper than wakefulness. Sharper than adrenaline. Sharper than the brittle clarity after a nightmare.

  The world stopped being a picture and became volume.

  From the next room came the faint shift of fabric, the soft creak of wood settling. The herbs layered in the air as a chord: lavender, something resinous, something green and dry like sun-warmed grass. Even the light felt textured, thick in the air rather than thrown from a lamp.

  A simulation would have to choose what to render.

  This didn’t feel chosen.

  He closed his eyes, and the heightened awareness stayed. It sharpened further. He felt his own body as if held in his hands—each tremor, each weak pull of muscle, each uneven rhythm of breath.

  Small.

  Wrongly small.

  He drew a careful breath and mapped it the way he would map a machine: joints, leverage, center of mass.

  Infant.

  The certainty landed sick and absolute.

  His eyes snapped open.

  He wanted to avoid testing it. He wanted to avoid knowing.

  Intention turned into motion anyway, as if the lag between thought and muscle had thinned.

  Both hands braced on the crib rail.

  Wood. Smooth from use. Too tall for him.

  He pulled.

  Arms shaking at once, burning with strain, head wobbling on a heavy, unstable neck.

  He tried again.

  Knees tucked under him by instinct—or accident—and for a heartbeat he found balance: spine over hips, feet planted, weight distributed.

  He stood.

  Barely.

  Tremors ran through his whole body, but he stayed upright.

  A short, disbelieving sound caught in his throat.

  An infant can’t do this.

  He let go of the rail to prove it, and his balance failed. Arms windmilling, he caught the slats with a soft thump—clumsy, ridiculous.

  Real.

  His heart hammered.

  One leg swung over the rail. The motion came with the messy confidence of a body that hadn’t learned fear yet. He lowered himself inch by inch, fingers whitening, then dropped the last few centimeters.

  Feet met the floor.

  He stayed standing.

  He held still, stunned by the fact.

  The room looked pale and spare—carved wood, clean lines, a few small trinkets placed with care. Everything felt old and strange, yet intentional, as if someone had designed “comfort” without ever seeing a hospital.

  On the far wall, a reflective surface caught the glow.

  A mirror.

  His throat tightened.

  Too high. He padded over in short, careful steps—unstable, learning—grabbed the frame, and pulled himself up until his face rose into view.

  A baby stared back.

  Round cheeks. A shock of dark hair that refused to lie flat. Eyes too large for the face, too dark to be comforting.

  He lifted a hand.

  The baby lifted its hand.

  His mouth opened.

  The baby’s mouth opened—no words, only the shape of wanting them.

  His mind went empty.

  Then it flooded back, frantic, reaching for anything that could make the image unreal.

  Hallucination.

  Drugs.

  Coma.

  VR.

  The wood under his fingers felt rough where the carving dipped. Warm, heavy air pressed against his skin. His own breath smelled sour.

  If this was virtual, it stood beyond civilian technology—beyond anything he’d seen proposed outside classified circles.

  A colder thought followed.

  They think I’m dead.

  His gaze locked on the baby’s face, as if staring hard enough could force it to resolve into his own.

  It stayed a baby.

  Another thought rose, half-mocking, half-pleading.

  Were the Buddhists right?

  Reflex rejected it—and left him with nothing better.

  He let go of the mirror and nearly toppled, catching himself with a palm to the wall.

  Okay. Think.

  The couple from earlier—the woman and the red-haired man—had to be his parents. Or caretakers. Close enough that the distinction could wait.

  Act like an infant.

  The orphanage had taught him that much. Be small. Be ordinary. Be overlooked.

  He forced his shoulders to slump. Let his hands wobble. Let his stance turn uncertain.

  Turning back toward the crib, he practiced clumsiness with every step.

  Halfway there, the door opened.

  A sharp, startled female sound cut the air—high, breathless.

  He froze.

  The woman stood in the doorway with a cup in her hand.

  Her eyes fixed on him.

  On the fact that he’d been walking.

  For a heartbeat, neither of them moved.

  Then her fingers loosened.

  The cup tipped.

  Water arced out, clear, catching the room’s gentle light.

  Then the arc held.

  The spill flash-froze in midair—instant, every droplet arrested as if time had thickened.

  It kept going.

  Ice surged up and over the rim, the escaping sheet hardening into a jagged, tapering brace, as if the spill had decided to become structure. Rime raced along the cup’s lip.