Day: 21 November 2022

I’ve never been much of a country boy. I appreciate it in the abstract, obviously. I’m glad it’s there, in the same way I’m glad there’s a bottom to the ocean, but my presence in it has never been very important to me. I guess we’d been stuck in the dome cities for too long. The caterpillar truck ground its way along the road network towards the mountains in the north-west, and I have to admit, things didn’t look quite as totally fucked as I’d expected. My last exposure to the great outdoors had been five or so years ago, though it’s honestly hard to tell, what with days having fucked off a while back. I wasn’t the only one who had lost track of time – most of us managed to divide our lives into roughly twenty-four hour slices. That was so hard-coded into every social practice and industry that we were kept on that track even if we lurched through them with irregular sleeping patterns and a constant sleep hangover. But actually counting the days? Why bother? I’d definitely had a feel for it in the early days. Weirdly, whether we were occupied or not didn’t seem to improve or  damage my sense of time passing more. For years I’d been heavily involved in various programmes (thank you municipal gardening team), and that had saved my life and others by giving us focus, and in that focus distracting us from the world going to hell around us. In between those projects, there were breaks of course – a few days here or there mostly – notably the lengthy-feeling (I think) gap before we got moved to Freshwater (the optimistically named city where Project Tutu was underway). All those periods of mostly free time are like elastic in my mind – they could have lasted days or months, with nothing to separate the hours from turning into weeks. I remember the sense of relief that came whenever the next assignment came. Relief that there was purpose. Not hope, that hadn’t felt part of the equation since the nukes, when I’d finally realised that even if our situation was overwhelming and possibly hopeless, we sure as shit were going to do everything we could to make it worse. Purpose, routine, structure. I wonder how many people completely fell apart without those in the shell years. Anyway, this is exactly why structure’s good – you’re busy and even if it doesn’t keep you from circling the abyss it gives you a little nudge away from the edge every day. What I was trying to tell you about was the last time I’d been outside, before Project Tutu.

Back then we’d been using the train network, which worked pretty well still and was heavily used for industrial transport, smashing clean through the grey outer world. We’d been pressed up against the windows to see the sad-looking trees and fields. They were still going, reluctantly. The crappy light emitted by the shell kept them alive, but it didn’t look as if they liked it. There was still some agriculture, despite most of it having been moved inside, and there were large communities living out there too, in the non-domed towns. Caravans and trucks arrayed together, roofed over with patchworks of tarpaulin for added protection from the weather, tents looking like they were barely clinging on. The weather had become confused. Climate change had been underway for decades, but fucking up the seas by taking away the tides had knackered the gulf stream and that wonderfully mild nuclear winter had between them rearranged the clouds and weather patterns. Clouds of sometimes murderous rain swept around the world, randomly poisoning the earth, periods of heat and miserable damp cold erratically tortured the poor bastards living out there. We saw animals – the hardiest of sheep, occasional horses and colonies of haggard-looking crows and magpies.

We even saw children sometimes, playing in the camps. That was a rare sight anywhere. Despite our make-work and projects, something inside our species had said “fuck it” and the birth rate had declined spectacularly since the shell enveloped us. All the usual fears about the future being a worse place for our children had previously been kicked down the road – have a kid, it’ll probably be fine… Now? It really didn’t feel like that. Seeing those kids wasn’t just rare, it was soul-searingly depressing. Well, accidents happen I guess. They were still a highlight of any community, but no one wanted to the be the one that actually had them. What I remember most about being outside previously was the rain that started coming down after we’d been on the tracks for a couple of hours – it was a long trip – grey rain on a grey sky. Like the world had turned black and white, we’d been somehow knocked back in time a few hundred years and this was the best approximation of the real world that humanity could manage any more. The sense that we were travelling into the past gripped me, and didn’t let go until we debarked in Freshwater. I’d stopped looking out of the window before then. We all had. No one even glanced at the glass, or looked backwards as we trooped off the train. No wonder we were ready for Project Tutu and a brighter future of turning inward and forgetting about the grey, poisoned world outside.

This journey was different. For one, the caterpillar truck was a real beast. If the roads went where Corporal Lindsmane thought we should go then we used them. We ground down those roads, the neotarmac crumbling after a decade of acid rain and hard wear. Not much in the budget for road gangs these days. With a relentless eye on our direction, if a road veered away then fuck it, the caterpillar just ploughed ahead through open countryside, up hills and straight through a small river. It wasn’t a particularly comfortable ride. Lindsmane and his little mob of soldiers were back on mission. They’d properly perked up since we’d had our little tiff. I wasn’t certain whether it was having had a chance to work out a little military paranoia, or if having an actual mission had sorted them out. But they were focused and the vague air of unease around them had faded. And we’d given them this purpose. I wasn’t entirely comfortable about that. I’m not sure if you’re supposed to commandeer a squad of soldiers and this ridiculous monster truck just because someone sends you a message in a dream. I was very glad we hadn’t tried to explain that part to Lindsmane and his men. They seemed so genuinely happy that I didn’t want to spoil it for them. Or get us all shot in the head and dumped on the roadside. If I’m honest, the latter was certainly the greater motivator for me.

We bounced around in the webbing bunks, feeling rather travel sick. There was a distinct lack of windows, and although the soldiers would tolerate us hanging about near the cab and the rear of the vehicle, they got a little tetchy when we stuck around for too long. So we lingered there as long as they’d let us, soaking up the best anti-travel sickness medicine there is: looking straight out in the direction of travel and never once looking at anything that has words on it. I always got travel sick in vehicles with wheels, or worse, anything on water. Vile business. Begrudgingly, Cheshblum confessed that he sometimes suffered and had some kick-ass motion sickness tablets he was prepared to share, just so long as we all fucked off and left him alone to do the driving. Considering that these might be the very last tablets he’d ever have, we were appropriately grateful and promptly fucked off as requested. He wasn’t wrong, they were quite impressive. Gex, Scoro and I had tentatively agreed to stay in the real world until we got to wherever it was that we were going. The soldiers had been badly spooked, and again, we didn’t want to get shot by freaking them out. Plus we’d lied to them at least a couple of times, and keeping that to a bare minimum would in theory reduce any awkwardness when we reached our destination. So instead I endured reality as the tablets kicked in and that awful dry-mouthed, teeth loose in my skull sensation diminished. Eventually we fell asleep, the motion of the caterpillar finally proving to be a physical lullaby.

It had been weeks since I’d dreamed normally, wandering through the random association of my mind catching up on the last few days of trauma and unwanted excitement. I saw the door in my dream that would allow me into my ownworld, hanging over me at a peculiar angle before it was carried off by a massive owl. Dreams, you have love them. I was woken up by a buzzing sound followed by Lindsmane’s voice: “ETA approximately thirty minutes.” I’d missed the caterpillar beginning the ascent, though now that I was awake the gradient was apparent. I hustled forward, using the regularly spaced handholds to pull myself up to the cab. We were following some rough track, which seemed like a good indication that we were indeed going somewhere.

“No checkpoints, no signs of life so far,” Lindsmane commented as I grabbed onto a ceiling bar. “But we’re getting close.” He pointed to the map spread out around him, the hologram making it look as if he was a god rising up from beneath the crust. I didn’t have much to say to that, just nodded and kept looking out the windscreen. There was something coming. Even though I wasn’t in the ownworld, I could sense a pressure behind my head – some weird effect of the oneirocyte and ownworld that my brain clearly new couldn’t fit inside my skull, so it was projected somewhere behind me, like listening to music that’s been recorded so it sounds like it’s moving around behind you. I was very tempted to pop in and check, but we’d know soon enough.

That thirty minutes could have been a million years. The track wound around the sides of the mountain (mountain by our standards – in most countries this would be a big hill), spiralling us ever higher. Finally we were there, and received the reception that Corporal Lindsmane had been looking for: more soldiers. I guess it’s like being in a family: our squad had been lost in the woods, but they’d blundered back out, straight into mum and dad’s back garden. Even though there were guns pointed at us, our soldiers looked delighted, in that focused and professional way they had. There were twelve of them that I could see, both in front and flanking our sides. We’d rolled up into a much better maintained area. I’d have called it a forecourt if it was a garage, but this was a little compound of fences and razor wire, big fuck-off towers with lights on the top and more soldiers. Behind it all, a huge dark hole into the mountain. In the gloom I peered up through the top of the windscreen. Further up the mountain were more shapes, something like big radar dishes, perhaps an observatory.

“Stay here,” Lindsmane said, adjusting his hat (probably a cap or something with a proper name – beret?) and clambered out of the cab to say hello. But the new soldiers weren’t very interested in him. I mean, they were friendly enough in that military way. Lots of nods and salutes, but no big hugs. They were intent on who else was in the caterpillar. I gave them a tentative wave through the window. That appeared to have been the right thing to do: more nods. Lindsmane was back in a couple of minutes, declaring that we were in the right place,

“They’re right keen to see you lot,” he said, with an appraising look that felt like I was being measured up against some notional ideal. Perhaps against whatever mental model he had of a scientist (something I’d avoided calling us, because we really didn’t give that vibe at present). The soldiers in front stepped aside and signalled something unseen. The caterpillar lurched back into life and we drove into the mountain.

I don’t know if it’s just me, but I’d much rather have a getting to know you conversation outside in the open air somewhere nice. My last choice would have been driving into the dark heart of a mountain. Oh well, beggars can’t be choosers. As the last hint of what passed for daylight inside the shell faded away, I felt the sheer weight of mountain above us, like someone was leaning hard on my shoulder, breath harsh against my neck. It felt like forever before the caterpillar slowed, ground to a crunching halt. All I could hear were our own held breaths and creak of the vehicle. Someone was being needlessly dramatic, but of course this seemingly endless moment was just an instant. And then the lamps switched on and we were bathed in the happy warm glow of electric light.

Now we were inside a building within the mountain proper – concrete floor, walls and ceiling. An inner man-made cave. Corporal Lindsmane said, “Right, this is your stop sir.” And we all hauled our bags onto shoulders and trooped out to meet our saviours. Lindsmane was crisply greeted a superior of some kind – more chest, shoulder or collar arrows no doubt – and with a nod, he and his people vanished through a set of doors. They looked very chipper, no doubt eagerly anticipating a proper military-style bunk somewhere in their near future. I took a moment to catch my bearings. This was a huge room, the caterpillar was parked neatly in the centre of a grid of yellow stripes that fanned out to be framed in a series of squares and rectangles. Damned if I know what that was about other than someone who was a tad over-enthusiastic with their painting set. Inset into the walls were a series of huge double doors and some smaller ones like those Lindsmane had gone off through. There wasn’t anything helpful in the way of signage – if you got this far you either knew where you were headed or you weren’t going any further. The last was backed up when I raised my eyes to the gallery that ran around the room some fifteen feet or more above. That was quite well populated with gun-toting soldiers and what seemed to be a few casual onlookers. Those rifles weren’t exactly trained on us, but they gave the powerful impression that we could be their target in a split-second. Cheery. We waited a moment in those rather austere surroundings before a set of the big double doors separated and cool blue light flowed into the room.

Out of the blue came a small deputation, and the words, “My foot still hurts you know.”

“Jesus fucking Christ. Edithine?” I  stammered, nerves making me a little swearier than I’d usually be when I thought I was meeting new people. “What the fuck are you doing here?”

“Hello Evanith, it’s been a little while since we did some gardening isn’t it.” Edithine looked great, especially considering it had been at least thirteen years since I’d last seen her.

“Nearly twenty, actually. You’re not the only one to lose track,” she said. The slight limp (yes, I still felt bad about it, even though I probably hadn’t thought of her name in a decade) was smoothly disguised under the cleanest suit I’d ever seen and really sharp hair styling. It certainly made the three of us look like an absolute state, dust and black-stained, unwashed and bedraggled.

“Well, you all look like shit,” she continued, “but we can see that sorted. Come along, we’ll get the three of you settled and cleaned up, and then we can get on with the work.”

Scoro piped up, with some of the questions  we all had: “Um, great. Couple of thoughts… who are you, what is this place and generally what the fuck is going on?”

Edithine smiled broadly, utterly ignoring her aides who seemed keen to get us all off to a shower. “I’m Edithine Charbroly. Before your friend Evanith knew me, and stabbed me in the foot with garden shears I was head of biotech at Charbio. I’d retired, but the world fell apart and they re-recruited me to lead Project Tutu. That’s how I know you’ve used the parasites, and that you were never on a list to receive them.” A wry eyebrow at our mix of surprised and guilty expressions, “So that’s interesting for starters. We think you’ve managed some leaps in the tech that are worth studying.”

“That was your voice in my ownworld?” I asked.

“Sort of. Mine was the voice you heard, projected by all the others.”

“Others?” (It was that sort of conversation.)

“Oh yes, we have almost all the parasite users here with us. You’ll meet them later. But first, I really must insist that we get you decontaminated. We operate a clean environment in here and honestly I can see the filth sticking to you all. Come along.”

Question time was over. Edithine set back off into the bluely-lit corridor. We followed, tailed by the rest of her team. The light was the same as in the case, UV sterilising us and the air we walked through. Edithine disappeared through a door at the end of the hall, and we were ushered into a different room coming off the side.

“I’m Velrent Hest, Edithine’s chief aide,” declared the round little man who accompanied us. He directed us to dump our gear on a series of benches. “Honestly, we’re probably going to burn all of your clothes and bags, but if there’s anything you need you should extract it now and we’ll send it off for cleansing.”

I couldn’t really justify keeping anything in my bags – ratty clothes, food packets and a couple of books. Hest spotted me wavering over the bag of zygoptics: “No need to worry about those, the project will give you all you need.” I dumped them on the bench with the bag. Scoro had made a small pile of keepsakes and a tablet which Hest indicated he place in a tray, ready for processing. As an afterthought I tossed the books in with them. Gex was being a little more circumspect and reluctantly pulled the big Project Tutu case out of her rucksack. Hest was all over that.

“We thought there might be a missing case, but project relocation wasn’t as clean and neat as we’d hoped. In the modern chaos there were things lost,” he rested heavily on the word “lost”, “how fortunate that you found this.”

Yes. Gex somehow avoided her ears turning red and Scoro subtly covered the awkwardness with a coughing fit. I was fairly sure we’d be expanding on this conversation later, but it seemed like we weren’t getting shot for treason yet, and that was a good enough outcome.

“Showers, scrubbers, decontamination, then clothing await,” Hest said, directing us towards the cubicles at the back of the room. “Please place all of your current clothing in the bins provided.”

We obviously weren’t the first guests to rock up, I assumed everyone went through this if they left and returned to the facility. We each took a cubicle and closed the door. They audibly locked behind us, which sent a wave of alarm down my spine, but they probably didn’t want to go to the bother of washing us if we could just go straight back out. The bin was a slot in the wall which I fed my coat, boots, now ripped trousers, shirt and underclothes into. I vaguely hoped for some acknowledgment, or maybe a hint of flames, but it just snapped shut. Next, the showers. This was a kind of bliss I hadn’t even considered. The water felt slightly acidic, accompanied by more of the familiar blue light, but it was hot and plentiful. The only cleaning agent appeared to be a lurid pink slime which smelled exactly how something you described as “chemical-scented” should. Skin tingling and soaking wet, I pushed open the next door after the shower turned itself off. This part was less good. The scrubber was much what I’d hoped it wouldn’t be – instead of a friendly loofah it was a room seemingly made up of nobbly rubber human-sized vaginas. With a bit of an inner sigh I squeezed through, and Christ it was a tight fit. The “scrubber” felt like being compressed through wet sandpaper. If I thought my skin tingled after the shower, this was more like feeling abraded as the rubber scraped all the moisture off my skin and had a good go at removing my hair. Decontamination followed, which was the blue lights but very intense so I had to keep my eyes tightly closed. When the light went off and I could open them again I felt incredible gratitude at seeing a nozzle marked “moisturiser, use all over” in the wall. Gloopy goodness took much of the recently-skinned feeling away and the next door opened to a changing room with an array of near-identical clothing hanging on hooks. Not a lot of opportunity for personal expression here, with maybe three variations on dark grey trousers, t-shirts and shoes. With a size for everybody, I got dressed again and went through the final door. There Hest waited with a handful of lanyards holding ID cards which he distributed as we emerged, sore but clean – cleaner than I think I’d ever been – into the next phase of our lives.

“Onwards,” Hest guided us out of the “welcome centre” as he called it and into the project headquarters properly. Bedrooms first, purely for orientation purposes, then the canteen where he left us for twenty minutes. This did feel like the Project Tutu we’d remembered, with its long racks of benches and tables and carousels of food and snacks (I always think there’s an important distinction between those two somehow), drinks and cutlery. We dug in. I don’t think we’d eaten much more than noodles and other dehydrated foods in the months that we’d been training our oneirocytes (or they’d been training us – symbiosis I guess), so this was a real treat. Some of this was definitely actual chicken for one thing, and I’d never tasted pasta without a tang of ash since the shell came up. Oh, and tea. Something the soldiers had bafflingly little of although I could have sworn the army ran on the stuff. It felt a bit like being on holiday. The cream-coloured walls, tastefully decorated with commercial landscape art and the food all lulled us into a sense of relaxation that had been absent for so long.

“Do you think they’re going to fuck us over about that case?” asked Gex, as we clutched our precious cups of tea.

“Only if they’ve really missed it. I mean, it wasn’t the only case, was it?” Scoro replied.

“Um.”

“OK. Cool. Well – the important thing is we brought it back, and only used like three of the oneirocytes, so there’s tonnes left over,” I said, “and Edithine was never vengeful, not even when I dropped those shears point-down in her foot.”

“You used to garden together?”

“Yup. Back in the olden days before the shell. Municipal landscaping. I thought she was dead – there was a fire, and I never found out if she was OK or not. There’s something kinda nice about meeting someone I used to sort of know way out here.”

“If it means she doesn’t have us all killed, then I am thrilled you have a pal here.”

Hest turned up shortly after, so we downed our teas and followed him onto the next part of the tour. This involved innumerable corridors, glass walls showing us more people dressed like us lying on beds and tapping computer screens with vague frowns on their faces.

“Ongoing testing and work with the parasites,” Hest commented, “I expect you’ll find what we’ve been doing quite interesting. I’m very interested to hear about your experiences with the parasites, too.”

“Do you mind if I ask,” Gex piped up, “But do you have an oneirocyte too?”

“Oneirocyte? Cute. Yes, everyone here except the soldiers have undergone nano implantation.”

“How many is everyone?”

“There are just under five hundred parasite subjects here, including myself and Doctor C – Edithine.”

“And what are you doing here?”

“Why, saving the world of course,” he said with slight surprise, “what did you think the parasites were for?”

Well, that shut us up for a bit. At last we turned yet another corner and Hest led us into a small lecture theatre where Edithine waited by a small tray containing a jug of water and some glasses.

“Thank you, Velrent,” Edithine said, dismissing our tour guide. “Please, take a seat–“ she gestured at the front row of well-worn plastic fold-down seats “–glass of water?” We all vaguely nodded and duly received a little glass of achingly cold water.

“I want to be clear from the start about what we’re doing here, and why you’re here too.” Her bright eyes bounced over each of us in turn, enveloping us in some social contract we’d not previously been party to. “When the nano-parasite project began, we were exploring the potential of unlocking the human unconscious and making it subject to the same discipline and rationality of the conscious mind. As you know, since you were supporting the project, that had a certain failure rate, which reduced as we improved the parasites and their interface. What do you think the project goals were?”

We hadn’t expected a question and answer session. I’d settled in for a good set of explainings, but I was happy enough to venture a guess. “Establish a deeper and more experiential virtual reality environment for education and entertainment.”

“Not bad,” smiled Edithene, “that’s almost exactly what we told the subjects we were doing.”

Seriously, fucking scientists.

“In fact, we’re aiming for an interface that can unite human psyches, enabling us to create environments that can be shared, cohabited and ultimately used as vessels to escape our corporeal forms. In short, this planet is dying, we can’t survive the continued environmental damage. The human population has declined by nearly ninety per cent in the last twenty years of darkness. That’s an estimate of course, but global surveys show near-total loss of habitat and life in the southern hemisphere and most of the northern. We don’t have very long left, and if we want humanity to survive at all, it’s not going be in these meat suits we’re wearing. Our future lies in the networks of nano fibres that have infested our brains. We’ll be able to extract the totality of human conscious and unconscious experience from the flesh of the brain into the parasite, then transfer the parasites into a nourishing support environment where we will persist indefinitely, with no break in awareness or identity.” She gave us a few moments of stunned silence to take that in before adding, “cool, right?”

Our peaceful little ownworlds were the first step towards ditching the human body and becoming digital intelligences uploaded into a weird net of black nanofibers stored in a bath of nutrient gel for all eternity. Well. It wasn’t quite what we had expected, but I also hadn’t expected such a gloomy prediction of the future of the human race and our sad little englobed Earth. Edithine left us and gave us some time for it to sink in. I think the thing that got me most was how damn cheerful she and Hest were about it. I guess if you’ve been working towards this goal for a while it suggests you’re on board with the hole ditching the meat suit thing, but it was a bit of a shock to run into for the first time. It’s not like I’m especially in love with the corporeal me – one knee is pretty dodgy and I’ve not been delighted by the general process of ageing, or the wear and tear from nearly twenty years of living in the gloom – but I do like being able to walk around and do stuff. Of course, the argument was that we could do that equally well in our ownworlds, where we need never grow old, ill or die. I mean, I got the idea, but I knew there was a difference between those two states of reality and ownworld. How far did you have to go before that barrier broke down entirely? We’d lost track and nearly forgotten to wake up, but I didn’t feel that was because we thought we were already awake, we were just really into dreaming… And maybe that is the same thing. Half of human experience is being involved in things, focused on some aspect of our lives, whether it’s work or gaming or lying comatose on a bed. If they feel inescapable, perhaps they are. But surely knowing you’ve got an option to get out changes things. I like options, even if I don’t use them. If the option of being alive in the real world was going to become unavailable, and from Edithine’s – Doctor C’s – account, it sure sounded like Earth was just a few years from being uninhabitable, then sure, oneirocyte upload and transfer might be the best future available.

Fuck, what would you do? I guess the Alometh got through this whole damn shell business better off than we did. I heard you guys just dropped into some kind of hibernation state when your planet got scooped up by. Sounds cool. Hard to imagine: did you all just freeze as the sky went dark, or was there a census and collective decision to sack it all off? And how long could you have lasted? I guess you can, like, stick your roots in the ground and suck out nutrients really slowly and keep yourselves ticking away super-slowly in the background. Would your lot choose to abandon the real world? Would I? If it came right down to it… maybe. As a last resort. Back then I wasn’t ready for the idea that it was last resort for humanity time. Hope is a weird fucking beast. Even when you think it’s fucked off at last, ground down till you haven’t even considered hope for a decade or more, when someone tells you that it’s all over, I found it was still flickering inside somewhere. Unloved, untended, just waiting for a reason to illuminate my insides with that strange tingly fire. Does it do anything on its own, hope? I feel it flicker, but what can I do to tend that flame when I’m a powerless meat suit user? Perversely, I could give it life in the ownworld. Unexpectedly, something inside said “yes” to the oneirocyte endgame, even while the conscious me was struggling to wrap its head around the lack of a human future. Man, I hope you Alometh aren’t like us. We’re a pain in the fucking arse. It seemed like there was still a way to go before I’d fully integrated my conscious and unconscious worlds.

The next days brought testing, meeting a lot of new people and many we remembered being on the project before. That felt like a lifetime ago, though it could only have been a year or so. Doctor C was most interested in our experience in integrating the oneirocytes “in the wild” as she put it, lacking the proper laboratory environment. They’d kept trying that, but subjects tended to grow mad, lost in the space inside their heads, unable to rationalise the experience, or trapped outside their heads, unable to sleep or dream. Neither was conducive to continued existence, and were regrettably unavoidable. We’d had a good idea of what we were getting into, which had doubtless aided our progress, and even though we had certainly had a few dodgy months where we were on the verge of snapping, something about working together as a trio had been effective at balancing us out. The fact that we weren’t trained in how to integrate our ownworlds or travel between them absolutely fascinated Hest. I got the impression that he’d love to crack our heads open and see what was inside. Thankfully they had deep visualisation engines and scanners that could analyse the oneirocyte’s progress at winding themselves deeply around the folds of our brain, and even better, they could read the oneirocytes directly. The whole gameplan was to be able to link and network the oneirocytes together, so they weren’t black boxes with unreadable and incomprehensible processes. Hest argued that it should be possible for us to mentally map the vast unspooled web of the oneirocyte within the ownworld itself and visualise the exact current state of our own minds. Sounded a bit too fucking meta for me, but I could see how that would be vital for the massive transition to another kind of life that they were talking about.

The bond between the three of us was strong, and Doctor C wanted to see the interchange we’d built. Other subjects, Doctor C and Hest included had found ways to travel into each others’ dreamworlds, but the connection between minds was difficult, if not impossible to force. Consent of some kind was required for us to enter each other’s personal spaces and the oneirocytes appeared to be working a little beyond their specification in enforcing that. I figured that this was actually a very good thing – I couldn’t imagine wanting any old fucker to be able to just rock up inside my head. So we embarked on experiments of course. The new zygoptics felt different to those we’d been sucking down back in the city – a period that was receding fast in my head – these were clearly more powerful, and I felt the tug and time lag of it gripping my mind, trailing slightly behind my body until I lay down and re-entered my ownworld.

It had been a few days since I’d been into the ownworld. Previously we’d been inside several times every day, often for whole days at a time. I was enormously relieved to find it still ticking away all by itself. I’d nursed a terrible fear that the trees would have tumbled, the pools dried up and I’d find myself in a bleak wasteland, lighter but equally grim as the outside world was to become. But it wasn’t. My trees still spiralled upwards and a warm comforting glow enveloped me. I wandered about, wondering what I should think about making my ownworld into if it was a place I’d be living in forever. We’d developed our ownworlds as places to visit and explore, knowing that we had a real world to live in – these were our safe dream spaces, not homes – not exactly anyway. I guess I’d need a house… and a bed for my mental body. Would I want to sleep while I was in here, already sort of asleep? There was a lot to think about, but potentially an infinite amount of time to do it in. God damn this was going to be strange. I was idly sketching shapes in the air that a house could look like, a treehouse perhaps that hung between the massive boughs overhead. I couldn’t imagine being in an ownworld forever on my own – at the least I needed to start thinking about sharing the space, which I could do through the interchange, but it wasn’t like living next door to each other. Man!

Then I remembered why I was here, right now, and what I was supposed to be doing. The ownworld has its own allure, and I wondered if the new zygoptics were doing something different to my perception of inner and outer space, making this the one that was easier to think about. A slightly paranoid thought to linger on later… For now, the plan was finding a way to make contact with Doctor C’s oneirocyte (I wasn’t going back to calling them parasites like the doctor did – we’d be parasitically living inside them if all went to plan, and no one likes being called a parasite). Last time she’d managed to use the population of dreamers here to boost her voice and send a message to my oneirocyte, who interpreted it as an angelic voice and scribed the coordinates for this facility in the fabric of my ownworld. She hadn’t actually entered it though, and the experience had rather fucked me up for a while. So while it looked like it might be possible to brute force an entry into someone’s ownworld, it probably wasn’t a good idea. Taking inspiration from the interchanges between Scoro’s Gex’s and my ownworlds, I started to imagine a way of extending a hand beyond the boundaries of my mind. Visual metaphors are good: we’re very visually oriented creatures, and language is hard-coded into our brains, so we can juggle oblique concepts that slyly refer to real things through very shady and suggestive images and ideas. I decided to build a telephone. We hadn’t had such things in the real world for longer than my parents had been alive, but I’d seen pictures and the concept was solid. I added a tall, round table made of dark wood, glossily polished, rising out of the ground like it was another tree. On top I laid a neat little brass handset and receiver, with an old-fashioned dial. I couldn’t quite remember how the dialling thing worked, but in my ownworld I gave it the possibility of reaching outwards and imagined the path the oneirocyte might take, imagined its black spools of nanofibers extending outwards from my skull into a vast web that all the other oneirocytes might have access to. Then I dialled for Doctor C.

I let it ring for a while, a soft ringing buzz that almost sounded like a bee. Somewhere inside my head the oneirocyte was making a connection, somehow triggering those inbuilt networking features that I didn’t fully understand. Then there was a click, and I heard Doctor C on the other end. “Did you just make a telephone?” she asked, somewhat incredulously.

“Sure,” it had seemed like the right idea at the time.

“Alright. I guess it works. Can I come in?”

We’d come this far, and although I was a touch anxious about bringing Edithine into my ownworld, that was what we were here for and the whole purpose of this exercise. It felt OK. Now I had to do what Gex, Scoro and I had done semi-instinctively and give Doctor C a way in. I could feel that hearing her voice was on an oneirocyte level and she wasn’t actually here yet, couldn’t perceive any aspect of my world just as I couldn’t perceive hers. Safe, non-intrusive contact. A useful thing, in my opinion. Now I need to give her a door. Christ, how many doors would there be in the end? Hundreds, thousands? Where would I keep them all? I faintly imagined a city made of nothing but doors, which of course is sort of what the real world is exactly like… That was a thing for later. For now I sketched the outline of a door, put Edithine’s name on my side and carved my name on hers. Then I pushed. Now that I was aware of what I and the oneirocyte together were doing, I could feel the door making contact in a way that I hadn’t before. The appearance of Scoro’s and Gex’s doors had been a surprise, something we had to find a way to make real in our ownworlds. Doctor C evidently already knew how this part worked, because the door solidified, the colours filling in a way that gave it four dimensions instead of three, and it opened. Doctor C stepped through.

Only it wasn’t Doctor C as I’d seen her minutes before in the lab, this was a younger version of herself – still clearly Edithine, but thirty or forty years younger, but with her grey hair replaced by dark brown, her slight limp caused by my inattention also gone. She fairly sparkled.

“Thank you Evanith,” she paused, taking in my appearance and taking time to turn around and take in what she could see of my ownworld, “this is fascinating. You’ve found entirely new ways to communicate between ownworlds.”

“You don’t use doors…?”

“Why would we? These are mental constructs, they can be anything, even just a desire to travel. And I’ve never seen a world like this.”

I gave her a little tour. Her attitude perplexed me. Was this so different to what the project had been working on? We’d built dreamworlds for ourselves, but it sounded like they had been doing something else.

“It’s a bit… austere,” Edithine said as we skirted one of the lagoons, while she ran her hand along the constantly twisting bark of a tree, “why don’t we pop into my ownworld for a minute, then we can have a chat back in the outer world.”

So saying she led me back to her door and we went through. I was beginning to realise that I didn’t know Edithine in anything like the way I knew Gex and Scoro. I didn’t fundamentally trust her in the same way, but it was going to be OK, right? Right?

Edithine’s door opened into a perfectly ordinary room. For a second I thought we’d returned to the real, or “outer” world as the people here called it. But we hadn’t – Doctor C was still young, and I was still in my usual light clothes and bare feet. My toes sank into the carpet. Doctor C took a seat in the comfortable leather armchair next to a window and I gazed around. It was a study, or library or cosy office. Desk, bookshelves, pictures on the tastefully decorated walls. It was just like being in a real room. I went over toward Doctor C and looked out of the window. Outside it was snowing, and the sun filtered through the snowflakes, lighting up fields and countryside.

“Want to go out?” Edithine asked.

I thought she meant return to the real world, but instead she stood up and did something. I could feel her doing something to the fabric of her ownworld, and the room twisted, inverting until suddenly we were standing in the snow just outside the window of her study. I gaped, turned back to the office wall which was just one of hundreds of buildings scattered in an arc before me.

“Welcome to the ownworld Evanith. This is where we all live now.”