Dreamspace: Escape C19

By Bennett Joshua Davlin

Published in 2020, this sci-fi novel predicted too much of the events that followed. It was scrubbed as "COVID misinformation," reviews and my bio erased-until it resurfaced twelve hours before Trump's second inauguration. Read on, see what they tried to hide.

China entombed the world. Now humanity found an escape.

• Language: English
• Publisher: CENTERED AMERICA PUBLISHING GROUP
• Release date: Oct 15, 2020
• ISBN: 9781735873657

Bennett Joshua Davlin

Bennett Joshua Davlin was born in South Central Louisiana and began making films at age five, completing his first novel by ten. He studied at Semester at Sea and London's City College before graduating from Tulane University, later attending Tulane's A.B. Freeman School of Business for his MBA.In the 1990s, Davlin worked as a combat war correspondent during the Yugoslav conflict. He went on to hold positions in the oilfield industry and in structured and international finance. As a CEO, he successfully turned around the largest manufacturer of high-end decorative goods in America-an achievement that earned him a job offer from Warren Buffett's former turnaround master, which he declined. Due to economic policies under President Clinton, Davlin was later forced to offshore manufacturing production to China. After a period living in Hong Kong and Southern China, he shut down the company, unwilling to contribute further to the rise of Chinese communism that he viewed as a growing threat to America's liberty.Shifting to Hollywood, Davlin became a studio screenwriter, penning major films such as the Jackie Chan action movie The Medallion (distributed by Sony, Columbia TriStar). His novel Memory became an international bestseller, published by The Berkley Imprint of Penguin and translated into multiple foreign languages by Sony Books, Blanvalet, and Random House. He went on to write, direct, and produce the film adaptation of Memory, released worldwide by Warner Bros. and EBE. In television, Davlin collaborated with Randy Douthit (co-creator of CNN's Crossfire and Judge Judy) under a first-look deal with CBS Paramount. He has guest lectured at NYU, The Tennessee Williams Festival, and other academic venues. Since 2017, he has been a contributing essayist and political commentator at CenteredAmerica.com, focusing on policy, economics, and philosophy. In 2020, he ran as a non-treasonous Democrat for U.S. president. He is an alumnus of Sigma Phi Epsilon, and a proud member of the Benevolent and Protective Order of Elks.

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Dreamspace

Escape C19

Bennett Joshua Davlin

Centered America Books

Copyright © 2020 Davlin Productions LLC

CENTERED AMERICA PUBLISHING GROUP

Published by Centered America Books A Publishing Division of Davlin Productions LLC 269 South Beverly Dr. Suite 537 Beverly Hills, CA  90212

DREAMSPACE: ESCAPE C19 (second edition)

This book is an original publication of Davlin Productions LLC This is a work of fiction. Names, characters, places, and incidents either are the product of the author’s imagination or are used fictitiously, and any resemblance to actual persons, living or dead, business establishments, events, or locales is entirely coincidental.

Copyright 2020, by Davlin Productions LLC, All rights reserved.

No part of this book may be reproduced, scanned, or distributed in any printed or electronic forms without permission. Please do not participate in or encourage piracy of copyrighted materials in violation of the author’s rights. Purchase only authorized editions.

CENTERED AMERICA PUBLISHING GROUP and CENTERED AMERICA BOOKS are a trademark of Davlin Productions LLC

PRINTING HISTORY Centered America Books trade paperback edition / October 9, 2020, second edition October 9, 2025 An application to register this book for cataloguing has been submitted to the Library of Congress.

ISBN

978-1-7358736-3-3 (paperback - KDP)

979-8-9881466-9-8 (paperback - Ingram Sparks)

978-1-7358736-6-4 (Hardcover)  

978-1-7358736-5-7 (eBook)

978-1-7358736-9-5 (Audio Book)

PRINTED IN THE UNITED STATES OF AMERICA.

10   9   8   7   6   5   4   3

OTHER WORKS BY BENNETT JOSHUA DAVLIN

MAJOR MOTION PICTURES BY THIS AUTHOR & FILMMAKER

THE MEDALLION

Sony Entertainment & Columbia TriStar Pictures

MEMORY

Warner Bros. & EBE  

BOOKS

FICTION

MEMORY

Penguin Books U.S., Random House Australia etc. Blanvalet Germany, Sony Books Japan 

THE MODERN ART OF DATING

Centered America Books & Various Foreign Publishers

UNION 57 Centered America Classic Books & Various Foreign Publishers

NONFICTION

HOW TO WIN THE WAR

THE PLAN TO SAVE THE U.S.A.

Centered America Books (2017)

SAINT MICHAEL STOOD UP

China Is Gog

Centered America Books (2020)

GOD’S GUIDE TO THE END OF THE WORLD,

WHEN EVEN YOU CAN BE SAVED

Centered America Books (2024)

THE PHILOSOPHY BEHIND DREAMSPACE:                      A GUIDE TO THE MESSIANIC AGE

Centered America Books (2025)

AUDIOBOOK EXPERIENCES

GOD’S GUIDE TO THE END OF THE WORLD

When Even You Can Be Saved

Centered America Audio Books

SAINT MICHAEL STOOD UP

CHINA IS GOG

Centered America Audio Books

CINE-GRAPHIC NOVEL

DREAMSPACE: Escape C19

Available only at www.centeredamerica.com

POLITICAL ONLINE ESSAYS

SHORT TAKES

Available at no charge at www.centeredamerica.com

THE ESSENTIAL ESSAYS

Available at no charge at www.centeredamerica.com

POLITICAL FILM SHORTS

The Secret of November 10th, 1619

Available at no charge at www.centeredamerica.com

The Political platform of the Non Treasonous Democrat Party (NTD)

Available at no charge at www.centeredamerica.com

The Second Era of Good Feelings: MAGA & NTD

Available at no charge at www.centeredamerica.com

AUTHOR’S NOTE

Written in 2013, Dean Wright—the special effects visionary behind Titanic, Narnia, and The Lord of the Rings—and I nearly brought this story to the screen—twice.

It foretold a coming plague from China: the Ying Yang Virus. Its timing, origin, and global reach—all eerily aligned with what would soon unfold.

Too close to reality, The Biden Administration flagged it as COVID misinformation.

Reviews wiped. My bio, works, and media scrubbed. Until twelve hours before Trump’s second inauguration—it returned.

Some call it coincidence. Others, prophecy.

Read on. Decide for yourself.

part one

David Bellingham the child

Now I have come to explain to you what will happen to your people in the future, for the vision concerns a time yet to come.

Daniel 10:14

​prologue

No one wanted to kill a child.

But this afternoon, Dr. Jim Tutwiler was driving through a storm in a rented Camaro, and this was the only way. Ahead, a boy lived trapped inside his own body—a mind screaming, a body silent—and Tutwiler’s invention promised freedom. Only the cost was everything.

He drove west from New Orleans, rain pounding the Camaro. Passing through the speed-trap town of LaPlace, he thought of Laplace’s demon, the imagined intelligence that could calculate past and future by knowing every atom in the present, misleading anyone. It reminded him of his own invention, bringing him here. And tonight, he felt close to being that demon himself.

Hours later, the forty-five-year-old turned down the Bellinghams’ dirt road. The car idled. Hertz rental folio vibrated gently on the dash. Dark-haired, handsome, and fit, Tutwiler imagined a line running perpendicular to his vehicle. Once he crossed it, the occupant in the house ahead would spot him. It would be too late to turn back.

But David Bellingham was waiting—a boy alive but locked inside himself. Medicine couldn’t cure him. The boy was in a living hell. To help him, Tutwiler had to speak the truth. Most of what was said, in his opinion, were lies. People didn’t handle the truth well.

Consider even the world map. It was a fraud. On his university office door, he posted the real one, The Peters Projection in light gray over the darker, fake Mercator Projection map:

Ironic. Humans didn’t even know their own world. Students inquired about the weird, stretched-out map. Greenland as depicted in the false map was bigger than North America, when it was tiny in comparison. But how many dared to question?Especially in the past, when questioning could get you murdered—your death celebrated for infringing on the presumptions of others.

The Camaro still idled…the thought of ways a novelist like James Joyce might cultivate an eternity from this moment—c’mon, he was just procrastinating. His foot pressed the accelerator.

Minutes later, David’s mother opened the door. She was a gorgeous blonde in her thirties. The kitchen smelled of coffee, Tony Chachere’s Cajun Seasoning, and something worn. A huge commercial coffee machine hummed in the corner beside countless cups and additives, making the place feel like a breakroom, no doubt for the nurses rotating in and out 24 hours a day. He knew she studied his face for judgment. But this wasn’t about her.

I’m Dr. Jim Tutwiler, he said when they first met. His blue jeans and PJ’s coffee-ball shirt didn’t look very professorial. Again, she eyed his business card, handed to her when he first arrived. It read:

Jim glanced past her into the living room. David lay half-reclined before a TV showing The Goonies, a nurse holding his eyelids open. Tutwiler’s stomach tightened.

Meanwhile, she had looked up and again caught herself enjoying his company, which singed her mistrust of the stranger. He reminded her of Mr. Darcy from the BBC’s Pride and Prejudice, which she recently watched. She had spent a great deal of the past few months watching television. She felt wrong enjoying his gesture just before she was angered by what he next made clear:

David isn’t feeling what you think he is, he said softly.

You’re wrong, she snapped.

The truth frightened people. It made them angry. And anger made them violent. But they had no time for lies when this boy was in such a state. The caretakers always proved to be the problem.

Jim learned the hard way that ethnicities, contrary to popular belief, stored the wickedness of their past. South America and Africa had cannibalistic, slave societies. People at the equator, having all they needed, were dominated by tyrants using the excess to build armies. At the poles, people were kinder to each other—their ancestors had to be, just to survive winter.

Morality stemmed from a need for group cohesion; the reason why much of the warm world was immoral, perpetuating violence. But Americans were cleansed of this past. He learned this secret from an audiobook while chasing bank investors between Geneva and Zurich. From then on, he only worked with patients in the U.S. or Israel. When people’s greatest lies were unmasked, their genetics influenced their reactions--he had the scars to prove it.

Jim locked eyes with her, which was strange because caretakers were usually old, not young and beautiful like David’s mother—a far cry from the beaten face in the police report.

Mrs. Bellingham, I’ve developed a method—experimental, but proven. Nine cases out of nine. It allows your son to escape the hell he is currently in—

He’s not in hell, her voice tight.

He is, Jim was firm with the force of experience. My videogame can get him out of it. Although that word hardly captures the immersive experience my invention creates. And it comes at a cost.

Tutwiler hesitated. He’d seen what the treatment demanded in nine prior patients. Speaking the truth would damn him. Staying silent would damn the boy. And the boy had already lived through damnation. He knew her husband had trapped her in more ways than one. The police report documented David’s prior signs of abuse. A lighter held under his arm by his father in the woods, supposedly to make him tough.

The dad spent little time with his sole child but, at eight, expected him to start football. His father had been the town quarterback before a senior-year injury. He got the job as a state trooper through his coach’s brother—becoming a psychopath lying in wait among many in society. No one suspected the Nazi uniform he once wore alone in the house—or the hamsters he buried alive as a child in a tennis can in the backyard.

The State Trooper met his wife at his traffic stop on I-49. She was heading home to claim the inheritance from a mother she despised—the same mother who had ignored her abuse at the hands of her mother’s boyfriend. At 17, she fled to Houston. In a hotel elevator that first night there, a fortune teller whispered: when she returned home, she would meet her Prince Charming. Maybe that caused her to mistake the wolf for a prince?

Now, he just wanted her to leave. He had blackened her name enough. She was no threat:

You turned him into a faggot, he snarled, and I’m gonna fix him.

In the video, Jim saw the normally demure woman challenge him. She refused to leave without her son. So he beat her. Injuries proved it. But she had expected this and needed something to offset his lies.

She had mounted a small spy camera in the bedroom, offering evidence. In its footage, Jim had seen the man strangling her at the foot of the bed. Her comment had triggered it:

David will never be like you, this frightened woman was almost laughing.

Jim could tell from the man’s reaction that the boy was like his mother. Certainly not like his father, talking about dissolving her body in acid. The con artist, who seldom showed his real mask, would’ve finished them both, believed Jim—except for their eight-year-old son, David. He had crept in, took the state-issued firearm from the side table, and aimed it at his dad.

David, put that down! barked the dad, lunging for the weapon.

The boy pulled the trigger—the shot through his dad’s head, splattering the back wall. The violent kick threw the eight-year-old backward. The rear of his skull struck the side of the table.

Then blackness.

Jim knew the symptoms well: lack of perception of the body, eyelids closed but seeing light through them. The patient usually thought they were dead because they could still hear—but their mind was intact—cut off from reality. Jim didn’t know that the wounded boy heard his mother scream that her son would never fall in love. She said it in the hall as paramedics wheeled his body out. Because of that comment, the boy thought himself dead, believing the dead remained in their bodies and could still hear.

At the time, his mother was haunted by a memory from the prior Christmas, when she was packing bags at Walmart and David saw a cat get hit by a truck. Bloody hands—he carried the animal toward her as she turned, alarmed—like something his father would do. The man had framed her via a false drug charge in her youth. He conjured a second charge to trap her and threatened to take David.

At the time, Mother told her son not to touch the bleeding cat in his arms—then David realized something profound:

Mommy, I know what I’ll do when I grow up… I’m gonna cure death.

Sweetie, she told him, death isn’t something you cure. It’s natural.

But weren’t all sicknesses ‘natural’ until someone cured them?

Later, that memory would keep her from pulling his life-support. Before she thought the curative of the wide screened TV.

Jim only knew she deployed it, thinking David could escape in media. The hospital report confirmed David’s brain was intact and conscious. Jim knew there was nothing they could do, except hint at euthanasia once the patient returned home. Locked-in syndrome: mind alert, body stone. He could taste dust, hear voices, feel tubes feeding him—but could not move, scream, or blink on command. A mind trapped in its own coffin.

Through the half-open kitchen doorway, Jim’s eyes quickly returned to the back of the boy in a wheelchair. A nurse seated beside him periodically held open his eyes and blinked for him. They had a huge TV covering the wall, media offering escape. He’d seen the same trick with prior patients.

Her eyes lingered on his business card as she glossed over the cost of his invention. She still didn’t believe he had anything to offer her child. So he cut to the well-honed approach:

Mrs. Bellingham…your son is cut off.

My son’s not cut off, she said finally. He’s trapped.

Jim leaned forward, letting the weight of his words land. I can give David a new body.

Her laugh was hollow. A new body? That’s impossible.

I can trick his mind into believing it. That’s what counts.

How?

Jim’s voice dropped, low and certain. By letting him play a very special videogame, the memory came to him like a jolt: the surgical suite, drills tapping holes into David’s skull. 

With your permission, I will marry microchips to David’s brain cells, wiring him into my videogame world, Jim slammed his fist on the table. A game that feels as real as this—living someone else’s life. But it’s an adult game…and David is a child. Which concerns me because the solution comes at a dire cost.

He remembered the lab nights, zipping a corpse into a body bag—the cold efficiency of testing his game as he searched for the next patient before realizing:

Repeated play kills the gamer. That’s why we only test it on Locked-In Syndrome patients…up to now, adults. But David… he’s trapped in the hell of a broken body. My game can free him.

Then he uttered the line that always closed the deal. And between sessions, he can speak with you.

His mother’s gaze softened, the promise of communication reaching her.

A week after David’s head surgery to attach ports. Dusk over Tulane University. The campus bathed in lavender and pink. They were on the top floor of the Richardson Building in the uptown campus.

Jim whispered, Okay…good to go.

In his lab, David lay inside a tanning-bed-like capsule. Jim had named it a comport. Ports from the boy’s head were linked via thick tangles of cables to humming machines. Complex eyepieces irrigated his paralyzed eyes. His mother hovered, tense.

He’s wired for sound, Jim whispered.

Baby, she murmured, think words, and we can hear them.

The speakers crackled to life, translating David’s trapped thoughts into sterile, electronic syllables.

CLEAR MY THROAT! CLEAR MY THROAT!              Techs suctioned his throat, I wanted that for so long…wait? You hear me? saline mist sprayed his eyes. Her tears fell fast. The boy had been choking on saliva for so long.

Mommy… I wanted to clear my throat for so long… MAKE IT STOP… MAKE IT STOP—

No, baby, she said, shaking. These people will make it right. You’re going to play a game.

Help me, Mommy! cried her son through his thoughts. Help me, Mommy! I DON’T WANT TO BE ALIVE!

His mother couldn’t control her tears. She’d picked the wrong man, been fooled, and ruined everything.

Jim gave the signal.

Computers hummed, screens flickered to life. The cooling towers groaned like a train gaining speed. Eight young techs scrambled, making last-minute checks. Monitors activated behind the comport, all shaking screens displaying the same text

A group photographer crept in—snapping one final frame.

Stop—freeze…a nine-year-old boy. Naked. Frightened. Eyes pried open by machines. No one in that room would guess it, but this image would become one of the most iconic photos in human history. Posters, dorm walls, T-shirts. Times Square marquee. National Portrait Gallery beside presidents and pioneers—

But that would come later…for now, his mother held onto hope. That this was freedom. That Jim’s invention would save her son. David did not know hope. He did not know freedom. He was the first child explorer in a new world.

A guinea pig. Somewhere in the future, he would become a savior on par with other famous souls of the early 21st Century. Prophet. Post-human. But not now. Now, he was just a boy screaming from inside a machine. In control of nothing.

Although no one would dare imagine it, Dr. Jim Tutwiler’s machine will not claim young David’s life. He alone will survive. And everything will change, when he will be liberated in the distant future by a top-secret government agent named Ray Kemper, whom he will meet—

In the year, 2059.

part two

Ray Kemper

"And there shall be a time of trouble.

Such as never was since there was a nation."

Daniel 12:1

one

Ray, you with me? she asked.

Her voice—his secret lover’s—sliced through their private comlink, wrapping around him like a half-remembered dream: warm skin, soap-slicked limbs, that final kiss in the hotel suite. The one they both knew could cost them prison, or worse. That risk lived in the air between them. Constant—

Breathing.

Maybe that’s why her voice shattered the moment he’d just had—the strange, sharp clarity that had surged up while he stared at the videowall showing a child’s face, angelic and doomed. David Bellingham, age nine. Frozen forever in that famous image, just before he entered Tutwiler’s simulation and became the only one to survive the gaming.

A thought had surfaced—something important. Terrifying.

Now it was gone.

Like a dream under light.

I’m here, Ray muttered. He didn’t see. I ducked before he looked back.

Heroism hadn’t drawn him in. Not glory. Not ideology. Just the simple hunger to matter. He’d enlisted in the FCC’s Web Agent Corps years before—the cutting-edge soldier class of the new web war. No bullets, no nations. Just feeds. Web locations. Lying from behind virtual skins. Acting roles—

Hunting.

America no longer printed currency. Just eCredits. Civilian life was a song lyric: Hanging on by a thread. Written by the Moo, the world superstar who hid behind Kid Rock’s skin, but wrote and sang. While Ray and millions of others lived its lyrics every day. After continual Covid, mass AI unemployment, the Great Hacking, planetary web outage, mass drownings, and electrocutions.

Ray Kemper served on the front line of this war. Songs might be written. But this was no symbol. It was the most terrifying world war in history. And wars were made. By accident.