So many people, all of them lost.
Like bluish-white apparitions made entirely from the swirling light of memories, they walked through fog, oblivious to the strangers who walked among them. They seemed to stretch on forever, or at least as far as Serah could see in the billowing gray clouds. She walked through the crowd without purpose. Occasionally, brightly colored words formed in the air in languages she couldn’t read, but somehow, she still knew what they said.
After a few minutes, she came to what, for all practical purposes, could be considered a wall — a slightly darker, denser patch of fog that pushed back with equal force when she touched it. Puzzled, she turned left and changed course to follow along the wall.
Her path led her into another large group of people, the same as all the others, except for one. To her left, in a small group of seven or eight, one of the figures abruptly took on a sharper focus. No longer an indiscreet bundle of swirling light, this one had the face of an older woman. Serah quickly looked away and picked up her pace, trying not to engage with the judgmental stare. They passed within arm’s reach of each other. Serah could feel piercing eyes studying her intently as she passed — head turning to follow her in her peripheral vision but making no move to approach.
Serah carried onward, accelerating her pace. The wall she had kept on her right and was following abruptly ended, and she found herself in the open again, surrounded by more of the featureless, ghostlike figures. There seemed to be fewer on her left, so she proceeded in that general direction, focusing all her attention on nothingness in front of her, afraid to look directly at any of the people.
On her left, she saw it again – this his time, a tall, thin man wearing some kind of workman’s coveralls. She caught a quick glimpse before looking away, probably too obvious this time. A shiver of adrenaline shot up her spine. She felt her face flush and her heartbeat quicken. Knowing she had seen him, the man turned his whole body toward her. She did not look back but could feel the same piercing eyes as the old woman’s. He was studying her.
She continued walking, fighting back feelings of panic. She had lost track of the direction she was traveling, unsure if she was even moving in a straight line. Signs appeared again in the air around her. She avoided looking at them. Some were directional, she knew. Others were informational. The language was still foreign, yet familiar at the same time. Abruptly, she came to another wall like the first one. This time, she turned to her right, keeping with a wall on her left and following it along.
Just in front of her and to her right, another flash of recognition appeared, and one of the vaporous figures took a solid form. This time, it was an older man, possibly in his mid-60s. He had silver hair, neatly coiffed, and a black and gray business suit. His general stature was that of someone in good health and physical condition. Unlike the other figures, however, he immediately started toward her as soon as he appeared, pushing other people out of the way as he inched closer.
Consumed with panic, Serah broke into a run. She stayed as close to the wall as she could, still excusing herself as she burst through crowds of people, sometimes pushing them, sometimes knocking them over. She had no idea how close the man was, but she knew he was somewhere behind her, pursuing her. He would never stop. He would only change form.
She was approaching a corner in the room of fog. This would force her to turn right. The crowds were growing thinner. If she kept straight to the end of the wall she would go through at least two more large groups of people, which she believed might slow down her pursuer. If she moved to her right now, she would be out in the open, and it would be a dead sprint. She was reasonably confident she could still gain ground on him in the open, but something about him seemed to move inhumanly fast for a man his age, and she was sure the crowd wouldn’t slow him down significantly. Even if it did, he could just appear as someone else in front of her.
She approached the last cluster of people before the corner. Once she was out of her pursuer’s sight, she would break to her right and into the clearing, hoping to gain as much distance as she could before he noticed and resumed his pursuit. Instead, as she entered the group, she caught a glimpse of a new sign flashing on the wall of fog ahead of her.
It simply hovered in the air, directly over what she now saw was a dark, black opening in the wall. Like the other signs, she could not read the language when she looked directly at it, but somehow her mind translated it.
“Veritas.”
Serah considered her options for a split second: run into the clearing and keep the chase going for who knows how long until she was finally caught, or trust her instincts and jump through the doorway, which, for all she knew, could leave her trapped in a room with no exits. Her instinct told her that “Veritas” was a safe place, but still, she did not know the actual purpose and meaning of the sign.
A hand toucher her right shoulder. She shrieked and twisted her body to break free. The hand slipped off, and another hand grabbed her exposed left shoulder while the first recovered and seized her right wrist. The door was only a desperate leap away. She had to know whether it meant salvation or damnation, if nothing else, to end the nightmare. With a scream of anger and terror, she flailed her arms, breaking free of her captor, and leaped forward, head-first into the opening.
She landed on her stomach on the cold floor. Everything went silent except for the sound of her rapid, heavy breathing. Wherever she was, she seemed to have lost her attacker for the moment. Slowly, she looked up and surveyed her surroundings. She was in a simple square room, about six meters on a side, approximately the size of her apartment, except that this room was empty, featureless, and apparently without light. The door had vanished as soon as she entered — or perhaps it only worked in one direction. The walls were translucent, like dim one-way mirrors, and beyond, she could make out the white glow of people walking around, oblivious to what had just happened. Immediately on the other side of the wall where the door had been, a black silhouette stood motionless, as if it were peering through the nothingness and somehow seeing her.
Something told her it could not pass through the door, and Serah instantly felt safe. She walked toward the wall where the figure stood and faced him at last, the blackness of the wall separating them. She studied the outline. It was not the same elderly man who had pursued her moments ago. The figure seemed smaller in stature. Yet, it had that same familiarity about it. Slowly, it raised a hand, held it out, and touched the wall. There was a faint flicker of light, a ripple of energy between the stranger’s hand and the wall. The figure began to wipe away at the fog, the way one would wipe water condensation from a window.
Slowly, the figure on the other side of the wall began to take focus. It stopped moving and leaned forward to peer in at her, and Serah saw herself staring into her own face with the same eyes as the mysterious others.
She screamed.
“It’s okay. You’re safe here,” a man’s voice said calmly.
Abruptly, she turned around. Where nothing had been before, a large, antique desk sat in the middle of the room, bathed in a warm light. Behind the desk was the mysterious old man. The one from her dreams and the one she had seen dead the night before at the construction site. “Please don’t do the ‘getting shot’ thing again,” she said in between gasps, her voice noticeably shaking, “I don’t think I can stand much more of this.” Despite herself, she laughed, half out of hysterics, half because she somehow knew the man was telling the truth when he said she was safe.
“You’re stronger than you think you are, Serah.”
“No, I saw your body. I dreamed of your death. The same face. The same everything. I was …” Something was wrong. She was losing focus. Her thoughts were becoming confused. She heard her voice slurring. Had she been drugged?
“Listen to me, Serah,” the man’s voice became urgent, but he also appeared confused. This is very difficult. I’m trying to help, but you’re in danger. You’ve seen him. You recognize him in any form. But you need to understand what he is.” He paused, trying to collect his thoughts. “You must …” He stopped abruptly, staring into space.
“Must what?” Serah demanded. “Who are you?!”
“That doesn’t matter. Think of me as the dreamer,” he said, half-mumbling, “and you are the dream.” He stared through her to the doorway, oblivious to her.
Serah turned around, already knowing what she would find. She stared directly at herself in the corner of the room, on this side of the doorway. She was wearing the same black and gray uniform of the murderous assassin in the other dreams, and from a holster at her side, she extracted the same unusual-looking pistol. Her doppelganger’s dull, lifeless eyes looked directly at her as the plaser came up to firing position.
“No!” Serah shouted.
For the first time in three nights, Serah did not wake up screaming from a dreamspinner-induced nightmare. Instead, she sat up abruptly and pounded the mattress under her right fist. “Damnit!” she hissed. She hit the control to detach the skullcap, felt the tingle of the nanofibers withdrawing from her scalp, and heard the confirmation beep that the device was safe to remove. Standing up, she peeled off the cap, threw it on the bed, grabbed the silk robe off the chaise, and punched up the dreamspinner’s control interface.
Sleep cycle initiated: 01:16 hours
Theta band program initiated: 01:38 hours
Program termination: 03:37 hours
Abort code initiated due to parameter failure.
Without thinking, she accidentally clicked the menu item to display the telemetry log, and the console began spraying random numbers and symbols into the air before her. She stared, transfixed at them for a second. For a moment, there was recognition. She almost felt she could make sense of the numbers and understand what was happening to her. For a moment, it all made perfect sense. Then, just as quickly, the realization set in. She realized she was looking at a bunch of machine code. It might as well have been ancient runic symbols. Her imagination was running wild.
She sat at the high-top table that divided the kitchen and living areas, selected “desk mode” from the console preferences, and went straight to her inbox. Within seconds, the house console beeped for attention. She looked over to see an incoming call. At 3:45 in the morning, it could only be one person. “Yes?” she said as pleasantly as possible by way of greeting.
“I saw you were logged in. Thought I’d offer you an update. You know, in case you were working,” Erik Walker’s voice said.
Serah sighed, somehow not surprised at his efficiency. Not only was he the most ubiquitous entity in her life, but he was frankly the only person who slept less often than she did.
“Morning, Erik.”
“Your friend in the scans you sent,” he began, obviously building tension toward a great revelation, “is dead.”
“I know. I was the one who made the scans.”
“Except that he died over twenty years ago,” Erik said with a bit of pride as a holo of the man appeared on her viewscreen. It was definitely the same man, though much younger.
Serah rolled her eyes. “I suppose now you’re going to explain how this can be?”
“It took me this long to find a facial recognition match. In this case, I had to jump through three interstellar Q-links and search a dozen off-world datanets.” The image of the dead man from Serah’s scan appeared next to its living counterpart. “I can tell you his name is Dr. Abil Halferne; he is … rather, was … a well-respected and highly accoladed scientist. Born on the Mycion colony, back before it went independent, 107 years ago. He has over fifteen advanced degrees: medicine, biophysics, neuroscience, cybernetics, xenobiology, you name it. At the time of his death, he worked for Banpei research station just off the jump station at Auria, where he lived with two dozen scientists — almost as impressive as him — as some sort of a think tank.”
Serah leaned back and punched a sequence of buttons on the food dispenser. “I thought Auria was a low-tech system.”
“They ban most off-world tech on the planet itself, but this was a self-sustaining station in the free space zone just off the gate. They had no direct ties to Auria.”
“It’s an odd place to put a research station,” Serah mused. The dispenser beeped twice, and she retrieved the cup from the open slot.
Erik continued, “Financing is completely off-book, as far as I could tell, but all of the members maintained active professorships at dozens of universities in different systems, so I imagine it was the most convenient location for them to travel to their day jobs.”
Serah nodded, “All right, so that’s a start. Let’s get hold of some of the other scientists who worked there and—”
“That’s just it,” Erik said, his voice becoming somber, “There was an accident twenty years ago. Some kind of system failure that resulted in the destruction of the station. They’re all dead.”
“So how is he on Earth and dead again, twenty years later? Did he fake his death? Twin brother? Is he a clone?”
Erik shook his head, “I haven’t gotten that far. I’m checking commercial transactions, transit access, public vidcams, and even passenger manifests on interstellar transports. This is as much as I could find in six hours. He’s made a great effort to stay off the grid … at least in the Root Realm.”
Serah exhaled dejectedly and drew the cup to her mouth. She was rewarded with a bitter taste that surprised her, and she almost spat it across the room. She turned around to read the display on the dispenser but already knew what it would say. Thurinese oolong tea. Perplexed, she checked the display, punching up the last requests the machine had filled. Someone must have been in her apartment. She suddenly remembered the 16 missing hours from the previous day when the waiter said she, or someone who looked just like her, had been drinking the same tea at nine stones.
“You all right, Miss Wyles?” Erik asked. Though he was not sending a holo for her visual reference, her image was still transmitted to him. There was no point in pretending at this point. He would have seen the entire incident with the beverage and could see the tell-tale puffy rings under her bloodshot eyes.
“Honestly, this whole thing has me a bit spooked, Erik. For the past three nights, I’ve been dreaming about this man. Yet, last night was the first time I’d ever actually seen him.” She leaned in and peered closely at the holo again. “I was hoping to find an answer, I suppose.”
Erik tried to be consoling, “Dreams are funny things. Maybe your mind is substituting this man for Something in the dream after the fact. Have you consulted your—” He paused, realizing what she meant. “Ah, of course you did. The dreamspinner malfunction.”
She made a clicking sound with her tongue and nodded in acknowledgment. Tears started to well up in her eyes. She straightened up and cleared her throat in her best imitation of “in control.” “The only reason I knew to go to that crime scene was because I’d already seen it. Erik. I think I’d already been there. I think–”
“Okay, stop there,” Erik interrupted. The images of Halfere disappeared and were quickly replaced by Erik’s holo. He had a concerned look on his face. “You’re jumping to conclusions. Dreams are hardly a reliable substitute for memories. Your conscious mind is constantly editing them, trying to make sense of what your subconscious sees and vice-versa.”
“No, this isn’t that. This was so real, Erik! And there’s more. There are gaps in my memory. Nineteen hours yesterday. I think I’ve been going places and talking to people, but I don’t remember any of it.” She started to cry. “I think I’m somehow involved in all of this.”
Erik held up a hand, urging her to stop talking. “We’ll figure this out. Why don’t you take a deep breath, relax, and tell me everything from the beginning?”
Serah nodded and paced for a second, summoning the image of every brave face she’d ever interviewed. She took a long breath and reached for the tea. The flavor was still off-putting but somehow familiar. She savored it for a few seconds before swallowing, hoping the sensation somehow held a clue to help her remember something new. She thought images of places and people were trying to form in her mind for a moment, but they quickly faded again. They were distant, only vaguely familiar, and possibly just her imagination. Forcing them wasn’t doing much to calm her nerves.
She closed her eyes, collected herself, and slowly told Erik everything she could. The first dream at the waterfall; the billy who approached her on the train the next day; fainting at work; not remembering, but apparently meeting the billy again at Nine Stones later that day shortly before he was murdered; the dream of the pipe-filled corridor that matched the construction site where Halferne was murdered. None of it made sense, but she felt better finally being able to tell someone about it.
“That’s… frankly amazing,” Erik said, trying to hide his concern. He paused and thought for a moment. Serah was half afraid he had a second holo calling the authorities or a team of psychoengineers running in the background. Finally, he nodded and spoke. “Here’s what we’re going to do: Dump your dreamspinner logs and telemetry to your watch folder so I can get to them. I’ll share them with some friends who know about stuff like this.” Serah started to protest, but Erik anticipated her reaction. “Don’t worry, they’re discrete, and I trust them. I really think they can help, though.”
She nodded reluctantly, got up, and walked across the apartment to the sleeping area. A holo-projector rose and followed her, projecting Erik’s holo alongside her. She entered a series of commands on the dreamspinner and received a confirmation beep a few seconds later.
“Good, I’ve got them,” Erik confirmed. “Now, the police will have run their analysis on the crime scene by tomorrow morning. Why don’t you go pick up their report, get the information I have to your contact to try to be helpful, and then come to the office? You’ll feel better once you’re among friends.”
“Erik, I can’t go down there, what if—”
“If you were really a suspect, they’d be at your door now asking questions, Serah. Stop thinking like that. You’re overreacting. Just pick up the press release, get our file to your guy, don’t make conversation with anyone, and certainly don’t offer up any of what you just told me. Just be cool, calm, and forgettable.”
She considered this and nodded. Maybe he was right, maybe she was overreacting, and there was a very simple explanation for all of this. “I suppose you’re right,” she said. Thank you, Erik.”
“I’ll see you soon,” Erik said, flickering out of existence.
Serah forced herself to finish the tea, deciding she was acquiring a taste for it against her better judgment. It did seem to help her focus. Disrupted sleep patterns and the stress of being involved in reporting two murder investigations — after Henry’s warnings – it was no wonder she was feeling confused.
She played soothing music, took a long shower, and got dressed, already feeling much better. Erik would get to the bottom of it. He had always been unerringly reliable in the past and would not let her down now. She had genuinely appreciated his concern and friendship. It was far beyond his job description to get involved with her personal life at this level. He was “technically” just a receptionist and occasional researcher. She made it a point to remember to buy him a thank-you gift when all of this was over and put him at the top of the list when she accepted her Pulitzer for the story she was about to write, whatever it was about.
Serah smiled and chuckled to herself at that thought. She turned off the music, dimmed the apartment lights, retrieved her bag from the couch, and started for the door. She stopped abruptly at the entrance. Her bag felt heavy and bulky. She opened it up, looked inside to inspect the contents, and immediately noticed an odd piece of angled metal tucked into the corner. She reached in to retrieve it and pulled out a menacing-looking object, approximately eight inches long with a contoured grip and wide cylindrical shaft. It was a gun. One unlike any she had ever seen. Her heart fluttered and skipped a beat, and she felt her face flush in panic.
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