“Ah, no, no, no!” I said, as I slammed my son’s medical cot into the doorframe. The upper half of his limp body slanted to one side then slipped off onto the wood floor. 

I’d been meaning to expand that entryway between the garage and the mudroom for months now. As I picked him up and fixed the now torn and bleeding I.V. patch in his arm, I swore I’d have it done that weekend. Even if I had to take a sledgehammer to it myself. 

“Alright, Kel. Sorry about that. Let’s try it again.”

I pushed Kel into the garage doorway much slower this time, watching the sides of his cot carefully. 

“Ah, ha,” I said. “There we go. Good job, buddy!” I reached over and slapped Kel’s open, lifeless palm, and couldn’t help but notice he felt a little clammy. I walked around and put a hand on his forehead. 

“You’re fever is back.” I shook my head and pulled out my phone to send a text: 

Hey Sandy. Hope you’re well. 

Kel, it would seem, is not. 

Feels hot. You think you could 

swing by today and do your thing? 

Muchas gracias!

The garage was...well, I don’t know if you could even call it a garage. Not anymore. What used to be a room where you could store four and half cars was now a maze of tables, desks, computers, stacks of equipment, electric cords, and plain ‘ol junk. 

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I wound the cot through and around towards the garage door. Or what used to be a garage door. I couldn’t remember the last time it opened. 

Kel’s finger caught on a flash drive halfway there and knocked it onto the floor. I wouldn’t have noticed had I not rolled over it. I picked it up, pocketed it, and kept going until I came to what I liked to call my Main Hub. 

It was a portion of the room consisting of a standing desk full of computer monitors, some of which hung from the unfinished ceiling. There was an empty place designated for Kel’s rolling cot just behind the desk and next to that, sitting in my deep freezer, was...the machine. 

Image if an industrial vacuum cleaner and a steampunk candelabra had a love child. That’s what the machine looked like. In reality it was a 5-qubit quantum computer with a state-of-the-art processor.

Impressive for a little garage set up, I know. 

It functioned like any other computational device, but I’d toyed with it for so long that over the years it had evolved into something else entirely. Now, it really only had one function: to get inside a brain.

I’d messed around with a number of names for it: The Subconscious Communications Device, the Alpha Wave Information Transmitter, the Sleeper Zap-O-Ray. All of which sounded stupid and didn’t do it the justice it deserved. Or would deserve once I got it working.  

I ended up settling on: “The Visual Integration Communications Construct.” Or “VICC” for short.

Catchy, right? 

That way I could refer to it as a “her.”

I locked the wheels of Kel’s cot down and turned everything on, which filled the room with a very familiar hum and buzz, followed by lots of blinking lights and a sticky kind of heat you only get from working with lots and lots of computers in close quarters. To me, the room smelt like nothing. But according to Sandy, it smelt like armpit and burning metal. But I guess when you spend years and years in the same room, doing the same thing over and over again, you go nose blind to it all. 

A terminal opened up on the screen listing the number of times I’ve attempted, and failed, to make VICC and Kel work together. That was arguably the worst part of my day. It was as if it was saying, “Hey, George, good morning. Ready to fail for the 3097th time today?”

I used to keep a baseball bat in the garage. But it ended up in my backyard along with about a dozen bashed-in monitors. 

I took in a deep breath, gave my screen a good ‘ol challenging squinty look, and snorted at it. 

Today was going to be different, I said to myself for the 3097th time. I could feel it.