Insomnia

17

"Hold on," Oz exclaimed. "So not only can you hack into people's dreams, you can hack into tech?"

Esme nodded before remembering she was speaking to him remotely. She was seated in front of a computer terminal, attempting to download the information she needed.

"Yeah," she murmured. "I call it going into Halfsleep."

"That's not a great name," he said. "Not a bad one. But not great."

"You got any better ideas?"

"Let me think about it."

"Well think quietly. I need to do it again."

Esme closed her eyes and entered Halfsleep. She dreamed and the room was aglow with an unearthly green. The screen before her looked like a pool of light. Her keyboard grew fangs on its ends. Shredded bluebonnets littered the table.

She extended a thought probe towards the computer and recoiled slightly at the sudden influx of information. Countless data points. Too many.

"Recent," she thought/whispered.

The flow lessened. Subsided. Eased. She remembered the Tempo of Alan's local dream.

"Similar," she thought/whispered.

Data for his local dream. Going back about a week. One ping from somewhere out west. Alan himself dreaming. Esme went back further. Still Alan. Then not Alan.

She pulled up the request/response signals for that night, records of communication between the Somnus server and everything that lurked inside Alan's brain.

Pain. Wrong. Wake up. DENIED. Pain. Wake up. DENIED. Wrong. Wake up. DENIED. Wake up. DENIED. Wake up. DENIED. Death. DENIED.

Esme recorded the aberrant entry in one of her Somnus databases. She searched for another victim's local dream. Saw the signals.

Ecstasy. Pain. Wrong. Ecstasy. Joy Wrong. Ecstasy. Ecstasy. Ecstasy.

Esme remembered this one. The part of the victim's brain responsible for happiness had been so overstimulated that it burned out - stopped working. The doctors assumed she was on drugs. She killed herself not long after telling Esme her story.

She recorded the entry. Then looked for another.

Confusion. Impossible. Rationalize. Confusion. Impossible. Rationalize. Recurse.

This one couldn't stop seeing invisible patterns after he woke up. Tried to connect stars at night. Chased them right off his roof.

Esme logged a few more before moving to another data column. Average dream rate, the amount of time a user perceived compared to the amount of time they spent asleep. Each was proportional to standard time. They each experienced only a night's worth of time. That didn't fit.

She looked deeper. Collected the dream dilation rates varying with time. At first time slowed. To a crawl. A dream year in a real hour. Towards the end it sped up. It became a dream hour in a real year. That would mask the effect in the average. She collected that information too.

Esme drifted outwards from her search. More evidence. More data. She concentrated on Max's dream Tempo and drew relevant intel towards her.

First, his login history. He was dreaming in Somnus during each incident. But he was in Somnus most nights. Hardly conclusive.

Second, chat room activity. He visited the Omens of Knightmare pages almost every day. He posted frequently, although under a pseudonym. Described the Knightmare briefly. It matched all the other sightings. Psychopaths loved to brag. She archived the data.

Last, his digital signature. She compared her current sample of Max's Tempo to the user that had entered each victim's local dream. A frown.

Only 30% match. Tempos recorded temperament, frame of mind, emotional state. They would fluctuate naturally, but rarely by this much. But one questionable data point wasn't enough to deter her. She recorded it anyway.

Esme detached her mind from the database. There was nothing else she wanted to know. She awoke from Halfsleep. Her back cracked painfully as she stood up from the chair and stretched. Esme stepped away from the terminal and left the room.

A series of winding hallways lay between her and the back door, littered with tall humming servers. As she passed through, she heard a slow scraping noise break through the melody. It sounded like a tire leaving skid marks. Esme stepped closer. Her breathing ran hot behind her mask. The hairs on her arms prickled. Her visor accented light and dark in the building. The glowing servers seemed brighter as shadowy corners vanished from her sight. She turned her head from side to side, searching for the noise. The lights blurred as they streaked across the glass.

There was a room at the other end of the hall. A terminal lay inside. The door was ajar and Esme peeked through. She saw a woman hunched over the desk. Her mask was off and Esme could see her face clearly in the light from the screen. Round eyes and plump cheeks. Brown hair. A sharp chin. She had a robotic arm and was drumming a rhythm against the table. The metal screeched and hissed. A burning violin. Esme looked closer and saw a body on the ground at her feet. Another guard? Dark marks were visible around a barely breathing throat. They looked like fingers. But only five of them - from one hand. She looked back at the woman's metal arm.

Esme bumped her foot into the door, causing it to open wider and creak. The woman turned around, shocked. Esme's mouth went agape beneath her mask. They stood in silence a moment longer before she started running.