Jon didn't want to go to the doctor, but this mother of all headaches left her in no condition to resist. She managed to stumble along with one arm draped over Sara-er, Summer's shoulder, only half-conscious of what was going on. Summer led her out to the car, strapped her in, and pulled out of the driveway a bit faster than she probably should've.
Jon spent most of the drive clutching her head and moaning, and thus didn't really get to notice much about the scenery or even the vehicle. The ride wasn't long, at any rate; Summer pulled into the E.R. parking lot barely five minutes after they'd left, leapt out of the far, and practically carried Jon inside. The headache surged, and Jon barely managed to stagger over to the bench by the wall before she collapsed.
Jon awoke to the sound of voices, a man and a woman. One seemed familiar; the other was unknown to her. Light was stinging the corners of her eyes, and she avoided opening them for the moment.
"But she's never had any issues with epilepsy before!" the woman said. "How could we have gone sixteen years without knowing she was epileptic?"
"Well," the man replied, "it's actually not unheard of for otherwise healthy people to have an isolated seizure. It's not common, but it does happen. So she may not actually be predisposed to this kind of thing; we'll have to watch and make sure there isn't a recurrence. But as I said, I'm not entirely sure that was a seizure. A massive overload of neural activity, yes, but far more organized than any seizure I've ever seen. It was like her brain was working overtime on something."
"Huh," the woman said. "Do you have any idea what?" Jon recognized the voice now; it was her and Summer's-
Hold on. It was her mom from when she was Jon, but she also recognized it as the voice of her and Summer's mother from her life as Autumn. Somehow, Jon was able to remember events from both her lives, like Autumn was another layer underneath Jon, which she could switch out at will. Oh, that was a computing metaphor, right? The old switchable ROMs that could be turned off so the computer could see the RAM in the same area...Autumn knew all about that, she was into that sort of thing. Jon was kind of surprised by it, but since she could understand it as Autumn, it didn't confuse her as Jon...who was she now, anyway? There was only one person in her head, but was that person Jon, or Autumn, or both?
"No, not really," the man, obviously a doctor, replied. "There was a lot of activity in areas having to do with long-term memory, but that's all I can tell you."
"She...she acted like...like she knew me," a girl sniffled. That was Summer, wasn't it? "Like she knew me, but didn't know we were sisters. Has she f-forgotten that?"
"I don't know," the doctor said. "It's really impossible to say, until we can talk to her."
Autumn was moved nearly to tears by this; even as Jon she realized how heartbroken Summer must be feeling. She took a deep breath, and tried to speak. "I'm all right," she said. The speech was still a little slurred, but more from her grogginess on waking up than from anything else. "I remember you fine, sis."
