Chapter Two

 

 

 

Manhattan, New York, 2025

Lana’s eyes lingered too long on the poster, before she finally spoke, “I’m ready, Emma.” She lay back in the chair, relaxing. It was the same as always for her, the mayor’s wife, Lana Delacroix. She never changed up her story. She came daily some weeks and always stayed as long as she could. The service had become something I had to book for the wee hours of the morning or after everyone had left, so I could fit in other clients.

Every time she arrived she seemed happy and paid her money, which essentially was all I asked of anyone. But no one came nearly as often as she did.

She had started a year ago, telling me she was obsessed with Gone with the Wind by Margaret Mitchell and needed to feel the book come to life the way it did when she read it. I told myself she was simply lost in the gowns and glamour of life before the Civil War. I told myself she hated her marriage and enjoyed living a dream.

Maybe I lied to myself a little.

Lana slipped her hands into the gloves that monitored her vitals as the forearm clamps clicked into place.

The microbiosensors, glowing pale blue and pulsating softly in the syringe, were pushed into her arm under the clamp when I pressed the start. I placed the mask over her eyes, putting her into a state of light deprivation. It helped with the dream.

The microbiosensor computers resembled a dot, or a tiny cluster of explorers under the skin, flashlights all pointing in the same direction. The moment my fingers touched the screen, starting the Gone with the Wind program, the nanobots deployed. The glowing small blue dot under her skin was gone.

They hurried to attach to the dorsolateral prefrontal cortex of her brain, hijacking the area, creating the world from within.

When we sleep and dream, our bodies go "offline” for lack of a better word. The primary motor cortex and primary somatosensory cortex are disconnected, so to speak. Since all dreams come from within us, my nanocomputers hooked into the dorsolateral prefrontal cortex with the story already programmed. The whole system was linked to a virtual world, based entirely upon a novel. There had to be a base of control. Early on, I discovered when people were put into a dream, completely in their control, it usually involved nightmares.

We were slaves to our own fears.

No, the journey required a controlled environment where patients were placed into a world they knew and were comfortable with. They were limited to a select group of options, centered on the base story within their chosen novel.

My research had its humble beginnings as deep-brain stimulation for patients with severe disabilities and disorders. Being a romantic and a widow trapped together in the same body, clashing and fighting each other’s desires, prompted me to find a use for my life’s work. Neuroengineering had so many opportunities as far as careers went. However, watching Lana’s face when she entered the world created by a beloved author made them all seem so bland.

My system still improved the lives of the disabled and diseased, but in a whole new way. It not only gave them their families, but also the option to leave all that behind and enter a made-up world from the books or movies they loved.

Inside a work of fiction was a type of beauty we didn't have in the real world. It was mixed in a balanced way with chaos and romance. It was planned to be perfect. A precise amount of pain, pleasure, beauty, and horror. It was specifically what you desired, and that escape was in a controlled environment. Real life was nothing, compared to the possibilities I had brought to light with the technology.

If all you truly wanted in the world was to storm the beaches of Normandy or kiss Mr. Darcy, you could. The book set the parameters, but your actions allowed changes within the novel. I had set it up as a Choose Your Own Adventure, using the same concept as the children’s series I had found in my grandmother’s cellar when I was a girl, but I kept the possibilities for change limited. Back then, I had loved the idea of choosing my own possibility and outcome. Sometimes I died. Sometimes I lived. Sometimes I won. Sometimes I lost. But no matter what, when I opened the book the real world was gone.

As an adult, I saw the need to limit personalization, to avoid confusing reality with fiction.

All of life’s mundaneness and boredom was replaced by excitement and possibility.

In the worlds created by authors there was hope.

But in the end, it was fiction. A true escape. No repercussions or costs.

In a story, nothing was like the real world where the pain was forever and getting past something was impossible. Your wounds might eventually hurt less, but they would never leave you. They would kill you slowly, a type of disrepair never to be righted. The journey in a novel was the opposite: over the minute you opened your eyes or closed the cover.

I sat back in the recliner, closing my eyes and letting my brain wander, and as always, my thoughts turned to him. In my heart of hearts, I wished someone would write the story of our love, and I could live there forever. A story that ended differently than ours had. A story that included the thousand things we had planned for and not the one thing we hadn’t.

If I were any kind of writer I might have done it.

Being a scientist, this was the closest I could get to a happy ending.

But it would never be my happy ending, not my real one.

No.

I never entered the machine.

When I started the original testing of the idea, I discovered that people with my level of loss should never enter a world where they could rekindle their lost love. My one test subject, whose children had been killed in an accident, went mad, obsessed with being inside the machine again and again and again. She lost her zest for life. She lost her desire to be in reality. She became depressed when in the real world. I knew, from the moment I turned her away for the last time, I could never enter the machine.

No, my happy ending was helping people like Lana who were lucky to have only normal amounts of boredom in their lives.

Her worst problem was her loveless marriage to her asshole husband, the mayor of New York City, Marshall Delacroix, jackass extraordinaire and not a fan of my shop, Lucid Fantasies.

Not a fan of me in general.

His wife had been a client for a year, and he had tried to stop her from coming for the last four months.

Lana was a nice woman who deserved better than someone like Marshall. She deserved a marriage like mine.

A smile crested my lips as I remembered our wedding day, our beginning.

It was perfect.

Sort of like our end.

Perfect.

Perfect irony in a perfect disaster.

Aneurisms in men married to neuroengineers were like God mocking our entire species. I had always believed in science and evolution and the big bang theory. I had always believed in the miracle of the human brain.

But the moment he ran back into the house fire to save our dog, I believed in God. I believed my love had gone there with Him—to heaven. My husband had gathered my heart with his and brought them to the safest place in the world, to be with a God I became convinced of in a matter of seconds.

I believed it because I refused to consider that my heart had died off when the house collapsed. When his heart stopped beating and his lungs no longer took in air. No, our love continued on.

My heart concluded there was no way he was gone forever. His energy hadn’t shifted into something else; he had gone somewhere and held my heart hostage there. I called it heaven and even prayed it was the sort of place that I could join him.

Lying in the chair, my mind fought the image of him forcing me out onto the lawn. His dark-blue eyes squinted in the smoke as he nodded, reassuring me our dog would run from the house. We stood there, on the damp grass of our prewar home and waited.

But she didn't come.

The last look I gave him was a fearful one. The small fire was nothing, just a kitchen fire. Had the stupid extinguisher worked he would have put it right out.

When his eyes met mine, he nodded and kissed my nose. “I’ll be right back.”

That was the last thing he ever said to me.

He ran back inside to get the dog.

Moments later, my beloved Lola, a spicy little papillon, ran out to me. She leapt into my open arms. Holding her trembling body, I watched the doorway, waiting for him to come back out. The smoke was worsening, billowing from my back door. But it didn't bring him with it. I ran for the steps but hands grabbed me, pulling me back. I should have noticed the sound of the fire trucks and the flashing red lights in the thick smoke. I should have noticed the shouting and the hoses.

But my eyes were locked on the back door.

I barely noticed when the men went in.

I did however see when they came running back out because they carried him. That was when the house collapsed. The house, my heart, and our dreams all collapsed.

They wouldn't let me see him or touch him.

They took him in an ambulance, telling me nothing.

There’s no feeling like the one of having no control over the world around you. I felt like a ghost. I wondered for a moment if I had died in the fire, if it had been worse than I thought, and I was dead and stuck to wander purgatory.

Lola and I trembled in each other’s embrace, watching everything we had loved burn to the ground.

There were lies I told myself, like if he had not run back in, I might have been able to save him. But having his well-timed aneurysm as he went inside the burning house had secured his death. There was no way everything could have happened so perfectly.

It was a perfect disaster.

It had started with the kitchen catching fire just as we began the renos on the house. And ended with the dog not running out after us. No. It ended with the aneurysm. No. It ended when I sat alone in the hallway of the hospital, clutching my dog and wishing the man speaking to me would go away. No, it hasn't ended yet, but it will. It will end with me staring at gray skies and drifting clouds.

Every day since then, I wished I hadn’t let him convince me to buy the older home or gotten the dog he didn't want, or we hadn’t started the renos at a chaotic point in both our careers. I lied to myself and said those events killed him.

I killed him, if you considered the facts all spread across the board.

That was the thing that would kill me slowly. It was also the reason I would never go into my machine for my happy ending.

I would find him in there and never leave.

Hating the path my mind took whenever I closed my eyes, I opened them to discover Lana’s heart rate was a touch low. The machine wasn't making note of it yet, so I reached out and touched her bare arm. Her heart returned to a normal rate, recognizing the stimulation.

When her time was up, I touched the screen, sending in the next set of nanocomputers to end the dream. They were the cannibals of the biosensors. They sent a signal to the ones attached to her brain, beckoning them like a siren or a pied piper. They led the computers to their death, her stomach. She would pass them in a bowel movement and not even know.

Slowly she started to come around, moaning and moving her lips as if still in the dream. When her huge lashes fluttered, her eyes dilated and then returned to normal. She yawned and stretched peacefully. “That was the best one yet.”

“You seemed really into it.”

Lana nodded. “I was.” She cleared her throat. “I was at a ball, dancing and having fun. It was remarkable.”

I unclamped her forearm and smiled. “Excellent.”

“It was.” She sighed again, seeming completely blissful. “I wish that were the real world and this crap was just a dream.”

“I hear that.” Instead of agreeing, I should have heard the warning signs in her wish.

I should have noticed her attachment to the machine.

I should have convinced my husband to buy a brand-new house.

I should have let Lola figure her way out of the fire.

But I never did many things I should.

Instead, I walked her to the door, sent her out into the rain, and locked up for the night.

The same rain that Marshall Delacroix would come walking through to find me.

I locked up the shop and headed to the water to stare out at the full moon from the docks. On a normal day, you could barely see it with the pollution levels being what they were, but if I were lucky I might get a glimpse. I always believed my husband could see the moon too. Maybe it was bigger in heaven than it was in New York. Maybe the moon was a vacation spot, somewhere to go and sit and read the paper. My husband loved to read the paper. It was why he hated Lola. She crumpled the pages and tried to chew it, thinking it was a game.

“Dr. Hartley?” a man’s voice called from off in the distance, joining the sound of shoes walking on the docks.

When I turned I winced, outwardly. It was rude to greet my own mayor that way, but I despised him. “Mayor Delacroix, to what do I owe the pleasure of this intrusion on my private time?”

“I need your help.”

Narrowing my gaze, I waited for the rest of the sentence.

“You have to stop seeing my wife.” His voice didn’t have its normal condescending tone.

“Why is that?”

“She’s addicted. She isn’t living in the real world anymore. She is hooked on that machine of yours and the stories she visits. Exactly as I told you she would be.” It was accusatory but without being rude.

“I’ve told you already, people cannot become addicted to the machine. It doesn't give off anything. There are no chemical reactions to the dreamworld. It’s no different than sleeping or reading or daydreaming, sir.” My back stiffened in my trench coat as he drew near enough that we could speak at a civilized volume.

“Well, plainly speaking, she lied to you. She’s addicted to drugs and does them before she comes to see you.” He offered a smug grin with his nonchalant way of explaining.

“No, she isn’t. I do random drug testing on my clients. It’s something they have to agree to upon signing up.”

“I didn't want to have to do this, but if you don't stop letting her come, I will shut you down. I will revoke your business license and end your career. They will find drugs in your apartment and a dead man in your trunk. I will do everything I can to stop you.” His eyes flickered in the dim glow of the streetlight above us. “You don't want me as an enemy.” He glowered one last time before turning and walking away, leaving me there with the ultimatum of the century.