Dark Side of the Moon

[Owens]

CW: psychological torture

The sun glistened against miles of shop windows, each displaying the latest in computer technology. Twin boys shepherded their father through the crowded streets, outshining the blazing star above. They talked, they smiled, they laughed. Nothing could separate them. So long as they had each other, this fleeting moment of happiness could last an eternity.

Yuichiro Hikari awoke in a level of pain known only to the denizens of Hell. The immutable torment of SoulNet continued to tear into his heart, a sensation that returned with a vengeance each time he learned to ignore it. His chest heaved up and down, doing nothing to satiate the anguish. Exacerbated by this torment was the wretched throbbing where his left eye should have been. Though given the best medical care Nebula had to offer, it was still an emergency procedure performed with basic equipment. A full-fledged hospital, this was not. Maybe that horse should have killed him.

But he could have handled that pain if the recovery didn’t require so much rest. Until recently he had been bedridden, torn from his work and his research, the things that truly mattered. Worst of all, he was getting assaulted by those dreams again. Trite nonsense with zero bearing on his life, yet they always brought the most unbearable pain. He was weak. Until he could rid himself of these nightmares, he would not know peace.

Wallowing in misery was getting him nowhere. It was unproductive. He was not the man in those dreams, and the similarities those children bore to people he knew were coincidental. The woman he often saw did not exist. It was fiction. What kind of scientist would he be if he couldn’t separate fiction from reality?

Repeating this to himself like a mantra, he pushed himself out of bed. He walked past the light, his dresser, a hairbrush, anything that could distract him, and trudged into his office. There, he slunk into his chair and waited for his remaining eye to adjust to the blinding computer light. Popping a painkiller too many with a cold mug of coffee, he got to work.

Ah, good news at last.

Below miles of complicated code, his computer terminal blinked at him, awaiting the next command. The program he had spent his waking hours preparing, dubbed RESURRECT.BAT, was finally compiled. If only he were in the mental state to get excited over it.

Still, he needed to satiate his curiosity. He downed the rest of his coffee, then entered a simple command: run.

Activating...
Loading program... Moon.AMP loaded.
Running RESURRECT.BAT...

From here, the program appeared to hang. Other processes on the computer ground to a halt, the program taking all available resources. Yuichiro balled his hand into a fist as he watched, his leg bouncing up and down impatiently. Any time now. Any time. (Don’t think about the dream — It’s not real. It was never real.)

After several agonizing minutes, something changed.

RESURRECT.BAT successful. ARISE, VIRUS OF THE NIGHT!

With a burst of dark energy, a creature materialized on the network. What exactly it was would be inconceivable to an onlooker, much less what it was supposed to look like. Its vertices protruded and receded every which way, its textures missing or mapped incorrectly. It shambled about with jerky movements, but it moved nonetheless. The Moon virus lived once more.

Yuichiro swore under his breath. The result was embarrassing for a scientist of his caliber. Given more time, research and data he could have restored the virus in a better state — a perfect one, even. Alas, this would have to do for now. So long as its capabilities remained intact, its appearance didn’t matter.

He opened a diagnostics window, running some preliminary checks. The beast wandered aimlessly around the computer in the meantime, surprisingly tame in its nature. Whatever aggression it held was absent, or perhaps waiting on a target.

Target, target… A true test of the virus’s capabilities required one. If successful, it could rid Yuichiro of the nightmares that plagued him. Before he could do that, he needed to know the extent to which it could manipulate them. The question was: who would be the test subject?

MegaMan was usually the go-to, but Yuichiro thought otherwise this time around. The navi had other matters to attend to, he didn’t need the distraction. (His nightmares might prove too insightful.) There was always someone else in Nebula, or abducting someone to play the role…

But it didn’t have to be that complicated. With a bit more digging, Yuichiro discovered a chatroom handle within the virus’s files, right alongside his own. ShadowWolf. That boy from… that nightmare. Another dream that never happened. Why his name would show up was a mystery. Didn’t matter — the username and instance information were already there. He would be the perfect target.

“Okay, my little abomination,” Yuichiro muttered to the virus as he typed some commands. “Do what you do best. Enter this boy’s dream.”

Oddly obedient, the virus obeyed. It established a connection to the boy, one Reg Garret, sound asleep, and got to work. Within the plane of dreams, it generated an endless landscape of rock and regolith, broken only by a high-tech facility…

[Cosmine]

An ever present low hum welcomed Reg with a familiarity so loud it was like he had never left. His eyes adjusted to the darkness, slowly making out the ceiling of his living room. It was never truly dark here, it was too dangerous for that.

Instead, the ten thousand square feet of building he called home was the safest place to be for miles. At least, that was the joke that people liked to tell.

He arose from laying down on the couch, feeling heavier than usual. His first step off led him to the middle of the greenhouse. Under the thick glass roof he could barely make out the stars shining above.

The walls of greenery underlit by floor lights offered a small, inaccurate glimpse of what nature was.

He knew better, he couldn't stay here hecouldntstayherehecouldntstayhere, no there were things to do and idle hands made for an inefficient life.

He stepped outside of the greenhouse, got his orders and got to work. His father he couldn't see his face had given him the job to study diligently and so he did. The words on the page filled his mind but the words themselves danced and morphed every time he glanced.

He gave his eyes a break. The monitor next to his desk offered a view of the outside.

Black. Sunless night and stars and pure, absolute black.

A darkness so raw the mind conjured images just to have something in the blanks.

No, he had to focus on his studies his-

The books, the tablets, the pens, the tools all gone. He had fallen through the window into the dark and as he spun to get his bearings, all that there was that surrounded him was the night.

His EVA suit had already began to feel the chill of the sunless sky, but there was a heading for home, and all Reg had to do was follow.