71
A GLOWING LIGHT.
A bright spot at the end of a long dark tunnel.
I floated toward it, my body weightless. The pain was gone now, erased, fading along with Clara’s terrified screams.
The tunnel shrank, collapsed, the light spreading outward until there was an expanse of white in all directions. I lay there, on my back, looking up into the nothingness for what seemed an eternity. Then, ever so slowly, the light faded, wavered and blinked out, leaving me staring into unending blackness…
My eyes were closed.
That was why everything was dark.
I opened them slowly, waiting while they adjusted. A room swam into view, dimly lit. I was laying on a gurney of some sort, and there were wires attached to me. Lots of them. I could not move. I appeared to be strapped down, restrained at the wrists and ankles.
Memories filtered back. The chase, the bus, the crash. If I was dead, this was not the afterlife I had been expecting. On the other hand, maybe I was in a hospital. The equipment in the room, whirring machines with blinking red and green lights, metal tables with instruments on top, certainly looked like the kind of thing one would find in a hospital.
“He’s awake.” Someone, a female, spoke somewhere to my right, beyond my line of vision.
“Thank you.” This voice was deeper, male. “I can see that.”
I pulled at the restraints. This was not right. Hospitals did not strap you down, at least, not unless you were a danger to yourself, or to others. Not unless you were crazy. Was I out of my mind? Was this one of those places where they treated delusional people, nut jobs? That would explain so much.
“Welcome back, Mr. Stone.” A figure stepped into view. A tall thin man in a white lab coat.
I had a sudden flash of recognition. I had seen this man before. He was the figure I’d seen at the motel, and in the woods. He was the one I’d dreamed about. Even though I’d never seen the figure clearly, never seen his face, I knew it was him.
“Where am I?” My voice was thin, croaky. “Am I in a mental hospital?”
“Goodness no.” The man in the white coat laughed, although I detected little mirth. “You’re not insane Hayden. May I call you Hayden?”
“Sure.” So where was I? More to the point, where were Darwin and Clara?
“What have you done with my friends?” I pulled at the straps again. They held tight.
“We haven’t done anything with them.” The man leaned in. I smelled a faint trace of garlic on his breath. “How do you feel?”
“Like a man strapped to a table,” I said. “Who are you?”
“You don’t remember me?”
“No.” I shook my head. “Should I?”
“This place, this room?”
“No.”
“Fascinating.” The man exchanged a glance with someone outside of my view, then looked back to me. “I’m Doctor Meadows. I’m a neurologist – Among other things.”
“Where am I?” I asked again.
“This is the Blakely Institute Hayden. You are a patient here.” Doctor Meadows folded his arms.
“I am?” I tried to turn my head, and discovered that there was a strap around my forehead holding it in place. A sudden stab of panic overcame me.
“I assure you, the restraints are for your own good.” Meadows must have seen the look on my face. He smiled, a gesture meant to reassure me. It didn’t.
“Let me out of here.” I twisted against the restraints. “Get these damn straps off me now.”
“Please calm down Hayden.” Meadows motioned to a person I couldn’t see. “I really don’t want to sedate you. We don’t know how that would turn out, not in your condition.”
The words cut through my anger, my panic. What exactly was my condition, and why did those words fill me with such dread? “What are you talking about? What’s wrong with me?”
“You’re dying, Mr. Stone.” This time he used my last name, a more formal address. “That’s why you came to us.”
“What?” This new information slammed into me like a sledgehammer. “I’m dying?”
“That’s right.”
“And I came to you.”
“Yes.”
“Of my own free will.”
“Of course.” Meadows dropped his arms to his sides. “Did you think we’d kidnapped you?”
“I don’t know what to think.”
“That’s understandable.” Meadows moved closer. “You’ve been through a lot.”
“Why can’t I remember coming here?”
“It’s a side effect of the process I imagine,” Meadows said. “You are the first person to ever wake up.”
“Wake up?” I really wanted to escape the table. “What process?”
“The transfer,” Meadows replied. “I’ll try to explain it as best I can.”
“Please do.” I was still concerned about Clara. Was she also strapped to a table somewhere?
“Well, you are dying Mr. Stone. I won’t bore you with the details, it’s irrelevant at this juncture, but suffice it to say, you don’t have long to live, at least, your body doesn’t.” Meadows took a breath. “Now-”
“What do you mean, my body doesn’t have long?” I found it hard to believe that I was about to shuffle off this mortal coil, bite the biscuit. I felt fine. Of course, it was hard to know what to believe since I had no memory of ever coming to this place, no memory of Doctor Meadows.
“Please Hayden,” Meadows said. “I am doing my best to explain your situation.”
“Fine.” I lapsed into sullen silence.
“That’s better.” Meadows clasped his hands in front of him, his fingers intertwined. “You were given less than six months to live. That was four months ago. You approached us three weeks ago and paid a considerable amount of money to be here. You sold your house, all of your worldly possessions as I understand it.”
“Why?” I pulled at the straps one last time. A halfhearted effort. “Why would I sell everything I own and give the money to you?”
“So that we could save you Hayden, save your mind, your essence.”
“I don’t follow.”
“This table, these wires, the machines you see around you, they are capable of wonderful things.” A flash of pride passed across Meadows’ face. “For the last three days we’ve been transferring you, your mind, into a new environment.”
“What the hell are you talking about?”
“The mind is a wonderful thing Hayden, an organic computer that houses everything that makes you the person you are. It contains your consciousness, your personality. We’ve found a way to take all the information in your brain, all your thoughts and personality traits, even your consciousness, and transfer it all into our own supercomputer. We literally pull you out of your body and put you in a new environment where you can go on living free of whatever malady afflicted you in this reality. A new lease on life.”
“I don’t believe you.” This had to be some sort of sick joke.
“It’s all true Hayden.” Meadows smiled. “You’ve been…” He paused as if searching for the right word. “Downloading, for a few days now.”
“Say I believe you – which I’m not sure I do – then why me?” A breakthrough like that, there would be more people clamoring to get in than they could ever cope with.
“Oh it wasn’t a decision we took lightly,” Meadows said. “You were very lucky to be selected. There’s a considerable waiting list for our service. We only take those people who fit the profile. Only one in ten will ever make it into the simulation.”
“Why not take everyone?” I wondered what the profile was. Enough money to make it worth their while? It sounded like they were running a business, selling immortality. That begged the question, just how much had I actually paid them in order to cheat my own death?
“Not everyone is suitable. We perform rigorous testing to ensure our subjects are compatible with the technology.”
“This is insane. I would remember coming to y
ou.”
“Actually, you wouldn’t,” Meadows said. “Right now most of your waking consciousness has been transferred into our simulated reality. Your brain is pretty much an empty shell. Think of it like a deleted hard drive. We assigned you a new life and wiped the old memories, otherwise you would reject the artificial reality as a fake, and we couldn’t have that. We often wondered if the original memories would resurface if a patient ever woke up. Now we know, the memories appear to be gone for good.”
“Have you got Clara strapped to a table somewhere?”
“Heavens no. She’s been in the simulation for a while now. Her physical body is long gone, just like the others.”
“There are others?”
“Oh yes. Thousands of them. You are just our newest patient.”
“So if I’m being downloaded into a new reality on some super computer, then why am I awake, talking to you?”
“Now that is a good question. Something went wrong. A virus. It got past all our firewalls, all our security protocols. We don’t know who programed it or how they into our systems, but it was probably a competitor trying to steal our business.”
“There’s more than one of you doing this?”
“Oh we’re not the only ones working on this technology. We just happen to be the only ones in the population stage. Actually putting real people into the environment.”
“And you didn’t guard against someone sabotaging you?”
“We did. Clearly not well enough.” Meadows shook his head. “The virus has wreaked havoc with the simulation. It wiped out hundreds of thousands of Artificials. All of them, just gone in an instant. Erased.”
“What’s an Artificial?” Good God, was I really buying into this nonsense?
“Artificials are people, not real people mind you, but computer generated life forms that interact and populate your world, otherwise you would be walking around in a mostly empty landscape. Instead of a well populated environment, the only other people would be the previous patients, and that would present problems.”
“Emily, was she real or one of your made up people?”
“If you met her after the virus hit, then she is real, I assure you.”
“So why did she go crazy and try to kill us?”
“Unfortunately there is another facet to the computer virus. It takes our patients, the real people we put into the simulation, and changes them. Like I said, the brain is merely an organic computer, and the consciousness, the bit we transfer, nothing more than an elaborate, brilliant, piece of software. The virus rewrote that software, stripped away the humanity.”
“Zombies.” I muttered the word under my breath.
“If you like,” Meadows said. “It doesn’t affect everyone at the same time, but it is spreading, infecting more people.”
“When I collapsed at the gas station…”
“That would have been the virus, the initial attack on the system. The computer glitched, then rebooted.” Meadows looked serious now. “After that, the virus started to spread, to change things.”
“Nothing worked. No phones. My car battery died.”
“Like I said, the virus began to rewrite the simulation, cause anomalies.”
“And the monsters? Those things that attacked us at the motel?” Why was I still humoring this man? A part of me did not want to believe him, a bigger part of me did. The character Sherlock Holmes once said something about arriving at the truth by eliminating all other factors. I was swiftly eliminating all the other factors, much to my dismay.
“Ah yes. The monsters,” Meadows said. “We have no idea about them. The simulation creates all manner of animals to make the environment seem real. Normally it would recreate familiar creatures, squirrels, birds, cows and the like. When the reference material got scrambled the system got creative.”
“Got creative?” That was an understatement. “Those things almost killed us.”
“Yes. I imagine they did.”
Another thought struck me. “The text messages. The ones sending me to New Haven. That was you?”
“Yes. It was. We did all we could to preserve the simulation, but nothing worked, it was failing. Every time we came up with a solution, the virus would adapt. In the end all we could do was create a safe area, a place the virus couldn’t reach. We migrated a small section of the simulation, a clean section, onto a new server with fresh firewalls. The trouble was, we couldn’t get any of the survivors there.”
“That still doesn’t explain the text messages.”
“I’m coming to that.” Meadows kept his voice even, low. “You were in the process of transitioning. You were our only link between this world and the simulation. When you saw me in the simulation, it was because we were reaching out to you. When you got a text message, it was us. Your physical body was still connected to the computer, so we could make use of your auditory and visual senses, at least to a small degree. You were our only hope of saving a few of the people we put into the simulation.” He paused, took a breath. “You still are.”
“So my brother…”
“He didn’t send you anything I’m afraid.” Meadows looked uncomfortable. “It was our best shot that you would take the messages seriously.”
“Is he dead?”
“He was never real Hayden, just another facet of the world we created, a detail we programmed into your personal reality.”
“So I don’t have a brother.” The realization hit me like a ton of bricks. I felt angry and sad, both at the same time.
“You do. Jeff is alive, at least out here. We modeled your brother in the simulation on your real life brother. We do that for all of our patients, it helps their mind accept the new reality.”
“This is a lot to take in.”
“I know it is.” Meadows placed a hand on my shoulder. “We never intended this, believe me.”
“Then why wake me up?”
“We didn’t mean too. Of course we knew it was dangerous to employ sensory input from this side to contact you, but that shouldn’t have caused this, at least, not on its own.” Meadows looked genuinely perplexed. “Something must have happened within the simulation to throw you out. Something traumatic that caused your consciousness to reject the new reality, at least temporarily.”
The bus crash. I remembered the chase, Clara losing control, the bus flipping. “There was an accident. I was hurt.” Another thought struck me, a much worse one. “Or I was killed.”
“You didn’t die Hayden. Even in the virtual world, if you die, that is it. Game over.” Meadows glanced past me again, toward the unseen person. “We have to put you back inside. You can’t stay here.”
“And what if I don’t want to go back?” I didn’t want to return to that nightmare, but I also knew Clara was there, and I couldn’t abandon her.
“There’s no other way. If we disconnect the download, you absolutely will die.”
“I’m already dying according to you.”
“Only your physical body Hayden. But if we unhook you, it will be like flipping a light switch. There’s not enough of you left, not in your own brain. You exist in the server now, on our computers. We can’t bring you back.”
“Oh.”
“It’s a one way street I’m afraid.”
“So what happens now?”
“We put you under again, put you back to sleep, and you wake up in the simulation.”
“Will I remember this?”
“Yes. We wiped your original memories, or rather the computer did, but we can’t wipe this. You are already a part of the simulation. Any newly created memories will remain. And that is good.” He leaned in close, his mouth next to my ear. “You need to reach New Haven. Lead anyone you can find there. Save them. It is safe there, I assure you.”
“Wait.” I needed more information.
“There’s no time. Who knows how this, being here, will affect you if we don’t. There may already be adverse side effects to coming back here.”
“But–”
“Listen to me.” His voice took on a grave tone. “Things are getting worse. If you don’t get to New Haven soon the virus will catch up with you, infect you all, just like Emily. We can’t stop it Hayden, we can only slow it down, but you must get to the safe area.” He looked up, nodded to someone. “If you will, nurse.”
I knew what that meant. “Wait, please…”
It was too late. I felt lightheaded, the room spinning, fading. I caught one last glimpse of Doctor Meadows standing over me, a look of concern on his face, before the room collapsed in upon itself in a flash of bright white light. In that moment, I saw something else too, another person in the room, coming into my narrowing field of vision, a clipboard in her hand. I could hardly believe my eyes, it was Emily…
72
I GASPED AND SAT UP.
“Oh, thank God.” Clara was crouched next to me. “You’re back.”
“What happened?” For a moment, my mind was blank. My head hurt. I looked around, surprised to find myself propped up against a tree. “Where am I?”
“The bus rolled.” Clara reached out and took my hand. “You took a real beating, hit the roof. We thought you were dead.”
“No such luck.” Things were coming back now. I remembered the chase, shooting back at the truck after it took out our tire. I also remembered the strange room, and Doctor Meadows. Was that all just a dream, something my mind fabricated while I was out cold? It must have been, because I also remembered seeing Emily, alive and well, just before I woke up. The only way she could be there, out in the real world without a scratch on her, was if the whole thing was nothing more than my own damaged mind keeping me entertained until I could recover from what must have been a tremendous knock on the head. Finally, pushing the unsettling thoughts from my mind, I looked at Clara. “Are you hurt?”
“I’m fine, except for a few cuts and bruises. I was wearing a seat belt. Those school busses are built like tanks.” She smiled. “Not that I’d want to do it again, mind you.”
“Yeah.” I glanced sideways, toward the road. The bus lay on its side. It looked like some almighty hand had taken a hammer and pounded it. All the window glass was gone, and the yellow paint was now missing in places, replaced by scrapes of bare metal where the vehicle had bounced and slid. Along the road, behind the bus, was a trail of debris. “Boy, we really wrecked that thing.” I forced a smile. It hurt my face so I stopped.
The Remnants of Yesterday Page 20