“What would happen to me?” Greg eventually asks. “To Mike?”
“He’s still with you?” Dr. Hester asks.
“No. Maybe. I don’t know. I haven’t heard from him in a while.”
“You would stay you. How you are now. How you remember. You would be Greg Hughes. You would just be Greg Hughes in Amorea.”
“And Mike Frazier?”
“Would be nothing. He’s probably gone now. Consumed by your subconscious. He was always part of you, Mr. Hughes. We just… separated him from you.”
“And they wouldn’t remember me?”
“Who?”
“The people. In Amorea.” Sean, he thinks, but it’s nothing more than a passing thought.
“No. They don’t remember you. They wouldn’t. It would start from the beginning.”
“All of this has happened before, and it will all happen again,” Greg murmurs, staring out the window.
“I’m sorry?”
“No, Dr. Hester,” Greg says. “I won’t go back. I don’t know what you’d do to me. I don’t know what you’d try and make me do.”
“Think about how many people you could help. Think about the lives you could save if only you—”
“No. I won’t go back.”
Liar, he thinks.
Dr. Hester leaves him shortly after.
TWO WEEKS later, he’s awoken in the middle of the night by a finger poking his face. He thinks he might be dreaming still (he was lying in a park with an electric blue sky above watching the clouds go by, a hand curled softly in his own, and he felt so, so loved) but then his eyes open and in the dull light, he sees a man standing next to his bed.
“Hi,” he whispers. “I have so much to show you. But you have to be quiet if you want to see the vegetables.”
It takes Greg a moment to place him.
The gardener.
“What?” he says, voice rough.
“I can show them to you,” the gardener says. “But you have to come with me now. Shh. Keep quiet. It’s a secret.”
He thinks, I don’t want to see that.
He says, “You can take me there?” He doesn’t know why he asks.
“Yes,” the gardener says. “I can show you. You were one of mine first. And I can show you where you sprouted, little vegetable.”
HE’S IN a flimsy wheelchair. He can walk now for longer distances before getting tired, but it’d take too long. Or so the gardener says. Greg sits and the gardener pushes and they’re moving down mazes of hallways, places he doesn’t recognize. He tries to memorize the route, but gets lost after the sixth or seventh turn. He still has cognitive issues, short-term memory problems, but they’re getting better. He’s getting better. He’ll probably never be the same and he’ll always look like a monster, but at least he’s getting better. That’s something, right?
He thinks, It wouldn’t be like this in Amorea. In Amorea, we can be however we want to be.
He doesn’t know where the thought comes from. He doesn’t want to be someone’s experiment.
He thinks, Are you sure?