Act I Fractured
Chapter 1
The sky split open in flashes of white, and for one impossible second, Steve Wozniak thought he was dreaming.
The world titled violently beneath him. Metal screamed, the wind crashed against glass and somewhere in the distance, someone shouted his name, but the voice dissolved into static before he could answer.
Then silence came, not true silence, just a ringing sound that was endless. The kind that swallowed thoughts whole.
His hands twitch, searching for something familiar, switches, wires, buttons, circuits. Anything that made sense. But his fingers closed around nothing but cold air.
Lights flickered above him… no, not above him, inside him.
Fragments burst through the darkness in a broken flashed, with a firm iron glowing in the dark. Blueprints scattered across a bedroom floor.
A garage humming with electricity and a voice saying, “You’re a genius, Woz. We’re going to change everything.”
The memories slipped away before he could hold onto them. Pain slowly spread through his chest as consciousness dragged him like a tide he wasn’t ready to face.
The ringing in his ears faded just enough for sounds to emerge, the distant murmurs, hurried footsteps and the rhythmic beeping of a machine nearby.
A hospital.
Steve blinked against the fluorescent lights overhead.
They burned into his eyes, merciless. His mouth felt dry, his body felt foreign.
A woman appeared besides him moments later, speaking softly, as if his brain needed extra seconds to translate them.
“Steve? Can you hear me?”
He frowned.
Steve… he knew that name.
Didn’t he?
The plane, the crash. It all sounded disconnected, like pieces from someone else’s story.
“What… happened?” Steve swallowed painfully.
The woman exchanged a glance with another doctor near the doorway before looking back at him.
“You’ve suffered a concussion,” she explained. “There may be some temporary memory loss.”
Memory loss…
The words echoed strangely inside his head. As if memory itself were a machine, one with a missing component.
Steve stared at the ceiling again.
Somewhere, inside the fog, another memory surfaced briefly.
A boy sitting cross legged on the floor beside his father, carefully studying exposed wires inside an old radio.
The memory just vanished immediately. But for the first time since waking, Steve felt fear.
Not fear from dying, but fear of forgetting.
***
Steve drifted in and out of consciousness for what felt like hours, maybe days.
The room was empty save for the constant beat of equipment beside him. Sometimes doctors or nurses moved between the lights, speaking in hush voices that he couldn’t understand.
Every question left him exhausted.
What day is it?
Do you remember your name?
Do you know where you are?
The answer came slow, other times incomplete and other times there was never an answer.
By the second day, Steve had learned to hide his worries by settling beneath his cool expression.
The fear was no longer physical, the bruises would heal, the headaches would fade. But the missing pieces inside his head worried him in ways he could never imagine.
Later that night, a nurse offered him a glass of water, smiling as she adjusted the blanket over his legs.
“You’ve had a lot of visitors asking about you,” she said softly. “People seem very worried.”
Steve frowned slightly.
“Visitors?”
She nodded.
“Friends, business partners, you know people from Apple.”
Apple… the word felt strange.
His chest tightened before his mind could understand why.
The name conveyed emotion without context. A feeling before a memory.
It was like hearing a song you once loved but no longer recognized.
He tilted his head toward the window across the room. Beyond the reflection of the hospital lights, the California night stretched endlessly outside.
Somewhere out there, an entire world apparently knew who he was. And yet a part of himself remained inaccessible.
Locked behind static.
The nurse hesitated before speaking again. “One of them stayed for several hours earlier today, he kept asking if you remembered him.”
Steve looked back at her.
“Who?”
“Steve Jobs.”
The name hit harder than the others. Not because he completely remembered it, but because something inside him reacted instantly.
A person’s laugh, music blaring too loudly, bare feet against concrete, and a restless voice speaking faster than anyone else in the room.
The fragments disappeared again.
Steve placed shaky fingers on his temple, frustration rising in his chest. His own mind felt cruel now, dangling bits of his life in front of him before tearing them away again.
“Don’t force it,” the nurse said softly.
Easy for her to say.
For the first time anger flickered beneath his fear at himself.
His entire life had revolved on understanding systems, logic, circuits, and patterns. Machines always made sense to him since every problem had a solution hidden somewhere.
But this? This was chaotic.
His own brain had deteriorated beyond repair.
After the nurse left, the room became quiet again. Only the gentle electrical beeping sound beside his bed remained.
Beep.
Pause.
Beep.
Pause.
The sound struck a chord buried within him.
Not in the hospital room, but another with another rhythm which was softer and warmer.
The faint hiss of a soldering iron.
A memory of tiny wires scattered on a wooden table. A child’s hand moves carefully beside larger ones.
“Electricity follows rules, Stevie,” his father’s voice gently whispered from within the recollection. “People believe it is magic because they cannot see it. But there’s always a reason things work the way they do.”
The darkness around Steve gradually dissipated. And for the first time after the crash, he remembered.
