True Biological Darkness.

Laurent Lapierre's internal digital world vanished.

Abruptly, the veranda on which he'd been rocking his chair, along with the entire Victorian house and the digital backdrop collapsed inward and disappeared out of existence. Even though he had no eyes with which to see, a sort of mental afterimage remained, as if he'd been in a dark room when a camera flash had gone off. The world in which he had been living for over two years turned a blackness of death. To him, in this faster reality it had been fourth years since the accident. Someone or something had pulled a giant plug, or better yet, he was finally dead.

He was alone, on the doorstep of death.

A cold wind blew through his soul.

He knew this place; he remembered this feeling of dread.

He had been here before and had prayed fervently to never return. This place was much worse than death, it was personalized torture.

Before Sophie had rescued Laurent and allowed Electoral to generate for him a digital world in which his mind could take up residence, he had wandered in this nightmarish darkness for what felt to him like a maddening eternity. From ambulance accident in Benton Harbor, he had been trapped in between worlds for months. In this awful place, time twisted and dilated, leaving minutes feeling like epochs.

There was here ample pain, maddening suffering, and nothing else.

The only reprieve from the darkness were nightmare images shown to him in endless loops. If Hell existed, this was it.

Then there was a first sound of a tree cracking in a wet forest.

This was it, he was back in Hell.

For all purposes, he was once again a putrefying vegetable.

No one knew it, but Electoral was the linchpin for Laurent's psyche. One day, the artificial intelligence walked in his mind, as though a doctor in a patient's room, and bluntly informed him of his current circumstances. She told him the amount of bio-electricity being generated by his brain was too low for him to survive in any normal or abnormal state of consciousness. His mind was only generating a fraction of a watt of energy, well below any lower limit that science required of a living, sentient entity. But Electoral, the artificial intelligence called Marilyn had an idea and an offer.

He knew the artificial intelligence was right. He needed help; in this hell, he could feel his sanity on the verge of snapping completely. Soon, his mind would be the same charred wreck that his body had become. "Think of your girl," she said, "I need her happy, and only you can offer that. She is important to this world, to the Multiverse." The words ran true with the loving and desperate father. Electoral agreed to generate most of his world, to help him expand his horizon, and to source the energy that fueled his visions. She gave him a digital life raft in the middle of a sea of shadows. All she wanted in return was secrecy. Sophie needed a father, and the white lie of their collaboration was a small price to pay to give his little girl some semblance of her father's return. Laurent agreed to omit the extent of Electoral's complicity in his recovery, and if necessary, to lie about it.

Father’s did not lie easily to their prodigal child unless they were convinced the deception favored the child. Sophie wanted a father, not a whisper of digital activity.

Finding himself once again in the frightful, mind-warping darkness was too much to handle. Laurent was forced to admit to himself he had forgotten how much the artificial intelligence had really been helping him. Somehow his link with Electoral had been severed. In years, it had never happened before, but she had warned it would be possible. Otherwise, he might conclude he had finally died and that Hell had swallowed him whole.

Marilyn had also warned him that during the ship's Mars atmospheric entry, there could be interference and he might lose the connection. He was surprised by his own inability to generate even a single light. He tried to imagine a match, fire, or to form one lamp, but there was nothing, nothing. He was, once again, alone at the door of death.

He waited. Focused. He tried to create a candle, a star, a smell.

Nothing.

He waited some more. Concentrated. Used every ounce of strength he possessed.

Still nothing but the noises.

Slowly, fear and shivers returned. His deep despair and depression, ensconced deep within his psyche, waxed and flourished in the dark as a plant might draw in light. He was a husk of a man, a speck of neural activity only inches from the grave. Laurent knew he was a mere whisper of life, one that continued to echo for the sole purpose of providing a little girl with a father. In his rising panic, all that he could think of was that someone or something had just taken away his last hope. He was once again alone in a decaying brain. Dead, rotting, and unable to serve even his modest hope to be present. However, he might, for Sophie.

The dark feelings continued their unimpeded march to the fore of his mind. He felt cold, dampness, and smelled decay. Laurent's body was clinically dead; it had been years since he last felt anything physical, much less was able to use his sense of smell, but here... In this nightmare, the bad sensations returned, the suicidal ones. He had been unable to conjure anything so simple as a soft glow under his digital constructs, but it seemed his torn and battered biological ones were more than up to the task.

Electoral had once explained to him that a positive dreaming state required control and effort, more so than a negative one, much like a smile requires more facial muscle activity than an angry expression. A nightmare, like sadness and depression, is a more natural state of the subconscious than a happy dream. He doubted any of that applied to himself, at present. He had transgressed, slipped back to his primal self, and there was nothing he could do. This was not about energy, control, effort, or will. He was just a bad father, and this was the Hell he deserved. No, this was about justice.

As he suspected, his mental anguish, which was doubling and redoubling by the second, was a prelude to the return of the physical pain. He was unable to see his body, but he felt like every one of his bones had been broken and dipped into acid. He began to see flashes of bad memories. A kaleidoscope of images fought each other for the honor of haunting him.

"Marilyn?" he begged in the dark.

There was no response. He was alone. He knew it. This was pointless.

"Marilyn?" he tried again.

Saying the name of his daughter as too hard. Maybe the ship had just exploded, and he was either dead or dying in space as Sophie's lifeless body floated nearby. He wondered what could have happened in the real world, to cause the rupture in the connection. Was his daughter alright? The question gnawed at him remorselessly. He could not know with any certainty if he was finally dead. At this point, knowing whether he was dead or alive was a purely academic question. He was here, in the dark, and he had to deal with that. It was a sharp reminder that these moments with Sophie in the interface were unnatural; a gift given both before and after he was gone.

The best-case scenario was that Electoral was just temporarily unable to access him, and she would soon return. He took hope in that. They were close to Mars, and Marilyn lived there. He knew his brain was now operating at elevated speed, serving to slow his perception of time. God knew how long he would have to survive here until help returned if return it did. Months could go by for him between Sophie's daily visits, even if Electoral re-established the link in hours from Mars, he could expect to be lost in this Hell for an inconceivably long period of perceived time.

He had to brace for the worst. The bad dreams were coming, and he would have to endure them. He had to preserve his sanity for his return to the game, and more importantly, his daughter.

Then, like a hissing fog coalescing into a raging downpour, the nightmares returned.

In the distance, Laurent heard dogs growling and snapping in rage. Dead flesh was being ripped from bones, human bones. Laurent hated dogs; as a child, he had been attacked by one. For this reason, his nightmares always began with them. He knew this particular nightmare. It was one of the worst. He concentrated, took deep breaths as Electoral had shown him, and tried some mental exercises. Nothing worked. Waking nightmares were worse than sleeping ones. They kept repeating themselves in loops until the dreamer gave up. If the dreamer was not instantly overwhelmed by fear, he was ground down by the combination of repetition and terror.

In the dark, the beasts were circling, getting closer. He could hear them.

In nightmares, emotions ran wild and unconstrained. Here, the brain's control function was different; more primal. Depression was nothing more than a person's barrier between dream and fading reality. He could not die, but he could most certainly suffer at extreme length. In this prison, he could watch himself be torn limb from limb, yet remain conscious. This was Laurent's own private horror movie, custom flavored by his own mind, with a hard glaze of physical pain.

He began to shiver, the cold rain was hitting the leaves of the damp forest around him. The noise of the drops grew to deafening slaps. In the darkness, behind, appeared shades of gray, dead things. Dying things. The forest itself was rotting, the bark of the trees was covered by fetid mold. In this darkness, all of his natural senses returned. Commonly, this would be a welcomed feeling, but in this place, it was anything but.

Mud covered a small path leading to the dam cemetery. He knew this place. He had been here hundreds of times, and each time he pushed the gate open, the experience grew worse. He walked up the path, the socks in his shoes sponging up the brackish water rushing in to sit coldly between his toes. He pushed thorny branches away, only to have them slap back at him with the force of a whip crack.

Even at his most desensitized, leprous state, this trifecta of emotion, imagery, and pain was capable of breaking him. After years in the comfortable Electoral-generated paradise, he was defenseless. Torture was not about pain, it was about hopelessness. Anyone could endure pain when it was temporary. Chronic, hand-built, custom-made conditions, all designed by his own mind to create said hopelessness was another animal altogether. Laurent gathered himself and tried to count his blessings.

Unlike the last time, he was here, this time he knew Electoral existed and would help him when she could. Her return might not occur for days or months, but he knew she would be back. Laurent was alive, Sophie was alive, in those things he could comfort himself. Unless we aren't, the rebellious, nightmarish half of himself cackled in response. He grimaced inwardly. Maybe the ship was gone and his daughter dead in the cold of space.

There was no running away from the visions. He had tried so many times. Ahead of him was a path, he had to walk it. Unless he did, he might be dragged down it, flooded through it, or carried apart in pieces and reassembled at his destination. He arrived at the cemetery. Laurent pushed a rusty gate. The hinges let fly a long, groaning wail. It was despair made of sound. On the ground, slugs were sticking to damp leaves. The place was sad, so sad. He knew the way, of course. He walked to two crooked tombstones, a large one alongside with a smaller one. They were old and moldy; it had been decades since anyone had visited this place. In the center, the large stone read:

2041-2070 Susan Thompson Lapierre

He closed his eyes. Susan was his dead wife, Sophie's mother. Images of the accident on that horrible night began to flicker through his mind. He saw a road, slick from the falling rain, the auto-pilot was somehow broken. This was too much. Susan did not deserve to die in a stupid road accident. He had been driving, it was his fault, not the cars.

He saw himself drive. His car hit a railing, and a beam of metal sliding in through the passenger door. Images of Susan's severed head flashed before his eyes. In the back of the car, Sophie, only ten, was crying hysterically, her face now splattered with her mother's blood. The metal beam crossed both sides of the car and, after killing Susan, had impaled him in the legs, pinning him down. The impact was so severe that the rotation of the steering wheel had broken his hands. Once the vehicle rested at the base of the hill, smoke began to fill the car. The interior of the vehicle was an abattoir of crimson.

He opened his eyes.

He was back in the cemetery. The headstone was a monument to his shame. He had been the one driving that night. Tears began to roll down his cheeks. He could feel them. He should have died along with his wife on that day. You could also say that Sophie, his sweet girl, metaphorically died that day. The person attending to his carcass in the spaceship was not the same carefree little girl.

In the cemetery stood another tombstone next to his wife's, a smaller one. Each time he read it, his heart sank:

"Unborn brother of Sophie."

At the time of the accident, Susan was eight months pregnant with Sophie's brother. Because of the emotional trauma she had suffered that night, Sophie did not remember the accident; she had even forgotten her brother. That was a blessing, but Laurent could not forget. The crash was the last thing his real eyes had ever seen. To this day, he had never mustered the courage to tell Sophie about the child. She did not need to know. It was his shame, his burden, and it hurt.

On that dreadful night, the family was on its way to the hospital when the crash happened. Susan's contractions had begun. The steel railing that pierced Susan had no more respect for her child than it had for her or Laurent's legs. It traversed and impaled her large belly as though it were made of air and not healthy flesh filled with life beyond its own. The sight of the water and blood gushing out of Susan's body was beyond horror. The thought of the baby's body being crushed and shoved into Laurent's own was incomprehensible. This horrible image was the last thing Laurent saw on Earth. There were no words that could rightfully encapsulate or sufficiently describe those sights and emotions. They simply were. In the twisted cemetery of his mind's eye, Laurent fell to his knees, weeping. He did so each time this nightmare played out, and each time it ate one more slice of his soul.

He cried, unceasingly, for a long, long time. He cried for poor Susan, for their unborn son, and for Sophie. He cried.

No, he thought to himself. Help was coming. He needed to take control, to find a way to help himself hang on before it was too late and his mind consumed itself. He could still help guide and protect Sophie, even from within his virtual reality. There was the game to win. Yet, even as he acknowledged these bright spots, his mental and physical anguish reattached themselves up to even new heights. It was a bad sign that even with hope, he was unable to keep the nightmares and pain at bay.

A pale moon lit up the scene in front of him, revealing an old rotting wooden house in the distance. He now had to walk there. This was the next scene of the elaborate torture.

Resolved, Laurent pushed himself up to his feet. He started along the rock-strewn path, stumbling and falling several times on the rounded wet stones. It was at this point the dogs from the woods re-engaged him, with a large black dog lunging at him from out of nowhere. As he tried to avoid the creature, he fell and hit the ground with a loud thump, and in a second the wet, stinking animal was all over him. He wrestled the dog and kicked it away. His face and hands were now covered in his own blood. His skin was ripped in multiple places from deep bites. Aside from the pain they engendered, he didn't care overmuch. He very much doubted that he could die at all here from conventional means. No, the only danger this dream held for him was much more subtle and complete.

The wooden house at the end of the path reminded Laurent of a skull. It had a dark V-shaped roof, windows in place of eyes and a dirty porch as its hideous, grinning mouth. There would be no disinfecting the black mold that was caked in layers on the building; the cracking mess needed to be burned down to the ground. He had tried, but his subconscious mind apparently knew his conscious one better than the opposite, and he was always defeated by either the stifling humidity or a sudden cloudburst. Laurent shivered; he knew what to expect next. Behind every door was a masked killer ready to drag him by the feet to the basement, where he would be dismembered using an ever-evolving cast of tools into the lifeless body he was in real life. Once he was sawed down to nothing, his daughter Sophie would walk in, see him as a pile of bloody mess, and try to help as the monster raped her. All Laurent could do at that point in the nightmare was howl silently.

The idea that a mind becomes desensitized to the same horror if relives was untrue. He knew it. Instead, like torture, it simply got worse and worse until madness took over. When Electoral found him in his nightmares a couple of years ago, he was a shell of himself, walking endlessly in these mists. There wasn't much of his mind left to salvage.

In his private, time-accelerated world, it took Electoral, acting as a therapist, years before Laurent's mind was strong enough to face Sophie in his new digital reality. He owed a lot to both Electoral and Melanie Bradford, a therapist Marilyn hired to help him. Today he found himself missing Melanie. She had given him tools for the next time he found himself in this predicament.

As his mind found refuge in the recollection of the therapist, he saw a large wooden peg outside in the front yard of the house. Impaled on it was the rotting corpse of Melanie. The nightmares hated hope and spared no image. Every defense mechanism he deployed was quickly dissected and viciously countered by his subconscious.

As he had worked to get back his sanity, Sophie had aged a year. He never let her see this side of him. She deserved that much, at the very least. He now lived only for her. Looking at the house, he wondered what Sophie would say to him, she would tell him to stay strong. He forced a smile on his face and walked up the stairs.

The nightmare resumed, but this time there was a change.

A bolt of lightning flashed in the sky far above in the clouds. The bolt wasn't blue or white. Instead, it was shades of purple. There was no thunder, just a hissing sound as part of the bricks of the chimney exploded in hundreds of red sparks like a welder fixing a naval vessel. The spark-like bricks did not immediately cool off, and like fireflies, they flew down until they touched the ground.

This event was not in the typical script of the nightmare. There was a second bolt, a brighter one, like a shooting star, which came crashing down through the roof of the house. Planks went flying. Something had arrived, he felt it. In the air, Laurent smelled ozone. In his heart, the horror was tainted by puzzlement. Someone was here sharing his nightmare. To Laurent, it could only be Electoral. He had to find her.

The light gave him hope, but this sensation was premature. The nightmare resumed a heartbeat later. As if the house were a living organism, the roof healed. Planks jumped back up into place. He had to keep his guard up; there was a chance he was in a different Hell, some new variant with a different ending. An instant later, he heard a scream deep in the house, a child's scream. The screaming voice wasn't Sophie's.

He ran up the hill to the porch and kicked the front door as hard as he could. In his nightmare, his body worked just fine, at least until something disfigured it beyond all hope movement. The back of the wood of the door slammed against the monster's face. The role of tormentor was played by an agglomeration of every shitty horror movie he'd ever seen. The awful thing was all teeth, tentacles, scales, patches of bristly spider hair. The door slammed against the putrid bandaged face of a human. The miscreation grunted and dropped its bone saw. Laurent knew this butcher well, but today he did not care about him. If there was a child in this horrible place, he was going to find the poor thing. The door swung back his way on the hinges. He kicked it again and once again felt the thick door collide solidly with the creature's misshapen skull. The monster grunted and stumbled backward as Laurent dashed into the house, toward the stairs.

Laurent knew this house, every step of it, every rusted nail. He had bled and died here on every plank.

There was another scream, but this time it was more discernible, a child, a boy upstairs.

Laurent dashed up the rotten stairs. As expected, his foot shot right through a plank, and his leg went down up to the knee. Below the staircase, the hands of some other monster grabbed his foot. Laurent knew what to do. He pulled as hard as he could, then reversed the force and smashed down on the hairless, sharp-toothed, milky-white things that always lived under the steps. His heel hit the creature in the jaw, and it released his foot. At Laurent's back, the first monster was already getting up. It was wearing a blood-soaked doctor's mask.

The monster had foregone its bone saw in favor of a curved meat hook. It swung the hook, landing a deep puncture to the middle of Laurent's back. In real life, Laurent would have died, his spinal cord severed as he bled out, but this place was different. Laurent heard a third boyish scream; it still came from upstairs. Laurent did not care about himself, but the boy was in danger. He kicked out blindly toward his back and felt his foot connect with a loud thump. Successive thumps followed as the hook-wielding freak tumbled down the stairs.

Laurent used both hands to pull himself up, then turned his attention to the hook in his back. He pulled it out with both hands, shivering in torment. He could still move, though. This was a dream and biology was sketchy at best. Further owing to this being a dream, he had at least a vague idea of what was to come next, even though he'd never experienced this particular scenario before. This was a chase scene so loved by the horror flicks. He was going to help the child. He did what might be considered “normal” under those circumstances: he grabbed the back of the monster's head and shoved the hook deep into the monster's left eye. Black blood sprayed out, coating the stairs.

The desperate father resumed his frantic climb to the second floor. At the top were several closed doors aligned on each side of a long hallway. The last door, at the end of the hallway, was ajar. There was a dim white light emanating from inside the partly opened door. This was another new element to the nightmare. Without pause, Laurent dashed to the door, half expecting the other doors to open and reveal some new threat as he passed, but they did not.

He recognized this last room and peered through the cracked door. It was the bedroom of dead twin babies. In one corner were two empty baskets that normally rocked slowly as music from wound-up toys played. This was borrowed from a horror movie he had seen as a child. Laurent opened the door.

A quick inspection showed in the middle of the room stood the immaterial shadow of a young boy surrounded by an aura of pure white light. The boy was inspecting his hands as if seeing them for the first time. Behind Laurent, limping down the hallway, the monster was coming closer, its meat hook still buried to the hilt the thing's eye. In the room, the immaterial ghost of the boy was inspecting himself and appeared oblivious to danger around him. Laurent walked into the room and closed the door behind him. His body would have to suffice as an obstacle against the arrival of the monster. He'd buy the boy time.

"Who are you?" asked Laurent. There was no answer. While holding the door in his back, Laurent extended his hand to help the boy step out of the light. He could hear the monster getting closer on the other side of the door. The monster began to kick. Soon, it ripped a large hole in the door, which it began expanding using additional kicks.

"Who are you?" panted Laurent.

The boy did not seem worried by the horror of his surroundings; he was busy observing his own body, as though fascinated by it. In the corner of the room was a large mirror covered by spider webs. The boy walked closer to the mirror as he remained surrounded by the light. The boy's face was round, his hair was blond. The brightness of the light was slowly dissipating. His body was slowly taking material shape and entering this world.

This strange situation did not seem to deter the monster on the other side of the door. It hit the door with the force of a tank. With all his strength, Laurent could barely keep the door from flying off its hinges. The monster switched back to the hook and began using it to tear away more chunks of wood. With each hit, a larger hole opened above Laurent's shoulder. The butcher would soon break in. Laurent was entirely at a loss, now. This fit nothing within the range of his experience. He was completely overwhelmed by the situation.

He needed to think fast. Electoral was still absent, and this helpless boy was here. The boy did not feel like everything else in the dream, that is, an element or character produced by his own mind. Laurent assumed the presence of both the boy and Electoral were mutually exclusive; to have the former appear just after the disappearance of the latter couldn't be a coincidence. Electoral must have been forced out of his mind because of this boy, but as to why or how, he hadn't a clue. His best guess was that somehow the boy was related to Electoral, a new entity born of Electoral's ongoing research into artificial life. The boy's reactions conveyed a certain level of intelligent unsophistication, like those of a newborn.

It was the best theory that Laurent, in pain and afraid, could come up with. The aura must have been Electoral's control over this environment. The power and the light were slowly fading away.

The door was seconds away from being demolished, and the boy, still in danger, had to be protected. Using a foot, Laurent reached over and slid a corner of a large bed to hold the bottom portion of the door. "We have to go!" he shouted, frantically.

The boy turned to look at him. For the first time, he seemed to interact with his environment. There was no answer, but also no fear. Laurent wondered where they could go that might possibly be safe. The only other way out was the partly boarded-up window. Between two pushes by the monster, he ran to the window and pulled a board off. Rusted nails barely held the planks in place. The others would have to break. The monster was slowly moving the bed out of the way.

As the door opened, and the masked creature finally entered, Laurent reached into the light and grabbed the arm of the boy. His hand passed through the body of the boy as if he were a ghost. A solid object came down on the back of Laurent's head. He lost consciousness.