From the Asylum - February 2005

The nightmares tormented his sleep, but when Andy was awake, the one thing he felt particularly sorry for was missing the punch line of that joke. The joke that changed his life, the joke after which nothing could ever be the same.

He was going 70 MPH on the Queensway that fateful evening of August 2012 when the cell phone rang.

“Where are you man, you’re going miss the party!” Josh was on the line, “Everybody’s here, and Melissa just asked about you.”

"I’m on my way, pal. Make sure she doesn’t dance with anyone else meanwhile.”

“Sure. Listen, if we’re talking already, I just heard this great joke. A man dies and goes to hell –“

“Damn!” Andy exclaimed as he realized he was about to miss his exit. He turned the wheel sharply to change lanes – there was no time to check his blind spot. And then there was a crash of metal when his SUV hit a smaller car. He felt his world spinning and collapsing, and then all went silent.

Of course that was then, when his friends still talked to him, when he still had friends. Now he was an outcast, a convicted felon, a zombie walking in the world of living. His waking hours passed mechanically between his gloomy one-bedroom apartment and his job, eight hours of mindless number crunching. The nights were another thing entirely.

Her name was Mary McCarthy, as he later learned. She was twenty-one, loved music, loved animals, and loved her life. And all that taken away from her that night, when Andy forgot his exit while listening to that joke. He tried to remember the rest of it. How did it go? So Satan offers him the grand tour. He gets to see how other villains are being treated. Something like that.

The penal technology advanced a lot by the second decade of the 21st century. There was no need for prison walls, jail guards, sirens and floodlights. Those were things of the past, consigned to the dustbin of history. Biocybernetic neural implants were a simple and effective way to punish offenders. These were thoughts and images wedged deep inside Andy’s super-ego. His monsters lay dormant as he was awake, and let themselves loose only when he slept. Trapped within a prison of his mind.

“I’m sorry I got you into this, Andy.” The soft feminine voice rose above the roar of the flames.

“Go away! Just go away!” He screamed at the blue-eyed woman in the passenger’s seat. “What do you want from me? Shouldn’t you be dead?”

“In a way, we all are.” She said and smiled, as the fiery inferno consumed the vehicle.

His punishment was one of an especially cruel and sadistic nature; each and every night, he had a recurring dream about the accident. Except that in the dream, he was often the one who died. He saw himself engulfed in flames in his blazing SUV, as Mary McCarthy just stood there and stared at him, without raising a finger to help. Sometimes she’d appear in the SUV next to him, and sometimes they walked hand in hand around the collision site and looked at the rescue workers doing their job. Andy always looked away and begged her to leave, but Mary … she gobbled the scene with her eyes every time.

Andy got to work late that day. He plopped himself on the chair by his desk and stared at the pile of financial reports with disgust. As an automaton, he started going over them and keying numbers into his computer. None of his coworkers said a word to him the entire day. Hypocritical bastards, he thought. I’ve been neuro-implanted, but that doesn’t mean that I’m a psychotic axe-murderer, he wanted to scream.

He found a way for his company to save half-a-million dollars by getting rid of some superfluous product stock while the market was still high. He typed his conclusions in a neatly formatted memo and dropped it in his boss’s “IN” tray. The fat slave driver will probably take all the credit to himself, Andy thought. He tried to keep himself amused by retelling the joke to himself.

He sees all the famous villains in history. Stalin, Pol Pot, Attila the Hun. They are all being tormented in various gruesome ways. Ok, what came next? The days went by.

One evening, Andy returned to his apartment and noticed a thick layer of dust covering the bookshelves. Before the accident, he liked to read. He read everything from Shakespeare to Sherlock Holmes. Why did he stop reading? He decided to give it a go again, and soon found out he liked the effect words and sentences had on his mind.

He found an old science journal from 2005, where the possibility of neural-implanted dreams was first discussed. Andy knew most of the theoretical basis behind his punishment, but he still read the article from start to end. The author mostly discussed ‘hard’ implants, ones that are active 24/7. He also wrote about ways to reach the lower cortex of the brain, where the super-ego dwells, for ‘soft’ implants, ones that only come out to play at night – which is what Andy had.

The author further speculated that future technology might be sufficiently developed to allow an Artificially-Intelligent (AI) neural implant, making for autonomous, independently evolving dreams. Andy flipped the page with disgust. The last thing he needed was a smarter Mary McCarthy inside his brain. Aha, there was something interesting, “The bio-chip which is producing the electric stimulus for the neuro-implants should be surgically implanted at the back of the neck.”

Andy tossed the magazine aside. He tried to feel the back of his neck with his hand, but couldn’t sense the biochip. Maybe it was implanted too deep. Before going to sleep on another blazing date with Mary, he tried to force his mind to remember the joke again.

Then, in a small room, he sees Adolph Hitler. Hitler is not drowning in sulfur; he’s not being flogged or flayed. He has a gorgeous woman sitting in his lap. So the guy asks …

“Did you hear the one about Satan and Hitler?” he asked Mary as they were sitting on the shoulder of the road, observing the conflagration – or at least, Mary was.

“Shhh. I have to watch this. They’re pulling the body out of the wreckage now.”

“Sorry. I guess you’re not the best person to discuss humor with, being dead and all. It’s just that I really need to know the punch line to this joke.”

“Are you mocking me? Is what you are doing to me already not enough? Damn you.”

Andy woke up and tried to pick up where he stopped last night. So the guy asks, “What kind of punishment is that? How come this evil bastard gets this beautiful woman to sit in his lap?” And Satan says …

Today was the day. Today, he decided, he was not going to take it anymore. In broad steps, he walked into his boss’ office and banged his fist on the table.

“You don’t care? Fine. I’m out of this slave pit.” He slammed the door on his way out of the corner office.

He saw Josh and Melissa by the water cooler. He was talking to her, and she was smiling. Andy’s blood boiled inside him. First that ‘friend’ got him into all this trouble, than he had forsaken his at the time Andy needed friends more than anything, and now he’s trying to pick Melissa.

He stomped his way to the cooler and stood between them. Ignoring him, Josh continued to speak to the young woman. He was getting to the punch line of his joke and wouldn’t let anyone interfere.

“And Satan says, ‘No, you don’t understand. She’s been a bad woman, and he is her punishment.’”

Melissa laughed, and Andy’s stopped in his tracks. So that was it. The words on the page of the science magazine danced before his eyes, as Josh’s voice echoed inside his skull.

Future technology might be sufficiently developed to allow for AI neural implants … Autonomous … Evolving …

Once he became aware of his place in the universe, everything was easy. That evening, he wished for a box of Ferrero Roche, and sure enough, one appeared under his pillow, wrapped in a red ribbon. This time he and Mary observed the crash from a nearby overpass. After the firefighters finished dousing the burning vehicles, he turned to her.

“I’m sorry about what happened,” he said, allowing himself to drown in those deep blue eyes, and presented her the box of chocolates, “I’m sorry you were blamed for the crash. It was all my fault. I’m sorry I have to come here every night and torment you. But that doesn’t mean we can’t be friends, right?”

She just kept staring at him, her pale face a Greek statue, colored in yellow by the highway lights.

He untied the ribbon. “If you don’t like it, I can get you some Toblerone next time.”

“I could use a friend,” Mary smiled as she accepted the gift, “Heard any good jokes lately?”

Alex Shternshain is a 36-year-old Electronic engineer, residing in the Ottawa suburbs with his son (an aspiring Tae-Kwon-Do champion), daughter (refuses to go to bed unless her pajamas are color-coordinated) and wife (presenting, the amazing work-family balancing act!). When he's not working with registers and amplifiers, Alex likes to write fantasy and science-fiction stories. He also enjoys a good game of chess, a well-contested snowball fight or a candle-lit dinner. His favorite X-man is Magneto.