Insomnia

11

She pushed thick blankets off of her stiff frame, and felt a chill run over her body. Sweat dripped from her torso. Esme's heart screamed in her chest. The ceiling fan spun in place, hanging from the ceiling above her bed. Its arms swirled lazily. Swishing air came upon her in waves.

Her face felt warm behind her mask, her jaw cupped gently by its lowest metal fold. A stylized faceplate jutted out an inch from her chin, its curves bevelled into sharp edges that followed the line of her cheeks. A glass visor cut across the tops of the plate to cover her eyes, leaving only her forehead exposed. The mask was specially designed to match the growth of her skull and she'd worn this one since she was a little girl. She hadn't taken it off in years.

Light shone through her blast proof windows. It glowed pure and white like a lens flare. Through the distorted view of her visor it possessed an almost solid quality - sun rays trapped in sleep paralysis.

The visor's protective glass blocked out all color save for black and white, leaving her world awash in grey.

She breathed slowly, and soon enough her racing heartbeat quietened into a steady thrum. She'd infiltrated many nightmares in her work as a Developer, but none so powerful as that one. Did Max push her out of her dream? And the dream that took her. It was the Knightmare. It must have been. And that surely meant Max himself, considering what she'd seen in his own dream. That haunting hellscape. His bleary golden eyes.

An excited chill rattled her bones. She'd been working towards this for so long.

Esme knew she needed to talk to Lucia. But the only hard evidence she possessed was her own story - of how she'd violated one of the most basic precepts of Somnus, and infiltrated another person's mind. That by itself was likely to land her in prison.

The night wasn't a complete loss, however. She could narrow her search. Collect information on one suspect instead of several. The only question was where to start.

She rolled over onto her side and snatched a touchpad off of her nightstand. Esme slid past the lock screen and began searching online Somnus forums. Something Minerva said the previous night had stuck with her. Those rumors that were floating around in chat rooms.

Esme had been shying away from online searches these past months. Atticus had once told her that it was already hard enough to separate fact from fiction when investigating cases that took place in dreams. Adding in a rabbit hole of online rumors only made matters murkier. But it had been months, and Esme hadn't found any conclusive leads elsewhere. So perhaps it was time to try it.

Soon enough, she had read through countless pages on the Knightmare, the caffeine fueled ramblings of mediocre Psions obsessed with that monster. Some of these sites insisted this was the government instituting the last phase of some ethnic cleansing program, the first stages being the Disaster.

Fifteen years ago, billions died on every continent. There was no pattern - no order or special meaning. A wave of suffering enveloped the globe. No one could have planned devastation on that scale. Not with any kind of coherent agenda in mind.

Others believed the Knightmare was a collective consciousness, born from a world of shared dreams and determined to devour its creators.

Unlikely. Esme had similar suspicions after the first Knightmare attack and had done research on pre Disaster artificial intelligence. The technology was seriously limited and a truly developed consciousness couldn't be created, especially by accident. But Somnus did provide a great deal of data which could potentially be used to teach artificial intelligence how to think. Subscriptions for the service were free provided users allowed Fantasian to record the data in their local dreams - that was how they continued fine-tuning their product. But the algorithmic complexity of parsing all that information to create a thinking being like the Knightmare was truly beyond them.

After a few hours of searching, she stumbled onto a forum of users that thought the Knightmare some kind of twisted folk hero, purging Somnus of the unworthy. They called themselves the "Omens of Knightmare" - would be harbingers of a cleansing god. The Omens believed that they themselves would be saved by the Knightmare's will, and tracked his every rumored sighting with a religious fervor.

She was hardly surprised by their bizarre little cult. There was already a rigid hierarchy of skill in the dream, typically measured through rankings in their monthly competitions. As a Developer, Esme was exempt from these bouts, and accorded special privileges of her own. But she knew how much Psions cared about the little numbers that determined their status. This was just the logical next step.

The rabid hatred with which these people spoke of the ungifted unnerved her. They conflated beauty with skill - worth with power. There were dark, almost satirical, prophecies that spoke of convergence with the godhead through Somnus. That promised heaven for the strong and a butcher for the weak.

For a moment Esme fantasized about showing each of these fools what it really meant to be at the mercy of someone stronger. But then she recalled the original purpose of her query: Tracking down the person whose vile acts spurred on their twisted little group.

She heard the doorbell ring.