Dr. Fredericks (48:07)
Dr. Frederick's personal log. They say that history will never remember the cautious. Every meaningful breakthrough in human advancement began with the same accusation. That it was reckless, that we were tampering with something meant to remain untouched. I have spent my career listening to that chorus of caution, nodding politely while I pushed the boundary further than any of them dared. The Somnum Project began as a question, a single thought that refused to leave me alone, nagging me in the sleepless hours when my own body betrayed me. Why must we waste a third of our lives? Unconscious sleep is an evolutionary compromise, nothing more. Eight hours stolen from us every night under the guise of necessity, leaving us vulnerable, unproductive, and shackled to a rhythm we didn't choose. We tell ourselves it is restorative, essential for for memory consolidation, hormonal regulation, and neural repair. All true, but those processes do not require the mind to go dark. They require the body to enter a cycle. Yes, but unconsciousness is a side effect, not the purpose. I dreamed of a better way. What if the body could sleep while the mind remained awake. What if we could divide the restorative function of sleep from the prison of unconsciousness? The implications were intoxicating. Workers could labor twice as long without fatigue. Soldiers could maintain watch for days without the fog of exhaustion. Innovators, thinkers, scientists, they could reclaim a third third of their lives. Eight extra hours every day. Entire decades of human potential unlocked. The idea alone was enough to draw interest from the right people, those who saw opportunity where others saw risk. A military subcontractor provided the initial funding, masking their involvement behind a series of innocuous wellness research grants. After all, the promise of a soldier who never sleeps is irresistible. With funding secured, I built the first stage of Somnum, a biochemical agent designed to induce the full neurological signature of sleep. Delta waves, REM cycles, glymphatic clearance, while leaving the conscious mind poison partially tethered to waking reality. The body would rest. The mind would continue. Our animal trials were, at first, miraculous. Rodents dosed with Somnam displayed stable vitals and rapid physical recovery. Without the traditional eight to ten hours of rest, remonset occurred faster. And periods of motor activity during sleep indicated that the conscious layer of the brain was never fully detached. When we moved to primates, the results were the same. They wandered their enclosures in a dreamlike calm, eating, moving, and occasionally mimicking grooming behaviors, while their EEGs displayed the patterns of deep restorative sleep. The science was sound. We were ready for human testing. Our selection process was meticulous. We targeted individuals on society's margins, Those for whom $3,000 could change the trajectory of their lives. Desperation is a powerful filter. The desperate will sign anything, endure anything, and they make for the most compliant participants. Each was screened for neurological stability, physical health, and, most importantly, isolation. We wanted subjects no one would miss if things went wrong. The facility itself was a masterpiece of controlled sterility. A low, windowless complex at the edge of an industrial park, its exterior forgettable by design. Inside, we constructed three layers of operation. The lobby, bright, cheerful and staged with posters of cartoon sons and smiling faces. A comfort for the anxious. The dormitory, sterile halls and private rooms, each with a camera mounted in the corner. Each subject isolated but within reach of our observation. The core lab. My cathedral. Here, every neural spike and heartbeat was monitored, every data stream feeding into our servers. The early doses were everything I hoped for. Participants reported a mild floaty detachment, the sense of being light but alert. Their EEGs displayed ideal sleep waveforms. The first night, one subject laughed softly as he described the sensation of dreaming without sleeping. He Said he could see colors behind his eyes that weren't there. Like the after image of staring at the sun. He was giddy. The others followed similar patterns. Increased REM density, slowed heart rate, full parasympathetic activation. And yet, when prompted, they could speak, answer questions, even stand and walk. I was witnessing the human body asleep and awake simultaneously, a violation of millions of years of biology. And it was working. But by the end of the first week, subtle anomalies crept in. Some participants began reporting fleeting sensations of being watched. They described catching movement in the corner, or feeling as if someone had entered their room. One woman said she woke to the sound of soft breathing right next to her bed. But when she turned, she was alone. I dismissed it as the expected side effects of hypnagogic hallucination. The line between waking and REM was supposed to blur. That was the point. The human brain, suspended in that liminal space, would invent shadows to fill the gaps in its place. Perception. Still, I began reviewing the security footage more closely. One night in room three, I watched a subject shift in his bed, eyes half open, lips moving as if whispering. He stilled suddenly, every muscle rigid. And in the far corner of the room, for a fraction of a second, the darkness seemed to fold in on itself like a curtain drawing closer. I told myself it was nothing, an optical artifact, compression noise in the recording. But I watched that clip 11 times before I shut the monitor off my chest, tight with a feeling I hadn't felt in years. Not excitement, exactly. Something more like uncertainty. The first time I saw the shadow move, I convinced myself it was nothing more than a camera glitch, a trick of the light against sterile walls. When it happened again, I told myself I was overtired, that weeks of night monitoring had frayed my perception. By the third occurrence, even I could no longer hide behind, behind excuses. Something was happening in these rooms that could not be explained by faulty equipment or lack of sleep. The anomalies had begun to form a pattern. Participants would drift into Somnom's induced state, smoothly at first, their breathing slow and even, their vitals showing perfect parasympathetic activation. Then, without warning, they would freeze. Their eyes would ease, open just slightly, unfocused, but moving with a strange deliberateness, as if tracking something invisible across the room. Their heart rates spiked, rim activity surged, and always, without fail, their gaze would drift toward the far corners of the room, as if there was something waiting there, just outside the reach of the light. By the time our newest batch of volunteers had arrived at the facility, the Somnum project had already left its infancy behind. We were long past the stage of speculation and naive discovery. The entity was no longer a rumor or. Or a shadow in the periphery. We had seen it. We had documented its movements, traced the patterns of its awareness, and learned the rhythm of its attention. The early phase, the one I sold to investors and military contractors as sleep research, was a necessary formality. That was before I understood the true potential of. Of Somnum. The drug was never just a sedative or a sleep aid. It was a key. Every dose thinned the veil between consciousness and the dark strata beyond inviting that which lingers in the in between to notice us. The participants were conduits. Now that is the word we began to use internally. Conduits. They were not patients and certainly not volunteers. No matter what they believed when they signed the paperwork in the cheerful yellow lobby, they were functional components of a system, a circuit designed to draw the between, one closer with each successive exposure. My staff understood this, and they embraced it without hesitation. The ones who hesitated are gone, filtered out by their own fear, their own lack of vision. What remains are those like Nurse Harper and Technician Miles. Individuals who can watch a man convulse under the weight of a presence not of this world and see not horror, but progress. Our protocols are refined now, clinical and Precise. Initial dosing, 15mg SOMNUM in liquid suspension, administered at 2100 hours. Patient is monitored for 30 minutes for vitals and neurological activity. Phase one. Subject enters half conscious state. EEG patterns mimic deep sleep, but higher cortical functions remain partially accessible. Staff, initiate environmental exposure. Lights dimmed. Audio dampened. Ventilation altered to low cycle hum. Phase two, induced vulnerability. Subject is transferred to the core observation chamber and restraint. Somnum levels are increased intravenously in 2 milligram increments until REM density spikes. This is when the entity notices them most consistently. Prolonged liminality. Subjects remain in contact state until physiological instability forces withdrawal or full neurological bleeding. It occurs. It is in phase three that we see the most meaningful interaction. That is where Ryan became valuable. He entered Somnam's haze with the same awe and docility as the others before him, eyes half lidded, lips moving in fragments of thought. He whispered the name without prompting, just as the others had. His voice carried a different tone, though there was recognition there, as if he had always known it was waiting. We noted the entity's response almost immediately. Shadows began to pulse and gather in the corners of the room. No longer darting or hesitant, but patient. The air pressure Dropped by nearly a full, full pascal. Just enough to make the glass observation window tremble if you knew to watch for it. Miles swore he saw condensation form on the inner pane, but I reminded him to document, not speculate. Ryan's vitals spiked, and then they stabilized. His mind was open, bridging the liminal state exactly as we had engineered. His body twitched in reflex to stimuli we could not perceive. The audio sensors captured low frequency resonance. Not quite a voice, but rhythmic enough to suggest communication. Every participant who reaches this stage gives the entity more than data. It learns. It maps the mind like an invasive current, probing, cataloging, and returning some fraction of that awareness in the form of impulses and whispers. Our initial goal of eliminating unconsciousness has evolved into something far greater. Direct interaction with a conscious intelligence beyond human understanding. I am under no illusions about the nature of what we are doing. This is not benevolence. This is not therapy. This is contact. The failed conduits, the ones who could not withstand prolonged liminality, serve a purpose as well. Their bodies remain useful to the process, their neural pathways still partially open, even as cognition fades. The extraction room is kept at a steady 45 degrees Fahrenheit to slow decomposition. Tubes feed into the core machinery that Miles and Harper manage with unflinching professionalism, capturing every flicker of energy, every pulse of neural echo that the between one leaves behind. We are building a bridge, neuron by neuron. Ryan is the first to survive four consecutive Phase three sessions without full neural bleed. That alone is extraordinary. His mind has become a beacon, a signal the between one clearly favors. His murmured phrases during contact have grown more coherent each night, transitioning from fragmented words to full if cryptic sentences. Last night, his lips moved around a single sentence that the audio sensors captured perfectly, though his own ears will never hear it played back. The door is almost open. The staff looked to me when they heard the playback, waiting for my interpretation. I only smiled. They are here to follow procedure. I am here to understand. I have been preparing for this next step since the day Somnam first bent the boundary between waking and dream. We have proven its capability. We have coaxed the between one to the edge of manifestation. We have learned to feed it attention, neural patterns and life itself. But progress, true progress, never goes unnoticed. In the past week, I've received three separate inquiries from organizations I did not invite into my work. Government, military, private contractors, call them what they are. Men who see profit and leverage. Where I see revelation, they hide behind polite emails and cold phone calls. But the message is the same we know what you are doing. We want it. I've noticed unmarked vehicles parked beyond the industrial lot after sundown. My staff tells me they've caught the glint of lenses on rooftops across the street, as if someone is always watching. Now let them. I keep meticulous backups in multiple secure locations. If they want Somnum, they'll have to take it from me. And by then it will already be too late to claim it as theirs. The between one does not belong to them. It knows me. It will answer to me. The conduits continue to hum in their beds. The machines capture every flicker of its attention. And I can feel the air in the core lab tighten with anticipation. Each night, I believe. No. I know that our threshold event is imminent.
