Hiatus (Patreon)

Fuck, 5:52pm! He knew he was cutting it way too close, but at least he made it home in time. It was almost two weeks ago since he kicked Josh out from the apartment, and he wasn’t any closer to finding a solution. He disconnected the helmet from the USB charger and looked down into it. Nestled between and inside the padding were wires and all sorts of homemade circuit boards. He’d spent several hours taking photos and tracing what he could see, but a lot of it was covered in glue. Since it was all custom built he had no solid lead to pursue.

He didn’t dare take it apart, in case he was unable to put it together again. The pattern was the same, every day. As best he knew, everything was going normal from when he woke up until the afternoon. Sometime around 3pm he would start getting unfocused and restless. He could still answer emails and take the occasional meeting, but he didn’t dare to do anything important as he couldn’t keep all facts straight nor concentrate on a task for more than 5-10 minutes. Moving helped, so he had started walking around the office, talking to co-workers. He would take the stairs and do some push-ups as well, but no matter what, by 5pm it was impossible to do anything resembling work.

By 6pm his mind would go blank and slowly come back around two hours later. He’d used a GoPro set up to capture what happens in that lost time, and it is exactly the same every time. He strips down to his underwear and dons a pair of shorts, unless he already has a pair on, turns on the TV on a sports channel, puts on the modified helmet, and then just sit and stare at the screen. The time differs a bit, the shortest has been 49 minutes and the longest 3 hours 6 minutes, but most land close to 2 hours.

The helmet has to be charged, otherwise he’ll leave the trance after about 20 minutes with an agonizing headache. That happened the first Tuesday, and was so bad he actually threw up. He threw out Josh on the Friday before, so he was home Saturday and Sunday, waking up in front of the TV both times. On Monday however he didn’t get back home in time, and was snapped out of his trance inside a gym at 10pm when the staff told him it was time to leave. He was utterly confused for several minutes. He was wearing only compression shirt, compression pants, and some sort of workout socks, none of which he had ever seen before, all drenched in sweat. Thankfully he found his clothes in the locker room, in the only remaining locked locker, and on his drive home decided to not risk not being home by 6pm again.

He couldn’t go on like this, but he really, really didn’t want to talk to Josh again. Ever.

Of course he had noticed that his body was getting muscled, much more so than what could be explained from what little exercise he did. Josh and he would go to the gym once a week, a different gym, fool around a bit with the machines and call it a day. So why he was filling out so much was a mystery, but one he didn’t care to solve. People would comment him on how great he looked. It felt great. Then came the fire alarm.

For some reason the kitchen fire alarm started beeping like crazy and Josh was standing in front of him, attaching some sort of muscle stimulation pads. Gear and clothes and his science experiments were strewn all around the floor. When Josh saw he was no longer in trance he panicked and started yelling “touchdown jockboy” over and over. Watching Josh flailing, he somehow knew that he was supposed to fall back into trance, and that made him go from surprised and dazed to angry.

Josh had done this. He had somehow made his body look like it did. God knows what else he had done. Josh wasn’t on the lease, so right there, naked apart from the electrodes glued to his body he told him to fuck off. To leave the apartment in 5 minutes, or he’d punch him out of it. He could find the rest of his stuff in the yard during the weekend. Josh started to protest and tell him how dangerous it would be. That he was mid process. “4 minutes” was his reply, and Josh rushed to throw some things into a bag, and ran out with it and his laptop.

5:58. He realizes he needs help. Some new program running in the helmet, perhaps. But he would basically have to trust the very person who had attacked him in the first place to do whatever he wanted with his brain. Well, any decision would have to wait until after these 2 hours of rugby or whatever was on.