Journey to the Center of a Mind

                              Journey to the Center of a Mind                             

     Tom Jepson had carefully cultivated his reputation as the top project manager for Apex Computer Consulting backed up by an outstanding record of accomplishment. 

        In fact, every one of his clients saw Tom’s expertise as so indispensable that, every time he took one of his extremely infrequent vacations, they would put their most important projects on hold until he returned rather than place them in the hands of a substitute. 

      Thus, for 21 years, he put in extra time late into the night and on weekends to deal with the minutiae of every single project, exerting maximum effort and brain power.

     Aside from the personal satisfaction and, of course, the advancing status and monetary rewards of Tom’s fanatical dedication to his craft, another, somewhat sinister, reason lurked beneath the surface.

     When Tom finally finished each of his projects you’d think he would welcome a well-deserved rest.  Seldom, however, did sleep come so easy to his overworked brain.

     Every time he attempted to turn off his overstimulated conscious mind, his subconscious transported him to a bizarre world where the totalitarian rulers of a rogue planet sought to capture him for “crimes” they said Tom had committed “against the federation” by fighting with a rebel faction. 

     Tom had no recollection of ever having sided with the rebels.

      Yet the rulers and their “security forces” pursued him throughout the solar system and made quite sure he knew that the ultimate penalty, should they ever catch him, would be his immediate execution in one of the horrible “atomic smashers” they used to enforce their iron-fisted rule of the fearful populace.

     However, after sleeping through several of these intergalactic near-death marches over the course of several hours each night, Tom would wake up soaked in sweat, but, for the time being, physically unharmed.

      Although he found his “adventures” extremely disturbing, Tom, up to now, believed his nightime excursions into the alternative intergalactic universe only existed in the dream state--or did they?

     After one particularly close call, when the federation’s forces almost captured him, Tom found himself unable to escape his dream sequence and return to conscious reality in his apartment. He tried to get up for work, but found himself shackled to his bed and appearing before some type of spaceworld magistrate.

     The magistrate said, “The intergalactic jury has found you guilty of anti-federation criminal activity. Your sentencing will take place in three days. Among possible punishments you could face final destruction in the atomic smasher.”

    “How can this happen?” Tom asked. “I am not even of your world. Even if I had belonged to this world, I have done nothing wrong. I am simply a computer consultant program manager.”

    “You now have entered our world through our portal,” the magistrate replied. “Because your subconscious has transported you into our world and, in that world, you have attempted to overthrow the federation, you must suffer the consequences.”

     Suddenly, however, Tom’s subconscious mind and his conscious mind sent him a message that jarred him back to the true reality of his situation.

     During his last vacation, the project manager had experimented with virtual reality. Instead of the technical breakthroughs for which he had hoped, his experiments went “way off the rails” and he crashed through the portal to the middle of the intergalactic battle.

     During that battle, Tom had signed up for the wrong side–the anti-federation forces that his subsconscious perceived as the underdogs in what looked like a battle slated to continue into eternity. The rebel forces had chosen him as their leader in their struggle to overturn what they considered the unrelenting cruelty of the federation’s dictatorship.

    For his own welfare, however, he knew he had to abandon the fight in which he really had no stake--except his own survival. The result Tom found in his dream world had taken him to a new reality way beyond that he had bargained for as “an elementary researcher” in the relatively new science of virtual reality. 

     He scanned his brain and stored memory for some novel idea that would enable him to escape what could become his last voyage both on earth and in the alternative universe to which he had unwittingly transported himself.

     Suddenly Tom remembered something in one of his experiments that, he believed, would offer the solution to his problem. He had read about an experimental mechanism VR experts had recently worked on that would enable the operator to rewind the VR “episodes” they had observed in the past.

   His research showed that this reversal mechanism would allow Tom to backtrack through his dreams and enter the reality existing at the time of a past memory so he could escape back through the portal and land back in reality.

   Turned out Tom had acquired a “beta” copy of this reversal mechanism when conducting his many experiments into VR. It took some time to uncover the mechanism from the vast amount of clutter around his apartment left over from the battles between his real and virtual worlds. During those battles the federation had turned his previously well-organized abode into a scorched-earth ghetto.

   After an hour of searching Tom uncovered the mechanism and wound it back to return to the memory that portrayed his last entrance into the portal. He then set the controls to change history and take him back to the time when he only was dreaming. The portal opened, his apartment crashed through it and Tom landed on his bed. 

   The project manager welcomed his return to the only reality he ever wanted to “experiment with” and gladly again assumed his role as a “cog in the wheel” of computer consulting.

    Tom knew that few of his fellow consultants would buy the true story of his extended “vacation,” so he chalked up his unscheduled and unusually long absence to responding to an urgent text message to visit a sick uncle.

     He resolved, however, to never again experiment with virtual reality and to stick to the few adventures he could find in his “dull computer geek life.”