Unfiction

by Gene Doucette

  There was a single door, standing next to what was clearly an observation window with one-way glass. Beneath that window was a complicated assortment of electronics, including what looked an awful lot like server towers. He didn’t know a great deal about computing, but he was pretty sure the server space he was looking at was tremendous.

  A thick metal circle was bolted to the ceiling, which was there to support a ring of lights pointed at his face from a number of different angles. Only a couple of them were on.

  Oliver tried to move. His arms weren’t going anywhere, but nothing but gravity was holding down his legs. Unfortunately, gravity seemed to be adequate, as he could barely lift them. The blanket was tucked in tightly, and certainly that was a factor, but it felt like it had been a long time since they’d been used.

  Next, he attempted to lift his head from the pillow. This went about as well, but less because of any kind of neck muscle atrophy and more due to the thing he was wearing on his head. He couldn’t see what it looked like, but weight-wise, it felt like a helmet. Except most helmets had padding at the contact points with the scalp. This one didn’t. It felt raw at those spots. When he moved his head, he was greeted with little stabs of pain.

  The very last thing he noticed was the other person in the room. She was sitting on a chair in the corner to his left, which put her out of his direct line of sight entirely, unless he turned his head, which he wasn’t all that interested in doing. He picked her out in his peripheral vision, but only when she moved to turn the page of the magazine she was engrossed in.

  “Hhhhh…”

  The word was supposed to be hello, but he didn’t get that far. His mouth was horribly dry, and there was this acrid aftertaste in it.

  It was enough of a noise to get her attention.

  “Oh!” she said. “Hello!”

  She got to her feet and moved to where he could see her without too much effort.

  “Hi, you’re awake!”

  He blinked, a silent acknowledgement that yes, he was indeed awake.

  She was an older woman, a bit on the hefty side, with black curly hair and thick glasses, wearing a nurse’s uniform. He’d never seen her before.

  “Water,” he whispered.

  “Yes, oh, right here.”

  A second later there was a straw in his mouth. She had a cup of water on the bedside, with a lid, like the kind you’d give a child. The water tasted dusty, but otherwise wonderful.

  “Not too much,” she said sternly, taking the straw back. “Don’t be greedy, you’ll make yourself sick.”

  Oliver wanted to drink all the water that existed in the world, but she was right. His stomach sounded an alarm declaring its intention to start rejecting things if he got out of hand. This didn’t mean he felt anything for this unnamed nurse at this moment other than white-hot hatred, for taking the water away.

  “Where am I?” he asked.

  She looked at him for a measure or two.

  “I’ll let them know you’re awake,” she said, and then she bustled out of the room.

  It was an excruciatingly long wait. It might have been only five or ten minutes in real time—there were no clocks in his range of vision—but felt like something closer to forever.

  The problem was that the longer he lay there, the more self-aware he became of his physical body. There were the probes touching his head, which only became more painful the longer he was aware of them. That was the worst part of this experience, but there was also every single voluntary muscle in his body. He didn’t know how long he’d been there or where there was, but it was long enough that all he could think about doing was stretching and moving and bending limbs that hadn’t been bent in a while. It reminded him of how his legs felt on long plane flights, only multiplied by a very large number.

  Oliver tried to free himself, but only once, and for just long enough to verify that he shouldn’t attempt that again. Heavy nylon straps held his arms to the bed’s sidewalls. Those straps were padded on the inside, but when he moved his arms even a little, it was painful. Some kind of rash was on his arms, and the skin around the IV needle was tender. He wondered if this was because whoever was in charge of tending to him didn’t know bedsores were a thing, or if he had been moving around a lot while unconscious and rubbing his arms raw.

  The door opened, and in walked an older gentleman, in a lab coat. He stopped two steps into the room, muttered something to the nurse, and waited for her leave.

  “Hello,” he said, closing the door. “It’s good to see you again.”

  He strode across the room, grabbed the metal chair from the corner, and moved it to the side of the bed, but didn’t sit in it right off.

  “Do you know who I am?” he asked.

  “You’re Koestler.”

  “Very good, yes. I’m Doctor Koestler. We have met before.”

  “Here? Or…” He wanted to say the last time he saw Koestler, the older man had a messed up leg, a gun, and a death wish. But he could already tell that Koestler and this Koestler were two different Koestlers.

  “We have met before,” the doctor confirmed. “Now, can you tell me who you are?”

  “Oliver.”

  Koestler didn’t react to this, which seemed like a reaction, in its own way. He sat in the chair, crossed his legs, and began taking notes on a pad of paper.

  “Oliver, then. What’s your full name, Oliver?”

  “Oliver Naughton. Sorry, Oliver Tennyson Davis Naughton. My family was weird about names.”

  Koestler wrote for a little while.

  “Look, I’d really appreciate it if you took this thing off my head,” Oliver said.

  “Do you have any other names?” he asked.

  “Me personally? Just Oliver. Well, sometimes Osraic, or Orrin, or Opie. Orson was another one. Oscar. There might have been one or two more, I forget.”

  “And these were your names?”

  “They were names people called me and I answered to. I made them up.”

  “You made them up?”

  “Look, really, get this thing off of me.”

  “Right. Of course.”

  Koestler put the pad down at the foot of the bed and leaned over to deal with the thing on Oliver’s head. Ollie could hear things being turned, metal-on-metal, and lots of squeaking.

  “I’m sorry, this is going to be unpleasant,” the doctor said. Then he lifted the device off, and it was tremendously unpleasant in the same way having skin torn from one’s body can be unpleasant. It hurt like hell.

  “Owwwww!” Oliver declared.

  Koestler looked at Oliver’s forehead with a measure of alarm.

  “Don’t want that to get infected,” he said, and then decided on a course of action, which involved a topical cream.

  Oliver got a decent look at the thing that had been attached to his head. It wasn’t a helmet, in the sense that wearing it would prevent a person from getting a head injury. It was a hat-shaped lattice of wires connecting pentagonal sensors. It looked lighter than it felt.

  Koestler rubbed a white cream on Oliver’s forehead, which was the first pleasant thing he’d felt since waking up. Then the doctor sat back down and returned to his pad of paper.

  “Do you know where you are, Oliver?” he asked.

  “No. I have no idea. Can you tell me?”

  “But you know who I am.”

  “I know your name is Koestler, but I’m betting what I think I know about you is different from anything on your résumé.”

  “I see. We’ll loop back to that.”

  “Can you untie my arms?”

  “We’ll get to that shortly. We need to make sure you’re stable.”

  “Stable,” Oliver repeated. He felt pretty stable.

  “Yes, we have to make sure you’re all the way out. I’m not yet.”

  “All the way out of what?”

  Doctor Koestler had an annoying habit of ignoring direct questions. In this instance, instead of responding, he pulled a small han
d mirror from his pocket.

  “I’m going to show you your reflection, is that all right?” he asked.

  “Sure.”

  Koestler held the mirror a few inches from Oliver’s face, and he had a good look. He was pale, as if he hadn’t seen sunlight in ages because, perhaps, he hadn’t. He looked scruffy, and he wasn’t at all fond of the facial hair. He thought probably it had been trimmed a few times, but that didn’t mean it wasn’t itchy. He suddenly and very desperately wanted to scratch his face.

  “Who did you see in the mirror?” Koestler asked.

  “I need a shave.”

  “Please answer. This is important.”

  “Doctor Koestler, I’ve been looking at my own face my entire life, and I didn’t see anything unexpected just now. It’s me. Can you please start answering my questions?”

  “Soon, yes. Do you know what Project Wise-Eyes is?”

  “I… yes, it’s a secret government experiment. Or it was. It was supposed to be something to do with remote viewing. But it wasn’t real.”

  “It wasn’t real, you say?”

  “I made it up. It was part of a story. There was no such thing.”

  “And do you imagine that, when you make up a story, there might be things you borrow? Street names, people you know… When you say you and I have met before, do you recall that meeting taking place here, or in one of your stories?”

  “You were a spy.”

  “A spy!”

  When he wasn’t ducking questions, Koestler repeated what Oliver just said as if he didn’t quite believe him and that was possibly even more annoying.

  “Yes,” Oliver said, “but… yes, to answer your question, I think it’s possible I borrow from other places when I decide on names of people or places. I think every writer probably does.”

  Koestler nodded.

  “All right. Now, to answer some of your questions, Oliver, Project Wise-Eyes is indeed a secret project, but it’s not related to remote viewing and it isn’t government-sponsored. We’re privately funded.”

  “This is Project Wise-Eyes?”

  “Yes, although I have to correct both of us. The project’s actual name is L’Oiseaux.”

  “The bird?”

  “Birds, plural. Yes, very good. Wise-Eyes is a nickname. Bastardization, in truth. Some of our volunteers were less than successful with the pronunciation. We heard ‘wise-oh’, and for some that became wise-eye. And our signage doesn’t help. Birds, of course. An owl is especially prominent in our seal. Wise owl with wise eyes. You understand.”

  “That sounds like you have a real branding problem there.”

  “Yes. And is this the first time you’ve heard this story?”

  Oliver didn’t know what he was supposed to think.

  “Yes?” he said. “You just told me for the first time, so yes.”

  “What do you remember before you woke up in this room?”

  “You mean, when I was in the other place?”

  “No. We’ll talk about the other place in a moment. Before that.”

  “I don’t understand the question.”

  “I guess you don’t,” Koestler said. “All right.”

  “Can you untie me now?”

  “Nearly. Let me explain what we do here. Project Wise-Eyes is—was—developing an immersive web experience. The device that was just on your head had been paired with an optical/auditory headset, which we removed when it was obvious… I’m getting ahead. To go along with that technology, we developed a compound to assist the brain in disassociating from the physical. This aided in the immersion.”

  “Lot Forty-Two.”

  He looked surprised.

  “Yes, that’s exactly right. We’re still beta-testing the entire thing. Or, we were.”

  “You’re out of beta?”

  “We’ve stopped the tests, sent home the volunteers, buttoned up the research. Because of what happened to you.”

  “Okay. Then what happened to me?”

  Koestler looked incredibly uncomfortable.

  “I’m going to tell you a few things,” he said, “and they will be shocking, and I apologize for it, but there’s really no other way. You were one of our beta testers. You came into the project very early, and actually helped us with some of the conceptualization. We didn’t recognize the complete opportunity, you see, not until you came along. We saw only a toy, something for gaming, or perhaps as a therapeutic solution. We focused on escapism. Your innovation was in seeing a tool: a way to expand the mind. You saw these server towers and the terabytes and decided to create something entirely different.”

  “A memory palace.”

  “Yes. Yes! How did you know this?”

  “I was inside of it.”

  “And then you escaped.”

  “I’m here, aren’t I?”

  “So you are.”

  Koestler cleared his throat loudly, and made eye contact with the one-way mirror. Oliver realized there was someone on the other side of that glass, and thought that this conversation was probably being recorded. Any minute now this would all start to make sense.

  “So you built your palace,” Koestler said. “It was a city. You named streets and so on, and began doing what one does in a memory palace: inserting your memories into these places. We could watch all of this, because the lattice was providing feedback to our team. We could see the build-out as it happened. And this was remarkable, because it gave us another new idea: an immersive experience in a world designed by a subject instead of a programmer. Imagine the implications!”

  “You’d put game designers out of business overnight.”

  “It was an exciting time. But then something went wrong. We never asked you to start inventing stories, but perhaps you saw the same thing we did, from the inside, because you stopped inserting memories into your city and started to interact with it differently. You—or someone--were writing stories on an imaginary computer inside the program. And then… you decided not to wake up.”

  “I don’t remember any of this.”

  “Yes, I know, and there’s a very important reason for that. A split occurred, inside the program. One day we were able to see your entire memory palace, but then we lost contact with your mind, and the only feedback we were able to receive was the text of the stories. All this equipment became nothing but a word processor for a writer who was trapped on the wrong side of things. And thank goodness we had that, because then we knew you were still in there. Still, we thought we’d never get you back. And… we aren’t sure that we have.”

  “I’m right here.”

  “Yes. In a way. Our problem right now is that your name is not Oliver Tennyson Davis Naughton. Your name is Wilson Knight. Oliver Naughton doesn’t exist.”

  Chapter Seventeen

  Four in the Morning

  It was a couple of days before he was able to walk around on his own, owing more to his legs not having been used for six months straight than for any other medical problem or security concern. He also got winded easily, so even though bipedal motion was well within the scope of his abilities, even if he wanted to flee the facility he couldn’t get far.

  It was a campus. He didn’t know where it was located for certain, but he could see tall buildings in the distance, and they were near the top of the hill, so he was guessing it was somewhere on the outskirts of Boston. That felt right.

  All he had to go on, for a whole lot of things, was feel. If what Doctor Koestler said was to be believed –and that was in no way a definite—Oliver had never been to the campus, or to Boston, or anywhere else. Oliver had never left the city of the memory palace, because Oliver hadn’t existed six months ago. Oliver wasn’t real.

  There was a part of him that was indisputably Wilson. The person he knew of as his writing mentor was like a phantom limb, or if that was too cliché, like the password Oliver knew well enough to type but wouldn’t have been able to write down if asked. He had all of Wilson’s instincts, but none of his active memories.
Everything felt like a permanent déjà vu.

  The campus consisted of four L-shaped buildings, which combined to wall off an inner courtyard. The trees in the yard were turning pleasant shades of orange and red, which also spoke strongly to a New England locale. There was a table in the middle of the grassy center, and a number of scattered Adirondack chairs made out of a material that only looked like wood. When Oliver wasn’t getting examined, sleeping, answering a battery of questions, or reintroducing solid food to a body that hadn’t had it for a while, he was sitting in one of those chairs.

  He was usually alone, in the sense that nobody else was also sitting in the chairs, but not alone in the sense that nobody else was around. Koestler had someone keeping an eye on him: a large man who kept his distance but who didn’t make any effort to disguise the fact that he was following Oliver around. It was Cant.

  It wasn’t Cant, because Cant wasn’t real, but Oliver didn’t know the man’s actual name and he looked exactly like Cant—from a distance—and so that was who he was going to be until Oliver decided otherwise.

  This was probably unhealthy. He was supposed to be learning how to become Wilson again, or something. There were undoubtedly many weeks of psychiatric examinations to look forward to, as experts tried to find Wilson’s memories inside of Oliver’s head, or maybe they would just tell him he wasn’t who he thought he was until he believed it himself. Or they would have him committed.

  He didn’t know how it could come to that, but it probably would. Could they declare you insane for not being the person everyone wanted you to be?

  “Hello, Wilson.”

  He turned at the sound of the wrong name, because he knew he was supposed to. Also, because the woman who’d said it wasn’t supposed to be there. It was Minerva.

  She was in jeans and a brown Fall-appropriate suede jacket over a white blouse. Her hair was brown with a touch of blonde highlights, pulled back into a ponytail. It looked longer than he remembered it ever getting.