I could have stopped myself. Every morning and every night I looked at the small pile of dreamers I’d hoarded, sitting just beside my bed. I’d gotten them from Sloane, and I knew she could be trusted to keep her mouth shut. I’d met Sloane before either of us came to live at Jude’s estate—in fact, I was the one who’d brought her here, who’d convinced her that this, not another boyfriend, not another pointless suicide attempt, was the answer she’d been seeking. She’d spent the last several years, before and after her download, researching methods of escape.
Thanks to Jude—which meant thanks to me—she’d discovered a new one.
These weren’t the puny hour-long dreamers that barely topped the buzz of an intense b-mod. These were industrial-strength dreamers, good for days, even weeks, of blissful mental absence. A nice long vacation from everything.
I kept them by my bed as a test. Every time I passed them by I knew I was stronger than that. I wasn’t that kind of mech. They sat there for days, one week, two, and I kept passing the test, passing them by.
Until one day, I didn’t.
I wasn’t prepared.
Heavy dreamers weren’t anything like the lightweight version I’d sampled.
They dragged you down.
Deeper than I’d ever been.
Trapped in a dream inside a dream.
Blind in a white fog.
Existence and nonexistence in one.
Being and non. Here and not. Pleasure and pain.
That was all there was. All I was.
And I was nothing.
Waking up was like breaking through the surface of a deep, black pool of water, emerging from silent depths into the too-bright, too-noisy open air. Everything was sharp edges; everything was off-key. I just wanted to slip back under.
“I thought you hated these things,” Ani said, standing over me.
“How’d you get in here?” I mumbled. It felt like the dreamer had blown my body into a million pieces, drifting on the wind, hidden in the crevices of the walls and floorboards, dissipated. I was everywhere and nowhere at once. “I locked the door.”
“Quinn had the house open it for me.”
Right. Artificially intelligent locks could be fooled. That was the beauty of dumb, mute technology: You couldn’t reprogram steel.
I reached for the next dreamer. It was set to last a week. “Have her lock it again when you go.”
Ani glanced at the dreamer in my hand. “Or I could stay. We could talk.”
I shrugged. The world was getting too sharp, the fog fading away. The longer I was awake, the easier it became to think. And I wasn’t in the mood to think.
“I’m just worried,” Ani said. “After what happened—”
“Get out.” I didn’t want to remember what happened. That was the whole point.
She flinched.
“Please,” I added. But I didn’t say it nicely.
“If you stay under too long…”
“I’ll be fine,” I said. “The dreamers are safe.”
“Right. Tell that to the empties.”
It was what we called the mechs who dreamed away their lives, twitching and shuddering for weeks on end. Empties because they were nothing without the dreamers; because they were hollow. Bodies whose minds were on permanent vacation.
These days, I only felt empty when I was awake.
I was the center of a storm.
Light swirled around me. Through me. Wind blew in waves of red and purple and black. Color had sound and sound had color. There was no body, but there was pain.
And noise, like metal on metal, like a scream.
And need, and memory, and flesh on flesh, and lips, and the weight of a body on my body.
And weightlessness. And nothingness.
The storm raged, but I was its center, and I was still.
Quiet.
It was getting harder to come back.
When the dreamer died, there was a moment in between. Like the dazed limbo between org sleep and waking when the dream dies away and reality strays just out of reach. It was like falling—but falling so far and so fast, through a darkness without a bottom, that it felt like flying.
When I came back to myself, Jude was there.
“Sweet dreams?” He leaned against the doorframe, arms laced across his chest.
“Very.” But there was nothing to remember about what these deep dreamers were doing to me; I didn’t have the words to describe it to myself. It was like becoming another person; an unperson.
“Then you must have been dreaming of me.” The words rang hollow, a force of habit. Or maybe it was just that the dreamer made the world seem tired, Jude’s words dull and empty.
“Worried about me?” I asked.
“Why would I be?” His eyes strayed to the single remaining dreamer. No matter—once they were gone, Sloane would supply more, as many as I needed. She understood escape.
He slung a scuffed red backpack over his shoulder and crossed the room, perching on the edge of the bed. With a cool smile, he swung his legs onto the mattress. I slapped them away. “This came for you.” He dropped the backpack on the bed. I reached for it—then jerked my hand away as the bag twitched toward me with a low mewing noise.
Jude shoved a slip of paper at me. “This too.”
He misses you, the note said. Typed, so I had no way of knowing who it was from.
But when the bag mewed again, I had a pretty good guess. I groaned and unzipped the bag. A flabby gray cat poked his head through the opening and nuzzled into the back of my hand. “Great. Just great.”
“You know her, I presume?” Jude stroked his hand along the cat’s head. It purred, arching its back. That was a sign. In a few moments, the cat would get freaked out by all the affection and lash out a claw. I kept quiet—let Jude figure it out for himself.
“It’s a him,” I said. “Psycho Susskind.”
“Doesn’t look very psycho to me,” Jude said, scratching his knuckle against the scruff of Susskind’s neck.
“He loves machines,” I said. “Thought the toaster was his best friend. People, not so much.”
“She dropped it off in person,” Jude said. She. There was only one she it could be. “Middle of the night. So does she look like you used to look?” he added. “Before?”
“I thought we weren’t supposed to talk about the past,” I reminded him.
“I’m just saying, she’s hot.”
“You would think so.” Jude was exactly Zo’s type, I realized suddenly. Not on the surface, maybe—there was nothing about him that resembled the creepy, greasy retros my sister used to bring home, their eyes red from a late-night dozer session or wide and twitchy from too many hours locked in a virtual reality circuit, fingers grasping at imaginary demons. Losers, and she knew it. Choices guaranteed to spite our father, sending him into one of his silent, pale-faced rages. But Jude could match Zo smirk for smirk, shoot down her snide crap with crap of his own. Throw in the gaunt, angular features, sharp and chiseled where the rest of us seemed waxy and soft, and he was the complete package. Either her soul mate or her double.
“You like the cat so much, you take it,” I said. “He’ll love you.”
Who was less human than Jude?
“She brought it for you,” he said.
“So?”
He didn’t say anything for a moment, pretending to concentrate all his attention on the cat. But I could see his eyes flashing, watching me from beneath heavy lids. “So nothing.” He stood up, scooped the cat into his arms. “You got that from Sloane, didn’t you?” he said, nodding at the final dreamer on the nightstand. I reached for it, but I was still moving in slow motion. He swept it away with ease. Jude nestled the small black cube into his palm, rubbing his fingers along its smooth surface. Most dreamers had a series of lines etched into their sides, indicating their duration. This one, which Sloane had been hesitant to pass along, was unmarked. “It’s a new one,” she’d said. “Something about a neural feedback loop? I didn’t really get it. But I guess somehow it works different on different brains.”