Brain

It's black; there is nothing: no sound, no sight, no haptic sensation. The universe does not exist, but I am.
A sound, peeling away at the antenatal nothing, it rings sharply in the vacuous abyss.
"Good morning, Colonel Archwright. If you can hear me, that means the slip-neuron gateways are active. Please remain calm. We will explain what is going on shorty. For now, we will--" another voice cracks into the blackness filling the void with a swilling synesthetic blue.
"There's transverse harmonics resonating somewhere. We should disconnect and reestablish a slip link on a different frequency."
The first voice returned, sweeping through the cloudy blue with a purple sharpness.
"Yes. Colonel, standby. We will--"

The void. It's claustrophobic infinity expands before me. A moment, or a millennia hangs.

A streak of purple.
"Colonel Archwright, sir, can you hear us? How are the harmonics? Stabilized? Good. Colonel, you will experience sight again very soon. Stay calm. It will take some time to adjust."

A brilliant flash. Colors. Shapes. Organic forms writhe. Concentric circles and fractal lines. A pulsing pattern emerges.
Shapes condense. Form takes shape from pure essence. People looking at me. Faces. They have masks on. There's a caustic yellow falling from the ceiling lights.

"How are you feeling, Colonel?" the purple experience fades leaving only the voice. A woman stands closest. Beneath her medical gear he can see her eyes.
"We will turn on more systems soon. Welcome back, sir."

-------

Knocking the joystick with the arm hanging from the body, I am moved forwards by the chair. It takes me towards the whiteboard, behind a labcoated man drawing frantic scribbles on the board.
"I'll try to explain it to you the best I can. I've been working on this stuff for years, so stop me if you get lost." the voice exclaims coming from the man, the blue fading and leaving nothing in it's wake.
"So you died. That should have been explained by now. And we took your brain and shunted it into an enclosed cylindrical void of spacetime adjacent to our own with an identical time axis. Uh. Your brain is basically in a pocket. We can call it. And that pocket is separate from everything here. But we use slip gate tech to bridge the gap between your synapses in the pocket and the vessel you're connected to. The body you're driving around now."
Motioning to his crude drawing of a lumpy brain, he encircled it and quickly drew choppy lines from the red brain to a stick figure in a different circle.
"Your brain is suspended in a sense. You can think and all of that, but entropy is preserved because the geometry of the slipthroat when we created the pocket caused a negative gradient across. So there is a drain built in to the pocket that basically keeps you suspended indefinitely. There's no real good analogy. Maybe something with glass blowing? I'm not sure."
He paused, turned to the board, and erased the drawings.
"Maybe you understand it. I'm not sure. I'll be here for the next few months. Once you learn to control the body you can ask me questions. It takes participants a while to get voice back. Who even knows when they'll have you off the ventilator. The other participants we've worked on--with. with. have said they felt like they were too small for their body. whatever that means. It gets better, they say. Anyway. The slip links should be pretty established by now. So if something were to go wrong it would have already. I guess you're back in the world of the living long term. Oh. and if you died--if you're body dies or something, god forbid, happens to the slip link--you probably will exist indefinitely in that pocket dimension. Based on it's geometry, it is unlucky to decay. Accounting for imperfections and internal stresses on the brane, I would estimate it will last around ten to the 38 to 40 years. So your brain will rejoin this universe well beyond when the universe ends."