There are things in this world that we as humans with our conscious limitations cannot readily absorb or accept on any level. For instance, if you are looking at a plain wall and all of a sudden a human eye blinks open, or if you are looking at yourself in a mirror and your reflection begins to speak to you or move independently, a normal human reaction is to experience sensory overload or have a psychotic break.
The mind will immediately fracture off and reject these hallucinations. The nervous system will start to go berzerk with the fight or flight reaction and an otherwise sane person will go straight into complete panic mode until they end up with a complete nervous breakdown. Some people may even feel nauseous or hyperventilate, or worse, go into convulsions, but to experience a tear in the fabric of reality on any scale will always require some form of psychotherapy to repair after the experience.
Waking up in a tube as a severed head is another good example of having a split with reality. Blinking your eyes open to find that where your chest stomach arms and lower extremities used to be, are now a series of wires, mechanical parts, and disconnected flesh tone rubber-looking prosthetics.
But on the morning of January 7th, 2026, that's exactly how Tobias McKinley found the state of himself.
His last conscious thought after initially waking up was the lid of the tube making a decompression sound and at least two people in lab coats and what looked to be hazmat head masks yelling as they frantically worked to get to him and find the correct tube in order to inject what he assumed was a sedative.
He remembered thinking about her face, the halo of sunlight as it kissed her hair and framed her entire being as if the light were coming from within her. He thought about her brilliant smile and her eyes, those eyes, like two large black moons... Those eyes_
Tobias remembered the brief excruciating impact of pain as if instantaneously recognizing not only his traumatic physical state but that he would never be able to see her ever again.
He froze in a jolt as the effects of the drug the two lab coats had given him conquered his awareness and the instantaneous knowledge of his traumatized physical state converged into a single tear that spilled out from his eye and rolled down his cheek just as he lapsed back into a medically induced coma.
Few things in this world have the ability to alter our reality so dramatically that we experience an instantaneous psychotic break. Head injuries, obviously or the loss of a limp perhaps, but for the most part, human beings are equipped with the body and mind's ability to shut down, be it psychologically as in the case of buffering or lapsing into a comatose state or physically passing out, or perhaps a combination of the two, but very few people remain cognizant of their surroundings while consciously being impacted with a severe break with reality.
Tobias had been on his motorcycle when the tractor-trailer came around the bend. The details of the accident would never come back to him but the fact that he had been reaching for a cigarette at the same moment that he was decapitated was later revealed to him.
It was noted in his report that Tobias upon learning this fact remarked with a very low affect that his mother had been right about it taking getting hit by a Mack truck to get him to quit smoking.
It was now the beginning of summer and Tobias was sitting up watching a basketball game from his hospital bed. He had been the first successful full brain transplant in human history and the memory of that horrible night three years earlier was barely even a talking point in his weekly sessions with Doctor Terry, but it was still there, the tube, wires, and prosthetics and for some reason_ her
The Charney boys, whom he never met but watched almost every day for the past two years play basketball in the street below never had any idea that they had a fan in Tobias McKinley. Dr. Terry had taken great care to blacken the windows out of the guest room above his garage which had served as Tobias's "hospital room" or that it wasn't even a hospital room that he was in. He was still a severed head inside a metal tube and the "room" was actually a virtual environment being digitally fed into his consciousness. In his mind he was a human, sitting upright in his hospital bed, watching three young kids shooting hoops in the street below.
In reality, the room was about 1200 square feet of a climate-controlled space housing the computer servers known as Tobias Black.
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