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And as well as the URL that Zuzanna had given me there was a QR code that people could scan.
I spent the next hour cancelling appointments. I emptied the kettle and unplugged it, cleaned up the small kitchen area and took the memory card from the server linked to the CCTV camera that looked over the entrance hall.
I walked home rather than getting the bus. At each major junction was a group of Jehovah’s Witnesses, quietly and unobtrusively going about their business. There were more women then men, though I noticed that there were never any single-sex groupings. They stood next to a sandwich board and handed out literature, but mostly they just talked amongst themselves. I noticed that the women all wore very sensible shoes, like the ones Carol had on, and suddenly it made sense – they were standing up all day. I remembered where I’d seen other Jehovah’s Witnesses and went around town until I’d been to every location, but Carol was not with any of them.
Over the next few weeks, I no longer had any reason to be at home. The dream-consultation software was running like a dream. The AI bots were sophisticated enough to not need manual tweaking. Zuzanna was mainly dealing with the associated problems that came with having a software platform going viral. Our joint bank account went in the red at one point as she bought more server space, more cloud hosting. We’d not considered the difficulty of scaling up. The free trial had brought people in, but was costing us a fortune. She sold some of her cryptocurrency via one of the new exchanges, and I cashed in an ISA I’d had for over a decade.
By the end of the second week, things were stable, but Zuzanna had been asked to fly to San Francisco to meet some venture capitalists who were interested in investing. I could have gone over with her, but she didn’t need me there, and I have always hated long-haul flights.
Our last night together we didn’t even want to make love, it was enough to just lie beside each other in a kind of mutually exclusive silence punctuated by occasional small reminiscences.
‘Maybe you will have dreams when I’m away,’ she said finally.
‘I don’t think so,’ I said sadly.
Over a year earlier, several months before Zuzanna moved in with me, there were a group of us from work in the pub. It was a happy-sombre occasion. There had been a large number of redundancies. I’d somehow managed to hang on, but most of my friends had taken the money. Jack started by saying ‘I had the strangest dream last night’. Everyone groaned. ‘We don’t want to hear it,’ Lindsey said. ‘No, I do,’ I interrupted suddenly. ‘Tell me.’ I listened to what Jack had to say, and, without being asked, gave my interpretation. The others then told their dreams, so there was only me and Lindsey left. ‘Oh, go on then,’ she said, and hers was the strangest and saddest of the lot.
‘Now your turn,’ she said.
My brow furrowed. I couldn’t remember what I’d dreamt last night. Nor the night before. Nor, I realised, for endless nights before that.
‘I don’t dream,’ I said, finally.
‘You must have – you just don’t remember them.’
I went quiet, and they didn’t push me on it. A week later I put in a request for redundancy and it was accepted.
Experiments monitoring brain activity during sleep have indicated that even non-dreamers do dream, they just don’t remember them. I recall having dreamt as a child, but at some point I must have stopped remembering them.
That was when I’d set up the dream-consultation business. I realised it was partially vicarious, as I pored over the recollections of other people’s dreams, yet never had my own to share. Perhaps this immersion would help me; but after over a year of doing this, I still didn’t dream.
With Zuzanna away, I was free to spend my time as I wished. I copied the memory card from the CCTV onto my computer, and watched again the footage of my last client climbing the stairs and ringing the bell, and then coming in for her consultation. I had a phone number and email address for her, but as she’d not booked another consultation I didn’t really know how to use them without worrying her.
I had identified five regular spots where the Jehovah’s Witnesses assembled, and there were at least three there every day, usually a man and two women. That meant fifteen people in town every day, and I never saw the same ones twice at the same spot, which meant that, assuming they took Sundays off, there would need to be 4,500 over the course of a year. It couldn’t be possible that there were so many in a single town. I would just need to keep looking and eventually I would bump into Carol again, as if by accident.
What did I want to say to her?
I wanted to know if she’d continued to have the dream about Donald Trump after seeing me, or if I’d somehow cured her.
The communications with Zuzanna had become more haphazard. I always knew how to find her, of course. There were a number of geek channels that she had set up for discussing the software, and then again, there were the forums devoted to cryptocurrency. But non-work communications had almost ceased. I realised I hardly knew her. I even created an account under another name with the dream-consultation bot. Without dreams of my own, I recycled some of the many that had been told to me over the year. The bot was good. The explanations were plausible. I recognised my own contributions to the algorithm, but after a few days of this, I realised the bot was responding in a way that I never could have. Whereas I would hear twenty dreams a week, this software was hearing twenty thousand. And, just as Zuzanna had predicted, genuinely new dreams were rare.
By this point nearly everyone was having dreams about Donald Trump.
I only intermittently checked my bank account, so it was a surprise when the ATM ate my payment card. I went online as soon as I could get to a computer.
Zuzanna had withdrawn the last of our funds. How could I have been so stupid as to trust her?
But there was a message from her on one of the secure channels.
‘I’ve had to protect our investment,’ she said, ‘and here’s the key.’
She had sent me a link to an online wallet for her cryptocurrency. I used the credentials she had provided me with and there it was – my money had all been transformed into something virtual and, rather than stealing from me, Zuzanna had made me a multi-millionaire. But without Zuzanna around to explain how, I couldn’t easily transform this into any currency I could actually spend.
With my need for some petty cash, and having started biking around town all day to speed up my watch of the Jehovah’s Witnesses, I signed up to be a courier for one of the new gig-economy delivery firms.
It was a week after I started that I took the order for pizza. My bike was idling on the strip where the restaurant was, but the delivery was out of town, at the edge of our normal delivery zone. I worked out that I could make this my last of the day, and head back via a different route to where I lived. Zuzanna had asked for a face-to-face via video conference that evening. I picked up the delivery from the pizza restaurant and packed the boxes carefully before hoisting the backpack over my arms.
Although I knew the area I wasn’t sure of the actual address, as it seemed to be a side road on a quiet estate. I had to ease up when I got onto the estate to work out which road it was on. It was called the Orchard estate and so there was an Apple Drive, a Pear Tree Avenue and, tucked away, a Blossom Close. I jumped off the bike, but I wasn’t in a particular hurry, other than to get back for Zuzanna.