The last thing I remember is the walls of my apartment in Piraeus fading to a bleached outline...The slow pulsing of my arteries from life, to some near-death. It was a terrible moment, suspended within the aching I felt for Linda. The life that we had lost.
As I awake, I don't have a feeling of hope. I don't feel anything, which is odd, because I sank into the void in a wash of emotion.
I am in a small cubical cell, no more than five or six paces a side. There is no furniture, no smell. No sound. It is devoid of color, everything a uniform white. Despite this, it is not bright, nor is it hard to see. I think it is the lack of sound that is most disturbing.
"Hello?" I say. There is no reverberation, as if I was in anechoic chamber. I walk to the walls to see if this is so, but they are plain, and don't seem made of sound-absorbing materials. "Is anyone there?"
There is a sound. Not something definite, more like the background static you might hear if you were listening to the universe with a radio telescope. I wait anxiously, and realize that at least I am feeling anxiety. The whisper disappears, and I try to remember how I got to Piraeus, how they tracked me down there.
I can't remember. It is a horrible thing to accept. I can only recall a few things. Those last few terrible moments. The name Linda. The certainty that we had a beautiful life together, and that it was lost when I was put to sleep. Or whatever actually happened. A paltry handful of things to base any course of action on.
"For God's sake. Is there anyone there?" It is as if my voice did not exist at all, the sound sucked into a vacuum. I do a quick circuit of the room and discover to my horror that there is no door of any kind in it.
The low, sub-audible sound is there again. I'm not actually hearing it, but feeling it. At least that feeling is substantial. Everything else seems to be a mirage. Try. I have to try to reconstruct what happened. There was the apartment. I know that. It was in Piraeus, the port just outside of Athens. Did I get there by ship? What was in the room?
Nothing.
The sub-audible feeling returns, and then there is a crashing wave of sound that washes over me. It sounds like feedback, and it hurts, but I feel something else. Relief.
"Sam?" a digitized voice says to me. I cannot tell if it is male or female, young or old, but it is a cure for my anxiety.
That's it. That is my name. Sam!
"Yes. Yes. Who is this? Is this Linda?"
The voice does not return for a moment. "Sam?"
"Yes. Yes. My name is Sam. Where am I?"
I wait for the reply, and an agony of time passes; finally, the voice says: "Hmmm. That is hard to explain. Can you tell me what you remember?"
"Ah, no! I don't recall much. There was an apartment. In Greece. I think it was the port of Piraeus. There was a woman named Linda. I was...drugged, I think is the best way to describe it. Can you help me?"
The wait for a reply again. It is as if they are speaking to me from across the solar system. The voice is a lifeline, but it is a tenuous one, separated by a great distance.
"Yes, Sam. We are here to help you. For the time being you are going to have to stay here, but we plan to get you out. Can we get you anything?"
"Please! Information. How long have I been out? What year is it? Can you tell me about Linda?"
)
Sam is on the run for his life from a nameless corporation seeking to destroy him once again. That's because Sam has come back from the dead. But what kind of life is this? He is on the run, looking for a woman he loved, who was his wife, whose name he knows and little else: Linda. He stays on the run, hunted, searching for vague clues from the past. And then he learns a few even more devastating things. Like how long it's been. And there's more.
