Fairness is a fairytale that we preach, a gentle rule we try to teach. To humble those of gifted grace, to help children find virtue's place. We dream the good will find their peace, and wicked hands will finally cease. That justice falls where evil lies, beneath impartial, watching skies.

 

Yet what of those who start with less, denied the light of happiness? Do they bear their fathers' plight, or carry sins beyond our sight? At Project Rophe, we reclaim the broken, forgotten, and lame. We heal the silent, dark, and still, the deaf, the blind, the mute, at will.

 

We pray for fairness nevermore, nor wait for fate to settle score. We take the power in our hands to bend the world to our commands.

 

The spatial mapping trial at Bellmount's Neurological Institute was supposed to be a routine thirty-minute telemetry calibration. Inside Booth A, Bradley sat rigid beneath the low hum of the monitors, a man accustomed to a world built entirely of acoustic echoes and tactile warmth.

Across the sea of vinyl tile in Booth B sat Maya, his newly met counterpart, whose world was built entirely of light and subtle motion.

He was blind. She was deaf.

Both had volunteered for Project Rophe, an experimental procedure promising an end to sensory impairment. Bradley was fitted with a neural implant that translated computer-generated spatial maps into visual perception. Maya wore a twin device that converted auditory frequencies directly into brain signals.

To Doctor Thorne, they were perfect biological mirrors. By hooking them into the same supercomputer, he could stream identical data to both brains at once, cross-referencing how a mind with no history of sight processed visual pixels against how a mind with no history of sound processed acoustic tones.

Then the power grid collapsed.

The room snapped into a blurred red haze as alarms blared down the hallway. Strapped into their anti-sensory helmets, both patients jerked as an agonising surge rippled through their implants. In the chaos, the staff panicked and bolted, failing to notice the two subjects writhing in pain, their screams muted by the helmets. The heavy doors slammed shut behind them, locking automatically.

Bradley was the first to wrestle through his restraints. Tearing away the telemetry leads, he yanked off his helmet, expecting the familiar safety of total darkness. Instead, light exploded into his mind like shattering glass. Photons pierced his newly-ignited visual cortex like shrapnel. He could finally see. But the light was blinding.

The sensation was excruciatingly violent. The muscles around his temples bunched hard, squeezing his eyes shut. He pressed his palms against his eyelids, but the glare didn't fade. His pupils remained milky white and unseeing; his sight was being burned directly into his brain by the malfunctioning chip.

Emergency strobes cast a rhythmic, blood-red pulse across the room. He stared at his own trembling hands, the faded fabric of his hospital gown. Across the room, Maya thrashed against her harness, struggling to claw off her own helmet.

Bradley forced himself up, his arms flailing like a marionette with cut strings. Unaccustomed to visual navigation, he stared down at his feet, watching them lift and land on the cold tile in hesitant, exaggerated steps.

Just as he was getting used to his sight, his right toe caught his left ankle, sending him pitching forward. His face slammed into the floor. His teeth sliced through his lip. A sickening vibration shuddered through his skull, twisting his nose into an ungodly angle, and the warm, metallic taste of iron flooded his mouth.

Shaking off the pain, he dragged himself across the tile on his elbows to Booth B and hoisted himself up by Maya's armrest. With a sharp tug, he lifted the helmet from her head.

"Maya!" he called out.

She flinched violently, pulling away into the frame of the chair. But his voice felt strange. He couldn't hear it.

"Maya!" he shouted again, and waited for the vibration of his own voice to reverberate in his skull.

Nothing.

"I can see!" he proclaimed. "I can see!" He strained his throat until his vocal cords burned.

Maya buckled her knees to her chest, her eyes squeezed shut, slapping wildly at the air before tumbling out of the chair away from him. She had nothing to say, only a terrified, breathless gasp as she scrambled away.

"I can see!" he screamed into the room.

Nothing.

Pain seized his chest, and his breathing grew erratic. Despite his intact ears, the world had gone completely dead. The hum of the server racks, the sirens in the hallway, even his own ragged breathing had been wiped clean from his consciousness. It was as if the very concept of sound had been deleted from his reality.

He slammed his hands against his ears, desperate for even the faint thud of physical contact, but met only flat, hollow stillness. The blinding red light kept firing into his mind.

He stared down at Maya as she crawled desperately toward the corner, like a panicking fawn running from an oncoming truck. She headbutted every obstacle in her path, crawling in frantic circles, and a dreadful realisation took hold: she couldn't see a thing.

What a sick joke fate had decided to play on them. The deaf had become blind. And the blind deaf.

Maya couldn't see a thing. To her, the air was suddenly electrified with sound. She could finally hear. But the sounds were deafening.

They struck her chest like brutal concussive waves, Her own screams terrifying her. It began as a low, violent vibration, a deep, visceral hum from the laboratory's mainframe that rattled the fillings in her teeth and juddered the bones in her skull. It felt like standing directly beneath a roaring jet engine, the raw decibels tearing through the absolute silence she had grown accustomed to.

Sharp, agonising frequencies punctured her mind like a rusty needle. Every chair she knocked over as she felt around in the dark assaulted her with a metallic clang, like swords against her armour.

The air conditioning vents hissed sinisterly into a roaring wall of white noise that battered her temples until her head throbbed. She clamped her hands over her ears, but the noise didn't fade. Her heart thumped in her head so loudly that she couldn't hear her own thoughts.

What made it worse was someone screaming her name in a monstrous growl.

"Maya!"

"Bradley? Is that you?" she whispered, shocked by the squeak of her own voice.

 "Maya!" His throat burned with each scream.

"Stop it, Bradley! You're too loud!" she groaned, attempting to crawl away from him, only for her cheek to meet the edge of a desk. A cold, biting line of pressure, as if a jagged piece of glass were dragging across her face.

"OW!" she screamed.

"Why did Dr Thorne turn off the lights? It's so dark in here. I can't see anything!"

But before she could conjure another thought, she heard a sound more terrifying than nails on a chalkboard. Bradley started to shout: "I can see! I can see!"

Those words hit her like a blow to the chest, knocking the air clean out of her lungs. Her stomach dropped in a heavy, sickening plunge, leaving her entirely hollow. If Bradley could see, then why couldn't she?

"Bradley, stop! Please!" she begged.

He didn't. He only kept shouting the same words, never answering a thing she said. She realised he could not hear a thing. The same sick joke, played from the other side of the room.

The deaf had become blind. And the blind deaf. 

Maya buried her face in her hands, her shoulders shaking with silent sobs. It isn't fair.