Serah Wyles walked a serpentine trail through palm trees and onto the white sand beach, knowing full well it wasn’t real, but also not caring for a moment. White, foamy tide roared up from her right, barely reaching her toes, providing temporary relief from the blistering-hot sands. There were clouds this time, purple-gray, low and ominous on the horizon. The sky had been empty last time, but these were far enough away that they were a nice contrast, not an actual concern.
Birds sang as they flew in from the sea with the tide. Each song was as different as the patterns of colors in their plumage. They sailed overhead on the ocean breeze, barely flapping their wings as they proceeded over the barrier dunes and into the tropical forest beyond.
It was good to relax finally. The last couple of weeks had been faster-paced than she liked. While the world was, on the whole, relatively peaceful, there were always minor squabbles between self-serving corporate executives on opposite sides of the world, ready to start skirmishes over territory and markets. As the agency’s primary foreign correspondent, it fell to her to tell the story and make it sound like anything other than what it was: ego and greed.
A scream sounded from trees to her left, not the cry of a bird or predator, but something desperate, almost human-sounding. Instinctively, she climbed the dune. Sand shifted under her feet, fighting her ascent, threatening to shift and consume her. At the top, a cold breeze met her; the clouds encroached, the skies darkened, and thunder sounded in the distance, its drawn-out rumble silencing the thrum of the sea.
The scream sounded again, more frantic this time, definitely human.
“Hello?” she called to the darkness. “Are you in trouble?”
She pressed on. The woods grew darker. Trees became uniform columns that grew wider until they were little more than square black pillars almost two meters on a side. She looked up. They seemed to extend upward for kilometers. A dazzling display of shooting stars, or possibly some bioluminescent insects, flitted across their tops.
A low thrum could be heard, and some of the pillars pulsed with light. Streaks of purple and red seemed to dance from one to the next, continuing down the rows, far into the distance, as if they were beacons telling her which way to go. The rain fell, colder than she expected, soaking her dress and freezing her feet. She considered turning back, but immediately found herself lost in a darkness that stretched endlessly in every direction.
A third scream prickled the hairs on her arm, louder and closer this time, sounding even more urgent. She continued following the streaks of light deeper through the gridwork of pillars. Vines and shrubs had become walls. The walls became a maze. Somewhere, defying all expectation, a bright red pipe appeared, emerging from the vines. She followed it through a series of turns until it was joined by a yellow pipe, then another red, two blue, until the entire scene had become a labyrinth of multi-colored pipes.
Footsteps through puddles, frantic and fast, echoed ahead. She thought she had caught a flash of movement, a figure stumbling through the maze.
“Hello? Wait!” she called and started after it, following the sounds of footsteps that gradually slowed from exhaustion.
She rounded a corner and saw him. A frail man, easily eighty natural years marked his face; dozens more could have been artificially added, for all she knew. He regarded her, panic and terror visible in his eyes. He was several centimeters shorter than her and wore a cream-colored tunic and black pants, not Earth fashion, stained with muck and mud and drenched by the rain. His hair, thinning on top, with the sides longish and only partially grey, was matted to his head and face.
His eyes looked upward as if making a calculation. “Eighty-Five,” he said. “Not yet!” He turned and started to run, but the pipes had closed in on all sides.
“Are you okay?” Serah held her hands up, attempting to be as non-threatening as possible.
“I’m not ready yet!” the man whispered quickly, as if thinking of what to do next.
“Not ready for what?!”
A shadow seemed to engulf the air behind him. A figure stepped out from between the pipes. It wore a crisp black uniform and a visored helmet that Serah did not recognize, but couldn’t picture as anything but sinister. It held a strange-looking sidearm in a gloved hand at waist height, aimed directly at the old man.
He grabbed Serah gently by each arm and looked sadly up at her. “I’m sorry,” he whispered.
The gun made a loud pop, then a distinct crack as the projectile entered his back, and a loud whump as his chest exploded, showering her in warm blood.
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 its 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 as if it were the predatory insect it superficially resembled. 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 preprogrammed, personalized custom dreams anymore; she just liked that they allowed her to function with a much more efficient and considerably shorter night’s sleep. Adrenaline politely told her any sleep seemed unlikely from this point, however.
Dispenser lights flickered on as Serah entered the kitchen area. 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 holoviewer in the corner by her cluttered, all-purpose table.
The barrage of flashing images and sounds made her wince in sensory overload. She struggled to discern meaning amid the pandemonium—another uprising at a Comanche embassy over in the Americas. There was always one. At 02:30, it felt like sensible people had long since left the world – well, the root realm, anyway.
She waved her hand to kill the holo and reduce the audio to ambient levels. The story didn’t matter. She just needed human voices in her space – her voices, her people, the newsfeeds. She hated being awake this early. Even her own agency’s overnight programming was laughably deplorable. 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 and eccentrics were up at this hour.
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 strange man’s face still haunted her, as had the unreal imagery. The beach was familiar. 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, but never impossible mazes or the graphic, blood-curdling murder of a terrified old man. That one was new.
She had to know what happened. Marching back to the sleeping area, she 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. This verdict was justified by a scroll of technical gibberish that felt like a foreign language to her, and she felt completely helpless in the face of such a 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 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 as “Syn,” or synthetic intelligence, so while he was not concerned with such human vanity, 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. “A rather disturbing nightmare has just awakened me.”
Allen tilted his head to one side and regarded her for a moment. “I’m so sorry to hear that,” he said. His tone was sincere, and 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. This wasn’t the well-rehearsed apology or defense of the product she expected. It felt like genuine concern for her well-being from a technician for the corporatocracy. She wasn’t that important to them.
“No, no, I’m fine.” She waved him off. “I’m just a bit shaken, that’s all. I’d 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 said, smiling. “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, still unable to concentrate.
Allen poured through the readouts for several minutes, occasionally furrowing his brow or mumbling in puzzlement. “This is going a bit beyond my experience, Ms. Wyles. Would you mind if I brought in one of our tier three experts?”
“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. It was a ridiculous choice of presentation, though right now she was grateful it was at least human, not a giant centaur or company mascot.
“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. That’s a real antique.” 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 had traveled extensively, spoke seven languages, and easily 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 woman 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 be the explanation 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 wisecrack 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 patching a small leak in a dike can cause shifts in the rocks that lead to more small leaks, 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—”
“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 Vir, a person who lived exclusively as a virtual presence; no physical body in use. Most of Serah’s friends lived this way now, 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 for syntelligence to misrepresent itself as a virtual human, and 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.”
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 printed on flyers to distribute whenever someone tried to convert her to 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 behind. Serah was alone once again.
© 2026 Darrin Snider. All Rights Reserved.
