Insomnia

6

Esme returned to Somnus and undid her face. Her skin lightened. Her eyes turned blue. Her nose receded on her face and her hair retracted into short curls instead of falling down to her shoulders. She tried avoiding the public eye for many reasons, this investigation not least of them. Ceres marketed her reclusiveness as a sign of her talent, but she just preferred her privacy.

She exchanged Nautilus for a simple rain coat and sweatpants. Unfortunate, since she preferred the briny armor for dream work. It was a creation that predated all others. One that did not take inspiration from stolen memories, but emerged instead from her own experiences. A visit to the ocean. The last time she'd seen her father.

"Where are we going, papa?" she had asked that day. He had draped her sleepy body over his broad shoulders. Her eyes were already closed. She only knew they had gone outside because the air felt softer.

"Goin' for a short drive, May. To the beach. You'd like that, right?"

She murmured agreement as he loaded her into the backseat. The engine started. Her eyes fluttered open a few minutes later during a brief spat of turbulence. It was spring, and below them swayed a sea of bluebonnets.

Esme shook off the recollection before pacing the cold sidewalk. It was barely dawn. It smelled like rain. She'd once asked other Psions to describe the scent to her. None had given the same answer. They each received the same neural inputs from the Somnus servers, but each one's brains had seemed to format them differently. The idea made her feel alone.

She'd even gone so far as to interrogate the programmers who encoded the sensory data that formed Somnus. When the servers scanned data from user dreams, they divided experiences into nested sectors, the most generic at the top, and the more specific closer to the bottom; snow would be sorted near rain, and hail would be a subgenre of snow. Once a concept was sufficiently defined, an average would be taken across every available data point to generate what the standard "rain" experience might feel like.

Yet despite their best efforts, in the space between event and memory, the essence of a thing became warped into millions of distinct individual experiences. Strange. So strange.

Esme opened a thought bubble, displaying a bird's eye view of the city. She was a few blocks away from her next destination. Esme decided to walk this time. No need to draw unnecessary attention to herself.

Yet it seemed unwanted attention was doing its best to find her, when a blizzard of notifications beamed through her mind. Esme would have put them on mute, but the police generally didn't appreciate being ignored. The messages were fairly standard, a series of requests to come in for questioning. Except for the last. That one was personal.

"Esme. It's Agent Castellano," the recording played. "You can't just go off on your own like this. We need to talk. Now."

Esme scowled before swiping left in the air to delete the message. She heard a chuckle and turned around.

"Glad to see I'm getting through to you," Agent Lucia Castellano said, sauntering casually towards her. She pointed at Esme's face. "Nice makeover."

Esme frowned and undid her changes, returning her face to its normal composition. In Somnus, her face looked the same as it did in real life. She had long since decided that she did not care if her nose was crooked, or her left eye was always a little more squinted than the right. One could always be more beautiful. For some Psions, it was an endless, painful pursuit.

"How'd you know it was me?"

"I'm with the government. We have our ways."

Lucia's woolen overcoat draped down to her knees atop a simple dress shirt and slacks. Psionic agents were visibly unarmed, but could summon a host of weaponry into their hands with a single thought. But for now she only held a cup of coffee in her hands.

"Why do you drink that stuff? " asked Esme, folding her arms. "Caffeine doesn't do you much good when you're already asleep."

"I like the smell. And it's warm." She shivered when she reached Esme's side. "Never understood why they let you feel cold in here."

"It's for realism."

Lucia shrugged.

"I never feel cold when I dream for real. That's usually how I know I'm dreaming."

"That's -- " Esme's words trailed off as she saw the gentle smirk on the agent's face. She frowned.

"Sorry, Esme," Lucia said. "It's fun to bait you sometimes.."

"Save it. What do you want?"

"Maybe I'm just checking in on my partner's little sister. Seeing if she's okay?"

"Your message implied otherwise."

"I disagree."

"I'm not dropping my investigation."

Lucia let out a full belly laugh.

"Investigation?" she said. "Since when did Esme Trahan sign the dotted line and deign to join us plebeians on the force?"

Esme sighed angrily.

"Since it turned out you couldn't even 'serve and protect' one of your own."

The mirth faded from Lucia's face.

"That's not fair."

"It's true."

"Atticus was my partner. I did whatever I could to help him," growled Lucia.

"It wasn't enough," Esme hissed.

"Maybe we could have done better if you'd been around to help. If you, I don't know... decided to do more with your life than build playpens for the rich and famous."

"I'm an artist. I make beautiful things."

"The things you make are a waste of your talents."

"I disagree."

"Oh?" Lucia said incredulously. "Then why are you going around playing amateur detective? Shouldn't you be making 'beautiful things' right now?"

"I --" Esme looked from side to side. The street was mostly empty, but a few people were giving them strange looks. "Do we need to talk about this here? Now?"

"Here? No. Now? Yes."

"I have a meeting."

"Cancel it."

"It's with the Triumvirate."

"Ah, the mighty Triumvirate is it?" Lucia exclaimed with mock formality. "Well, why didn't you say so?" She made a show of pushing her forward. "Run along, run along. Take as long as you need to convey to those spoiled brats that Agent Lucia Castellano, of the goddamn World Bureau of Investigation, could not care less about their little club." A pair of spiked cleats materialized into her hands. "And if you could deliver my boots up their asses too, I would appreciate it."

"Fine, fine," said Esme, "Point taken. I'll get there late."

Lucia nodded.

"Good. I'm sending you a link to a world. Accept it. Meet me there."

Esme received the request a moment after Lucia disappeared. For a moment she considered running off and leaving her there, but that would only prolong the older woman's meddling. With another sigh she opened a thought bubble, received the Seed images, and left the city behind.