Chapter One, The Boardroom

James Wilson was the CEO of the Oneirica Corporation. He sat now at the head of the boardroom table leafing through an extensive report that had been commissioned to evaluate the impact of the recent terrorist bombing of his own company and the economic ripples that would have to be weathered over the coming months and years.

The reports contained page after page of meaningless data, intelligence, and theories. Meaningless because time did not allow one the privilege to go back and change anything. As he flipped through the pages, his eyes and heart stopped when he reached the section devoted to the casualties of the blast. Hundreds of people were confirmed dead, but at the bottom of that page was a short list of MIAs, and at the top of that list, the name Jack Adams, VP–Marketing was printed in bold letters.

Wilson addressed the table. “Still no sign of Jack?”

The executives looked at one another, inquiring in mime and hoping that someone in the room would take the initiative and answer the “old man.”

A voice spoke from the crowd. “We sent two police officers to his flat the day of the blast to make sure he was all right, but no one seemed to be at home. The police say they are close to completing the legal formalities needed for us to gain access and investigate his apartment.”

The old man looked around the table. “Any of you have any thoughts on whether he might be alive? Did anyone get to know him well enough to understand what he might do in the wake of such a disaster?”

He intended the question to insult the humanity of the crème that had risen to the top of the Oneirica’s crop. Wilson knew that no one in the room understood anything but charts, graphs, and theories. He knew that none of them had received the communal genes necessary to provide any insight into a man’s location in the psychological desert, especially after a windstorm such as this.

A young executive spoke out. “His last recorded phone call was to a miss Rebecca Ridpath. Our intelligence division informs us she is an old girlfriend from his college days.”

Wilson looked at the young man speaking. He was about twenty-four years old, fresh out of Stanford or Yale. Yet his words made him sound like one of the thousands of dropouts who dropped in to the government safety net. Of the bunch sitting at the table, the old man knew that the young speaker, Trevor York, would be the one forthcoming with a voice on the matter, regardless of whether he had anything to contribute or not. Trevor was the only one seated there who trusted himself enough to speak out on matters that did not contain numbers, averages, or demographic data. He was the youngest executive in the company, which probably provided at least a clue to the source of his confidence.

When Mr. Wilson had been a young man, he was much like Trevor—he spoke out when no one else would. He assumed authority and responsibility from a situation when others would coward. It was a quality that made him the object of much ridicule and cynicism, but it was also the attribute that ensured he made the cut, even if it was his family’s company.

Over the course of his career, while the others would continue to sit around the table, the old man slowly moved to the front of it, and for a moment, the childless CEO wondered whether the young man speaking would have the same courage to go the distance.

He asked, “So tell me, Trevor, what do you think about this matter?”

Trevor replied, “About the bombing, sir, or about Mr. Adams?”

“Let’s start with Jack. I think we can call him Jack. He was a colleague, and I hope, at least on some level, a friend to us all.”

Trevor stood up, his speech animated by his hands as his words unfolded from his tongue. “Well, from what I have been able to piece together, he was not in the building when it went down. There are no footprints, no signs that he accessed any computers or made any phone calls from his office. As well, his secretary Laurie is present and accounted for, and I doubt he would have come into the office without her to fetch his files.”

Trevor took a sip of water and continued. “After the blast I was able to interview her, and it would seem that on the night before the bombing, Jack was celebrating his thirtieth birthday, and Laurie says she saw him in a nightclub downtown.”

Oneirical’s CEO spoke as he looked at each of the executives. “A nightclub. Jack did not strike me as the type to go to a nightclub. Was he there on business? I hope this isn’t the same club we were working with on that soma experiment.”

Trevor answered, “Yes sir, the same club, but I don’t think everyone in this room is privy to that information, so maybe we should excuse those who are not involved in marketing, or research and development.”

Wilson waved his hand, and most of the executives seated at the table left without a word. But a few of them were heard gossiping as the door pushed them out. Most were aware of the experiments, even if they didn’t have the clearance; but all knew that to say anything, even at a whisper, was grounds for dismissal, not just from Oneirica, but from every affiliated company as well; in other words, a total black ball and an end to life as they knew it.

“Continue, Trevor.”

“I am afraid that Jack might have taken a dose of soma.”

The table erupted in chitchat as executives exchanged ideas and information, disbelief by most, and the occasional word that someone saw it coming.
The old man asked, “What makes you say that?”

“Well, I am still waiting to confirm it with our underground operative Gordon Campbell, but everything seems to point in that direction. Laurie has told us she did not see him take the drug, but says her girlfriend told her it did happen. That, and he was last seen leaving the club with a Ms. Cara Johnston, a writer and a woman with a record of possession, and someone we would not expect Jack to come in contact with. I think she might have been his dealer.”

Everyone at the table sat back and looked at Wilson. They knew the name Cara Johnston well, even if Trevor had no idea who she was. Cara Johnston was the creative thinker who had been originally contracted to work with the designers of soma and the soma marketing team. Her ideas helped pave the way for the marketing staff to construct the most profitable hallucination that could be programmed into the user, once the user was under the influence of the drug.

Through her ideas, the drug had been fine-tuned to deconstruct the programming of aging, experience, religion, ethics, and all the other things one learned over time, and to replace it with the easier-to-impregnate psychology of a child. By doing this, advertising could infiltrate codes that had originally been configured by family, church, and state.

While under the influence of soma, the consumer was also made hypersensitive to emotions, emotions that then could be played upon through visual and audio stimuli, an art that the Capital Corporation had mastered years ago. Jack, however, had never been made aware of the origins of the soma experiments, and thus had no idea who Cara Johnston was. Jack had been assigned to the files well after they were set in motion, and although he was made aware of soma, he had no idea that the drug’s real function was to make consumers more gullible, more sensitive, and easier prey for his marketing initiatives.

Wilson said, “Cara Johnston. How the hell did she get involved in all this?” He sat back and felt time reel itself back through his internal projectors; he felt the weight of a decision he had made long ago slowly coming back to haunt him.

A younger Mr. Wilson sits at his desk, fidgeting with his clock pen. The calendar on his desk displays December 5, 1982. Beside that calendar, a number of pictures face him, look at him, and help to drive him through his day. His late father, the patriarch of Oneirica, the company that James now presides over, sits front-row and center behind a window of glass, watching every move he makes.

Directly in front of his desk, a wall of televisions keeps him informed of what is taking place in the world, but more importantly what is taking place on the floors of the stock exchanges around that world as they shuffle the ownership of his company, something his father never needed to worry about—for back in his day, the company was still private and owned outright by the Wilson family rather than the communal bank of equity markets, which now hold the lease to his fortune.

The markets today are acting on the second straight quarter of lost revenue that Oneirica has been required to post: losses that can be accredited to a general lack of interest in the company’s vast holdings in the entertainment sector. Movie sales are down, music, even books. Escapism is on a decline, and young Mr. Wilson and his team of executives are at a loss as to what to do about it, but one thing is for certain: if things don’t change soon, James will not live up to the legacy left to him by his father.

The real problem, James believes, is that consumers are unable to connect with the complex images and sounds that the new computer generation is creating. The sixties, and the acid generation it produced, somehow discovered the connection between simple mathematical operations and the human matrix. And in doing so, they are now creating machines that can actually play with a person’s mind, both visually and audibly.

But if Oneirica is to move forward and add something significant to this human experience, it will need to find a way to connect with this human matrix of experience, not just visually or audibly, but emotionally. And in order to do that, one needs not just to improve the message, one needs to change the way the message is received.

On his desk, directly in front of his father’s photo, a small file folder rests squarely and neatly before him. In it are the abstract conjectures of a young chemical engineer from Germany; it is a proposal for a chemical catalyst that would enable the average person to not just see and hear the images presented to him, but to actually feel them. The user would be able to integrate them into his own narration of reality, giving his human brain the toll it would need to pay in order to develop a more complex hallucination around the simple world it resides in.

Mathematically, life exists between the realms of the complex and the chaotic, and chemically, this new wonder drug proposed by Dr. von Schleinitz would act as a bridge between those two worlds. A dangerous bridge, but a bridge that would need to be erected if, Oneirica and its affiliated companies are to survive and develop a need for the ever-increasing number of disposable products that the market would soon demand to be absorbed.

However, there is something standing in their way. The proposed drug is essentially a hallucinogen, and although it was shown to have some interesting possibilities in the area of personal psychology, its long-term effects remain unknown. Like the television before it, no one working on the development of the drug is sure what exactly would happen if it were to be introduced to the public.

Would it simply alter the psychology of a small sector of the population, or would it mutate and deviate into every nook and cranny of the human experience?
On the one hand, the drug has the potential to help a person create a more complex image of the world around him, and thus a more interesting role in it. However, on the other hand, if that image became too complex, it could soon reach chaos and have no way out of the abyss that chaos represented.

James also knows that if he is to introduce the catalyst into the marketplace, it will have to be done under the cover of night, for no legislative body would ever endorse it or allow it to be given out to the public at large. The marketing campaign that would introduce it to the world would need to be underground and completely unconnected to Oneirica. If the experiment went wrong, the very fabric of an individual’s reality could be undone, and the consumers of the drug would be cast into a psychological abyss of biblical proportions. However, if they went well, an individual would enter a realm where every possibility could be realized, every dream manifested, and every piece of fiction turned to fact.

The moral decision was entirely in James’s hands, and watching the ticker flash the constant devaluation of his company right before his eyes, he knew he would need to take bold steps if he were to rescue his floundering ship from insolvency. Picking up the phone, he calls the young scientist. “Dr. von Schleinitz?”

“Ja?”

“I think I am ready to make a decision regarding the funding for your drug. We have a company plane in Frankfurt on business this week. It will be waiting to bring you to New York. Please bring all your files and any thing else you might you need.”

“Auckesitnick, vee vill get to Frankfurt as soon as vee can. Tank yu Mistar Vilson, dis could be zee beginning of a brave new vorld.”

James added, “I will prepare my staff for your arrival, and please remember this is all top secret. Any leak and we could all end up in jail.”

When the memory had lapsed, he looked around the boardroom at the silent faces of those executives who had been with the company long enough to know exactly how devastating this could get. He wondered how many, like himself, understood how complicated a situation they were in.

Trevor had not been with the corporation long enough to know all the details, but he sensed the mask of confidentiality they were all wearing, and he was hoping he could get at least one of them to remove it, so he kept speaking. “I am sorry, sir.

I am not exactly sure what you are talking about.”

The old man shouted, “Of course not, kid. How long have you been with us?”

Clearing his throat, Trevor answered, “Just under a year, sir.”

“And how much do you know about the soma files?” Wilson threw the bombing reports on the desk as if they were the very files in question, and the boy answered, “Actually, sir, I wrote my master’s thesis on a hypothetical drug similar to soma; well, actually more like Prozac. Nonetheless, sir, that thesis is why I was hired here. Don’t you remember?”

“Yes, I remember, and stop calling me sir. Frankly, son, this is not a hypothetical drug; it is a real drug with ten times the hypnotic and suggestive qualities of Prozac. This is also not as clean-cut as a master’s thesis. This, my dear boy, is reality, or at least it is reality for those of us not hypnotized by soma, or for that matter Prozac.”

“For them, this is just one big unconnected trail of events. And the problem now with making our fairy tale believable again is the big smoldering hole left in the middle of Petrolia from that terrorist blast. So, my dear boy, did you ever consider in your thesis what would happen to the users of your hypothetical drug if such an event were ever to take place?”

The young executive straightened his back and arrogantly stood his ground to the old man. “Actually sir, I did.”

“Well then, my dear boy, why don’t you tell us all what you think might have happened to Jack if, while under the influence of soma, he watched his entire life disintegrate before his very eyes? What would happen if he were distracted from his corporate role, from our script, from this reality we have spent the past two millennia creating, for even just a brief moment? I mean, could a combination of that blast and the soma have dislodged him from the matrix? Do you think he could have fallen out of our communal dream and into someone else’s, or even worse, his own?”

It was the elder executive’s deepest fear—an event or a set of circumstances so profound that they could unravel a lifetime of careful market research, investment, product placement, education, and technological advancement, and bring the whole dream to a screeching halt. An experience so real that it could not be airbrushed, dismissed, or forgotten; an event so traumatic that it would have to be written into the dream no matter what. Only, how was the old man going to spin out of this one?

Wilson sat back in his chair. He was not one to show emotion, but the stress of the past few weeks was beginning to catch up with him. His corporation, Oneirica, was facing the greatest challenge of its life, and for the first time in its history, he did not have total control over all the psychological weapons he would need to win the coming battles.

On the streets of Petrolia, uneducated, unfaithful, and unknowing militants were armed with the most technologically advanced chemical weapons ever produced, and they didn’t even realize it. They were killing each other with them, or worse, casting each other into a psychological abyss by erasing the very programming that made people human, that made them civilized.

The old man knew that someone who was trapped in that abyss must have set the bomb. He also knew that he, James Wilson, was partly responsible for it. But the old man was not like them. He was educated, he was faithful, and he did know what role he played in the grand scheme of things. That role demanded that he find a way to preserve his life and the life of the Oneirica, and for that matter all the life that depended on that template for survival.

Trevor interrupted the old man’s thoughts, his naive and curious mind wondering just how much information was sitting around the table.

“Sir, I would love to answer that question, but I think you are going to have to tell me everything about the original soma experiments, and for that matter any other relevant secrets that might be pertinent to this case. There is no doubt in my mind that Oneirica is in grave danger right now, and the disappearance of Mr. Adams seems to be our biggest clue. If we can understand where he might be hiding, and why, maybe we will understand the programming error in our marketing mix that caused this whole fiasco.”

Did he just call the bombing a fiasco? Wilson asked himself. Countless dead, a fiasco? He looked at Trevor straight, and debated telling him all he knew. Would it be enough? Could it be enough? Could it make a difference? Did it really matter, anyway? Of course it did.

Wilson answered, “Where should I start?”

Trevor’s eyes lit up, as he realized he was about to be given the key to a magical kingdom. For a moment he was afraid of what the old man might tell him, but curiosity edged him on.

“How about the beginning?”