Letters from the Lost Man, Part 18

"Honey...honey..."

"Hmm?"

"Are you awake?"

I crack open my eyes. It's dark, but in the dim glow of the alarm clock and the cable box, I can see Linda's face smiling at me, cradled by her pillow.

"Well, I am now."

She frowns teasingly. "Aw, I'm sorry."

"It's okay," I smile back at her. "It's good to see you. I missed you today."

She reaches over and caresses my cheek. "I missed you too. Did you have a good nap?"

I think about it for a second. "Bizarre dreams."

"Oh? What about?"

I pause to think again. "Don't remember."

"Well, I hate to interrupt your bizarre-dreamy nap, but you have a meeting to get to," she says.

I push myself up on my elbow. "What?" I ask, perplexed.

She turns her head to look up at me, and I notice a dark stain on the pillow. "Mission Avenue. Don't you remember?"

My mouth opens, but no sound comes out. The entire side of her face is covered in some kind of dark liquid.

"Honey, what's wrong?" she asks, sitting up. Some more fluid drips from her head onto the pillow.

Not looking away, I grope behind me for the lamp switch. The room floods with light and I can see that Linda's entire side of the bed is soaked red. Blood drips freely from a gaping hole in the side of her head. She stares at me curiously.

"Baby, you're really starting to scare me. What's wrong?" she pleads, reaching out to touch me with a blood-covered hand.

I jerk backwards, falling out of bed in the process. I hit my head on the bedside table. The lights go out, and I mean that literally. The room is dark again. I jump to my feet and press my back against the wall, looking at the now apparently empty bed in terror and holding a swelling bump on my scalp. Cautiously, I reach over and try the lamp switch. To my surprise, it works. As if I had never turned it on in the first place.

That's because I didn't. I am alone in the room. The bed is empty and the only thing the sheets are soaked with is my own sweat. It was a nightmare.

"Damn right it was," I say out loud, just to reassure myself.

The human mind is messed up. Why would it ever show someone something like that? Makes me wish I could erase my memor-...

10:55 PM.

Damn. My brain is devious. How am I going to justify avoiding this meeting now? If I don't go at this point, I doubt I'll be able to sleep for the rest of the night. Besides, if it is all just a delusion, how far could I possibly delude myself? I hope I don't regret asking that, even if it is only in my head.

*****

I tell you one thing, driving around in this part of town at this hour definitely makes me wonder how the hell a delusion would think this could possibly help me. The neighborhoods near the outskirts are pretty rough. Buildings in disrepair, people on street corners, cars creeping along the road without their headlights on. It's a pretty scary place, but as I head toward Mission Ave., things get a bit sparser.

I pull up to a rusty mailbox barely hanging onto its post. Turning my head sideways, I see the faded numbers.

1240

This doesn't look like a church. It looks like a house, or what used to be a house. There is broken yellow tape tied around the posts of the front porch. In the faint light of the streetlight, I can see white lettering on a red sign that says "CONDEMNED" and smaller writing under it that's too tiny to make out from here. I must have the number wrong.

I continue driving slowly down the avenue, ticking off the address numbers as I go, looking for something resembling a church. Several minutes later, I see the silhouette of a cross rising against the moonlit clouds in the distance. That must be the place.

1420

Oh yeah. This is the place. Honestly, it doesn't look much better than the house I just looked at. It's faded and stained with age. The windows and doors are boarded up. There's a chain across the entryway to the parking lot, so I pull a little forward and park on the street out front. I haven't seen a car since I got on this road, so I doubt anyone will complain. I get out of the car and make my way toward the front doors of the church.

It seems boarded up pretty solidly. So do the windows. Maybe there's something around back. I make my way around the side of the church. The ground is really uneven and is covered with several layers of dead leaves in various stages of decomposition. They crunch far more than I feel comfortable with. A nice layer of ivy blankets almost this entire side of the building. In the back, there's a wide open space and I can barely make out the outline of several dilapidated picnic tables. Against the wall there leans what looks like some broken pews and a few chipped plaster statues of Jesus and the Virgin Mary. In the center of the back wall, a door stands open.

"How inviting," I mutter to myself.

I make my way to the door. It's pitch black inside...of course. I look around behind me. There are a few clouds here and there in the sky, but for the most part, the practically full moon illuminates most of the area. I don't know what I expect to see out there. Reasonably satisfied that no one's sneaking up behind me, I peer into the church.

"Hello?" I call, though not too loudly.

Something inside shifts and there's a rapid whipping sound like the flapping of wings. Okay...this is a little creepy.

"Loretta?" I venture with a bit more volume.

Several feet away, a narrow slit of light appears and widens into a doorway. A woman stands just inside the open door and waves me over.

The light from the next room doesn't offer too many details of the one I have to cross to get there, but it seems way less sinister now. I walk to the doorway and stand before the woman with an inquisitive stare.

"Oh, Richard," she says, sounding relieved. She steps forward and gives me a hug.

I stand frozen, not sure how to react. I know I don't know this woman, but she seems somehow familiar. She's dressed a bit shabbily, but she has a pretty face and well-kept blond hair. The feeling that I've seen her somewhere before gets stronger.

"In the car," I blurt out.

She steps back and looks at me curiously. "What?" she asks.

"I saw you in my car. After the accident. It was upside down and you were hanging from the passenger seat."

She shakes her head. "No, Richard. The accident was in an ambulance, and I was the one driving."

Images flash through my head of a grassy field at night rotating around and around. The sound of sirens echo over the smashing of glass and the scraping of metal.

"C'mon," the woman says. "Come inside and I'll explain everything, like I promised. I'm sure you're a little confused right now."

"Hmm," I say noncommittally. I have to remember, if this is a delusion, I can't let it convince me that it isn't. Of course, if it isn't a delusion... Man, this sucks.

The woman leads me into the room. It actually doesn't look all that bad in here. It seems clean and well-tended. There is a nice rug over the hardwood floor and a couple of cozy looking chairs. There's a small fire crackling in a brick fireplace against the far wall. I turn around and look back out the door. I can barely see the rectangle of light that is the church's back door leading outside, the one I had originally entered through. It looks dreary out there. The woman walks over and closes the door.

"Have a seat, Richard," she says, indicating one of the chairs.

"Wait a minute," I snap. "Is there any way that you can prove to me that any of this is real? That it's not just some delusion?"

She shrugs helplessly. "I can't. Because it isn't real. Besides, perception is reality, so how could I even prove it in the real world?"

"Wait, did you just say this isn't real?" I ask.

She nods. "It's as real as your brain tells you it is, which makes it real enough. But strictly speaking, no. None of this is real. That's what I've been trying to explain to you. Please, sit down and we'll talk about it."

Hesitantly, I take a seat. Heat radiates from the fireplace. It feels pretty good. It wasn't exactly cold out, but it wasn't warm either. It makes it hard to believe it's not real. But when your delusion confesses right away that it's a delusion, what can you do?

"I'm not a delusion, Richard," the woman says.

"How did you-?"

"I can sense some of your thoughts. It's the nature of what we're dealing with here," she explains.

"What exactly are we dealing with here?" I ask, shaking my head in disbelief.

"Let me start at the beginning," she says. "First, in case you don't remember, my name is Loretta Vine. I am, or was, a nurse working in a classified government medical research facility. I had higher aspirations, maybe go to medical school and become a doctor, but something happened about a year-and-a-half ago that put all that on hold.

"I was approached by one of the doctors at the facility. A brilliant man by the name of Hans Spector. Everyone in the facility respected and/or feared him. He wielded a lot of power for a researcher, but that's because his discoveries were so significant, they promised to change the face of, not just medicine, but almost every scientific discipline in the world. He said he had his eye on me. Said that I showed a lot of promise and would make a great researcher someday. He said he could put me on the fast track.

"I later found out that this was the kind of fancy talk he layed on most of his recruits, especially the women. I didn't care, though, because I believed this would be my fast track. I was sure that I could make enough of an impression to get me where I wanted to go. I got particularly excited when I heard what project we were recruited for."

I take advantage of her pause to venture a guess. "Brainwashing?"

Loretta smiles. "Not quite. It was actual memory reprogramming. This was not just conditioning someone's responses to a stimulus. This was literally rewriting every memory in their brains and giving them a whole new life. The implications were enormous. Just imagine the applications: treatment of post traumatic stress disorder, witness protection, criminal rehabilitation-"

"Brainwashing," I interrupt, finishing her list.

She looks away, embarrassed. "Admittedly, we hadn't really considered the ways this technology might be misused."

"Really?" I ask. "'Cause it's the first thing that springs to my mind."

"I know how foolish it sounds, but when you're so close to such brilliance and significance, it blinds you to the potential consequences. I assure you, we all believed, at the very least, that it wouldn't happen in the experimental phase. We figured the problem would come once the technology was out there, and we figured the government would regulate it so heavily that we wouldn't have it on our conscience."

She looks away, staring into the fire and seemingly holding her breath. "My ambition help blind me too," she continues. "I was a nurse. The reality of it is, we're not likely to make much of an impact. In fact, we weren't likely to learn much about the technology at all and probably wouldn't be let in on any of the finer details. Check vitals, report to doctors, take on the drudge work."

"But you didn't let that be it?" I ask.

She shakes her head. "No. I tried and tried. Took advantage of every opportunity and went through every door that was even slightly ajar. I even tried to get...close to Dr. Spector."

"Hmm," I acknowledge.

"Actually, it turns out the advantage was mine," she continues. "The truth is, they were seriously understaffed for the scale of the project. At any one time we had fifteen to twenty subjects in the experimental group. Then there were the controls, but they were actually a lot easier to manage. Most of the nurses and assistants ended up with a lot more responsibilities than we expected. When I learned how to read the reports from the monitoring system and a little bit about Mnemosyne, I jumped at the chance to show my worth and soaked up every bit of knowledge I could."

"Wait a minute," I interject. "Mnemosyne?"

"Yes," Loretta nods. "Mnemosyne is the system that does all the magic. It is responsible for the erasure and implantation of memory via electrical and chemical stimulation. It's named after the Greek goddess of memory, a Titan and the mother of the Muses."

I sigh and roll my eyes. "How epic."

Loretta smirks. "Yes, our hubris knew no bounds."

"What happened next?"

"Well," Loretta says, pausing to remember her place, "I was working with Mnemosyne, actually starting subjects on the program. Really just automated stuff. They never let me touch the individual memory scripts, but I saw some of them. I'm not really sure I would know where to begin with that stuff anyways. I'm pretty technical, but that was a little over my head. Eventually, my curiosity about the project grew into a curiosity about the subjects.

"See, they had me do some of the 'exit interviews', as they called them. When a patient completed a course, they would be woken up and interviewed to see what was sticking. Getting the interview didn't actually mean you exited the program. It was just an incremental check of the progress. Honestly, some people took to it really quickly. Dr. Spector said it wasn't like you write this life story and save it to their brains like you would a computer's hard drive, but some of the subjects made it seem that way."

I shudder at the creepiness factor.

Loretta looks at me in surprise. "You know, I never had that perception of it."

It's even creepier when she reads my mind.

"I'm sorry, I'll try to stop," she reassures me. "Anyways, about ten months into my involvement in the project, you showed up."

I raise my eyebrows. "I did?"

She nods. "Yeah. You were in pretty bad shape. They said you were in a car accident, but I didn't believe it. I know what gunshot wounds look like."

"I was shot?" I ask incredulously.

"Yep," she confirms. "At least three times, from what I could see. It didn't really surprise me that much. I mean, it surprised me that they tried to lie about it, but not that you were shot. You see, most of our subjects were volunteers from prison. A few were soldiers suffering from severe PTSD. Many had wounds, though they had long since been treated for them elsewhere. You were the first we treated for injuries at the facility before beginning the Mnemosyne program."

This is definitely eerie. "Why would anyone volunteer for this?" I ask.

"For the prisoners, it came with the promise of a commuted sentence, depending upon their response to the treatment. Naturally, we only offered them limited information about what they were volunteering for, but think about it. They would walk out of there not remembering that they committed a crime, not remembering that they spent time in prison, but what's more important, not remembering the events in their lives that caused them to commit the crime in the first place. Is that so bad?

"And the soldiers. Well, some of them had seen some pretty terrible things in their service. The experiences hamper them from leading the normal lives they should deserve after an honorable discharge. Instead, they go home and have constant nightmares and flashbacks. They avoid interpersonal interactions so they aren't faced with the possibility of having to talk about their experiences. They're angry, paranoid, sometimes violent. All the while, they're aware that something is wrong and want to do something to stop it, but they don't know what."

Loretta levels me with an intense stare. "If it were you," she says, "wouldn't you want it to go away?"

I swallow. "Yeah," I nod.

"But you," she continues, "I wasn't sure why you were there. No one knew, or at least, no one discussed it. Dr. Spector told me you were just another criminal, but I didn't believe it. When you resisted the treatment more strongly than the rest... Well, I'm not sure why, but I had a hunch there was something really fishy going on."

"Yeah, you were trying to erase my memory," I suggest.

She shakes her head. "No, we erased your memory, or so we thought. It was the memory programming that you were resistant to. I wasn't able to conduct any of your exit interviews, Dr. Spector handled that personally, but I heard some pretty wild things.

"In the beginning, most of the subjects reported a surrealism to their memories. Some even had odd things go on, like what you might expect in a dream. I don't know everything you told him, he kept many of the specifics to himself, but almost all your new memories were...trippy."

"Tell me about it, sister," I snicker.

"There was something about it, though," she goes on. "Whatever you were telling him made him believe the treatment was failing altogether. He ordered a fresh wipe and some of the technicians to come in and make some custom tweaks to your device and its programming. He was convinced you could be treated; he just had to figure out how. You were actually blanked out for a couple of weeks. You woke up once or twice, which was unexpected due to the amount of medication in your system, but you seemed...I would say, alert. Not like the vegetable that was suggested you would be without new memories.

"During those two weeks, my curiosity was killing me. There was definitely something up with your inclusion in this program, so I decided to do some snooping. I, shall we say, 'acquired' a password from a colleague for the project's records. They contained detailed files on every subject in the experiment. Oddly enough, I was only able to come up with your name, date of birth and a picture. All other information in your file was restricted to users with a higher security clearance than my colleague. Yours was the only file with any such restriction. Now I knew I was on to something."

The fire crackles in a punctuated kind of way. I take a deep breath.

"Then the strangest thing happened," Loretta starts again. "Dr. Spector asked me to go in and start you on your new program. Again, it was all automated, of course. I just had to push a button and make sure your IV dosage was correct. I was in there, checking all the stuff, wondering who the hell you were, when you woke up."

"I did, huh?"

She nods. "You woke up, and what's really strange, you said my name. Now that was just odd. I thought for a second I had to have imagined it. Then you started demanding to know where you were and said you remembered being shot in the side. At the time, even though I thought there was something weird going on, I still ultimately believed Dr. Spector was trying to help you, so I convinced you to calm down and accept the treatment. I don't regret that. The less they know something's up, the less likely they are to erase and try again."

"What changed your mind?" I ask.

"Hmm?"

"About believing Dr. Spector was trying to help me," I clarify.

Loretta shakes her head. "Dr. Spector never wanted to 'help' anyone. He was in it for the glory. He's actually a very small man inside. He's got a Napoleon complex. This is a realization I slowly came to as time progressed, especially watching him react to your response to the treatment.

"One day he came to me. He was very angry. He said I was tainting the experiment. He said you had mentioned my name in an exit interview. He said the only way that could have happened was by waking you up in secret and talking to you. The only reason I didn't confess to him about the day we did speak is because you already knew my name. I wasn't wearing a name badge, and most of the time people referred to me as 'Nurse Vine'. I told him I didn't know how it could have possibly happened, and that was the truth."

"What did he do?" I ask.

"Nothing except threaten me. He said if I interfered again, I would be thrown off the project and find myself just an RN at a local hospital. After that, he didn't let me anywhere near you. The funny thing is, he also said that you had been responding better to the treatment than you ever had before. I guess he figured it was due to the machine tweaks, but I don't think so.

"See, all the other people who responded so well, they wanted to be treated. At least, there was something in it for them. They were either naturally more suggestible or they wanted to be. You, though... I don't think you wanted to be there. I don't think you were ready to let go of your life. I think you were fighting against it, but when I reassured you, I think you stopped fighting so much."

"Yeah, thanks," I say in an exaggerated tone.

Loretta gives me a serious look. "You should be grateful. If it weren't for that, I might not be here talking to you now. You would have been reset and maybe even buying this lie. You would have been treated and released, none the wiser about what had been taken away."

"Ignorance is bliss," I argue.

She shakes her head. "Willful ignorance is bliss," she counters. "I don't think your will has anything to do with this life."

"All this based on a hunch?" I ask.

"At first," she admits. "But then something happened that clinched it for me. A group of men showed up at the facility. They were all dressed in suits. One of Dr. Spector's assistants said they were auditors from the DoD."

"Department of Defense?"

Loretta nods. "That's what we thought at first. It turns out they were part of a classified agency that was assembled by the DoD. All I know is that they called themselves the NIA. I don't know what it stands for or what they're actually in charge of, but it sure did get the conspiracy theories flowing."

"National Intelligence Alliance."

Loretta blinks at me a few times.

"Right around the time congress passed the Intelligence Reform and Terrorism Prevention Act of 2004, which established the Office of the Director of National Intelligence, the DoD collaborated with the Department of Homeland Security to create the NIA," I blurt out.

She looks shocked. "How-... How do you know that?"

I also look shocked. "I'm not sure..."

"Do you remember anything else about it?"

I think. "Uh, well... After the DNI took the reigns of the U.S. Intelligence Community, which had been previously been held by the CIA, the DoD and DHS, uh...formed the NIA to, uh..."

Nope, I'm losing it.

"It's okay, Richard," Loretta reassures me with wide eyes. "I'm amazed you remember that much. What's even more amazing is that you actually know that much."

I nod. "I don't know how I know it..."

"It only seems to confirm my suspicions that there was more to your admittance to the program than appeared on the surface."

"So what did these NIA guys do?" I ask, eager to see if more memories could be triggered. "You said they were auditors?"

"Well," says Loretta, "that's what the story was. I guess it probably wasn't too inaccurate. They went to find Dr. Spector, then immediately went to your room. Nobody else was invited to that meeting. They came out about 45 minutes later and left. Dr. Spector came out ecstatic."

"What pleased him so much?"

Loretta shrugs. "We weren't sure at the time. Shortly after that, though, the project got a huge grant. Dr. Spector said that the current set of subjects had finished their treatment and proved the project's success and that they were all to be released so we could move on to the next phase of the project with a new set of subjects."

"Released?"

"That's what we were told," Loretta clarifies.

"But not what happened?" I ask.

"All the subjects were taken off the treatment and given final exit interviews. I even performed a few of them. It had really seemed to work. They had vivid memories of specific things that we had programmed, and what's better, they had no recollection of anything being amiss in their lives. No memories of criminal behavior. No memories of war trauma. It was truly amazing."

"But?"

She sighs. "But...once the novelty of the end of this phase of the program faded, my suspicions started to arise once again. I started wondering how they were going to explain the final exit interview process to them. How they were going to explain why they all ended up in a fenced off hospital away from the city and why they were all loaded onto a bus at the same time to go for 'reintegration', as we were told. It didn't seem to make sense. That's when I started snooping around again.

"I logged back into the project records to see if there was any information on what was happening to them or where they were going, but now they were all restricted files. I couldn't get any more info on the rest of them than I could get on you. So, I started kind of following people around. Eavesdropping. Almost everyone was careful about what they said, even when they thought no one else was listening. They did drop one clue, though."

"What's that?" I ask, leaning forward in suspense.

"Well, the other researchers kept mentioning a room number on the 25th floor. Now, we all knew that's where they kept their labs, and it was all restricted, so none of us were allowed up there. But we had always heard them say stuff like, 'lab 2' or 'lab 7'. They never referred to room numbers up there before this new phase of the project. And they only referred to this one room, but they never specifically spoke about what was in there."

"What was in there?" I ask impatiently.

"You were," she tells me. "I couldn't watch them load everyone on the bus from beginning to end, but from what I did see, you weren't among them. After the visit from the 'auditors', I was keeping my eyes open. I think Dr. Spector was trying to keep me busy in particular, so I wouldn't notice they had kept you at the facility. I knew you had to be in that room, and I was right."

"How did you find out?"

Loretta stares toward the fire, but her eyes seem out of focus. "I went up there. It was probably a dumb thing to do, but I couldn't help it. I was really starting to get a bad feeling about the whole project. After all the researchers left one night, I sneaked into the locker room."

She looks at me with a sly expression. "See, none of them were supposed to keep anything important in there, but I had been watching for days and noticed that one of them put his lab coat in the locker with his security badge still clipped to it. So, I broke into his locker and stole the badge and slipped it behind my own."

"Wait a minute," I interrupt her. "Why the hell would you do that? What if you got caught? There's no telling what they did to the other subjects in the experiment, and there's no telling what they would do to you."

She smirks. "I know what they did to me," she says matter-of-factly.

I look around. "Oh. You did get caught."

"We both did," she says with a nod. "Even knowing that, I still would have tried. There is something big going on here, and if we were able to figure it out, I think we could have easily negotiated our freedom."

"Could have..." I muse.

Loretta nods slowly and goes back to staring at nothing behind the fire. "We almost got out too. I used the security badge to get in through the stairwell doors, smooth-talked the guard to let me in the room, called him in and knocked him out with a sedative, and we made it all the way downstairs without alerting security. It was only after we tried to leave through the lobby that the receptionist sounded the alarm. We took one of the facilities ambulances and actually made through the back gate. There was already a roadblock set up right outside, so I rammed through it off the road. I guess we lost traction on the wet grass and flipped."

All of this sounds vaguely familiar, but I can't conjure any specific memories about it. "How do you remember all that?"

She shrugs. "Don't know. The only thing I can think is that I was right about the subject needing to be willing for the treatment to have maximum effect. I'm also not sure why we're able to be here and communicate together right now. Somehow the Mnemosyne systems have to be linked already. I don't think the devices that we had attached to each subject had the processing power on their own to handle what we were doing. I think there was a central server on the 25th floor that handled most of the data. The actual devices were probably just an interface. I think there's got to be a huge repository of information on that server too, so that subjects could be provided with accurate data in real time regardless of what they decided to do."

"What do you mean?"

"Well," she replies, "say a subject wanted to take a trip outside the confines of what we've specifically set up for them. Say they go to Europe or the Caribbean, the details about those places and the trips there would have to be accurate experiences. Once they were released, we wouldn't want them to go back to those places to find that it's nothing like they remember it. We have no idea what effect it would have on the treatment, but it can't be good."

"You mean you couldn't control that? Whether or not they went on a trip?" I ask.

She nods. "We probably could have, but we didn't want to be too restrictive, especially if it stretched the imagination or their perceived reality. Besides, that was just an extreme example. There are much more mundane details, like reading a book or surfing the internet."

I blink. "Wait, are you saying this system is hooked up to the internet?" I scoff in disbelief.

"No, no," she amends. "I mean, I don't know for sure, but I can't imagine that it is. I'm just saying, they must have some kind of representation of the internet on their server, or maybe some kind of filtered connection or something."

"I'm sure they couldn't represent the entire internet," I say. "The space requirements would be staggering."

"Again, I don't know for sure," she reiterates. "But what's clear is that we are both somehow connected to the same system and that's why we are able to be here at the same time right now."

I grow thoughtful. "Is this what you really look like?"

Now she blinks at me. "What do you mean?"

"Well, I mean, are you using someone else's body the way you..." I trail off, not really wanting to talk about Linda right now.

Loretta sighs. "Richard, I'm really sorry about that, but you have to know now that what happened in the bank wasn't real. The bank wasn't real, the people weren't real, what you saw wasn't real," she explained.

"Why did it happen then?" I ask.

"I don't know," she says softly. "But after it did, I knew I had to find a better way to do this. I did what I'm good at; I snooped around. I don't know how or why, but it seems that I'm able to directly interface with parts of Mnemosyne. During the time you didn't hear from me, I was figuring out how to set this up. I think they made a serious mistake in our favor when they hooked me up to this thing."

"Yeah, until they figure out what we're doing," I point out. "Didn't you say this thing has some kind of output? Aren't the researchers monitoring us right now?"

She nods. "They could be. But I doubt they'll see anything that raises their suspicions. I've managed to set it up so that the output from this will look like nothing more than dreams with no real details that would raise any flags. I've done that for you before, after you woke up while I was monitoring you. I'm pretty sure I've figured out how to do the same thing from in here. If I was wrong, I doubt we'd still be here."

"Well, even so," I say. "What good is all this going to do?"

"I figured that, between the two of us, we would be able to figure something out," she replies in a hopeful tone.

I lean back in my chair and rub my temples. "I don't know, Loretta. I mean, what can we possibly do from in here?"

"I don't know, Richard," she answers. "We have to try, though. Maybe we can take advantage of the fact the whole system is linked together. Maybe there's some kind of way to, I don't know, hack the system."

"Do you think you can do that?" I ask.

She shakes her head. "I don't think so. I mean, I can tweak Mnemosyne here and there, but that's because I have some experience with it. I don't know the first thing about hacking servers or whatever it is they have."

"Yeah, I can write some code, but I wouldn't know how to exploit security holes or what to do to bring down the system," I add.

"If only we had Neo," she laughs.

I can't help but grin. "You mean from, like, the Matrix? Funny."

We quickly get serious again. "I don't know what we'll do," Loretta says. "But we're out of time to think about it tonight."

"What time is it?" I ask, looking at my watch.

"It doesn't matter," she replies. "If we go on too much longer, they might start to notice that this is a really long REM cycle. Might raise a few flags."

"Okay, I guess I'll go then," I say.

Loretta nods. "Listen; go straight to bed as soon as you get home. And try not to think too much about what we've discussed tonight when you get up tomorrow. Someone might notice, and if our programs are reset, I doubt they'll let this happen again."

"Okay," I tell her, though I know it's going to be next to impossible not to think about everything I learned tonight. I'll have to do my best.

With little delay, I leave the church. Loretta assures me that I'll hear from her again soon. I hope so, though I'm not sure what good it will do. This can only go on so long before we're found out; I don't care how confident she is. We have to figure out a way to get out of here before that happens. We just can't figure it out right now. As I drive home, I practice not thinking about the most important thing I have to think about at the moment.

I hardly notice the drive as I pull up into the driveway at home. I didn't have much success keeping the thoughts away. Maybe once I've had a chance to sleep on it I'll have better luck. The bed calls to me the moment I walk in the door. I'm actually pretty tired. I collapse onto the soft bedspread and pull a pillow under my arm. It isn't long before the darkness creeps in.

I'm free...

*****

Letters from the Lost Man, Part 17

I have him on the run. For the first time, I have the upper hand. I see a glimpse of fluttering black fabric disappear around a corner. I bolt down the bare white hallway in hot pursuit. He's not going to get away from me this time.

The length of the next hallway opens up before me and seems to stretch for miles. In the far off distance, a cloaked figure slips into an open doorway. How the hell did he get down there so fast? I take off at a full sprint. The bare walls provide no perspective for me to mark my progress. It seems like I'm going nowhere.

Then, slowly, the door starts to get bigger. I'm getting closer. I lean into the run and really pump my legs. I'm going to catch this sonofabitch...

The apparent blackness of the room through the doorway was only an effect of the brightness from outside. There is a single dim spotlight in the center of the room shining down onto a hospital bed. There's a guy lying there under the covers with some kind of device attached to his head. The black-cloaked figure is leaning over him.

"Hey!" I yell.

The hood jerks as the head underneath looks up quickly. I can't see the face through the shadows of his cowl.

"Who are you?" I demand.

The figure shakes his head. "Don't be afraid of me, Rick...I'm who you want to be," his low voice sounds evenly from the shadows. It sends a chill up my spine.

"No!" I scream, but it's too late. The figure rolls onto the bed and disappears into the man's body. I run a few steps toward the bed, but a noise from behind has me spinning to find its source.

"What are you doing out of bed, Mr. Menda?" the creepy black-haired doctor in the doorway asks with a German accent.

I look back toward the bed. It's still occupied. "Stay away from me!" I shout at the doctor.

In a blur of motion, the doctor suddenly stands before me, staring at me with a perverse hunger that makes me want to retch. I stumble backwards.

"If you keep resisting, we will have to terminate the experiment," he says to me, grinning.

I continue to step backward until I bump into the bed. I look down at the man laying there. I see my own face cradled in the pillow. Startled, I look back toward the doctor.

"There is nothing to worry about, Mr. Menda. Just relax. This is for your own good."

I look down again. The man with my face opens his eyes and suddenly lunges for me. He grabs me and pulls me onto the bed while the doctor rushes forward to help.

"Trust me, Mr. Menda, you would thank me for this if you could," the doctor says calmly over the commotion.

A machine somewhere in the room begins beeping rapidly. I struggle against the two men, but they're both incredibly strong. They're both trying to push me into...into...

The beeping comes faster and louder. It actually sounds more like...

Ringing. I jolt upright, the restraining arms around me suddenly gone. I look around, panting. The room is dark, save for six red, glowing symbols.

4:26 AM.

The phone rings again. I reach blindly over to the bedside table. "Hello?" I ask groggily, pressing the handset to my ear.

"Richard?" a familiar voice crackles on the other end.

I freeze, catching my breath. Am I still dreaming?

"Hello?" I ask again out of confusion.

"Richard, can you hear me?" The connection isn't so good, but I'm sure I know that voice.

"Who is this?" I demand.

There's a pause. "Richard, this is Loretta," the woman's voice says.

I squeeze my eyes shut. "Okay, you're not real. I'm going to hang up the pho-"

"No, Richard, wait!" Loretta's voice pleads. "I am real. Please, you have to trust me."

"What do you want?" I ask impatiently, thinking to condescendingly humor my delusion for just a moment.

"I need to meet with you. We have to talk. I know this is hard for you to understand right now, but please believe me. Both our lives as we once knew them depend upon it."

"Why can't we talk right now?" I ask.

"There isn't enough time," she responds. "Listen, at eleven pm tonight, come to this address: 1420 Mission Avenue. It's an abandoned church near the city limits. I should have everything set up by then and we can talk safely. Just make sure you get ready for bed and actually lie down before you leave. Got it?"

This sounds absurd. "Yeah, sure," I lie.

"Richard, please. You're not crazy. Come tonight and I'll explain everything."

"Uh-huh, ok," I say with a patronizing tone.

"Fourteen-twenty Mission Ave., you're sure you got that?" she asks.

"I got it."

"Say it," she says.

"Forty-twenty Mission Ave.," I repeat with a sigh.

"No, FOURTEEN-twenty," she corrects me.

"Okay, I got it."

"I really hope to see you there, Richard."

There's a click, then a buzz. I hang up the handset and stare into the darkness for a few minutes. What time is it?

4:31 AM.

Damn, it's early. I doubt I'm going to get back to sleep, though. With the threat of dawn right around the corner, I might as well go ahead and start the day.

Work has been really weird ever since...Linda. People either avoid eye contact, or when they do get up the nerve to interact with me, it's always with a tone and expression that comes off as, well, forced sympathy. I took a week off after it happened. They wanted me to take more, but what the hell? Yeah, as if I don't already spend every unoccupied waking moment thinking about what happened and how much I wish...

Well, the point is, the last thing I need is more time to myself. Work is an excellent distraction, and it would work even better if everyone would stop walking on friggin' eggshells around me. Every hushed whisper I walk up on or furrowed brow that greets me is just another deafening drumbeat extending my already seemingly endless mourning. I swear it would be easier for me to get over if everyone else would get over it first. Maybe.

And so, I scrub off the previous day's muck and gloom in my morning shower. I get dressed in a daze, choke down an antidepressant in lieu of breakfast and coffee, then get straight on the road. At work, I'm greeted with surprise and faux empathy.

"Mike! You're here early this morning," some random guy whose name I don't remember yelps. Already looks like he's squirming to get away.

"Yeah, couldn't sleep."

"Oh," the guy says heavily. "Well, I'll see ya around. Try not to work to hard."

I nod. You are hereby released from this uncomfortable situation. This place is seriously depressing, but it's a tad bit less depressing than home, which is why I'm here. Ah, cubicle sweet cubicle.

"Hey, Mike."

I nod to my neighbor. "Hey, Tom. How's it going?" Tom practically lives here.

"Oh, y'know...it's going," he says, rolling his eyes.

Tom actually hasn't been that bad. He makes work tolerable.

"You look tired," he notes.

"Oh, yeah," I agree. "Weird phone call this morning. Woke me up at 4:30."

"Really?" asked Tom with a curious expression. "Who the hell would call that early?"

I stare at my desk for a second. "I don't know," I lie. "Must've been a crank call or something."

"Huh," Tom offers. "Well listen, I've already gotten a call from Greer about the meeting this afternoon."

"So early?" I ask.

"Yeah, he's such a dick, but what else is new?"

"What did he say?"

Tom shrugs. "I don't know, some bullshit about crossing the i's and dotting the t's on the reports. I was only half listening."

I laugh. I do that infrequently lately, as I'm sure you can imagine. It's another reason why I come to work. Tom can usually get a laugh out of me. So while I'm here I'm either working my ass off or laughing at Tom. It keeps the pain at bay until punchout time.

And so the day goes by. I get some work done. Laugh at Tom's quips. We go to the afternoon meeting. Greer is a raging douchebag, like always. Tom does most of the talking while I nod in a manner that I hope is intelligent. Nobody really pays me that much attention, which is kind of how I prefer it. We grab a late lunch, and all too soon, 5:00 rolls around.

"I'll see ya tomorrow, Mike. I'm outie," Tom offers as he skips out of the office.

"Later," I call after him.

Well, I guess this means I have to go home too. I clean up around my desk, close the files on my pc and generally just delay the inevitable. Having no more options, I gather myself up and head out. On the way home, I contemplate stopping all sorts of places and doing all sorts of things, but really, I think I just want to go home and sleep. I've been doing that a lot lately. Sleep is the other way I avoid my problems.

I step in the door and take off my belt and throw it on the couch. Lacking the motivation to remove anything else, I turn down the hall and plop into bed. It wouldn't be the first time I've slept in my clothes over the past few months. I roll over and look at the alarm clock.

5:54 PM.

Not that it matters. I'm not going anywhere tonight. There was no phone call this morning. It was just a continuation of my weird dreams...and yet...

Where did that address come from? Is there even a Mission Street on the edge of the city? Morbid curiosity drags me out of bed, but only far enough to bring the laptop back with me. I pile up the pillows behind me and open the cover. Let's see what MapQuest has to say on the matter.

Now, what was that address again? It was something like...1240 Mission Street. I type that in. MapQuest loads a page with 1240 Mission Avenue. That's right, it was an avenue. Well, the street is real, and it is about at the city limits. I just don't know if I have the number right.

Not that it matters. I'm not going anywhere. Yeah, so, I looked it up and it exists. So what? Maybe I passed by that street once on my way out of town. I don't know. Of course, I don't remember ever being in that area, but that doesn't mean anything. I might have heard about it from someone else. Who knows what my deluded mind has incorporated into its wild fabrications?

Resolute, I close the laptop lid and roll over. I'm not going anywhere, except maybe to sleep. I feel pretty weary, actually. I close my eyes and stretch out. I can feel myself being pulled deeper. Deeper into...what are they pulling me into?

"Trust me, Mr. Menda, stop struggling. You would thank us if you could."

*****