Man Inside

by Christopher Barr

I had a dream where I was underwater; it was milky and shady in spots.  My breathing or lack thereof seemed to be not a problem.  I was swimming barefoot in blue jeans and a white t-shirt under this massive object above me that was blocking the sun from lighting the water.  As I approached this thing it was big like a whale floating, but upon a closer inspection, to my dismay and disbelief, it was a brain, a human brain, the size of a blue whale - just floating there.

After recovering from the shock of what I was looking at, I found myself quickly shifting to asking the question why.  Why was I there swimming around in the water and why was there a massive human brain there too?  I swam along the right hemisphere of the brain as thoughts of the vastness of creativity and the art that it can produce when channeled properly.  I was swimming by the area of the brain where imagination is ignited.  I thought of my university philosophy professor talking about the brain-in-a-vat, instantly thinking, was I in the vat with the brain?  Was it really that huge or was I somehow really this small?

I swam over to the left hemisphere to ascertain some logic and mathematical reasoning for such a find.  This brain was not connected to anything, it’s just floating with no skull to protect its fragile fleshy surface from the worldly elements and it had no body or nervous system to support it.  Water is a conductor I thought, electrical pulses travel through water, so what if the water was the relaying system for the brain to give its orders?  That’s preposterous because biology has no record of such an organism.  But that doesn’t mean such an organism still can’t exist outside the purview of biology.   

At the Frontal Lobe I stared at its mass, it started to shiver or vibrate as if suddenly becoming cold or possibly excited for some reason.  I reached out and touched it, calmly rubbing its jelly-like skin.  The shivering stopped up until I let go, then it started to shiver again while backing away from me.  I swam down and under it passing the Pituitary Gland when I noticed small fish all swimming around the Medulla Oblongata, the brainstem severed three feet down from the Pons.  The brain stopped shivering as I floated underneath the Cerebellum.  I was thinking about how oddly bizarre this all was but I was also surprisingly not as shocked as I imagined I should be.

There was sudden transparency while looking up at the brain.  I was able to see through the outer flesh and view the Limbic System, with the Hippocampus and the Hypothalamus easily visible.  How was I able to do this and to what purpose?

Then I woke up, strapped to a table; thinking was I even awake because this place felt equally bizarre.  A shaded creature approached me and inserted a black needle into my arm.  I looked at its figure, its shape and was a bit mystified.  It had arms, a face, and eyes, it had skin and fingers but yet it wasn’t human.  I don’t know if I was experiencing some form of Aphasia or was I still dreaming.  Telling the difference appeared to be troublesome because unlike the water with the massive floating brain, this all seemed oddly…real. 

I looked down at my body and noticed that I was strapped to the table but not by straps because straps don’t pulsate.  The more I focused on whatever was holding me to the table, the more I could feel that it was rough skin on mine, a scaly skin, a cold skin.  I tried to lift my right hand when a painful feeling of a hundred needles was piercing my skin.  When I stopped pulling and relaxed my hand the pain and needles went away. 

What was happening to me and what was I doing there, strapped to this table?  The creature walked over to a number of other shaded figures.  I could hear clicks and slurs, was that a language or was that a machine I was hearing?  Looking around the room I couldn’t see much, there was a skylight so I could see that it was night because the stars were out.  To my left were machines of some sort, they sat upon one another but weren’t actually touching like one would expect, they looked as if a magnetic field existed between them and kept them from touching.  The floor was liquid and little beads of light traveled around it like traffic and often would travel up and into the bodies of the creatures.  Was it some kind of internetworking system where information was moving around like microscopic cells would or was it an energy system that was passing on nutrients to these creatures?

I looked down and the needle in my arm retracted into a device and then folded up into the ceiling.  Three creatures came over and surrounded me; they all placed their hands on my stomach and looked at me, staring.  My mind felt like I was being hit with powerful waves of hot water smashing against its shores. I thought to myself, what do you want with me?  Because I wasn’t alone in there as I always was in the past.  My thoughts always suffered in solitude but not today.  The smashing waves suddenly stopped as the air in my mind was filled with silence.  Within the calm, I felt language, the very communication device we use to speak but not in the form on a page, or spoken but rather in the ideas that inspire one to speak them in the first place.  The genesis of thought that is manufactured in the mind into an utterance that is spoken out or a word written down, there is this nucleus that manifests itself within the mind that becomes what defines us, it creates a signature or stamp of uniqueness that becomes thoughts with which recall memories and forecast movement with ideas and beliefs.

This is what they wanted and I don’t know why or certainly can’t use language to explain why that is.  They want my unique code, religious believers might call it a soul, but men of science call it by its name, consciousness.  They want my brain's operating system, this is why they haven’t killed me, this is why I’m here, I’m here as an experiment on separation.  Can the mind and body exist…apart?  The unconscious, subconscious and conscious mind must coexist within the Homo sapiens organism.  Separation is not possible; separation is death for one cannot live without the other.

Like the massive brain in water, I am perplexed at what is happening but I’m curious, why is this happening and to what end?  What can be done with a harvested conscious mind?  I have to deduce that they have a purpose for what they are doing, they have me strapped to a table in a room, trying to figure out how to get my mind out of my brain without killing me because they must know that if I die my mind dies with me.

These beings are clearly not religious because for centuries people have believed that once the body dies the soul leaves it and goes to heaven.  If this were true they could conceivably kill me and somehow, with their advanced technology bottle my soul, my mind at the moment of my death.  I can’t explain it but I can feel they have no interest in my body or brain, whether it lives or dies.  They just want the essence within it, they want my complete identity, my past present, and future which leads me to wonder if they are medical doctors, wanting to understand the answers to life or they might be psychologists of some sort that want to understand why we do what we do, why we are who we are.  As they connect to my mind I am able to extract shadows of them in my thoughts moving around, I can feel them but that feeling is foreign to my thought processing so it is fragmented at best.

The mind is a maze but it isn’t digitized, it’s something else, something more.  It’s not a soul that goes to heaven when the body dies nor is it something that can be successfully uploaded into a computer in spite of the many scientific attempts.  It is a system of biology, a system of nature that serves as a weapon for my particular species.  A weapon against all predators and unfortunately for our planet as well, so with that, I suppose that the great weapon of mass destruction is the human mind and these things want it.

Is it the hardware of it that they want because I can’t imagine they’d want the software portion, I’m no one?  I didn’t do anything with my life thus far, for the most part, if I had to be honest, I sat around and dreamt of the future and missed most of the present.  There are men of great genius that would serve far better subjects than a university drop out.  Why aren’t they here on this table and why aren’t I back in my New York apartment dreaming of being someone special, someone famous, someone important.  Maybe this is important and maybe this is what I’m meant to do if we are actually meant to do anything.  This could be my great moment because they chose me and not the genius with all the answers.  Maybe I am important.

The creatures press harder against my chest and stomach as I see the walls around me collapse into a liquid form and fall to the floor.  I can see me to my left, no that’s me to my right, I look down toward my feet and see a row of people on tables just like mine.  I then look to the sky and I see a dome cover reflecting millions of bodies on tables.  I see them all as dots and as individuals at the same time.  Blue lights appear over everyone’s head, they’re doing it right now, my nose bleeds and the blood drips up.  If the laws of gravity apply wherever I am, this evidence leads me to believe I’m in fact upside down.  I’ve been this way the whole time but it certainly didn’t feel like I was.

I’m skateboarding down a steep hill in Virginia…… 


I’m slapped in the face by my mother……….

I’m tasting cotton candy for the first time and I hate it because it feels weird in my mouth…….

I looked up and could see the light spill into a vase thinking, is that me?  Is that what I amount to?  Off in the distance I can now see the Earth on fire; I’m on a space ship, floating by the moon as my home burns.

I love the feel of grass in the summer….if I’m not conscious then what am I?


What is happening to me…  I want to go….

The Earth was attacked by an unknown Alien life form at 21 hundred hours eastern standard time, April 20^th 2034.  The attacks began with the Chinese city of Wenquan and then La Rinconada in Peru and the Bolivian city of Potosi and then the Ecuadorian city of Quito, all these cities are among the highest in altitude in the world.  The attacks ended four days later, spanning the globe, at Beijing, China, a city of one of the lowest in altitude.

The light above my brow is so bright, this is not the afterlife.  This is immediate in its….ectoplasm………………….


I’m disappearing……I’m gon……



3.1415926535….89..793…………   … .. .

Zero Point

by Christopher Barr

The Japanese soldiers picked me up and off the beach during that summer in 1944.  I had been shot twice the day before while I and the Allied Forces attempted to advance upon the field.  I suppose I understand why they kept me alive as their prisoner.  I know they wanted intelligence on invasion planning.  I was put on a battleship with a number of other guys and taken to Japan to a sadistic camp 4 miles north of Nagasaki.  There, I was beaten repeatedly for information with sticks and rifle butts.  I knew little to no Japanese so when they ordered answers to their questions, all I heard was gibberish, so they beat me more.  These solders saw all us prisoners as shameful for being captured alive in combat.  The warrior spirit of the Japanese field army code, states that the individual if defeated must calmly face death while in battle and to those that disobeyed orders would be killed by the Japanese sword, a symbol of wisdom and perseverance to the Japanese people and an honour to die by.

The camp was surrounded by eight-foot high barbwire fences.  They kept most of us cramped in long wooden cells filled with lice, fleas, parasites, bedbugs and flies.  Sometimes some of us would be put in bamboo fortified cells outside and half underwater, where those that stayed there used the bathroom and ate right where they slept, we didn’t have to deal with the bed-bugs there but the flies swarmed to the point that it was impossible to not breathe them in with every breath.  Because being half underwater, sleeping became hard to do, which means most of us barely slept.  On a daily basis they’d give us scraps of rice and would later ask questions most of us never understood, and then they would beat us.  Every so often six prisoners where brought out for all to see, bound, gagged and blindfolded, and with many watching, their heads were cut off with samurai swords.  Their bodies were dragged to a pit by other prisoners where they were burned and in some cases eaten by younger Japanese soldiers.

The savage beatings became a daily ritual that I actually started getting used to, not to say they became enjoyable in anyway but they became routine, that my body was so numb from the last beating that it could no longer feel pain.  What I didn’t get use to was when the other men were tortured and in some cases to death.  Once a young man was pulled out of one of the housing units and four Japanese soldiers performed a vivisection on him, right there on the dirt and with no anesthesia.  Others would be tied upside down to determine how long it would take them to choke to death.

Operation Meetinghouse got underway as I, along with over a hundred other guys remained prisoners of war.  The firebombing by the B-29’s leveled the city of Tokyo in the biggest air raid to ever be executed by the will of man.  Some of us were worried that if these soldiers don’t kill us in here then the US bombs might.  My left arm was broken and the lower right side of my face was slashed with barbwire by a guard during that time, as well as 27 guys lost their lives in a fit of rage the Japanese held over the bombing of their homeland.

When times were quiet around the units, we’d all talk about food, what food we’d like right then and there, what food we had in the past and where we had it.  We never really talked about the usual guy stuff, like sports and women.  Especially women, none of the guys wanted to even think about it.  Maybe that was the real torture of the place, all the things we lost and all the people that mattered.  We never really entertained the idea of escape because the risks were too high.  This place drained the life force right out of you, leaving a shell of a man with no past, present or future; we were just meat, and barely that.  We weren’t individuals anymore with names, hopes and dreams, we were meat for them to beat, burn, eat or laugh at.  I wasn’t from anywhere anymore, I didn’t have a wife or children, and I didn’t have parents or brothers and sisters because in this place…I was never born.  

When the plutonium grade atomic bomb dropped on August 9^th 1945, the men that I was with in the outdoor cells all dove under water.  While we forced ourselves to stay underwater, I looked up as wind, fire and a bright white light painted the surface above us.  Once we got up we all gasped for air, only then we could see that the prison camp we were at was destroyed, the entire housing units for the prisoners was gone, the guard house was gone, the cage we were in was shattered and the fencing around the prison was broken open.  This place had been leveled as we could hear the screaming sounds of people and the roar of sirens.  Blood and dead bodies filled most of the outdoor cages.  Over a hundred of us entered this prison during the summer of 1944 and now 16 of us are walking out.  The smoke was so thick that we couldn’t even see where we were walking or what direction we were going but we needed to keep moving.

By the time we walked out of that prison camp, most of us were starved and looking like walking skeletons, some had lost body parts that were cut off.  If they weren’t beat to death, stabbed with a sword or shot, most of the men died from dysentery, pellagra, cholera and vitamin deficiency, before the discharge of the bomb killed the rest of them.  We walked by a building that was in bits and pieces after the tornado force of the bomb blasted through it.  I pulled wood splinters out of my leg and chest as we walked through the smoke, coughing and spitting up blood.

As we walked we could see a massive black cloud in the sky, hovering there like a city-size flying saucer.  The smell of burnt wood and flesh filled the air as it started to rain out.  The rain was black in color and thick, so a bunch of us picked up wood from a crumbled building to shield us from the black rain.  Terrified, screaming people ran toward us and then past us, their exposed skin was red, black and bubbling, blood poured from their dusty bodies as they ran by ignoring us.  One horrified woman ran naked by me as the skin fell off her back splashing to the ground next to my feet like molten lava.

I could see that this backwater city was transformed into a momentary vision of hell.  As we walked closer to the city, all still elated from the blast, we started to see the devastation, the horror that those of us that survived would never be able to erase from our minds.  I knew it was Thursday and I knew judging by the position of the sun’s rays, barely forcing their way through the clouds and smoke that it was just after noon.  But what I was looking at in front of me seemed alien in nature; they were ant-walking alligators, creatures of the fall-out that looked to be neither human nor animal, neither living nor dead.  Any noticeable features or gender were burnt off of them as they walked creepily nowhere.  The radiation poisoning and immense heat melted their flesh and clothing off their bodies.  These creatures that were once human beings had the misfortune to survive when the sky exploded 700 yards above Nagasaki.  The great light would have filled the sky laying waste to 80,000 people and destroying two-thirds of the city while setting fire to the remaining structures.  These things are the survivors of the direct blast and firestorm.

They had no eyes to see out of and no will to live but there they were, skin seared from their skulls leaving a black, shiny leathery substance.  Their mouths would open and close without any purpose, revealing a red hole surrounded by blacken teeth with no lips.  Twenty of them staggered on charred stumps for legs and they all gave off this horrifying murmur, whether that’s all they could do to scream wasn’t quite clear.  Hopefully whoever was still inside those black skeletal bodies, I can only hope was unconscious and the person they were before the blast is dead and gone, leaving what I see before me eerily murmuring.  One of them was carrying what looked like to be a baby but it was charcoal in color and molded to the creature as if it were part of it all along.

I have been through and have seen some horrible things in this war, and I heard of the devastating things the Japanese were doing to the Chinese, but no human being deserves this fate.  I wanted a machine gun desperately to shoot them all down and put them out of their horrifying misery.  These things walking here were not responsible for the war I was fighting in.  These people were farmers and fisherman trying to live their lives while their insane government and its pride were exacting atrocities in their names.

This blackness will never leave me.  What have we done to this place?  How is it possible to win in such devastation?  Were American’s all cheering victory back home the same way they’d cheer when the New York Yankee’s win the World Series?  Is that what this is, a competition?

Some of these charred people have finally started to lean over and die.  A soldier that was part of my group picked up a rock and stated to bash them in the skull while hysterically crying.  A couple of the other guys pulled him away as we moved on leaving the remaining alligator people to wander and die.

As we moved closer to the city we were all shocked at the site of this dusty wasteland.  Buildings were gone with the exception of big concrete government structures.  Most of them were severely damaged with pieces of black stone falling off them.  I don’t know why we were walking this way, walking into hell, but there we were at zero point on August 9^th, 1945, walking in silence.  

Dr. Elliot Sutherland

Department of Bio-Technology and Research

00120 Via del Pellegri

Vatican City