(Third Person Limited)
The lecture hall was half full, which meant it was quieter than usual but still loud enough to feel crowded.
Shawn sat near the middle rows, notebook open, pen resting between his fingers. The professor's voice washed over the room in steady waves, explaining consensus algorithms and their failure cases, but Shawn wasn't really listening—not because he was distracted, but because the content arrived already processed.
Each sentence landed in his mind fully unpacked.
By the time the professor finished describing a concept, Shawn had already traced its historical origins, its practical implementations, its edge cases, and the reasons it would fail under certain assumptions. The lecture felt less like learning and more like confirmation that he hadn't missed anything important.
That should have bothered him.
Instead, it felt numb.
He wrote anyway, jotting down diagrams he didn't need, partly out of habit and partly to anchor himself to something physical. The pressure behind his eyes was back today, stronger than the night before. It pulsed slowly, like a second heartbeat buried beneath his skull.
Around him, students shifted in their seats. Someone whispered a question. Another tapped their foot impatiently.
Shawn noticed all of it.
Too clearly.
The whisper carried not just words but breath patterns. The tapping followed a rhythm that deviated slightly every fourth beat. Even the flicker of the projector bulb registered as a repeating fault cycle.
His jaw tightened.
Focus. Just get through the class.
The professor turned toward the board, chalk scraping lightly as he wrote. Shawn glanced down at his notes—and the page seemed to stretch.
The lines on the paper elongated, spacing themselves in a way that made underlying structure obvious. Symbols connected to one another without effort, relationships forming faster than he could consciously acknowledge.
A sudden wave of dizziness hit him.
He gripped the edge of the desk, knuckles whitening. The pressure in his head spiked sharply, sending a flash of heat through his temples.
The room tilted.
"—Shawn?"
The professor's voice cut through the haze, distant and oddly distorted.
Shawn tried to respond, but the words didn't come out right. His mouth opened, but his tongue felt heavy, uncooperative.
The lecture hall fractured.
Not shattered—fractured. Like a pane of glass cracking into clean, geometric segments. Faces broke into patterns. Sounds separated into layers. The hum of the lights became a waveform he could almost see.
This isn't normal.
The thought was calm, precise, terrifying.
His vision dimmed at the edges, tunneling inward. The pressure in his skull surged, no longer a warning but an intrusion, as if something inside him were expanding without permission.
Shawn stood up too quickly.
The chair screeched backward, the sound sharp enough to draw attention. Several students turned in unison.
"I—" he started, but his legs gave out.
The world dropped.
He barely felt the impact as he collapsed into the aisle, consciousness slipping away in uneven pulses. Voices rose around him—shocked, confused—but they reached him through layers of abstraction, as if filtered through water.
Somewhere above, someone shouted for help.
Shawn's last clear sensation was the strange, dispassionate awareness of his own body failing—heart racing, breath shallow, neurons firing too fast, too dense—
Then everything went dark.
The lecture hall returned to noise and motion, students scrambling out of their seats as someone knelt beside him. The professor called for an ambulance, voice tight with urgency.
On the floor between rows of desks, Shawn Vargas lay unconscious, his face pale, his mind still burning with patterns that refused to shut down.
*******************
(First Person)
I woke up to white.
Not a clean white—no, this white had texture. Hairline cracks in the ceiling paint. Slight discoloration near the corners where air didn't circulate properly. Fluorescent lighting humming at exactly sixty hertz, though one of the bulbs stuttered every few seconds, introducing a subtle harmonic distortion.
I noticed all of it instantly.
That was the first thing that scared me.
My eyes were open, but my body lagged behind, as if awareness had booted faster than the rest of me. There was a faint chemical smell in the air—antiseptic, plastic, something metallic beneath it. Hospital. I didn't need the context clues; the pattern was already complete.
Memory replayed itself with unsettling clarity.
The lecture hall. The pressure. Standing up. Falling.
I tried to sit up.
Pain flared behind my eyes, sharp and invasive, like a needle pushed too far. I groaned despite myself and stopped moving.
"Don't try to get up yet."
A soft voice came from my left. Calm, practiced. A nurse stepped into my field of view, adjusting something on a monitor I hadn't noticed until now. Heart rate. Blood pressure. Oxygen saturation. The numbers meant something different to me than they should have—I could see the relationships between them, the deviations from baseline, the signs of stress still lingering.
"You fainted during class," she continued. "You're at St. Mary's. Do you know your name?"
"Yes," I said, then paused. My voice sounded normal, which felt wrong. "Shawn Vargas."
"Good. And today's date?"
I answered without hesitation.
She nodded, satisfied, but her eyes lingered on me a second longer than necessary. Professionals were good at hiding concern, but not perfect. Microexpressions leaked through if you knew how to look.
I knew how to look.
"How long was I out?" I asked.
"About six minutes before the ambulance arrived. You regained consciousness briefly in transit, but you were disoriented."
That didn't match my experience.
There was no gap. No blur. Just… compression. Like time had folded in on itself.
"Your mother's on her way," the nurse added gently.
That landed harder than the pain.
"She was at work," I said automatically. "Her shift doesn't end for another three hours."
The nurse blinked. "She left early."
Of course she did.
I closed my eyes, exhaling slowly. I could already imagine her face when she arrived—fear first, then forced calm, then the questions she wouldn't ask out loud. She'd lost my father suddenly. The universe had taught her that warning signs were lies.
I opened my eyes again. "What tests are you running?"
The nurse hesitated. "CT scan first. The doctor wants an MRI afterward, just to be safe."
Just to be safe.
Those words carried more weight than they were meant to.
The CT came first—fast, clinical, almost boring. I lay still as the machine whirred around me, cataloging my skull in slices. I could feel the pressure in my head again, dull but constant, like something pressing outward from the inside.
The doctor came back sooner than expected.
He was trying very hard not to look alarmed.
"We're going to do the MRI now," he said. "There's something we want a clearer look at."
That was when fear finally made it past my intellect.
The MRI room was colder than the rest of the hospital. The machine dominated the space, an enormous white cylinder that looked less like medical equipment and more like a tunnel into nothing. The technician explained the process, warned me about the noise, asked if I was claustrophobic.
I wasn't.
I lay down on the narrow table, arms folded across my chest, head locked into place. The restraint felt unnecessary—I had no intention of moving—but protocol was protocol.
As the table slid me into the machine, the world narrowed.
The first noise hit like a hammer.
Clang. Whirr. Thump.
The sound wasn't random. That became obvious almost immediately. It followed sequences—precise, repeating, layered. Magnetic pulses interacting with tissue, producing a mechanical symphony of brute-force physics.
I listened.
Not passively. Actively.
Patterns emerged within seconds. Repetition intervals. Deviations. Error correction cycles. My mind latched onto them effortlessly, mapping structure where there should have been only noise.
Then something changed.
A new sensation bloomed behind my eyes, sharper than before, resonating with the machine's rhythm. Each pulse sent a faint echo through my skull, as if the MRI were knocking on something inside my brain—and something was knocking back.
I shouldn't be able to feel this.
Thoughts accelerated.
The sound resolved itself into layers, then abstractions. I stopped hearing clangs and started perceiving sequences. My mind built models, predicted the next pulse before it happened, then adjusted when the machine deviated.
The pressure surged.
For a brief, horrifying moment, I felt… aligned.
Like the machine and I were part of the same process.
Then pain detonated behind my right eye, white-hot and sudden, tearing me out of whatever state I'd fallen into. My breath hitched. The technician's voice crackled through the intercom, asking if I was okay.
"Yes," I lied, jaw clenched. "Just loud."
The scan finished not long after, though time had become unreliable. When they slid me out, my clothes were damp with sweat, my heart still racing.
They didn't let me go back to the room immediately.
Instead, they parked me in a small waiting area outside radiology. A nurse handed me water I didn't remember asking for.
That was when I saw my mother.
She stood at the end of the hallway, clutching her purse like it was the only solid thing left in the world. Her eyes locked onto mine instantly, wide and searching, scanning for injuries that weren't there.
I hated myself for putting that look on her face.
She reached me in seconds, pulling me into a hug that was tighter than necessary, her hands trembling slightly against my back.
"Don't ever do that again," she said, voice breaking despite her effort. "Don't scare me like that."
"I'm okay," I said automatically.
The lie tasted bitter.
A doctor cleared his throat nearby.
"Mrs. Vargas? Shawn?" He gestured toward a consultation room. "We should talk."
The room was smaller than the MRI suite, dimmer, deliberately neutral. The kind of place designed to soften bad news without ever truly succeeding.
The doctor sat across from us, folding his hands together.
"We found a mass," he said.
The word landed with deceptive simplicity.
"A lesion in the brain," he continued. "Based on its location and characteristics, we're concerned it may be malignant."
My mother inhaled sharply.
I felt… calm.
Too calm.
"How large?" I asked.
The doctor looked surprised, then answered. "Roughly four centimeters. It's been growing for some time."
Four centimeters. Growth rate implied months. Possibly longer.
"I want a biopsy," I said. "And genomic profiling. Full imaging history if available."
The doctor blinked. "We'll schedule further tests, yes, but—"
"And I want raw scan data," I added. "Not just summaries."
There it was.
The first crack in the illusion that I was still normal.
The doctor studied me for a long second, then nodded slowly. "We'll discuss next steps."
As he left the room, my mother turned to me, eyes wet, searching my face.
"We'll get through this," she said softly. "Whatever it is."
I nodded, reaching for her hand.
Inside my skull, something pulsed in quiet agreement.
Not with her.
With the future.
(Third Person → First Person Transition)
The consultation room emptied too quickly after the doctor left.
The silence that followed wasn't peaceful. It pressed in from all sides, thick and suffocating, broken only by the faint hum of the ventilation system overhead. Shawn sat beside his mother, their hands still loosely clasped, though neither of them seemed aware of it anymore.
Mrs. Vargas was staring at the door the doctor had exited through, as if expecting him to return and say he'd made a mistake.
Shawn watched her from the corner of his eye.
Her breathing was uneven. Too shallow. Her grip tightened unconsciously every few seconds, then relaxed, like she was reminding herself to stay composed. He could predict the tremor before it came, the exact moment her shoulders would hitch.
He hated that he could do that now.
"I'll be fine," he said again, softer this time.
She finally looked at him.
The look hurt more than the diagnosis.
"Don't," she said quietly. "Don't do that thing where you pretend you're not scared so I don't have to be."
He opened his mouth, then closed it.
Because she was right. And because the truth was worse.
"I'm not pretending," he said carefully. "I just… haven't processed it yet."
That was only partially a lie.
She studied his face, searching for something familiar—panic, denial, anger. When she didn't find it, her fear deepened.
"You collapsed," she said. "In the middle of class. You scared everyone."
"I know."
"You know your father—" She stopped herself, swallowed hard. "He didn't get a warning, Shawn. He just didn't come home one day."
The hit-and-run hovered unspoken between them, a ghost neither of them ever named out loud anymore.
"I'm still here," Shawn said.
For now.
A nurse knocked gently and stepped inside, clipboard tucked against her chest. "Mr. Vargas, we're going to admit you overnight for observation. Neurology wants to run more tests in the morning."
Mrs. Vargas nodded immediately. "Of course."
Shawn nodded too, though his attention had already drifted inward.
Because something was wrong.
Not physically—at least, not in a way he couldn't already account for. The pain behind his eyes had dulled to a manageable pressure. His vitals were stable. No nausea, no vertigo.
But his thoughts…
They weren't slowing down.
If anything, they were accelerating.
When the nurse left, Shawn leaned back in his chair and closed his eyes.
And the world unfolded.
Not metaphorically. Literally.
His mind began organizing everything it had encountered today—lecture content, MRI acoustics, doctor's phrasing, his mother's microexpressions—into layers of abstraction that stacked neatly on top of one another. Connections formed without effort, branching outward like neural lightning.
He tried to stop it.
He couldn't.
Okay. Breathe. Just think about one thing.
He picked something simple. The MRI machine. The pulse sequences. Gradient coils. Magnetic field alignment.
The details bloomed instantly, far beyond what he consciously knew. Not memorized facts—derived structures. He could reconstruct how the machine worked from first principles, filling in gaps intuitively.
That wasn't normal.
His heartbeat quickened.
Stop.
The word echoed, but the process didn't obey.
He became aware of another layer—something deeper, closer. A subtle sensation inside his skull, not pain, not pressure, but density. As if portions of his brain had become… thicker. More interconnected.
He pressed his fingertips against his temple.
Nothing external. Everything internal.
That was when the realization finally landed.
Clear. Cold. Terrifying.
This isn't a temporary spike.
The tumor wasn't just there.
It was doing something.
Not damage—not yet. No loss of function. No degradation.
The opposite.
His eyes snapped open.
The room looked the same, but his perception of it had sharpened further. He could hear the distant elevator doors opening three floors away, the faint buzz of someone's phone vibrating through a wall. The overhead light flickered at irregular intervals, revealing a loose connection he hadn't noticed before.
His mother was watching him again.
"Shawn?" she asked. "You look… pale."
"I need my laptop," he said suddenly.
She frowned. "Your what?"
"My laptop," he repeated, more firmly. "It's in my bag. I need it."
"Now?" Her voice edged toward concern. "Honey, you just—"
"I need to check something," he said, meeting her eyes. "Please."
She hesitated, then nodded, reaching for the bag at her feet. She handed it to him, still watching closely.
The moment the device powered on, something in Shawn's mind clicked.
The familiar interface felt… slow.
His fingers hovered over the keyboard.
For the first time since the collapse, fear finally gave way to something else.
Focus.
If this is permanent, he thought, then time isn't my only constraint.
He didn't know how long he had left.
But he knew one thing with absolute certainty.
Whatever was growing inside his head was not waiting for permission.