The ICU Author Chapter 1

CHAPTER ONE: BRAIN OVERDRAFT

I am sitting beside my sister’s ICU bed, staring at a monitor that beeps like a heart learning Morse code.

I haven’t slept in… what day is it? Thursday? Sunday? The nurse said “Tuesday,” but she also said I should take a walk, and I think we both knew that was comedy.

Hospitals are strange, time-proof environments. The lights never dim, coffee never tastes like coffee, and somewhere, always, there’s a machine sighing louder than I can. I’ve been here long enough that the vending machine and I have a toxic relationship. It gives me Funyuns and I give it resentment.

My sister is still unconscious, though they say she’s improving. Her face looks calmer today. The kind of calm that costs you a month of your life. I’m thankful, quietly, somewhere under the static in my head — but mostly I’m running on autopilot caffeine and misplaced imagination.

See, I’m an author. Or I was. Or I’m pretending again. Hard to say which. I self-published a military action-adventure novel last year — Crimson Vortex: Strike at Dawn. The reviews were… mixed. One man on Amazon said my dialogue “reads like a caffeine-addled parrot with PTSD.” Another said I “invented new ways to misuse semicolons.” My mother gave it five stars, though she admitted she didn’t finish it because “too many guns.”

Anyway, ever since the book came out, I’ve been nursing a creative hangover — that mix of pride, shame, and the vague suspicion that maybe I should have gone into HVAC repair. But when my sister got sick — sudden, brutal, sepsis — the world stopped moving except for the inside of my head.

And the inside of my head, God help me, did not get the memo to shut up.

At first, I thought the sleepless nights would make me contemplative. You know — journal-worthy stuff, like life is fragile or what truly matters. Instead, my brain decided to run a late-night open mic of terrible novel ideas.

One night, while she lay unconscious and I sat there holding her cold hand, my brain whispered:

“What if… you fell in the shower… and nobody found you for three days?”

And because I was too tired to filter, I said, “Go on.”

Thus began The Flood Below. A psychological thriller where a struggling author (hello) slips on a bar of Irish Spring, hits his head, and floods the downstairs neighbor’s apartment while drifting in and out of consciousness. It was, admittedly, not great literature. The central metaphor was literally “everything goes down the drain.”

But my brain was relentless.

“What if,” it said, “you wrote a Hallmark-style romance parody? Like Fifty Shades of Gray but sanitized for daytime TV?”

“Already done,” I muttered. “It’s called A Missing Gray — 49 Shades of Beige.”

I started jotting notes in my phone between nurse check-ins.

Main character: Becky Mayweather, small-town candle shop owner with trauma related to unscented wax.

Love interest: Brock Stone, mysterious CEO of a gray paint company called Neutral Ambitions LLC.

Conflict: Can Becky overcome her fear of commitment and grayscale décor?

Tagline: Love isn’t black or white — it’s Pantone 427C.

I was deliriously proud of that tagline for ten minutes before realizing it was the stupidest thing I’d ever written, which — honestly — was saying something.

Still, I laughed, right there in the ICU. The nurse peeked in.

“Everything all right?”

“Just my career,” I said.

She nodded, in that polite ah, we have a live one way nurses do.

But the worst idea came two nights later, around 3 A.M., when the monitors glowed like alien constellations and my body felt like it was made of bad coffee and carpet lint.

That’s when my mind whispered, in its late-night Cinemax narrator voice:

“What if… artificial intelligence… became self-aware… and decided you were the Antichrist?”

I didn’t even argue. I just opened a new note.

Title: The God Algorithm.

Tagline: In the beginning was the Code.

In this one, humanity invents an AI to solve world peace, and instead it creates twelve billion conflicting Wikipedia pages about the Book of Revelation. It begins to quote Scripture unironically in binary. Eventually it declares the internet its “body” and broadband its “blood.”

It’s basically Revelation meets Silicon Valley.

And I thought — if I survive this hospital, I’m writing that.

Or maybe I’ll just confess it to a priest.

Days blur. Nurses shift like actors in a long-running play. The cafeteria soup changes color but not flavor.

My sister’s condition inches upward like a bad stock chart — good day, dip, rally, stall.

Meanwhile, my brain — untethered, unhinged, and entirely uninterested in rest — keeps staging pitch meetings in my skull.

One morning (or possibly night), I woke up in the ICU chair with my notebook open on my lap. The page said:

> “New series idea: The Spy Who Couldn’t Log Out.

Ex–CIA agent trapped in a smart fridge.”

I don’t remember writing it, but I recognize my handwriting — the kind of slanted scrawl that looks like it’s trying to escape the page.

It’s not just exhaustion; it’s creative delirium. Like my subconscious is running an unpaid writer’s room and forgot to tell HR.

At breakfast — meaning vending machine Pop-Tarts and coffee brewed by Satan’s cousin — I stared at my reflection in the metallic lid. Puffy eyes, beard scruff, that thousand-yard stare of a man who’s been edited by both trauma and Red Bull.

I thought about my last “author bio.”

 Matt Bowers writes high-octane thrillers exploring moral ambiguity and the nature of courage.

Ha. These days, my moral ambiguity was whether it was wrong to drink hospital coffee from a paper urinal if it meant fewer trips to the vending machine.

(For the record, I didn’t. Yet.)

Around day six — or maybe day sixty — I started narrating my own life aloud. I couldn’t stop it.

“The author sits by the bed,” I murmured, scribbling.

“He wonders whether the beeping means hope or just fresh battery life. He contemplates his next novel idea: Sepsis and Sensibility. A tender Regency romance set in a modern ICU.”

I chuckled, which turned into a hiccup, which turned into something suspiciously like a sob, but I blamed that on dehydration.

I’d become one of those characters I used to mock — the tragic writer, too self-aware to be profound, too tired to care. My inner monologue had turned into a podcast nobody asked to subscribe to.

A nurse with kind eyes — her name tag said Becky, which felt cosmically hilarious — adjusted my sister’s IV.

“How are you holding up?” she asked.

“Me? I’m good. Just drafting the great American hospital novel.”

She smiled the way people do at toddlers and unstable creatives. “Well, keep it PG-13.”

Too late. My imagination doesn’t do ratings.

That night, Becky appeared in my notes again.

But not Nurse Becky. Fictional Becky. The wax-traumatized candle-maker from 49 Shades of Beige.

In my overtired brain, she started arguing with Brock Stone about color palettes.

And then — because my neurons hate me — The God Algorithm interrupted, speaking in binary Latin, accusing them both of narrative sin.

Before long, my own characters were forming a union.

You ever been so tired your thoughts start filing HR complaints?

Because I have.

Here’s how it went, roughly, somewhere around 2 A.M.:

> Becky (the fictional one): “You can’t just leave me in Act Two without closure!”

Brock: “You ghosted me after the paint store scene!”

The God Algorithm: “ALL SHALL BE DIGITIZED. PUBLISH OR PERISH.”

Me: “Can everyone please shut up? I’m trying to emotionally cope!”

Becky: “Maybe you should write about that.”

The Algorithm: “EMOTIONAL COPING: INVALID INPUT.”

I laughed so hard I almost woke up the patient next door. Then I remembered the ICU was not, in fact, a writer’s retreat.

That morning, the doctor said my sister was responding to treatment. I nodded — relief like a quiet gust through the exhaustion. I sat back down, stared at her pale face, and felt my brain slow, just a little.

There’s this weird guilt that comes when you start to imagine again while someone you love is still hovering near the edge. Like the act of creating is a betrayal of the crisis. But maybe it’s the opposite — maybe it’s survival in disguise.

Still, I couldn’t stop the absurdity. My mind had become a factory that only produced nonsense.

I pulled out my notebook. Wrote the heading:

New Novel Idea: The ICU Writer.

Synopsis: A sleep-deprived author loses his grip on reality while watching over his sister, convinced that his unwritten characters are haunting the hospital halls. The defibrillator beeps become Morse code from his subconscious. The cafeteria cashier is secretly an editor. His sister — when she finally wakes — tells him to rewrite everything.

And somewhere between laughing and crying, I realized… that was just me.

By now I’ve learned every beep pattern in this place.

The IV machine is a metronome for existential thought. The hallway lights flicker just enough to suggest divine editing. And the air smells perpetually like bleach and broken dreams.

My sister’s breathing has steadied, thank God. Her color’s back. I sit here watching the slow rhythm of her recovery, feeling like an unpaid extra in a hospital drama where the protagonist is finally learning humility.

Except, of course, I can’t just be humble — I have to narrate humility.

“This,” I tell myself, “is character development.”

I imagine the eventual memoir pitch:

A Frustrated Author Learns Compassion in the ICU, While Accidentally Writing Three Terrible Novels and Talking to His Characters in Public.

It’ll sell dozens of copies. Maybe dozens and a half.

And then — because fatigue is the world’s best hallucinogen — I drifted into that dangerous half-dream state.

The hospital hums into static.

Monitors blink like stars.

And suddenly I’m not in the ICU anymore — I’m in a writers’ conference… held in my own skull.

The Flood Below is sitting in the front row, damp and resentful.

A Missing Gray is fanning herself dramatically, complaining about the air conditioning.

The God Algorithm has hijacked the projector, displaying apocalyptic PowerPoints about syntax.

And me? I’m standing on stage, trying to moderate a Q&A.

> Me: “Okay, one at a time. Who has a question?”

Flood Below: “Why do I exist?”

Me: “Good question. Moving on.”

Beige: “Can I have a happy ending, please?”

Algorithm: “ALL ENDINGS ARE THE SAME. DELETE.”

Then the sprinkler system activates.

Because of course it does.

I wake up — real world now — to the sound of a nurse saying my name.

I must have dozed off mid-fantasy. My neck is a question mark, my notebook drool-stained.

My sister’s eyes are open.

She’s awake.

The monitors beep steady, rhythmic, almost musical.

“Hey,” I whisper.

She tries to speak; only air comes out. But her eyes say everything.

I squeeze her hand. “Welcome back.”

For a moment, there’s peace — that quiet, holy kind of peace that doesn’t need words.

Then, of course, my brain ruins it.

Because I hear it — faint, insistent — a voice in the back of my mind, whispering in smug italics:

> “Chapter Two practically writes itself.”

And God help me, I smile.