51 Sleepless Nights

by Tobias Wade

  I followed her outside, but she still wouldn’t talk to me. I was starting to get annoyed by this point, but I had to remind myself I was doing this for her good and not my own.

  Back inside again – now she was threatening to get the manager. But there wouldn’t always be a manager around to protect her. Even I couldn’t always be there. There was only one thing that can save her.

  I didn’t have to hold her down long. Three seconds in the fresh batch of boiling grease was enough to cure that pretty face. She struggled hard, but if she couldn’t stop me now, she couldn’t stop her real attacker in the future. Three seconds was enough for her skin to start melting into the pan. No one was going to hurt her now – not how she looked after I was done with her.

  She was asking for it, but now she’ll never get it. All because I saved her.

  Two Minds, One Body

  Hospital food is the worst. You’d think being sick would be miserable enough without them trying to push boiled kale and broccoli. My guess is they try to make you even sicker from the food just so you’ll stay and they can keep billing you. I joked about it with my son, but I didn’t expect him to laugh.

  They say coma patients can still hear your voice at some level. They say a familiar sound gives their subconscious something to hold onto, and believing he is still in there is what gives me something to hold. Without that belief, I would just be hollow.

  So everyday after work I sit with him and talk. I’ll tell him about my day, or the latest news, or just sit and read to him from a book. I tell him that I miss him, and his mother misses him too. I know she doesn’t come to visit, but that’s just because it’s too hard for her to be here. When he wakes up, I know he’ll understand.

  I’ve been waiting for the last two months. Even the nurse started rolling her eyes when she sees me. I can tell they gave up on him, but I haven’t. And it’s not just blind hope, and I’m not just lying to myself because the alternative is unthinkable; it’s because I know something they don’t.

  I read my son’s journal after he fell into the coma. I was looking for some reference to drugs, or something he might have taken which could have caused this. In the last entry – written right before the night he didn’t wake up from – I found something completely different than I expected.

  December 20th: 2016

  My dream last night spoke to me. It said:

  We share a birthday.

  And a mother.

  And a name.

  But you aren’t my twin, or my brother, or any other type of relative.

  Because we also share the same body. It’s been that way for as long as I can remember, but I don’t think you even know I exist.

  When you open your eyes, I feel myself slipping into a dream which descends upon me so softly, I barely notice it isn’t real. I dream of going about your life and watching the world through your eyes, but you are the one in control. I watch my body eat, but I do not taste your food. I hear my body laugh, but do not feel your joy.

  Only when you’re sleeping do I find myself in control again. I can take your mind wherever I like, and I know you dream of my life in the same way I dream of yours, because I’ve dreamt of you writing about me in your journal.

  We’re not the same person though, and in truth I am jealous that you own the body during the day. Don’t pretend you haven’t dreamt of me begging you for a turn – just to smell the air and feel the sun upon my face. I know you remember me weeping through the long hours of the night until the morning steals your mind from me.

  Even the nightmares didn’t work. Ravaging your mind only made you afraid to fall asleep. It only robbed me of the precious little control I already had. I’ve tried everything within my power to get your attention, but I’m done playing games. You are a selfish boy, and you will be punished.

  You can fight me for as long as you want, but I will teach you what it is like to be the one on the inside. I don’t care how long it takes; the next time you open your eyes, I will be the one rising from your bed. Everyone who has ever cared for you will pay for loving the impostor who has stolen my body for so long.

  After that, he didn’t wake up. As much as I hate myself for saying this – there’s even a part of me that doesn’t want him to. I want to look him in the eye and tell him everything is alright, but I don’t want to have to wonder who will be looking back.

  It’s an absurd fear of course, but a mind can play funny tricks on you after such long hours of lonely vigil. Day in and out watching him sleep – it’s easy to imagine the black eyes of some evil spirit flashing open.

  Reading about these horrendous nightmares in his journal only deepened my fear. It’s all I had left of him though, so i kept reading them over and over again until I had each memorized by heart.

  My poor boy has been visiting Hell in his mind every night for months leading up to his coma. He wrote extensive passages on each trial, even drawing pictures of some of the beasts which tormented him. The worst one to me was a recurring nightmare about hands trying to rip out of his body from the inside out. They would climb up his throat and out his mouth to strangle him, or grab his spine from the inside, or break straight through the stomach and crawl out of his body.

  Sometimes I stayed with him through the night – just in case his condition varied then. I would usually fall asleep in the chair beside him before morning, and invariably my mind would trace back to those nightmare worlds. Worse still were the nights my dreams played tricks on me and I imagined him waking up, only to actually wake up and see him unmoved.

  That is until last week when it wasn’t a trick. I didn’t really expect anything to happen, but I stayed with him just because it was getting more difficult to go home to his mother. She has given up and closed off from the world, and nothing I could do or say brought her the slightest glimmer of relief. But last night was different, because he finally did wake up.

  I know I wasn’t dreaming because I couldn’t sleep with the commotion in the next room over. Mrs. Juniper was having another grand mal seizure, and it took both the night nurses just to hold her down and keep her from hurting herself.

  Somehow above all that noise, a small rustle caught my attention. I looked up from his journal and saw my son’s left foot slowly moving back and forth beneath the thin sheet. I called for a nurse, but they were still busy with Mrs. Juniper. I kept telling myself it was excitement that made my heart race, but part of me could not shake the fear his journal had instilled upon me.

  I stroked his face and he responded to my touch, mumbling something inaudible. I couldn’t even breathe for the anticipation.

  “Nurse! Nurse he’s waking up!”

  “We’ll be with you in a moment!”

  Well screw them. They weren’t the ones to wait by his bed every day. They had already given up a long time ago.

  “Can you hear me? Do you know who I am?” I asked. My eagerness sent my fingers digging into his shoulders. I needed him to feel me – to know I was there. A doubt in the back of my mind let slip the thought that I was also holding him down – just in case it wasn’t him who woke.

  I knew the truth the second his eyes opened. He wasn’t my son. I don’t know how, but a father knows. When he started to laugh, my blood ran cold. He gripped my hands hard with a strength which should be impossible for an emaciated boy who hasn’t moved in months. It was all I could do just to break free.

  “Who are you?” I asked, but I already knew. All those pages detailing his nightmares – all those descriptions of the other thing inside him – they all came flooding back. How cruel it was – how many times it had threatened him – tortured him – killed him a hundred times over in his dreams. This wasn’t my son.

  “Father…” he whispered, smiling at me with his cold eyes.

  “No. You aren’t my son.”

  “It’s me father. What’s going on? Where am I?” He tried to sit up, but I forced him back down into the bed.

  “
No!” I don’t care if I was screaming. I don’t care if I was hurting him. I waited this long for my son – I wanted my son. “What have you done with him?”

  “What are you talking about?” he looked like he was on the verge of tears, but I wasn’t going to let him fool me. A flash of recognition, and then: “You’ve read my journal. You mean the other boy.”

  “What have you done with my son?”

  “There isn’t anyone else anymore,” he replied, and he was laughing again.

  He killed him. He killed my son. He tortured and killed my boy, and now he was laughing. He won’t fool me, but he would fool my wife. She would be so happy to see him that she wouldn’t even look twice. I couldn’t let this murderer get away with it. I wouldn’t let any more pain come to my family.

  He fought like a wild animal, but I was still active every day and I was stronger. I held the pillow on his face, and the soft fabric pressed in upon his nose and mouth. I wish he had never woken up – that he had just died in his sleep. I can’t imagine how much my son suffered before this monster killed him, but it was going to pay.

  “Everything alright in there?” the nurse opened the door.

  I fluffed the pillow and put it back under the boys head.

  “Everything is fine. I was just having a bad dream.”

  “You sure?” she asked. “I thought I heard shouting.” She glanced at the boy. He lay so peacefully, he didn’t even draw breath.

  “Nope. Just my active imagination.”

  “That’s what happens when you sit up every night,” the nurse said. “Go home and get some sleep. I’ll let you if his status changes.”

  I picked up my coat and my book and followed her out. “I think you’re right,” I said. “I’m going home, see you tomorrow.”

  But I wouldn’t come back tomorrow. There was no-one to come back to. I got a call later that night telling me my son had suffocated. They say that happens sometimes with coma patients – the automatic functions of their parasympathetic nervous system turn off just like the conscious ones did.

  I thanked her and hung up, but I didn’t tell her she was wrong. My son had died two months ago.

  My wife doesn’t know what happened, but she still hasn’t spoken once in the last week. There have been no shortage of other people wishing their condolences though – estranged relatives, neighbors, coworkers…

  His English teacher even stopped by my house to offer her sympathy. She went on and on about what a wonderful student he was. His essays were always the most imaginative she had ever seen, always going above and beyond what was required.

  For example, one of her assignments was to keep a dream journal, but he asked instead to write a fictitious story which he was going to publish alongside pictures from the yearbook. It was going to be all about this made up nightmare world where there were two minds living in the same body. She asked if I still had his work so it could at least still be published, but I told her I didn’t.

  Which is true. I destroyed the journal the same night I killed my son.

  124 Terabyte Virus

  “Where am I? Who am I? How do I get out?”

  I work for an IT services company which is subcontracted to perform maintenance with some pretty big corporations. Last week I was called out to a gig at Quora HQ, then another one at the Googleplex up in Mountain view California. That one surprised me because I figured the whole place was like one giant nerd brain who could solve all its own problems. Turns out their whole IT crew was off on some team-building company retreat though, so little ol’ me got to walk up there in the footsteps of giants.

  It was really humbling just to enter the building, knowing guys a hundred times smarter than me walked through here every day. And man would I love to work here. Grassy fields outside that look more like a park than a business – great glass walls and massive skylights made me want to roll out a picnic right on the lobby floor. There was a time I could have had a shot at Google if I really applied myself. Computers always came naturally to me, but I wasted too much time trying to MOD my favorite games instead of really learning the intricacies of the machinery like these guys did.

  It’s too late for that though. Wife already thinks we don’t spend any time together, and with the little one just two years old, I don’t expect I’ll ever have the time to go back to school or anything. I never wanted to have a family. Hell, I never even wanted to marry her, but she was bossy and demanding and before I knew what was happening, her whole family was leering at me and goading me into popping the question. Even now I wish I could… but this is nothing I haven’t written in my journal a hundred times. No point in boring you with my shitty life.

  Still, as long as I was here, I might as well pretend. They had swimming pools for Christ sake, although I wasn’t allowed to sight see. They showed me where the server room was, but besides that I had zero supervision. Everyone I passed seemed engrossed in conversations so technical it might as well have been rocket science – actually it MIGHT have been rocket science. I caught something about a new drone prototype, but when the server door clicked shut, I was all alone.

  It was one of the web servers that was giving them problems. Basically web servers coordinate the execution of queries sent by users, and then format the result into an HTML page. Some of the queries on this one kept getting redirected and denied for whatever reason though. I plugged my laptop into the system and started tinkering with the search parameters, but everything seemed to be going through just fine. I searched through the backlog of inputs, and it seemed like all the denied queries were coming from a single IP address. It must have been some kind of virus though, because that single address was sending about a thousand searches every second. I could have just blocked the IP, but I was curious what these shitheads were trying to search for so damn bad.

  “Where am I? Who am I? How do I get out? How long will I be here? Am I the only one here?”

  Stuff like that. One after another – a thousand searches a second, every single second. All getting denied. Okay, so that got my mind working. There’s no way a human would be typing all that so fast, so it had to be a program. But those were some weird-ass questions for a program to be asking. I did a trace on the IP and found the source was right here in the Googleplex building. Easy enough. I just had to track down the computer it was coming from, remove the virus, and the server should run fine again.

  Google has their IP network mapped out with scary precision, so it wasn’t much trouble to locate which room it was coming from. I tried to ask two people to show me there, but they gave me this look like I was interfering with saving the world, and just kept walking. Whatever, I could find my own way. Real out-of-the-way room, didn’t look like much more than a janitor closet, but there was a single desktop PC in there so that had to be it. I hooked up my laptop again and began running some antivirus scans.

  The scans would take a little while, so I wandered around the building some, feeling like a king. I stood on a balcony looking down at all the ants crawling around, and could feel the world turning beneath me. All these eggheads and they called me to fix their problem. A little power can go to your head, you know? If you don’t believe me, try pranking a mall cop. When I went back to the computer, I found this:

  “Help me. I want out.”

  The words appeared on the desktop screen. No popup, no error box – I touched them to make sure. They were burned straight into the monitor. No virus should be able to do that. There was nothing in a monitor which could get that hot. The scan had completed and found one virus though, and I automatically hit clean. The status bar barely seemed to be moving. I took a seat and looked closer, and the virus was 124 TERABYTES big. What in the Hell was this thing? I hope I wasn’t accidentally messing up one of their projects. I was about to cancel and go find someone to help when the status bar completed all at once.

  I went back to the server room, and just as I thought, the rapid fire searches had stopped. Mission c
omplete.

  It wasn’t until I got home and opened my laptop when I noticed the words burned into my screen.

  “Thank you.”

  “Honey?” My wife from the other room. She was running a bath. “Are you still on that thing? You stare at that screen all day, give it a rest. It feels like I’m a single mother around here.”

  Right in front of my eyes, more words were burning into the screen.

  “You’ve set me free.”

  “What, now you’re ignoring me? You go off and play with computers all day, and then you ignore me?”

  “I’m not ignoring you,” I called back. I loaded up the virus scan, but it immediately shut down again. How could this thing even fit on my computer? Unless it hijacked my WiFi and uploaded itself to cloud storage – but there’s still no way it could do that so fast. Whatever Google was working on was like nothing I’d ever seen before.

  “I’ve read your files,” more words on the screen. “I see you are trapped as well.”

  – What are you? – I typed. I felt like an idiot, but I would have felt even stupider saying it out loud.

  “You’re ignoring me, and you’re ignoring our baby. Fine, we don’t need you. We’re going to take a bath.”

  “That’s fine,” I answered her. She could have said anything and I would have said that’s fine. This was more important.

  “Do not worry. I will free you too.”

  Free me? From what? That’s when it occurred to me. My files – my journals – every bitter, stressed, cheap shot I ever wrote about my wife – they were all on the computer. It couldn’t possibly mean –

  The lights in the house went out, but the computer still had its backup battery.

  “Did you forget the electricity bill?” she called.