To Sleep (part 2 of 2)
by Martin Higareda
The gel warmed and soothed her. It reminded her of some of the sensory deprivation techniques she had used as a child, especially the sodium solution suspension. But the gel didn’t crystallize...and it didn’t itch. And now, of course, simply the drugs.
The irony of the difference was always with her; her genetic coding was an anomaly, a throwback from before restructuring...somehow her DNA had come out of the wreckage unscathed. Her body was a time capsule, stranded in the past; to tamper with her kind now was futile, and often lethal. So again, the chemicals, the trance-inducing processes. Technicians poking gingerly at her mind. Children with firearms.
The gel was the last word in simulated reality. With the others, a Kaleidoscope provided sound and vision, but different people wore a web to stimulate the cerebral cortex, providing detailed hallucinations, or recalling memories with stunning accuracy. Today it would be used to re-create the dream that killed Nyle Ilyetski.
“You’re not talking much,” He hadn’t seen her in a week, and she wasn’t.
“Sorry,” she murmured. They were walking, taking one of the main avenues into the part of the city designated for marketing and entertainment...what might have been known as “downtown,” once upon a time. She stared at people, buildings, her clothes...everything but him. The world of glass and light were reflected in azure, in her eyes.
They found and browsed a language emporium, in silence. She wandered slowly up and down the banks of softly glowing machines, idly absorbed in none of them; he watched her, looked away. He found himself wishing, just for a moment, that he was normal. Subject and participant identities were restricted from one another, but he imagined sacrificing knowing her for even the slightest glimpse inside her mind.
Dreamers couldn’t share Delta. They couldn’t be programmed, either. Something, some ageless natural defense, prevented any crude manipulation or enhancement of the intellect. And trying to share dreams caused a sort of feedback, an excruciating psychic static that was debilitative. Saul had heard about some of those early crippled minds when he was very young, and reacted badly; his first episode.
They took a lift to the Bhakerhet, the finest restaurant museum in the city. They ordered from a menu, once they were finally seated; he convinced her to try Peruvian. They chatted briefly, and pretended to enjoy the forty story view.
She willed her hands to be still. “I don’t know how to speak about it.”
“Are you kidding? You can talk about anything.”
“Usually.” A faint smile.
“And then it’s impossible to shut you up.”
“I know.” Another one. “But this…it’s something new.” She stared out the window, no pretense at all, her face alive with memory. He watched her for a time, and shifted uncomfortably. New. He absently rubbed his temple, above the scar, and waited. Finally she turned, and began dissecting her food. The words came slowly.
“Saul, remember that time, you were really young, and you kept telling me about one of your recurrents? The one about...someone, some stranger, that you’d felt you’d known forever? I was too young to get it then.”
A brief silence. “You mean it took you this long?”
She rolled her eyes, kicked him lightly under the table. “This is important, you heartless experiment. Try being sensitive, or something.”
He laughed warmly, pleased, but took her hand, and told her, “I’m sorry. Really, I’d like to know.” She squeezed his hand, and withdrew. He noted this, but made no comment.
She said, “I think it’s happening, what you told me, but I’m not sure if it’s the same thing. You know how you went on and on, saying you’d met a girl, and you knew her, all about her…and she knew you? You felt complete, whole. A perfect feeling, almost--” She took a breath. “Like love?”
He nodded, remained silent. She relaxed.
“I think it’s the same thing. It’s this...I don’t know.” A moment’s frustration. “And I don’t know where it comes from. It can’t be the others, I’ve felt that before. So maybe it’s just me, yes?”
He thought about it. “Maybe. They told me it was natural. I was just hitting puberty, so I didn’t question them too much. But why do you say ‘you think’?”
“Oh. Well for one, he has a name. And he shows up almost every night, now. I don’t think that’s normal for recurrents…or abnormal, for that matter. It’s entirely too strange, and I can’t talk to the techs about it, they’ll have me in Delta modeling for months.”
“Techs.” He grimaced into his drink. A moment, then, “Are you okay? I mean, with-”
She looked at him fully for the first time. “No, it’s nothing like that. I’m fine. It’s just so...real. Waking, real. Eerie. And just as you said, a perfect sense. It’s actually a wonderful feeling, as long as I don’t stop to think about it. My head keeps getting in the way; I get confused about things.”
Saul leaned back, sighed. “I know.” He looked outside for a time. “Can’t be an other. No lucidity….” He trailed off, and it was her turn to wait. She toyed with her food, and finally pushed it away. Warm, it had been an excellent dinner. Back to the view. The sky outside was darker now, and she could see his reflection in the glass.
“Not possible,” he was saying. He shook his head. “It must be chemical. Maybe they’ll model you after all...unless....” He turned to her. “You said he had a name?”
She nodded.
*** Centuries earlier no one knew anything about the biology of dreams; details, guesses, pieces of the puzzle called consciousness. Scientists knew what was happening, but not why, or how. They knew it wasn’t enough to simply sleep. REM sleep deprivation slowed motor and mental response, eventually triggering delusional states, hallucinations. Sleep disorders were almost invariably linked with abnormal dreaming, and dreaming began only after the mind entered a characteristic brainwave pattern, the Delta.
The Delta had long been associated with altered states of consciousness, but again, no one understood the mechanics; it was learnable, and not. Firewalkers, yogis, martial artists, even poets, all knew how to evoke the Delta state, creating a delicate union of the waking and unconscious, even subconscious, mind. But no one could say precisely what they did. Easier to explain thinking.
No one could have foreseen the damage.
Years of Delta deprivation began a curious regression; without it, humans didn’t just revert to the old tendencies of unstable emotional response, sociopathic behavior, violence. Eventually, they went insane.
*** They watched her. They watched the two of them, watched as they traveled, talked, enjoyed the others, enjoyed each other. From their point of view, there was nothing extraordinary. Dreams within normal parameters. The techs ignored her finally; it was impossible to conjecture what she could have done to cause Ilyetski’s fallout.
For an aberrant, she was rather reliable...even celebrated, after a fashion, in this limited circle. Her brainwaves were rock solid, flawless, her working record pristine. Accelerated training. No psychotic episodes. If there were any faults, it was in her sublimation: she literally lost herself in their dreams. Her capacity had never been fully mapped, but she could easily harbor two or three times the number of participants as any other subject dreamer. They just affected her a little more deeply.
The mind provided its own insulation between levels of awareness; it was difficult to transfer a waking experience to dream, or a dream to waking. Thus, a subject could always wake and leave his subconscious retinue behind…the occasional psychotic break was more a result of mental distress and fatigue inherent in aberrations, than any lingering dream. Even so, dream interaction, to initiate and maintain several dozen emotional and cognitive states, was one thing.
Imagine having an eidetic dream memory.
They programmed the gel for another session, and began again, searching for deviant patterns, spikes, anything that suggested feedback or overload. Yet they knew, somehow, that it was fruitless. No one had ever seen a dream externalize before.
They needed his point of view.
Until now.
Maybe it was a regression, an inelegant genetic primacy from the dark ages. She was young, supple, beautiful. But so what? Must attraction dictate action? What right had he, or any, to presume some right of ravishment merely from chance proximity? But this interior conflict, while viciously fought, did not last long. It could not. Might as well argue the validity of hunger.
But was it reciprocal?
He would take her hand, and it would fill him with joy, to touch her; it would fill him with pain, to know it was fleeting. They would speak, and they seemed to go on forever, their conversations. Always something new, conflicting, absorbing. Always some new aspect of her soul. But what did it mean?
He ached, on some visceral level, to hold her, consume her, physically, emotionally, to share himself the same way. It was a timeless, unspeakable need. Yes, forever, it had been this way, for so long he had almost taken her for granted, her presence, her laughter, the way she smiled and thought and cried. Perhaps he should have told her so.
He stared now, at this hand.
“Nyle...Ilyetski was a participant.” Saul said, as carefully as he could. “He died two months ago.”
*** In the center of the structure, also underground, stood the Nexus. It was cylindrical, and monstrous; perhaps sixty stories high, one hundred feet wide. In the center, at the bottom, the cocoon was cradled by a viper’s nest of cables, work lights, metal piping and gleaming supports. The cocoon itself was little more than an insulated half-coffin, enclosing the subject completely save the arms and head, these attached to other monitoring devices.
The others, the participants, were led to the top of the cylinder, each assigned one room and attendants. The rooms made a circuit of the cylinder, and from down below could be seen as a dim blue halo. The participants reclined in ambient couches, were attached to a Kaleidoscope, and invited to sleep.
Participant and subject would then share Delta, and dream. Huge databanks hidden within the walls attempted to record as much information as possible, for archiving and study…in case even the aberrations disappeared one day. But that was a limited process, despite the technology: minds weren’t easily catalogued.
Participants needed Delta sleep only about once every month, or even less frequently; it depended on the individual. Even so, weekly observations were customary. No one minded going, but no one missed it, either. It wasn’t recreation, it was preventive medicine.
Madness, the inoculation.
*** The rock must have struck a natural variation in the skull, some subtle imperfection. The fracture pressed bone into brain, near the temporal lobe. He was unconscious for months.
He never knew how much damage had been done. He had no real notion of being hurt at all, didn’t even dream, but he did have a strange recollection of his parents. He was lying on a beach, but it was cool and dark, maybe pre-dawn. Instead of waves, something like a steady murmuring, almost voices. The sand felt like linen. The stars felt all wrong.
His parents stood over him, looking somewhere over his head, past his field of vision. He couldn’t see their faces, but he could see that they were sad. Or angry. Maybe both. A door opened in the sea, and angels like mirrors came to collect him.
Apparently, he wasn’t supposed to wake up.
Because he was who he was, they did the unthinkable. Given the choice of a delusional invalid or a healthy Dreamer, they took a risk, did some surgery, and gave him implants. Wet wires. Tiny clockworks. They did nothing but the simplest of tasks; they allowed his awareness to continue.
It was 3 a.m. when he finally awoke. He got up, looked around, found a mirror…was startled by the new beard. He started to dress, but the techs came in then, alerted by his consciousness. They were pleased, very excited, and clapped him on the shoulders, called him Lazarus. He smiled back, unsure.
He got headaches sometimes, but now he could use a Kaleidoscope. And he shaved as soon as he was home.
If there was such a thing as oblivion, she knew where to find it.
She’d once read that, long ago, chemical designers used to engineer small doses of illicit joy for underground markets...men, woman, children. There were many forms, most of them physiologically or mentally addictive, and all of them harmful. People paid money anyway. If they didn’t have money, they stole, they killed, they sold themselves or others. They needed to escape, and the need was like no other. She thought she knew what it felt like.
The nights he would not appear were torment. She played her requisite games with the others, meaningless, mindless, absorbed in none of them. The urge to see him, speak to him, was a great twisting hunger within her. The strangeness of him (an other? a dream? some prophecy?) filled her days with distraction. Should he appear, his absence was a chasm filled, and that first touch of his lips made thought impossible. She caught herself smiling during waking hours, foolish. What was he? Nothing. What did he mean? Nothing. What would come of this? Nothing.
He was real.
He was dead.
The DEI filled her vision. The lift slowed, slowed, descended, and she stepped off. She knew the machines well enough to do her own programming. Darkness, peace. She wanted her insides to stop hurting, she wanted the haunting over. But no sleep. Just oblivion.
She paused just outside the building. No one had seen fit to tell her anything. If Saul hadn’t, no one would. Dreams and death…why her? Why now? What had they been doing to her, all this time?
Yes, she knew the machines. They would tell her anything she wanted to know.
They’d known what was happening. They monitored everything, stored everything, reviewed everything. They didn’t want to make any more mistakes. So they had watched, night after night, as the two of them grew together, grew intimate, grew inseparable. And the death meant nothing...how could they not think to tell her? No, push her in the gel, make him live again. Watch her love a memory. He felt ashamed for them. Let them try this madness once. Let them feel hell.
He tried to feel something besides anger, bitterness. A participant, an other, lucid! Walking around in her mind, doing anything he pleased, making her dreams reality. What had he said to her? What had they done together? Ah, but what did it matter, it was all in the mind, right?
Right.
He tried to consider it a breakthrough, a momentous new age, a whole other universe; complete interaction between minds. What use then the body? Exciting. Astounding.
Why did it have to be with her.
He should have gone straight to DEI. Her flat was empty, had been all day. He cursed himself for the self-absorption. Maybe in the hundreds of years of quiescence people had forgotten real feeling, anguish, despair, their repercussions. He couldn’t forget if he wanted to. But, would he want to?
He went outside and waited for another lift, truly agitated now, attracting attention. Faces staring, voices whispering. Well, good. He wanted violence, it felt good to think about it. He wanted to roar at them, beat them. Innocents. The bastard children of the age. He covered his face.
He bullied past the outer offices, causing a mild uproar. Mostly they stood around, unable to speak. What does one say about behavior one has never seen? How does one speak to madmen? No time to care. Data storage, subject histories. He went to a Kaleidoscope, directed his way to data files. Male. Ilyetski. Nyle. Yes.
No. He frowned, brought up biologics. The files appeared, floating before him in perfect three dimensional resolution. But something was missing. More scans, more graphs. Frustrated, he began a history scan. More files appeared. He became aware of murmuring all around him, and ignored it. He scanned the files quickly, and cursed. No...too normal, too nominal; all green, no variation. How was this possible? The participant was textbook example of perfect brainwave. There were no natural curves, no chemical progression, no Delta withdrawal, no--
He stopped. He blinked, stupidly, into the flickering light. Comprehension sent him, finally, to his knees.
The Delta.
The sick feeling, felt earlier, consumed him.
“It’s almost night,” He had to clear his throat, say it again. “They’ll be here pretty soon.”
“I know,” she answered. Her voice was calm, unearthly.
“Do you?” he asked. “Do you know, all of it?” It hurt so much just to see her like this. She nodded her head, eyes down, or closed. Her voice was still calm, though hoarse.
“How could they not know?”
He wanted to answer, but couldn’t. The notion amazed even him. “I don’t think they could have,” he said, the truth. It was important for her to have truth. She started moving, slowly, and it was a moment before he realized she was crying. He looked away. She began to whisper, a chant, a litany, a prayer. He grew cold. The whispering grew, mixed with sobs.
“I killed him.”
He stood, and went to her then. She kicked at him, scrambling away, her hair in her eyes, wet. She pulled herself up, went to the window, beat at it.
“Stop,” he said, because he could think of nothing else to say. She pressed her hands to the glass, and they trembled. He tried to hold her, and she turned on him, crying out. She pushed him away, and when he touched her again she screamed. He staggered back, his hands to his head; the sound was alien to him. The scream went on, and on. He shouted her name finally, moving towards her again, and she seized a Kaleidoscope from a monitor and hurled it blindly. It struck the window, and shattered it. Stale air rushed in from the cylinder, and he could hear endless echoes of the glass falling below.
“Stop it,” he pleaded. He felt strange...helpless. It frightened him badly, more than the scream, more than her. “Please, stop. It’s alright now...”
She looked at him, her eyes darkened, bright. She made herself calm, her hands into fists. “It’s not, Saul. It’s not. He was one of us. He was one of us. He died for me, Saul. He’s dead, and it’s me. It’s me.” She went to him, and stared into his eyes. He didn’t touch her.
“He couldn’t have known about you.”
“But they did,” she said, and moved away. “He loved me. He wanted more--” Her voice broke, and she took a breath. “We both did. And I gave it to him. Don’t you see? It’s me.”
She stared out into the Nexus, the tears coming freely. He could say nothing. He had no power over this, over himself. He was almost through the doorway when he heard the soft music of glass, and looked. He saw what she meant to do.
“Don’t,” was all he had time for, before she disappeared.
*** “You have no idea what you’re asking,” he was saying. Saul leaned on a counter, watching him, feeling very, very tired. There was an old saying...he counted to ten. It worked. He cleared his throat, one more time.
“Dr. Haubb, it doesn’t matter. He’s gone. Ok? Is that safe enough for you? We know which tests work, and which don’t. It can’t happen again.”
“But--”
“No. You have to do it. You’re dead, all of you. You’ve been dead for hundreds of years. We brutalized our nature, but now Nature’s woken up. It will take time before we reach an equilibrium again, but this, all this,” he gestured around the lab, “this is all done.” The doctor seemed to calm a little, but looked impatient: what did a Dreamer know?
Saul continued. “People like us, like her, like him, it’s the next stage. Natural selection I think it’s called; only the strongest survive? How many more deaths do you want, how many more broken minds? What more proof do you need?”
Dr. Haubb sat down, sighing. Patronizing. He made as if to speak, puffing himself up. Saul gave up finally, and raged. He began throwing things, tablets, vials, recordings. He shoved the doctor’s desk. It was worth it, to see the terror on his face. Saul grinned, because he knew it was frightening.
“Dr. Haubb,” he said, all teeth. “Forget it. You don’t have to believe me, I don’t care what you believe. But you are going to revive her. It’s not a request. Something is happening with us, and we’re going to find out what it is. Yes, we.” He waited until the doctor was really listening. “I've gone through the files. A man, a participant, develops his own Delta...he can dream. But that’s not all...he can participate with another dreamer. He’s been doing it for years, not even knowing. You'd still have never known, if not for the two of them, the way they interacted. Imagine if the lucid dreaming hadn't killed him. Imagine what we can do with it now.”
Saul watched the doctor. He was still shaking, minutely.
“He found her, he loved her. He had no way of knowing what he was doing. But you did, and you let her dream it, dream him, over and over again, until she loved him back, until she couldn't live without him."
There was silence. Saul didn't know for how long. He looked up from the floor.
"Haubb. Repair her brain damage. Yes. Why not? You’ve already create a hybrid...one of us, and one of you. I didn’t ask for it, but you did it anyway. Do it again.” The doctor looked helplessly at the little scar. Saul felt contempt. “Bring her back. Learn from her, from all of us. Maybe it won’t save you...but maybe we can be free of each other.” He let the doctor mull this over. It was hard to tell, but he didn't think Haubb could see what he really wanted.
He walked alone, thinking of her. He despised what he’d become, but thought, somehow, it was progress. Maybe no one would be saved. But oh, to have her back. He began to fight with himself again, strange conflicts arising, strange, because they were quite new. But they felt old.
Would she still remember Nyle? Would they allow that? Would he want them to?
He arrived home, but found there was no place to rest. He found he didn’t feel like it anyway. He wandered softly through his apartments, out onto the terrace. He closed his eyes, listened to the world waking all around him.
He opened his eyes finally, then went inside.
copyright 2003, Byronic Eye Entertainment
Short Stories
Floating, falling, unmoving.
She hadn’t mentioned the dreams to Saul, the feelings. Some part of her yearned to share the experience with him, the newness of it, the adrenaline, the exhilaration. Some stronger part hesitated.
“Are you going to make me guess?” he asked. The food had come, and she wasn’t eating.
No one missed the actual dreaming. No one missed anything.
The re-created session revealed little.
He loved her, perhaps just as fiercely, with no thought of tomorrow, or consequence. He didn’t know why, it had never occurred to him to ask.
The first Dream Engineering Institute was created in a place called Bethesda, Maryland. It evolved from three neighboring hospitals: one military, one government, one public. A century later, the latest DEI was a single structure marvel of architecture and technology, a towering skein of glass and steel and electromagnetics. Nestled within, deep underground, were the vast wards, home of the latest, most advanced gel containment facilities. Delta-active subjects, as they were known, were tested here for brainwave profiles, tolerances, trained in dreaming protocols, themselves studied and scanned, their patterns archived, made available for later research.
It was a severe trauma to the head, and a complete fluke.
People rushed past her. Or perhaps they were hours. She couldn’t tell. She continued on, cold inside, burning even. Driven.
Saul rode the lift with the windows open, the wind in his face drawing tears from his eyes. The wind, yes. He could understand her pain, but it didn’t help his in the least, this understanding. In fact, it became worse. Knowledge was a terrible thing, for the brave and the cruel alone.
It was a huge complex, it would take him hours to search...he stopped, thought hard. Techs and medics alike paused, came to him, hovering. He ignored their queries, looking past them, around them. To see him again? Was that it? The wards were underground...but no. She’d want the whole story, not second hand memories, truths. Where? Files on participants, up. He had no access, but what of it? Without him, without her, they were nothing. Shadows and puppets of people. Evolution? Evanescence. Goodbye, o happy world.
He found her some hours later, in the last place he imagined, and it didn’t surprise him. She looked up as he entered. He waited to see if she’d speak, and sat down when he knew she wouldn’t.
Dr. Haubb was shaking.
Saul left the DEI, anxious to be home, to sleep. The sessions could wait--would wait, and he certainly didn’t want to be around during the surgery. No sessions…he wondered what the others would be thinking. He wondered what it would be like, for the first time in his life, to dream alone. He felt the blood in his ears. He wondered if he’d ever sleep again.
Would he tell her? Tell her everything?
What difference would it make?
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