VERONICA
A SCI-FI SERIAL NOVEL
CHAPTER ONE
You wouldn’t guess how peacefully John was sleeping by the stiff foam bed on which he was lying, even if it was wrapped in synthetic cotton. Or by how all the white walls ping ponged the LED light in the room, to the close effect of having the cold, hollow chamber glow. How many tortured geese and ducks were de-fowled to stuff these pillows with feathers that would poke out from the fabric? For an institution providing medical professionals a place to help people feel better, the building itself seemed to conspire against the idea of comfort.
But John didn’t mind.
Not in the typical sense. John was in no conscious state available to assess or give opinion of his situation; his perceptive mind was in no operational form—off duty. Instead, he was in his mind, dreaming in a place where souls live, a place where all energy passes.
John knew this world well. He studied it. He created technology that would open windows between this world and the physical, creating a relationship between thought and feeling where one could manipulate the other, even beyond an individual’s body. The practice would become the foundation for understanding the universe; the mastery of it would become the way to control everything within.
This technology, the culmination of John’s fifty-some year old existence, as a thinker and a doer, made him rich. The world he had lived in, as a kid with its Nintendo games and Pop Tart crumbs was vastly different from the one he was helping to create as a neuro-engineer.
Mastery was still a generation away, but these were exciting times nonetheless. A period of discovery and transformation, of hope for harmony, and perhaps a final resting place for scientific understanding. John’s window, poorly named Portal Exchange, was activated by a coded electrical impulse that stimulated the mind at just the right frequency to align it with one’s subconscious, generated within a small device the size of an earpiece. It was on the brink of becoming the next revolutionary development in cell phone technology: a form of telepathy.
As well versed as John was in exploring his own unconscious world, and in discovering connections (portals) to others’, he was far from mapping even part of the system, so he was far from able to manipulate the elements with any consistency. Just the same, he was far from capable of initiating the process without the device that provided the electrical impulse.
Being that as it were, now resting in his hospital bed, unconscious and unaligned, John was unfamiliar with his world, with no portals or vast understanding of anything. John was lost, dreaming in a state of melancholy. He was on a beach, looking out to an endless horizon. Something was pulling as his feat. The sand. He was sinking. A pocket of air below the surface of the sand was slowly caving in, and the weight of John’s standing body was pushing him down. He didn’t panic; he just observed. The sand came to his knees. He wondered, what was he doing at the beach? He hated the beach. Who got him to go to come to the beach? Now he noticed he was in a bathing suit, a navy blue and yellow one. He hated yellow. Who gave him this bathing suit? What is his watch doing in the bathing suit pocket?
The tide came in fast. It felt cool, refreshing. He wanted to stay. The water loosened the sand that pulled on his feat and he was free to move again. He turned around and put out his hand. An older, quite aged, gentleman took his hand and shook it. He wore a blue-gray suit while standing in the middle of a wood paneled office. Water flowed above their heads, as if the ceiling were the surface of the ocean. They stood in sand. John was now wearing a brown suit. Why brown? He should have worn his dark blue, so as not to perfectly match all the wood furniture and décor.
10
A mourning husband learns that technology can preserve and project the conciousness of his deceased wife, affectively bringing her back to life. But as she's connected to the automated household, it only takes a mechanical glitch to turn this loving wife into a suspicious, hostile, manipulative enemy.