“What if we just pissed him off?”
“Why do you think it’s a ‘him’?”
He paced another path to the long tables and paused to look at the perfectly stacked shelves, the surreal atmosphere saturated with dreamlike qualities. Yet he was wide awake, seeing and feeling and hearing. This was not a dream.
All we have are our senses. What if our senses lie? What if our filters obscure the truth? Then what we see and hear and believe is no more relevant than lies on a computer.
“Paul.”
She was slumped over the counter. Dead weight hung on her face. There were no fumes left. He’d have to carry her back, let her sleep again. At least she got a few hours of waking. Maybe the next time it would be longer.
She spun the laptop so that it faced him and tapped the corner of the screen. The toolbar showed the date and time.
A year has passed.
That was how dream disease had gotten so bad, how the streets had grown so empty. Why the laboratory was so abandoned.
“I think someone is hiding us, Paul. That’s why we’re here.”
Marcus
Clay.
Marcus lay on a massive bed on the tower’s third floor, sunk deep in soft comforters and a pile of pillows, staring at a black ceiling. Daylight diffusely filled the room, yellowish beams penetrating the tinted windows.
How could this happen?
He was supposed to wake up in New York City, his body an exact duplicate of the one left behind on the Settlement. Not a clay body.
A pure, 100% clay body.
The technology to fabricate with clay cells—printing organs, ears, fingers, eyeballs—had been established long before biomites. But fabricating an entire body?
Why would someone do this to me?
These were the questions he asked upon waking. And he woke often, sleeping the majority of the day, sometimes waking on the floor with lumps and bruises and no recollection of how he got there.
He crawled out of bed, his knee refusing to bend, the back of his head staining the pillow with pink watery spots, his throat sore from screaming at the ceiling, cursing his plight.
Cursing Mother.
She did this. She turned me back into clay and abandoned me.
He had fallen under her spell, believed in his destiny that he would save mankind from an insatiable power.
And now I’m just human.
This was more than a sick joke. This was punishment. She sent him to a tropical purgatory. He didn’t give a shit how the food got there or how all this worked. He just wanted off this godforsaken hellhole, wanted back in his biomite skin.
Unlike the second floor, the third floor had no inner walls. It was wide open. There were views in all directions. The floor slowly rotated (a speed he couldn’t feel) so that a mounted telescope provided a multitude of views. Right now, it was pointed at the grassy field.
Paul and Jamie were sleeping in the U-shaped building; he’d seen them at the picnic tables once or twice. Apparently there was food there, too. They made no attempt to find him. Occasionally they looked at the tower.
But he was safe.
The only access into the tower was through an elevator. He had wedged an office chair between the elevator doors to keep them open. He’d found a cache of food on the third floor that would last for months. He would stay in the tower as long as it took. He would outlast them.
There has to be a way back to the mainland.
If their identities could be streamed to this remote island, they could be sent back. The fabricated bodies would still be in New York. He had leased the lab space with funds from an inexhaustible account; the lab would hold them. His legal team would make sure of it, that until his fabricated body rose up and Marcus acknowledged he was fully aware, they would keep paying the bills until the end of time.
There has to be a way to reverse the route.
He aimed the massive telescope at the back of the U-shaped building, bent over the eyepiece and closed one eye. He had seen them, Paul and Jamie, eating lunch at one of the picnic tables.
“Where are you now?” he muttered.
Computers whirred into action. Electric light flickered across the ceiling. Back on a large oak desk, half a dozen monitors streamed a variety of images. With the help of the cane, he hobbled over and fell into the chair. There was no keyboard or cables.
Just images of Paul and Jamie.
The security system of a paranoid dictator had been engaged. Exactly what Marcus needed.
Paul and Jamie were watching a laptop inside a library.
There was no sound, just their expressions on vivid display. They were shocked and surprised at whatever they were seeing.
Marcus smiled.
“Let’s see what else I can do.”
Jamie
The goldfish glided, one eye looking through the glass.
Jamie wondered what it was like to fly. Living in water must be like that, never having to fear falling. Always floating.
Always flying.
The fish tank warped into a slurry of brimming tears, her body a plastic coffin she couldn’t escape. Hands on her lap, eyes forward, she listened to the man in the baseball uniform discuss the weather. Somewhere a woman answered a call. Even the fish looked bored.
They’re going to shut me off.
She was aware it was the dream, but that did nothing to ease the fear burning her insides like dry kindling, hollowing her out until there was nothing but the toxic vapor of terror. Somewhere, boys were laughing.
Boys?
Something was wrong with that detail. She couldn’t remember boys being in the building before they shut her off, no recess playground.
Then he arrived.
The witness.
And the fear evaporated. It shouldn’t, she knew that. His arrival put her toes on the ravine’s edge, placed a hand on her back to shove her into the long dark hole where she would be sacrificed to the laws of the state, her crime against humanity being the possession of biomites.
His shadow crept into her periphery.
The goldfish watched, unblinking, as his face moved into view—
“No!”
She slashed in the sheets, fabric tangling around her arms like a damp boa constrictor. Kicking, screaming, she thrashed across the mattress, pulled her legs to her chest, huffing in the corner of a white room.
No fish, no witness.
I’m here. Here and awake.
Paul didn’t come.
He looked tired before she went to the room, said he might sleep this time instead of sitting guard. He hadn’t slept much since they left the tower.
She stripped off the T-shirt, wet with sweat and two sizes too big, and threw it in a growing pile of spoiled clothing. A slice of yellow sunlight knifed across the room, cutting across her waist as she pulled on a pair of large shorts and another T-shirt, this one tan instead of white. The flip-flops—three sizes too big—slapped at the linoleum and echoed down the long, empty corridor.
The lobby was empty.
A sheet and pillow were bunched on the leather couch, a basket of fruit on the table next to it. She took an apple and looked out the wide window. Purple clouds boiled in the distance, flashes of lightning in its belly, the sky a stewing cauldron.
The sun was setting on the picnic tables, the laptop flashing images in the building’s shadow. Further out, Paul was standing at the sundial, his back to her. His hospital gown was tucked into a loose pair of khakis like a baggy shirt. He hadn’t changed since waking.
He was bouncing his hand on the tip of the sundial’s fin, stabbing the point into his palm. “I’m dreaming,” he said.
“You’re awake, Paul.”
“No. When I sleep… I’m dreaming. I see Cali and it’s… it’s different. Something’s different. It’s like she’s waiting. Never saying anything, just watching me. Haunting me.”
“Stop it.” Jamie grabbed his hand. “You loved her and that’s all you could do.”
“I have never had a dreamland, Jamie. Never even had a normal dream. But I do now. Ever since we woke on this island, I’ve been dreaming.”
He traced the fleshy wounds with his fingertips, then spoke at the distant trees.
“This time I was sitting on the couch, waiting for her hallucination to appear in the trees. Instead, I fell asleep and woke up on the side of a hill in a strange land, one I’d never seen before. There was the sea and a village… and then I fell asleep again, only this time I dreamed of the dream disease lab.”
He twitched.
“It was dark and moldy. The equipment had been stripped from the room. The beds were there, the shower, too. Our bodies were gone, though. It was like all this time had passed, like I was really there. But then I found this.”
He chuckled, shaking his head.
“It was the little cross, the two sticks bound with a band of jute. It was something Raine carried with her, said Joshua made it for her in dreamland. She found it outside her cabin and swore he put it there. She must’ve had it in the dream lab.
“I sort of forgot about the skin suits and the waking and the island… but then I looked for you, and when I didn’t find you, I remembered you were sleeping in the next room. I remembered we weren’t on the Settlement anymore. We both were. I’m dreaming, I thought.”
He shook his head, thumb in palm. The pain was grounding him in the present moment. He wanted to be sure he was awake. Or wake himself up.
“The door to the lab was open,” he continued. “The rest of the building was much the same, the doors open, the offices empty. Cobwebs were in the corners. I remembered when we were there, when the window was broken and they came after us. You remember that?”
She nodded.
“One of the offices across from the fabrication lab, that’s where they got inside. I went there and the window was missing, a sheet of plywood in its place. A sliver of light punched through a weathered knothole. I looked through it. You know what I saw?”
He turned his head, squinting as if the view were right there.
“The gray… the cabins across the field, the wind turbines… it was all gray. And someone was splitting wood. I think it was her. I think it was Raine.”
“It was a dream.”
“Was it?”
He massaged his hand, smudging tiny beads of crimson into the wrinkled valleys, the pain reminding him that he was here, he was awake. It hurts in the dream too, Paul.
“Did you have the same dream?” he asked.
She nodded.
“Did you see him?”
“He’s closer.”
Marcus would want to know that, would want to know that someone called the witness was about to look into her eyes, fill her with peace before sucking her soul into the cold vacuum of death. But it was more than that, she sensed. She didn’t just die.
He consumed me.
She didn’t want to believe that, didn’t want to think it was that easy and wasn’t going to tell Paul any of that, either. She could be wrong. But there was something otherworldly about the witness’s presence, a man that convinced her it was all right to die, to give herself.
A man, she thought, that could eat dreams.
______
Thunder dropped a cool breeze across the yard. The laptop strobed across the picnic table, images coming and going.
“I know what this place is,” Paul said.
He straddled the bench and spun the laptop toward her. An aerial view of the grassy field was filled with boys, some lounging, others throwing a Frisbee. Groups of teenagers were at the picnic tables, playing cards.
Boys. Were those the boys I heard in the dream?
“This place was some sort of alternate reality experiment. There are no times or dates, so it’s hard to assess just how long ago, but I get the feeling it was before biomites.”
“Why?”
“They used a needle and cable to bridge the human brain with a computer.” He rubbed a spot on his forehead. “There was a surgical stent installed that allowed access to the frontal lobe. The computer then created a new reality.”
She turned away from the laptop but not before seeing an image she would never forget—a young man, thirteen or fourteen, lying on a hospital bed, a rigid steel needle staked into his forehead, clear salve pooled around the base.
“How come we’ve never heard of this?”
“There’s no telling how long ago it was. Besides, I get the feeling it was experimental and illegal. That’s why this place is so isolated. There’s a giant resort on the other side of the island, something the very wealthy would enjoy. On this side are the dorms and the classrooms and library. I’m guessing they were using teenagers to work out their mistakes.”
The scene of a classroom played out, rows of bored teenagers listening to an old man with multiple jiggling chins. She looked up.
“Only boys, though,” she said.
“Yeah, this was for boys. There was one for girls, too. It was somewhere else.”
“Where?”
He started to answer, the word dusty and quiet and doubtful.
“Where were the girls at?” she repeated.
“The Settlement.”
“What do you mean?”
“Remember the red brick house? There were remnants of old log cabins out there, too.”
“That’s… that’s not a coincidence.”
“No.”
“Why were they separated?”
“I don’t know. They called it the Foreverland Project. I think it was a precursor to dreamland. The needle and computers created these realistic alternate realities. Then biomites came along and there was no need for a needle, no need for a computer. People started generating their own dreamlands… their own foreverlands.”
Jamie tapped the screen. “This is telling us something, Paul. It’s no accident the Settlement was built where it was, no accident we’re here. This laptop is telling us something.”
“Maybe.”
“This is where it all started. Powers-that-be, dreamlands and foreverlands and alternate realities. Someone wants us to connect the dots. Marcus was looking for the powers-that-be. Maybe we found it.”
“We haven’t found anything.”
“Not yet. Where do you think they did these experiments?”
Paul turned toward the tower. The second floor.
That was where all the technology was located—the offices, the beds, the fabricators. Of course, that was where the needles would be. There were computers there, too; ones that responded to questions.
“We need to get back up there,” she said. “Now.”
“It’ll be dark soon and it looks like rain. Besides, he’s not going to let us inside.”
“He’ll let us up.” She felt injected with caffeine. “Marcus will want to hear this. He’s as anxious to get off the island as we are.”
She snapped the laptop closed. He nodded compulsively, agreeing but not really hearing her. Maybe she couldn’t trust him in front of Marcus, not yet. Maybe he didn’t want the old man to let them up, afraid he’d lose control.
The thunderheads rumbled.
“Let me grab some boots.” Jamie pulled off her flip-flops and ran through the grass, the cool blades slipping between her toes. She yanked on the door. The handle turned freely but wouldn’t open.
“What’s wrong?” he called.
“Door’s locked.”
Paul waggled the handle. He examined the doorjamb, no place for a key or even a scan lock. He looked around. The air smelled damp. And it would be dark soon. And all their food was inside.
They tried the other doors. Maybe they’d been locked all this time, they hadn’t used them. Only this back door had been unlocked, but not anymore.
The first raindrop fell.
“Come on.” Paul started for the
grassy field. “We’ll break a window.”
He walked at first. When rain spots began wetting his back, he began running. The sundial was too heavy. They entered an open path in the forest. Paul stomped through the underbrush, picking up branches, testing them like baseball bats.
Above them, the foliage pattered. Raindrops found their way to the undergrowth. The forest was waking up. Jamie tucked the laptop beneath her shirt.
“Coconuts!” Jamie shouted.
Paul was back on the trail, sprinting toward the beach. He returned with a husked coconut tucked in his arms. Jamie had squatted beneath the shelter of a tropical palm, the wide leaves bowing under the watery weight, tiny streams shedding off the scalloped edges. She held the laptop, their only connection to the outside world, like a baboon protecting her young.
“Come on!” he shouted above the rain patter.
“I’ll wait here!” He doubled back and grabbed her arm, but she resisted. “This can’t get wet. Go knock out a window and come back with something to wrap it up.”
“This isn’t going to blow over.”
“And this can’t get wet.”
Dusk was ticking away the remains of the day. Jamie hunkered down, water pooling around her flip-flops, feet squeaking as she shifted her weight.
The sky had disappeared between the small openings of the canopy; she heard Paul before seeing him. He was carrying an angular rock, chopped the stocky stem of a frond and held it up over his head like an umbrella.
The back of her shirt was soaked, but her belly was still warm and mostly dry. She took cover with him. They took a narrow path that led away from the field. A flash of lightning revealed the dome-shaped roof of a squat building, the door wedged open with a fallen branch.
He yanked the door open. It was pitch black inside.
“Couldn’t get a window to break out,” he shouted. The rain pounded the curved roof. “Security glass shattered but didn’t break. We can stay here tonight, find something tomorrow.”
She heard him shake and felt a spatter of rain across her face that tasted slightly of salt. The room smelled dank and hopeless, the subterranean feel of a basement, the atmosphere penetrating her bones with a wet kiss. The next flash of lightning lit up the confines.
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