Phobias

Warning: content with death and corpses

It had taken years and years for the technology to develop, but finally, Emmett hooked up several screen monitors to the machine that he and his fellow scientist had been manufacturing just for this specific occasion. 

He took a step back and surveyed his work. One of the screens showed a heart monitor while the other one blinked several colors for a few seconds before settling on a blank white screen where Emmett would view the images from his patient’s mind. Next to this was a single hospital bed with 4 straps, two on each side, with small plastic tubes running up and down its length, ready to administer anesthesia to his patients. 

Situated at the head of the bed was probably the most interesting component of his design out of everything in the room. It was nothing but a helmet with several long wires coming out of the top that attached to one of the monitors. This was the thing Emmett was most excited about and what effect he intended to be testing that day. If it worked, it would be revolutionary in cognitive psychology. Particularly in accurately identifying people’s mental health and being able to cure them of it completely without the use of addictive drugs. 

He pressed a button on one of the monitor keyboards and spoke into a small microphone. “Send him in, Stacy.” 

A few moments later, Stacy came in, leading a man behind her - the volunteer test subject for the experiment Emmett was about to conduct. 

Emmett smiled and picked up a clipboard from the monitor table. “Thank you for joining me today Mr...Davis!” he said, scanning his paperwork. “I’m Dr. Usoro, I’ll be the one conducting this experiment today. You already know Stacy here, she’s the anesthesiologist, here to put you to sleep for this.” 

Mr. Davis returned Emmett’s smile. “I’m excited to be here.”

“Excellent! I assume that you were briefed on what exactly is going to happen today?”

“Yes.” 

“Perfect. If you’ll please lay down here on the bed, we can get started.”

Mr. Davi nodded and walked over to the bed and lay himself down. Stacy followed and began locking one of his arms into the straps.

“Woah, wait a minute,” Mr. Davis said, jerking away. “Are those really necessary?”

Stacy stopped and looked up at him. “Mr. Davis, the simulation you are about to experience will be very intense. These are simply to ensure you don’t injure yourself as we don’t know yet what reaction to expect.”

Mr. Davis hesitated. “Alright…” 

Stacy walked around the bed and strapped his other arm down. She then proceeded to his legs. 

“There we go,” Emmett said once she had finished. “Now that that’s done, we can start with the actual simulation. Mr. Davis, you’re going to be under the effects of anesthesia for at least half an hour while my machine searches your mind. I know you’ve already had this explained to you but I feel it’s important to emphasize. While you may be asleep, you will experience exactly the effects that my machine has on your thoughts and it will feel like you’re living them out. They will feel very real, but once you wake up, they’ll feel like nothing but a dream. Understand?”

Mr. Davis nodded. “Yes.”

“Good, so you’re ready then?”

Mr. Davis nodded again. He seemed too nervous to form many words. 

“Perfect, here we go.” he gestured again to Stacy who took a needle and inserted it into the vein of Mr. Davis’s wrist and injected it with the sleep drug. The man winced slightly but within seconds the drug had taken effect and he was unconscious. 

Emmett didn’t waste any time. He fastened the helmet over Mr. Davis’ head, making sure it was secure before flipping a switch at its base. 

Immediately it started to hum. 

Emmett stared expectantly at the monitor. For a few seconds, it remained blank as the machine began probing Mr. Davis’ mind, searching. Then, quite suddenly, color began to fill the screen. For a moment it seemed indiscernible but it quickly began to take shape into a scene. 

At first, Emmet saw nothing but a single, small room, about the size of a broom closet. He looked down and saw a body under him and knew immediately that he was seeing this all from the perspective of Mr. Davis. He thought for a moment that maybe Mr. Davis’s worst fear was confined spaces, but then something odd began to happen. The angle of the scene shifted, almost like a camera in a movie, to show the entire ceiling had disappeared, revealing what appeared to be a bright, blue sky.

“Incredible…” Stacy muttered.

Emmett watched with interest as the walls began sinking into the floor, becoming lower and lower, and revealing more and more blue sky until suddenly there seemed to be nothing around him except open air and the floor. Emmett was able to just barely discern the ground from where Mr. Davis stood in the simulation and deducted that he was about one thousand feet in the air. The image began to move around rapidly, like a head looking around in panic. The screen monitoring Mr. Davis’s heat began to beep more insistently, indicating his heart rate was climbing. Emmett suddenly thought he knew exactly what the fear he was seeing was.

The legs scrambled to the very middle of the floor as though desperate to keep away from the edges. Emmett doubted it would do any good. The floor began to shrink rapidly, the edge of the open sky getting closer and closer to the middle. 

Mr. Davis’s heart monitor began to beep rapidly to a point where Emmett tore his eyes from the screen to stare at it, concerned. If his heart rate got too high, there could be a risk of him going into cardiac arrest in which case Emmett would be forced to stop the simulation. He didn’t want to do that, as was very keen to see the whole thing through. 

He glanced back at the screen to see that the floor had now shrunk so small that Mr. Davis was standing on his tippy toes in an attempt to stay on. However, within a matter of seconds, it had disappeared entirely and he plummeted down to the ground. 

Almost immediately, a sharp buzzing began emanating from the heart monitor. Emmett’s head whipped towards it with a jolt of panic. That was the warning signal that Mr. Davis’s heart rate was too high and they needed to pull him out of the simulation. 

“Stacy!” he shouted. “Shut it down! Pull him out!”

Stacy, who had also been on high alert since the buzzer went off, rushed over to Mr. Davis and stopped the flow of anesthesia into his blood. At the same time, Emmet dashed to the helmet on Mr. Davis’s head and ripped the helmet off him. The screen showing his fear went black but he knew that Mr. Davis’s brain would still be experiencing the nightmare for a few more moments before it finally faded away. He thought about administering a shot that should wake Mr. Davis up but his body was already running so full of adrenaline that it’d probably be a death trap. 

All Emmett and Stacy could do were stand there and watch helplessly as the beeps on the heart monitor were replaced by one long, high-pitched, note signaling that Mr. Davis had died. 

The two stared at each other in mute silence before Emmett spoke in a quiet voice. “Put him with the others.” 

Stacy nodded and together they unstrapped him. Stacy went to the other room and came back wheeling in a stretcher with a body bag zipped open on it. They both grunted as they loaded his body in the bag and Stacy wheeled it off. 

She exited the room and went down a long hallway lit up with fluorescent lights. At the end of it, she turned right and entered another room, this one a walk-in freezer. Five bodies already lay in it, those that Stacy and Emmet had accumulated over the past two weeks. All of whom did not survive the simulations. No matter how many changes Emmett made to the system, the results were always the same. Emmett had lost his medical license when they had caught him working on such a highly dangerous project, no matter how many times he had insisted that with the right research and technology, it could practically cure the mental health crisis going on in the country and maybe even the world. Stacey wholeheartedly agreed with him which is why she had decided to leave her medical job with him and take up work with his studies. It had been hard work but the hardest task was testing out the machine without raising too much of a public eye until they were sure they had perfected the technology.

Stacy pushed the stretcher into the freezer and shoved the body bag onto the hard frozen floor. With a huff, she whirled around and wheeled the stretcher out, already planning on the next ad they would put in the newspaper to attract more volunteers. Hopefully, the next run they did would be more successful.