This Is Not an Isekai (Prologue IV)

POV: Emily Carter

"How is the Bennett boy?" her colleague asked, nodding towards the closed door.

"Oliver."

Her colleague looked at her. "What?"

"His name is Oliver."

The answer had come out sharper than Emily intended. Maybe it was because, somewhere between examinations, reports and conversations over the past three days, a four-year-old boy had simply become the Bennett boy.

"How is Oliver?" her colleague asked.

"No change. He's still asleep. Dr Whitmore actually expected him to wake up sooner."

"Poor kid."

Emily glanced towards the closed door but said nothing.

"I saw a report about the accident yesterday," her colleague continued. "Apparently, the first lorry was overloaded."

"The one carrying the steel pipes?"

"Yeah. And apparently there was something wrong with how the load was secured as well. The police are still investigating."

"My God. The driver must be a complete wreck."

"If it was even his fault."

Before Emily could answer, a sound came from the room. At first she wasn't sure what she'd heard, but then it came again, louder this time.

Someone was shouting.

Emily's attention immediately snapped towards the door.

"Oliver?"

Before she had even reached the door, the voice on the other side turned into a scream. Emily pushed the door open.

Oliver was no longer lying peacefully against his pillow. His eyes were wide open, his breathing was rapid, and both hands were clutching the blanket.

"Oliver, is every—"

"§!%&?! @#&%!!"

Emily stared at him for a second, completely thrown by whatever had just come out of his mouth. She had expected confusion, crying, maybe even screaming after everything he'd been through. She hadn't expected... whatever that was.

Oliver didn't seem to notice her confusion. He held up his hands and stared at them before looking back at her.

"§!%&?! @#&%!!"

He sounded increasingly desperate, but Emily still couldn't understand a word. She watched him for a moment, trying to work out what was happening. The sounds weren't random. He was speaking quickly and with obvious purpose, as though he expected her to understand him.

"§!%&?!"

His voice grew louder, his breathing quicker. Whatever he was trying to tell her, he was working himself into a panic.

Whatever was happening, she needed Dr Whitmore.

"It's all right, Oliver. Just stay in bed. I'm going to get the doctor."

Emily turned towards the door. She was almost outside when Oliver shouted after her.

"Wait! Who the fuck is Oliver?!"

Emily almost stopped at the sudden switch to English. She hadn't understood anything he'd said before, but this time every word had come out perfectly clear. And judging by the way he'd shouted it, he genuinely didn't seem to know who Oliver was.

That was enough. She stepped into the corridor and turned to her colleague.

"Get Dr Whitmore."

Her colleague hurried away. Emily glanced back towards the room, still trying to make sense of what she'd just heard. Oliver could obviously speak English after all, so what had he been speaking before? And why didn't he seem to know his own name?

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Before she could make any sense of it, a dull thud came from the room, followed almost immediately by the monitor alarm. Emily spun around and rushed back inside.

He was on the floor beside the bed, struggling to get back on his feet. The IV line had been pulled from his arm in the fall, leaving a small streak of blood running down his skin.

"Oliver! Don't move."

***

POV: Oliver

Voices slowly pulled him back to consciousness.

"Shouldn't he have woken up by now?"

A woman's voice, muffled but close enough for him to make out the words. She sounded worried.

"Hard to say," a man replied. His voice was calm, almost routine. "After what happened, I didn't want to take any further risks."

He remained perfectly still, keeping his eyes closed. His head felt heavy, and for the moment it seemed easier to listen than to announce that he was awake.

His memories slowly returned. The tiny hands, the far-too-high voice, the nurse who hadn't understood a single word he'd said. Then came the less pleasant part: trying to get out of bed, his legs giving way beneath him and the floor rushing up to meet him. And the pain. He definitely remembered that. So it hadn't been a dream.

Apparently, they had put him back in bed. His head still hurt slightly, and every muscle in his body felt as though he'd spent days doing nothing but sleeping.

He kept his eyes closed. If they thought he was still asleep, maybe they would keep talking.

"Maybe it would be better if someone stayed with him this time," the woman said.

He recognised her voice now. The nurse from before. The uncertainty in it was hard to miss.

"Definitely," the man replied.

Neither of them spoke for several seconds before the nurse spoke again.

"Dr Whitmore... there's something else. When he first woke up, he was speaking some language I didn't recognise. It sounded real, and he kept looking at me as if he expected me to understand him. Then I called him Oliver and he suddenly switched to perfect English."

Dr Whitmore was quiet for a moment. "What did he say? Did he know who he was?"

"I don't think so." Emily hesitated. "He asked, 'Who the fuck is Oliver?'"

There was a brief silence before Dr Whitmore's calm, professional tone disappeared. "He said what?"

When Emily didn't answer, he continued, "He's four years old."

Emily sounded faintly amused. "I know."

Oliver resisted the urge to roll his eyes. Apparently, of everything that had happened, that was the part they were struggling to believe.

"Should we tell him what happened to his parents? What do we do if he asks?"

Dr Whitmore didn't answer straight away. "Then we'll have to tell him they didn't survive the accident."

"Have Social Services found any relatives yet?" Emily asked, her voice quieter now.

"Not yet," Dr Whitmore replied. "They're still looking."

Emily let out an audible breath. "Then he's all alone."

The answer didn't come immediately. "For now, it looks that way."

What?

For a moment, he was certain he had misheard.

There was something in the doctor's voice that made it clear he didn't particularly like that answer either. Parents dead in an accident. No relatives. Social Services looking for someone to take care of him. He tried to fit the pieces together, but the longer he thought about them, the less sense they made.

What fucking accident are they talking about? And why do they think I'm Oliver?

He hadn't been in a car accident. He had been in Bern, at the university hospital, because of his tumour. He remembered the preparations for surgery. He remembered his family.

After that—

Nothing.

And now he was lying here in a body that definitely wasn't his. He kept his eyes closed. There had to be an explanation. A reasonable one.

Experiment.

The idea had already occurred to him the first time he woke up, and by now it didn't seem quite as insane. Maybe something had gone wrong during the operation. Maybe he hadn't woken up afterwards and someone had tried some experimental procedure. Brain, consciousness, some kind of technology he'd never heard of.

It was ridiculous, but at least it was an explanation. The only problem was that he wasn't exactly an obvious candidate for a secret medical experiment. He was a thirty-five-year-old Swiss man with a brain tumour who'd spent most of the last two years looking after his family.

Clearly a prime target.

Then there was the slightly bigger problem of his body. Tiny hands, short arms, a voice several octaves too high. Whatever they had done, this wasn't his body.

A brain transplant briefly crossed his mind.

No.

Consciousness transfer sounded stupid enough, but at least it would explain why he remembered his entire life while apparently occupying someone else's body.

Then there was everything he'd just overheard. The people around him didn't think he was some anonymous test subject. They thought he was Oliver, a four-year-old boy whose parents had just died in an accident.

So apparently whoever was behind this hadn't just given him a new body. They'd given him dead parents and Social Services as well. Very thorough, he thought dryly.

Except that made the whole experiment theory even harder to believe. Why let him wake up completely unprepared? Why discuss the accident and his supposed family right beside him?

Either the people running this experiment were astonishingly bad at their jobs, or there was another explanation.

Unfortunately, he knew exactly what explanation a webnovel protagonist would come up with.

Isekai.

He grimaced beneath his closed eyelids. Of course that was where his brain went. He'd spent far too much of the last two years reading stories that started almost exactly like this: man dies, wakes up in someone else's body, spends five minutes being confused and then gets on with his new life. The annoying part was that it fit.

Maybe he had died during surgery. Maybe Oliver had died in the accident. Maybe, for some completely idiotic cosmic reason, he'd ended up in the boy's body. Or maybe this wasn't even his world.

Brilliant.

For years, he'd made fun of protagonists who accepted reincarnation after three paragraphs and immediately started planning how to revolutionise their new world with modern knowledge.

Idiots.

For just a moment, he felt rather smug. He'd been right about those protagonists after all. Faced with the same situation himself, he was accepting absolutely nothing.

So, experiment it is.

It was a terrible theory, but at least it didn't require webnovels to be a reliable source on how the universe worked.