Sleepless

by Louise Mumford

  Thea clicked onto Ted’s sleep diary to get an idea of what happened each night. The oh-so-familiar wires and electrodes were attached and checked by Moses, then Ted was left alone to settle into sleep. Mood music played at first, explained by Moses in a voiceover.

  ‘Whales and waves and all that shit. Not strictly part of the tech, but I’ve got a feeling the punters will warm to that a bit more than to just listening to the clicks and whistles of what’s really going on. Secret: most of the important stuff isn’t even sound …’

  Thea fast-forwarded chunks of it, until Moses came into the room halfway through the night. The voiceover came again.

  ‘So, this is the bit we need to refine, but right now I’m waking Ted up in strategic parts of his sleep and getting him to read the language textbooks. We’ll have to tweak that for public rollout as, much as I’d love to sneak into everyone’s bedroom every night like the frickin’ BFG, it’s an unworkable part of the tech right now.’

  Thea clicked back on the main diary. Ted was still speaking Italian, and Moses was nodding and tapping a pen against his teeth as he swivelled in his chair.

  ‘Gonna need to get you someone Italian to talk with so’s I can fully check this is working cos honestly, bro, I have no clue what you’re saying …’

  A hand and arm came into shot, placing a mug on the detritus of his desk.

  ‘Uh-uh, come here, Maxie …’

  Moses grabbed the arm and pulled the woman briefly into shot, kissing her as if they were in the final scene of a rom-com. However, that wasn’t what made Thea gasp and nearly let the laptop slide off her knees.

  The woman on the screen kissing Moses, wearing a floaty long dress and a brass twist of metal around her upper arm, had very long, very red, very familiar hair.

  Moses wrapped an arm around her shoulders and kept her in shot, despite her trying to wriggle out.

  ‘Everyone, meet the very clever, very wise, incredibly sexy … Delores Maxwell!’

  Chapter 31

  Delores.

  Delores Maxwell. Max, as he called her.

  They had been a couple; he had created Morpheus while with her, living in an apartment together, laughing, kissing, making each other cups of tea.

  The Delores back at the Sleep Centre, she knew this Moses, the sedated wreck of a man only a few feet from where Thea sat now. She’d hidden him in the monastery, left him to his madness. She’d stolen the tech from him and shoved him out of sight.

  No wonder she hadn’t wanted him to be found.

  Back on the laptop screen, the next entry was different to the last, just an empty room, Moses’s desk in the foreground. At first Thea thought the camera had been left on by mistake until she heard Delores’s voice.

  ‘We’re not going to get another chance like this.’ She moved into view.

  Seeing this Delores was like having your favourite comic book character drawn by a different artist: you knew who they were, but there was something wrong with the line work and shading. She’d tied her hair up into a messy ponytail and was wearing a long skirt with a belt that had moons and stars hanging from it.

  ‘Shouldn’t this be about what’s the right thing to do, ethically? Not about money?’ Moses appeared and moved around Delores, so he was centred on the screen. He rubbed at his eyes; his clothes were rumpled and his face unshaven.

  ‘Ethics? Really? Now you’re worried about that?’

  ‘I guess I’ve made enough deals with the devil to get a Christmas card from him each year. I know the sleep data we will one day collect: how long people sleep, what they dream of, what scares them, how they learn, all of it …’

  He paused and rubbed at the stubble on his chin.

  ‘I know we’ll sell it. To a Big Data company that is currently trying to integrate robotics, gene therapy and the rest of it. Human 2.0. The ultimate upgrade. I don’t care about that. I don’t think people will care either because they’ll desperately want to be a part of it, won’t they? They won’t want to be left behind. Reverse ageing, get smarter, run faster, heal quicker. They’ll sell their data for it like that.’

  He clicked his fingers.

  ‘The ship for data privacy has sailed. We all waved it off years ago. But … there are other ships that we can still halt …’

  Delores rolled her eyes and crossed her arms over her chest, ‘Really? This is about … rumours and scare stories? You are planning to turn down the only offer we have that will get us out of debt because of some stupid conspiracy chatroom horror stories?’

  She disappeared out of view for a few seconds and came back with a cloth rucksack that had happy faces on it. As Moses spoke she stuffed a jacket and a pair of shoes inside.

  ‘They’re not horror stories. What we’re doing with Ted, it’s real. What a company like Aspire could do with that is fucking scary and, yes, I get that a business has to make money—’

  Delores flung the bag onto a chair and gave an exasperated scream. ‘Do you? Do you really? Because we haven’t made any for years now and we have no money left. Where do you think all of this comes from? Do you think I just magic it up?’ She threw her arm out to encompass the room and the desk, full as it was with wires and screens.

  Moses took a step towards her, reaching for her arm, but she jerked it away.

  ‘But, imagine it, Max,’ he said softly. ‘I give you this sleep tech. You get the opportunity to reboot your brain and dream your way to a cleverer, better you. Imagining it? Good. Now imagine that in those dreams, so subconsciously embedded you won’t even realize, you are actually being influenced to buy a certain brand of trainers, or drink a certain type of water, or, fuck it, vote for a certain politician. Like product placement. But in your dreams.

  ‘Actually no, not like product placement because right now, you notice it, don’t you? In a film, when the handsome action hero gives you a flash of his designer watch? You know you’re being sold to. Well, hopefully, you know. In your dream it won’t be like that. You won’t know it’s happening and it will change the choices you make the next day, every day. Not little choices. It might start with the small stuff: what food to buy, what colour to dye your hair, what toy a child wants for Christmas, but slowly and surely, it will spread. It will fucking spread. Whoever has the money and the opportunity to use the tech, will use it and they will use it for a host of things we haven’t even thought of yet.’

  Thea paused the video again, her hand shaking. Phase Three wasn’t self-improvement. Phase Three was … mind control? That couldn’t be right. There was no way any company would be allowed to sneak into people’s dreams like that and use them for their own gain. There were laws against that kind of thing. Or there would be.

  In the freeze frame, Delores had been caught about to sit down and, paused mid-movement, it looked as if she’d been winded, as if Moses had given her a kick to the stomach, which had doubled her over. A silver moon glinted on her belt.

  Thea pressed play.

  Delores sagged onto the arm of a chair and didn’t say anything for a while. She played with one of her bangles and then sighed. ‘But, I mean, anything like that, it’s so far in the future, it’s … I don’t know, sci-fi. We don’t have to worry about that now.’

  Moses stayed silent.

  ‘Isn’t it? That’s what you said.’ Delores looked up at him, her eyes sharp.

  ‘That’s what I thought at the time.’

  ‘Jesus!’ Delores started to pace, coming in and out of view. Moses sank into his desk chair. ‘Building blocks, you said. Just building blocks that no one else would be able to work with …’

  ‘But that’s the thing about building blocks, Max – they can be built upon.’

  Delores continued to pace. ‘But there would be all sorts of checks and controls on any kind of tech like that—’

  ‘We’ve all seen how honest and transparent big business is, right? And tech can’t be mishandled at all? Right? Right?’

  He sat forward in his chair and this time successf
ully grabbed Delores’s hand as she walked past him. He swung her to face him, her belt jangling.

  ‘If we own the tech, we own the choice of what to do with it. Or what not to do.’

  For a moment Delores’s face softened as if she might let him pull her into his lap where the two of them could sit entwined, while they figured it all out. Then she pulled her hand away.

  ‘But we don’t have a choice, do we? We’ve gone way past the point of having a choice. We’re broke. We have no more money to do this on our own. And … I don’t want to do this on my own anymore; it’s too big for us. What you’ve created, we can’t cope with that by ourselves. Not even the great Moses Ing could, even if that guy existed anymore. If you don’t want it to get into anyone else’s hands, well then – there’s a solution, isn’t there? Just stop.’

  Moses slumped back into his chair. ‘Stop?’ Disbelief made his voice crack. ‘But, I’m so close, I can’t just stop …’

  Her eyes burned into his. ‘All you are is a name now, Moses. You’ve spent all your money, called in all your favours … There’s nothing left. And, fool that I am, I’ve let you drag me down with you.’

  Moses put his head into his hands, but Delores wasn’t finished.

  ‘I didn’t come back here today to rehash this argument. You know how I feel. Sell it to Aspire. Nothing you’ve said today has changed my mind.’

  She crossed her arms again but this time she held her elbows, like she was trying to get warm, or stop her body from splitting in half.

  Thea glanced at the apartment behind him. It didn’t look quite the same as it had done in the previous video. Before it had been neat and ordered; now there were clothes strewn over the chairs, one of the tastefully coloured rugs was half kicked up and there were pizza boxes and cans on the big glass coffee table. Had Delores left him because of this?

  Delores picked up the bag, walked out of view, and in a few seconds, Thea heard a door slam.

  Moses stayed sat in his chair for a while, head bowed, long enough for Thea to hover the cursor over the stop button. But then he turned suddenly and faced the camera, looking into it like it was a friend who understood, expectant almost, waiting for whoever was watching to give him the answer he so craved.

  Today, he was wearing a Superman T-shirt.

  ‘A good scientist always keeps a record, eh? Don’t even know what I’m recording here, or why. Guess it’s … Let the records show that Max wanted me to stop and that I wouldn’t, that I can’t, despite knowing how it could be used.’

  He stared at the camera for a few moments longer. ‘And let the records show that, if I’m ever not around, she’ll sell the tech to Aspire as soon as she can.’

  Eyes grim, jaw set, he reached towards the camera and flicked it off.

  Chapter 32

  There was no voiceover.

  Ted’s sleep diary cut into the footage, a few weeks later. Night vision mode showed him hooked up and sleeping and a little superimposed clock in the corner said the time was 2.38 a.m. At first, it was almost as if Thea was looking at a still photo – there was so little movement, only the digital clock counting off the minutes as they passed. Ten minutes in and Thea almost lost concentration, until, suddenly, just as she was beginning to wonder whether she should start fast-forwarding again, Ted sat up in bed.

  Bolt upright.

  There was sound on the diary and Thea could hear him breathing, short, panicky breaths as he scrambled back in the bed, thudding against the headboard, speaking so quickly that she couldn’t catch what he said. He put his hands out as if warding something off, then kicked the covers off his feet, bundling the sheets up in a frantic movement. Before Thea could see what he’d caught in the sheets, Ted was up and out of bed, straight to a big window that opened outwards just enough for a person to squeeze through, if they were determined.

  Ted was determined.

  He climbed onto the sill, still muttering, and opened the window to its furthest point, then he threw the bundle of bedclothes out with such force that it made him wobble.

  From another corner a second figure rushed into the room, yelling, ‘Stop!’ It was Moses but though he tried, he couldn’t get across the room fast enough to save Ted as he teetered at the window, his feet twisting and trying to grip the windowsill. He turned to Moses, one arm stretched towards him, his eyes pleading for help but there was nothing Moses could do.

  Thea watched in horror.

  The diary cut out and Moses’s face filled the screen again, his voice serious.

  ‘Ted hallucinated during his sleep periods, specifically in the REM part that we’d been using to help him learn the languages. That night you just saw, he said he could see spiders, the big furry ones that can jump, and they were all over the bed covers. So he bundled them up and threw them out of the window. Then threw himself out too.’

  Moses paused.

  ‘There is a wide ledge underneath that window, part of the roof for our downstairs neighbour’s balcony. Ted fell onto that, then rolled into our neighbour’s balcony canopy, which broke his fall.’

  Thea unclenched her hands. Moses reached up and adjusted the camera, widening the view until Thea could see the person sat next to him.

  She clenched them again.

  It was Ted. Except this wasn’t the Ted she had seen previously, with his shy smile and goofiness, the one who had joked about knowing Russian.

  This Ted could no longer joke.

  Propped up next to Moses was a blank waxwork of the man Ted had once been.

  But even waxworks have the illusion of life about them, a twinkle painted onto the eyes, a smile carved into their faces. This Ted was empty and unfinished, eyes vacant, head lolling to one side with drool gathered at the side of his mouth.

  Moses didn’t look at him but rubbed a hand over his forehead as if trying to massage away a headache.

  ‘He’s been like this for … three days now. His body functions, so he’ll swallow if he’s fed something … like a … like a baby … but—’

  A jagged half-cry, half-gulp made him stop talking and he bent forward over the desk suddenly, his shoulders heaving. Ted remained upright due to the strap around his chest, his eyes glassy.

  Moses pushed himself up again and angrily swiped at the mess on his desk. ‘Max was right – I can’t do this on my own. Look what I’ve done!’ His voice broke again. ‘I thought I’d factored it in. I know that if a body’s REM sleep is tampered with then hallucination is a possibility. The brain goes into stress mode and compensates where it can. I knew that. I thought I’d dealt with it. And anyway, when the person gets normal sleep again, the body would reset itself. The person shouldn’t become …’ he turned for the first time and looked at Ted ‘… this.’

  For a few minutes it seemed as if Moses was transfixed by Ted. He gazed at him. The only sign he’d not become catatonic as well was the slight tapping of his fingers on the desk.

  ‘I won’t believe this can’t be fixed. I just need to be able to think better. I’ll edit all of this together, my record. Put it on a memory stick, keep it safe – just in case.’ Moses turned to the camera once more, a manic edge to his voice. ‘I did this. So I will undo it. On my own. No one else gets hurt.

  ‘I think I know what to do.’

  Thea let out a breath. The video stopped.

  Upstairs, something smashed.

  Chapter 33

  The knife had been left embedded into the dresser earlier that day.

  Now it was in Ethan’s hand.

  She had left him peacefully sleeping less than an hour ago but now, as she skidded into the bedroom, he was neither peaceful, nor asleep.

  The crash had come from the dresser, which was on its side, its drawers spilling out, and Ethan stood next to it, awake, motionless, holding the knife.

  Thea didn’t move. Maybe if she stayed still, he’d stay still too. He looked awake, but Thea knew he wasn’t. Not really. This wasn’t one of his normal nightmares. She knew exactly what was ha
ppening because she’d just seen it happen to Ted in the video diary. Poor Ted in his pyjamas, trying to throw imaginary spiders out of a window.

  But Ted hadn’t had a knife.

  Thea realized that this wasn’t Moses’s tech anymore. Delores had taken it from him and who knew what they’d done to it, or how quickly it worked.

  Or how quickly you got to the dead-eyed, dribbling stage …

  Did the bedroom door lock? Maybe Thea could just lock him in. But then he’d be locked in with a knife and Thea didn’t want to imagine what he might do to himself. She couldn’t leave him to that, after what they’d been through.

  She had to try and get the knife from him.

  ‘Ethan?’ she said softly.

  Almost as if he had become voice-activated, he sprang to life, marching over to her. She willed herself not to cower against the wall.

  ‘Ma’am. I’m going to have to ask you to stay here. We have a situation.’

  Thea couldn’t take her eyes away from the knife, how sharp it looked with its evil, serrated edge.

  ‘Ethan—’

  ‘I’m sorry, but this is no place for—’ His eyes flicked upwards and he suddenly gripped her with one hand. ‘MA’AM! DOWN! INCOMING!’

  He threw her to the ground with such force, a searing pain shot through her shoulder. His weight pinned her down, protecting her from an imaginary blast and she gasped, the air crushed out of her lungs, spots forming in front of her eyes.

  Don’t faint, don’t faint, don’t faint, she chanted to herself.

  She screwed up her eyes and blinked furiously as, above her, he shouted out instructions to the wallpaper. Mercifully, after a few minutes, he moved and she rolled into a half-seated position, gingerly prodding her shoulder as he crouched in front of her, the knife gripped firmly in his hand.