Board Thread:Writer's Workshop/@comment-35711173-20181214071705

The inspiration of this story was a nightmare.

I had considered the categories of Computers and Internet, Reality and Mental Illness.

-

I was in the garage, trying to earn my Boy Scouts metalworking merit badge by making a “Pirates of the Caribbean” lantern out of an old can. While cutting the skull with tin snips, I sliced my fingertip. A piece of shiny metal poked out, but it didn’t hurt, and I saw no blood. A sliver from my project, I guessed. When I tried to pull the chip out, more and more came, so I cut the tough steel off and pulled again. After several minutes of struggling, I had chopped off three or four pieces of springy ribbon and tossed them around the bench. There wasn’t any pain or bleeding. As I examined the wound, I noticed more silvery alloy and a tiny light flickering inside.

My mother opened the kitchen door and came out. “Are you OK,” she said with that look that meant she knew something was wrong. “Everything is fine,” I said, trying to hide the injury. “Show me that hand,” she demanded. I couldn‘t talk her out of it, so I held my finger up, unable to stop shaking. What did it mean? She looked at it. “That’s a nasty cut. You should have come in at once.” She dragged me into the bathroom and poured rubbing alcohol on it and then put a bandage on. “It’s so deep that you need a tetanus shot.” My lips trembled in surprise and confusion. A foot of steel unreeled from my finger, and she wanted me to get a tetanus booster? But I stayed silent. She took me right to Doctor Kennedy’s office. Instead of the usual eternity of watching “Deadly and Disgusting Diseases” on the TV, they led us directly to the exam room. I had expected the Doc to see me for only a moment and then order his nurse to give me the injection. To my surprise, he gave me a checkup that seemed to take forever before he administered the shot. That evening, I looked under the gauze while taking my bath and found an ordinary looking cut with a stitch in it underneath the bandage. When I picked the scab, it even produced a drop of blood and reassuring pain.

Had it happened or had I dreamed it all? After my bath, I put my slippers on and went out to the scene of the crime, the garage. When I searched Dad's workbench, I found one of the bits of ribbon spring in the trash. It had happened, and they tried to hide it from me. As I lay in bed and stared at the ceiling that night, I wondered what it meant. Had I been dreaming or hallucinating? It didn’t seem like a dream, and I wasn‘t going crazy. Yesterday, I thought I was a human being. Today I discovered the truth. Why did my mother and Doctor Kennedy pretend that I wasn’t a machine? All of this must be some kind of test. Mom and Dad were only pretending to be my parents. What if they were robots too? Layers of possibilities flooded my head as I tried to sleep. Doctor Kennedy had to be part of the whole conspiracy. He made it so couldn't see the metal inside me. Did he control The Matrix? Did people who went postal for no reason and killed complete strangers discover the truth? I felt like Deadpool, the Merc with the Mouth who understood the great secret. Was the Joker crazy or did he learn that nothing was real? I thought of my computer and imagined myself as a box on a desk. If bigger computers made a fake world for me, I had no way of knowing it. Someone must be watching everything I did, and I didn’t have any idea who.

I realized I told anyone, they might destroy me. So I closed my eyes and worked even harder at pretending I was asleep. 