Seeds of Foreverland: A Science Fiction Thriller
Page 7
“Enough with the tongue, son. It’s time to grow up. There is no more time to be childish. This is the future. Do you understand me? You will bring the future to the world.”
He wanted to remind his father that he was twelve years old. But he had slapped the child out of him. Harold didn’t dare sharpen his tongue. Ever again.
“You are at the foot of changing the human race. I want no more jokes from you. Your mother and I have discovered freedom that you cannot fathom. And it will be yours to see it through.”
“See what through?”
“Dreams, son. We have freed the mind. The mind is the fertile ground that gives rise to new universes. We are the seeds of embryonic realities, you understand. Each of us is a soul that can give birth to new universes, new realities. New gods. We’re counting on you.”
“On me? I don’t… I mean… I don’t understand.”
“Shhh. Stop for a moment. It’s a lot, but there isn’t much time. You’ll have to trust me on this. Put your arm here.”
He patted the workbench.
Harold laid it down. His father, the neurosurgeon, the computer geek, poked it and prodded, told him to move his fingers and turn his hand, then diagnosed it as a sprain.
“Put some ice on it.”
That was what he said and got up like they had been discussing Little League baseball. Not gods and angels. Not helpless animals brained by a needle. Not dreamworlds that were real.
Dad checked the readings on a few instruments, but the monitors remained blank. He stood over Mom and then pointed.
“Upstairs,” he said.
“Where we going?”
“You’ve had enough for now.”
“Shouldn’t you… I mean, if I’m going to dominate the world, shouldn’t you show me how it works?”
Even in the dim basement, his father’s furrowed brows darkened; his eyes became dark holes. Creases cut his forehead, wrinkling the slick shine around the hole. That was as close to jokes as Harold would get.
“What about Mom?” Harold asked. “Is she okay?”
“She’s beautiful.”
“Can we wake her up?”
He shook his head.
“What do you mean?” Harold whined.
“She’s in a good place now.”
“She’s—” Harold almost fell down. His father was talking about her like she was sleeping.
“She’s not dead,” he said. “In fact, she’s never been so alive.”
“How long does she have to stay?”
He didn’t answer.
That was when Harold noticed the other tubes, the clear ones running from the insides of her arms. She was being fed. His father didn’t have those. He must’ve been getting up and taking care of things while Mom stayed there. Already her knees and elbows were bent, fingers curled like autumn leaves.
That was why the tube was gone on the desk. His father had gone up there, he had been doing business. That was the gel they soothed their foreheads with before the needle plunged.
“Son.”
His father grabbed his arm, but Harold yanked away. He took his mom’s hand, his fingers fitting into hers, the palm warm and dry. Her lips were parted, a fresh sheen of balm gleaming on them. Had he put that on, too?
The needle. It was so long, so firmly rooted.
His shoulders began quaking. That knot of fear that swelled in his throat was back, only this time it continued growing until it broke in a puddle of tears that spilled down his cheeks. He tried to stop the sobs, tried to keep quiet, waiting for his father to come around the table and slap the child from him again. But he didn’t. He let Harold cry for his mom.
Because she wasn’t going to wake up.
Harold bawled until snot leaked from his nostrils. He just wanted to talk with her, that was all. Just wanted her to open her eyes so he could tell her something, just one last thing before all this was over. If he could just go out on the patio and she could smoke a cigarette, he could tell her not to go down into the basement. Not to put the needle in her head.
The world could wait.
“Life.” His father’s hands rested on Harold’s shoulders like stiff paddles. “She’s creating life, son.”
“I don’t care.”
“Her dream will become a new reality where anything is possible, where she can be a benevolent goddess, a caretaker for a new world. There will be no death, son. She will create a universe that lives forever.”
Harold continued crying.
His father went to the head of the bed and gently combed through Mom’s short, choppy hair. It had been months since Harold had seen her without the kerchief. Without it, he would’ve seen the hole.
“All our test subjects are in their own worlds,” his father said with a quiet, calm tone. “The computers augment their dreams. They make their own reality, son. But their minds are small, their worlds limited. The most they can experience is a tiny bit of space. But your mother…”
He stroked her cheek.
“Her world is so much bigger.”
“I don’t care.” Harold wiped his eyes.
“You have to accept this.”
“Why?”
“To be a goddess requires total commitment.”
In time, he would learn how to deal with his sleeping mother, but he would never accept it. Perhaps she wanted to do this like his father said. Maybe this was her idea, her master plan. Later, doctors would explain that the brain damage sustained by his father’s technology was irreversible, that removing the needle would end her life.
He would always hold it against him.
His father pried Harold’s hand from his mother. Gently, he guided him to the steps. When Harold resisted, he pushed.
Harold didn’t look back.
12.
Harold was shipped off to the grandparents.
He returned to pick up clothes or a toothbrush and find his father in the office. The doors would be closed, but drawers would be opening or closing, his business-voice would be on the phone. The conversations were often heated.
Harold would eyeball the basement door, but his father would always sense him in the house, peel open one of the doors and stare. Sometimes he’d say something.
Most of the time he’d just stare.
It was just before the police arrived in their unmarked cars that Harold had snuck over early one morning on his bike. They would park black SUVs in the street and knock on the door. His father answered as if expecting them. His office was in order, papers for Harold’s custody to be awarded to the grandparents and his wishes for his wife’s care. Federal investigators put him in the backseat and drove him off.
Harold would never talk to him again.
Blake and John told their parents what they saw. At first, they just wanted to get Harold in trouble. However, their parents alerted the police and they quickly went to federal authorities. Tyler Ballard’s arrest was imminent.
Almost planned.
His mom would remain in the basement. Months later, Harold saw them escorting her out of the house with a bevy of electronics below the gurney and the needle still in her forehead.
But before all that, Harold snuck into the house to see the office doors slightly ajar. His father was asleep, his cheek pressed against the desk calendar.
The basement door hinges squeaked.
Harold pulled the door open enough to slip inside and descend into the darkness. He paused on the bottom step, waiting for his eyes to adjust while the industrial dehumidifier hummed in the corner. He stood there so long that he expected his father to pull the door open.
In the green and red electronic light, his mom rested peacefully.
He tried not to look at the needle spiked in the middle of her forehead, tried not to imagine the queer sensation of the cold shank sliding into her front lobe or the gel slipping it through a surgically installed stent. Was she in pain? Did she feel the cold splinter in her head, an itch she couldn’t scratch?
His fat
her had been down here, he was sure of that. Her hands were no longer at her sides but now folded across her stomach; her lips glistened with a fresh coat of lip balm, the corners turned up slightly. Or did he imagine that?
She already looked older.
The bed began to whir. Her body rolled in a rhythm that massaged her from beneath. A special bed for the comatose patient that was likely to suffer from bed sores.
There was a temptation to pull out the needle, to force her awake. She could put it back if she wanted, go back to her dreamworld, that place that his father said would last forever. But just one more time, he wanted to talk to her.
Why didn’t she say goodbye?
His father never explained how they did all this, what the protocol required or the software backups that sustained his mother’s body while she dreamed. Many years later, Harold would understand. He would take the technology to even greater heights and use it in ways his father never dreamed of using it. But for now, as a child, all he saw was a needle.
Where is she?
If he pulled it out, would she be in there? Or would that just be an empty body, a place where his mother once lived? That would be Harold’s greatest discovery; one day he would learn the identity was not bound to the body. It only needed a vehicle, and the body was such a poor one, indeed. The senses easily fooled, the mental filters willfully delusional.
He took her hand. It was cool but lotioned. Her elbow moved like a rusted hinged. He tucked his fingers into hers and felt the tears wanting to gush up, but he put them back. He just wanted to stand there as long as he could, until his father came for him.
He just wanted to be with her in case it hurt.
Perhaps he imagined that she knew he was there, could feel his touch and squeezed back, because one of the monitors came on at that moment, the black screen crackling like a sheet of plastic. Images slowly replaced his reflection, emerging from the dark of a long, deep sleep.
At first, it seemed like a screensaver had been activated. It appeared to be a stock photo of a long, empty beach, the kind Harold longed for. The sun was rising off the horizon, slices of fire brimming the distant surf. The sand was slick and smooth, the incoming tide licking the beach with thin foamy sheets that eroded a set of footsteps.
Harold followed the tracks to a distant figure.
She was wearing a flowing dress hiked to the knees. She stopped to pick up a seashell, examining it before tossing it in the tide.
The tears came for Harold again. He couldn’t stop them this time, their salty tracks resting on his upper lip. Eyes blurred, he watched the woman idly wander in her new world.
Wearing a pink kerchief.
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Copyright © 2015 by Tony Bertauski
All rights reserved, including the right of reproduction in whole or in part in any form.
This book is a work of fiction. The use of real people or real locations is used fictitiously. Any resemblance of characters to real persons is purely coincidental.
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