The dream ended as my body fully re-entered the Earth’s regular timeflow. However, my brain did not easily relinquish the dream, terrifying though it had been. My eyes flew open to find a tall man dressed in white staring down at me, but all I could recall was that the NBA had been taken away from me, and it had never been given back.
I wanted it back.
“You bastard!” I yelled, sitting bolt-upright, which caused Dirk to jump backwards. My throat was dry, and my voice caught before I was able to continue. “You’d better explain quickly where the NBA has been for the past two centuries!” I lifted myself off the platform with the intent of attacking the man, but my legs failed me after such a long period of disuse, and I collapsed to the ground.
“It is worse than I feared,” said Dirk to Adam, ignoring me. “Not only was his timeflow elongated instead of shortened, but he endured over two-hundred years of dream-time.”
At these words, my vicious anger turned into silent confusion. Adam looked at me as if I was a scientific abnormality. “That’s impossible. The hibernator is not supposed to dream!”
“The potency of DTB’s imagination was underestimated, it seems. His mind was not content to go unused for such a long period of time.” Dirk looked again at the readouts on the control panel as if to verify something. “Had the off-season been shortened to mere minutes, as intended, he would not have had the time to dream, much less live out years of his life in a dream.”
“That maybe be true, but it was not I who entered the initial inputs, Dirk,” Adam said coldly. “I believe that was your doing.”
Dirk glared at the shorter man. “And it was not I who concocted the plan to subject highlight makers to underfunded chronomancy. My inputs were correct.”
As these words were exchanged, my anger returned. These two men, Dirk Nowitzki and Adam Silver, had been the ones to trap me in an NBA-less purgatory. I now understood that the past decades of my life had all been a terrible hallucination, but the dread, the terror, the helplessness, all of those things had been real.
Dirk and Adam continued to argue, attempting to one-up the other in matters of scientific protocol, too busy exerting their misused knowledge to pay any attention to their sickly, feeble guinea pig. That was fine. I had learned all that I needed, and my strength had been resummoned.
I leapt from the floor and tackled Dirk. Having been caught by surprise, he toppled easily to the floor. On the way down, his head knocked against the solid metal of the instrument panel, and he lost any ability to resist. My hands quickly found their way around his neck. However, just as quickly, a pair of surprisingly strong arms wrapped themselves around my chest and cast me aside.
Up again in an instant, I charged at Adam. He had been standing still, foolishly expecting that he would be able to reason with me with words, so it was not difficult at all to land a punch right on his nose. His nasal bones gave away easily under the power of my fist, and blood spurted from his nostrils as he collaped limply to the ground to join his colleague.
—
Adam was groggily coming back to the conscious world. I slapped Dirk in the face, trying to get him to do the same. Finally, his eyes opened, and he realized his predicament. “Hey, what’s going on?”
“Oh, just getting you ready for a little experiment.”
Dirk struggled against his bonds. “You have no hope of operating any of our equipment. It is beyond your ken,” he announced defiantly.
“It it really? I found it quite intuitive.” I removed myself from the hibernation chamber and placed myself at the control panel. The settings had all been entered, and while the equipment was known to be faulty, I knew that it would be faulty in my favor. Scanning the large array of switches and knobs, I found the one I wanted: telephony.
I leaned into the microphone. “Ten million years for you, thirty minutes for me. How does that sound?”
Their screams were rendered silent by the glass, but their panicked faces were satisfaction enough. To what horrible depths of fractured insanity their minds would descend to, I did not know. From the look of things, they did not know either.
I allowed them to consider their plight for several minutes. Then, with the press of a button, I induced their hibernation. Another button, and the timeflow in the chamber was manipulated to such a severe extent that the bodies of the men were visibly aging despite the anti-aging effects of the fluid.
I studied the displays in front of me. They had already begun to dream, but I quickly grew tired of monitoring their vital signs. However, from the documentation, I knew that there was a TV built in to the control panel. I flipped it on, and to my delight, the first game of the season had just begun.
“Now, back to basketball.”