The Last Dreamer

by Nicholas Erik

  “No I didn’t,” he said.

  “You stayed.”

  “I was thinking.”

  “You liked it.”

  “Did not.” Tommy couldn’t tell if she was serious. By her expression in the dim lot, it looked like she was. He slapped himself in the forehead and shook his head. This was like having a conversation with his ten year-old self. “Whatever. It doesn’t matter. The hell did you find after your taste test?”

  “It was arson.”

  “Again, a great—”

  “And,” she said, her voice growing sharp, loud, cutting his off like a machete through a branch, “it was done by amateurs. Hired.”

  Tommy raised an eyebrow. “So why do we care?”

  “When did the company start?”

  “You tell me, since you must know.” Anya didn’t say anything. “Fine, I’ll bite. Twenty years.”

  “Twenty years. And how long has the Reverend been waiting for Devin?”

  “I don’t know. A long time.”

  “Twenty years?”

  “Yeah, could be,” Tommy said.

  “And how long have you lived here?”

  “Twenty years,” Tommy said. “Give or take. What’re you getting at?”

  “The men in the suits that took Devin. Miss Ena, me. We’d all been waiting for the Dreamer for twenty years.”

  “Mr. Parsons was in on it,” Tommy said.

  “That’s a good start.”

  “If you knew already, why’d you come here?”

  “Theories without data are untenable.”

  “Okay,” Tommy said. “I’ll put that on the fridge.”

  “Sherlock Holmes.”

  “Huh?”

  “It’s a quote from Sherlock Holmes,” Anya said.

  “Do you still have that corkscrew?”

  “Why wouldn’t I?”

  “Because I think I need to get faced.” Tommy opened the truck’s door and started the engine. Anya jumped in the truck and the pair drove off to the ranch home, to regroup and find out more about this Mr. Parsons.

  39 | New Plans

  “It’s like he’s a ghost,” Tommy said.

  Their search yielded nothing. Even a trawl through the deep web had uncovered no trace of Mr. Parsons. Whatever he had owned in Rever’s Point—the warehouse, a house, any cars, anything at all—none of it showed up anywhere. The deeds and titles were all scrubbed from existence, like they’d dropped through a wormhole.

  “Government,” Anya said.

  “That a theory or a fact?”

  “Just a theory,” she said. She watched him swish the whiskey around in the bottle that she and Devin had shared in this very house, all those weeks ago. Then Tommy took a long swig and wiped his chin. Offered her the bottle.

  She took it, and his eyebrows arched a little bit.

  “No shit,” he said. “You’re a strange duck, Anya.” He grabbed the bottle from her. “That’s an expression, by the way. Figure of speech.”

  She waved him off, like she didn’t give a shit and he was interrupting. “Nothing.” She wasn’t used to turning up nothing. The laptop’s lid banged shut as she slammed it in frustration.

  Tommy stared at the ceiling and then bolted forward, like the whiskey had given him sudden inspiration. Anya jumped in her seat and reached for the corkscrew. But he was too excited to notice.

  “He had a daughter,” Tommy said. “She came here a couple weeks ago and I…” He took another drink, finishing off a few shots before continuing the thought. “I took her to Samuel.”

  “What’s her name?”

  “Sarah. Sarah Parsons. I mean, I guess she’s his daughter. Who knows—it could all be bullshit.”

  Anya flipped the laptop open and began working the keys. Social media profiles, photographs and credit card statements flew by. Some of them had been scrubbed, others were in full view. This girl had just posted way too much content to be wiped from existence.

  Anya stopped typing and looked up. Tommy had his eyes bunched together in a furtive stare.

  “Yes?”

  “You find anything about Sarah?”

  She turned the screen around and pointed. His eyes raced through the various windows and pictures floating in the digital ether. One stood out—a picture of Mr. Parsons and Sarah. The only one of the bunch. His arms were wrapped around her shoulders in an awkward facsimile of a hug.

  No one looked all that happy to be there, but the two of them were trying hard.

  “Father and daughter,” he said. “I guess that much wasn’t a cover.” A tiny amount of whiskey clung to the bottom of the bottle. He slid it across the worn coffee table, and Anya polished it off. Then she pointed at another article on the screen.

  “Damn,” Tommy said. “She was inside when the warehouse burned down. The girl was pretty banged up, but I didn’t think it was from that.”

  “Amateurs.”

  “Yeah, I doubt Mr. Parsons would cook his own daughter. If he’s actually the one covering some tracks.”

  A knock at the door gave both of them a start. Tommy held up a hand, gesturing for Anya to be quiet, then he snuck over to a drawer in the kitchen and withdrew a revolver.

  He pressed the tip up against the door at about chest height.

  “Who’s there?” He squinted through the peephole, but couldn’t see anything in the darkness. Whoever was outside was covering it up with their hand. “I’m armed.”

  He tapped the end of the revolver against the door to show that he meant business.

  “I’m here because she called for me. Anya.”

  Tommy turned around and fired a question at the girl on the couch. “Sounds like an older broad out here, says she knows you.” Then the pieces clicked together. “So this is Ena. The Reverend would love this.” His lips turned up in a wry, knowing smiling.

  He unbolted the door and stuffed the pistol in his pocket.

  “Come in,” he said, making a big show with his arms. “Make yourself at home.”

  “I’m here for the girl,” Miss Ena said, “and if you try to hurt her again—”

  “Wouldn’t dream of it.”

  “That’s funny.”

  “What is?”

  “Your choice of words.” Miss Ena walked over, until she was behind Anya. The girl didn’t turn around. Her eyes seemed focused on the screen, but in truth they just stared out into nothingness.

  “Why’d you lie,” Anya said.

  “Allow me to explain,” Miss Ena said, and then she told the entire story. From the beginning, until the now.

  40 | Twenty Years Gone

  “Are you sure you want to hear this, child?” Miss Ena sat down on the cigarette burned couch, gathering her long skirt off the floor in a bunch.

  “I’d like to hear it,” Tommy said. He cracked another beer and stepped around the other side of the coffee table, so that the three of them formed a kind of triangle.

  Miss Ena shot him an icy glare, and Tommy didn’t add anything else.

  Anya nodded, her eyes focused on the floor.

  “I’ll take one of those,” Catalina Ena said, and gestured at the beer. Tommy grabbed the six pack from the fridge and tossed her a couple. The older woman drained the first in two gulps and started on the other.

  “It was twenty years ago,” she said. “I worked for Chimera on a secret project. Project Dreamer. Word had come to the higher-ups at the company that a special woman existed. One who could enter the lives of others through her dreams. Of course, we, as scientists, thought that this was pure fantasy—impossible, breaking all laws of genetics and physics. The very fabric of reality, even.

  “But Parsons, he tracked the woman down. Brought her in. It wasn’t hard. She didn’t even know about her abilities, and most people thought she was a kook. It was only because one of her psychiatrists was a friend of my father’s that we even knew about this woman. She was suffering a nervous breakdown at the time, and Parsons went out and offered her help or something else. I don’
t know.”

  Catalina shook her head, slugged down the rest of the beer and gestured for another.

  “Ain’t that illegal? Breaking confidentiality?” Tommy said.

  “Wouldn’t be the first time Chimera did something shady in the name of science,” Catalina said with a wry grin.

  “And this Parsons, he the same guy who owned the warehouse around here?” Tommy said.

  “Probably,” Catalina said. “Wouldn’t surprise me if the government was keeping an eye on Devin all this time, after what happened with the first Dreamer.”

  “So he’s government?”

  “Parsons was the lead asset tasked to the project.”

  “CIA? DARPA?”

  “Way deeper than that. They don’t even have an official name. We just called them the Ghosts, because they were always listening, always around, always watching. And they were scary as hell.”

  “Goddamn,” Tommy said. “Goddamn.”

  “Can I finish, or are you going to keep interrupting?”

  Tommy eyed the woman as she fingered the tab on another beer, cracking it open with a hiss. “If you keep drinking at this rate, I don’t think you’re gonna remember the story anyway.”

  “I can hold my shit together. Question is, can you?”

  Anya’s eyes grew wide when she heard the cuss word. And the thought of Miss Ena, incense burning naturalist, as a high-tech scientist was hard to bring her head around, too. Miss Ena had always given her a difficult time about spending so many hours on the computer, off in “another world,” as she called it.

  The pieces were beginning to come together, though, about the origin of those objections.

  Since no one spoke, Catalina took the floor again, resuming the story.

  “So this woman’s psychiatrist contacted my father, and he let the other people on the board know about it. Soon, the calls were out to the government—everyone agreed that this was a game changer. A few years from the stain of the Cold War, the thought of engineering the ability to control minds—well, I don’t think I need to explain what that would mean. It’d revolutionize spy craft and military protocol. War would be forever changed, and the country that held that technology could rule the entire world.”

  “Doesn’t the United States already kind of rule the world?” Tommy said.

  “Nothing lasts forever,” Catalina said. “Look at the past fifteen years. Two recessions, two wars, bleeding money, surpassed in every research field by other nations. That’s what Project Dreamer—and anything like it—is meant to do. Halt inevitable decline by fighting against the natural laws of the world. Everything trends towards entropy and chaos.”

  Her words were measured, deliberate, as if she’d been thinking about them for the past two decades, planning this speech for this very moment. She reached out and wrapped a hand around Anya’s index finger. The girl pulled it back a little, but not all the way.

  “I’m sorry, child.”

  “For what?” Anya said.

  “For what comes next,” Catalina said. “After a lot of theorizing and cross-checking what this woman had told her psychiatrist—stories of the dreams, the places she’d been in them, the things she’d done—Parsons and my father determined that she indeed possessed the ability to enter the minds of other people.

  “That took a month, maybe more. It was a long time ago, so I can’t be sure of the details. The woman stayed at our headquarters in the desert a few miles outside Jamestown, Arizona. A few miles away from where you grew up.”

  Anya nodded, remembering the dim house, its earthen smell.

  “Project Dreamer was official. We knew what she could do. Now my team had to figure out how it worked, so we could reverse-engineer it. Perfect it, commoditize it.”

  “And rule the world,” Tommy said.

  “Not quite,” Catalina said. “Maybe that was part of it. But there was a whole consumer angle, too. The ability to control things—objects, robots, maybe even avatars—with the power of your mind. Or the chance to be someone else, experience their life. Haven’t you ever wished you were someone else?”

  “Fuck that. I like who I am.”

  “You’d be one of the few. And besides the recreational uses, it had the potential to be ground-breaking for social relations.”

  “I’m not seeing it,” Tommy said.

  “You’re a white male. Ever wondered what it was like to be gay? Black? Native American? Chinese? Anything besides someone in the powerful majority?”

  “Not really.”

  “That’s the root of social inequality, and prejudice. A lack of caring. A lack of understanding. If you could be gay for a day, see how people looked at you, then it’d change your view of the world.”

  “This a story or a sermon,” Tommy said. “Cause I don’t really want to think about faggots.”

  Catalina sipped another beer and raised an eyebrow before rolling her eyes. “I’m just trying to explain why I would be part of a project like this. Because right now, the way things have progressed, it might seem like my motives were less than pure. I wanted glory. A Nobel Prize, maybe. And maybe we were guilty of playing God. But the motives…”

  “Who’s this we you keep talking about,” Tommy said. “Tell us about that.”

  “It was a small team. Tight, people that could be trusted. Best and brightest, but also those with a heavy investment in Chimera. Project Dreamer was a delicate subject, one that had far-reaching political, security and social ramifications. We needed to beat our competitors and other countries to market, and the only way through that was to keep them ignorant of it all. So they chose me because my father was on the board and was CFO of the company.”

  “Nothing like nepotism,” Tommy said.

  “I’m shocked someone like you even knows that word.”

  “I know a couple things.”

  “I was the first one on the team. The de facto leader. The most trustworthy.” Catalina snorted, almost spraying beer across the carpet. “That’d be funny to my father now, given what happened. But at the time, I was a good solider. The best soldier. And there was Mark Stanton, a brilliant neurologist and an expert in neural learning. He’s the one I gave Devin to. The one who visited every week.”

  “Why,” Anya said.

  “We’ll get there soon enough,” Catalina said. “But Mark, he was a decent man. Maybe blinded by the company line, or a quest for glory. It can infect us all, should we not be careful. And the last member of the team, well, he was what you might call a true believer. A scientific zealot. Samuel Thane.”

  Both Anya and Tommy let out confused gasps. The Reverend, a scientist? It didn’t track.

  “But he’s a—” Tommy started.

  “I know,” Catalina said, and waved him off with a dismissive flick of her hand, “he started that cult of crazies out in the redwoods. The Lionhearted, is it?” Her eyes bore down upon Tommy hard, like he had something to answer for.

  “Yeah,” he kind of mumbled into his beer, “that’s it. I’m sorry.”

  “Don’t apologize to me for what you’ve done. Apologize to her. Apologize to the Dreamer.”

  “I did and I will,” he said.

  “Anyway,” Catalina said, the momentum of her story unstopped by this little interlude, “before he became a man of the cloth or a shepherd of the poor and misguided or whatever he claims to be, Samuel was a scientist. In fact, he was the woman’s psychiatrist, the one who kicked off the whole project.”

  “He hates Chimera,” Tommy said. “Hates it.”

  “We all had our own way of dealing with what happened. Because, a few weeks after the official start of the project, everything changed. The woman, she was in her third trimester of pregnancy and had been dealing with a battery of questions, tests and other prodding. It was a lot to handle, given her mental state, which was precarious. When a person thinks they’re insane, it’s just as good as the real thing.”

  Catalina pushed the almost empty beer can away as the story wound down to
its conclusion.

  “So we decided to tell her the truth.”

  “The truth?” Tommy said.

  “About what she was, what she could do.”

  “She didn’t know? The hell is that possible?”

  “What’s more likely,” Catalina said. “That you can control other people’s lives by the simple act of dreaming in your sleep, or you’ve gone bananas?”

  “I’m just saying.”

  “Did your brother ever mention his ability to you?”

  “No,” Tommy said. “But we ain’t all that close in that way. Kind of different. I like chicks and stuff.”

  “Yes, you made that quite clear earlier.” The two stared at each other, but Tommy blinked first. “We brought her into the conference room. Big glass room in the center of headquarters. Lots of people working in the surrounding labs, on different projects. It was Samuel’s suggestion to do it in a normal, semi-public environment. Well connected to reality.”

  “Let me guess. It was a terrible fucking idea.”

  “We sat her down, the three of us, and sat around making small talk with her for a few minutes. How she was feeling, if she thought the baby was a boy or a girl. She thought it was a boy, because it kicked a lot.” Catalina turned and flashed a small smile at Anya. The girl was staring, eyes rapt and electric, taking in each beat of the story.

  “And then I say, ‘Myra, we just wanted to tell you something about yourself. We think it’ll help ease a lot of the problems you’ve had.’ And she nodded, like she trusted us, and I said, ‘The dreams you’ve told Dr. Thane about, the intensity of them, there’s a reason for that.’ And I took out this folder and slid it across the jet black table. She brought a delicate finger up and flicked it open, but kept her eyes on me. And then I said, ‘Your dreams, they’re real.’ And I gestured for her to read the file. Which she did, and we waited. All she said at the end was, ‘Thank you, may I go now?’ We thought she was just processing. It was a lot. That was the last thing I ever heard her say.”

  “Why?” Anya’s voice was small, like she didn’t want to know, but needed to.

  “Because Myra—Myra Sylvi, your mother—she went back to her room and she…killed herself. Slit her wrists in the tub with a pen she’d snuck from one of our offices. I found her, but it was too late.”