Dr. Robert Cobb—Bob—rolled his son down the central hallway of their home on a medical grade cot. Jack looked peaceful laying there, less dead-looking than he did yesterday. More caramel color in his face today. That was good. His eyes were less crusty too. The front left wheel was squeaking again, though. Bob made a mental note to fix that.
Bob put two fingers on his son’s limp wrist to feel for a pulse. He knew Jack had one. The beeping heart monitor attached to the IV stand on the cot was evidence enough. But Bob just … needed to check for himself, needed to feel the blood still pumping through his son’s vein. It was comforting. And Bob was in serious need of comfort.
They entered the living room—well, what used to be a living room. The couch had been replaced with stacks of humming servers and other computational hardware set in framed crates as tall as Bob, and that was pretty tall. The kitchen table, now a makeshift desk shoved into a corner, was a solid wooden slab filled with computer monitors propped up by an aluminum infrastructure bolted to the wall. It was designed to allow Bob complete visibility of all his screens at any given time.
Where the two armchairs once sat now stood a large cylindrical machine that, to the layman’s eye, might resemble a single slice CT machine welded to a transparent tanning bed. Bob didn’t actually have a name for it, not yet. He just referred to it as, “the Machine” or simply, “the Cylinder.” He’d give it a nice name one day, once it actually started working right. If it ever did.
The cot came to a halt against the big cylinder. Bob carefully picked his teenage son up and laid him on the foam pad inside. The boy felt lighter than usual. Bob really needed to do some muscle stimulation cycles with him this week to prevent that atrophy from setting in again. He made a mental note to do that as well.
Hanging from an open panel on the back of the machine was a thick line of electrical cords all zip tied together. At the end of it was a rubber cap dotted with receptor nodes. Bob pulled the contraption further out of the machine until the cords were taut, then slipped his fingers into the elastic band. He stretched the cap open and carefully slipped the device around Jack’s shaved head. Once it was secure, Bob pulled his fingers free. The elastic band caught on his cracked, pinky fingernail and snapped against Jack’s temple.
“Oof! Sorry, Son,” said Bob, cringing. “That would have stung if you were awake.” He offered a quick smile, then stared down into his son’s blank face. He let out a sigh, closed Jack’s slack jaw, then adjusted the cap so the nodes were all in the right place. “I’ll be more careful tomorrow, I promise.”
Bob sat down on his rolling office chair and pulled himself up to the table. He rubbed his hands together then proceeded to turn everything on.
Monitor screens flickered to life one at a time, each with clusters of windows already showing live data sets and initiation sequences of various programs. The crates of custom hardware behind him, which admittedly cost more than his home, hummed even louder. And the machine holding his son responded with a low, harmonic tone.
Bob inspected a window on a monitor to his far left. This was arguably the most important software he had running. Thanks to the electrochemical sensory nodes attached to Jack’s cranium, Bob could measure two particular hormones oozing around in Jack’s brain. Namely, Gamma-Aminobutyric Acid and Acetylcholine.
The interface represented these two by displaying vertical bars side by side. The red one on the left had the word GAMA under it and the blue bar, ACE. Why were these two chemicals important? It had everything to do with sleep.
There’s a lot of complicated processes that go into making sleep happen and … unhappen—circadian rhythms and all that. But broken down into its most fundamental binary components were GAMA and ACE. Simply put, the more GAMA Jack had the deeper into his coma he slipped. The more ACE he had the closer to the surface he came. GAMA bad, ACE good. It was a bit more complicated than that, and Bob knew that. But he needed a simplistic way to measure his success, or lack thereof, and this would have to serve for now. Currently, Jack’s GAMA was wobbling back and forth between 97% and 98% while the ACE—you guessed it—wiggled around the 3% to 2% level markers.
For the past seven years, Bob had been trying to bring that ACE level up past 51% and GAMA to 49%. He was convinced that if he could meet those markers, he could trigger the wake up protocols he built and pull Jack out of his coma. Maybe. That was the theory anyway. But how to raise that ACE? That was the question that plagued him day and night.
Bob received a lot—and I mean a lot—of criticism over the years for this project, which is one of the reasons he operated out of his home, high up in the Rocky Mountains—alone. Child Protection Services was a pain to deal with for the first few years too, but they eventually left them alone since the experiments never resulted in any proof of injury. But the medical community never left them alone. Dr. Cobb, once an outgoing and renowned neuroscientist, had become a recluse, cut off from the world. Many close friends, and even some family members, became outspoken opponents because of what he was doing with Jack. At first, Bob ignored it all. Overtime, it began to tear him apart.
Bob looked at a Polaroid photo propped up on a stack of framed accolades, certifications, and licenses he’d torn off the wall. The photo had three people wearing Mickey Mouse hats, their arms over each other’s shoulders: Bob, Jack, and Jack’s mother, who was a beautiful black woman with unusual stark, blue eyes. Her name was Gemma, and Gemma had left them.
Bob cracked open a can of sparkling water and stared at the photo. He sighed, and took a long sip. The carbonation helped with the heartburn and anxiety. Pills came next. A handful for breakfast and even more for dinner. He set the bottle down and pulled a window into his center screen.
The window was blank save for a single blinking cursor in the top left corner. Bob typed the word, “Initiate,” then clicked return. A line of data populated the screen, ending abruptly with the word “Launch? Y/N.”
Bob looked back at Jack, let out a long breath, then turned back to the screen. He typed “Y” and clicked return.
The cylindrical machine lit up, beeping and humming. Jack’s body twitched, then fell still.
Bringing ACE to 51% and pulling Jack out of his coma was the ultimate goal, yes, but that wasn’t all Bob had going on with his son. His main focus this morning was a project even more controversial and arguably more dangerous than experimenting with Jack’s chemical composition. A project that had to do with interpreting the information spinning around inside Jack’s mind and converting it into legible text. A project Bob called Comm+.
Years ago, when Bob first proposed this idea to a group of “esteemed” colleagues, nearly all of them laughed in his face. It can’t be done, they said. You’re wasting your time! You’re a sad, old man and you should just move on. The response was brutal, but it didn’t deter Bob from trying. In fact, it solidified his resolve to prove them all wrong. He was an award winning Neuroscientist for Heaven's sake. He knew he could develop the technology to communicate with the comatose despite what they said. He just knew it. I mean, look how many people told the Wright brothers flight was impossible. Imagine where we’d be now if they’d listened.
After seven years, however, that strong resolve had begun to crumble, slowly replaced by severe depression and—oh what's a good way to put it? Barely tethered rage.
Data began to waterfall down in front of Bob, reflecting off his glasses. Unintelligible data. It was his computer’s attempt at making sense of Jack's brain in a visual format. And it was a mess. Measuring hormone levels with digital technology was nothing compared to reading and converting a sleeping person’s thoughts into readable text.
Originally, he had started with the source code of a dictation program that converts sound into text as his base logic. Slowly, with the help of a limited use A.I. system, he built upon the program, allowing it to learn the vast highways and junctions between nerve impulses, axon terminals, neuron clusters, gland cells, neurotransmitters, and the like. And so far the results had amounted to … complete nil.
Bob pulled up a text/edit window from the program and typed, “Jack, are you receiving this?” When he clicked return, the sentence left the window, immediately slipping into Jack’s waterfall of data. The question was instantly lost, buried by millions of bits as soon as it was submitted.
In a perfect world, the system would communicate the message to Jack’s subconscious. And in an even more perfect world, Jack would be able to “think” back a response that would show up as text on Bob’s screen. Bob was sure the messages were being received, but he couldn’t verify that. Sending data was the easy part. Getting a response back was, well, yeah … that was the frustrating rub.
Bob submitted his question to his son a few more times before rolling his chair over to Jack. He checked the boy’s pulse again, then put his lips to Jack’s ear.
“Jack, this is Dad. Are you receiving this?” He waited, squinted up at the monitor across the room. “Jack, this is Dad. Can you hear me? Jack, this is Dad. Are you there?” He paused, checked the monitor again. “Jack, this is Dad. Stop being such a lazy butt and get out of bed, kid. You’re late for your soccer game.” Bob shook his son’s arm. “Jack, do you hear me? It’s Dad. Can you hear me? Can you hear me, son? It’s almost Father’s Day, did you know that? I bet you completely forgot. It would be really great if you … you know, if you were here for that. Was thinking we could kick the ball around like we did when you were little. Remember that? You loved soccer. No, you love soccer. Present tense. I know you are, uh … are you getting any of this, Jack?”
Bob looked into his son’s face. There was nothing there. The only sign of life was the rise and fall of the boy’s chest. Bob put a hand on his son’s sternum and closed his own eyes. He remembered when he used to check Jack’s breathing as a baby. He’d been so paranoid the kid would just pass away in his sleep. SIDS and all that. Not a lot, really, had changed since then.
Bob pulled off his glasses and pinched the bridge of his nose. A headache was already forming. Usually it didn’t start until lunch, but today the pain was ramping up early.
There was a soft beep from his monitor and Bob looked up, put his glasses back on. His eyes went wide and a tingle of excitement rushed down his spine. He rolled back over to the kitchen table and clicked on a flashing green icon.
Years ago, when Bob built this system, he implemented a program to recognize certain patterns, words, and phrases running through the waterfall. There was way too much data and it was spilling out of Jack way too fast for Bob to sit and analyze every line one at a time for something that might resemble a word. This program located and isolated all that for him.
A line of text popped up on a new window. It was a simple combination of words, numbers, and symbols pulled from Jack’s stream of digitized consciousness.
9*sk@IFF##sd129—:DAD?:—2200DH$^%
Bob blinked. There! Clear as day was the word “DAD” followed by a question mark. Bob blinked again. It very well could have been a coincidence. Sure, let’s not get too excited yet. Those three letters just arbitrarily coming together was definitely a possibility. But probably unlikely. In any case, Bob needed proof that this was intentional communication from Jack, a direct response from his prompts before he got emotional about it. To do that, he’d need to duplicate the results and get the same or similar response immediately. If this was real, if this was truly Jack … Well, let’s not get ahead of ourselves yet, okay?
“Jack!” yelled Bob, rolling back to him. He grabbed Jack’s hand with both of his own. “Jack, can you hear me? Jack, buddy, are you getting this?” He paused, hoping for another green icon to appear on the screen. “Jack, this is Dad. I’m right here next to you. Can you hear me? Respond, Jack. Please respond.” He waited again. Nothing. No response. “Come on, Jack. I know you can hear me. Stop playing around, bud. I need you to say something. I need you to think—”
A red light flashed on the screen monitoring Jack’s vitals. It was the heart rate monitor blaring a warning. Jack’s Oxygen levels were dropping and dropping fast.
“No, no, no,” said Bob, rolling back to the kitchen table. COMM+ was now displaying a shower of zeros, his GAMA increased 1%, and Jack’s vitals were all over the chart in erupted chaos.
A window popped up: “Emergency Shutdown Required—Click Spacebar to Execute.”
Bob looked back and forth between his comatose son and the screaming computers. Maybe he could wait it out? Maybe this will pass? Maybe if he just … Bob slammed a fist down on the spacebar of his central keyboard and let out a few choice words.
The lights on the machine flickered off and a series of melodic chimes followed in a decrescendo. Three of Bob’s screens flashed white, then went dark. An internal fan inside the case of servers clicked on and began its emergency cool down process.
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Bob stood up, ran over to Jack, and yanked off the sensory cap. He checked his breathing, his pulse, then checked them again three times over. Jack’s pounding heart finally calmed after a few terrifying minutes. Bob’s heart was still pounding as he fell back against the wall and slid to the floor. He let out a sigh and pinched the bridge of his nose again under his glasses. The headache was thundering in full now. Punishment, no doubt, for what he’d done.
After a long moment, Bob kicked the side of the machine as hard as he could with his bare foot. Then he kicked it again and again. He stood up and slapped the thing. It stung, but he slapped it again. He balled a fist and slammed that into a plastic panel near Jack’s head. He yanked the bundle of cords out from the underside of the machine as hard as he could then kicked the thing again.
Bob let out a roar, left the room for the garage. When he opened the door, he flicked on a light and dug around in a cardboard box of sports supplies. He didn’t find what he wanted, so he pulled a long plastic tub off a shelf, let it drop onto the floor, and pried it open.
There it was. Mixed in with a pile of sports equipment was the thing he was looking for: A Louisville Slugger Meta BBCOR baseball bat. He picked it up, gave the handle a squeeze, and walked back inside the house.
Bob stretched the bat out testing its reach. As he approached the kitchen table, he cocked it back over his shoulder, and—
Ding! Dong!
Bob paused, mid-swing. What was that?
Ding! Dong! Ding! Dong!
Bob blinked, lowered the bat. Was that the doorbell? It had been so long since anyone had used it he forgot he had one. Where was his phone? He felt for his pockets—wait, he had no pockets, he was wearing his torn up sweats today. There it was, on the kitchen counter. He opened his security app and pulled up the front door camera. Bob let out a breath of relief when the person standing at his door came into view. It was Rose, Jack’s nurse and aunt. Why was she ringing the doorbell? She had a key.
“Hi Rose,” said Bob, opening the front door.
“Bob,” said Rose, stepping inside. “Sorry, forgot my key. How’s my favorite nephew today?”
“Uh, good. Good, yeah. Same ‘ol Jack.” He smiled, cleared his throat trying not to think about the traumatic event that had just taken place. Or the even more traumatic event that might have taken place had she not arrived.
Rose was a beautiful black woman, much like her sister. She even shared the same unusual blue eyes. She was wearing red scrubs today. The ones that matched her lips. As a registered nurse, she took it upon herself to take care of Jack’s body after Bob pulled the boy out of hospice care. She only lived ten minutes away and had no children of her own so it wasn’t a huge hassle for her to stop by twice a week or so—or so she claimed.
“What’s with the bat?”
“Oh, this?” said Bob, closing the door. “Just … fixing things. You want a coffee? Soda?”
Rose lifted an eyebrow as they walked together to the living room. “You seem … jumpy. Like, extra jumpy. Something wrong?”
“Jumpy? Nope, I’m … good. Just uh, you know, just plugging away. Same ‘ol me.” He gave her a broad smile and tapped the machine with the bat as they approached Jack. “You want me to move him back onto the cot or—”
“I can manage,” she said. “Why don’t you go for a run or something. Or like, shave, maybe? You look like a hobo. Smell like one too.”
Bob stroked his blonde, graying beard. It was getting long. Living alone with a one track mind, he tended to neglect himself.
“Thanks, Rose. You’re always so sweet. I’ll leave you to it then.”
Rose didn’t respond, already pulling out the maintenance kit from under the rolling cot to replace Jack’s IV and catheter.
“Yep. Okay,” said Bob. “I’ll be back in a bit. Thanks, Rose. Really, thank you for always being there for him. It’s more than Gemma ever—”
“Bob.” She glanced back at the man. “We all love him … in our own way. Some of us just … show it differently.”
“Well, I know I say this a lot, but when you see her, tell her my door’s always open. Always has been. Despite … you know.”
Rose gave him a flat smile, then turned back to Jack. Bob took that as his cue to leave. He put the bat over his shoulder and headed back to the garage.
***
After closing the lid of the plastic tub holding his sports equipment, Bob noticed another tub. It was on its side, its contents spilled out. He must have knocked it off the shelf in his haste. He didn’t even notice it until now. He grunted, then started cleaning up the mess.
This tub was filled with old hardware. Countless drives and terabyte memory banks, a few old consoles, and bundles of wires. He was about to seal the lid shut when a small SD card caught his eye. It was white with the words, “F-Divya T-Bob” written on one side with a fine red sharpie. He had a momentary flashback. Divya. She was an old friend of his from grad school. A wiz of a software developer. They’d been great friends until they went their separate ways. Just … lost touch, he guessed. It was so long ago he couldn’t remember why.
He turned the card around in his fingers a few times, smiling. She’d made this for him—Not for him, per se, but she made this particular copy for him. It was a program; something fun—a game. That’s what it was. A game! What was it called? He remembered the feeling of enjoying it but that was all he could recall.
He nodded his head, game in hand, and walked back inside. He went to his bedroom—a simple 12 X 12 with wood flooring and a foam mattress against a wall—grabbed one of his laptops off his end table, laid down on the bed, and plugged the SD card in.
The game was designed in a classic, 8-bit format like the original Pac-Man or Nintendo’s first release of Mario Bros. On the lower half of the title screen was a linear rendering of seven snowmobiles blazing across a white, snowy landscape. And above them, big and bold in the center across a bright blue sky, were the words, “Welcome to the Halls of Death and Time.”
Seemed like an ominous title for what looked like a snowmobile racing game. It’d been so long since he’d played, though, he couldn't remember how the title made sense until the last snowmobile stopped mid-screen and fell through the snow.
Ah, yes, it was coming back to him now.
The title screen scrolled up as the view followed the snowmobile, and the poor little rider, down a vertical tunnel into darkness. The words “tap spacebar to start,” appeared on the screen.
Bob was hit with a subtle feeling of nostalgia as he started the game. The screen went gray, flickered, then faded to black. Then images appeared. The little snowmobile and rider were now floating above some sort of circular platform encased in a pillar of blue light. The lower third of the screen segmented itself off and a line of green text appeared next to a blinking green cursor. Then words appeared: “You fell down a hole and woke up in a vast underground cavern floating above a mysterious disk. Regret coming to Antarctica yet? What are you going to do?”
That’s when Bob remembered, this was a text based adventure game. You controlled your character by typing in commands. Bob typed: “Scream for help,” and clicked return. The cursor dropped a line and the game responded with: “No one can hear you. You’re alone, cold, and terrified. What do you do?”
Bob smiled, then typed a line of unintelligible nonsense and clicked return just to see what would happen. The cursor lowered to the next line and responded with: “That command doesn’t make sense. Are you high? What are you going to do now?”
Bob let out a one-syllable laugh. He forgot how clever and cheeky Divya was. A boring game developer could have had the algorithm respond with, “does not compute,” or have no response at all if it didn’t fit precisely in line with its algorithm. But not Divya. Her personality was already shining through the game and it had just begun. A vague memory of a little animal … something like a cat popped into his mind, but he couldn’t remember how it came into play later on.
Bob responded with, “Get my feet on the ground and explore the cave.” He thought maybe imputing two commands back to back might be too much for the program to understand, but it wasn’t. The 8-bit image on the top of the screen changed to a bird’s eye-view of a large cavern. The little character began running around, bouncing back and forth between the walls until …
“You spend hours in near darkness—good thing you had your flashlight—exploring the cavern until you come across a metal, pocket doorway framed with hardened plastic. It looks like something you’d find in Tomorrowland at a Disney theme park. The door is askew, jammed open at an awkward angle on its tracks. The opening is just wide enough for you to crawl through. What should you do?”
Bob didn’t hesitate. “Enter.”
There was a quick animation of the character crawling through a broken door. As soon as the little guy got through, the image pulled back out to a bird’s-eye view again. This time, a long, white tunnel stretched out in front of the character.
“There you are,” came Rose’s voice from the doorway.
Bob looked up, closed the laptop. “Rose. You’re … You’re done already?”
“He’s cleaned up, in good shape now. Much better shape than how I found him.”
“Okay. Thanks.”
Rose stared at him for a moment. “You okay, Bob? I mean … really.”
“Yeah,” said Bob, nodding. “Fine.”
Rose nodded back, squinting. She pointed over her shoulder. “Left him in that monster of a machine thing for you.”
“Okay.”
“Any luck? With … you know, your experiments?”
Bob sighed. “Maybe. A little here and there. Thought I had another breakthrough this morning but … I don’t know. It was probably just random static.”
Rose nodded again, pursed her lips. She sucked in a breath. “Well, then. I’m off.”
“Yeah.”
“Take care of our boy, Bob.”
“I will. And thanks again. For everything.”
Rose nodded, tapped the door frame a few times with her long, red nails, then left.
***
After a long shower and a close shave, Bob made himself a sandwich and printed out the isolated line of text he pulled from COMM+ that morning.
He had a bulletin board where he kept his “wins.” It was pretty bare, to say the least. But he did have them occasionally. Six of them to be exact—now seven. He pinned the paper to the board at the bottom. Above it were lines of text that had the words: “Mom,” “h3ll0,” “he1p,” “dAd,” “wheRe_ami,” and, “b0ring,” somewhere in various lines of code. And now he had a second one that said DAD. That made him feel good, even if it probably didn’t mean anything.
Bob sat down in his office chair, flipped on a monitor, and pulled up “Medical News Break” on a streaming service. It was his favorite channel to get updates about the medical world.
A story about the coma wave—of all things—was on. It had been seven years since the massive sleep pandemic washed over the Earth. It was considered old news by now so he was surprised to see an update on statistics and case numbers in a live story.
When the travesty first hit, thousands of young people—only the youth—from around the globe simply fell into a comatose state with no explanation. Jack, of course, was one of these victims. Thousands soon turned into hundreds, then dozens as the years went on. Now there were only a handful of kids slipping into comas on a daily basis. The phenomenon had many names, most of them cheesy titles like “The Great Slumber” or “The Deep Sleep,” but Bob had always just referred to it as the Sleep Pandemic.
As he listened to the story, Bob pulled up his ex-wife on social media. Not only was she beautiful, but she had a successful and demanding career in stem cell research. That was her excuse for missing her days with Jack.
She had two types of pictures posted: the first was of her with her team wearing lab coats and showcasing their collective success as medical professionals. The other type of picture was of her wearing various bikinis with various people on various beaches. He had a few things to say about that, but he restrained his fingers from typing any comments.
Occasionally there was a photo of Jack with an ask that people donate to the Sleep Phenomenon Society, but never a mention of Bob. But why would there be? She obviously didn’t want anyone to know about her washed up, psychotic, unreasonable, neuroscientist ex-husband.
An ad for a funeral home popped up in his feed and he nearly threw his phone across the room. Even the advertising algorithms seemed to think he’d eventually fail his son.
Jack let out a breath, set his phone down, and turned his attention back to Medical News Break. A new story was on. This one was about a medical startup—a unicorn, in fact—that was utilizing virtual reality to train med students.
“But the most interesting part is that they’re gamifying it.” said the red-headed woman on the screen. “Medical students from all over the world can compete to rank for most successful surgery completions, rated by a mix of A.I. and a panel of expert surgeons.”
It cut to a video of a student wearing ultra thin VR glasses and operating on … well, nothing—just the air.
“Apparently,” said the host. “The cool new way to improve your success rate is to gamify it.”
“Yes, everyone is gamifying everything nowadays,” said a male counterpart from off screen.
Bob lowered his eyebrows and took a big bite of his sandwich. His full attention was on the story now.
“Gamahahon, huh?” said Bob, ruining the word, “Gamification,” with a mouthful of turkey and mayonnaise. “Hmm.”
A strange thrill suddenly filled his guts as an idea came to mind. His eyes opened wide and he stood up so fast he knocked the plastic plate onto the floor, spilling his food everywhere. He started cleaning it up, then decided to shove it to the side with his food instead. He’d take care of that later, he had something more important to do.
He ran to his bed, grabbed the laptop he was playing the 8-bit on, and ran back—literally ran. He yanked the SD card out and hurried to the kitchen table. Most of the peripheral screens woke up as he sat. The rest of them woke up when he plugged the card into an attached dongle. An icon for the game appeared on the center screen desktop as Bob initiated a source code extraction program. It took a good ten minutes, despite the awesome amount of computing power he possessed, to pull the game’s source files and integrate it into a sandbox version of COMM+. It must have been an incredibly large file. How did all that fit on that little card?
A window with a progression bar measuring the load time popped up with the words, “Integration in progress.” This wasn’t a new procedure. Plugging new programs into COMM+ was pretty much routine. He’d have a new idea, write code for it, then try it out all the time. Or he’d purchase applications online and test those out inside COMM+. Results were sometimes interesting, but nothing ever showed any real promise. There wasn’t a miracle solution out there that would make COMM+ work the way it was supposed to. Not yet anyway.
By the time Bob was finished strapping the sensory cap back around Jack’s head, the game was locked and loaded, ready to launch inside of COMM+. Bob initiated the launch sequence and then stepped back. What happened next was completely unexpected. It was something that … oh how to explain it? Simply put, it changed everything.
After the words, “Welcome to the Halls of Death and Time,” filled the window running COMM+, Bob knew neither his, nor Jack’s life, would ever be the same again.