Discovery Nightfall

His brain punched the shield of its myelin sheath until his skull throbbed from the pounding, as he tried to decipher the shapes and shadows blurred between cracks of his opening eyes. Mold saturated the thick, damp air, constricting his breaths each time he attempted to fill his lungs, causing him to choke and cough on the stomach-turning smell. The man searched depths of his mind, hoping to find answers to questions surrounding where he was, and how he had wound up there. All he found was empty space and stale air.

He could feel slimy moss tickling his palms as he slid his hands across the soaked bricks and stones constructing a wall of the cell that was dimly lit by a wheezing torch, hanging on the cracked and sagging wall, just beside a staircase leading into a pitch-black abyss. His eyes squinted as they scanned the area and came across a leather backpack lying on the first step- all that was visible before darkness overtook the ascending staircase. With his knees bent and back crouched, the man gingerly tiptoed to the bag, doing his best to stay quiet enough to not wake what might be lurking somewhere within this dungeon of terror.

The man unzipped the bag, hoping to find any clue telling him what was going on, but all he found was a little black notebook filled with pages of blank lines, except for the last page having random letters arranged in an illegible manner. After staring at the letters long enough, he found two addresses strategically placed within the confusion of misspelled words then started his way up the slippery concrete stairs. Each step he took brought with it a stronger aroma saturated with iron and moist oxygen.

Before seeing the end of the staircase, he realized he was now in the middle of four white walls containing an oak dresser and white linens lying on top of a king-size mattress, as he looked down and saw his tan boots standing on an olive-green carpet. The smell of baking cinnamon buns lingered between the bare walls, coming from the other side of the black steel door, slightly cracked, next to what he remembered as his dresser.

Next thing he knew, he was standing in front of that dresser, pulling out twenty thousand dollars-worth of hundred-dollar bills. He had no idea where this money had come from, why he knew he needed to take it with him, nor the reason for the voice inside of his head compelling him to go to the addresses he read in the little black notebook. All he knew was that he didn’t have much time to get to the first address listed within the jumbled lines of misplaced letters.

The man blinked then couldn’t believe his eyes when they opened, showing him the image of a tanned-skinned woman with black hair and brown eyes tied up, lying on her stomach in the center of a bare room with four brick walls and a concrete floor. She was screaming behind the duct tape masking her lips, so the man freed them as gently as possible to let her words be heard.

“What are you doing here,” the panicked woman yelled to the man, “You’re not supposed to be here. Where’s Jacob? Where’s our son?” Tears were swelling her eyes and rolling down her cheeks as she rolled to her side.

The man’s mouth kept itself open as his mind tried to comprehend the words he just heard. He remembered that he had a wife as he searched for the cat who had just stolen his tongue, then remembered the day he met this woman, on the first day of his freshman year of college. Somewhere between the first time he met this woman and the memory of their wedding day he remembered the day his only child had been born and that the young boy was missing.

The woman cut off his thoughts, saying, “You have to go find Jacob. You have to get our son back. Please. Go.” She stared at him, gulping anxiety and deeply inhaling fear.

“What,” he said, “Where? Who? When?” Thoughts flooded every inch of his mind, blurring the line separating reality and imagination. He couldn’t tell if all his visions were real, or just make-believe.

“You must take the money my mother withdrew from the bank and pay them. They will send us all to the dimensions of the fifth parallel if you don’t. Please. Go.”

“Who? Go where?” The man barely found a way to place words between his hyperventilating breaths.

“You have all the answers you need. Please. You must go now.”

All of a sudden, the man was nervously shivering with consternation in the middle of a bright green field sprinkled with purple flowers, standing beside an all-black 1967 Ford Mustang Fastback with solid black rims, knowing he should have gone to the other address that was hidden amongst the misshaped words. To his right, the sun was glowing green and blue, hiding its bottom half behind the tree-lined field running toward the horizon’s edge. It was larger than ever, close enough to see sunspots flare up as liquid flames jumped into the sky over the man’s head.

He placed his body in the driver’s seat of what had always been his dream car and turned the key that was already hanging from its ignition before stomping the gas pedal and taking off as quickly as the sportscar would allow him. The sun was stepping from behind the horizon, as he looked into the rearview mirror to watch a dust cloud form under his tires, then began chasing him down the dirt road that he was on. It grew larger and larger as it came closer and closer and his skin sweated more and more as he grew hotter and hotter.

His vision started to blur as his flesh began to melt and came to a boil, then he screamed in a voice he had never before heard. He could see silhouettes of human-like figures and heard the voice of what he remembered to be his son’s, just before he felt Hell’s fury ignite him and consume his being. The pain ceased just as his eyes finally closed.

“Good job, good job. Best version to date,” Professor Strande said as his sapphire eyes opened and he removed diodes lining his wrinkled forehead and temple, all the way to the back of his head, decorating his pale skin and shaggy, salt-and-pepper, hair with white polka-dots that housed connections to wires leading to giant computers along the back wall of a white-themed laboratory.

There were other scientists wearing white jackets standing beside him, a couple others standing in front of the computers’ CPU's, checking diagnostics that were being displayed on screens placed on either side of the large boxes, and two more in front of a screen who were looking at recordings of Strande’s brain activity.

A middle-aged, tall, overweight man with curly brown hair, who was standing next to the professor that was still sitting up on a hospital bed, looked to Strande and said, “Were there any glitches? Could you tell you were dreaming? And what exactly can we do differently?”

Professor Strande was being unbuckled from leather straps attached to harnesses on the bed when he said, “It was the most realistic version. There were a few glitches, still, from one scene to another, but it still felt real. Just that I might have not remembered some things for some reason. That could be improved. Also, I woke in my dream with no memory again, so it felt as if I were doing everything for no reason again. We need to find a way to tap into a deeper region, maybe a different area all together, so that we can fix that too.”

“What were you dreaming about,” the curly-haired man asked.

The, slightly more-older-than-younger, lead professor took a deep breath then said, “Isabella was there again, and we were trying to get Jacob back again. Almost same exact scenario all over again, except this dream started out in an entirely different place as before. But the smells were real, and the imagery was vivid. I couldn’t tell those were just part of my dream this time. We really did make strides from our last version.”

None of the professor’s associates said anything to the man. They had all worked with Strande long enough to know what he had gone through, what those dreams signified. He didn’t usually allow his dreams to interfere with reality anymore, but they all knew their mentor well enough to give him the moment of silence he needed after waking from those types of nightmares.

Professor Strande stood and stretched, before asking through a yawn, “How long was I asleep this time?”

“About twenty minutes,” the curly-haired man said. “How long did it feel?”

“Like it was hours. Just think about that. Think about all we can do in that time. Just think of all the people we can help overcome trauma, all the mysteries we could solve, the disorders we could study on a deeper level. Our possibilities are endless. We just need to fix these bugs and we have the world in front of us, Milton.”

Milton nodded his curly hair in agreement, fixed his square glasses, then said, “Yes, sir. We will surely make real discoveries and breakthroughs. This will one day bring us a Nobel Prize.”

Things are looking good, everyone,” Strande said as he turned to his colleagues, continuing with, “at this pace, we will be able to unveil Project 6743, or as we call it, Project Discovery Nightfall, to the government before the end of the year.”

Everyone patted themselves on their backs and cheered for their leader’s words. For, this was the team’s magnum opus, their mark on history’s timeline. They all had sacrificed every jewel hidden within their treasure chests in order to construct this ship, whose sails would carry them into the tides of a new ocean, and they were all ready to see what lied just ahead.

Professor Strande walked away, turning at the door before walking through it and saying, “Keep up the good work, everyone. We are going to see payday sooner than we think. We are changing the future, keep that in mind.”