Chapter Text
Unihemispheric Slow-Wave Sleep: sleep where one half of the brain rests while the other half remains alert. This is in contrast to normal sleep where both eyes are shut and both halves of the brain show unconsciousness.
Unihemispherical: The name that this girl has chosen for herself. Once she takes this… she’ll finally be an umamusume. Umestrogen. She’d stolen it in the dead of night, a scientist in an academy was making batches and batches of the stuff. To sell them to others who wished to be umamusume, but of course, she didn’t have that money. Yes, she had a job, early for her age, but that age was 15, and parents controlled what she got to spend her money on.
They’d kill her if they found out, certainly if they did before it was already irreversible. So, she holds the pill in her only comfort, the bathroom. The one place she was allowed a locked door to hide behind. What was she waiting for? Her nerves wouldn’t get any less calm.
“Down the hatch.”
And then, the pill was gone. Take daily, and probably wear a hat until her tail grew too big to hide in a few months. The first step to being who you are, a real umamusume.
“There’s 16 hours. Now… the hard part. Being me the other 8.”
You see, this young child was what some would consider a prodigy, someone with unparalleled skill and knowledge of the mind. The other half would call her a mad scientist, of course, obsessed with the idea of not needing to sleep. She’d tried countless experiments and methods over her childhood.
Caffeine? No, of course not, that just shuts off your mind’s ability to recognise it’s tired, it still needs sleep.
Sunlight? It decreases melatonin production, but all that does is delay sleep. Plants don’t need to sleep though, just rest to a lesser degree. Maybe with enough augmentation, humans and umas could photosynthesise and not need to sleep? ...Nope, movements simply requires too much energy for it to be practical.
Well, how about polyphasic sleep? Take small naps to not need to fully sleep! She tried that at 7, it opens up more of the night, but still requires around the same amount of sleep. Plus, she still has to be awake for school.
Sheer Force of Will? Tried every day since 8, usually ended up with her falling asleep an hour before she needed to get up, being exhausted during class, and then passing out from when she gets home to dinner time.
Unihemispheric sleep? Now… that one could be a winner! It isn’t as restful as normal sleep, but there are plenty of animals that use it, and it allows for 24/7 bodily wakefulness! Just need to figure out how to do it herself!
For the years since that idea, it refused to leave her mind. It became an obsession, the purpose for all her education! Specialising even further into matters of the mind, monthly brain scans on herself to detect every little change, comparing it with those of her classmates and others she could persuade!That number… quickly dwindled, her lack of social skills becoming more and more apparent, even being sent to therapy in an attempt to shake this focus. Despite what their parents tried, nothing could shake their child’s commitment to the motto she’d say for years and years:
“I will prove to the world that we can use every single hour in the day to progress the future of the world!”
5 years into this obsession, at age 13, she had run out of people who took her seriously. 5 years of a child rambling about how if she can just get a good enough look at people’s minds, if she can just get the right people and machinery then she could do it, well… no one wants to listen to that after so long. It led to isolation, naturally, which only threw her further and deeper in. “Just one success, that’s all that’s needed,” she thought, “then they’ll respect me again! They’ll love me, and will all line up to join me!”
Some day at 14, she realised the reason why she always gathered her thoughts on late night runs alone, and a second reason for why she always felt isolated by her peers. Years of studying her one brain, and it took a study analysing the differences being human and umamusume minds for her to realise that hers fit far more closer with that of a female umamusume, not the man currently comprising her body. Which brings the girl back to today, in the bathroom, taking her first pill of the drug that would let her be herself in at least one way. It wasn’t the only thing she’d stolen though, you get plenty of opportunity to do that once you get good at climbing fences and you run in the middle of the night. The other things… well, they weren’t at home, far too big a contraption to not be seen. Its home was at a nearby junkyard, the culmination of years of hard work, ready to change her mind once her body was ready.
The next few months were of anxious waiting, going over everything she’ll need to do over and over again. Checking her machine over and over and over again. Being treated worse and worse by her parents as they slowly started to realise that she was becoming an umamusume, until eventually, the day finally came. Her metric for when her body would be ready: The day they took drastic measures.
“You have been going behind our back, taking this horrid substance and killing our boy?! I bet this derangement is where your stupid, stupid obsession came from! Go, if you don’t want to be my son that bad, fine! But I certainly have no daughter!”
...expecting it didn’t stop it from hurting. It also didn’t stop her from crying, despite the smile on her face.
“Alright then… well, I have a second surprise for you, then!”
“GET OUT!”
Unihemispherical ignored her parents’ cries.
“A big surprise indeed! By tomorrow, I’ll either be dead, or I will have completed everything I set out to do! I will live up to my name, my real name. Unihemispherical!”
Her parents didn’t care. She was kicked out, and she ran. The smile disappeared as soon as she turned around, her tears streaking down her face as she went to the junkyard.
When learning about surgery, especially brain surgery, there are a few rules that they instill into you immediately.
1) Don’t do brain surgery with unsanitised equipment, or in an unsanitised location. There’s only so much you can do to sanitise a literal dump, but Unihemipshperical had tried her best.
2) Don’t do brain surgery while emotional. Your hands will shake, and if you’re anything but calm, you’ll kill your patient. That was nothing that a few hours of getting ready couldn’t help with.
3) UNIHEMISHPERICAL, FOR THE LOVE OF THE THREE GODDESSES, DON’T PERFORM BRAIN SURGERY ON YOURSELF.
All she could really do to counteract that point was to call an ambulance to get ready. She told the emergency services that in one hour, an umamusume was about to be unconscious, nearly dead in the junk yard, with her brain open. She’d require immediate brain surgery, but there would be equipment there. Of course, not the equipment she would be using, typical equipment like this won’t work for performing surgery on herself. Her set up was a strange mixture of holding her head perfectly still with metal, an array of mirrors allowing her to see her own scalp, and…
Well, she’d already quadruple checked everything was there, now was the time to perform the surgery. Slightly seperate the mind’s need for sleep into two sections, two halves of her brain, able to work independently while the other slept.
Unihemispheric Slow-Wave Sleep. That or death. The girl was 16 now, and it was time to change her life.