Image: Mist at Breakfast, detail of painting by G Baron, 2012
The Gateway Project
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By Gerald Baron
September 2019 A young programmer drifts into another world in search of a solution to developing a virtual reality video game. |
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The Gateway Project
By Gerald Baron
September 2019
“This room is too small,” Terry thought to herself. She tried to take a deep breath and suck in a little more oxygen. Rubbing her palms together gently, she concentrated on their dampness to avoid the sense of claustrophobia. She looked at the clock. Four minutes after three. She couldn’t believe she had only waited ten minutes. The room seemed even smaller than when she first carefully opened the door, half expecting to see that it was occupied by someone else like her waiting for news, expecting the worse.
Dr. Tsorvalis entered. He had on a green checked shirt, tan khakhis. Not doctorly at all, Terry thought, a bit deflated.
“Hello Terry,” he said and she looked anxiously at him to see if there was any sign in his entrance that would give her hope for Steven.
“Hi Dr. Sorlias,” she said quietly, badly mispronouncing his name. He was used to it, and suppressed the hint of a smile.
“Sit down, please,” he said, motioning to the uncomfortable looking pleather loveseat. He sat down on the arm chair with the oak table and light separating them, so much that he had to sit on the front half of his chair and look sharply to his right to address her directly.
“What is going on, Doctor?” she asked. No patience now for pleasantries. It was Terry’s way.
“We are trying to find that out, Terry,” he said. Now she could tell there was no good news in those eyes and that quiet voice with a distant Eastern European accent.
“We have completed all the tests that we have at our disposal for a case like this. There is no sign of viral infection, nothing out of the ordinary in blood chemistry, no unusual brain activity that we can tell from the MRI and the new TROSS scans we have here at St. Lukes. This is remarkable because typically when there is the degree of distortion of reality as we have here, brain wave activity will quite clearly show it. We can trace abnormalities looking at where those disturbances are happening and diagnose and treat from there, but this is proving quite unusual.”
“You must have some idea,” she said, desperate for something more to hang onto than this.
“No, we don’t. Well, yes, we have ideas but nothing that is certain at all at this time. We are concerned that his physical condition is deteriorating and we are just not sure why, so that is the immediate concern. We know that what is going on his mind is creating excessively high levels of stress. We are treating him with anti-psychotics and diazepam to reduce his anxiety and control his hyperactivity, but these seem to be having little effect and the disturbances he is experiencing are growing worse.”
“What about the Seroquel?” Terry asked.
The doctor looked at her as she knew something he did.
“We’ve replaced that, we don’t think that was doing for him what he needed.” He didn’t reveal the angry words he had aimed at the doctor who ordered the anti-agitation drug.
“What are you to make of what he is saying? He keeps looking at me so strangely, says I am shimmering, that he has never seen anything so beautiful, that he sees me now like I really am, as if he never knew me, like I’m almost a stranger.” Terry’s voice was shaking as she relayed this, not knowing if this was a revelation and if this might make things worse for Steven. “It started when we went fly fishing to Winthrop.”
“That is consistent with his delusion or hallucinations,” Dr. Tsorvalis tried to be reassuring. “When I talk to him it feels like he expresses himself in ways that suggests he thinks I am some sort of magical being, a supernatural being like an angel or almost some god--”
“Yes,” Terry interrupted, “That’s how I feel, like he thinks I’m a goddess or something and it’s almost like he just wants to fall down and worship me. He looks at me like I’m a stranger, a strange being even.”
“He has said things in admiration to me that are very strange, and frankly troubling,” the doctor said, now the worry on his face more evident to Terry than ever. “What is most bizarre is that he seems to know things about my childhood and background, troubling things, that he mentions in passing, things that no one except my wife and mother know about. He talks about them in familiar terms and says that I have shown great strength and that all that has happened in the distant past is being made right.”
Doctor Tsorvalis went on to explain that there were other doctors involved in examining him that caused a very different and frightening reaction.
“Dr. Timmings has resigned from this team because of things that Steven said to him.”
“Isn’t he the psychologist?”
“Yes,” Dr. Tsorvalis confirmed.
“How can he just leave, don’t we need him to try to figure this out?”
“Yes, we do need a psychologist, and we have contacted Dr. Robert Richards in Seattle to meet with the team. He is Dean of the School of Psychology at UW and tops in his field. He will meet with us in the morning.”
“I can’t imagine Steven being that mean to someone that they would leave, it’s just not like him,” Terry said.
“You would understand if you knew what Steven said.”
“What did he say?”
The doctor hesitated.
“I really can’t tell you, that would be violating Dr. Timmings privacy. Steven spoke to him while Doctor Timmings was trying to do his evaluation. Steven accused him of some awful things including a terrible crime. Like in my case he brought up things that had happened in the past that apparently few if any know anything about. It was quite horrifying and Dr. Timmings was terribly upset and disturbed. I don’t blame him for resigning and we on this team are concerned for him now. It is very important that things Steven said never are repeated so if Steven ever talks about this I beg you to consider that these are said as part of this delusion, there is no truth to them, and Dr. Timmings feelings must be respected here.”
“Of course,” Terry said, in great confusion. “Of course.”
“We are taking the next steps to try to get to the bottom of this,” Dr. Tsorvalis said, a bit brighter.
“I thought everything, all the tests, were done.”
“All that we can do, yes, but we have contacted an infectious disease specialist from Sacramento and a specialized neuroscience team from BHRI. Uh, that’s the Brain Health and Research Institute here in Seattle. Amazing group, way out in front on brain research.”
“Didn’t you rule out infection?”
“We have, but one of our team members recalled a patient with similar, or I should say, with delusions and mental illness of somewhat similar nature, and this doctor was the only one to diagnose it. It turns out the patient had contracted an extremely rare bacteria in Thailand that had entered his brain through his optic nerve and caused a brain infection that triggered extreme hallucinations and delusions. He believed the world was being taken over by an evil being he called Satan-Walmart. His was one of six cases ever found.”
“Did he make it? I mean, did he get better?” Terry asked.
“Uh, yes, full recovery.” The doctor hesitated, recalling that that particular patient was the only one to survive the infection.
“Steven has never been to Thailand,” Terry dismissed the idea, although the idea of a brain infection causing hallucinations triggered a sight blossoming of hope. Anything for an answer, even a disturbing one.
“I understand,” Doctor Tsorvalis said, “but it is possible this doctor can identify some other source of infection unknown to us. We must try.”
“Yes, absolutely,” Terry agreed. “What about the brain research people, what are they going to do?”
“Well, I mentioned the TROSS scans we did on Steven. This is the most current brain scan technology we have here and actually in the state. But this group at BHRI has been working on deep data analysis of TROSS scans that apparently is far beyond anything currently available. Using AI, artificial intelligence, they are looking at hundreds of thousands of scans and finding things about what is real, what is hallucination and delusion. I’ve read some of the preliminary results of these on ArXiv, a database for preliminary science reports. It’s all very cutting edge and experimental and many are pooh poohing it, but we really have nowhere else to turn.”
“Doctor Sorlas, I am so grateful to you,” Terry said. If she felt the slightest sense of relief it was knowing that Steve had landed in the hands of someone not only competent but who from all appearances was taking his condition seriously and showing a great deal of interest. Of course, she thought, it could be just science to him.
“It’s Tsorvalis, but please call me Tomas,” the doctor said as he stood up to shake her hand.
2
Two months earlier it was Saturday afternoon at Steven and Terry’s home near Delgado Park in the Greenlake area in Seattle. Steven had been working in his home office in the cramped upstairs of their two bedroom, one bath home. A 48 inch screen stood on his adjustable standup desk. Two smaller screens flanked the large one, and from here Steven did his coding in advanced simulations. His company developed advanced simulation algorithms that were used in the gaming, entertainment, education and even advanced business application industries. He’d been burning a lot of midnight oil on the problem of developing a believable gateway to another dimension that wouldn’t seem hokey, contrived or too magical. If he could nail it, the applications for the approach he envisioned could be pretty broad and interesting. It vexed him, and to relieve his mind he retreated to his garden.
This was his sanctuary. The small city lot surrounding the early 1950s era Craftsman style brick house had been turned into a garden that demonstrated Steven’s curiosity, sense of beauty and deep love for getting his hands deep into the dirt.
“It’s primal,” he would explain to Terry or his friends who came to visit and enjoy the garden. “It’s like smoking, well, not much like smoking, but it is something my grandpa did, great grandpa and I’m pretty sure just about all the ones before them going back to, well, LUCA, you know, our last common ancestor.”
It was late summer and some of the hydrangea trees he so loved were showing a bit of weariness as if they were longing for the time when their foliage could be returned to the earth and they could rest to start things all over again in the spring. Rudbeckias were in full bloom along with the gerbera daisies and other long lasting flowers. The crocosmia blooms were all tucked up into the seed pods just waiting for the frost when they would droop down into the soggy soil to sleep for the winter and deposit new growth. Selfish gene? Yeah, right, Steven thought. It was all a bit too wondrous and magical for such things to just fall in to place. Steven went into the side yard where his small but productive vegetable plot was found. He picked up the hose and sprayed the tomatoes carefully avoiding the ripening cherry tomatoes and large beefsteaks.
The gateway problem rose up in his mind. His mind was grinding, accelerating through images of clouds, of doorways, of mist, of miniature black holes, of melting patio pavers and the water spray covered the young tomatoes. As he watered and contemplated, he quite suddenly felt a breeze wash across his face and with it a scent of flowers such as he had never experienced before. He looked around. The tomato plants were not moving, neither was the rhody along the pathway to his garden. The breeze continued to brush his face. He looked up to the tall Western Red Cedar bordering his yard. Not a branch was stirring, not a needle.
Steven wiped his face lightly with his hand as if to clear the sensation away. A minute later, it came again, and with it the scent of flowers and plants and wine and crisp air salted with ocean breezes, everything that made him hungry and long for more and more and more. Now Steven held still, sensing something but very uncertain what. He felt a near imperceptible shiver of fear.
“Look.”
He heard a voice. Soft. Breathy. Like the wind. It was in the breeze, but even deeper.
No, couldn’t be. He pushed it from his mind. He saw the young tomatoes covered in water from his errant spray and whispered, damn.
“Look.”
He turned around, knowing there was no one there but almost hoping there was. He turned to his spraying with commitment. He saw that he was now over-watering, but he feared quitting. He did not want to recognize that he was hearing a soft, very beautiful voice. It was not outside his ear, like someone standing next to him. Closer than next to him. In him. It was in his ear he felt, even between his eardrum and brain. But, it wasn’t like a voice inside his head. If anyone else was nearby, he thought, they would hear it, too.
“Look. Straight ahead. Inside.”
He looked toward the plants, his much loved plants. His hand holding the nozzle relaxed and slowly dropped to his side. First he looked past the plants, then before them. He looked at the air as if he was watching a bug between him and the soft shadowy green of the plants now past his visual focal point. What was that? A shimmer in the air? Like tiny waves or ripples in a quiet pond? The ripples grew until it seemed the air in front of his nose was a pond filled with them. The air was in motion. He reached out his hand thinking he might feel it.
“Come.”
The voice no longer frightened him. If he could describe it he would say it was an audible breeze speaking his language. Wherever it was, he wanted to be. Whoever it was, he wanted to know.
He stepped forward, not with his feet, but with his mind. Into the shimmer and ripples, into the air except it wasn’t air at all. It was something of substance, more than fog or mist or even water, less than a wall. At first it seemed dim, gray and even dark. Slowly it lightened as if his eyes were adjusting.
“Welcome.” The wind-voice was closer than his ear, yet it didn’t frighten him. He didn’t turn. No use in that he knew.
“Where am I?” Steven asked. Then his real question: “Who are you?”
Terry looked out the kitchen window. Steven was standing there as if in a trance. First his left hand moved out as the right hand holding the hose slowly lowered. The nozzle was dripping slightly spilling water onto his bare leg soaking his short socks and sandal. He didn’t seem to notice. Deep in thought again. Steven was known to stare off into space, his eyes seemingly wandering the universe while deep in thought on some difficult or impossible problem. Terry turned away and opened the freezer to see what might be there to airfry for dinner.
“Is this how it is done?” Steven suddenly thought to himself. Wow, I am figuring out the gateway problem in a way I couldn’t have imagined. He felt a bit of relief. This wasn’t real, this was just his mind cranking away on a vexing problem. Pretty cool, he thought, and his mind ran to how to transform this into code.
“But it is,” said the voice.
“What is?” Steven asked. He knew he had said nothing.
“This is real. You are really here.”
“Where am I?” he repeated the question.
“Where you have always longed to be. And have been. And always will be.”
“Heaven?” There was fright in his Steven’s question. Did he just die?
The voice laughed lightly. More a chuckle than a laugh but in it Steven heard all the melodies of Mozart, Handel and Vivaldi combined. It rang on and on and it seemed for just a moment it would never end and that is all he would ever feel, hear, sense again, and that was just fine.
“Come,” the voice said. It was farther away, still in his ear or inside his head but now some distance away and off to his right.
Steven felt himself moving. Not walking, not flying, just a soft motion in the direction of the voice.
The gray dim sense had turned into brilliance. He knew he was in his garden and that it was a comfortable and familiar space. He recognized his own plants but he had never seen how absolutely brilliant they were, not just in color but in structure, in motion, in living. He felt some of the leaves sigh as if the long summer that was now into early fall had wearied them and they longed for the transformation that was already happening within them.
“Listen.”
Steven focused and he heard. It was not the sound of a machine, more a choir. Yet, he could recognize water as if coursing through the cells, meeting up with photons from the sun and dancing together as if they were friends who had been apart for far too long. He felt the warmth emanating from the blossoms of his rudbeckia and now instead of seeing them as temporary bits of color and refreshing beauty that brightened his little patch of Eden, he saw them living and reaching out and singing in voices of such purity and sweetness that he felt a strange and wonderful desire to join in their song. They and their songs seemed to be reaching up and out to something and somewhere that he knew so well and sending forth an expression of such gratitude and joy that he had himself had only rarely felt and then usually as a child when the glory and love and beauty hit him in a transport that he felt could not be contained within the boundaries of earth.
“You are home, Steven,” said the voice, now closer to him than his heartbeat. “This is where you have always longed to be and you are home.”
“I’ve died then,” said Steven, with far more hope than resignation.
The voice laughed again the music of the masters.
“No, does it feel like you are dead? You are very much alive, more than you ever have been. Look. You stand yet in your garden.”
Suddenly Steven felt the nozzle in his hand, the water dripping onto his foot. Then he was back again with the voice.
“I am home,” Steven said, with relief and some confusion. “But, where is that?”
“You will see.” And the voice was gone.
3
Terry looked out the window just as Steven noticed the water dripping on his foot. He stared at it for a moment, then slowly lifted the nozzle and tightened it on the hose to stop the leaking. Terry watched as Steven then slowly walked toward his chair in the vegetable garden side yard. He seemed to sit down with a heaviness that bothered her.
“You OK?” she asked as she approached.
“Uh, yeah,” he said. “Yeah, I think so.”
“What do you mean? What were you doing?”
“Watering the tomatoes.”
“I see that, but you just stood there, getting wet.”
“Deep in thought,” he said. How could he explain the unexplainable to her? She would think he was crazy. And one thing he knew, he wasn’t crazy.
“I’ve been working on this gateway problem, it’s a real bugger and suddenly I think I got it figured out. It’s crazy but it makes sense. Just have to see if I can code it. So bizarre but boy, if it worked would it ever be cool.”
Steven was serious now. His mind started racing as he began to figure out the coding process in his mind. The shimmer part, he could do that, the ripples were easy, lots of code for that around. How do you get the feeling of looking right in front of you, but inside you and behind you and into space and into the space between your electrons and nuclei? That was going to be tough. What about the voice? How would that work? He knew there was no way he could replicate what he heard, the softness, the breathiness, the breeze, the music that seemed to fill the air and sky and whole world. That would be a trick. He’d have to google that. Maybe somebody has done something like it. What would he google? Sounds of heaven? That was crazy.
He started to believe that maybe this was just a way his mind was working to solve a tough problem. He never had that experience before, but seemed to him almost like the stories of inspiration that some very creative people had told. How things just came to them. Like there was a window to another world. An opening to a different kind of reality that left them with insights and answers that no one could imagine how they could have come up with such things on their own? Maybe there was another dimension of some kind that was tied to this one, and once in awhile, these dimensions collided or intersected, or, here was a crazy thought, maybe this was just some kind of quantum entanglement. Ah, he thought, that’s a promising direction for code.
He tried to remember the thoughts he had about the tightly wrapped up dimensions of string theory. Sure, that theory didn’t seem to be going anywhere, but what an idea, and it seemed to work so well. It fit, it was so elegant. He wanted very much to believe that string theory was the answer and that there really were these dimensions all rolled up like straws. What if they were unrolled? What if someone, maybe even he, could come up with the technology to capture them, unroll them, see what they really were. What if they were another world, like Flatland of two dimensions, and people or some form of intelligent creature really lived there? What if unlike the other dimensions they were connected in some way, entangled or duplicated? What a discovery that would be. Pieces would fit into place. Newton would be put on the shelf and people would talk about the good old days before the theory of everything was revealed. Einstein would look like a piker next to Steven P. Lambright, the discoverer of the ninth and eleventh dimensions.
You will see. You will see. He kept hearing the last thing the voice said to him, or thought he did, or believed he had imagined it. Will I see? Will it come back? Can I call it? Was it just my imagination working through my gateway problem? Or, is something wrong upstairs? The farther he got from the shimmer, the more he doubted whether anything real had happened until three days had gone by. His doubts were resolved. It was a hallucination of some sort. He had been working too hard, he needed a little time off. But, he had shown some of his co-workers some initial work he done on the gateway simulation and they were pretty much blown away. Vlad in particular. And if Vlad liked something, you know you were on the right track.
“Steven, what’s going on with you?” Terry asked with a little exasperation in her voice.
“What do you mean? Nothing. Nothing is going on.” He was not convinced and neither was Terry.
“Yeah, I’ve been working pretty hard,” he admitted. “Finally getting somewhere on that gateway thing and feel like I’m close to a breakthrough, but when I get there, we need to take some time off.”
“I think we need to now,” said Terry. As usual, her connection to reality was always a bit more secure than Steven’s, although most of the time he was reluctant to admit it.
“Where shall we go?” he asked. Suddenly the sound of getting his mind off the gateway and the troubling issue of what happened to him while watering the tomatoes sounded freeing.
“Hmm,” Terry hesitated. She wanted for a long time to come up with something they would enjoy doing together but nothing they tried really seemed to click. “How about going fly fishing on the Methow?”
Steven looked at her, dumbfounded. He had never gone fly fishing in his life, although he had to admit the few pictures he saw of it in outdoor magazines he’d think about buying in the airport shops always looked quite magical. He remembered years earlier buying a copy of Gray’s Journal just because the painting of a lone fly fisherman on a remote river looked so peaceful and inviting.
“You’re kidding, right?” Steven said, bemused.
“I wasn’t but if you think it is a terrible idea--”
“No, no. I just think it is a wild and crazy idea. So, what the hell, let’s do it!”
Steven texted his boss within the hour letting him know he was checking out for a couple of days taking some vacation time. He’d accumulated a lot. Taking vacation time wasn’t in his normal mode of operation.
The next morning, they were in the car, heading south on I-5 to Burlington where they would take Highway 20 across the North Cascades Highway, through spectacular mountain scenery aptly called the Alps of the Northwest. As Steven drove the BMW 330i through the winding mountain passes he felt a lightness fill him. It scared him. Reminded him of something. Oh yes, now he remembered, clearly. The lightness of the, of the, of the, what? What should he call it? A vision? A dream? A brainfart? A visitation? A hallucination? A sign of mental strain? He didn’t know and as he recalled the musical voice, the flowers in his garden singing songs of praise and lifting their blossoms up in a sort of worship he decided he didn’t care what to call it. It wasn’t real, but it was a real experience as his recollection of the experience now showed. What is a dream, after all? When you wake up from a dream, pleasant or horrific, the emotions and memories are real. The unique experience can be called up again in unpredictable circumstances and suddenly bring you back in sensation and emotion to that experience. He had offten wondered if that happened with dreams, what was reality really all about? How can we possibly know what is real? More difficult and troubling, how can we possibly trust memories, especially distant memories when we can’t tell the difference between them reflecting a real experience or a dream experience?
“You’re awfully quiet,” Terry said after a long time.
“Yeah,” Steven said, “Isn’t this beautiful country? I can’t believe we live a couple of hours away and hardly ever come out here.”
“You are pretty tied up with work,” she said.
“Well, maybe that’s got to change a little.”
She laughed quietly which irritated Steven just a little. He’d said it before, but this time, things seemed a bit different. He wasn’t sure why. He just knew that life wasn’t exactly what he thought it was before that little incident watering his garden.
They arrived in the touristy Western town of Winthrop hungry for lunch. Nothing looked too farm-to-table to them so they settled on a pizza place that in early settler days had served as the smal town’s prison, or so the small wood plaque outside the entry door informed them. Looking past the Western gloss of the buildings and gift shops, they could still sense the genuine history of the place almost like that which still hung in the air sometimes in Pioneer Square in old Seattle. Steven looked out the paned window, imagining rough and tumble farmers packing six shooters on their hips coming up the dusty street on horseback. Steven pulled out his iphone and Terry grabbed for it.
“Oh no you don’t, buster!” she said firmly. “You promised to disconnect on this trip.”
“Hey, hey, hey!” he laughed, reaching to retrieve it. “I was going to youtube how to fly fish. Do you have any idea what we are doing?”
“No, but that’s what makes it fun. We can learn together.”
They ate pizza, drank two beers and watched six videos of basic fly casting techniques.
“We’re good,” Steven said and Terry laughed. He was always a confident fellow, she thought. And she loved him for it.
An hour later, mostly spent in the fly fishing shop in Winthrop, they entered the crystalline flowing water of the Methow. Steven could feel the cool of the water against his calves as he cautiously went deeper protected by the lightweight waders they purchased at the shop. Along with fly rods and reels, floating line, a dozen hand-tied dry flies of varying bug types, many-pocketed fishing vests for the both of them, floppy hats with flaps in the back to keep off the hot Eastern Washington sun, sunscreen, and assorted other things coming up to a total of $842.93. Steven, never one to spend money he didn’t need to spend, thought this fly fishing thing better turn out to be something they enjoy or this was a big wasteful splurge.
The felt-bottomed shoes built into their light green waders helped keep them from slipping as they both cautiously walked toward the middle of the stream. Steven had seen one of the youtube videos show how trout like to hide in the calm water behind rocks as the river flowed quickly on both sides of the rock. The swift water would bring their food to them and they could pick and choose like a conveyor belt sushi place. Place a fly gently above the rock, let it float near the rock and bingo, trout on!
But casting, that was a trick as both of them soon found. Lines, tangled at their feet, the carefully made flies whapped into the water scaring anything within a hundred feet. Ten and two, ten and two they said out loud to each other trying to remember both what the helpful sales clerk in the store had told them as well as the videos on basic fly casting. But, magically, after twenty minutes or more of sheer clumsiness they began to get the feel. Three flies were lost to too quick snaps of the line, but soon they got the thrill of seeing a ten foot, then fifteen foot and then twenty foot cast with the mayfly tied to the end of the near invisible leader gently float to the surface then ride the rippling waves downstream.
Steven was ready to try to float his fly past the rock while Terry focused on the calmer water outside the main river near the west bank. Then he felt the scented wind and quickly looked around.
“Steven,” said the wind-voice quietly.
The rod slowly dropped to his side, the dry fly now pulled underwater at the end of the line as Steven focused on the space a few inches in front of his eyes. The shimmering ripple came, this time with the barest sensation of flaming swords, as the voice called his name again.
“Rob, is that you?” Steven asked fearfully and eagerly. Now he heard, or thought he heard in the voice the sound of his brother’s long lost voice. Rob, three years older than Steven had died a hero’s death in a Humvee in Afghanistan. The shock of that had never left Steven and had left his dad a nearly empty shell of his former self.
“Steven,” the voice laughed with the musical lilt of Mozart’s most happy harpsichord solos. “You need not ask me that.”
Steven looked around. He still stood in the river but could feel no clothes nor cold as the water flowed around him. Before, as the water rose above his knees near the middle of the river the pressure from the swift flow made his feel like he could slip in and be carried down in a heartbeat with the cold water filling his waders and forcing him into the clear water. Now, he felt as solid as the rock, and he could see as clearly as if there were no water the large trout lazying behind the rock.
“It’s so beautiful here,” Steven said, the awe and joy in his voice.
“Yes, it is Steven.”
Steven looked around some more. The hills and mountains surrounding the Methow river were magnificent in his and Terry’s eyes before as the drove along the bank looking for the place to enter the river the sales clerk in town had told them about. But, now, there was something very different about them. Steven looked and tried to think how he would describe it. How can I tell Terry about this, he thought. They were fresh and new like they had just been made or painted by a master artist, yet they looked as old as the universe itself. The colors were stronger, far stronger, yet nothing was garish or out of place. They were the mountains and hills that every mountain and hill in the world longed to be. And somehow, they seemed alive. Steven listened hard.
“Are they talking?” he asked the voice.
“Of course. You will understand them soon enough. Just know that they are happy to see you here. As we all are.”
“Look over there,” said the voice and somehow Steven knew that he was pointing toward Terry.
Terry had her back to Steven and it was a good thing because if he had seen her face he felt he might have died.
“She’s glorious,” Steven said more to himself than the voice, but he was shaking. For he saw her with an awe that would greet every first time visitor as they gazed up at the statute of Artemis in the great temple of Ephesus.
“Is she a goddess?” Steven asked, still trembling.
“Of course,” said the voice. “If you could see yourself you would be quite surprised.”
Terry lifted the extended line off the water and with a graceful and practiced motion cast it behind her, then forward, then back, then forward with each cast reaching out further and further until she extended the cast and let the line float gently to the upstream side of the fast water flowing just past the calm water where Steven could clearly see several large and strong trout waited. Every move she made was in exquisite slow motion so he had time, so much time, to wonder at it, the sheer beauty of the movements of this far larger than life woman he loved. There seemed to be a kind of light around her that sparkled and danced as if the air itself were turned to music. One of the trout clearly visible to Steven now saw the mayfly floating toward it at the edge of the eddy. With a burst it sucked it in and now Terry with surprising expertise and grace lifted the line and felt the surge of the astonished fish.
“I have much to show you,” said the voice, though Steven seemed to not hear so mesmerized was he by the slow motion action of the fish fighting for its freedom and Terry’s gentle and persuasive pull on the line ever closer to her. Steven heard her say to the fish to not worry that he soon would be freed to again rest in the calm water and feed on the mayflies that rose from the river dancing on the surface as their wings dried.
“Come,” said the voice and Steven heard. Then in an instant or an hour or a week he found himself on a hill overlooking a vast city at dusk. The lights were coming on in the city and he could feel the bustle of evening activities.
“Where are we?” asked Steven. “How did we get here?”
The voice laughed the laugh of the music again.
“Soon you will learn you need not ask such questions,” the voice assured him, and again Steven thought, yes, that is Rob, has to be, but more than Rob if that makes sense. Make sense? None of this makes any of this make sense and Steven was joyful with that thought.
The tour of the city went on and Steven thought he recognized places and streets and even people but everyone looked like they were more than people. As if there was an elevation, a moreness to who each and everyone was. He talked to some and soon felt at home as if he had always lived here. Within each he felt he had known them forever and some he was sure he had. All felt like family at its happiest Thanksgiving meal ever.
Then they stood on the top of a mountain higher than any he had ever seen. It was night and he looked out into the dark night sky, yet it was not dark. It was full of lights brighter than the sun yet he could see them. He could see them farther and farther and farther away, a vastness that did not frighten him but made him feel both mighty and tiny.
“It’s beautiful,” Steven said quietly, mostly to himself.
“The Ruler wants you to come,” the voice said. “When you are ready.”
“The Ruler?” Steven asked, a bit of fear showing in his voice.
“Yes, this is all his. It’s why you have been brought here.”
Terry had landed the fish, and as she gently held the exhausted creature to carefully remove the tiny hook from his mouth, she looked over to see if Steven had watched her moment of glory. She had been so intent on remembering the instructions from the video and the fly fishing expert in the shop that she hadn’t even thought of Steven fishing nearby. Now, she saw that he was standing still in the river, the rod drooping in his hand, the tip under water and the line stretched out downstream. Oh no, she thought. Not again. She quickly released the fish.
“Steven! Steven!” she called out.
She watched him slowly look around, as if dazed. Then look down at his hand and the rod in his hand as if he could not make out what these were. He looked downstream seeing the end of his rod in the water and then, as if realizing what he needed to do, he lifted it and began slowly to reel in the line. As he did so, he turned to Terry. She saw in his eyes a look of wonder as if he were totally immersed in a power that completely held him in its grasp.
“Steven, what were you doing?” she asked, now the fear clearly coming through her voice. “Didn’t you see me catch that fish?”
“Of course I did,” he said with a question. “It was a beauty and you handled it perfectly.”
“But you were just standing there, looking the other way, you weren’t even watching!”
“I saw every bit of it, more than you know.”
Terry turned away and pushed her way against the stream flow back to the car.
4
Steven stared into his doppio with cream.
“Something bugging you, bro?” asked Vlad. Vlad worked with Steven’s group in designing applications and coding platforms used by other tech companies developing games, apps, educational systems and more.
“Huh?” Steven said, coming back to the Magpie Coffee Company conversation. “Oh, yeah, I’m fine.” Vlad was unconvinced.
“Vlad,” Steven looked up. “Do you believe in spirits, I mean a spirit world?”
“Crazy question, man. Where’d you come up with that one?”
“Just wondering. Been thinking about some ideas for a game, some simulation thingy.”
“Like what? And, oh, the answer is no, firm no.” Vlad said, as if that would end a conversation he didn’t really want to get into.
“Well, hang in here with me for a bit, but I’ve been thinking about something. Just an idea really. What if, what if, well, you know all about dark energy, dark matter and all that stuff.”
“Yeah, it’s like 90% of our universe and we’d be collapsed into the Great Crunch if it wasn’t there, but nobody seems to know what the hell it is.”
“Yeah, that’s right. We know it is real. We can see its effects in the acceleration of the universe, but we have no freakin’ idea what it is made up. I mean, WIMPs? Give me a break! So we have something that is real, provable, but unknowable. 26.8 percent of our universe is made up of stuff no instruments we have can find. Less that five percent is the stuff we can find, matter made up of neutrons, electrons, molecules and all that stuff. The rest we call ‘energy’ without having a clue what it is.”
“OK, so what?” asked Vlad.
“I think it is a big deal. We gotta ask what is real, don’t you think? I mean if the universe was a democracy we wouldn’t even count. Five percent? We’d be a blip on the screen of reality.”
“So, what’s that got to do with your big idea?”
“Let’s say, hang with me, let’s say that you could find a gateway to dark matter. That someway, somehow you could go from this world of atoms and electrons and quarks and all that, all that stuff we know and can find and measure, into another place where there may be quarks and gluons, but they are nothing we could know. And say, if you could get there, you found that it was right here, right now, right where we are, like right in our ears, our brains, in the spaces between our atoms and electrons. It wasn’t way out there, or up there like heaven or anything like that, it was part of our world but a part that we just didn’t have the equipment to see it with.”
“Kinda weird, dude, but I’m with you. I can sorta see a pretty cool simulation going. Instead of jumping outside some place, you jump inside. I like it.” Now Vlad was starting to get a distant look as his mind took off thinking about another world embedded in this one that we just couldn’t find. He was flying quickly to powerful monsters and beasts that ten year old kids would have to battle for dominance.
“You have to deal with the exclusionary principle,” Vlad said after a bit.
“Yeah, but doesn’t that strike you as kind of a made up rule?” Steven had thought about that one. “I mean Pauli finds nothing in that huge space between electrons and the nucleus so he says that nothing can get in between, not other electrons, not photons, nothing. It’s like saying an empty room by law will stay empty. I mean, says who? And anyway, he was only talking about the stuff we know, he had no idea about dark matter or energy or any of that stuff. And if there is something in that room that we can’t see, does it mean there is nothing there? I mean even quantum vaccuum is filled with stuff, with particles popping into and out of existence.”
Vlad was now building simulation models in his mind. He was thinking of the imagery that would make a game experience like nothing anyone had seen before. He’d leave it to Steven to come up with science justification, if Steven thought one was needed. Vlad didn’t need one, just a plausible world for implausible battles that the little nerds would always win.
“It’s always been weird to me that we have very limited equipment for knowing our world.” Steven went on after draining his doppio.
“Take our eyes for example and the idea of scale. We know the kind of world that exists inside us in viruses and cells and down to DNA level, I mean we can see that if we get the right equipment and even simulate it. Then scale it out to universe scale, again, we have to have the equipment to see out the 13 billion light years away. We just don’t have the equipment. I mean, like a hummingbird.”
“Hummingbird?”
“Yeah, a hummingbird. Ever have one fly at your face? Scares the crap out of you, but there’s no chance of them flying into you if you look at how fast they dip and weave and fly around with other hummingbirds. I mean their eyes and brains must work at 1000 frames per second or more compared to our 24 frames. Imagine what it would be like to observe the world at 1000 frames per second?”
“Slow things down to a decent pace, I would think,” said Vlad. “Be pretty cool as long as it didn’t mean you died like a hummingbird. But, I don’t get the connection to your dark energy thing.”
“I’m just thinking that our senses, our equipment for experiencing the world is pretty dang limited. What if somehow it wasn’t. What kind of weird world could you see?”
Vlad and Steven were silent as both strong minds spun on the possibilities.
“So, why did you ask me about spirits?” Vlad asked, but now he knew where Steven was going with this. “Are you thinking that somehow this invisible reality that we know about called dark energy or matter or matter or whatever is really a sort of spirit world?”
“‘Course, if you call it that, no one would take you seriously,” laughed Steven. “Just like you when I asked you that question. But, think about it. What is spirit? What have people always considered things like angels, and God, and dead people who were spirits? They were ‘non-material’ they said. That means, in our world, our ridiculously limited twenty first century limited thinking that it was not real. I mean, for twenty thousand years before us, no one even thought to question the reality of a spirit world. Sure, they usually couldn’t spot it or say, yup, here it is, but they didn’t doubt it. They knew it was there, knew it in their bones. Why?”
“Well,” Vlad reassured himself, “We’ve grown up a bit since then, Steven.”
That felt a bit like a condescending lecture.
“Not so sure about that Vlad. I’ve been reading some Greek philosophers in the last few years. Not sure how much progress we made. Sure, we can collide particles and bust them up into a gazillion pieces and say what they are made of, but when it comes to understanding the real things, like what it all means and why are we here and what is really going on in this universe, I’m starting to think we’ve lost our way. Maybe a new Renaissance is needed. If you look at the progress made in science or where they are stumbling around and kind of get over certain ideas, it has a lot to do with philosophy.”
“Going a bit too far for me, buddy,” Vlad said, sipping his ice drink. “I thought we were talking gaming.”
“Look at Hoyle, he wanted that whole idea of the Big Bang, a start to everything, to go away because he believed the Steady State proved his atheism. Scientists tend to think they operate in a vacuum undisturbed by things like what non-scientists think, but they are not in a vacuum and when they operate that way, they can’t really get at what’s real.”
Steven paused for a bit, then realized he was quickly losing his friend’s interest.
“OK,” Steven relented. “Let’s get back to the simulation. What do you think of my idea?”
“Can’t say. Who’d you pitch it too?” Vlad asked, trying to put a gentle end to what was getting a bit uncomfortable to him.
“I’m thinking GDB Games, for one. They have some pretty way out stuff, look at that Sombrero Galaxy simulation. Seems they might be a fit, but I’m a long ways away from even thinking about that.”
“So, what do you want from me?” Vlad asked. He found himself both drawn to and repelled by the idea of creating an experience around the idea of anything smacking of a spirit world. As true blue believer in only what science reveals he had little patience for philosophy, theology or anything he considered fantasy.
“Your freaking brain!” Steven laughed. He was in near constant awe of what Vlad came up with in CGI. His imagery was stunning and original. “To start with, help me with this gateway thing.”
“Ahh, now I see,” said Vlad, feeling he’d bit the bait without even knowing it was being put in front of him. “I see why you are so wrapped around the axle on that gateway project. It’s all part of this simulation, right? You needed some sort of reasonable way to go from knowable energy and mass, our world, to dark energy and matter and back again.”
“Got it.”
“Yeah, I’ll help with that, as long as I don’t have to buy into all this spirit talk. Dark matter, mystery, weirdness, that’s all OK. No spirit stuff, OK?”
“OK,” Steven smiled and he almost felt the voice laugh its music.
5
The ride home from the Methow river had been uncomfortable.
“Am I supposed to worry about you?” Terry asked, well past the point of deciding whether to worry or not.
“No, not at all. Why would you worry just because I said I saw you like I’ve never seen you before. That I love you like I’ve never loved you before. You worried about that?”
“Yeah, kind of,” said Terry. “You said you saw my fish, saw me catch it, but you never turned my way as far as I could see. How could you see it?”
“‘As far as you could see,’ you said,” answered Steven, “Maybe you can’t see nearly as far as you think you can. Maybe none of us can see really far compared to what is out there to see. Or in there to see.”
“Talking nonsense again, Stevie boy,” she said, wanting to change the subject.
When they returned home Steven threw himself into his work like he never had before. Adding to the already heavy schedule of design and coding projects assigned to him, he dug deeper and deeper into creating a gateway to a world he now knew was far more than a figment of his or anyone’s imagination.
Terry had never seen him this driven.
“Another all-nighter?” she asked when she got up at 6:15 and found him staring out from the couch a cup of french press in his hand.
“Yeah,” Steven said with great weariness.
“How long is this going to go on?” her fear now mixed with anger as he seemed unresponsive to her and her now continual pleas that he take some time. Some time for her, for one thing, but just some time.
“I’m making progress,” Steven said, “I think I’m close to nailing it, but they keep throwing more things at me at work. I just wish I could concentrate on it for a while.”
“I just don’t understand why this has gotten so important to you all of a sudden,” she said. Yet, she was pretty certain it had to do with the time in the garden and on the river and a couple of times since where Steven appeared to go into a kind of trance.
It was a second marriage for Terry. A small town girl raised in a community where couples didn’t just start living together, she married at age 20 and was divorced by 24. The physical, mental and psychological abuse of her first husband, the son of a well respected town business owner and church elder, left her feeling vulnerable and uncertain of any relationship but this was met with a closed-fisted commitment to make the marriage with Steven a till death do we part business. Steven’s fits were bringing back to her the dread, anger and self-preservation instincts that came to dominate her life in the four years of that tumultuous time.
“Steven, please,” she begged. “Take some time off, get some sleep, honey. This is madness. I don’t give a crap about some stupid gateway project, you gotta take care of yourself and, and, me!”
“I’m so sorry,” Steven said, meaning it with all his heart. The vision of her in the river focused on the fish in a shimmering light pulled him back toward her. He wearily got up from the couch and hugged her. She cried in his arms, feeling his love but also feeling no reassurance that this meant anything other than more of the same.
The fever started a day later. Another night without sleep, with Terry tossing and turning in their empty bed, and Steven came downstairs from his screen-filled office looking more worn, tired and ill than ever. He went to bed where he tossed and turned without resting.
“Steven,” the breeze-voice said. The air in his room was filled with a scent of mountains and streams. Steven thought he heard a mountain birds rising call.
“Rob? God? Mozart? Whoever the heck you are, leave me alone, can’t you see I’m sick. You’re making me sick.”
“Steven, it’s time to see the Ruler.”
“The Ruler?” Steven asked. “I’m going to see him?”
“Look,” said the voice, and again the music in that sound deep inside him made him feel light, childlike, whole.
“No!” Steven said firmly, as he closed his eyes tightly, afraid if he looked at the air in front of his face as he lay on the bed, he would be gone again. He was too tired, feeling too ill.
“Steven, the Ruler is calling you. But you can choose to see him or not.”
“I choose not,” Steven said with uncertainty. The voice had told him of the Ruler, that he was the maker of all and now ruled without force. Steven had converted what he had been told into a sort of Super-Mind that created and controlled the dark matter world he was building on his iMac upstairs. It was his world, but the avatars he created were designed to make their own way, so controlling this world, the simulator’s world, was not the right way to say it. Making the flow work, would be better. Sometimes, as Steven was finding out, that wasn’t easy.
“I will see him,” Steven said, wearily, “But I need some sleep, can I get some sleep first? Tell the Ruler I will come soon.”
Terry had come in the room and heard those last words. She carried a digital thermometer in her hand.
“Dreaming, Steven?” she asked, the fear in her voice evident.
“Huh? Oh, no. I mean, I don’t think so.” The jerk back to the reality of his bed, his fever, his wife, his life was sudden.
“What’s this about a ruler?”
“I’m just playing out simulation ideas in my mind,” Steven said. Terry was far from convinced. She knew the gateway simulation project he worked on had turned into an unhealthy obsession, but she sensed there was far more going on, and now her fears deepened.
“Stick this in your mouth,” she said firmly. She pulled it out from under his tongue and looked at it. It had gone up a full degree in the past two hours.
“I’m calling the doctor,” Terry said. No protests from the weakening Steven were going to stop her. She had to take charge.
6
Vlad came to see him in the hospital. Terry warned him to not talk business, no simulation stuff, no gateway or dark matter talk at all.
“Sure,” I understand, he said. “I’m just really worried about him.”
“Thanks, Vlad,” Terry sighed leaving the room. She turned at the door. “I know your friendship means alot to Steven, you just need to help me get him back to himself.”
“I’ll do what I can,” Vlad said, and meant it. Though, the simulation had captured him now too as he built the world inside this one made up of wonders and colors and gigantic physical features far beyond anything in this world of light matter. Steven’s talk about this strange place he visited and what he saw there had fired his creative imagination as nothing else. So what if this all came from some weird delusion or hallucination, it was great stuff.
“I saw my house there,” Steven said as soon as he saw Vlad enter the room.
“Slow down, buddy,” Vlad said. “Your sweet one said no talk of work or dark anything. Everything is to be light today, sweetness and light.”
“You have no idea what light is,” Steven said, the fever still burning, but burning even more was his memory of his last answer to the voice.
“It’s all upside down, all wrong. It’s not dark at all, here is dark. There is what is real, here, nothing is really real, I think. It’s like vaporous here. Lewis was right, you know.”
“Steven, don’t go there!” Vlad said firmly. No more talk of great divorce stuff, bus rides to the gateway, grass as hard as nails and all that. He wanted nothing like that in his game. It was a game after all, not some sort of metaphysical, meta-theological speculation. Steven seemed to keep forgetting that. He was taking this far too seriously and Vlad had begun to share the worry that was etched on every new line on Terry’s face.
“Hey,” Vlad said, trying hard to change the subject, “When you taking me fly fishing? Terry said you guys had a magical time.”
“It was great,” Steven agreed, but his mind was on the experience of the river, of seeing the fish, of Terry as Artemis, of the surrounding mountains that he could hear talking and singing quietly, of the birds flying that laughed when he noticed them, laughing the laugh of those who recognize a long lost friend.
“Did you know mountains sing?” Steven asked. “Make sure you build that in.”
Vlad looked away, feeling his eyes glisten.
“Is Terry OK,” asked Steven said after a minute. He sensed how troubled Vlad was.
“What do you mean?” Vlad asked, vying for time.
“I mean, she seems to be worrying about me a lot, seems kinda distant. Sometimes I think she thinks I’ve lost it.”
“Well, yeah,” Vlad responded with troubling honesty. “Does she have a reason to worry?”
“Maybe I’ve told her too much of what I have been seeing, what’s inside,” Steven looked away. “I can see where she thinks it’s pretty crazy, but it’s not, you know.”
“I guess I don’t know, Steven,” his affection and worry for his friend coming through.
“Vlad, come on,” Steven turned to him. “If I was crazy you of all people would know it. I haven’t told you the half of what I’ve seen. Shouldn’t tell you any of it, but damn if it isn’t showing up in your amazing work. I gotta tell you what’s in there if the simulation is going to be anywhere near real. And you are nailing it, nailing it!” Steven’s enthusiasm was tiring him, and Vlad. Vlad hadn’t shown him yet the monstrous creatures he was creating on the side, and the epic battle themes that would drive the game.
“Steven, a simulation is never real.”
“I think I know the difference between what is real and what is simulation, Vladomich.” Steven’s laugh was as weak as the cold tea on his hospital tray. “So you don’t buy into these ideas like Elon’s that this is all a simulation, created and managed by some big mind dude out there on a distant planet?”
“I’m not saying there’s nothing to it, but what is real is real and if we’re in a simulation, then it is real,” Vlad affirmed, not realizing his contradiction.
“Exactly,” said Steven and closed his eyes, satisfied.
“Vlad?” Terry came in the room softly.
“Yeah, I think he went to sleep.” Vlad said, wanting to leave but wanting even more to have his friend wake up from this nightmare and get back to being Steven.
“Let’s step outside,” Terry suggested. They walked out of the psychic ward of St. Lukes together, down the elevator, out into the crisp air of October in Seattle. The sun was shining and lingering warmth from the autumn sun touched their faces if not their moods.
“Vlad, I have to know what is going on,” Terry said, feeling if Vlad was the only one who could possibly understand and maybe give her some peace.
“I don’t know Terry,” said Vlad. “I guess I still think he is just too wrapped to tight on this dark world simulation project and the gateway and all that, but I know his boss has been pressuring him too. I’m just hoping this time away will give him some rest and he can start getting better.”
“Why the fever?” Terry asked. “The docs say they haven’t found infection.”
“Well, we know and they know that if there is a fever then there is infection so they better keep looking is all I can say, or we better find some docs who know where to look.”
“I think they are thinking it is more psychosomatic, more tied to his agitation. They’re putting him on Seroquel.”
“Shit,” Vlad said, looking away. “Like that is going to help.” He’d had some unfortunate experience with the anti-agitation drug watching his father die.
“At any rate, they called in a psychiatric specialist from U Dub,” Terry said.
“Doctor Tsorvalis?” Steven asked in surprise.
“Yeah, something like that, Sore-something. Why, you know him?”
“Don’t know him but he’s a heavy hitter in schizoid studies. Written some books I guess. Read a feature on him in the Times.”
“Schizophrenia?” Terry asked. It was the first time such a diagnosis had occured to her.
“I really don’t think so, Terry.” Vlad tried to be reassuring. But knowing they were calling in a top dog meant someone was taking Steven’s condition pretty seriously. “The good thing is, Doctor Tsorvalis can rule it out and then you can forget about that one.”
“Guess, you’re right,” said Terry. “Right now I’d give anything to find out what is going on. I was surprised the MRI showed no lesions or tumors in his brain. That was what I figured. It would almost be a relief.”
“How you doing?” Vlad asked, changing the subject that was making him increasingly fearful.
“Thanks for asking,” Terry said. “OK, I guess, what else does one say? I’m worried to death. What do I do? What if Steven is gone from me forever, I don’t mean dead, I mean just mentally gone? How the hell is one supposed to handle that? I don’t think I’ve got the strength for that.”
“You getting some help, I mean, professionally?” Terry looked at Vlad as if he said a dirty word, as if there were yet dirty words that could shock.
“No,” she said, turning away. The memory of “counseling” through her first relationship was too painful. How could she be blamed in any way for the abuse that Rollie had put her through? How could Rollie have convinced that dope of a so-called professional that the real problem was her? That she was damaged in childhood and needed to confront it head on.
“No, been there, done that, no counseling thank you very much,” Terry said with finality.
“Understand,” Vlad said, not understanding at all. Just about everyone at work he knew was in counseling of some form or another. Some even seemed to be helped a little.
“Anything I can do?” Vlad asked, sincerely.
“Yeah!” Terry said. “You can get him off this damned gateway project or whatever the two of you call it. It’s making me crazy!” She didn’t realize what that sounded like to Vlad.
“Terry, I will do all I can,” Vlad said, “But I gotta tell you this. When Steven is better I won’t guarantee that I will keep him off it or that I will stay off it, either. Too much progress made, too much interest from some major players in what we have and too much possibility of creating a lot of buzz. This could be a big ticket for the two of you, I mean retirement, yachts, private jets, whatever.”
“Vlad, I would throw away all of those things into Green Lake and happily watch them sink if I knew I could have Steven back.” But she knew where Vlad stood and that made her more lonely than ever.
7
When Doctor Tsorvalis entered room 335 in the psychiatric ward of St. Lukes on “pill hill” in Seattle, the patient was staring motionless at the ceiling. The heart monitor connected to him showed a pulse rate of 38 with blood pressure at 114 over 67. The TV on the wall opposite above the bed carried a baseball playoff game, once again without the Mariners in the mix. A soft beeping came from the monitor and filtered gray light from a misty October Seattle afternoon came through the half closed blinds.
Steven followed the voice and was sitting comfortably at home when he became aware of a towering figure in his living room. When Steven was overawed when first saw the house he now sat in as if had always lived there.
“Is this the Ruler’s palace?” Steven had asked looking at the grandeur that surpassed any image he had of chateaus or mansions or even Ludwig’s fantasy. Only what he had dreamt of as a child where he might live came close to the scale and beauty of what he stood outside of now. The musical laugh again filled Steven’s ear as the voice explained that no, no not at all, this was not the Ruler’s home, this was his home, Steven’s home.
After a complete tour Steven settled into the sitting room, choosing a soft recliner. Never had he felt more like home. He wondered why, but the question seemed a bit silly to him. He was home, how could he doubt that?
“Will I see you sometime?” Steven asked the voice, expecting and receiving a highly musical response.
“Steven, you are given to see what very few do, at least until their time,” explained the voice in notes now low and more somber than normal. And knowing Steven’s question said, “You are beyond the cherubim, those guardians at the gate, the ones with flaming swords. You have heard the stories when you were a child. When the time comes to see me, you will see that you have known me all the time.”
“You talking the Garden?” Steven asked, his mind suddenly spinning. The cherubim with flaming swords? My god, how cool would that be! Coding an entirely new gateway sprang into his mind. But a greater question burned.
“Why? Why am I allowed to see, to go beyond the swords?”
“A few have seen briefly past the swords, but some the Ruler has sent back. You are not past the swords, Steven. Not yet. Not now. Like they, you are only given to see a little, but it is enough for them and others to know that we are here, and they too are here, right here even when they cannot see beyond the guards.”
“But, why--” Steven was returning to his puzzlement about why he was here when he noticed the figure in the room.
“Is that you?” Steven asked of the voice, certain that it was. The hearty music that rang to the level and far beyond of Cosi Fan Tutte assured him it was not.
Steven watched as the figure walked slowly through the room, pausing as if looking at someone or something. He reached down and gently held something Steven couldn’t quite see in his hand.
Dr. Tsorvalis looked down at the catatonic Steven on the hospital bed. He gently reached out to lift his wrist. He felt his pulse and looked at the monitor. 40 beats per minute. He felt Steven’s fever.
“Steven,” he said quietly. Steven stared up at the ceiling, showing no recognition. “Steven, can you hear me?”
Dr. Tsorvalis felt he heard an answer, yet Steven’s lips never moved. He continued staring straight up, breathing shallowly.
“I am Doctor Tsorvalis,” the doctor explained slowly. He was very familiar with the patients in coma who later told of everything that had happened in the room when others thought they were completely gone.
“Yes, Steven,” Doctor Tsorvalis answered a question he heard only in his head. How did he hear that? The patient lying still on the bed told the doctor what he saw of him. His strength, his kindness, his love for his patients, his sense of duty and responsibility. He told him he knew of his father’s anger and violence, he saw in his strong presence a child fearful as the door banged open in his small room, as he saw what his father did to his brother. He saw in his care for his patients the pain he had felt in losing his small son, and his wife in grief turning away from him and into the empty words and bed of another man. He saw in him the strength of grace and forgiveness coming from deep within him a connecting point to a braver, stronger reality and being. He was a rock made strong by flows of grief and fears and a faith that flowed not from within him but from outside him to fill his veins, his heart, his muscles, his living cells down to the smallest bits of stardust he was made with with a strength he could not find in himself.
Steven watched as the strong presence in the sitting room of his mansion revealed all that was in him. Then, he watched as the figure of the good doctor stretched up to his full, magnificent height causing Steven to almost gasp at the power and beauty and grace he showed as he left the room.
In the hospital room, Doctor Tsorvalis pulled himself away from the bedside of the inert patient, shaken, confused and afraid.
8
When Vlad saw Steven next the patient was sitting quietly on a patio in a chair outside the sliding door of his room. It was a patient room in a quiet neighborhood on Queen Anne hill with a view of the marina at the base of Magnolia. Vlad had driven up to the large house that had been converted into offices, a lab, rooms filled with computers and a few patient rooms facing west overlooking the shimmering blue water of Puget Sound. On the right column entering the driveway was a bronze plaque on the hundred year old brick. BHRI 2019 was all that was written on the plaque.
Before meeting with Steven, Vlad had conversed with Doctor Tsorvalis and Dr. Katie Simonson of the Brain Health and Research Institute. Doctor Tsorvalis could not bring himself to talk about the strange encounter with Steven standing at his bed, but he did relay in quite graphic terms what happened when Doctor Timmings was brought in for a psychological evaluation.
“It was quite terrifying,” Doctor Tsorvalis relayed. Steven had awoken from his trance-like state soon after Doctor Timmings began talking to him. Steven had looked at him strangely, then said softly, “Get away from me you bastard! You are an abuser! A killer!” The doctor had appeared shocked and shaken and tried to talk to Steven and calm him down. But Steven got more agitated and began talking about Christine. At that point, Doctor Timmings asked Doctor Tsorvalis to administer a strong dose of an anti-psychotic which Steven was already receiving. As Doctor Timmings left the room Steven’s now loud voice followed him crying out that he would have to account for all the things he had done, that Christine and her broken family were calling out to him and that he needed to turn around and face his actions.
“Why are you telling me this?” asked Vlad.
“We think you can help us,” Doctor Simonson responded. She was new to the story of Steven and his illness.
“Doctor Simonson and her team here at Beery, I mean BHRI--”
“You can call it Beery,” Doctor Simonson interrupted.
“Doctor Simonson was called in,” Doctor Tsorvalis continued, “ because of the uniqueness of this case. We have ruled out the typical diagnoses of cases similar to this, such as brain infection, brain cancer, exotic diseases, trauma, drug induced, even schizophrenia and psychosis.”
“How can you rule that out?” Vlad asked in surprise. It was obvious to him that Steven was crazy. Out of touch with reality. This had to be hallucinations or a bad trip of some kind, despite the inspiration it provided. “Do you have some sort of new name for lunacy?”
“Well, we haven’t ruled out everything, and certainly something pretty significant is going on with his brain,” explained Doctor Simonson, a fifty-ish fashionable woman with a calm and reassuring manner that came across to Vlad as a bit too haughty.
“Steven trusts you,” said Doctor Tsorvalis. “We want you to talk to him. Listen to him. Get him talking. Let him explain to you what he is feeling, and experiencing. Describe his world, his reality.”
“Isn’t that what you guys do?” Vlad asked. “How am I supposed to know what it means and whether or not where we go with things will hurt him? I mean, all I’ve been told so far is don’t talk about work, the simulation that is driving him crazy, because that is just encouraging him.”
Vlad stopped. For the first time, he felt the fear for his friend coming up in a tightening in his throat and in moisture in his eyes.
“I mean, I want him better. I don’t want to kill him.” Vlad said looking away.
“We want him better, too, Vlad,” assured Doctor Simonson. “But you need to know that as Doctor Tsorvalis has explained to me, conversations with Steven about his experience have proven difficult, troubling. We really think you could help us better understand what his reality is and how we can deal with it.”
“Ok, I get it, I guess,” Vlad said with uncertainty. “Just give me some guidelines so I don’t fall off the edge here.”
“If he gets really agitated, or if he starts accusing you of terrible things, or starts focusing on you instead of him and what’s he’s seeing and doing, then you must end it immediately. I’d advise you to not let him talk about seeing you or what he is seeing in you. Or anyone else for that matter,” Doctor Simonson replied. Doctor Tsorvalis moved nervously. He wanted to explain to Vlad what had happened in the hospital room as he did to Doctor Simonson. He looked at her and she quietly moved her head from side to side. No, she indicated. We don’t need to go there.
“Got it,” Vlad said. “Can I have a Diet Dr Pepper? And one for Steven?” Maybe sipping their chosen softdrink from the office lunch room might soothe things.
9
“I don’t really know, Vlad,” Steven explained, his weariness making his words sound as if they were carrying the burden he felt. “Yeah, I’ve thought about the whole Hugh Everett many-worlds thing, and I suppose maybe that could explain it, but how the hell would one cross over into one of those worlds when those guys have all made it clear that one can’t touch another. They split, divide and then keep dividing without any relation between them at all. So, I can’t see that that is what is happening.”
“Maybe they don’t have all the rules right yet?” Vlad suggested. “You’ve been kinda focused on this dark matter idea, but I just assumed you were jazzed about the CGI potential. I mean, it’s damn cool to think about how some how moving into that unknown world that everyone knows is there but doesn’t have a clue what its made of.” Vlad’s work on the graphics of this dark world based on Steven’s descriptions still held him in a firm grip. Many late nights were spent in attempting to create the lightness, the airiness, the solidity, the grandeur of the landscape and architecture that Steven described. Plus the realistically horrifying creatures to create the storyline for the game.
“Are you supposed to be talking to me about this?” Steven asked, closing his eyes and letting the sunlight filtering through the paper birch trees above his patio warm him. He was wrapped in a woolen blanket leaning back in an outdoor chaise lounge chair.
“Yeah, the docs said it might do you some good. Changed their mind about it I guess.” Vlad said, still uneasy about this new direction. “Works for me as I every time you tell me about where you’ve been and what you are experiencing I get massive more stuff for the simulation.”
“How’s it going?” Steven asked, not opening his eyes. Vlad noted that his interest in the future of this project, once so important to him, seemed to be waning.
“Awesome, I mean freaking awesome. I showed Kent Deloy from GDB a bit of the gateway graphics the other day and I’m telling you I thought he was going to jump out of his chair. He started going on about this being a whole new genre of game, that we could take this thing into unlimited directions, started going off on how we could use augmented reality to make it like what you saw with Terry and the others where they what is happening in one world is reflecting what is happening in another, I mean the guy went practically nuts. And he hasn’t even seen the simulation yet.” Vlad realized that he was starting to spin on the possibilities and remembered he was here to help his friend. A friend who was once so wired about this they thought it was killing him and now seemed so detached.
“The Ruler wants to see me,” Steven said quietly, looking out toward the garden.
“What? Who is this Ruler? I don’t get it,” Vlad said, wanting to get Steven talking.
“I don’t know all about him, actually, don’t know much at all. But, he is pretty much everything, I mean complete charge.”
“Despot?” Vlad’s mind began spinning. It answered a dilemma he’d been struggling with.
“Oh no!” Steven said looking at Vlad, wondering how he could think such a thing. “Opposite really. I mean the whole game is his, like ––”
“Oh, I get it, like the Master Mind of the simulation, the one who’s playing games with all of us. Toying. Cripes, Steven, you better meet him so you can help me figure out how he plays into this thing.”
“I don’t know that I can,” Steven said, turning away.
.
“Why? If he wants you to come, why don’t you just go, wherever the hell that is.”
“I won’t come back,” said Stephen. There was a long pause. “I love Terry, I love you, I love my life, I love this place, and while I want to go through that gateway more than anything in my life, more than my life, I just don’t know that I can just go. I want to, but it feels like I am not done. I don’t think it would be right.”
“Wait, wait, wait,” Vlad said, trying to catch up to this. “Wait, why would you leave Terry, or me, or anything? I thought you said you knew Terry there, could see exactly what was happening, could see her like you never saw anything before?”I Even Doctor Tsorvalis, you said you saw him and talked to him.”
“Yes, and the other doctor, too.”
“Doctor Timmings?” Vlad asked, afraid to let Steven in on what he knew. “You know he’s posted bail, right?”
“No, I didn’t know,” Steven answered. “Haven’t seen anything of him since then.”
“Turned himself in. He wants to try and help Christine’s family. Terrible tragedy about that girl. Family was just devastated, still are. Lost his license, of course.”
“Something good came from that then,” Steven said wearily.
“So go back here a minute,” Vlad asked. “You said you saw Terry in the river when you were fly fishing, you saw Doctor Tsorvalis, Doctor Timmings, but now you say you don’t want to leave because Terry is here. Doesn’t make sense, bro.”
“Makes perfect sense. Ever see a hologram? How about what’s on your screen, like the big screen or just any screen?” Steven was tiring and seemed dismissive of the question, as if it should be obvious. But Vlad felt he was close to getting to some answers and pushed forward.
“So, you’re saying that when you saw Terry, like a goddess, that was some sort of hologram or projected image of some kind?” Vlad was hopeful. Simulation thoughts started speeding through his mind, but before they got much headway he pulled himself back remembering he was here to help the docs get a better idea of what was going on.”
“No, no, no,” Steven said, feeling exasperated at Vlad’s inability to understand what seemed so clear to him. “There it is real, it’s real here. It’s all made of stuff, but it makes no sense to talk about here and there because it is all here, right here. The difference is in the light stuff, the ordinary matter we know we, we see as if through a darkened glass or screen of some kind, and it’s fuzzy, out of focus a bit, like everything operates with a dim bulb. That’s why everything is so bright and light and brilliant. Dark matter? Yeah, right. What a joke. Things are all upside down.”
“I know you’re tired and I’m pushing you, Steven, but you have to try and explain this. I just really don’t get it. You think that the other side, the deep inside, through the gateway is what is real and what is happening here is just a reflection, a projection of some kind? That what happens happens there and if we see anything here we are just looking at a fuzzy image of what is real, what is in there?”
“Not sure I can explain it to you, Vlad, still trying to put the pieces together myself. But you got to stop trying to make a distinction between what is real and what is not, what is here, what is there. It’s all real and it is all here.” Steven hesitated, thinking harder than he should.
“OK,” he said after a bit, “Let me try this. Stick your finger out.”
Vlad did, not knowing what kind of joke this might be.
“It’s made of stuff, we call it matter, right? That’s right but it’s not the whole story. What you are looking at there is much more than what we can see with our puny little eyes and the stuff it is made of is much more than the cells and molecules and atoms and gluons and all that stuff we seem to think we know so much about. It’s also made of stuff, real stuff, more real than you can imagine stuff. Matter or atoms or quarks that are the real stuff, whatever they are called. Here? They are all here but what we know and call real are the real WIMPs, they don’t touch a candle to the stuff of real matter. Where is it? It’s a wrong question, isn’t it? Right here, whether we’ve got the equipment to see it or not. I don’t know why but I’ve been able to see it, just a bit, and I know it is right here, right here.” And he reached out his shaking hand to softly wave the air close in front of his eyes.
Steven paused. Took a deep breath, leaned his head back in his lounge chair and looked into the filtered light through the trees.
“You and I and everyone who ever was and ever will be exist. For a time in this wishy washy stuff we think we know about that our so-called experts say is real because we can measure it. Call it light matter instead of dark matter but that is sort of opposite of what it is. But we exist always and forever and eternally in this, this created universe, but created in different stuff that we can’t know, or touch, or measure or do anything with as long as we are limited by what we think is the real world.”
“So we are in both places at once?” Vlad asked, trying hard to follow.
“Yes and no,” Steven said. “God, how do I explain this? Both places? Did you hear me?”
Steven thought silently and as he did Vlad seemed to feel the strength leaving him.
“Are you real, Vlad?” Steven asked finally looking right into his eyes.
“Well, I think I am,” Vlad said. Was Steven leading him astray, trying to avoid his questions?
“That’s the point, isn’t it?” Steven responded tiredly. “I think, therefore I am. Decartes had something right there, don’t you think? If your own awareness that you actually exist defines you as a person like no one else, that you have a sense of “me-ness,” that there is actually some being that is thinking and thinking about him thinking, then you are real, right?”
“Yes,” Vlad affirmed, “I am real.”
“But, where is that real who is you? I mean, where do you go when you go to sleep and your mind takes you off into strange lands and crazy impossible adventures? Where are you? Where are you when your mind wanders and you stray out of the world of appearances into a world of, like, pure thought? Where are you?”
“Seems pretty philosophical, Steven,” Vlad said. He was getting concerned that wasn’t helping either his simulation or the doctors’ diagnosis. “You sure reading those Greek guys hasn’t well--” he hesitated.
“Made me crazy?” Steven looked at Vlad with a slight smile. Vlad tipped his head slightly sideways as if to say, caught me.
‘So there is only one you and you are just a load of carbon, H2O and a bunch of other things, right?” Steven asked, warming again to his answer.
“Yeah, stardust as they say, just stardust neatly arranged into a package I call me and you call your buddy.”
“Right, but you are packaged not just in stardust but in that other stuff that the light world can’t see, find or know. You are not two bodies or presences, you are all one but you are put together with what we’d think of as some pretty exotic stuff. Information, as they say, but dictated into two distinctive languages. Sort of like a novel translated into English and Russian. What is the real novel?” Steven felt it should now be obvious to a bright guy like Vlad.
“OK, I’m following, I think,” Vlad said and thought quietly for a moment. “Then why would you not go to the Ruler? Why did you say you had to stay here for Terry, and me and your family?”
“Because she and you and even I are not yet released.” Steven said it with a sadness that Vlad could feel. Released? What the hell could that mean, Vlad wanted to ask, but he saw that Steven was nearing the end of his strength.
“Released, yes, and not yet,” Steven said slowly and with effort. “Released. We are tethered to this stardust, we want to escape it but we can’t. We know there is more, but it is out of reach, tantalizing us. The light matter weighs us down and keeps us from the freedom of being who we really are, who we were made to be from before it all began. Terry is here, you are here, still waiting release. And so must I. I cannot go to the Ruler until my release is complete.”
Steven’s head drooped onto his chest and Vlad left quickly to find the doctor, fear choking him as he felt he had pushed his friend too far.
10
“I could have driven, you know,” said Steven, petulantly.
“Maybe,” Terry said with a faint smile. The relief she felt having Steven’s strength and health beginning to return made everything lighter and bouyant. Even his stubbornness.
They stopped in Fremont at the Juicy Drip, a favorite of coffee snobs in the area. Terry went to help Steven out of the car, but he brushed her away as he gingerly walked toward the cafe. Terry sipped her double short breve latte and Steven his doppio with a good pour of heavy cream and discussed the upcoming meeting with Doctors Simonson and Tsorvalis.
They pulled up past the old brick columns in front of the Brain Health and Research Institute and parked in a spot marked for patients. Almost immediately, a young man pushing a wheelchair came up and despite Steven’s protests, managed to get Steven into the chair and pushed him through the tall entry door of old wood and intricate leaded glass. Both doctors were waiting for Steven and Terry in a smallish conference room just past the main entry which featured a large open staircase with craftsman-style balustrade to the upper floor.
“How’s things at beery?” Steven asked with a bit more brightness in his voice than he felt.
“Well, the question is how is Mr. Lambright?” Doctor Tsorvalis responded with a smile. He shared Terry’s relief at Steven’s apparent recovery. For more than one reason he wanted this patient to return to normalcy.
After more pleasantries and Terry describing Steven’s return home from the Beery patient room, Doctor Simonson came to the reason for this visit.
“Steven, we are all so very glad you are feeling better. We’re going to continue to monitor your recovery closely and want to respond as quickly as we can if there should be any relapse,” the director of BHRI explained.
“I’m going to be fine, really,” Steven mildly protested, tired of doctors and everything psychiatric.
“But, we are really eager to hear what you have concluded from your tests,” Terry said.
“Let me briefly explain what we have done in Steven’s case,” Doctor Simonson responded. She went on to say that part of their research at the Institute was focused on what typical medical science considered paranormal, including near death experiences.
“We’ve reviewed literally thousands of reports from people who have had NDEs and we have one of the top research experts in the field on our staff. We take this phenomenon seriously and our research has uncovered some interesting things––”
“You’re saying that Steven had a near death experience?” Terry asked in surprise. “Don’t those come when people are, well, near death?”
“Yes, you are right, Terry,” said Doctor Tsorvalis. “Steven’s events occurred prior to or concurrent with his illness. That is why we don’t consider this a typical NDE event.”
“First, let’s take a step backwards on this,” interjected Doctor Simonson. “One of the most important things we focus on at the Institute is getting better at determining what are real experiences and what are not, those we call affected events. We define a real experience as what everyone encounters as part of their daily lives such as seeing a rainbow or conversing with a friend. What we consider separate from that are dreams, hallucinations, even hypnotic experiences. Drug induced experiences and others like them show extremely minor differences in synaptic patterns, chemical exchanges in the brain and locations of neuroactivity. We’ve been able to determine that through AI research into the hundreds of thousands of brain scans through the TROSS scanner. Based on this we can evaluate the nature of these experiences.”
“Interesting,” said Steven. “So, have you concluded I’ve been hallucinating, or on some wild trip?”
“No, it’s what we expected but we found just the opposite. You are completely normal in terms of any comparison of actual experience versus affected experience, and we now know that whatever you experienced was as real as this conversation right now,” Doctor Simonson said with certainty.
For Terry, it felt like the air left the room.
“I, I, uh, just want to make sure I am understanding this,” said Terry, her voice slow and quiet. “When Steven says he saw me in the stream in that way, like he described, and the others, and heard this voice and all this, this is no delusion, no crazy, I mean no wild, I mean you are saying it’s just like normal, like what it is?”
“Yes,” said Doctor Simonson. “But, let’s be clear. I’m not saying anything about the reality of what he experienced, what I’m saying is from a brain science standpoint the experience he conveyed is no different than any other memory that we can fully verify. Does that make sense?”
“Yes, I mean no, it doesn’t make sense. You’re saying that when Steven saw me in the stream as this goddess sort of creature, what he saw was for real, he actually saw something, but you can’t say if what he saw was real or not. No, I can’t say that make sense.” Terry fully expected and hoped for an exotic psychiatric condition that could be treated by drugs or therapy or some other such standard problem. This was different. How could she be assured that Steven was recovering or fully recovered? She didn’t know if she could live with the vulnerability of seeing him again standing in his garden with water dripping down his leg.
“We talked a bit about NDEs and we’ve done more research on this than anyone else,” Doctor Simonson went on. “We have found like in Steven’s case, there are strange, unexplainable phenomena involving consciousness, involving vivid experiencs that we would fully expect would fall into the imaginary spectrum or be consistent with affected experiences. But, they don’t, at least as far as we can determine with the technology and science available to us today. We might like them to, but they don’t.”
“So those people saying they went through a tunnel and saw a light and all that BS, you’re saying that’s really real?” Terry’s skeptical side was taking over. “You’re saying the tunnel is real, the light is real, that, come on, you’re saying that science has now proven God exists?”
“No, no,” Doctor Tsorvalis jumped in. “I think what their research has found is that these experiences are real. As Dr. Simonson said, we can’t verify the accuracy of what Steven says he saw, but what we can say is from a brain scan and analysis standpoint what he saw is what he saw. He actually did see it as far as brain mapping is concerned.”
“Right,” Doctor Simonson continued. “That doesn’t prove that there is really a tunnel, or a voice, or anything about life after death. That is beyond science to know. It just shows that for those who experienced it, we cannot distinguish those experiences from the common everyday experiences we call reality. We know definitively that they do not belong in the category of affected experiences such as drug induced hallucinations or dreams.”
“So, bottom line, if I am understanding what you are saying is that you have determined that Steven is perfectly sane, has no psychiatric diagnosis you can pin on this?” Terry was deflated and afraid.
“Not exactly,” Doctor Simonson said, looking down at a report on the conference table in front of her. “We scientists and doctors have to have a name for everything so if we don’t have a name already we come up with one.”
“Got that right,” Steven said, with a smile. As an ADHD-diagnosed student he often heard his dad say, “They used to call this bad behavior and get out the wooden spoon!”
“So,” Doctor Simonson continued, “Despite this being a singular case at this point, we have defined it as ‘Self-induced NDE’.”
“Cindy,” Terry said, half to herself. “How precious. You mean you are categorizing this as a near death experience, but that he created the experience himself, like he wasn’t dead or dying but he just decided to go through the tunnel and see the light on his own?” Terry was getting more troubled by the minute.
“Well, sort of,” Doctor Simonson was uncomfortable as well.
“How about his fever, his weakness, his disease or whatever the hell he had?” Terry demanded. “Are you saying he brought all this on himself, that he just willed himself his fever and illness?”
“Terry,” said Doctor Tsorvalis with a bit of firmness that suggested he was not liking the questioning of their diagnosis. “We have found no physiological cause for the fever or weakness. We can’t determine a cause other than the stress and psychological distress of the NDE taking a severe toll on his body. Psychosomatic. That is all we can say.”
Terry felt there was much more they wouldn’t say, but that they just really wanted this problem and she and Steven to just go quietly away. She was quiet for a time and Steven looked at her, feeling her struggle and wanting to reassure her.
“You know that leaves me in a really bad spot,” said Terry, with a hint of anger.
“Terry,” Steven said, reaching out to take her hand. “I know what you are afraid of, and what you are saying. You think because they say I did this on my own, that I went there because I wanted to, that I might do it again.”
Terry looked at him and felt the tears welling in her eyes. More than anything, she just wanted Steven back. She wanted their lives as they were. She wanted to feel safe and safe was the last thing she felt right now. As she looked at him, she saw that what was could never be.
“I made a decision, honey,” he said quietly, determinedly. “I cannot go. I told him that. I don’t think he’s coming back.”
11
“Shadow” won simulation game of the year for GDB Games at the international conference held in Paris. It featured augmented reality where players were projected into another dimension that reflected their likeness and actions in this dimension. The new dimension or world, called Shadow, was a fantasy world of incredible brightness and beauty combined with dark beasts and frightening apparitions. A master mind called “The Ruler” directed the game’s imaginary creatures without mercy, using them to battle against the real-life players projected into this world. Blood and pain overflowed. Players entered through a gateway of shimmering light that vibrated wildly until it formed two flaming blades crossed as if protecting sacred space. The swords were wielded by two shapes that shone with light shining brightly from inside them. A voice spoke to them in breathy tones accompanied by Mozart and Vivaldi. The negative reaction of some of the young players to the music was causing discussion among the development team. Pplayers joined with others around the world in epic battles against the cruel and hideous creatures controlled by the Ruler. Those who successfully defeated the beasts and overthrew the Ruler were hailed in the Glass Castle and crowned as Ruler of Shadow. Then it all started again with only the names of the victors listed on the medieval style room called “Hall of Conquerors.”
Steven had returned to work and focused on assignments from the office. He tried to go back to the Gateway Project but by the time he returned to it, he found that Vlad had taken it in some new and disturbing directions.
“It’s not like that Vlad, not all!” he had protested.
“I really don’t care about what ‘it’ is like,” Vlad responded. “This isn’t about your little adventures any more, Steven, you got to get over that. I told you I didn’t want any of your spirit world nonsense. That’s just a non-seller and you know it. Yeah, you started me on this whole simulation thing and your ideas were just wild, but they don’t work in the game world, at least as I know it.”
Steven tried to explain and how the Ruler was restricted in the spacetime existence outside of dark matter and that another power had rebelled and sought the bitter destruction of all the Ruler had made, and that things were moving so that rebellion would end in victory for the Ruer. With that the gateway would dissolve, the swords removed and the boundary between the entangled worlds would be gone forever. If there was going to be a simulation with his name on it, he wanted it to be right, true to reality. At least his understanding of reality.
Vlad would have none of it, and Terry was greatly relieved when Steven told her that he and Vlad had agreed to end their partnership on the Gateway Project and that what Vlad was doing was now called “Shadow” and Steven wanted no part in it. His name would not be listed as a designer. Vlad promised to pay him some of the royalties but he was out of the contract with GDB. It hurt, he told her, but it hurt far worse to see what his vision had become.
Vlad stood near the back of the small gathering at Greenlake for the memorial service. The pastor made no mention of Steven’s illness. Doctor Tsorvalis and Doctor Simonson were there, along with some of the Beery staff. So was Al Timmings, now a real estate agent.
“Steven,” the voice had come as he worked in his upstairs office.
“No!” Steven had responded. “I can’t. I promised.”
“Your love for Terry and your friends and your family will not go unanswered,” the wind-voice answered. “The Ruler is calling for you and he would not call if it were not for Terry and your loved ones as much as for you.”
Steven felt a sense of fear and eagerness at once. The light from the worklamp on his desk shimmered.
“Welcome home Steven,” said the Voice, but now Steven could see Him. It was Who he suspected and fell to his knees with his face on the ground.
Terry took the call from Vlad three months after the service. She declined his invitation to come to see his new home on Lopez Island, a massive stone and wood mansion looking west above the small village with its small white church in the middle of the town, on the bluff leading into Fisherman’s Cove. Four small steeples pointed to the sky from the tower above the church entrance. Vlad was now a regular in the worship and Bible teaching services in the small village church.
Terry also initially declined his generous offer.
“Too much, Vlad, I can’t do that. It wouldn’t honor Steven.”
“Don’t do it for Steven, don’t even do it for yourself. You have to take it for me,” pleaded Vlad. “You have no idea how unbearable this all is. You know what Steven meant to me.”
Vlad stopped. Terry thought she heard his voice cracking.
“I took what was his and made it into something he hated. It should never have happened. If I had to do it all over again, I’d delete the whole damn thing. I could care less about the money. It’s a trap, a wicked trap and I need to get out of it. I’ll tell you Terry, I don’t know what I’m going to do. You have to take it, for me. That\’s all I’m asking.”
Later that month, Terry wrote out a check for $5 million to the non-profit fighting human and sex trafficking.
By Gerald Baron
September 2019
“This room is too small,” Terry thought to herself. She tried to take a deep breath and suck in a little more oxygen. Rubbing her palms together gently, she concentrated on their dampness to avoid the sense of claustrophobia. She looked at the clock. Four minutes after three. She couldn’t believe she had only waited ten minutes. The room seemed even smaller than when she first carefully opened the door, half expecting to see that it was occupied by someone else like her waiting for news, expecting the worse.
Dr. Tsorvalis entered. He had on a green checked shirt, tan khakhis. Not doctorly at all, Terry thought, a bit deflated.
“Hello Terry,” he said and she looked anxiously at him to see if there was any sign in his entrance that would give her hope for Steven.
“Hi Dr. Sorlias,” she said quietly, badly mispronouncing his name. He was used to it, and suppressed the hint of a smile.
“Sit down, please,” he said, motioning to the uncomfortable looking pleather loveseat. He sat down on the arm chair with the oak table and light separating them, so much that he had to sit on the front half of his chair and look sharply to his right to address her directly.
“What is going on, Doctor?” she asked. No patience now for pleasantries. It was Terry’s way.
“We are trying to find that out, Terry,” he said. Now she could tell there was no good news in those eyes and that quiet voice with a distant Eastern European accent.
“We have completed all the tests that we have at our disposal for a case like this. There is no sign of viral infection, nothing out of the ordinary in blood chemistry, no unusual brain activity that we can tell from the MRI and the new TROSS scans we have here at St. Lukes. This is remarkable because typically when there is the degree of distortion of reality as we have here, brain wave activity will quite clearly show it. We can trace abnormalities looking at where those disturbances are happening and diagnose and treat from there, but this is proving quite unusual.”
“You must have some idea,” she said, desperate for something more to hang onto than this.
“No, we don’t. Well, yes, we have ideas but nothing that is certain at all at this time. We are concerned that his physical condition is deteriorating and we are just not sure why, so that is the immediate concern. We know that what is going on his mind is creating excessively high levels of stress. We are treating him with anti-psychotics and diazepam to reduce his anxiety and control his hyperactivity, but these seem to be having little effect and the disturbances he is experiencing are growing worse.”
“What about the Seroquel?” Terry asked.
The doctor looked at her as she knew something he did.
“We’ve replaced that, we don’t think that was doing for him what he needed.” He didn’t reveal the angry words he had aimed at the doctor who ordered the anti-agitation drug.
“What are you to make of what he is saying? He keeps looking at me so strangely, says I am shimmering, that he has never seen anything so beautiful, that he sees me now like I really am, as if he never knew me, like I’m almost a stranger.” Terry’s voice was shaking as she relayed this, not knowing if this was a revelation and if this might make things worse for Steven. “It started when we went fly fishing to Winthrop.”
“That is consistent with his delusion or hallucinations,” Dr. Tsorvalis tried to be reassuring. “When I talk to him it feels like he expresses himself in ways that suggests he thinks I am some sort of magical being, a supernatural being like an angel or almost some god--”
“Yes,” Terry interrupted, “That’s how I feel, like he thinks I’m a goddess or something and it’s almost like he just wants to fall down and worship me. He looks at me like I’m a stranger, a strange being even.”
“He has said things in admiration to me that are very strange, and frankly troubling,” the doctor said, now the worry on his face more evident to Terry than ever. “What is most bizarre is that he seems to know things about my childhood and background, troubling things, that he mentions in passing, things that no one except my wife and mother know about. He talks about them in familiar terms and says that I have shown great strength and that all that has happened in the distant past is being made right.”
Doctor Tsorvalis went on to explain that there were other doctors involved in examining him that caused a very different and frightening reaction.
“Dr. Timmings has resigned from this team because of things that Steven said to him.”
“Isn’t he the psychologist?”
“Yes,” Dr. Tsorvalis confirmed.
“How can he just leave, don’t we need him to try to figure this out?”
“Yes, we do need a psychologist, and we have contacted Dr. Robert Richards in Seattle to meet with the team. He is Dean of the School of Psychology at UW and tops in his field. He will meet with us in the morning.”
“I can’t imagine Steven being that mean to someone that they would leave, it’s just not like him,” Terry said.
“You would understand if you knew what Steven said.”
“What did he say?”
The doctor hesitated.
“I really can’t tell you, that would be violating Dr. Timmings privacy. Steven spoke to him while Doctor Timmings was trying to do his evaluation. Steven accused him of some awful things including a terrible crime. Like in my case he brought up things that had happened in the past that apparently few if any know anything about. It was quite horrifying and Dr. Timmings was terribly upset and disturbed. I don’t blame him for resigning and we on this team are concerned for him now. It is very important that things Steven said never are repeated so if Steven ever talks about this I beg you to consider that these are said as part of this delusion, there is no truth to them, and Dr. Timmings feelings must be respected here.”
“Of course,” Terry said, in great confusion. “Of course.”
“We are taking the next steps to try to get to the bottom of this,” Dr. Tsorvalis said, a bit brighter.
“I thought everything, all the tests, were done.”
“All that we can do, yes, but we have contacted an infectious disease specialist from Sacramento and a specialized neuroscience team from BHRI. Uh, that’s the Brain Health and Research Institute here in Seattle. Amazing group, way out in front on brain research.”
“Didn’t you rule out infection?”
“We have, but one of our team members recalled a patient with similar, or I should say, with delusions and mental illness of somewhat similar nature, and this doctor was the only one to diagnose it. It turns out the patient had contracted an extremely rare bacteria in Thailand that had entered his brain through his optic nerve and caused a brain infection that triggered extreme hallucinations and delusions. He believed the world was being taken over by an evil being he called Satan-Walmart. His was one of six cases ever found.”
“Did he make it? I mean, did he get better?” Terry asked.
“Uh, yes, full recovery.” The doctor hesitated, recalling that that particular patient was the only one to survive the infection.
“Steven has never been to Thailand,” Terry dismissed the idea, although the idea of a brain infection causing hallucinations triggered a sight blossoming of hope. Anything for an answer, even a disturbing one.
“I understand,” Doctor Tsorvalis said, “but it is possible this doctor can identify some other source of infection unknown to us. We must try.”
“Yes, absolutely,” Terry agreed. “What about the brain research people, what are they going to do?”
“Well, I mentioned the TROSS scans we did on Steven. This is the most current brain scan technology we have here and actually in the state. But this group at BHRI has been working on deep data analysis of TROSS scans that apparently is far beyond anything currently available. Using AI, artificial intelligence, they are looking at hundreds of thousands of scans and finding things about what is real, what is hallucination and delusion. I’ve read some of the preliminary results of these on ArXiv, a database for preliminary science reports. It’s all very cutting edge and experimental and many are pooh poohing it, but we really have nowhere else to turn.”
“Doctor Sorlas, I am so grateful to you,” Terry said. If she felt the slightest sense of relief it was knowing that Steve had landed in the hands of someone not only competent but who from all appearances was taking his condition seriously and showing a great deal of interest. Of course, she thought, it could be just science to him.
“It’s Tsorvalis, but please call me Tomas,” the doctor said as he stood up to shake her hand.
2
Two months earlier it was Saturday afternoon at Steven and Terry’s home near Delgado Park in the Greenlake area in Seattle. Steven had been working in his home office in the cramped upstairs of their two bedroom, one bath home. A 48 inch screen stood on his adjustable standup desk. Two smaller screens flanked the large one, and from here Steven did his coding in advanced simulations. His company developed advanced simulation algorithms that were used in the gaming, entertainment, education and even advanced business application industries. He’d been burning a lot of midnight oil on the problem of developing a believable gateway to another dimension that wouldn’t seem hokey, contrived or too magical. If he could nail it, the applications for the approach he envisioned could be pretty broad and interesting. It vexed him, and to relieve his mind he retreated to his garden.
This was his sanctuary. The small city lot surrounding the early 1950s era Craftsman style brick house had been turned into a garden that demonstrated Steven’s curiosity, sense of beauty and deep love for getting his hands deep into the dirt.
“It’s primal,” he would explain to Terry or his friends who came to visit and enjoy the garden. “It’s like smoking, well, not much like smoking, but it is something my grandpa did, great grandpa and I’m pretty sure just about all the ones before them going back to, well, LUCA, you know, our last common ancestor.”
It was late summer and some of the hydrangea trees he so loved were showing a bit of weariness as if they were longing for the time when their foliage could be returned to the earth and they could rest to start things all over again in the spring. Rudbeckias were in full bloom along with the gerbera daisies and other long lasting flowers. The crocosmia blooms were all tucked up into the seed pods just waiting for the frost when they would droop down into the soggy soil to sleep for the winter and deposit new growth. Selfish gene? Yeah, right, Steven thought. It was all a bit too wondrous and magical for such things to just fall in to place. Steven went into the side yard where his small but productive vegetable plot was found. He picked up the hose and sprayed the tomatoes carefully avoiding the ripening cherry tomatoes and large beefsteaks.
The gateway problem rose up in his mind. His mind was grinding, accelerating through images of clouds, of doorways, of mist, of miniature black holes, of melting patio pavers and the water spray covered the young tomatoes. As he watered and contemplated, he quite suddenly felt a breeze wash across his face and with it a scent of flowers such as he had never experienced before. He looked around. The tomato plants were not moving, neither was the rhody along the pathway to his garden. The breeze continued to brush his face. He looked up to the tall Western Red Cedar bordering his yard. Not a branch was stirring, not a needle.
Steven wiped his face lightly with his hand as if to clear the sensation away. A minute later, it came again, and with it the scent of flowers and plants and wine and crisp air salted with ocean breezes, everything that made him hungry and long for more and more and more. Now Steven held still, sensing something but very uncertain what. He felt a near imperceptible shiver of fear.
“Look.”
He heard a voice. Soft. Breathy. Like the wind. It was in the breeze, but even deeper.
No, couldn’t be. He pushed it from his mind. He saw the young tomatoes covered in water from his errant spray and whispered, damn.
“Look.”
He turned around, knowing there was no one there but almost hoping there was. He turned to his spraying with commitment. He saw that he was now over-watering, but he feared quitting. He did not want to recognize that he was hearing a soft, very beautiful voice. It was not outside his ear, like someone standing next to him. Closer than next to him. In him. It was in his ear he felt, even between his eardrum and brain. But, it wasn’t like a voice inside his head. If anyone else was nearby, he thought, they would hear it, too.
“Look. Straight ahead. Inside.”
He looked toward the plants, his much loved plants. His hand holding the nozzle relaxed and slowly dropped to his side. First he looked past the plants, then before them. He looked at the air as if he was watching a bug between him and the soft shadowy green of the plants now past his visual focal point. What was that? A shimmer in the air? Like tiny waves or ripples in a quiet pond? The ripples grew until it seemed the air in front of his nose was a pond filled with them. The air was in motion. He reached out his hand thinking he might feel it.
“Come.”
The voice no longer frightened him. If he could describe it he would say it was an audible breeze speaking his language. Wherever it was, he wanted to be. Whoever it was, he wanted to know.
He stepped forward, not with his feet, but with his mind. Into the shimmer and ripples, into the air except it wasn’t air at all. It was something of substance, more than fog or mist or even water, less than a wall. At first it seemed dim, gray and even dark. Slowly it lightened as if his eyes were adjusting.
“Welcome.” The wind-voice was closer than his ear, yet it didn’t frighten him. He didn’t turn. No use in that he knew.
“Where am I?” Steven asked. Then his real question: “Who are you?”
Terry looked out the kitchen window. Steven was standing there as if in a trance. First his left hand moved out as the right hand holding the hose slowly lowered. The nozzle was dripping slightly spilling water onto his bare leg soaking his short socks and sandal. He didn’t seem to notice. Deep in thought again. Steven was known to stare off into space, his eyes seemingly wandering the universe while deep in thought on some difficult or impossible problem. Terry turned away and opened the freezer to see what might be there to airfry for dinner.
“Is this how it is done?” Steven suddenly thought to himself. Wow, I am figuring out the gateway problem in a way I couldn’t have imagined. He felt a bit of relief. This wasn’t real, this was just his mind cranking away on a vexing problem. Pretty cool, he thought, and his mind ran to how to transform this into code.
“But it is,” said the voice.
“What is?” Steven asked. He knew he had said nothing.
“This is real. You are really here.”
“Where am I?” he repeated the question.
“Where you have always longed to be. And have been. And always will be.”
“Heaven?” There was fright in his Steven’s question. Did he just die?
The voice laughed lightly. More a chuckle than a laugh but in it Steven heard all the melodies of Mozart, Handel and Vivaldi combined. It rang on and on and it seemed for just a moment it would never end and that is all he would ever feel, hear, sense again, and that was just fine.
“Come,” the voice said. It was farther away, still in his ear or inside his head but now some distance away and off to his right.
Steven felt himself moving. Not walking, not flying, just a soft motion in the direction of the voice.
The gray dim sense had turned into brilliance. He knew he was in his garden and that it was a comfortable and familiar space. He recognized his own plants but he had never seen how absolutely brilliant they were, not just in color but in structure, in motion, in living. He felt some of the leaves sigh as if the long summer that was now into early fall had wearied them and they longed for the transformation that was already happening within them.
“Listen.”
Steven focused and he heard. It was not the sound of a machine, more a choir. Yet, he could recognize water as if coursing through the cells, meeting up with photons from the sun and dancing together as if they were friends who had been apart for far too long. He felt the warmth emanating from the blossoms of his rudbeckia and now instead of seeing them as temporary bits of color and refreshing beauty that brightened his little patch of Eden, he saw them living and reaching out and singing in voices of such purity and sweetness that he felt a strange and wonderful desire to join in their song. They and their songs seemed to be reaching up and out to something and somewhere that he knew so well and sending forth an expression of such gratitude and joy that he had himself had only rarely felt and then usually as a child when the glory and love and beauty hit him in a transport that he felt could not be contained within the boundaries of earth.
“You are home, Steven,” said the voice, now closer to him than his heartbeat. “This is where you have always longed to be and you are home.”
“I’ve died then,” said Steven, with far more hope than resignation.
The voice laughed again the music of the masters.
“No, does it feel like you are dead? You are very much alive, more than you ever have been. Look. You stand yet in your garden.”
Suddenly Steven felt the nozzle in his hand, the water dripping onto his foot. Then he was back again with the voice.
“I am home,” Steven said, with relief and some confusion. “But, where is that?”
“You will see.” And the voice was gone.
3
Terry looked out the window just as Steven noticed the water dripping on his foot. He stared at it for a moment, then slowly lifted the nozzle and tightened it on the hose to stop the leaking. Terry watched as Steven then slowly walked toward his chair in the vegetable garden side yard. He seemed to sit down with a heaviness that bothered her.
“You OK?” she asked as she approached.
“Uh, yeah,” he said. “Yeah, I think so.”
“What do you mean? What were you doing?”
“Watering the tomatoes.”
“I see that, but you just stood there, getting wet.”
“Deep in thought,” he said. How could he explain the unexplainable to her? She would think he was crazy. And one thing he knew, he wasn’t crazy.
“I’ve been working on this gateway problem, it’s a real bugger and suddenly I think I got it figured out. It’s crazy but it makes sense. Just have to see if I can code it. So bizarre but boy, if it worked would it ever be cool.”
Steven was serious now. His mind started racing as he began to figure out the coding process in his mind. The shimmer part, he could do that, the ripples were easy, lots of code for that around. How do you get the feeling of looking right in front of you, but inside you and behind you and into space and into the space between your electrons and nuclei? That was going to be tough. What about the voice? How would that work? He knew there was no way he could replicate what he heard, the softness, the breathiness, the breeze, the music that seemed to fill the air and sky and whole world. That would be a trick. He’d have to google that. Maybe somebody has done something like it. What would he google? Sounds of heaven? That was crazy.
He started to believe that maybe this was just a way his mind was working to solve a tough problem. He never had that experience before, but seemed to him almost like the stories of inspiration that some very creative people had told. How things just came to them. Like there was a window to another world. An opening to a different kind of reality that left them with insights and answers that no one could imagine how they could have come up with such things on their own? Maybe there was another dimension of some kind that was tied to this one, and once in awhile, these dimensions collided or intersected, or, here was a crazy thought, maybe this was just some kind of quantum entanglement. Ah, he thought, that’s a promising direction for code.
He tried to remember the thoughts he had about the tightly wrapped up dimensions of string theory. Sure, that theory didn’t seem to be going anywhere, but what an idea, and it seemed to work so well. It fit, it was so elegant. He wanted very much to believe that string theory was the answer and that there really were these dimensions all rolled up like straws. What if they were unrolled? What if someone, maybe even he, could come up with the technology to capture them, unroll them, see what they really were. What if they were another world, like Flatland of two dimensions, and people or some form of intelligent creature really lived there? What if unlike the other dimensions they were connected in some way, entangled or duplicated? What a discovery that would be. Pieces would fit into place. Newton would be put on the shelf and people would talk about the good old days before the theory of everything was revealed. Einstein would look like a piker next to Steven P. Lambright, the discoverer of the ninth and eleventh dimensions.
You will see. You will see. He kept hearing the last thing the voice said to him, or thought he did, or believed he had imagined it. Will I see? Will it come back? Can I call it? Was it just my imagination working through my gateway problem? Or, is something wrong upstairs? The farther he got from the shimmer, the more he doubted whether anything real had happened until three days had gone by. His doubts were resolved. It was a hallucination of some sort. He had been working too hard, he needed a little time off. But, he had shown some of his co-workers some initial work he done on the gateway simulation and they were pretty much blown away. Vlad in particular. And if Vlad liked something, you know you were on the right track.
“Steven, what’s going on with you?” Terry asked with a little exasperation in her voice.
“What do you mean? Nothing. Nothing is going on.” He was not convinced and neither was Terry.
“Yeah, I’ve been working pretty hard,” he admitted. “Finally getting somewhere on that gateway thing and feel like I’m close to a breakthrough, but when I get there, we need to take some time off.”
“I think we need to now,” said Terry. As usual, her connection to reality was always a bit more secure than Steven’s, although most of the time he was reluctant to admit it.
“Where shall we go?” he asked. Suddenly the sound of getting his mind off the gateway and the troubling issue of what happened to him while watering the tomatoes sounded freeing.
“Hmm,” Terry hesitated. She wanted for a long time to come up with something they would enjoy doing together but nothing they tried really seemed to click. “How about going fly fishing on the Methow?”
Steven looked at her, dumbfounded. He had never gone fly fishing in his life, although he had to admit the few pictures he saw of it in outdoor magazines he’d think about buying in the airport shops always looked quite magical. He remembered years earlier buying a copy of Gray’s Journal just because the painting of a lone fly fisherman on a remote river looked so peaceful and inviting.
“You’re kidding, right?” Steven said, bemused.
“I wasn’t but if you think it is a terrible idea--”
“No, no. I just think it is a wild and crazy idea. So, what the hell, let’s do it!”
Steven texted his boss within the hour letting him know he was checking out for a couple of days taking some vacation time. He’d accumulated a lot. Taking vacation time wasn’t in his normal mode of operation.
The next morning, they were in the car, heading south on I-5 to Burlington where they would take Highway 20 across the North Cascades Highway, through spectacular mountain scenery aptly called the Alps of the Northwest. As Steven drove the BMW 330i through the winding mountain passes he felt a lightness fill him. It scared him. Reminded him of something. Oh yes, now he remembered, clearly. The lightness of the, of the, of the, what? What should he call it? A vision? A dream? A brainfart? A visitation? A hallucination? A sign of mental strain? He didn’t know and as he recalled the musical voice, the flowers in his garden singing songs of praise and lifting their blossoms up in a sort of worship he decided he didn’t care what to call it. It wasn’t real, but it was a real experience as his recollection of the experience now showed. What is a dream, after all? When you wake up from a dream, pleasant or horrific, the emotions and memories are real. The unique experience can be called up again in unpredictable circumstances and suddenly bring you back in sensation and emotion to that experience. He had offten wondered if that happened with dreams, what was reality really all about? How can we possibly know what is real? More difficult and troubling, how can we possibly trust memories, especially distant memories when we can’t tell the difference between them reflecting a real experience or a dream experience?
“You’re awfully quiet,” Terry said after a long time.
“Yeah,” Steven said, “Isn’t this beautiful country? I can’t believe we live a couple of hours away and hardly ever come out here.”
“You are pretty tied up with work,” she said.
“Well, maybe that’s got to change a little.”
She laughed quietly which irritated Steven just a little. He’d said it before, but this time, things seemed a bit different. He wasn’t sure why. He just knew that life wasn’t exactly what he thought it was before that little incident watering his garden.
They arrived in the touristy Western town of Winthrop hungry for lunch. Nothing looked too farm-to-table to them so they settled on a pizza place that in early settler days had served as the smal town’s prison, or so the small wood plaque outside the entry door informed them. Looking past the Western gloss of the buildings and gift shops, they could still sense the genuine history of the place almost like that which still hung in the air sometimes in Pioneer Square in old Seattle. Steven looked out the paned window, imagining rough and tumble farmers packing six shooters on their hips coming up the dusty street on horseback. Steven pulled out his iphone and Terry grabbed for it.
“Oh no you don’t, buster!” she said firmly. “You promised to disconnect on this trip.”
“Hey, hey, hey!” he laughed, reaching to retrieve it. “I was going to youtube how to fly fish. Do you have any idea what we are doing?”
“No, but that’s what makes it fun. We can learn together.”
They ate pizza, drank two beers and watched six videos of basic fly casting techniques.
“We’re good,” Steven said and Terry laughed. He was always a confident fellow, she thought. And she loved him for it.
An hour later, mostly spent in the fly fishing shop in Winthrop, they entered the crystalline flowing water of the Methow. Steven could feel the cool of the water against his calves as he cautiously went deeper protected by the lightweight waders they purchased at the shop. Along with fly rods and reels, floating line, a dozen hand-tied dry flies of varying bug types, many-pocketed fishing vests for the both of them, floppy hats with flaps in the back to keep off the hot Eastern Washington sun, sunscreen, and assorted other things coming up to a total of $842.93. Steven, never one to spend money he didn’t need to spend, thought this fly fishing thing better turn out to be something they enjoy or this was a big wasteful splurge.
The felt-bottomed shoes built into their light green waders helped keep them from slipping as they both cautiously walked toward the middle of the stream. Steven had seen one of the youtube videos show how trout like to hide in the calm water behind rocks as the river flowed quickly on both sides of the rock. The swift water would bring their food to them and they could pick and choose like a conveyor belt sushi place. Place a fly gently above the rock, let it float near the rock and bingo, trout on!
But casting, that was a trick as both of them soon found. Lines, tangled at their feet, the carefully made flies whapped into the water scaring anything within a hundred feet. Ten and two, ten and two they said out loud to each other trying to remember both what the helpful sales clerk in the store had told them as well as the videos on basic fly casting. But, magically, after twenty minutes or more of sheer clumsiness they began to get the feel. Three flies were lost to too quick snaps of the line, but soon they got the thrill of seeing a ten foot, then fifteen foot and then twenty foot cast with the mayfly tied to the end of the near invisible leader gently float to the surface then ride the rippling waves downstream.
Steven was ready to try to float his fly past the rock while Terry focused on the calmer water outside the main river near the west bank. Then he felt the scented wind and quickly looked around.
“Steven,” said the wind-voice quietly.
The rod slowly dropped to his side, the dry fly now pulled underwater at the end of the line as Steven focused on the space a few inches in front of his eyes. The shimmering ripple came, this time with the barest sensation of flaming swords, as the voice called his name again.
“Rob, is that you?” Steven asked fearfully and eagerly. Now he heard, or thought he heard in the voice the sound of his brother’s long lost voice. Rob, three years older than Steven had died a hero’s death in a Humvee in Afghanistan. The shock of that had never left Steven and had left his dad a nearly empty shell of his former self.
“Steven,” the voice laughed with the musical lilt of Mozart’s most happy harpsichord solos. “You need not ask me that.”
Steven looked around. He still stood in the river but could feel no clothes nor cold as the water flowed around him. Before, as the water rose above his knees near the middle of the river the pressure from the swift flow made his feel like he could slip in and be carried down in a heartbeat with the cold water filling his waders and forcing him into the clear water. Now, he felt as solid as the rock, and he could see as clearly as if there were no water the large trout lazying behind the rock.
“It’s so beautiful here,” Steven said, the awe and joy in his voice.
“Yes, it is Steven.”
Steven looked around some more. The hills and mountains surrounding the Methow river were magnificent in his and Terry’s eyes before as the drove along the bank looking for the place to enter the river the sales clerk in town had told them about. But, now, there was something very different about them. Steven looked and tried to think how he would describe it. How can I tell Terry about this, he thought. They were fresh and new like they had just been made or painted by a master artist, yet they looked as old as the universe itself. The colors were stronger, far stronger, yet nothing was garish or out of place. They were the mountains and hills that every mountain and hill in the world longed to be. And somehow, they seemed alive. Steven listened hard.
“Are they talking?” he asked the voice.
“Of course. You will understand them soon enough. Just know that they are happy to see you here. As we all are.”
“Look over there,” said the voice and somehow Steven knew that he was pointing toward Terry.
Terry had her back to Steven and it was a good thing because if he had seen her face he felt he might have died.
“She’s glorious,” Steven said more to himself than the voice, but he was shaking. For he saw her with an awe that would greet every first time visitor as they gazed up at the statute of Artemis in the great temple of Ephesus.
“Is she a goddess?” Steven asked, still trembling.
“Of course,” said the voice. “If you could see yourself you would be quite surprised.”
Terry lifted the extended line off the water and with a graceful and practiced motion cast it behind her, then forward, then back, then forward with each cast reaching out further and further until she extended the cast and let the line float gently to the upstream side of the fast water flowing just past the calm water where Steven could clearly see several large and strong trout waited. Every move she made was in exquisite slow motion so he had time, so much time, to wonder at it, the sheer beauty of the movements of this far larger than life woman he loved. There seemed to be a kind of light around her that sparkled and danced as if the air itself were turned to music. One of the trout clearly visible to Steven now saw the mayfly floating toward it at the edge of the eddy. With a burst it sucked it in and now Terry with surprising expertise and grace lifted the line and felt the surge of the astonished fish.
“I have much to show you,” said the voice, though Steven seemed to not hear so mesmerized was he by the slow motion action of the fish fighting for its freedom and Terry’s gentle and persuasive pull on the line ever closer to her. Steven heard her say to the fish to not worry that he soon would be freed to again rest in the calm water and feed on the mayflies that rose from the river dancing on the surface as their wings dried.
“Come,” said the voice and Steven heard. Then in an instant or an hour or a week he found himself on a hill overlooking a vast city at dusk. The lights were coming on in the city and he could feel the bustle of evening activities.
“Where are we?” asked Steven. “How did we get here?”
The voice laughed the laugh of the music again.
“Soon you will learn you need not ask such questions,” the voice assured him, and again Steven thought, yes, that is Rob, has to be, but more than Rob if that makes sense. Make sense? None of this makes any of this make sense and Steven was joyful with that thought.
The tour of the city went on and Steven thought he recognized places and streets and even people but everyone looked like they were more than people. As if there was an elevation, a moreness to who each and everyone was. He talked to some and soon felt at home as if he had always lived here. Within each he felt he had known them forever and some he was sure he had. All felt like family at its happiest Thanksgiving meal ever.
Then they stood on the top of a mountain higher than any he had ever seen. It was night and he looked out into the dark night sky, yet it was not dark. It was full of lights brighter than the sun yet he could see them. He could see them farther and farther and farther away, a vastness that did not frighten him but made him feel both mighty and tiny.
“It’s beautiful,” Steven said quietly, mostly to himself.
“The Ruler wants you to come,” the voice said. “When you are ready.”
“The Ruler?” Steven asked, a bit of fear showing in his voice.
“Yes, this is all his. It’s why you have been brought here.”
Terry had landed the fish, and as she gently held the exhausted creature to carefully remove the tiny hook from his mouth, she looked over to see if Steven had watched her moment of glory. She had been so intent on remembering the instructions from the video and the fly fishing expert in the shop that she hadn’t even thought of Steven fishing nearby. Now, she saw that he was standing still in the river, the rod drooping in his hand, the tip under water and the line stretched out downstream. Oh no, she thought. Not again. She quickly released the fish.
“Steven! Steven!” she called out.
She watched him slowly look around, as if dazed. Then look down at his hand and the rod in his hand as if he could not make out what these were. He looked downstream seeing the end of his rod in the water and then, as if realizing what he needed to do, he lifted it and began slowly to reel in the line. As he did so, he turned to Terry. She saw in his eyes a look of wonder as if he were totally immersed in a power that completely held him in its grasp.
“Steven, what were you doing?” she asked, now the fear clearly coming through her voice. “Didn’t you see me catch that fish?”
“Of course I did,” he said with a question. “It was a beauty and you handled it perfectly.”
“But you were just standing there, looking the other way, you weren’t even watching!”
“I saw every bit of it, more than you know.”
Terry turned away and pushed her way against the stream flow back to the car.
4
Steven stared into his doppio with cream.
“Something bugging you, bro?” asked Vlad. Vlad worked with Steven’s group in designing applications and coding platforms used by other tech companies developing games, apps, educational systems and more.
“Huh?” Steven said, coming back to the Magpie Coffee Company conversation. “Oh, yeah, I’m fine.” Vlad was unconvinced.
“Vlad,” Steven looked up. “Do you believe in spirits, I mean a spirit world?”
“Crazy question, man. Where’d you come up with that one?”
“Just wondering. Been thinking about some ideas for a game, some simulation thingy.”
“Like what? And, oh, the answer is no, firm no.” Vlad said, as if that would end a conversation he didn’t really want to get into.
“Well, hang in here with me for a bit, but I’ve been thinking about something. Just an idea really. What if, what if, well, you know all about dark energy, dark matter and all that stuff.”
“Yeah, it’s like 90% of our universe and we’d be collapsed into the Great Crunch if it wasn’t there, but nobody seems to know what the hell it is.”
“Yeah, that’s right. We know it is real. We can see its effects in the acceleration of the universe, but we have no freakin’ idea what it is made up. I mean, WIMPs? Give me a break! So we have something that is real, provable, but unknowable. 26.8 percent of our universe is made up of stuff no instruments we have can find. Less that five percent is the stuff we can find, matter made up of neutrons, electrons, molecules and all that stuff. The rest we call ‘energy’ without having a clue what it is.”
“OK, so what?” asked Vlad.
“I think it is a big deal. We gotta ask what is real, don’t you think? I mean if the universe was a democracy we wouldn’t even count. Five percent? We’d be a blip on the screen of reality.”
“So, what’s that got to do with your big idea?”
“Let’s say, hang with me, let’s say that you could find a gateway to dark matter. That someway, somehow you could go from this world of atoms and electrons and quarks and all that, all that stuff we know and can find and measure, into another place where there may be quarks and gluons, but they are nothing we could know. And say, if you could get there, you found that it was right here, right now, right where we are, like right in our ears, our brains, in the spaces between our atoms and electrons. It wasn’t way out there, or up there like heaven or anything like that, it was part of our world but a part that we just didn’t have the equipment to see it with.”
“Kinda weird, dude, but I’m with you. I can sorta see a pretty cool simulation going. Instead of jumping outside some place, you jump inside. I like it.” Now Vlad was starting to get a distant look as his mind took off thinking about another world embedded in this one that we just couldn’t find. He was flying quickly to powerful monsters and beasts that ten year old kids would have to battle for dominance.
“You have to deal with the exclusionary principle,” Vlad said after a bit.
“Yeah, but doesn’t that strike you as kind of a made up rule?” Steven had thought about that one. “I mean Pauli finds nothing in that huge space between electrons and the nucleus so he says that nothing can get in between, not other electrons, not photons, nothing. It’s like saying an empty room by law will stay empty. I mean, says who? And anyway, he was only talking about the stuff we know, he had no idea about dark matter or energy or any of that stuff. And if there is something in that room that we can’t see, does it mean there is nothing there? I mean even quantum vaccuum is filled with stuff, with particles popping into and out of existence.”
Vlad was now building simulation models in his mind. He was thinking of the imagery that would make a game experience like nothing anyone had seen before. He’d leave it to Steven to come up with science justification, if Steven thought one was needed. Vlad didn’t need one, just a plausible world for implausible battles that the little nerds would always win.
“It’s always been weird to me that we have very limited equipment for knowing our world.” Steven went on after draining his doppio.
“Take our eyes for example and the idea of scale. We know the kind of world that exists inside us in viruses and cells and down to DNA level, I mean we can see that if we get the right equipment and even simulate it. Then scale it out to universe scale, again, we have to have the equipment to see out the 13 billion light years away. We just don’t have the equipment. I mean, like a hummingbird.”
“Hummingbird?”
“Yeah, a hummingbird. Ever have one fly at your face? Scares the crap out of you, but there’s no chance of them flying into you if you look at how fast they dip and weave and fly around with other hummingbirds. I mean their eyes and brains must work at 1000 frames per second or more compared to our 24 frames. Imagine what it would be like to observe the world at 1000 frames per second?”
“Slow things down to a decent pace, I would think,” said Vlad. “Be pretty cool as long as it didn’t mean you died like a hummingbird. But, I don’t get the connection to your dark energy thing.”
“I’m just thinking that our senses, our equipment for experiencing the world is pretty dang limited. What if somehow it wasn’t. What kind of weird world could you see?”
Vlad and Steven were silent as both strong minds spun on the possibilities.
“So, why did you ask me about spirits?” Vlad asked, but now he knew where Steven was going with this. “Are you thinking that somehow this invisible reality that we know about called dark energy or matter or matter or whatever is really a sort of spirit world?”
“‘Course, if you call it that, no one would take you seriously,” laughed Steven. “Just like you when I asked you that question. But, think about it. What is spirit? What have people always considered things like angels, and God, and dead people who were spirits? They were ‘non-material’ they said. That means, in our world, our ridiculously limited twenty first century limited thinking that it was not real. I mean, for twenty thousand years before us, no one even thought to question the reality of a spirit world. Sure, they usually couldn’t spot it or say, yup, here it is, but they didn’t doubt it. They knew it was there, knew it in their bones. Why?”
“Well,” Vlad reassured himself, “We’ve grown up a bit since then, Steven.”
That felt a bit like a condescending lecture.
“Not so sure about that Vlad. I’ve been reading some Greek philosophers in the last few years. Not sure how much progress we made. Sure, we can collide particles and bust them up into a gazillion pieces and say what they are made of, but when it comes to understanding the real things, like what it all means and why are we here and what is really going on in this universe, I’m starting to think we’ve lost our way. Maybe a new Renaissance is needed. If you look at the progress made in science or where they are stumbling around and kind of get over certain ideas, it has a lot to do with philosophy.”
“Going a bit too far for me, buddy,” Vlad said, sipping his ice drink. “I thought we were talking gaming.”
“Look at Hoyle, he wanted that whole idea of the Big Bang, a start to everything, to go away because he believed the Steady State proved his atheism. Scientists tend to think they operate in a vacuum undisturbed by things like what non-scientists think, but they are not in a vacuum and when they operate that way, they can’t really get at what’s real.”
Steven paused for a bit, then realized he was quickly losing his friend’s interest.
“OK,” Steven relented. “Let’s get back to the simulation. What do you think of my idea?”
“Can’t say. Who’d you pitch it too?” Vlad asked, trying to put a gentle end to what was getting a bit uncomfortable to him.
“I’m thinking GDB Games, for one. They have some pretty way out stuff, look at that Sombrero Galaxy simulation. Seems they might be a fit, but I’m a long ways away from even thinking about that.”
“So, what do you want from me?” Vlad asked. He found himself both drawn to and repelled by the idea of creating an experience around the idea of anything smacking of a spirit world. As true blue believer in only what science reveals he had little patience for philosophy, theology or anything he considered fantasy.
“Your freaking brain!” Steven laughed. He was in near constant awe of what Vlad came up with in CGI. His imagery was stunning and original. “To start with, help me with this gateway thing.”
“Ahh, now I see,” said Vlad, feeling he’d bit the bait without even knowing it was being put in front of him. “I see why you are so wrapped around the axle on that gateway project. It’s all part of this simulation, right? You needed some sort of reasonable way to go from knowable energy and mass, our world, to dark energy and matter and back again.”
“Got it.”
“Yeah, I’ll help with that, as long as I don’t have to buy into all this spirit talk. Dark matter, mystery, weirdness, that’s all OK. No spirit stuff, OK?”
“OK,” Steven smiled and he almost felt the voice laugh its music.
5
The ride home from the Methow river had been uncomfortable.
“Am I supposed to worry about you?” Terry asked, well past the point of deciding whether to worry or not.
“No, not at all. Why would you worry just because I said I saw you like I’ve never seen you before. That I love you like I’ve never loved you before. You worried about that?”
“Yeah, kind of,” said Terry. “You said you saw my fish, saw me catch it, but you never turned my way as far as I could see. How could you see it?”
“‘As far as you could see,’ you said,” answered Steven, “Maybe you can’t see nearly as far as you think you can. Maybe none of us can see really far compared to what is out there to see. Or in there to see.”
“Talking nonsense again, Stevie boy,” she said, wanting to change the subject.
When they returned home Steven threw himself into his work like he never had before. Adding to the already heavy schedule of design and coding projects assigned to him, he dug deeper and deeper into creating a gateway to a world he now knew was far more than a figment of his or anyone’s imagination.
Terry had never seen him this driven.
“Another all-nighter?” she asked when she got up at 6:15 and found him staring out from the couch a cup of french press in his hand.
“Yeah,” Steven said with great weariness.
“How long is this going to go on?” her fear now mixed with anger as he seemed unresponsive to her and her now continual pleas that he take some time. Some time for her, for one thing, but just some time.
“I’m making progress,” Steven said, “I think I’m close to nailing it, but they keep throwing more things at me at work. I just wish I could concentrate on it for a while.”
“I just don’t understand why this has gotten so important to you all of a sudden,” she said. Yet, she was pretty certain it had to do with the time in the garden and on the river and a couple of times since where Steven appeared to go into a kind of trance.
It was a second marriage for Terry. A small town girl raised in a community where couples didn’t just start living together, she married at age 20 and was divorced by 24. The physical, mental and psychological abuse of her first husband, the son of a well respected town business owner and church elder, left her feeling vulnerable and uncertain of any relationship but this was met with a closed-fisted commitment to make the marriage with Steven a till death do we part business. Steven’s fits were bringing back to her the dread, anger and self-preservation instincts that came to dominate her life in the four years of that tumultuous time.
“Steven, please,” she begged. “Take some time off, get some sleep, honey. This is madness. I don’t give a crap about some stupid gateway project, you gotta take care of yourself and, and, me!”
“I’m so sorry,” Steven said, meaning it with all his heart. The vision of her in the river focused on the fish in a shimmering light pulled him back toward her. He wearily got up from the couch and hugged her. She cried in his arms, feeling his love but also feeling no reassurance that this meant anything other than more of the same.
The fever started a day later. Another night without sleep, with Terry tossing and turning in their empty bed, and Steven came downstairs from his screen-filled office looking more worn, tired and ill than ever. He went to bed where he tossed and turned without resting.
“Steven,” the breeze-voice said. The air in his room was filled with a scent of mountains and streams. Steven thought he heard a mountain birds rising call.
“Rob? God? Mozart? Whoever the heck you are, leave me alone, can’t you see I’m sick. You’re making me sick.”
“Steven, it’s time to see the Ruler.”
“The Ruler?” Steven asked. “I’m going to see him?”
“Look,” said the voice, and again the music in that sound deep inside him made him feel light, childlike, whole.
“No!” Steven said firmly, as he closed his eyes tightly, afraid if he looked at the air in front of his face as he lay on the bed, he would be gone again. He was too tired, feeling too ill.
“Steven, the Ruler is calling you. But you can choose to see him or not.”
“I choose not,” Steven said with uncertainty. The voice had told him of the Ruler, that he was the maker of all and now ruled without force. Steven had converted what he had been told into a sort of Super-Mind that created and controlled the dark matter world he was building on his iMac upstairs. It was his world, but the avatars he created were designed to make their own way, so controlling this world, the simulator’s world, was not the right way to say it. Making the flow work, would be better. Sometimes, as Steven was finding out, that wasn’t easy.
“I will see him,” Steven said, wearily, “But I need some sleep, can I get some sleep first? Tell the Ruler I will come soon.”
Terry had come in the room and heard those last words. She carried a digital thermometer in her hand.
“Dreaming, Steven?” she asked, the fear in her voice evident.
“Huh? Oh, no. I mean, I don’t think so.” The jerk back to the reality of his bed, his fever, his wife, his life was sudden.
“What’s this about a ruler?”
“I’m just playing out simulation ideas in my mind,” Steven said. Terry was far from convinced. She knew the gateway simulation project he worked on had turned into an unhealthy obsession, but she sensed there was far more going on, and now her fears deepened.
“Stick this in your mouth,” she said firmly. She pulled it out from under his tongue and looked at it. It had gone up a full degree in the past two hours.
“I’m calling the doctor,” Terry said. No protests from the weakening Steven were going to stop her. She had to take charge.
6
Vlad came to see him in the hospital. Terry warned him to not talk business, no simulation stuff, no gateway or dark matter talk at all.
“Sure,” I understand, he said. “I’m just really worried about him.”
“Thanks, Vlad,” Terry sighed leaving the room. She turned at the door. “I know your friendship means alot to Steven, you just need to help me get him back to himself.”
“I’ll do what I can,” Vlad said, and meant it. Though, the simulation had captured him now too as he built the world inside this one made up of wonders and colors and gigantic physical features far beyond anything in this world of light matter. Steven’s talk about this strange place he visited and what he saw there had fired his creative imagination as nothing else. So what if this all came from some weird delusion or hallucination, it was great stuff.
“I saw my house there,” Steven said as soon as he saw Vlad enter the room.
“Slow down, buddy,” Vlad said. “Your sweet one said no talk of work or dark anything. Everything is to be light today, sweetness and light.”
“You have no idea what light is,” Steven said, the fever still burning, but burning even more was his memory of his last answer to the voice.
“It’s all upside down, all wrong. It’s not dark at all, here is dark. There is what is real, here, nothing is really real, I think. It’s like vaporous here. Lewis was right, you know.”
“Steven, don’t go there!” Vlad said firmly. No more talk of great divorce stuff, bus rides to the gateway, grass as hard as nails and all that. He wanted nothing like that in his game. It was a game after all, not some sort of metaphysical, meta-theological speculation. Steven seemed to keep forgetting that. He was taking this far too seriously and Vlad had begun to share the worry that was etched on every new line on Terry’s face.
“Hey,” Vlad said, trying hard to change the subject, “When you taking me fly fishing? Terry said you guys had a magical time.”
“It was great,” Steven agreed, but his mind was on the experience of the river, of seeing the fish, of Terry as Artemis, of the surrounding mountains that he could hear talking and singing quietly, of the birds flying that laughed when he noticed them, laughing the laugh of those who recognize a long lost friend.
“Did you know mountains sing?” Steven asked. “Make sure you build that in.”
Vlad looked away, feeling his eyes glisten.
“Is Terry OK,” asked Steven said after a minute. He sensed how troubled Vlad was.
“What do you mean?” Vlad asked, vying for time.
“I mean, she seems to be worrying about me a lot, seems kinda distant. Sometimes I think she thinks I’ve lost it.”
“Well, yeah,” Vlad responded with troubling honesty. “Does she have a reason to worry?”
“Maybe I’ve told her too much of what I have been seeing, what’s inside,” Steven looked away. “I can see where she thinks it’s pretty crazy, but it’s not, you know.”
“I guess I don’t know, Steven,” his affection and worry for his friend coming through.
“Vlad, come on,” Steven turned to him. “If I was crazy you of all people would know it. I haven’t told you the half of what I’ve seen. Shouldn’t tell you any of it, but damn if it isn’t showing up in your amazing work. I gotta tell you what’s in there if the simulation is going to be anywhere near real. And you are nailing it, nailing it!” Steven’s enthusiasm was tiring him, and Vlad. Vlad hadn’t shown him yet the monstrous creatures he was creating on the side, and the epic battle themes that would drive the game.
“Steven, a simulation is never real.”
“I think I know the difference between what is real and what is simulation, Vladomich.” Steven’s laugh was as weak as the cold tea on his hospital tray. “So you don’t buy into these ideas like Elon’s that this is all a simulation, created and managed by some big mind dude out there on a distant planet?”
“I’m not saying there’s nothing to it, but what is real is real and if we’re in a simulation, then it is real,” Vlad affirmed, not realizing his contradiction.
“Exactly,” said Steven and closed his eyes, satisfied.
“Vlad?” Terry came in the room softly.
“Yeah, I think he went to sleep.” Vlad said, wanting to leave but wanting even more to have his friend wake up from this nightmare and get back to being Steven.
“Let’s step outside,” Terry suggested. They walked out of the psychic ward of St. Lukes together, down the elevator, out into the crisp air of October in Seattle. The sun was shining and lingering warmth from the autumn sun touched their faces if not their moods.
“Vlad, I have to know what is going on,” Terry said, feeling if Vlad was the only one who could possibly understand and maybe give her some peace.
“I don’t know Terry,” said Vlad. “I guess I still think he is just too wrapped to tight on this dark world simulation project and the gateway and all that, but I know his boss has been pressuring him too. I’m just hoping this time away will give him some rest and he can start getting better.”
“Why the fever?” Terry asked. “The docs say they haven’t found infection.”
“Well, we know and they know that if there is a fever then there is infection so they better keep looking is all I can say, or we better find some docs who know where to look.”
“I think they are thinking it is more psychosomatic, more tied to his agitation. They’re putting him on Seroquel.”
“Shit,” Vlad said, looking away. “Like that is going to help.” He’d had some unfortunate experience with the anti-agitation drug watching his father die.
“At any rate, they called in a psychiatric specialist from U Dub,” Terry said.
“Doctor Tsorvalis?” Steven asked in surprise.
“Yeah, something like that, Sore-something. Why, you know him?”
“Don’t know him but he’s a heavy hitter in schizoid studies. Written some books I guess. Read a feature on him in the Times.”
“Schizophrenia?” Terry asked. It was the first time such a diagnosis had occured to her.
“I really don’t think so, Terry.” Vlad tried to be reassuring. But knowing they were calling in a top dog meant someone was taking Steven’s condition pretty seriously. “The good thing is, Doctor Tsorvalis can rule it out and then you can forget about that one.”
“Guess, you’re right,” said Terry. “Right now I’d give anything to find out what is going on. I was surprised the MRI showed no lesions or tumors in his brain. That was what I figured. It would almost be a relief.”
“How you doing?” Vlad asked, changing the subject that was making him increasingly fearful.
“Thanks for asking,” Terry said. “OK, I guess, what else does one say? I’m worried to death. What do I do? What if Steven is gone from me forever, I don’t mean dead, I mean just mentally gone? How the hell is one supposed to handle that? I don’t think I’ve got the strength for that.”
“You getting some help, I mean, professionally?” Terry looked at Vlad as if he said a dirty word, as if there were yet dirty words that could shock.
“No,” she said, turning away. The memory of “counseling” through her first relationship was too painful. How could she be blamed in any way for the abuse that Rollie had put her through? How could Rollie have convinced that dope of a so-called professional that the real problem was her? That she was damaged in childhood and needed to confront it head on.
“No, been there, done that, no counseling thank you very much,” Terry said with finality.
“Understand,” Vlad said, not understanding at all. Just about everyone at work he knew was in counseling of some form or another. Some even seemed to be helped a little.
“Anything I can do?” Vlad asked, sincerely.
“Yeah!” Terry said. “You can get him off this damned gateway project or whatever the two of you call it. It’s making me crazy!” She didn’t realize what that sounded like to Vlad.
“Terry, I will do all I can,” Vlad said, “But I gotta tell you this. When Steven is better I won’t guarantee that I will keep him off it or that I will stay off it, either. Too much progress made, too much interest from some major players in what we have and too much possibility of creating a lot of buzz. This could be a big ticket for the two of you, I mean retirement, yachts, private jets, whatever.”
“Vlad, I would throw away all of those things into Green Lake and happily watch them sink if I knew I could have Steven back.” But she knew where Vlad stood and that made her more lonely than ever.
7
When Doctor Tsorvalis entered room 335 in the psychiatric ward of St. Lukes on “pill hill” in Seattle, the patient was staring motionless at the ceiling. The heart monitor connected to him showed a pulse rate of 38 with blood pressure at 114 over 67. The TV on the wall opposite above the bed carried a baseball playoff game, once again without the Mariners in the mix. A soft beeping came from the monitor and filtered gray light from a misty October Seattle afternoon came through the half closed blinds.
Steven followed the voice and was sitting comfortably at home when he became aware of a towering figure in his living room. When Steven was overawed when first saw the house he now sat in as if had always lived there.
“Is this the Ruler’s palace?” Steven had asked looking at the grandeur that surpassed any image he had of chateaus or mansions or even Ludwig’s fantasy. Only what he had dreamt of as a child where he might live came close to the scale and beauty of what he stood outside of now. The musical laugh again filled Steven’s ear as the voice explained that no, no not at all, this was not the Ruler’s home, this was his home, Steven’s home.
After a complete tour Steven settled into the sitting room, choosing a soft recliner. Never had he felt more like home. He wondered why, but the question seemed a bit silly to him. He was home, how could he doubt that?
“Will I see you sometime?” Steven asked the voice, expecting and receiving a highly musical response.
“Steven, you are given to see what very few do, at least until their time,” explained the voice in notes now low and more somber than normal. And knowing Steven’s question said, “You are beyond the cherubim, those guardians at the gate, the ones with flaming swords. You have heard the stories when you were a child. When the time comes to see me, you will see that you have known me all the time.”
“You talking the Garden?” Steven asked, his mind suddenly spinning. The cherubim with flaming swords? My god, how cool would that be! Coding an entirely new gateway sprang into his mind. But a greater question burned.
“Why? Why am I allowed to see, to go beyond the swords?”
“A few have seen briefly past the swords, but some the Ruler has sent back. You are not past the swords, Steven. Not yet. Not now. Like they, you are only given to see a little, but it is enough for them and others to know that we are here, and they too are here, right here even when they cannot see beyond the guards.”
“But, why--” Steven was returning to his puzzlement about why he was here when he noticed the figure in the room.
“Is that you?” Steven asked of the voice, certain that it was. The hearty music that rang to the level and far beyond of Cosi Fan Tutte assured him it was not.
Steven watched as the figure walked slowly through the room, pausing as if looking at someone or something. He reached down and gently held something Steven couldn’t quite see in his hand.
Dr. Tsorvalis looked down at the catatonic Steven on the hospital bed. He gently reached out to lift his wrist. He felt his pulse and looked at the monitor. 40 beats per minute. He felt Steven’s fever.
“Steven,” he said quietly. Steven stared up at the ceiling, showing no recognition. “Steven, can you hear me?”
Dr. Tsorvalis felt he heard an answer, yet Steven’s lips never moved. He continued staring straight up, breathing shallowly.
“I am Doctor Tsorvalis,” the doctor explained slowly. He was very familiar with the patients in coma who later told of everything that had happened in the room when others thought they were completely gone.
“Yes, Steven,” Doctor Tsorvalis answered a question he heard only in his head. How did he hear that? The patient lying still on the bed told the doctor what he saw of him. His strength, his kindness, his love for his patients, his sense of duty and responsibility. He told him he knew of his father’s anger and violence, he saw in his strong presence a child fearful as the door banged open in his small room, as he saw what his father did to his brother. He saw in his care for his patients the pain he had felt in losing his small son, and his wife in grief turning away from him and into the empty words and bed of another man. He saw in him the strength of grace and forgiveness coming from deep within him a connecting point to a braver, stronger reality and being. He was a rock made strong by flows of grief and fears and a faith that flowed not from within him but from outside him to fill his veins, his heart, his muscles, his living cells down to the smallest bits of stardust he was made with with a strength he could not find in himself.
Steven watched as the strong presence in the sitting room of his mansion revealed all that was in him. Then, he watched as the figure of the good doctor stretched up to his full, magnificent height causing Steven to almost gasp at the power and beauty and grace he showed as he left the room.
In the hospital room, Doctor Tsorvalis pulled himself away from the bedside of the inert patient, shaken, confused and afraid.
8
When Vlad saw Steven next the patient was sitting quietly on a patio in a chair outside the sliding door of his room. It was a patient room in a quiet neighborhood on Queen Anne hill with a view of the marina at the base of Magnolia. Vlad had driven up to the large house that had been converted into offices, a lab, rooms filled with computers and a few patient rooms facing west overlooking the shimmering blue water of Puget Sound. On the right column entering the driveway was a bronze plaque on the hundred year old brick. BHRI 2019 was all that was written on the plaque.
Before meeting with Steven, Vlad had conversed with Doctor Tsorvalis and Dr. Katie Simonson of the Brain Health and Research Institute. Doctor Tsorvalis could not bring himself to talk about the strange encounter with Steven standing at his bed, but he did relay in quite graphic terms what happened when Doctor Timmings was brought in for a psychological evaluation.
“It was quite terrifying,” Doctor Tsorvalis relayed. Steven had awoken from his trance-like state soon after Doctor Timmings began talking to him. Steven had looked at him strangely, then said softly, “Get away from me you bastard! You are an abuser! A killer!” The doctor had appeared shocked and shaken and tried to talk to Steven and calm him down. But Steven got more agitated and began talking about Christine. At that point, Doctor Timmings asked Doctor Tsorvalis to administer a strong dose of an anti-psychotic which Steven was already receiving. As Doctor Timmings left the room Steven’s now loud voice followed him crying out that he would have to account for all the things he had done, that Christine and her broken family were calling out to him and that he needed to turn around and face his actions.
“Why are you telling me this?” asked Vlad.
“We think you can help us,” Doctor Simonson responded. She was new to the story of Steven and his illness.
“Doctor Simonson and her team here at Beery, I mean BHRI--”
“You can call it Beery,” Doctor Simonson interrupted.
“Doctor Simonson was called in,” Doctor Tsorvalis continued, “ because of the uniqueness of this case. We have ruled out the typical diagnoses of cases similar to this, such as brain infection, brain cancer, exotic diseases, trauma, drug induced, even schizophrenia and psychosis.”
“How can you rule that out?” Vlad asked in surprise. It was obvious to him that Steven was crazy. Out of touch with reality. This had to be hallucinations or a bad trip of some kind, despite the inspiration it provided. “Do you have some sort of new name for lunacy?”
“Well, we haven’t ruled out everything, and certainly something pretty significant is going on with his brain,” explained Doctor Simonson, a fifty-ish fashionable woman with a calm and reassuring manner that came across to Vlad as a bit too haughty.
“Steven trusts you,” said Doctor Tsorvalis. “We want you to talk to him. Listen to him. Get him talking. Let him explain to you what he is feeling, and experiencing. Describe his world, his reality.”
“Isn’t that what you guys do?” Vlad asked. “How am I supposed to know what it means and whether or not where we go with things will hurt him? I mean, all I’ve been told so far is don’t talk about work, the simulation that is driving him crazy, because that is just encouraging him.”
Vlad stopped. For the first time, he felt the fear for his friend coming up in a tightening in his throat and in moisture in his eyes.
“I mean, I want him better. I don’t want to kill him.” Vlad said looking away.
“We want him better, too, Vlad,” assured Doctor Simonson. “But you need to know that as Doctor Tsorvalis has explained to me, conversations with Steven about his experience have proven difficult, troubling. We really think you could help us better understand what his reality is and how we can deal with it.”
“Ok, I get it, I guess,” Vlad said with uncertainty. “Just give me some guidelines so I don’t fall off the edge here.”
“If he gets really agitated, or if he starts accusing you of terrible things, or starts focusing on you instead of him and what’s he’s seeing and doing, then you must end it immediately. I’d advise you to not let him talk about seeing you or what he is seeing in you. Or anyone else for that matter,” Doctor Simonson replied. Doctor Tsorvalis moved nervously. He wanted to explain to Vlad what had happened in the hospital room as he did to Doctor Simonson. He looked at her and she quietly moved her head from side to side. No, she indicated. We don’t need to go there.
“Got it,” Vlad said. “Can I have a Diet Dr Pepper? And one for Steven?” Maybe sipping their chosen softdrink from the office lunch room might soothe things.
9
“I don’t really know, Vlad,” Steven explained, his weariness making his words sound as if they were carrying the burden he felt. “Yeah, I’ve thought about the whole Hugh Everett many-worlds thing, and I suppose maybe that could explain it, but how the hell would one cross over into one of those worlds when those guys have all made it clear that one can’t touch another. They split, divide and then keep dividing without any relation between them at all. So, I can’t see that that is what is happening.”
“Maybe they don’t have all the rules right yet?” Vlad suggested. “You’ve been kinda focused on this dark matter idea, but I just assumed you were jazzed about the CGI potential. I mean, it’s damn cool to think about how some how moving into that unknown world that everyone knows is there but doesn’t have a clue what its made of.” Vlad’s work on the graphics of this dark world based on Steven’s descriptions still held him in a firm grip. Many late nights were spent in attempting to create the lightness, the airiness, the solidity, the grandeur of the landscape and architecture that Steven described. Plus the realistically horrifying creatures to create the storyline for the game.
“Are you supposed to be talking to me about this?” Steven asked, closing his eyes and letting the sunlight filtering through the paper birch trees above his patio warm him. He was wrapped in a woolen blanket leaning back in an outdoor chaise lounge chair.
“Yeah, the docs said it might do you some good. Changed their mind about it I guess.” Vlad said, still uneasy about this new direction. “Works for me as I every time you tell me about where you’ve been and what you are experiencing I get massive more stuff for the simulation.”
“How’s it going?” Steven asked, not opening his eyes. Vlad noted that his interest in the future of this project, once so important to him, seemed to be waning.
“Awesome, I mean freaking awesome. I showed Kent Deloy from GDB a bit of the gateway graphics the other day and I’m telling you I thought he was going to jump out of his chair. He started going on about this being a whole new genre of game, that we could take this thing into unlimited directions, started going off on how we could use augmented reality to make it like what you saw with Terry and the others where they what is happening in one world is reflecting what is happening in another, I mean the guy went practically nuts. And he hasn’t even seen the simulation yet.” Vlad realized that he was starting to spin on the possibilities and remembered he was here to help his friend. A friend who was once so wired about this they thought it was killing him and now seemed so detached.
“The Ruler wants to see me,” Steven said quietly, looking out toward the garden.
“What? Who is this Ruler? I don’t get it,” Vlad said, wanting to get Steven talking.
“I don’t know all about him, actually, don’t know much at all. But, he is pretty much everything, I mean complete charge.”
“Despot?” Vlad’s mind began spinning. It answered a dilemma he’d been struggling with.
“Oh no!” Steven said looking at Vlad, wondering how he could think such a thing. “Opposite really. I mean the whole game is his, like ––”
“Oh, I get it, like the Master Mind of the simulation, the one who’s playing games with all of us. Toying. Cripes, Steven, you better meet him so you can help me figure out how he plays into this thing.”
“I don’t know that I can,” Steven said, turning away.
.
“Why? If he wants you to come, why don’t you just go, wherever the hell that is.”
“I won’t come back,” said Stephen. There was a long pause. “I love Terry, I love you, I love my life, I love this place, and while I want to go through that gateway more than anything in my life, more than my life, I just don’t know that I can just go. I want to, but it feels like I am not done. I don’t think it would be right.”
“Wait, wait, wait,” Vlad said, trying to catch up to this. “Wait, why would you leave Terry, or me, or anything? I thought you said you knew Terry there, could see exactly what was happening, could see her like you never saw anything before?”I Even Doctor Tsorvalis, you said you saw him and talked to him.”
“Yes, and the other doctor, too.”
“Doctor Timmings?” Vlad asked, afraid to let Steven in on what he knew. “You know he’s posted bail, right?”
“No, I didn’t know,” Steven answered. “Haven’t seen anything of him since then.”
“Turned himself in. He wants to try and help Christine’s family. Terrible tragedy about that girl. Family was just devastated, still are. Lost his license, of course.”
“Something good came from that then,” Steven said wearily.
“So go back here a minute,” Vlad asked. “You said you saw Terry in the river when you were fly fishing, you saw Doctor Tsorvalis, Doctor Timmings, but now you say you don’t want to leave because Terry is here. Doesn’t make sense, bro.”
“Makes perfect sense. Ever see a hologram? How about what’s on your screen, like the big screen or just any screen?” Steven was tiring and seemed dismissive of the question, as if it should be obvious. But Vlad felt he was close to getting to some answers and pushed forward.
“So, you’re saying that when you saw Terry, like a goddess, that was some sort of hologram or projected image of some kind?” Vlad was hopeful. Simulation thoughts started speeding through his mind, but before they got much headway he pulled himself back remembering he was here to help the docs get a better idea of what was going on.”
“No, no, no,” Steven said, feeling exasperated at Vlad’s inability to understand what seemed so clear to him. “There it is real, it’s real here. It’s all made of stuff, but it makes no sense to talk about here and there because it is all here, right here. The difference is in the light stuff, the ordinary matter we know we, we see as if through a darkened glass or screen of some kind, and it’s fuzzy, out of focus a bit, like everything operates with a dim bulb. That’s why everything is so bright and light and brilliant. Dark matter? Yeah, right. What a joke. Things are all upside down.”
“I know you’re tired and I’m pushing you, Steven, but you have to try and explain this. I just really don’t get it. You think that the other side, the deep inside, through the gateway is what is real and what is happening here is just a reflection, a projection of some kind? That what happens happens there and if we see anything here we are just looking at a fuzzy image of what is real, what is in there?”
“Not sure I can explain it to you, Vlad, still trying to put the pieces together myself. But you got to stop trying to make a distinction between what is real and what is not, what is here, what is there. It’s all real and it is all here.” Steven hesitated, thinking harder than he should.
“OK,” he said after a bit, “Let me try this. Stick your finger out.”
Vlad did, not knowing what kind of joke this might be.
“It’s made of stuff, we call it matter, right? That’s right but it’s not the whole story. What you are looking at there is much more than what we can see with our puny little eyes and the stuff it is made of is much more than the cells and molecules and atoms and gluons and all that stuff we seem to think we know so much about. It’s also made of stuff, real stuff, more real than you can imagine stuff. Matter or atoms or quarks that are the real stuff, whatever they are called. Here? They are all here but what we know and call real are the real WIMPs, they don’t touch a candle to the stuff of real matter. Where is it? It’s a wrong question, isn’t it? Right here, whether we’ve got the equipment to see it or not. I don’t know why but I’ve been able to see it, just a bit, and I know it is right here, right here.” And he reached out his shaking hand to softly wave the air close in front of his eyes.
Steven paused. Took a deep breath, leaned his head back in his lounge chair and looked into the filtered light through the trees.
“You and I and everyone who ever was and ever will be exist. For a time in this wishy washy stuff we think we know about that our so-called experts say is real because we can measure it. Call it light matter instead of dark matter but that is sort of opposite of what it is. But we exist always and forever and eternally in this, this created universe, but created in different stuff that we can’t know, or touch, or measure or do anything with as long as we are limited by what we think is the real world.”
“So we are in both places at once?” Vlad asked, trying hard to follow.
“Yes and no,” Steven said. “God, how do I explain this? Both places? Did you hear me?”
Steven thought silently and as he did Vlad seemed to feel the strength leaving him.
“Are you real, Vlad?” Steven asked finally looking right into his eyes.
“Well, I think I am,” Vlad said. Was Steven leading him astray, trying to avoid his questions?
“That’s the point, isn’t it?” Steven responded tiredly. “I think, therefore I am. Decartes had something right there, don’t you think? If your own awareness that you actually exist defines you as a person like no one else, that you have a sense of “me-ness,” that there is actually some being that is thinking and thinking about him thinking, then you are real, right?”
“Yes,” Vlad affirmed, “I am real.”
“But, where is that real who is you? I mean, where do you go when you go to sleep and your mind takes you off into strange lands and crazy impossible adventures? Where are you? Where are you when your mind wanders and you stray out of the world of appearances into a world of, like, pure thought? Where are you?”
“Seems pretty philosophical, Steven,” Vlad said. He was getting concerned that wasn’t helping either his simulation or the doctors’ diagnosis. “You sure reading those Greek guys hasn’t well--” he hesitated.
“Made me crazy?” Steven looked at Vlad with a slight smile. Vlad tipped his head slightly sideways as if to say, caught me.
‘So there is only one you and you are just a load of carbon, H2O and a bunch of other things, right?” Steven asked, warming again to his answer.
“Yeah, stardust as they say, just stardust neatly arranged into a package I call me and you call your buddy.”
“Right, but you are packaged not just in stardust but in that other stuff that the light world can’t see, find or know. You are not two bodies or presences, you are all one but you are put together with what we’d think of as some pretty exotic stuff. Information, as they say, but dictated into two distinctive languages. Sort of like a novel translated into English and Russian. What is the real novel?” Steven felt it should now be obvious to a bright guy like Vlad.
“OK, I’m following, I think,” Vlad said and thought quietly for a moment. “Then why would you not go to the Ruler? Why did you say you had to stay here for Terry, and me and your family?”
“Because she and you and even I are not yet released.” Steven said it with a sadness that Vlad could feel. Released? What the hell could that mean, Vlad wanted to ask, but he saw that Steven was nearing the end of his strength.
“Released, yes, and not yet,” Steven said slowly and with effort. “Released. We are tethered to this stardust, we want to escape it but we can’t. We know there is more, but it is out of reach, tantalizing us. The light matter weighs us down and keeps us from the freedom of being who we really are, who we were made to be from before it all began. Terry is here, you are here, still waiting release. And so must I. I cannot go to the Ruler until my release is complete.”
Steven’s head drooped onto his chest and Vlad left quickly to find the doctor, fear choking him as he felt he had pushed his friend too far.
10
“I could have driven, you know,” said Steven, petulantly.
“Maybe,” Terry said with a faint smile. The relief she felt having Steven’s strength and health beginning to return made everything lighter and bouyant. Even his stubbornness.
They stopped in Fremont at the Juicy Drip, a favorite of coffee snobs in the area. Terry went to help Steven out of the car, but he brushed her away as he gingerly walked toward the cafe. Terry sipped her double short breve latte and Steven his doppio with a good pour of heavy cream and discussed the upcoming meeting with Doctors Simonson and Tsorvalis.
They pulled up past the old brick columns in front of the Brain Health and Research Institute and parked in a spot marked for patients. Almost immediately, a young man pushing a wheelchair came up and despite Steven’s protests, managed to get Steven into the chair and pushed him through the tall entry door of old wood and intricate leaded glass. Both doctors were waiting for Steven and Terry in a smallish conference room just past the main entry which featured a large open staircase with craftsman-style balustrade to the upper floor.
“How’s things at beery?” Steven asked with a bit more brightness in his voice than he felt.
“Well, the question is how is Mr. Lambright?” Doctor Tsorvalis responded with a smile. He shared Terry’s relief at Steven’s apparent recovery. For more than one reason he wanted this patient to return to normalcy.
After more pleasantries and Terry describing Steven’s return home from the Beery patient room, Doctor Simonson came to the reason for this visit.
“Steven, we are all so very glad you are feeling better. We’re going to continue to monitor your recovery closely and want to respond as quickly as we can if there should be any relapse,” the director of BHRI explained.
“I’m going to be fine, really,” Steven mildly protested, tired of doctors and everything psychiatric.
“But, we are really eager to hear what you have concluded from your tests,” Terry said.
“Let me briefly explain what we have done in Steven’s case,” Doctor Simonson responded. She went on to say that part of their research at the Institute was focused on what typical medical science considered paranormal, including near death experiences.
“We’ve reviewed literally thousands of reports from people who have had NDEs and we have one of the top research experts in the field on our staff. We take this phenomenon seriously and our research has uncovered some interesting things––”
“You’re saying that Steven had a near death experience?” Terry asked in surprise. “Don’t those come when people are, well, near death?”
“Yes, you are right, Terry,” said Doctor Tsorvalis. “Steven’s events occurred prior to or concurrent with his illness. That is why we don’t consider this a typical NDE event.”
“First, let’s take a step backwards on this,” interjected Doctor Simonson. “One of the most important things we focus on at the Institute is getting better at determining what are real experiences and what are not, those we call affected events. We define a real experience as what everyone encounters as part of their daily lives such as seeing a rainbow or conversing with a friend. What we consider separate from that are dreams, hallucinations, even hypnotic experiences. Drug induced experiences and others like them show extremely minor differences in synaptic patterns, chemical exchanges in the brain and locations of neuroactivity. We’ve been able to determine that through AI research into the hundreds of thousands of brain scans through the TROSS scanner. Based on this we can evaluate the nature of these experiences.”
“Interesting,” said Steven. “So, have you concluded I’ve been hallucinating, or on some wild trip?”
“No, it’s what we expected but we found just the opposite. You are completely normal in terms of any comparison of actual experience versus affected experience, and we now know that whatever you experienced was as real as this conversation right now,” Doctor Simonson said with certainty.
For Terry, it felt like the air left the room.
“I, I, uh, just want to make sure I am understanding this,” said Terry, her voice slow and quiet. “When Steven says he saw me in the stream in that way, like he described, and the others, and heard this voice and all this, this is no delusion, no crazy, I mean no wild, I mean you are saying it’s just like normal, like what it is?”
“Yes,” said Doctor Simonson. “But, let’s be clear. I’m not saying anything about the reality of what he experienced, what I’m saying is from a brain science standpoint the experience he conveyed is no different than any other memory that we can fully verify. Does that make sense?”
“Yes, I mean no, it doesn’t make sense. You’re saying that when Steven saw me in the stream as this goddess sort of creature, what he saw was for real, he actually saw something, but you can’t say if what he saw was real or not. No, I can’t say that make sense.” Terry fully expected and hoped for an exotic psychiatric condition that could be treated by drugs or therapy or some other such standard problem. This was different. How could she be assured that Steven was recovering or fully recovered? She didn’t know if she could live with the vulnerability of seeing him again standing in his garden with water dripping down his leg.
“We talked a bit about NDEs and we’ve done more research on this than anyone else,” Doctor Simonson went on. “We have found like in Steven’s case, there are strange, unexplainable phenomena involving consciousness, involving vivid experiencs that we would fully expect would fall into the imaginary spectrum or be consistent with affected experiences. But, they don’t, at least as far as we can determine with the technology and science available to us today. We might like them to, but they don’t.”
“So those people saying they went through a tunnel and saw a light and all that BS, you’re saying that’s really real?” Terry’s skeptical side was taking over. “You’re saying the tunnel is real, the light is real, that, come on, you’re saying that science has now proven God exists?”
“No, no,” Doctor Tsorvalis jumped in. “I think what their research has found is that these experiences are real. As Dr. Simonson said, we can’t verify the accuracy of what Steven says he saw, but what we can say is from a brain scan and analysis standpoint what he saw is what he saw. He actually did see it as far as brain mapping is concerned.”
“Right,” Doctor Simonson continued. “That doesn’t prove that there is really a tunnel, or a voice, or anything about life after death. That is beyond science to know. It just shows that for those who experienced it, we cannot distinguish those experiences from the common everyday experiences we call reality. We know definitively that they do not belong in the category of affected experiences such as drug induced hallucinations or dreams.”
“So, bottom line, if I am understanding what you are saying is that you have determined that Steven is perfectly sane, has no psychiatric diagnosis you can pin on this?” Terry was deflated and afraid.
“Not exactly,” Doctor Simonson said, looking down at a report on the conference table in front of her. “We scientists and doctors have to have a name for everything so if we don’t have a name already we come up with one.”
“Got that right,” Steven said, with a smile. As an ADHD-diagnosed student he often heard his dad say, “They used to call this bad behavior and get out the wooden spoon!”
“So,” Doctor Simonson continued, “Despite this being a singular case at this point, we have defined it as ‘Self-induced NDE’.”
“Cindy,” Terry said, half to herself. “How precious. You mean you are categorizing this as a near death experience, but that he created the experience himself, like he wasn’t dead or dying but he just decided to go through the tunnel and see the light on his own?” Terry was getting more troubled by the minute.
“Well, sort of,” Doctor Simonson was uncomfortable as well.
“How about his fever, his weakness, his disease or whatever the hell he had?” Terry demanded. “Are you saying he brought all this on himself, that he just willed himself his fever and illness?”
“Terry,” said Doctor Tsorvalis with a bit of firmness that suggested he was not liking the questioning of their diagnosis. “We have found no physiological cause for the fever or weakness. We can’t determine a cause other than the stress and psychological distress of the NDE taking a severe toll on his body. Psychosomatic. That is all we can say.”
Terry felt there was much more they wouldn’t say, but that they just really wanted this problem and she and Steven to just go quietly away. She was quiet for a time and Steven looked at her, feeling her struggle and wanting to reassure her.
“You know that leaves me in a really bad spot,” said Terry, with a hint of anger.
“Terry,” Steven said, reaching out to take her hand. “I know what you are afraid of, and what you are saying. You think because they say I did this on my own, that I went there because I wanted to, that I might do it again.”
Terry looked at him and felt the tears welling in her eyes. More than anything, she just wanted Steven back. She wanted their lives as they were. She wanted to feel safe and safe was the last thing she felt right now. As she looked at him, she saw that what was could never be.
“I made a decision, honey,” he said quietly, determinedly. “I cannot go. I told him that. I don’t think he’s coming back.”
11
“Shadow” won simulation game of the year for GDB Games at the international conference held in Paris. It featured augmented reality where players were projected into another dimension that reflected their likeness and actions in this dimension. The new dimension or world, called Shadow, was a fantasy world of incredible brightness and beauty combined with dark beasts and frightening apparitions. A master mind called “The Ruler” directed the game’s imaginary creatures without mercy, using them to battle against the real-life players projected into this world. Blood and pain overflowed. Players entered through a gateway of shimmering light that vibrated wildly until it formed two flaming blades crossed as if protecting sacred space. The swords were wielded by two shapes that shone with light shining brightly from inside them. A voice spoke to them in breathy tones accompanied by Mozart and Vivaldi. The negative reaction of some of the young players to the music was causing discussion among the development team. Pplayers joined with others around the world in epic battles against the cruel and hideous creatures controlled by the Ruler. Those who successfully defeated the beasts and overthrew the Ruler were hailed in the Glass Castle and crowned as Ruler of Shadow. Then it all started again with only the names of the victors listed on the medieval style room called “Hall of Conquerors.”
Steven had returned to work and focused on assignments from the office. He tried to go back to the Gateway Project but by the time he returned to it, he found that Vlad had taken it in some new and disturbing directions.
“It’s not like that Vlad, not all!” he had protested.
“I really don’t care about what ‘it’ is like,” Vlad responded. “This isn’t about your little adventures any more, Steven, you got to get over that. I told you I didn’t want any of your spirit world nonsense. That’s just a non-seller and you know it. Yeah, you started me on this whole simulation thing and your ideas were just wild, but they don’t work in the game world, at least as I know it.”
Steven tried to explain and how the Ruler was restricted in the spacetime existence outside of dark matter and that another power had rebelled and sought the bitter destruction of all the Ruler had made, and that things were moving so that rebellion would end in victory for the Ruer. With that the gateway would dissolve, the swords removed and the boundary between the entangled worlds would be gone forever. If there was going to be a simulation with his name on it, he wanted it to be right, true to reality. At least his understanding of reality.
Vlad would have none of it, and Terry was greatly relieved when Steven told her that he and Vlad had agreed to end their partnership on the Gateway Project and that what Vlad was doing was now called “Shadow” and Steven wanted no part in it. His name would not be listed as a designer. Vlad promised to pay him some of the royalties but he was out of the contract with GDB. It hurt, he told her, but it hurt far worse to see what his vision had become.
Vlad stood near the back of the small gathering at Greenlake for the memorial service. The pastor made no mention of Steven’s illness. Doctor Tsorvalis and Doctor Simonson were there, along with some of the Beery staff. So was Al Timmings, now a real estate agent.
“Steven,” the voice had come as he worked in his upstairs office.
“No!” Steven had responded. “I can’t. I promised.”
“Your love for Terry and your friends and your family will not go unanswered,” the wind-voice answered. “The Ruler is calling for you and he would not call if it were not for Terry and your loved ones as much as for you.”
Steven felt a sense of fear and eagerness at once. The light from the worklamp on his desk shimmered.
“Welcome home Steven,” said the Voice, but now Steven could see Him. It was Who he suspected and fell to his knees with his face on the ground.
Terry took the call from Vlad three months after the service. She declined his invitation to come to see his new home on Lopez Island, a massive stone and wood mansion looking west above the small village with its small white church in the middle of the town, on the bluff leading into Fisherman’s Cove. Four small steeples pointed to the sky from the tower above the church entrance. Vlad was now a regular in the worship and Bible teaching services in the small village church.
Terry also initially declined his generous offer.
“Too much, Vlad, I can’t do that. It wouldn’t honor Steven.”
“Don’t do it for Steven, don’t even do it for yourself. You have to take it for me,” pleaded Vlad. “You have no idea how unbearable this all is. You know what Steven meant to me.”
Vlad stopped. Terry thought she heard his voice cracking.
“I took what was his and made it into something he hated. It should never have happened. If I had to do it all over again, I’d delete the whole damn thing. I could care less about the money. It’s a trap, a wicked trap and I need to get out of it. I’ll tell you Terry, I don’t know what I’m going to do. You have to take it, for me. That\’s all I’m asking.”
Later that month, Terry wrote out a check for $5 million to the non-profit fighting human and sex trafficking.