Prompt Lost
I Am Jacob
I am Jacob.
Once in awhile I need to remind myself.
Four years ago I was brutally murdered.
My killer was a total stranger to me. In general that’s very rare – you are much more likely to be killed by someone close to you.
Kyle Timothy Janson was nobody to me. I had never even seen his face before. The police investigation told an unnerving tale of a road trip, with the sole purpose of taking a stranger’s life.
My killer (I won’t name him again. Saying his name feels strange. Not emotionally, but physically strange – like a dog pawing at your leg while you sleep, trying to wake you up, but the pawing blends into a dream you’re having, and feels like a monster at the bottom of your bed, trying to eat your feet. Saying his name feels like that.) He drove all the way from Tulsa. He waited outside my apartment. He picked my building because there was a small alleyway beside our building’s garage without cameras.
He waited there for three hours, starting at 1AM, waiting for the first person who entered or exited the garage.
Lucky me.
Although his name is such a weight for me, going through the details of my murder somehow isn’t a problem. Sometimes, weird as it sounds, I almost enjoy it.
He had a four inch knife. I went into the garage at 5AM to get my car, and he just made it happen. Ran up behind me, stabbed me, all told, 30 times.
The first one went through my spine, and there went my legs. That is a weird feeling, just loosing your legs all of a sudden. One second they’re there, the next they’re gone.
Once I was on the ground, he had free reign. There were defensive injuries, I’m told, on my arms and hands, but it didn’t amount to much of a defense.
He left me in the garage and, bizarrely, drove off in my car. I don’t know what he was thinking – i suspect he wasn’t, just acting on instinct – but that would be his undoing.
He was pulled over on the turnpike when a cop’s automatic plate scanner saw the car was reported stolen in connection with a homicide.
Prints and DNA established probable cause and a warrant was procured for a brain scan, which revealed everything, as they always do.
A jury found him guilty, a Judge sentenced him to be Wiped and Reseeded.
If you take the brain scanning tech, and tweak it, you get something a little more aggressive. This is a Wipe. The government erases your brain waves, blanks your neurons, and you become an empty husk – a husk into which another consciousness can be inserted like a ripe ear of corn.
I was that corn. My newly dead brain was also scanned, common place with murder victims, and that scan installed into my killer’s empty mind. This is a Reseeding.
Wipe, Reseed. Now my killer’s body is my own. I was lucky I have no memory of his face from before the Reseeding, otherwise I would have needed a much longer period of psychological treatment. As it stands, a year of comprehensive preparations and coping strategies did it’s work, and…for the most part… I think of this body as my own.
For the most part. Except for strange ticks, strange feelings, like that dog in a dream thing, or the…excitement I sometimes feel when I describe my own violent death.
Sometimes, I will go see a movie, usually a horror movie, some gore fest. I hated those kinds of films before, in my original body, but now, I relish them, almost fetishistically, though I’m embarrassed to admit it.
I saw there was a series of murders recently in Chicago. I’ve been following them with rapt attention, sneaking google searches on the topic at work, in the bathroom, wherever I can get a second to myself.
I’ve been googling other things as well. Terrible things.
I have to remind myself sometimes.
I am Jacob.
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