Fred Aiken Writing

I checked the internet for tips on going to sleep and staying asleep. I think that was the wrong way to go. People on the internet have some deprived minds and little filter.

It’s been four days since I’ve slept, and I can’t remember a good night’s sleep since I was fifteen. Now I’m an adult with a driver’s license, a career, mortgage, bills, serious relationships, the possibility of starting a larger family, and looking to get a promotion within the next year, and yet still I can’t figure out a way to do what not just people have been doing for thousands of years but entire species seem to do with little to no effort: get one good night’s rest.

I’m told it’s essential. In fact, I know it is. I’m running on fumes trying to figure out how to fix my brain so that it will shut up and let my body rest. My dad said to work harder, but I think that’s just because he needs someone to help around the house to do yard work and various other miscellaneous tasks that he prefers someone help him with. My mom told me to read more, and that would tire my eyes out until I drifted off to sleep. And of course my newly converted Buddhist sister said I needed to meditate on my problems, which sounds great, since the silence would be soothing, but in order for it to work I imagine that my brain would need to stay still for a second or two longer than it does.

I guess the fact that none of my family’s advice seems to be working makes me come across as a lazy, kinda illiterate person with ADHD, and maybe those things are true about me, some of my worst qualities that I don’t always like to admit to. I’m sure I can’t be the only one.

I haven’t told my wife. I sometimes watch her sleep, which sounds a lot creepier than it is. I guess spending fifteen years with someone kind of makes you their ultimate stalker. But she’s beautiful when she’s sleeping. I mean, she’s beautiful all the time, but it’s more an innocent beauty when you watch the person you love sleep. But the main reason I haven’t told her yet is because I don’t want her to worry. I know she’ll worry. It makes no sense to scare the both of us into thinking this might last forever. And then she’ll probably do her own research, which would be vastly better than mine, and she might even find a cure, or perhaps an expert in the field that would have the cure on tap, and I would finally be able to go to sleep for once. Why don’t I tell her?

It might not work, I suppose I tell myself. And then I’ve just worried my wife, she gets panic stricken, can’t sleep herself, and then we’re both in the same boat. Except the boat is capsized without a captain and we’re both drowning because we’re too far out for anyone to hear us. Or too sleep deprived to muster up the energy to swim to shore.

It’s okay, though. It’s not like I’m the first person in history to suffer from insomnia. There’s certainly plenty of literature about the subject to suggest quite a few other people go through it, and I guess that’s comforting in a small way. At least it means there might be someone out there that could tell me how to manage my sleeplessness better. If only I could hear them over the roar of the mob pulsating through the digital arena of the internet.

I went to a more reputable website that only has posts and articles from experts in the field. Individuals with phDs and doctorates and a whole host of certificates that made them sound even more impressive than they already were. The problem with scientific data, though, is that it’s oftentimes inconclusive, or at the very least it can’t tell me with absolute certainty what will help with my insomnia. It might give me some great educated hypothesis that might work. But none of the articles seem feasible, since a lot talk about various studies happening all across the country, all across the world, in which they’ve yet to be finalized, given the green stamp of approval, and commodified on the stock market for mass production. Whatever promise academia might have, it’s not nearly ready for someone in my position to take advantage of what it offers.

My last option, the only thing I have left to bank on, is to go further into the internet. The deep web is an intriguing vessel of a vast amount of data collecting through an infinite spectrum with no horizon, which perhaps is the reason why it appeared so elusive at first. But I quickly put in a handful of carefully selected key words and phrases into a data mining program that pops back up with a few solutions. It all sounds a lot more exotic than it actually is. I’m left with several thousand pages worth of information the internet has to offer, ninety percent of which is useless.

A common theme, though, of the deep web’s solution to deal with insomnia is to kill myself. I’d like to say I thought about it for a long period of time, considered all the pros and cons, but really, I just don’t think I have the energy to kill anyone, much less myself.

The doctor that delivered Dennis said it was impossible. The doctor said he shouldn’t be able to breathe, he shouldn’t be able to function, and he definitely shouldn’t be able to think or be conscious. And yet Dennis operated perfectly fine without a brain. It was a medical mystery, but still he walked, talked and lived among the world with no distinguishing feature.

It wasn’t something, though, that Dennis openly advertised. He didn’t go around telling friends, classmates, or even colleagues later in life, that he had nothing in his head. Nonetheless, it typically was brought up in some capacity, especially whenever he happened to go on dates, at which point his date would ask him at some point in the evening what he was thinking about, and he would reply: “Nothing. I don’t have a brain.” At first his date thought that he was being self-deprecating and assumed he was just exaggerating, and so they would press him, “No, seriously, what are you thinking.” Dennis knew the date would not last much longer after his date began to press him.

Even during interviews, prospective employers asked Dennis what his thoughts were, how he would handle certain theoretical scenarios, and his usual reply was to always refer to a supervisor. Employers had a vastly different response than romantic interests. Those employers tended not to care in the slightest one way or another if Dennis had any intelligible thoughts. In fact, in a lot of cases, they admired how open he was to not knowing a single thing, and how willing he would be to take direction. 

So, on the scale between romance and work, Dennis’ choices leaned heavily towards becoming more and more of a workaholic. He mindlessly performed one task after another, never asking what his purpose or reason behind the task. All he knew was that a supervisor had asked him to do so, and so he did. 

Every afternoon, after work, though, he would go see a doctor, one of the few remaining doctors that still wanted to study how he operated without a brain, and each afternoon said doctor would only have one question for Dennis. What did you do today?

His response was typically null. He did not remember what he did, because he did not have the capacity to remember without a brain. Instead, he simply did. And so he told the doctor each night, “I don’t recall, but is there something you would like me to do?”

The signal came late on a Wednesday night, just seconds before Kathy would have gotten up to collect her things and leave the lab for the day.

“Come quick, Cassius!” she called for her lab partner whom she had an on-again-off-again relationship for the past few years. 

“What is it?”

“There’s a signal.”

“Someone’s trying to contact us?”

“Or something?”

“Either way, it has to be sentient in some manner.”

“Who do you think it is?”

“I dunno. Do you think we should respond?”

“Sure, why not? That’s the whole reason this lab was set up in the first place. I think we’d be doing a disservice to our patrons if we didn’t make contact.”

So Kathy and Cassius spent the next five hours drinking coffee and coming up with ideas on how to respond to the message. It was important they get it just right. They couldn’t just say ‘hello’. Whatever they thought of might set the tone for the rest of human history. It could be the reason foreign invaders destroy all life. They settled on sending an echo response that mimicked that of the original just in case. That way there could be no confusion.

A few thousand years later, Kathy and Cassius had died, but an armada showed up at the doorstep to their bodies’ burial site to put down flowers and say ‘hello’.