STRAPPED SECURELY IN HIS solitary confinement bed, he thought back to a time not so long ago, when he had almost given up. He had screamed in frustration as he drifted the precious diary against the far paneled wall of his basement den. Sleep had failed him for days. Teetering on the brink of exhausted madness, he had steadied his toppling body from the attacking nauseous vertigo with an outstretched hand, frantically grabbing for purchase on a solid oak table. Weeks had gone by; he knew that his assumption was correct. There was not any real proof, just a constant gnawing at his bleeding stomach that his theory was sound. The explosion during the final battle with Doctor Z did not destroy the Space Rock!
The superiors that he had approached never even remotely agreed with him. In the end, the frantic, almost psychotic pleas got him nowhere, except forced hospitalization for a nervous breakdown. His caregivers were professionally polite at first, but the constant haranguing about some fantastical rock that had supposedly dropped from some magical nighttime sky, and then recovered by some Arab Bedouin in the desert, eventually broke down their resolve. When the strongest anti-psychotic medication had failed to calm the obviously insane patient, they had him wrapped in a straight jacket for his own protection, and imprisoned in an isolated secure padded room.
The people that were once his supervisors simply wanted the man gone. They wanted him to stop talking about the Space Rock in any way, shape, or form. Most of them were actually relieved at his complete breakdown. The once highly ranked Field Agent's actions now seemed to be the incoherent ranting of a broken man's reality, perpetually looped in the throes of all this alien rock nonsense. It was the perfect cover story, 'see, the man is obviously a lunatic; he does not even know what he is saying'.
The evidence that the rock still existed was as clear to him as the rhythmic throbbing pulse from his heart! He was still alive, that was all the evidence he required. The scientists had discovered much about the properties of the Space Rock during their desert experiments. If it had exploded, an object that proved to be so extremely volatile would have killed everyone at the service station, the scene of the final battle. It probably would have killed everyone and everything in most of the Northern Hemisphere for that matter. The rest of the government did not want to believe that the terrible object could have survived. From the very bottom of their sub-consciousness, leaders could not fathom that kind of threat to the whole world, if it had. The area had been gone over with a fine-tooth comb for weeks and they found nothing. It was so much easier just to think that it was gone from this world forever.
This morning though; at least he thought it was morning, something was different; something was…amazing. He awoke, and had an epiphany. Abruptly, like a gigantic thunderclap exploding in his mind, it was immediately crystal clear what he had to do. Done were the daily tirades, the frothing at the mouth and the dementia. Where had it gotten him, a padded room wrapped in an octopus sheet, his arms bound in a painful 'x' across his chest. No, he realized that he could trust no one. He did not care anymore; the truth was his alone. With all of his years of training and the available resources that were once at his disposal, he would get out of this confining dungeon and go underground. The Space Rock will be his someday! When that moment happened, the world will rue the day that they had thought of him as a person with an unsound mind. He would prove to them what was possible to achieve by a man with a weapon of this magnitude. He could not remember a time in his existence when he felt more alive; more centered with thoughtful purpose. He would completely embrace this newfound emotion and use it to absorb all of the energy that it could provide, to accomplish his new secret aspirations.
Now, confined on his bed, his piercing maniacal laughter picked up an eerie, hysterical quality, as its harmonics resonated through the thickly insulated door, and echoed all the way down the dimly lighted hall.
