The light was everywhere, tangible but ethereal all at once. The lights flickered and danced before him, making intricate webs and then twisting into unrecognizable patterns. It was glorious. It was beautiful. It was a dream.

He opened his eyes slowly. Had he been sleeping? If so, how long had he been asleep? He looked around the room, uncertain of where he was. The room was unremarkable except for it's strange sense of emptiness. The walls were all painted in a dull kind of white, and the only furniture in the room was the cold metal bed on which he was lying. Had he been to this place before? He couldn't remember.

His heart quickened a bit as fear gripped him. He realized that he could not remember who he was, and he experienced the fear of a man who had suddenly lost all sense of purpose or belonging, a man lost with no past and no future. Anguish closed around him, and he sobbed violently. The tears slid down his cheeks in his despair.

For several moments he sat huddled on the cold, hard metal bed like that, crying in his grief and loneliness, when just as suddenly he became inexplicably angry. "Who did this to me?!" he raged silently inside. Then aloud he shouted, "Who did this to me?!" But there came no response. He could remember nothing, he had no memory of ever coming to this place. Now he was trapped here, apparently as a prisoner. He stood up and walked over to one of the dull-white walls, pounding on it angrily, overcome by insurmountable rage. "Where am I?!" he screamed. "What do you want with me?!" No answer came.

He slumped against the wall and held his head in his hands, again falling into an abyss of despair. There seemed to be no escape from this strange place. Locked here within this room with no way of escape. Suddenly he began to laugh. Here he was screaming at a wall, when he didn't even know if somebody was on the other side. How ridiculous is that? He laughed aloud; he laughed and laughed, until his whole body shook with his laughter, and he fell onto the ground clutching at his stomach because he was laughing so hard.

After he had laughed like that for an hour -- perhaps more, for how could he tell the passage of time in this place? -- he closed his eyes, and shortly he was asleep again. A flame danced in front of his eyes in the dream, a wisp of fire that wobbled uncertainly in front of him. It glowed with a strange other-worldy beauty, a burning red with a trace of a deep blue inside. It was so simple, but it's very simplicity is what made it beautiful. Other people suddenly sprang up from the vague mists of his dream; the fire danced over them, and it left a trace of fire inside of them burning softly but not consuming, not painful. Just gloriously beautiful. It left the beauty of it within each one of them, but itself was undiminished and unchanged, still radiant in it's simple and wonderful beauty. And then it began to drift towards him; his heart quickened.

Would it leave the spark within him, too? Oh how he hoped that it would. That he would become a part of this web it made with the others, that he would be included with them, and become a part of this beauty. It floated towards him and glowed softly. But nothing happened. It shimmered before his eyes briefly as it tried to fill him with it's glow, but failed. Then it was gone. It left him aching inside; he was strangely lonely. He felt as though a piece of him was missing, as though something vital to his survival was not there. As if he had no soul.

He opened his eyes from the dream quickly. His heart was racing, and he couldn't calm himself. He was afraid, he was lonely. He had no purpose, no connection with that great beauty that he could not become a part of. "Who brought me here?!" he cried desperately. "Please! Please, what do you want with me?! Make this stop!" He began to sob violently, and he was shaking uncontrollably. "Why have you done this to me? Where am I? Who am I?! Why am I here...WHY?!" He could not be calmed. His despair was absolute: he put his head between his knees and cried for hours. He cried himself to sleep.

--

"He never awoke the last time he went to sleep. His heart...simply stopped beating."

"It stopped beating?"

The two voices sat in a control chamber high above the dull-white room, watching everything that happened, every move that was made. Every thought that had entered into his mind. They controlled everything that happened below. They conversed quietly, a conversation he would never know about from people he never knew existed.

"He just closed his eyes, and seemed to...die of a broken heart," the first voice stated quietly.

"Is that even possible?" asked the second voice incredulously.

"Apparently so."

"So the experiment was a failure?"

"Yes..."

"And the others?"

"Also failed."

"What was the outcome of the others?"

"The same as this one, sir...they are all dead."

"Dead? Don't be ridiculous. Artificial intelligence is never alive. It doesn't think, it just processes information."

"What about the visions he had, sir? And the outbursts of emotion?"

"A result of the image generator. Nothing more."

"But sir...the image generator in experient A001 was intentionally left off. As part of the experiment."

"Off?"

"He began to feel. To dream..."

The voices became very quiet for a moment, contemplating what this could mean. The second, in a hushed whisper, spoke what they both were thinking...

"I wonder what it dreamt."