Drugs, nothing like the methamphetamine that got me in here in the first place, had slowed my mind down while the doctors uploaded their own «corrective» programming. It had felt like I served an eighty year term. But, I’d been in prison for only three hours.
By year twelve, things had gotten rough. I’d wanted to die, begged them to let me die, but they’d ignored me. Just kept pumping the drugs through my system. By year sixty, I had arthritis so bad that waking up was a daily lesson in misery. By year seventy, cataracts had clouded my vision, preventing me from reading, which had been the one thing that had kept me sane.
And, I woke up to find that none of it had been real.
Phantom pains echoed in my joints. Everything I looked at was in exaggerated colors. A headache throbbed behind my eyes. Another spasm racked my muscles. They’d said muscular anxiety would be a possible long term side effect. I climbed into the waiting taxi.
«312 Eisenhower Street,” I said before rifling through the plastic bag. I didn’t bother reading the dosage instructions. I opened each of the three pill bottles and popped the drug cocktail intended to keep Gao candidates from losing it once they were tossed back into the real world. I leaned back and felt the pills work their magic.
I sensed someone watching me and I opened my eyes. «What?» I growled.
«Is the Gao treatment as bad as they say?» the driver asked.
I closed my eyes again. «Yeah. It’s bad.»
«I have a nephew that’s had a couple brushes with the law. I keep telling him he’s got to behave or else they’ll Gao him. But he don’t listen. He’s young and stupid. What’d you get caught for?»
«Possession of illegal substances,” I replied.
The driver continued. «So does it work? They say you can’t go near crime without getting sick. That true?»
«I haven’t had a chance to find out yet.»
The interminably long ride ended with the driver still asking questions like he was Anderson Cooper. I didn’t leave him a tip and headed into my dump of a house. I half–expected to see everything covered in years of dust and my goldfish floating corpses, but the house was exactly as I’d left it this morning.
I headed straight for the drawer with the hidden back and reached for my stash. As soon as my fingers touched the plastic, a wave of nausea swept over me. I tried again and found myself lurching to the sink to puke.
I wiped my mouth with the back of my hand before laughing uncontrollably and without humor. They’d really done it. I was still me, but they were in my head, too, and I hated them for it.
Slamming the drawer closed, I headed outside and to the bar.
It took me three months to adjust to having two realities shoved into my brain. I learned what I could control and what the Gao programming controlled. I turned in my best friend, the neighborhood’s biggest drug dealer, to the cops two weeks after I was Gao’d. Things got a bit easier each day after that.
«What do you want me to do with this punk?»
I cracked my neck from side to side before examining the man bleeding on my floor. Two of my henchmen held him to keep him from collapsing. If he was conscious, he showed no signs.
«Put a bullet in his head,” I said. «And leave his body out for his friends to find him first.» I took a step closer, careful not to touch him or risk the Gao nausea. «No one sells drugs in my neighborhood. No one except me.»
I motioned to my boys to take him away, and I looked through my office window to watch the manufacturing line below. A muscle spasm shot through my body, but I was used to it. Instead, I smiled. My empire was growing.
I couldn’t touch drugs after I’d been Gao’d, and that helped me keep my head on straight. I couldn’t get my hands dirty, and that kept me off the cops’ radar. I’d always known I could run the business twice as good as my old buddy could. He enjoyed sampling his own stuff too much, and without the Gao programming, I would’ve been just like him.
No, I knew I could do it better than he'd done. I’d just needed to a plan, and that was easy enough. After all, I’d had eighty years to work out the details.
This wonderful short was written by Wattpadder RachelAukes, writer of 100 Days in Deadland and various other fantastic stories.
Reginac7 Somewhere Else
«You're an expert dreamer. There’s nothing to worry about.»
Melanie Five was an optimist. A calculating one. She expected her programs would work. A game, she called it.
I spent my days anticipating the fear that would grab at me when she arrived in the lab and sent us to sleep. Yet I wondered if it was the open–ended aspect of it all that was the real terror. She gave me freedom to go where I wanted but I didn't know how to stop once I was speeding along. Time emerged like a child’s tower of blocks, collapsing as I passed by.
The smallest planet always appeared first. I covered its circumference in two, no, three steps. I felt like a giant walking across the brown and gray rock. Around me in my dream’s eye I saw the emptiness, the black night, galaxies in the distance coming toward me or expanding away.
It was the largest planet, though, that made me sense something hidden and waiting. I struggled to penetrate down to its surface but dense clouds stopped me.
«Do you still dream?» I asked Melanie Five once.
«Of course not!» she said. «I stopped that long ago. I have other work now. I am developing a new game, in fact, that will reproduce my earliest years. It should turn out to be great fun.»
Her reputation was flawless, over a million dreams that she had experienced and recorded. Part of our training was to live in her image.
«A dream is a fabrication, no more than the firing of synaptic charges. The game is meant to help you know who you are in physical space. You need to put your faith in what you can experience in the dreams and bring that confidence into real life.»
I told her I didn’t understand.
«You know, Thelonious, if you insist on challenging my methods, one night I might forget to retrieve you from the dream at all. Now, I know you don’t want that!» She smiled and pretended to laugh. «You love the freedom your body has in the dream. That's the point of it! Relax. Go to sleep. I’ll take care of you.»
Her reassurances were hollow. She wasn’t there to take care of any of us with our problems in physical space, the disabilities that had brought us to her in the first place. She was there to see how her game played out.
Its essence was solitude. There was only this endless journeying through the black void into unknown star systems and beyond those into distances never seen before or marked in any way. There was only the terror. That was what she monitored with her instruments and careful notes.
What to do? It came to me one day as if the idea had been waiting for me to notice it. As I fitted my false left arm with the old, familiar brace, I remembered. As I applied the necessary cream to the burns that traced much of my body, I remembered. As I slipped awkwardly into my chair and drove it out of the building, I knew. The chip she had inserted into my brain had one flaw. It would let me linger in a place as long as I wanted.
I arrived early for the next session and entered into the dream faster than I ever had before. I heard her shout of approval as I did so.
I approached the largest planet first. Its dense clouds moved in the familiar swirling streams below me. This time I stayed, watching. I had nothing to lose anymore but my fear.
After a while I heard the call from the surface of the planet below, a seductive whistling that resonated through me like the vibration of glass. In the next moment my left arm was my own again, blood and muscle and tissue, and my skin was whole. «You have always been perfect,” I heard a voice say. «We have anticipated your arrival.»
A vortex emerged, spinning counter–clockwise, and I hovered near it. At the narrow base I saw nothing but the flickering of light, and then a landscape showed itself, filled with life forms, all of them beckoning to me.