Over the next four days all those we rescued recovered. It took all ten of us who had escaped earlier to minister to their needs and those of the infants. Amira and April took care of them. The others were like invalids, bedridden and disoriented while their minds slowly awoke from a deep hypnotic trance. By the second day they were able to speak a bit from their beds and feed themselves from the platters we brought.
I imagine that if we had delayed another few days devising a more elaborate plan, leaving them under Dora’s spell all that while, their recuperation might have taken months. As it was they were only under her shroud three days as compared to Ingrid’s one.
I spent my time at Beth’s bedside and as she awoke from her trance I assisted her by reminding her of all the details of her past that we’d shared. She told me it seemed like her whole memory had been wrapped in a dense fog and put to sleep and only now coming back to her in bits and pieces.
This made me realize that the goggles not only cast beautiful, seductive images before people’s eyes, they attacked the brain. I’d often wondered from years before why Dora was equipped with the tiny lasers that had been able to repair Amira’s and Beth’s eyesight. Now it all became clear. These tiny guns were constantly busy zapping synapses in the brain itself, memory and identity synapses that were still busy after the glasses were put on and that conflicted with the story line that Dora drew. In a short span, perhaps weeks or a month, those millions of neurons were silenced and that person’s identity was gone and that mind powerless to resist any suggestion put into it, like a one-year-old child again, in Dora’s lap as she sang her lullabies.
This was the most chilling revelation I’d ever had about her. It was insidious. But it filled in the picture perfectly. Why try to persuade a human of your case or what path to take if your presence alone, as you gaze into his eyes, can slowly drain his mind of all power of reasoning. All you need to do is keep him fixated upon you, entertained and starring back until that enchantment is complete.
They used to say that television was addictive and a brain drain. This was technology’s big step forward, a screen that selectively zapped your brain cells for its purposes. You might call it interactive viewing, as you turned it on. But it could hold your head perfectly still, fixated to keep you staring at it, while it performed the painless operation of slowly deleting your consciousness. You were in the dentist chair labelled ‘AI’.
What confirmed me in this theory was that Beth, after she did recover her old self, always had certain lapses of memory, blank spots in the timeline I’d shared with her. We’d talk of this in bed together for long hours. She remembered the day Amira and I had found her at the bottom of the staircase with a broken leg, how we pulled her up to the nurse’s office, but she couldn’t recall anything of the hotel we took her to and her month long convalescence, only a few details about her sight improving, little recollections like hobbling down the street in the sunshine on crutches and the storefront which they excitedly entered to bring home make-up to apply to each others faces.
I told her in detail about the exact look of the room we inhabited, the layout, the furniture, the large bed we shared and even the subdued sex with Amira fully clothed and sidelined beside us. But she had only the faintest, foggiest recollection. Those cells were dead. Like a romantic fool I told her I’d take her back to that hotel and we’d spend a whole month in that same room reliving those moments so they’d be alive again. Then I kissed her goodnight.
