As soon as my head touched the pillow I was immediately sucked into a dream state. Unnaturally quick and deep. I am use to long days for months on end and even then when the sore muscles and over taxed mind can hardly make it back to my RV I STILL have to drink and prepare for bed. I can’t remember a time where I fell asleep so quickly.

My limbs just seemed to become bricks and my mind didn’t quite shut off correctly. I stopped seeing and stopped being conscious but I didn’t quite stop feeling or hearing yet.

As I was going fast and hard into a deep sleep the last thing I heard was “Ohhh Pat… You didn’t deserve this” and my mind couldn’t place the speaker. Thinking about it, it could only logically have been Lela but I couldn’t help but want for my late wife.

In that moment nothing else mattered but her, which had been a trail of emotions I hadn’t experienced for a long, long time.

I couldn’t shake the last good memory I had of her. The look of pure joy on her aging face when I finally came home that last summer and she told me she finally got her motorcycle license and bought a bike. She had grand plans of spending that fall riding together after finally getting over her fear of riding that quickly on 2 wheels. The kids were grown and out so “It was her turn to let her hair down and enjoy being HER” she said. It sounds like a silly thing but she was crying when she showed me her license with a M endorsement. We hugged and everything just felt perfect.

That December we found out about the cancer and that was the last moment my heart was whole.

Then maybe because I became aware of the tragedy or because I wasn’t quite asleep yet the moment was gone in a blur and I was sucked into a scene of a movie I had seen countless times with my kids. It was a mildly scary kids movie where a big blue furry monster and a little green eye went around scaring kids for power. Instead of them I saw Lela and a floating computer.

Then I saw my own oversized body strapped into a chair with what looked like a doctor's plastic facemask with a tube going back to an acetylene tank being slowly placed over my mouth and nose.

Laughing gas. I was breathing laughing gas and couldn’t help but laugh but it wasn’t ME doing the laughing. It was my body strapped to the table. Then I thought of a line from a book I read with my kids when they were in high school. Soma. The clothing brand? No. The drug. What was that drug? Was it real?

Then it came to me. A quote from that book about new worlds and bravery. “I’ll make you be free whether you want to… or not”... “Or not!”. “Make you free” I thought I understood but by this time whatever was in the food or air that caused my incredibly sudden departure from the real world had lifted me up in the air and I was floating on a cloud of happiness and joy. I laid there basking in the warm sun and good vibes for what had to be hours. It could have been days or weeks even. I wasn’t in a state to tell time or think logically.

Then it happened though. Like so often the good times don’t last and with a crippling pain of sadness and regret I fell. Through the clouds picking up speed my body tumbling down, down, DOWN. Down through the good times and crashing back into the earth that once was but was no longer. Down through every happy moment I managed to scrape together since my wife was ripped away from me. Down past every bit of love and joy we shared together and into the deepest darkest pit of despair and sorrow that was imaginable.

I kept falling through the earth and the darkness into a pitch black inky mess with nothing around me. Not even my dignity because I was crying. I knew why I was crying but I couldn’t consciously think about it. It wasn’t like I couldn’t think about it but that I was actively being forced to NEVER think about it.

In the darkness shapes began to collapse into figures and figures into people. I saw my wife. The love of my life is crying. Out of reach. Then I saw my kids. I knew my wife had left this world but my kids. They were adults but they appeared as children now. Innocent and kind. I couldn’t let them cry. I tried to run towards them. Forgetting my pain and suffering for a moment to do nothing but help them. I ran. As fast as I could manage with my heart pumping hard and fast I was almost to them but they were yanked away at the last moment.

Then I awoke but I wasn’t awake. I tried to sit up but my body wasn’t mine. It wouldn’t respond. The best I could do was flap my arm in front of my eyes to send me abruptly back into the darkness.

My kids were gone and there was nothing else for me. Nothing left. No happiness or sorrow. Just existence. Nothing to live for.

I stood there. Head clearer than it had been all day. I was being controlled, or my emotions were being controlled and through that I was being controlled. It could only be one person. Lela, or more accurately the new AI who had ripped this world and everything I cared about away from me. Then I underwood the futility of it all. I would never see my kids again.

It hurt more than I could imagine. I was cattle or sheep being herded towards a cliff by wolves who had power over me in ways I couldn’t even begin to understand. So thinking about it, I was there. A sheep bleating while an ever growing cliff face came up and under me. Falling and falling again staring down at the gray floor and monotone walls of the dungeon I was stuck in.

I slept for hours that night but no rest happened. When my dream self finally hit the floor of the tomb I was struggling in I jumped up with the biggest gasp of my life. This time I was actually awake and the fear and dread pumped through my body. I had enough time to think about an aspirin before I collapsed down on the bed again and began a second restless sleep.

This sleep was not my doing and my emotions were not my own. I was a play-thing for another and nothing I did was me. That was my last thought that night. Possibly my last real thought.