Presumably I got on Dr. Fürböck's nerves quite a bit with my constant questions about the past. One day he appeared with a large cardboard box and said that in there were the records of Doctor Giese, and he hoped that I could find enough answers in it. Immediately I began to clear out the box and to skim over the files and put them in order.
Most of them were transcripts of the lectures that the good Doctor Giese had given. In all this mess, however, there were also many handwritten notes, which I first had to sort out, as they were obviously rummaged through and lying unordered in the box. When I looked through them, I realized that all the pages referred to patients he had listed as number 1 to number 5.
The next day, I approached Dr. Fürböck about this. I asked what had become of these patients. It took him quite a while to pull himself together and give me an answer. Unfortunately, the first patients had died during the special treatment. When I asked, he said that this concerned number 1, 2 and 3. I would be number 5, I could see for myself that most of the papers referred to number five.
"And what about number four?" asked I, and Dr. Fürböck took a considerable time to think. Then he said that number four had been a very special case. It involved a young woman, perhaps 24 or 25 years old, who had apparently suffered some kind of shock and had been admitted to the institute as a coma patient. Dr. Fürböck's recollections came only fragmentarily and incoherently.
She – Dr. Fürböck thought her name was Eva – had easily recognizable strangulation marks on her neck, but police who investigated the case and took the woman's boyfriend into questioning ultimately decided there was no crime. The boyfriend credibly asserted that Eva loved choking, that is, she liked to be choked during the sex act because the reduced oxygen supply to the brain increased the pleasure. This practice was very common at the time and the police, who also questioned other acquaintances of Eva, learned that she was known for this preference. However, she had not given the arranged sign to stop this time, and when he finally let her go, she had already lost consciousness, whereupon he had immediately dialed 911.
Dr. Giese had taken Eva into his program as patient number 4, she became his favorite subject, so to speak. Young and beautiful and already as good as dead – that was a challenge for him. He did everything he could to treat her to the highest level of his knowledge and keep her alive. He spent several hours a day with her to make sure she was set up in the best possible way, that all the equipment was working perfectly. Every day he spent at least an hour sitting next to the container she was in, talking to her, stroking her hand and reading to her from the newspaper. He was very pleased with her condition, because she was the first one who did not die right away. While Dr. Giese was giving lectures, preparing scientific papers and reports, he always took time to visit Eva. This even went so far that he sent Dr. Fürböck as a deputy to conferences abroad, as he did not want to leave Eva alone.
In some of their conversations, Dr. Giese mentioned to Dr. Fürböck that he was particularly pleased with Eva's brain stimulation. He said that he was deeply convinced that the brain was using more and more areas as a result of the permanent stimulation and – here Doctor Giese became almost rapturous – that a leap in the evolution of man was taking place here. He did not know what this stimulation would trigger in the end, but he would soon know. According to his investigations, already about 60% of the brain areas – or more – were active.
So the day came when he brought Eva out of her sleep. She had spent about 50 years in a coma. Dr. Giese locked himself in with Eva for days, examining and scrutinizing every little detail. During the brief breaks he allowed himself, he reported to Dr. Fürböck that Eva was a wonderfully successful experiment. Of course, her musculature as well as other bodily functions had suffered from the long period of inactivity, but the physiotherapists would surely improve that through sustained training. But her nature, her nature! He had not known her before, of course, but she was wide awake again almost from the first moment and wanted to know everything about herself and her stay at the institute. The neurological examinations and also the conscientiously performed MRIs confirmed that she could use 60 or more percent of her brain capacity. That was phenomenal for him, a breakthrough whose scope he could not yet fully appreciate.
Eva had made good use of the training with the physical therapists and was able to walk unassisted by the second month after her awakening. She struggled with speaking at first because her larynx had not fully recovered, so she had a deep, almost male‐sounding voice. She talked with Dr. Giese for hours, learned the medical details amazingly quickly, and as Doctor Giese once jokingly mentioned, she could probably pass the medical exam within a month. He virtually raved about how bright her mind was and how quick her grasp was. He raved that she would engage him in debates for hours and had more philosophical questions than he could answer. He raved that here was an evolutionary leap.
One day – Dr. Fürböck was just at a conference in France – Doctor Giese simply dropped dead, his heart had failed. On the same day, Eva disappeared from the institute. Dr. Fürböck left the conference immediately and traveled back to Vienna. The death had made him head of the institute, but at the same time he had his hands full. So it was not surprising that he could invest only a little time in the search for Eva, and already a few weeks later he was no longer thinking about her. He devoted himself fully to patient number 5, to me. He studied the records of the late Doctor Giese and followed his instructions very carefully. Number 5 developed well, day after day he visited his patient, examined him daily. Here Dr. Fürböck ended his report.
I had listened to him breathlessly and now asked what had become of Eva, number 4? Dr. Fürböck shrugged his shoulders and said he didn't know. He said that, in his opinion, she could not have gone far in her weakened condition and would probably have been found somewhere as an unidentified, unknown female corpse. However, he said, he still checked with the police months later, but no unidentified female body had been found anywhere. Now, at least, he seemed unconcerned about Eva's whereabouts.
After this conversation I was quite agitated and immediately began to search for her on the Internet. This was quite difficult, as I had neither a family name nor any further details about her, so all my searches came to nothing. There was also no report anywhere about a girl who had fallen into a coma while choking. Defiantly, I imagined I had someone out there with whom something connected me, a kind of sister in destiny.
This thought never left me.