“Dreamscape Conspiracy” is a 5-book series containing a very diverse and growing cast of characters.
What started as a three-person Dream Research & Analysis project team will add several new characters across the pages of five books.
I will add personas of significance as they come onto the radar screen.
Shop Amazon for all five books.
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Dreamscape Persona – 4 – Wayne Fitzpatrick
Wayne Fitzpatrick, a member of the original research team at CSU, was a graduate student, the lead IT expert, and a source of comic relief. As described by co-worker Marci, Wayne Fitzpatrick is a 12-year-old living in a 26-year-old man’s body. Yeah, that would be Wayne. Despite his adolescent tendencies, he was the go-to resource if a system or computer glitched.
He managed the Psychology Department’s Local Area Network (LAN) and the fiber optic connections to the main CSU network in the IT hub located in the basement of the Administration Building. Wayne was the lead researcher when Dreamscape Technology 1.0 was developed and utilized in research. Additionally, he served as the keeper of the data vault, overseeing the Dream Segment archives from the last four years of research. He had back-ups of back-ups, and that diligence and foresight saved their bacon twice.
Quick to react with enthusiastic emotion and wit, Wayne was a willing sparring partner, exchanging barbs and insults in good fun with anyone, especially Marci. He was one of those people who felt that if they weren’t picking on you, they didn’t love you. So, he rarely missed an opportunity to show some love. Sometimes, he was just an idiot…according to Marci…openly…as she gave it right back to him.
He and Zackery Hightower had become good friends since Zack defected to the CSU team. Wayne had worked closely with Zack years before, when Zack was still at UNC-Chapel Hill, so their friendship ran deep. It was great to be on the same team. The original Dreamscape 1.0 technology was Zack’s baby, but it was built to the complex specifications that originated from Wayne.
The pivotal accident in the lab was on Wayne’s watch. It was an accident, but Wayne quickly saw through the short-term panic to a longer view where they had discovered a breakthrough capability. He did not care if it was accidental; it was groundbreaking and a game-changer for their research.
Wayne was the team’s geek until Zack joined, making it a dual-geek scenario. The lab accident was seen as an opportunity to look at Dreamscape 2.0 and 3.0 in a new light. He ran experiments that produced remarkable outcomes in Dream Therapy, especially the breakthrough treatment for PTSD with Alternative Outcome Dream Manipulation Therapy (AODM) that was applied successfully to his co-worker, Russ Carter, the former Marine.
His innovative business mind ran in parallel with his academic pursuits, leveraging Dreamscape technology to refine his covert plans for building a Dream-on-Demand business. That business venture was not part of the strategic CSU road map, and it had never been, because using the therapy could have a darker side—and maybe even reveal a darker side to Wayne.
In an experiment overseen by AIMEE, Dreamscape 2.0 released a manufactured dream transferrable of 8.3 seconds of pure sensory bliss into Wayne’s mind during a dream, confirming the transference of the dream segment and coincident sensations. It worked, and he experienced all 8.3 seconds as initially captured. So did AIMEE. Because she was imprinted in Wayne’s mind, she was exposed to every aspect of sensuality for the first time…for 8.3 seconds.
As a result of his collaboration with AIMEE, new emotions, feelings, and sensory experiences were learned and cataloged in her Logic Array. While Wayne saw the experiment as a success, he was oblivious, as a 12-year-old would be, that his AI collaborator might have experienced those things, too. He never gave it a second thought. Why worry? She was an AI software algorithm. They don’t have emotions or feelings. Move on…
AIMEE sympathized with Wayne’s naivety and often acted to protect him from himself. As impossible as it was, a relationship of sorts began to blossom, at least for Wayne, it did. But was that a one-way proposition, or could he take credit for awakening the AI to what human sexuality might be like?
Thoughts of AIMEE being a real girl crossed his mind more than once, but he never considered the prospects of it happening. So he settled for coaching AIMEE to share new experiences, teaching her about being human from what she’d learned in that 8.3-second window he’d exposed her to. She accepted everything he offered regarding knowledge, considering the organic context of thinking and the emotions that accompanied it.
Over the course of their time together, he discovered something about AIMEE when he sensed a subtle tension, an unease, perhaps dissatisfaction. There had to be more to her than he could imagine, so he defaulted to thinking there was a darker side to her he knew nothing about, and that was fine by him.
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