I looked at it carefully and saw that it didn’t have a lock on it. I was grateful for that. That meant all I had to do was brute force my way through.
I looked around the door jamb but didn’t see anything of interest. So I knelt down and looked under the door. There was a bolt holding the door in place, a bolt that was jammed into a hole in the ground.
I figured that I needed to somehow get that bolt lifted up. So I searched the facility for some tools. It took me a while, but finally I found a metal ruler, some glue, and sticky putty.
I stuck on some putty onto the end of the metal ruler and tried to lift up the bolt. It wasn’t quite working the way I thought it would. I could feel it though—I could get that bolt up.
After a long series of attempts, I finally got the bolt to lift and I pushed the door open.
There I stood, in a little vestibule. Double doors ahead, and double doors to my right. Randomly, I chose to go through the right.
In the dim light of the nighttime, I walked through the halls. It was a strange feeling to be all alone in the facility. An entire eight-story building that could hold thousands of people. Completely vacant.
I went down the hallway and continued searching, looking at the labels of each room as I walked by.
Then, I found it.
Room 550.
It made sense after I thought about it. The new wing was put up in a hurry, and it was clear that whoever designed the building was just throwing it together. No wonder the layout didn’t make any sense.
I went into Room 550. And there it was.
It had to be a STESIS pod.
Made of what looked like a combination of surgical steel and slick white medical grade plastic, it was a big bulky machine. It was made of two parts. One was like a bed of sorts. It was inclined up and it had mechanical parts that looked like the bed would lie down flat before sliding into the second, larger part of the machine. That part was a hulking mass that looked like an MRI machine.
The bed had articulated supports for a person’s arms. And at the top where the head was supposed to be, there was a carrier for the wired headset that was dangling. The headset was like a visor—one of those virtual reality ones from the old days—and there was a net of diodes and sensors where the top of the skull was. The pod itself was padded and looked like it was embedded with sensors of all kinds.
There was a monitor that was attached to the outside of the machine. It appeared to be a console or terminal program, and text was scrolling through it at a dizzying pace.
I watched the text and it looked like a debug log. I couldn’t get it to stop refreshing the log, but I could see there was a repeating error. To try and catch a glimpse of it, I recorded the log on my phone and played it back frame by frame.
[CRITICAL] Host disconnected mid-session, error code 02414.
Suddenly, I jumped out of my skin and dropped my phone.
I heard a noise.
It was coming from inside the machine.
It sounded like something alive. I was terrified.
Every nerve in my body was firing, telling my legs to pump as fast as they could to get me the hell out of that room. I wanted to burst out of the room and slam the door shut behind me.
But my eyes were fixated on the noise. Something was in the machine.
I wanted to use the flashlight on my phone, but it had slid towards the machine when I dropped it. I looked around and flipped the light switch. I don’t know why I did it. It didn’t turn the lights on before, and there was no reason that it’d magically work this time.
Then I got an idea. I could use the flash on the camera.
I took it out of the backpack and fiddled around with the settings. Then, I took a test shot.
The flash fired.
And I heard another groan.
I didn’t want to know what was in there. I didn’t know what I was going to see.
But I had to. I just had to.
I took a few steps closer and fired the flash again. It looked like there was a human being in there.
I figured that if it was an injured human, it couldn’t hurt me. I was still scared as hell though.
I worked up the courage to get right up into the machine and fired the flash again.
There was a man in there. A man dressed in a white lab coat.
I reached in and grabbed a hold of some part of him and dragged him out.
He was lying there on the ground, his body twitching. It looked like his whole body was spasming with little electric shocks.
I wanted to give him first aid, but I had no clue what to do.
“Hey, mister, I’m here to help. I wanna help you. Can you tell me what to do?”
The man could hear me. He made eye contact with me and his lips started to open. But no words came out. His head twitched left a touch and then jerked to the right, over and over again. His lips moved erratically. It was a sickening sight—the man was like a strange automaton that was malfunctioning.
“Do you know who did this to you?” I asked the man. “How did this happen?”
The man sputtered, trying to answer. But he couldn’t.
“There were soldiers here,” I said. The man’s eyes widened and he appeared to be nodding. I asked him, “Do you know where they went?”
He struggled to speak, but we both knew he couldn’t. So, with a trembling hand, he put his forefinger and thumb together and tried to make a motion.
I understood. He needed to write.
I grabbed the notepad and pen out of my backpack and put the pen in his hand, holding the pad for him to write.
After a few long moments, he managed to scrawl something onto the pad. I took a look at what he wrote. In a slanted line, he tried to write in scraggly letters.
Evrythng ned 2 know is in there
I looked at him, and he flicked his eyes towards the machine. Nodding, I gave him a look of acknowledgment. Then, he flicked his eyes urgently towards the pad in my hand. I looked back down at it, reading the lines beneath the first one.
help...t
kil me im going to die
A heaviness stooped my shoulders and a deep sigh leaked out of my lungs. I tried to find the words that would come out of my throat.
I croaked, saying, “Mister, I’m sorry...I...I just can’t do it. I don’t have a gun.” I wasn’t even sure I could do it even if I had a gun.
The man just laid there, his eyes vacant. His head bobbed back and forth ever so slightly, ticking like a fast clock. I felt awful...the man didn’t deserve to suffer like that. But I just couldn’t bring myself to kill him. I thought about dragging him up to the roof and throwing him off, but I wasn’t even sure that he’d die from the fall. And I sure couldn’t bring myself to crush his skull, even if I could find something that was heavy enough to do the job. I did the next best thing and dragged him next to the wall and tried to make him comfortable. It was a lame gesture, I knew it. But it was the best I could think of. I just had to wait for him to die.
It was a dreadful wait. I tried to make the most of the time by recording the console and playing it back, but I couldn’t focus. Was this how all those soldiers were ending up? Speechless, immobile, and twitching like some grotesque puppet?
I’m not sure how long it took for the man to die, but he finally did. When he stopped twitching and breathing, I checked his pulse to confirm that he was in fact dead.
He’d said that the answers were in the machine. I still needed to find Nyla, and I’d exhausted all my ideas for trying to get clues in the facility.
I thought about just going home. It wasn’t like Nyla was my wife. Was it worth all this trouble? I had no idea what laid ahead of me. I might be staring at a squad of soldiers pointing their rifles at me. I might be captured and imprisoned somewhere. I might have bullets tearing through my body. I might live the rest of my life with scars and injuries, each day in searing pain. Or my life might end.
My head was spinning.
Then I thought about w
hat it’d be like to live my life after all of this. Could I just go back to making sales calls and complaining about delivery service fees? Could I go back to watching YouTube conspiracies after I’d been chased by soldiers? After I’d watched a man die? Maybe I could...Eating a cheeseburger and fries in my PJs sounds really good right about now.
I was tired. I had a choice to make.
I could either go home or dive in deeper.
SIX
Press Enter To Continue
I chose to go home.
I made my way to the subway station and took the train all the way back to my apartment. The ride was devoid of people, and the train skipped a lot of stations. Yet, somehow, the train managed to take forever. That’s the MTA for you, I guess. Even with nobody to serve, even with reduced service, they find some way to get delayed.
When I got back to the apartment, it was dawn. It was a long night, and I needed to get myself showered and into bed. As I showered, the events of the night played back in my head. I tried to sleep, but I kept drifting in and out of consciousness.
I heard Yakov’s heavy footsteps outside my room, so I got up. It must’ve been 6 a.m. He was like a machine. He got up at the same time every day, even on his days off.
“Yakov?” I said, poking my head out of my room.
“Yes my friend,” he replied on his way to the kitchen.
“There any coffee up?”
“Not yet, but I make it, just for you.”
I got out of my room and tried to eat some breakfast. Leftover thin crust from Domino’s. Usually my favorite. But it was hard to chew and swallow the food.
Yakov brought over some coffee and sat down at the dining table. He leaned his elbows on the top, and the table creaked under his weight.
“I keep hearing things on scanner,” he said. Yakov had a police radio scanner set up in his room and he was an avid listener ever since the virus hit.
“What’re you hearing?” I asked him.
“Last night, eighteen DOA diff breathers in our precinct.” Yakov sighed heavily. “Many people dying. And many husbands and wives fighting. Men and women were not meant to be together twenty-four hours.” He sounded very sad.
I noticed that he had the newspaper on the table, so I gestured at it. “Read anything good in there?”
Yakov scoffed. “Good? This virus is crafty like chameleon. Shapeshifter…” He narrowed his eyes in suspicion. “There is more than ten strains. If you get infected and make antibody, you can get again anyway. What is this?”
“Well, at least it means that you can get immunity from some of them,” I said.
Yakov curled the corner of his mouth up and frowned in doubt. “I have friend back in Russia, she is biochemistry scientist. She says virus mutates each time it spread to new person.”
Shaking his head, he sighed.
“My friend, we are all dead.”
With his mug in hand, he picked up his heavy body and lumbered back into his room
“I go listen to scanner,” he said. “I tell you if anything interesting happens.”
It was a Saturday, so I didn’t have any work to do. Which was a bad thing. I had to stay busy. My mind was racing. What happened to Nyla? What the hell happened to that dead guy? What was that pod?
Returning to my room, I tried to occupy myself by playing some games. I logged on to 28 Dayz. The server was dead, which I was surprised about. Usually, Saturdays were full.
But all those questions were nagging me. As I was holding the mouse button to chop wood for the fort I was building, I realized there wasn’t enough action in the game to keep my mind busy. I was going out of my mind.
I got out of my chair and paced around in my room. My heart started racing and my breathing got short. I started running my hands through my hair. Where was Nyla? How could I find her? What did that guy mean that all the answers were inside?
I was frustrated. So frustrated that I shoved my chair into the wall. What the hell was I going to do? I felt powerless. I kept thinking about how maybe I should’ve let her go up first. Or maybe I should’ve gone back in to save her. Then I started laughing at myself for thinking I was some kind of hero. You would’ve gotten shot and killed if you tried to fight them, I thought to myself.
But I just couldn’t take it anymore.
I had to go back.
I took my electric skateboard and rode it to the train station where I took the train back to Brooklyn Navy Yard. Then, I snuck back into the building the same way I had done with Nyla, and I made my way to Room 550.
When I got inside the room, there was a foul stench. The stench of rotting flesh struck me right in the gut, and I doubled over, clutching my stomach. That man’s dead body was still lying where I last put him. I nearly vomited, but I managed to drag him out of there and into a different room. Back in Room 550, the odor was horrible, so I had to wait and let the room air out a little.
While I was waiting, I played back some of the video recording of the console logs to try to learn more about the system. There wasn’t much I could do just by watching, but I got a sense of what was going on. Each line was tagged either INFO, WARNING, DETAIL, or ERROR. Most of it was tagged info. It was one hell of a verbose logging system, and I wondered what kind of moron would turn on that level of verbosity for such a complex and fast-moving system.
After a while, I sniffed the air. It still smelled disgusting, but at least I wasn’t retching. I went in and started examining the pod.
I could tell that, to get hooked into the system, I’d probably have to be lying down on the bed platform. From there it would decline down and, on the track on the ground, move into the main machine. The question was: how do I safely hook myself up?
I looked around the machine and saw that there was a magnetic clipboard attached to the side. There was a checklist written by hand.
Neural Cap
Visor
Bodysuit
Hydration tube
Saliva ejector
Neuromuscular Paralysis Injection
Check config
Start pods
Check PSU
Check APU
Check sled servos
Start serverd
Start vitalsmon
Connect to farm
Put pod in loop
Set session parameters
Check parameters
Run diagnostic
Launch session
Post-Immersion Supplement
tgarro thomasgarro1234!!!
I spent the next couple of hours figuring out how to operate the console. The display was a touch screen, but thankfully there was also a physical keyboard. I was happy tapping away on it—I could tell it had those fancy Japanese Topre capacitive switches.
I remembered how I would spend hours debating with other keyboard geeks in online forums about why the Happy Hacking Keyboard was superior to every keyboard, even the vaunted Cherry mechanical switch keyboards. It seemed so petty now.
After making extensive use of the man command for help on syntax and stuff, I finally got the server daemon started and the vitals monitor. It looked like the system was thorough and had a lot of redundancy and error correction. A lot of it was way over my head, and I wished I had the time to figure out how it worked. But I had much more pressing matters.
I searched the room and found a bodysuit hanging in one of the lockers. It was made of some kind of dark gray elastic, like a scuba suit. There were these reactive areas all over the arms and legs that would shrink if you rubbed them with a downward stroke. On the inside of these areas were what felt like diodes or probes. I guessed that they were important to keep in place.
With the bodysuit on, I put myself into the sled—that’s what I was calling the bed. The sled was cushioned, and the sensors were glowing. Next, it was time to put on the cap.
The neural cap was heavy. There were dozens of thickly insulated wires on each half. The blue ones were for the left hemisphere, and the red ones for the right.
Underneath, there were a smattering array of electrode pads. I’d seen a movie once where they put on that cold slimy conductive gel, so I looked around for a bottle of the stuff. After I found it, I slathered my hair in it and tried to part it wherever there was an electrode. When I put the cap on, I prayed that they were all in the right position.
After that, I had to put the hydration tube and saliva ejector tube into my mouth. I couldn’t remember the last time I went to the dentist, but it was one thing I didn’t miss because of the virus.
Standing there in the sled, I looked at the checklist, which I had brought with me. I was missing a few items. Neuromuscular paralysis injection. Honestly, it scared the crap out of me. I guessed that they needed to make sure that people weren’t flailing their arms and disturbing the equipment while they were jacked in. I was also missing the post-immersion supplement, but I figured I’d be lucky to even get out of the immersion alive.
I took a big breath and swung the keyboard and display over to me where I could type from the sled. I punched in a few commands to set the parameters—I just used the same ones from the previous launch. Then, after I ran the diagnostics, I typed the launch command into the console.
But I didn’t press enter yet.
This is it, Wayne. Are you really going to go through with this?
Dark doubts started to creep into my head. Fear started crawling over my skin. In my chest, my heart began to pound.
Screw it.
I pulled the visor over my head. It covered my eyes, and it was pitch black in there. A tone sounded off, indicating that it was active. The sound swooped all around me—there was some advanced surround sound system in the visor. I wondered if it was a unidirectional audio system or whether someone could hear what was playing in my headset.
Then, I jammed my finger into the enter key and held my breath.
And…nothing happened.
I opened my eyes, took the visor off, and looked at the console.
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