A while later, Johnny started waking up. He didn't have to open his eyes. They were already open, strangely enough. He was staring in one direction, but could not redirect his gaze. What he was looking at, with a strange wide view, was a room full of brains in jars. Most of them in jars full of bubbling blue-clear liquid. The donkey's body was still lying on the same movable surgical table in the middle of this new room. It's empty skull was staring back at him like a black hole. The woman seemed to be looking directly at him.
"Good. You must be conscious now," she said.
"As you can see, there are quite a few brains in here. Most of them a failure. All the ones in those bubbling jars are still alive, but they are unconscious."
She walked around the room, introducing each brain to Johnny. Each one with a name. "Greg Holslander," "Elizabeth Fisher," "Luke Peterson," read all the plaques beneath each brain.
Johnny started to scream. But he couldn't. He couldn't find his voice. He couldn't even feel his own body.
The woman walked over to him, reached out, and lifted him up. She swung him around, and there was yet another bubbling jar with a brain inside of it. Only this one had wires connected to the brain. It was disconcerting, how she was holding him. He couldn't feel her hands at all, but could clearly see she grabbed him and somehow moved him around very easily to look directly at this brain.
"Say hi," she said as she lowered Johnny down to look at this one's plaque.
"Johnny St. Claire," it read!
She then turned his vision to look at.....himself! There he lies on another surgical table that was previously out of his view. His skull was similarly opened, with the same black hole looking back as the donkey's dark empty brain case!
He started panicking. He wanted to thrash around. To move. To do SOMETHING. But he was now nothing more than a brain in a jar! His body an empty vessel.
"Yes, your body is now dead. I tried keeping it alive, but it was useless."
She moved the camera around so he could get one last look at the human body he was born with and occupied for his first 11 years of life.
His eyes were open, but disconnected from any sort of brain. They just sightlessly stared into space. His face pale white and ghostly looking. In fact, his entire body was pale white. Embarrassingly he was completely naked. His small, dead little penis exposed to the world. His familiar hands and fingers looking somehow different. Already, the skin was shrinking as the decomposision process was already underway.
There was that scar on his knee from when he crashed his bike a few months ago. A mole on his neck. She lifted his arm, and it was already stiff and fast becoming unyielding.
"Dead as a doornail," she said. "But your brain is still very much alive. Which means you are still very much alive!"
He wanted to ball his eyes out. His heart rate would be beating very rapidly, save for the fact that whatever fluids his brain was immersed in, was pumping throughout at a specifically regulated rate.
He noticed a microphone next to his little jar when she completed his little your by showing what he was reduced down to in his little bubbling jar. The wire leading from the device into his brain. That's how he was able to hear! She had it plugged in into and working in the auditory section of his brain!
But that's all he was now. Just a helpless brain inside a jar, identical to all the rest in that room. She then turned the camera towards another jar next to him. This one was totally shaped differently. It was many times less wrinkly. It was significantly smaller. The plaque beneath that, said "donkey."
"That body of yours lying over there, that's just a waste product. Even though I was interested in keeping it alive, it wasn't my main objective, you see."
She then turned his camera back around. She gave him a tour of the donkey's body. She first showed him it's teeth. Huge, blocky, and yellow. It's fur was gray with white fur around the nose and mouth. It's belly fur was white. It had large, tall, broad ears. And four legs that ended in four hooves. She showed him the underside of the hooves as well. "Just in case you were ever curious to see what they look like, as you won't be getting that chance in the near future."
She showed the tail, and ended with the huge, long, black penis and it's enormous, jiggly, wobbly balls. Balls filled with nothing but donkey seed and DNA, no doubt.
She then placed the camera high up on the shelf, so Johnny's brain would be forced to look down and process the images he was about to see. He could clearly see the donkey with its gaping black skull. He could see both his brain (Himself!), and the donkey's next to his.
"First, I need to fuse a few, specific pieces of the donkey brain with yours," she began.
She carefully brought, first the donkey brain's jar over to the table. Then Johnny's. Horrified, with a sinking feeling in his now dead / non-existent belly, he saw both brains side-by-side.
"Don't worry. I'll keep all of your intellect and memories completely intact," she continued.
She pulled out the donkey's brain from it's jar, that had a tube attached that was still sucking in the bubbling water.
Then she just as carefully lifted Johnny's brain out of his! It would have made him sick, and he desparately wanted to look away. But he had no control over his camera. He couldn't feel her touching him!
"The brain itself, ironically enough, doesn't have any nerve-endings. So you're totally numb to everything, and will feel absolutely no pain," she assured him. If "assured" is the correct word.
Then she placed a hand on the large front section of his brain.
"As I was saying before, I'm going to leave your full human intellect completely intact." She lightly patted the front of his brain. "This here is your frontal lobe. This is all that makes you, you. Well, mostly anyway. Your human-level processing and intellect occurs here, but your memory center is over here." She pointed at a different, smaller section of the brain. "That too, shall remain with you. Therefore, you will never lose your identity, nor where you came from nor who you once we're. You'll remember your family, your school friends, and all of your teachers. As well as your lessons. Unfortunately, you will never out any of that to any sort of practical use. I do appreciate your sacrifice, so thank you."
It was very disconcerting to him to watch her patting his brain, while being completely disconnected from the fact that brain was him in his entirety while viewing it from above through a camera lens. He "felt" like he was sitting on that shelf above. Not on that table below. It was almost as if he were watching TV of this happening to someone else. But he reminded himself that was him! Again, he wanted to panic. But that brain continued to just sit there blindly and helplessly, greedily slurping up that bluish fluid through that tube.
She then pointed out the various other sections on the brain. The auditory center. Where vision is received and interpreted. The part that controls hunger. Basic survival instincts like "fight or flight." Muscular movement, and the instinct to move around with your body. The instinct to eat, sleep, and procreate.
She then produced a scalpel, and brought it closer to Johnny's brain. He tried begging her to not do this! But he has no voice. Nothing to manipulate anything in the world, and she cannot hear his pleadings. Matter of fact, if she were to admit it, it was rather awkward to her to speak to what seemed like an inanimate object. But she intellectually knew that brain was an entirely comprehending human being. She always found that strangely fascinating. That's what humans are. Not the face, the hands, the arms, the legs, toes, and feet. But this ugly, scary looking horrifying wrinkly, squishy, lifeless, mass.
She cut into his brain! Removing a small section. She then cut into the donkey's brain and cut off a similar section. She very quickly brought the donkey section over to his brain and attached it. She put some sort of gel around that spot.
"This is a cell-growth agent. Designed to encourage....well ..cell growth. It's a new age-defying technological achievement produced by the CDC a couple of month ago," she explained. "I can essentially remove tissue from one body and suture it to another, and the two ends will mesh and not reject eachother."
Poor Johnny had no idea what function she just took away from him, and gave to him from the donkey. He wasn't sexually active yet as a young boy. And he certainly wasn't at this moment. So he had no idea that's what she just did to him. And will not know this for quite a while. He will now have the instinctual propensity to have sex with other donkeys! His human intellect would fire be horrified and plead to not be a part of such dirty deeds.
She then did the same with various other parts of both brains. Mixing and matching the donkey brain parts to the core of his human brain. Slowly, instead of having "phantom" hands and arms, he now has "phantom" legs! This was the first function he took notice of! He no longer remembered how having hands felt, even though he remembered having hands and how useful they were!
Once she was finished after something like 12 hours of careful and delicate surgery, she declared her triumph.
She then placed the new Johnny-donkey Frankenstein brain into Johnny's original blue fluid-filled jar.
"Well, I'm going to take a break now," she said. "And I suggest you do too as well."
He saw her walk over to his brain, grabbed halfway down his visual feed, and unplugged the cord that was connected to his brain, from the cord connected to his camera. Suddenly, everything went black! And he was now "sucked" into the presence of being held within the jar. He could still hear. But he could not open his eyes and look around. He was completely, 100% blind.
He heard her say:
"Good night now, Johnny boy. I'll give you a good 12 hours of rest while your new brain heals."
And with that, everything went completely 100% silent as well. He couldn't even hear the bubbling of the jars any longer. He could not hear, see, feel, smell, or taste. He was just a brain stuck in a jar with no connection to the outside world at all. Just a simple unplugging of a cord took it all away from him. He floated in silence for the next 12 hours. Desparetly wanting to stretch all four of his legs before he finally fell totally dormant.