Forced to Become a Creature of the Night

     Tom Jepson had worked his way up from rookie programer to become the top project manager at Apex Computer Consulting in only five years. His clients relied so strongly on Tom’s expertise that, if he had taken one of the extremely infrequent vacations, they had threatened to pull out of a number of important projects rather than entrust their operations to anyone but Tom while he remained out of the office.

      Thus, for half a decade, he had 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.

     His work brought immense personal satisfaction and, of course, the advancing status and monetary rewards that came from Tom’s fanatical dedication to his craft. Another, somewhat sinister, complication lurked beneath the surface.

     In order for Tom to complete many of his projects he had to continue them at home. Due to his breakneck and tiring schedule, this meant often pulling all-nighters.

     Often, while his conscious mind worked overtime with concerns arising from his daytime profession, his subconscious mind transported him to a bizarre alternative universe. There, the totalitarian rulers of a rogue planet sought to capture him for crimes they said Tom had committed against their interplanetary federation by joining forces with a rebel faction. 

     The computer ace had no recollection of ever having voluntarily sided with the rebels.

      Yet the rulers and their security forces pursued him throughout the solar system and told him 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.

     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, thankfully, still physically intact.

      Although he found the dreams extremely disturbing, Tom, up to now, had realized his nightime excursions into the intergalactic realm only existed in the dream state--or had they?

     After one particularly close call with his intergalactic pursuers that lasted longer than most had in the past, the programmer found himself unable to escape his dream sequence and wake up in his apartment. When he tried to get ready for his day job he found himself shackled to his bed and appearing before a 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, where you have attempted to overthrow the federation and you must suffer the consequences.”

     Suddenly, what seemed like a solution to his problem dawned on Tom’s mind.

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

     He could not help coming to the side of those he perceived as the underdogs in the other world to which his dreams had transported him. He had signed on to a rebel squad in the latest battle against the federation and sought to overturn what the  rebels considered the federation’s dictatorship.

    For his own welfare, 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 when conducting what he considered very elementary VR experiments. 

     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 the VR user 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 wreckage around his apartment resulting from the battles between his real and virtual worlds. During those battles the federation had nearly destroyed his apartment.

   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 reverse the effects of his battles in the virtual reality world and take him back to the time when he only dreamed about more efficient ways to complete computer programming projects. The portal opened, his apartment crashed through it and Tom landed on his bed. 

   The project manager breathed a sigh of relief, glad he would soon return to life as an ordinary cog in the wheel at a computer consulting firm the following week.

    It took him some time to fully recover from his ordeal and to explain his absence--especially since very few of his fellow computer geeks would buy his story.

     Tom resolved to never again experiment with virtual reality and to stick to whatever adventures he could find in his daily workday life.