Prometheor

Leo and Fabian

Leo rode his bicycle to work. It was one of the many things that set him apart from other examples of 24th-century man. He built it himself using blueprints recovered from Earth and his adoptive mother, the historian, would have been proud.

Of course, for his fellow ignobles, the bicycle was a nuisance. Askahuila was a beautiful city and the cost of building and maintaining it was a debt the ignobles were shackled to. In the end, they took it out on each other.

He ignored their angry shouts on the way to the office. As a cybernautic dreamer, he had been conscripted at a young age to dream up weapons for the new age, an idea he scoffed at. He wasn't particularly subversive, he just performed the bare minimum.

The method for tracking a worker's productivity was very precise and nuanced, but altogether easy for him to work around after his first week on the job. He spent the most time at his desk dreaming of ways to elevate himself into the galactic peerage of nobility, the House of Man.

Around noon each day, his supervisor, Herry, would appear to collect his dreams for the morning. Herry was one of those lady chimps that broadcast her femininity by wearing the latest human fashions. Leo left a stack of two or three dreamcubes on the corner of his desk so he could be pretending to sleep when she came around. He would never give her anything valuable, a lesson he learned the easy way.

Months ago, one of his colleagues was able to craft a spell and Herry managed to take credit for it and have the inventor sent away on some triviality. Of course, this was after the efficacy of the spell had been verified; crafting a spell that any dreamer can cast is a mind-boggling task.

Leo didn't waste his time on such things; magic, no matter how boring and systematic it turned out to be, was not what his mind was tuned for. At least, that's what he told himself to feel better because, in truth, a cybernautic dreamer must have a very close relationship with a lucid dreamer to craft a spell, the more simpatico, the better.

And this made crafting spells out of reach for cybernautic dreamers like Leo. He worked alone, ate lunch alone, and biked back home alone. Once his adoptive mother passed away into the dreamsphere, she haunted his dreams about coming to Askahuila to make a fresh start.

Perhaps she hoped he would forge collaborative relationships here, but that didn't pan out. The only people he talked to outside work were the people he met at the Stellar Drop, his favorite watering hole. He knew the owner, Tiny, and most of the staff, though he had never seen any of them outside the Drop.

He found a seat at the bar and wondered if Tiny was a nickname. Before long, the burly man was standing in front of him.

"The usual, please," he mumbled.

While Tiny fixed his drink, Leo scanned the bar. This was a robust crowd. Leo got nervous in the presence of imminent violence and since his "Immobilizer" invention worked a little too well, he was always searched at the door.

Tiny returned with his drink and Leo watched the inky liquid inside the glass slowly expend its residual fluid motion. Inside the dark fluid, a chemically wrought electromagnetic display moved independently of the liquid medium, exhausting its own translation of the kinetic energy of motion. A tiny spiral arm galaxy spun and rocked in the glass long after the rest of the fluid was still. This was the Milky Drop, one of a variation of drinks that involved a chemical reaction taking place catalyzed by the atmosphere. He watched the tiny galaxy spin sedately inside his glass for an extended spell-bound minute. There were a few variations on the theme: the Andromeda, and perhaps predictably, the Amalgamation.

To Leo, the Milky Drops tasted like home.

#

He paused for a moment and leaned back in the small, cramped workspace. Those were the days, he told himself. Waking up alone riding to work and showing up sweaty. Working with sleeping drones and a chimp supervisor at a shit job so he can enjoy some mind-expanding Drops. He often lost the memory of riding his bike back home and his brain screamed at being forced from cosmic dimensions back into his skull cavity, but still. Those were the good old days. He was going nowhere fast, and deep down he knew it, but still.