The fish were yellow now, though she remembered them as a less realistic purple the last time she was here. A cool mist played across her face as she sat on the rocky bank beside the raging river. The roar of the falls wrapped her in white noise, and for a moment she surrendered to the serenity of isolation. She wiped her hands on her blouse, stood, and walked along the narrow rock wall toward the cliff’s edge. The sound swelled, a siren call drowning her senses in euphoria.
Her muscles loosened, her breathing slowed, and her steps fell into rhythm with her heartbeat. The wet stone betrayed her bare foot near the waterline. She slipped, and the trance shattered in a surge of adrenaline. She caught herself before tumbling to certain death under nature’s spectacle.
Not yet, she thought.
She slowed her breathing and willed herself to relax again, and after a few moments, the feeling of lightness returned. Perched on her hands and knees, she peered over the edge at a vast blue-green ocean a kilometer. From here, the water appeared still and unmoving – a simple type of beauty against the raging torrent of the clifftop rapids. The endless flatness of the horizon felt like the world’s edge — or possibly the distant shore of another. It called her. She answered.
Legs straightened. Arms lifted for balance. She drew a deep lungful of cold, damp air, closed her eyes, and fell forward, joining the waterfall in its timeless descent.
She flew.
The sensation felt natural, like swimming. With a thought, she drifted from the clifftop toward the ocean below, occasionally soaring up or off to one side to assure herself that she was in control. Satisfied, she scoffed at the immutable laws of gravity, pitched upward and rolled, looking back in wonder at the endless cascade of water. Arms limp, she scissored her feet and gained speed down the sandy shoreline. A rainbow formed ahead, vivid against the milky white foam. She sailed silently through it.
When her momentum slowed to a near stop, she rolled, torso downward, and dove towards the ocean’s surface, picking up speed as the roiling waters rushed up to meet her. She leveled out a few meters above them and skimmed the beach for two more kilometers. White sand and palm trees passed underneath her. The falls faded to a soft exhale, replaced by the gentle hiss of wind rustling through leaves, the thrumming of waves on the shore, and the staccato song of birds in the distance. A glade rolled into view. She shifted her weight, slowed herself, and touched down on a carpet of dew-soaked wildflower petals, stopping herself with three running steps before collapsing and rolling onto her back. She dug her fingers into the dirt.
She lay there for a long time. The noon sun warmed her face and dried her clothes. Her mind emptied. At last, none of it mattered anymore. Serah Wyles: the quiet one. Serah Wyles: the nobody. Serah Wyles: the sensible one who always played it safe. Serah Wyles: the boring one that nothing ever happened to. Carefree birds flew inland in a vivid display of colors and songs, each species engaged in its own dance.
Without warning, the birds went silent, reversed course, and fled toward the sea. A scream pierced the grove, cutting her tranquility in two. The meadow stilled as the echo died. She sat up and peered into the dense thicket of trees, now unnaturally quiet. Leaves rustled deep in the trees, moving toward her. An elderly man burst from the thicket and continued running across the glade in her direction. His movement was far spryer than his years allowed.
Still, this was incredibly rude. Couldn’t he see she wanted to be alone to enjoy what little downtime she was allowed? She stood up and began stepping backward, pretending to survey her surroundings, hoping to divert the man’s attention somewhere. The last thing she expected or wanted was human contact. Not now. Not here.
The man stopping almost directly in front of her. He searched her face with a mixture of recognition and surprise. “It’s you, isn’t it?!”
“Hello,” she said, stupefied. It was a silly thing to say. She’d never seen the man before, though he recognized her. This happened occasionally. As a correspondent reporter, she was on the lowest rung of “celebrity.” Everyone recognized her, but they never knew from where. They were usually disappointed once they learned she was that girl from the news.
“You’ve got to help me,” he pleaded. “There isn’t much time.” The accent was unusual. She couldn’t place it, but she understood the words. The old man grabbed her shoulders frantically. This was no holographic avatar; his fingers were cold and clammy.
She stepped back, releasing herself from the man’s grip. “I don’t understand.”
“No, wait…” His voice trailed, and he seemed lost in thought as he took in the surroundings. “This is wrong! It’s too tropical,” he said, his accent drawing out the last word with an extra syllable.
He was right about that much. She looked for signs he was hopped up on brain dust or some other narcotic. His face was round and pink, not gaunt and gray. Maybe he’d accidentally ingested something. Perhaps he was ustable–possibly violent.
“Well,” she offered, “you could try the waterfall about two kilometers up the beach. The clifftop had pine trees.” She spoke in calm, helpful tones, then realized she sounded more condescending than soothing.
“Don’t let him find me,” he whimpered. “Not yet.” He fumbled around in his pockets as if looking for something.
Serah’s throat went dry. The man was hysterical, incoherent with shock. “Who? Don’t let who find you?” she asked as she looked around for signs of a nurse, caretaker, or anyone who might know the man and be able to help him. The last thing she wanted was to be dragged into somebody else’s crisis.
He studied her, longer this time. His expression turned ambivalent. Then, his hands together under his chin, his face lit up with realization. “I’m so terribly sorry. This wasn’t part of the plan.”
The trees began rustling again. A tall figure clad in a gray-caped uniform emerged. The mirrored visor of a helmet obscured his face. She didn’t recognize the uniform, but nothing about it felt friendly. The figure raised an arm and aimed a weapon toward them.
“No,” the old man whispered. He turned to Serah, fixed her with a gaze of either apology or pity, then shrugged defeat. “I’m so sorry.”
There was a high-pitched whistle as the projectile sped through the air and a dull thud as it entered the man’s back. The man’s face froze, still staring at her. Then his chest opened with a wet crack, and blood washed over her.
She screamed in the darkness of her apartment for almost a full minute before her conscious mind took hold of her senses and told her to stop. The repeating echo of the gunshot faded to the sound of her pounding heart in her ears. Her body was drenched in cold sweat, and her arms still tingled from the shock as she forced herself to her feet and took a few long breaths to calm her racing heartbeat.
She pressed the release button on the skullcap. It took five seconds for the nanofiber leads to retract from her scalp and the bio-adhesive contacts to release. She quickly pulled off the multi-tentacled device and tossed it on the pillow. A delicate silk robe was draped over an old-fashioned chaise in the corner. She slipped into it, flipping long black curls from under the collar as she began pacing the apartment.
“Lights,” she said in a shaky, unsure voice, half terrified by the lingering visions of the dream and half frustrated by the interruption to her sleep cycle. The walls of the sleeping area finally came into focus as her eyes adjusted. She allowed the sensation of silk on skin and the familiar surroundings of her apartment to bring her back to reality. The robe clung to her sweat-covered arms, feeling like a heavy second skin as she walked back to the bed, flipped on the dreamspinner’s display, and keyed up the log files.
Sleep cycle initiated: 01:33 hours.
Theta band program initiated: 01:54 hours.
Program termination: 02:41 hours.
Abort code initiated due to parameter failure.
“Parameter failure,” Serah muttered, mulling the phrase over in her mind a few times. So, that was what the arcane piece of machinery called a nightmare. It was an understated expression, she thought. Was “parameter failure” the cause or the result of her nightmare? She reset the program. It wasn’t that she cared about these pre-programmed, personalized custom dreams; she just liked that they allowed her to function with a much more efficient and considerably shorter night’s sleep. Considering the shock to her system, however, any kind of sleep seemed unlikely tonight.
Dispenser lights flickered on as Serah entered her kitchen; multiple display panels indicated their readiness despite the unusual hour. She punched up her personal preferences menu and thumped the “coffee” entry at the top of the list with three fingers. She could not prove anything, but she believed the machine somehow registered how hard she pressed the panel and adjusted its preparation time accordingly. It took a mere seven seconds for the panel to slide back, revealing the perfect cup of coffee — at least by her standards. She grabbed the cup, sipped at it, and made a silent gesture that her kitchen recognized as instructions to pull up the newsnet feed and send it to the viewer in the corner by her cluttered, all-purpose table.
The barrage of flashing images and noises made her wince with sensory overload, and she struggled to pick meaning out of the pandemonium. There had been another uprising at a Comanche embassy over in the Americas. She watched momentarily, trying to figure out which embassy it had been, but eventually gave up. It seemed there was always an uprising somewhere these days. Places and reasons eventually blurred together, though most everyone she knew maintained the same opinion: Sensible people have long since left the world – this one, anyway.
She waved her hand, killing the video feed and reducing the audio to ambient levels. She did not care about the story but needed to hear human voices and the familiar tones of the newsfeed announcers. She hated being awake at this hour, as even her own agency’s overnight programming schedule would be laughably deplorable. If she left it up to her preference file, the screen would assume that she was up at 3:00 am by choice and select some 350-year-old movie she had already seen several dozen times. The last thing she wanted now was imagery of some fictional, unobtainable lifestyle in a quaint, centuries-old period piece. Journalism was her reality during daylight hours and her refuge in the uncertainty of the overnight world, though she had always meant to ask someone in programming if they knew why stories of violence and human suffering played overnight while human triumph stories dominated the day. Perhaps only the misfits were up watching the news in the middle of the night. Even the eccentrics would be long asleep.
She sipped at the coffee again and let the voices drift off to background noise like the sound of the sea crashing against the shore in the dream. The indistinguishable chattering brought back the noise of the falls, and the face of the strange man still haunted her. Everything except him had been a familiar part of the dream. It was one of her favorites — despite the minor deviations from the laws of physics and geography that, thankfully, she always failed to notice when she was in dreamstate. The dreamspinner selected it for her every few weeks or so and varied it depending on the current needs of her subconscious – which, of course, was the dreamspinner’s job. Sometimes, the variants were mildly disturbing, such as a storm or a sudden fall while flying, but never the graphic, blood-curdling murder of a terrified old man. That one was new.
She marched back to the bedroom area, pressed the diagnostic button on the sleep monitor, and waited a few seconds. A green icon appeared on the screen indicating that no anomalies or failures were found, which made her wonder if a broken system was even capable of self-diagnosis. For that matter, did the diagnostic systems still even work? Her dreamspinner was at least fifty years old, and its skullcap technology was radically different from the modern neural jack. It seemed unlikely that many people had experience in tuning a device such as this, and even if she had it restored to like-new condition, the machine had more than outlived its expected lifespan. It wasn’t a stretch to believe the diagnostics and safety systems had stopped working decades ago. She struggled to remember if the woman who had sold the unit to her had mentioned any such defects.
The display justified the green status with a scroll of technical gibberish that felt like a foreign language to her, and she suddenly felt completely helpless in the face of such a deceptively simplistic and ultimately useless feature.
Serah tapped the communications console on the wall, scanned her personal comm directory, and selected the listing for the dreamspinner’s manufacturer. Within seconds, a holo-projector lifted itself off the table, scanned the room for the most convenient, unobstructed floor space, and hovered over it. A projected figure shimmered to life in the middle of the room.
“Noctivo Systems customer support at your service. My name is Syn. Allen. How can I help you this evening, Ms. Wyles?” The holo was that of a portly middle-aged man with a high forehead and round wire-rimmed spectacles wrapped around each ear. The acoustics and ambient echoes seemed slightly off, betraying his nature as a light projection. She knew she should probably get the holo-drone fixed, but like the dreamspinner, it was nearly a century old, and she took so few calls at home that the expense hardly seemed justified.
“Hello, Allen,” Serah smiled, then suddenly remembered her casual state of dress and instinctively closed her robe in embarrassment. He had identified himself with the “Syn” honorific – identifying himself as a synthetic intelligence – thus, he was probably not concerned with such human vanity. Still, it was certain he was recording everything he saw in the room to add to her customer file. “Something seems to be wrong with my dreamspinner,” she continued. “I’ve just had a rather disturbing nightmare that woke me up.”
Allen tilted his head to one side and regarded her for a moment. “I’m so sorry to hear that,” he said with a sincere tone as he looked around the room for her sleeping area. Are you all right now? Should I send a medical team?”
Serah was taken aback for a moment. She’d expected a well-rehearsed apology or defense of the product, not genuine concern for her well-being. This is a technician for the corporatocracy. She could not believe she was that important to them. On the other hand, she realized that her neighbors would have heard her earlier terrified screams, yet they didn’t bother to knock or at least call to see if she was okay. This was mildly disturbing. “No, no, I’m fine.” She waved him off. “I’m just a bit shaken, that’s all. I’d just like to make sure it doesn’t happen again, you understand.”
“Of course,” Allen nodded. He gestured with his hand and a collection of words assembled in the air around him, blurred by the low-res distortion at the projector field’s outer edge. Serah could see that he was expertly traversing a series of menus, though she couldn’t decipher any of their contents. The image on the sleep monitor next to her bed flickered and began scrolling various pieces of telemetry, and its output was mirrored in the air to Allen’s right.
“Ah, there we are,” Allen smiled. “I have access to your system now, Ms. Wyles. If you’d like to sit and relax, this should only take a couple of minutes.”
“Thank you,” Serah said, sitting on the couch in the sunken living room where she could see the entirety of her L-shaped efficiency apartment. She tucked in her legs, sat on her feet, and sipped her coffee. After a few unproductive minutes, she grabbed the portable datapad on the cushion beside her and pretended to study it.
Allen poured through the readouts for several minutes, occasionally furrowing his brow or mumbling to himself in puzzlement. “I think this is going a bit beyond my realm of experience, Ms. Wyles. Would you mind if I called one of our tier three experts to consult?”
“No, not at all,” Serah rolled her eyes, wondering how crowded her apartment would be before the night was over.
A few seconds later, a second man appeared in the middle of the room. He was taller than Allen, with a well-toned muscular build and a strong jaw. His good looks were almost cartoonish, like those found in an adult-oriented simulation — the type where a man arrives to fix the helpless woman’s malfunctioning appliance and finds himself helplessly seduced into some ridiculous parody of lovemaking. She laughed at the ludicrousness of such an encounter but could not think of another explanation for why a technician would choose such a completely inappropriate personal presentation. She gave a quick prayer of thanks that he was at least human in appearance. A seven-foot eagle, centaur, or other strange mythological creature was fine in social settings, but having one traipsing around her living room in the middle of the night would probably have been more than she could bear after her earlier excitement.
“Hello, Allen,” the brawny newcomer said politely. “What have you got?”
“Ah, Étienne, bonjour, take a look at this.” Allen grabbed a text block from the air before him and “threw” it across the room.
Étienne, even the name reeked of pretension, reached out and caught the image, reassembling it in front of his face with one well-practiced motion. It followed in front of him as he walked toward the sleeping area. “Wow, an old T40 series. Don’t see too many of these anymore.” He chuckled and looked around the room. His eyes eventually fell on the couch where Serah was sitting. “Good evening, Ms. Wyles,” he said, pretending to have just noticed her for the first time. His oversized biceps seemed to flex as he spoke her name.
“Hello,” Serah said, stifling another laugh by staring into her empty coffee cup. She recognized his accent as that of a Londoner who spoke English far more often than his native French. Allen had probably called a local tech in case a physical service call was required. It would serve Étienne right if he were forced to bring his physical body to her apartment to complete the repairs. She would revel in irony if, in the real world of the Root Realm, Étienne was actually a frail, 100-year-old man with first-hand knowledge of her dreamspinner’s internal workings.
Allen continued, “The diagnostic shows no physical anomalies with the local system, yet look at this telemetry…” The two spoke quietly together, pulling up various displays on the sleep monitor, occasionally arguing over their interpretations in techno-babble speech. After several minutes, they gave up, and a third person appeared in the living room: a shorter, blonde female in her early fifties dressed in a white suit. Judging from the amount of data that seemed to orbit around her, she must have been a high-level engineer of some sort. The newcomer conferred with the other two technicians before returning to the living room.
“Ms. Wyles?” she asked, then continued without waiting for confirmation, “I’m Vir. Dr. Adams. I’m a dream supervisor for Noctivo Systems.”
Serah put the coffee cup on the table in front of the couch. She was certain this would explain of what everyone was whispering about. “How do you do?” she offered, resisting the urge to shake hands with the projection.
“I just saw your dream. Looks like you took quite a shock. I hope you aren’t suffering any lingering effects.”
“No, not really,” Serah assured her. “It’s just that … well, nothing like that has ever happened before.”
“That’s understandable,” the woman said, nodding as if she hadn’t paid attention to Serah’s words. Tell me, Ms. Wyles, are you under any unusual stress lately? Work or relationship difficulties?”
The personal nature of the question took Serah aback for a moment. She considered making a wise crack about how she enjoyed keeping an ample supply of stress in her life but thought better of it. The woman was a psychoengineer, after all, and probably over-analyzing every shift in her posture. “No, nothing out of the ordinary,” she finally said, making sure to keep eye contact lest the good doctor read something into that as well.
“There was a man in your dreams. Did you recognize him?”
“No, I’ve never seen him before.”
“Well, people in dreams may be proxies for real-life relationships. Did your feelings toward him remind you of anyone you know, a boss or a boyfriend, maybe?”
“No, neither. You watched the dream. I only saw him for a few seconds, He didn’t elicit any feelings at all.” Serah paused for a minute. “Listen, if this is some free psychoanalysis you’re giving me, I’m not comfortable with doing anything like that at this time.”
Dr. Adams appeared mildly disappointed. “Your dreamspinner has suffered what we call a ‘parameter flood,’“ the woman began in an inflection that reminded Serah of several of her former primary school instructors. “You see, when you are exposed to drastic changes or unusual stress, the dream program is designed to compensate, but with a minimum deviation from your preprogrammed sleep/dream regimen. On rare occasions, the stress level is so severe that the compensations create additional stress on your subconscious. An analogy might be the way that patching a small leak in a dike can cause shifts in the rocks that lead to more small leaks, and then larger ones until the entire dike collapses. With the dreamspinner, those leaks are nothing more than program instructions. In a parameter flood, the dream state deviates from the preprogrammed dataset, and the number of compensating instructions increases exponentially until the dreamspinner simply can’t keep up. In those instances, it’s programmed to abort its programming and wake you up to minimize the risk of psychological damage.”
“You’re saying I’m so stressed, I broke your dream machine?”
Dr. Adams frowned slightly, “Not precisely. It’s just that—”
“A joke,” Serah furrowed her brow, instantly regretting the attempt to make one. “As I just said, I haven’t been under any unusual stress lately.” Had the woman not been paying attention, or had she just not believed her? She identified herself as a virtual person, meaning she was human, but lived exclusively in-Prame and no longer used her physical body. Most of Serah’s friends lived this way, but they were still very much human. Dr. Adams seemed more like a synthetic personality trained as a psycho-engineering help file. It would be a minor breach of ethics to have syntelligence misrepresent itself as a virtual human, but the corporatocracy wasn’t above such breaches of trust.
Adams cut her off abruptly, “Maybe you don’t think so, Ms. Wyles, but your subconscious most certainly does, and our equipment agrees with it.”
Never mind, Serah decided. Adams was human, after all. A synthetic customer service rep would not be baited into rudeness like that.
Adams composed herself and gestured to a block of telemetry hovering in the air to her left. “We do, of course, have staff members who monitor the system and intervene when these types of situations arise, but with cutbacks being what they are, and your system being as old as it is… Well, it’s nothing you need to worry about. Even when real-time dream supervisors aren’t available, this legacy model has three dozen failsafe systems. It may give you some bumpy nights, but it’s still perfectly safe to use. I suggest you consider upgrading from this hardware-based system to one of our hosted neuro-simulation services. They’re much faster and more efficient at dealing with –”
“I sleep offline,” Serah snapped and lifted her hair, showing pure, unblemished skin behind her left ear, where an implanted neural interface would normally be found on 95% of Earth residents. “No wetware interface.”
Dr. Adams was taken aback. “A slowbander? That’s fascinating. I haven’t met many planet-side adults who don’t—” she paused, embarrassed. “So, are you an immigrant, then?”
“I’m born and bred Terran,” Serah sang, not bothering to meet the doctor’s gaze. She had been through the conversation so many times that she wondered if she shouldn’t have the transcript written out on flyers that she could distribute whenever someone tried to convert her to the ways of modern technology. “It’s simply a personal choice,” she shrugged.
Dr. Adams smiled patronizingly, obviously having already performed her mental categorization. “Well,” she said dejectedly, “technically, this model’s service program does cover both individual and group therapy sessions to help you orient yourself to the sleep/dream regimen, as well as helping you optimize the programs to give you the maximum benefit. Of course, nobody uses these old models anymore, and we no longer have the physical facilities to handle such requests, but Noctivo will honor the letter of the agreement should you choose to–”
“I’ll be fine,” Serah said curtly.
Dr. Adams smiled and faded from the room. Allen and Étienne said brief but polite goodbyes and followed shortly behind her. Serah was alone once again.
© 2022 Darrin Snider. All Rights Reserved.
