Cael was eight the first time he asked if his dreams were real.

  His mother, half-asleep on the couch with a book in her lap, told him gently, “Of course not, sweetheart.”

  He didn’t believe her.

  Because in that dream, he had fallen from a world of glass into a world of sand — and when he woke up, his knees ached with a pain he couldn’t explain. A lingering burn, like something remembered by the body that never happened.

  He started keeping a journal that day. He called it “The Map of Me.”

  He was a quiet child—observant, always watching. At twelve, he read about quantum superposition and asked his science teacher, “If a particle can be two things at once, why can’t people?”

  At fifteen, he built a rudimentary neural feedback loop using his father’s old radio parts, trying to record brainwave patterns during REM sleep. It failed, but the data logs showed something strange: a harmonic pulse, not from the equipment, but from him.

  No one noticed.

  By seventeen, he was auditing college-level physics courses online and writing strange essays about consciousness behaving like a waveform—collapsing into a personal universe shaped by perception.

  His peers mocked him. Teachers labeled him brilliant but "abstract." He got used to eating alone.

  Then the accident happened.

  The car crash that killed his parents left Cael with two things: a long scar along his ribcage and a question he couldn’t shake—

  “Where did they go?”

  Not in the religious sense. Not even philosophical. Literally.

  Stolen content alert: this content belongs on Royal Road. Report any occurrences.

  If consciousness left the body, did it end—or move?

  His grief didn’t break him. It turned him inward. Sharpened him.

  He got into CalTech on a full scholarship. Graduated at twenty. Postdoc at twenty-four. Then came the coma.

  It was supposed to be a harmless sleep study. Just a neural induction test. But something misfired. Cael dropped mid-sentence and didn’t wake for nine days.

  When he did, he refused to describe what he saw.

  The incident was quietly buried. He signed NDAs. But something in him changed. He began to obsess over his journals again. Began cross-referencing old dream sketches with real-world data. Star charts. Forgotten languages. Auditory hallucinations reported by patients under anesthesia.

  A pattern formed.

  He was thirty-one when he pitched the idea to the DARPA rep in a closed-door room with bad lighting and three skeptical engineers.

  “The mind isn’t just interpreting reality,” he told them. “It’s creating it.”

  They didn’t laugh. They didn’t agree either. But a month later, a grant appeared. And with it, a new private lab space and a vague contract under a program called VIRE.

  It stood for Virtual Interface for Reality Exploration. A name designed to sound harmless. Palatable.

  They built the lab in the Arizona desert. Quiet. Hidden. Underground.

  Cael handpicked every researcher. Lena was the first. She had a background in neurophysics and a knack for understanding Cael’s ideas without flinching. Others came and went.

  But only Cael stayed through every setback.

  He had relationships, once.

  A woman named Sera, during grad school. She was kind, curious, but grounded in things like weekends and birthdays. She said he “lived too far inside his own head.”

  He didn’t argue.

  After that, brief flings. Conversations that died in the gaps between logic and intuition. He wasn’t cold—just distant. People expected passion, but Cael operated on curiosity, not emotion. He didn’t feel things loudly. He studied them.

  His brother Ezra had been his last real connection. A soldier, older by five years. Grounded. Honest. Protective.

  They used to talk late into the night about impossible things. Ezra was the only one who never told him to stop asking.

  Then Ezra went missing during an off-the-books military mission overseas. No body. No answers. Just a closed case and an empty coffin.

  Something inside Cael calcified that year.

  Now

  VIRE had been active for almost three years. They’d mapped over 400 consciousness patterns. Most showed normal neural drift—memories, dreams, chaos.

  But sometimes…

  Sometimes, a person’s resonance took shape. Organized. Almost like a destination.

  That’s what Cael was chasing.

  Not dreams.

  Not illusions.

  Other realities.

  His life had narrowed to this point—a singular, unshakable truth he hadn’t yet proven:

  That each mind was a world.

  And he could find a way to visit them.