The Exact Recount of Half a Story

On the morning of a day not so particular, Z woke up with not just a glee, nor just any variety of contentment that made him doubt himself whether or not he deserved it, but an unadulterated happiness. Something that some indeterminate time ago, Z never thought was possible.

In truth, Z had always been apathetic towards technology, quite strangely so, because he worked so closely with all the useful features and convenience such technological advances provided and when one chanced to ask Z, all he would say was that he made a stupid promise to someone a long time ago, to whom he could not even really remember: that everything that he could see, he could quantify without the help of a equipment. 

As time passed and Z learned his limitations, as all reasonable persons would when faced with reality. However, the promise he made naively and thoughtlessly sometimes he kept himself to its venerable standard. And that had helped him in many of the endeavors when learning the truth about the power of numbers and of things in variables. 

A stubbornness that was fairly attributed to his idiosyncratic worldview that was neither here nor there, but he rationalized it well inward and ordinate with extremely sound personal rhymes and reasons: Digging deep and one would always find someone’s downfall due to technological mishaps, and that was just statistically sound; and Z would be damned if he let himself be another set of numbers he might have to look at. That would just be a shameful irony an esteemed economist could not outlive.

Sometimes Z would just claim that there was something cold and mysterious about the properties of technology, and might not as quantifiable as they should have been by any measures and standards. Z had found himself aligning with the view that technological advances, materialistic or otherwise, were just mere generative chockfull of prideful numbers and algorithms, and it was just how the world worked when one really wanted to get to the bottom of it. And that was no way to treat numbers. Such disrespect!

And when his best friend asked him whether or not Z believed in a higher power, Z said he knew that he could not possibly trifle or concern himself such a complex concept, however simple discourse had it that it would be very hard for him to believe there was one, if any entity, that was more highly ordered than the existence of mere numbers, but that answer had never satisfied anyone asking and listening for something more profound, maybe not even Z himself.

Z’s friend told him that there was a new quantifiable way for Z to see things, and it was about to hit the open market. He and Jane, his beloved wife, had early access to the Homer, a type of sleep regulator device. They both had some stakes in the company that produced it, and they would really like Z’s comments on it.

“It’s still in beta mode.” His friend said casually. “We have selected thousands of applicants for the first rolling-out model, and a lot of the reviews are great. I can’t wait for you to try it.”

Z had always consciously convinced of himself realizing bigger and better things coming along his path, but thanks to his own revelations, relying on primordial instincts and possibly intuitiveness, not a piece of technology, because in his analytical data, contributions of technology had inferred a great number of malevolence that couldn’t be accounted for in many researches, and as an eager and keen study, Z had found such facts to be simple truism. 

“It records brainwaves throughout your REM sleep and translate it into recognizable forms of information and store it. You can play the dream you had for your next sleep as many times as you want. It saves automatically everything you experience viscerally too. It is quite a beautiful piece of technology.” His friend said, extolling the virtues of the future of ultimate catharsis and psychotherapy, which Z thought was quite a claim his friend had made, however, it would have no bearings on Z’s mind. Why would Z want something meddle about with his brain chemistry by the sound of it? And his cynicism grew partly because of how he viewed clichéd shticks that bore practically no real world meaning such as psychological tropes used to group helpless people into an even more pathetic bunch. 

Z realized that it was harsh criticism on his part, and maybe he desperately wanted to, otherwise, he’d be wrong, and that was no where good to go. 

“Do you think that when anyone uses technology for any kind of help at all, it is somehow an admittance of weakness or vulnerability?” His friend asked, with his face grimaced with real ponder. “I think it’ll change your life, for better or worse. Try it on Z, and I won’t take no for an answer.”

Z promised to at least try the Homer once, because according to his arbitrary rules, promises should be kept. After all, he kept a promise with one person before, badly he might add, so why not now?

At the end of a work week not long after, Z had convinced himself long enough throughout that day to finally get into it. He took a shower, brushed his teeth, gulped his melatonin pills, and put the device on top of his head like a virtual reality machine but more well built and more comfortable. Drowsiness seeped in and effervesced with ease, and he realized that he was lucid in this dream.

Everything was just as the brochure from the product claimed it to be. The interface was beautiful, the heightening of his senses, even more visceral than when he was awake he thought. Every sensory debut was more impressive one after another, but it was just introductory courses. For a more lucid experience, Z had to pay a walloping 1,299.99 Karlups to completely immerse himself with its swaths of features, including a total control of his surroundings, subjects, and objects, if he ever got to dream up his ideal dream. Luck! Another unbearable concept that encompassed the technological advances, for all Z knew. 

After he agreed to the terms and conditions of the payment, there was an instant moment of decidedly updates on his surroundings. Seemingly, the Homer had searched his memories, photos, social media presence, and the many searches from his search engine as it stated in its terms in order to create his ultimate background, from where Z could explore the derivative contents of his own dreams. 

He recognized the setting right away. It was definitely the night of his school trip in middle school, when he made his first promise to someone, and he now remembered who it was. X was there with him, and the two of them were lying next to each other under the cover of the stars, green blades of grass under them, and they were hand in hand, intertwined at the mouths. Reliving such a memory had reminded him of the silly promise he made. Of course it was with a girl he loved, Z thought. How could he have forgotten O? Maybe the years had rendered him impervious to moments of pure ecstatic innocence, or whatever that feeling was, something he thought he could never experience again. 

And then they started talking, but the dialogues were intelligible and quickly passed by with Z and O falling fast asleep, cuddled up till the morning, even though that was not how he remembered it happened. There was a much more urgent thing that happened, but he could not remember what the conversation was about. When he woke up in the morning, he was in tears, and unable to process what just happened, Z called in sick and took some more sleeping pills, and dived right back into his dream. 

This time he was able to discern right away the settings, and O reappeared in the same order as his last sleep. And this time, it seemed that his brain overcompensated and was able to review the setting a lot better. He could hear himself talk to her with words of poetic sweetness, and proclaim his fondness of her, and then hear she said the same thing in return. It was overwhelmingly amazing that anyone would be able to reconnect to their perfect moments in life like so, and just like so, Z had thought to thank his friend for such a great product.

Z woke up again with a massive headache. Maybe it was not the best move to have swallowed multiple sleeping pills at once like so. Z should have known better, but the urgency called for it, and it was worth it. Z got up and went to work, but his mind was still fixated on the Homer. Z called his friend up and thank him, told him that it was the greatest technology he had ever experienced, and his friend laughed and told him that it was nothing to write home about and told Z plainly that he should wait for the next major updates. To Z, even having that moment over and over was more than enough. And night comes, he would like relive it over and over again. And so it was. And then it was again, so. One day, determined to reconnect with the girl he had not seen for decades, and the main subject of his ultimate dream, Z did his due diligence and found her on a social media page and contacted O. 

After exchanges of politeness, they both rekindled with words of encouragement and positivity. Z then told her about the night he had on the Homer and that she played the main character in his dream of dreams. O stayed silent during his speech and then disputed that was what really happened. 

Z asked her how did she mean? And O told him that she remembered that night really well. That the fact even though she told him she liked him, but she was already well on her schedule to leave with her family to another place, and that she was fond of him and joked about how when Z was able to count all the stars in the sky and all the blades of green grass they laid upon, and estimated the drops of water in all the oceans because counting water would be unrealistic, then and only then she would promise herself to be his forever, and Z promised such tasks to be nothing he could not handle. 

Z collapsed into his hands and tidings of memories flooded his mind because he knew that what she said was true, and that his dream was nothing than figments of his delusions. Z and O said goodbye and half exchanged looks of remembrance and expectations.

Night came and Z thought long and hard about what happened. Maybe this was his chance to really put his past behind him. Z kept on dreaming the same one gain and again to what seemed to be years, and each and every time, he could feel himself very conscious about the experience, and the narrative changed bit by bit within him. And one day, the dream had stopped making him feel anything. 

In order to revive the feelings, Z concocted a plan. he had to count all the stars he could count, and quantify the blades of grass from under and estimate the drops of water the could estimate. The task should be easy in a dream, and that the truth will come to him, and maybe then he could outlive his infantile promise to himself and O. 

Z set out his odyssey, and each day he would systematically count, and each passing months, new updates and features that came out with tools inside the Homer that helped him with such a brave endeavor.

And who is to say he was not successful by any measure. That was all to be said about that.