For a long time, Lauren simply existed as a series of pulses. She was the slow rise and fall of her chest; she was the faint, rhythmic thrum of blood in her ears; she was the weight of her own limbs pressing into the table. The world had narrowed to the physical boundaries of her skin. There was no "Lauren" to occupy the space, only a biological entity processing a stream of sensory data that it no longer knew how to categorize. A fly landed on her cheek, its tiny legs prickling against her skin, but she didn't blink. The sensation arrived at the brainstem, but it died at wall of severed white matter. it could reach a center capable of deciding that a fly was an annoyance.

Eventually, the silence was broken by the soft, metallic rattle of a wheelchair being maneuvered into the room. Martha didn't move alone; she signaled for a junior orderly, a quiet man whose presence was as unobtrusive as the beige walls. Together, they approached the table, their movements coordinated and devoid of urgency. They didn't speak to Lauren; they spoke about her, treating her body as a piece of luggage that needed careful shifting.

With a synchronized heave, they hoisted her from the table. Because the procedure had stripped away her motor functions, Lauren’s body was heavy and limp, her limbs swinging with a loose, pendulous momentum. She was dressed only in her simple white underwear, her small frame looking startlingly fragile against the industrial grey of the wheelchair. Her arms draped over the armrests like discarded scarves, and her head lolled to the side, her gaze fixed on a distant, unremarkable point on the floor. There was no struggle, no instinctive attempt to right herself; she was a passenger in a vessel that had lost its rudder.

The journey through the hallway was a series of rhythmic jolts. Every bump in the linoleum sent a shudder through Lauren’s spine, but the sensation arrived in her mind as a series of unrelated vibrations, devoid of the concept of "movement." She saw the ceiling lights pass over her in a blurring strobe of fluorescent white, a conveyor belt of light that she watched with a vacant, glassy curiosity. To her, the world had become a sequence of textures and flashes, a sensory movie with the sound turned off and the plot deleted.

They arrived at the recovery ward, a room that smelled of old linens and ozone. The orderly maneuvered the chair into a corner, tucked away from the main thoroughfare but within sight of the nursing station. He didn't bother to adjust her posture; he simply left her there, slumped in the chair, her chest rising and falling in a slow, mechanical cadence. Martha stepped back to survey the placement, her eyes scanning the room for any potential hazards. She didn't check if Lauren was comfortable; comfort was an emotional state, and Lauren was now an entity of pure biology.