Sloan Dreams

He was white water rafting speeding down a river with intense rapids buffeting him around in a small blow up boat of some kind. He felt like he was about to be engulfed in water. He couldn’t breathe.

A dream. The ceiling was a dead slab of white. Sloan tracked a hairline crack from the corner to the light fixture, his pulse thumping with the jagged rhythm of his caffeine high. Sleep wasn't an option any longer; the silence of the house was too loud, and the blueprints in his head were too bright.

He didn't run to the garage. He moved with the quiet, practiced efficiency of a ghost, the linoleum cold against his bare feet. The garage smelled of ozone, solder, and the damp, metallic scent of North Carolina humidity trapped in concrete.There it sat on the workbench: the bot. It wasn't a toy. It was a skeletal assembly of metal, fiberglass and logic boards sticking out all over. A crude vessel for the quantum physics algorithms he’d been culling from online forums. To most people, it was a hobby. To Sloan, it was the only thing that felt like it made sense. He opened his laptop, the glow of the terminal window casting a sickly blue pallor over his features. He wasn't just coding; he was trying to build a back door out of reality.

Between the lines of code, the fugue states began.

He found himself staring at the cursor, imagining the tech not as a tool for progress, but as a biological exit strategy. Biotechnology wasn't about "helping people"—it was about the erasure of the fragile, failing human shell. He drifted into a vision of a world scrubbed clean of the messy, angsty heat of emotion. A world of pure oxygen and silent, colorful harmless little - “creatures” is the only word he could think of. A world where he wasn't a fourteen-year-old boy in a quiet suburb, but a witness to brand new shiny space.

"Sloan."

The voice was a serrated blade through the haze of his vision. He didn't wake up so much as he crashed back into his body. His mother stood in the doorway, her silhouette framed by the weak, gray light of morning. She looked tired. She always looked tired lately, her eyes searching his face for a version of her son that was recognizable. “Before you change the world come and get some breakfast, Sloan.” It sounded loud and flat, but she was absolutely devoted to Sloan’s whim. Sloan didn't smile. He just felt the heavy, leaden weight of the “present".

The transition happened on a Tuesday, during the sterile hum of AP Science lab. One moment, the teacher was droning on about molecular bonds; the next, the sound began to glitch. The room stretched. The faces of fellow students became smooth, featureless masks of beige rubber skin. His lab partner opened her mouth and he felt like a black hood had just been thrown over his head. Sloan looked down at the lab desk between the test tubes and saw the wood grain swirling like liquid. He wasn't in the classroom anymore. He was back on that spongy, alien ground, the air thick and sweet in his lungs. The "butterflies" weren't excitement - they were a visceral, autonomic panic. He was standing on the precipice of a world he had built in his mind. He wandered through the forest of his own subconscious, terrified by the beauty of his detachment, and for the first time, he realized he had forgotten to build that exit, a return path to reality.

He stumbled upon a “machine” for the lack of a better word—a relic of his own imagination—and forced his mind to "reset." When the world snapped back, he was standing in the middle of the lab. The silence was absolute. The teacher’s mouth was moving, but the audio hadn't reconnected. The look on his classmates' faces wasn't curiosity; it was the quiet, horrified pity reserved for someone who had just "gone away" while standing right in front of them.

The "shrinks," as he’d come to call the procession of clinical observers, didn't use words like wonder or technology. They used words like dissociative, fugue, and maladaptive daydreaming. They sat in rooms that smelled of stale coffee and industrial carpet, scribbling notes as Sloan tried to describe and explain the mechanics of his other world. He realized then that his "technological revolution" was just a sophisticated cage. He began the long, agonizing process of re-integrating into a world that felt fundamentally broken. The therapy didn't make the dreams go away; it just stripped them of their luster. He learned to stay seated in his chair. He learned to listen to the garbled voices. He learned to live with the "dead white" of the ceiling, even when the stars were calling him out to the garage. He thought to himself, losing an imagination is what it costs to stay “sane.”

This sane world was a heavy, low-voltage slow motion thing, but Sloan forced his fingers to move through its thick air. The computer screen on his workbench no longer glowed with the frantic, blue urgency of an escape hatch; it was just a terminal window, flat and cold. He had stopped culling the quantum forums. Instead, he spent his evenings running standard diagnostic loops on the bot, watching the arms twitch in predictable, uninspired arcs. The skeletal assembly of metal and fiberglass remained on the bench, but the phantom pulse that used to bridge the gap between the logic boards and his own nervous system had vanished. It was, as the shrinks wanted, just a hobby now.

Outside the the garage, a quiet neighborhood hummed with its usual warm, boring routine. He could hear the distant clink of dishes from the kitchen, the steady, rhythmic sound of his mother moving through the house. She smiled more often now when she looked at him, relieved by the dull, recognizable version of her son that sat at the dinner table. He gave her the nods and the brief, practiced responses she required, paying the daily tax demanded by reality.

Yet, sometimes, when the pressure pressed against the garage windows, his eyes would drift back up to the hairline crack in the white ceiling. The stars were still out there, buried deep beneath the sterile white slab. The return path he had forgotten to build wasn’t entirely gone - it was just buried under layers of industrial carpet and stale coffee. He had learned to stay in his chair, but as his fingers hovered over the plastic keys, a tiny, rebellious part of his mind wondered if a cage, no matter how sophisticated, could ever truly hold him.