Never had I dreamed that I would become the victim of one of those trillion to one events that are so rare that they never happen… but I guess I’m living proof that I did and that they do.

Living proof?  Am I living at all like this?  My essence… or would you call it my soul?  I’m sure whatever you call it, there would be some sort of theological debate about it, but I’m in no mood for a debate at the moment, or any moment right now to tell you the truth.   My spirit… soul… essence… me… is trapped behind a barrier of protons and charged neutrons.  Behind extra-dimensional matter and quantum flux.  These are what make my cage, and perhaps my home for as long as I – and he – lives.

I can’t really be angry with him.  God knows he’s had a tough life.  Where my parents loved me, his ridiculed him.  Where I was raised in a life of science and nurturing, he was a child of the streets, having to fend for himself for most of his life.  He made some bad decisions, paid the price for them, and did his damnedest to turn his life around only to be stricken by a nuero-muscular disease and end up a cripple.  From there, in a desperate move to be whole again, he signs up with a half brilliant, totally mad genius who makes him the guinea pig for all sorts of transdimensional experiments that give him the use of his legs, but ends up dooming me to the existence I’m tortured with today.

Still, despite the drastic physical differences due to the experiments, I can’t help but marvel at how much the two of us have in common.  The drive, the curiosity, the tenacity.  He is definitely me made over, but he has doubts.   Doubts about the journey, doubts about his place on the new team, and well-founded doubts that I’m not quite as “dead” as he and my friends think I am.

I know this, because he knows this and, in some way, I think he knows that I know.

I’m the itching in the back of his skull.  The small headache when he thinks or talks about me.  I even managed to make his heart beat in prime numbers once.  Just something… anything to signal that I’m still here and still looking for a way out.  Unfortunately, for all his good intentions, he’s not the brightest cookie in the world(s).

Still, I continue looking for any means of escape from my prison of neurons and peptides.  I’m still here and I don’t think I’m going anywhere.

This is a doozy, though… no body, no control… just a floating consciousness and a few scattered sub-atomic atoms held in a sort of ultradimensional stasis around my “host’s” body.  He’s not aware of this, of course… no one would be.  There’s no mass to them… or me.

“Me” is a concept I’m beginning to have difficulty dealing with as well.  It’s not just me, it’s “us”.  Me and him, him and his shadow… the little screaming, crying voice in him mind asking, demanding, and begging to be noticed.   I may have lost all meaning of the word “me”, but “us” am getting pretty tired of going unheeded.

Still, no matter how much I want to, I can’t blame him.  After all, the accident wasn’t his fault and I’m sure that if he could, he’d have skipped the whole unpleasant affair as well.

My poor fraternal doppelganger isn’t the only one who’s suffered.  I think of Rembrandt.  The last member of the original dysfunctional family of sliding that we started out with.  I’m sure he must have taken my passing hard.  He hasn’t talked to my warden about it yet…  I suspect that he doesn’t want to make him feel bad about having absorbed my subatomic structure like a hungry sponge.  The recent run-in with Wade, or what was left of her, couldn’t have helped either.

You can’t imagine what it’s like to see someone you care so much about suffering so and not being able to shed a tear for her… or for Colin, who’s steady anchor to reality was severed leaving him a leaf in the raging river of the multiverse.   I can’t imagine what he must be going through… out there all alone.

I suspect Remmy’s talked with Maggie about it, or maybe even Diana, the new girl.  She’s a smart one, she is.  Her and the professor would have gotten along without a hitch.  Both of them brilliant and volatile… That would be one brainstorming session I wouldn’t mind taking part in.

Maggie’s been taking the last year hard, as well.  She puts up her standard military-issue facade of professionalism and grit, but she’s hurting.  She misses Colin and me very much.   She’s actually confided in my host, saying that she feels lost, no home or family to go back to and nothing to look foreword to when they get to wherever they’re going.  Poor Maggie, I can see right through her even if my jailer can’t.   I suspect she’s still trying to coax a little trace of me out by befriending him and telling him about my life and our adventures together.   Not something I would personally approve of, but not something I would not discourage at this point.

It has been a wild ride for me as well, going from a living breathing person to a personality trait to nothing at all.  Some days I think I will go mad from the frustration of the whole thing, but still I go on.

I’ve put all of my effort into trying to gain some small measure of control over my host, even if it’s nothing more than what we had before, with him in control and me being the little annoying voice in the back of his head.   Ideally, I’d like to have the “time share” again, with me taking total control at times… I know that scares the hell out of him, but there are times when his personal feelings become secondary.

I’ve got a great plan, problem is… I have no idea how to go about doing it.  Oh, I could wait for another anomaly that could reactivate my subatomic particles, but that would be yet another one in a billion chance that would probably never ever happen.  No, my only shot is to take control of this body myself in some way.

I’ve actually had some success in this endeavor with the heartbeat and headaches I mentioned before, but those are small potatoes…  I’m going for the big things.

One night, my host was doodling on a sheet of paper.  He was exhausted from the day’s endeavors and fell asleep with the pencil still clutched in his hand.   With all of my might and will, I focused on that hand and managed to move it.  It took well over two hours before I managed to scratch out a small two-word message on the paper.

Still here…

When he awoke, he couldn’t make heads or tails of the message… admittedly, it looked like chicken-scratch… my control wasn’t that good.  He tossed the note aside and fell asleep on a couch.

I screamed, I yelled, I called him every curse word I knew and even made up a few as I went along.  All I managed to do was give him a small headache.

It was at that point I gave up.  I just stopped and waited for the inevitable wave of insanity to claim me as I knew it would.  There wasn’t any point anymore, I was dead to my friends… I might as well be dead to me as well.

But, there was a reason I didn’t… It was something I saw before the gang went to slide later that day.  As Diana and Rembrandt leaped into the wormhole, my host glanced at Maggie to tell her to come on, and there, grasped in Maggie’s hands and held up to her chest, was a small piece of paper.  My host never noticed it, but my attention was drawn to the words scribbled on the paper like a magnet.

Still here…

Did she know?  Did Maggie know the note was from me?  I wasn’t sure, but it did give me the thing I most needed at that moment… a little glimmer of hope.

So, I continue to exist… still held in my prison with a warden that suspects I’m here, but doesn’t have the knowledge or courage to free me.  My only way out of this is to find someway to get out myself, so I’ll keep stimulating neurons and nerves in my quest to get noticed and get the hell out of here.

I face a long hard battle, one that will take every fiber of my will… but even after a year, I’ve made little if any progress to brag about.  How can I keep going under these conditions when my friends think I’m all but dead and no one is there to encourage me or tell me everything’s going to be all right?  How can I go on knowing that I’m nothing but a shadow of a man without body.  How can I go on against insurmountable odds and a problem that I don’t have the first idea to solve?

When it all seems bleakest, I have one thing that keeps me going.

I think of home.

The rest is easy.