As she mounted the stairs to her apartment, she started to feel a faint but noticeable burning in her chest. It grew stronger the closer she got to her door, and it wasn't until she was turning the key it the lock that she recognized what it was: she had missed Hugh and Cammy. She wanted to see them, to talk to them; it was weird how the feeling was so acute that it seemed to be sending tiny hot threads soaring through her body.
She stormed in, and was disappointed to see that they were gaming together, sitting cross-legged on the floor on yoga pillows, facing each other. They had their goggles and glovetips on.
"On our ten," Cammy barked. She could get really aggressive in these daily, city-wide competitions.
"I can't quite draw a bead..." Hugh growled. "Can you get us any lower? There's just too much damn debris."
A moment of tense silence followed, and then Cammy yelped in what Tayla hoped was triumph.
"Got 'em," Hugh intoned. "How you like that, Jack?"
Tayla sighed. They might as well not have been home when they were gaming. The burning sensation in her chest wasn't going away soon. She didn't know how long it was until the end of the round, so she shot them both a text saying she was home. She couldn't hear the blinky sound that meant it had sprung up on their respective HUDs simultaneously, but she knew it had been delivered when Jenny nodded and smiled. "Hi, honey," she said. "We've almost cleared the perim. Just a sec, ok?"
Knowing their built-in headphones made them deaf, Tayla sent them both a "K" in response. It took another four minutes before they were done, and the whole time Tayla was sitting on the couch next to them with one leg crossed over the other, bouncing her knee impatiently. She still only had a vague notion of what was going to happen once she could see her roommates' faces again, but the need to find out was inescapable.
Finally, both Cammy and Hugh's spines relaxed in unison. Cammy carefully lifted her headpiece off, and had to refocus her gaze on Tayla after being screenbound for so long. "Hey, girl," she said, her voice as sunny as always.
Tayla couldn't help it. She slid off the couch and knelt next to her lifelong friend, crushing her in a fierce hug. She felt Cammy resist for a few seconds, then relaxed. "What's wrong?" she asked. Tayla could feel the angular edges of Cammy's glovetipped fingers tentatively coming to rest on her back. "What is it?"
Tayla pulled back. "Sorry," she said, frowning a little. "I'm not sure why I did that. I just... really missed you today."
By this time, Hugh had fully re-engaged with the real world as well, and was eyeing her warily. Tayla looked over at him. "You too." His mouth tilted up at the corners, but his eyes remained dully neutral. After all, he had been putting in overtime, hoping to make enough money to take Cammy on a vacation package later that summer.
"Well, we missed you too, Tayla," he said, looking more at Cammy in curiosity than her. "It's good that you're home."
Tayla pulled back from her friend's embrace. Their hug had eased that burning in her core a little, but there was still enough left to keep her from being comfortable. "So, what have you been doing today?"
Jenny shifted a little on her yoga pillow, and Tayla sat on the floor too, leaning back against the couch she had been fidgeting in while the couple gamed. "Getting to the seventh level of today's Citywide, of course," she said, clearly pleased with herself. "We strove."
The phrase caught Tayla off guard, mostly because that thought hadn't run through her mind at all that day. That was strange; over the last few months, it had propagated through pretty much everyone she knew, shorthand for "We strive to do our best". She didn't know where it had come from, only knew that people were parroting it everywhere now. Until today, its intent had seemed to be fostering a sense of uniform purpose, like the whole country was working together toward some common end. Although at the moment she couldn't quite recall what that was.
Leaving the women to their discussion, Hugh was getting up and stretching the muscles he hadn't used while gaming. He wandered over to the wall console and dialed in some music. The vaguely danceable thump filled the apartment at a non-intrusive volume. For a moment, Cammy closed her eyes and nodded to it dreamily before speaking again. "And what have you been doing, Tayla?"
All of a sudden, Tayla realized that she didn't know how to answer. It would be highly irregular for her to talk about what she had been doing, and might make her roommates suspicious. It wasn't that her activities had been so unusual, it was just that they had *felt* so different, and she had spent wildly inappropriate amounts of time doing them.
"Well, I went to the gym first..." (She didn't add, "and stopped before the timer went off, simply because I felt like it. Then I took an extra-long shower, just because the warm rushing water felt so good.")
"... and then did some shopping for lunch." ("I stood there hovering over the produce for about twenty minutes because I couldn't remember them smelling so amazing. No one else seemed to notice.")
"That reminds me," Cammy said, "On the lunch break, Hugh and I had some really good noodles with edamame. Weren't they good, Hugh?"
Her boyfriend was still perusing the music lists, but tipped his head up long enough to answer, "Oh yeah. They were really... good."
Tayla frowned a little. Whatever it was that she had wanted to get from this conversation, she wasn't getting it. She desperately wanted to talk about her dreams, but she knew they wouldn't understand. They were dedicated workers, and it would never cross their minds to miss a shift on purpose.
The music was starting to bug her, too. She had never really considered it before, but Hugh had set the shuffle to fifteen-second increments, which barely gave you enough time to register what song it was before moving on to the next one. Granted, the recent roster of hit songs were one-minute loops that would go on endlessly if you let them, but Hugh seemed to think that he didn't need even that long to enjoy it. And now that she could compare them in quick succession, Tayla could tell how each song was really similar to the one that came before it, not to mention the one after.
Maybe there was a way to talk about her dreams, because Cammy was still looking at her expectantly, wanting to hear how Tayla had filled the time between lunch and this moment. "After that, it was kind of strange," Tayla said. She took a deep breath and bent the truth. "I saw my dad."
Cammy smiled and gave a wistful "Aww..." But then something connected for her and her brow furrowed. "Tayla, I thought your dad died when you were little."
Uh oh, she remembered, and scrambled. "Well, that's the strange part. it turned out not to be my dad. It just looked like him. But I stopped to talk to him anyway."
"That's so great," Cammy said. "Where did you see him?"
"On top of..." Tayla said, before making up something more plausible, "the park. On top of that hill, the one that overlooks the pond." It had really been on the roof of an impossibly high building that was also her childhood home, and she could see literally forever in all directions. "We sat and talked for a long time. I told him everything that had happened in my life since he -- um, my dad -- died, you know."
Cammy's face took on a serious caste that almost doused the fire in Tayla's stomach with cold fear. "Wait..." she began, "... was he okay with pretending to be your dad?"
Tayla nodded. "Sure. I explained it to him, and he was fine. We sat and talked for a long time, actually." It had been so long, in fact, that she and her father had watched the sun set. They had been up so high that they were able to witness what happened below the horizon, where huge doors opened in the sky and the sun was pulled back, as if into some giant hangar, before the doors swung closed and night fell. It had made Tayla feel like her heart was going to shatter, seeing something she had always thought was true being revealed as a shallow trick, and that her father had no choice but to disappear from her life for a second time.
"That was nice of him," Cammy said, "to spend that time with someone he didn't even know."
"It really was," Tayla responded, leaving out the way she had awakened with tear stains on her pillowcase, and how she had rushed to throw it into the wash before the morning alarm went off.
"Hey," Hugh said from across the room. He had lost interest in the music and had been flipping through his life apps. "Income's here, on time for once... wait a minute." He looked down, puzzled, at his handscreen. "It's kind of low."
The hair on the back of Tayla's neck stood up, something she hadn't known it could do. She hadn't considered this consequence. She had missed three shifts, so of course the weekly house income was going to reflect that. Her mind raced to come up with a plausible explanation for why three out their twenty-one collective wage portions were missing.
She popped up to her feet, looked at the screen over Hugh's shoulder. "Hm," she said. "Oh, that's right! I jumped on a few gaming tourneys last week. While you both were out. I meant to mention that... I guess for some reason they didn't subtract the fees out until this week. Sorry, guys."
The couple seemed far from upset. In fact, Cammy jumped up and ran over for an enthusiastic hug. "That's so great! You know, I could have sworn my visor was loose the last time I put it on. You must have adjusted it... Oh, I knew you'd be hooked if you gave it a chance!"
Tayla leaned into yet another lie. "I just know how good you guys are, and didn't want to say anything until I got some practice."
"This is great!" Hugh said, more excited than he had been in a long time. "We can help you train, and then look out triad competition! We have to get you a rig!"
Tayla tried not to roll her eyes. The last thing she wanted to do at this point was to wall herself off from the real world behind a visor and glovetips. Not when she was starting to truly appreciate the sights, sounds and smells of the living world. It had to be the dreams that were doing this to her, heightening her senses and emotions.
The three of them went out for dinner that night, spending more than they should have on drinks and dessert. Hugh insisted they were simply spending against the profits they were sure to make once Tayla joined their gaming team. Tayla just grinned and tried to act the part.
He and Cammy were tipsy and already starting to grope each other on the ride back to the apartment. Tayla knew what that meant. She retired to her room, clapping her headphones on and struggling to find some tolerable music to drown out the passionate sounds coming from the other side of the wall. Fortunately, by the time they got home there were only fifteen minutes left before lights out, so she didn't have to wait long.
The night alarm went off, and she lifted her sleep mask off where it was looped around her bedpost. She clicked it on, fully intending to use it, and then found herself stalling again. She tried to talk herself out of it. After all, how much longer could she be able to keep her secret? Her clumsy cover-up had already managed to get her roped into a triad tournament that she had absolutely no aptitude for. She should just give in and put the mask on, then she wouldn't need further explanations for lost wages. She pulled the band back, with every intention of slipping it on over her head... and then just didn't. She left it turned on, and gingerly returned it to its spot.
She lay back on her bed, pulled up the cover, and closed her eyes, looking forward to the feeling she thought she had completely forgotten about until three nights ago, that of slipping into natural sleep. What would she dream tonight? Would she see her father again? Maybe she would return to that mansion-ified version of their old house, and would run through the rooms laughing, smelling every Thanksgiving dinner her grandmother had ever made, playing hide and seek with all her old stuffed animals...
The feeling didn't come, though. At first she thought she was too excited to go to sleep to actually get there, but after a half hour she wasn't sure anymore. She knew that she could just put on the mask and let its flashing patterns bring her almost immediately down into a delta-wave state, but her thoughts of possible dreams was almost too strong to resist. Maybe she just had to wait a little bit longer...
Another half hour, and she sat up. Clearly, it wasn't going to happen. She found herself wondering what would happen if she were to walk around in the apartment in the dark. The idea seemed so devilish that she couldn't resist, and she swung her feet out from under the cover. She was immediately amazed at how different her bare feet felt on the carpet, merely because it was night. She took a few experimental steps away from her bed, and smiled in the dark at her own silliness. Was she thinking some kind of alarm was going to sound? She hesitated only a moment with her hand on the doorknob of her bedroom, before opening it and walking out into the short hallway.
She leaned an ear against Cammy and Hugh's door, just long enough to make sure that she could hear their slow, tandem breathing. She didn't have to open the door to imagine them lying there, side by side, sleep masks slowly pulsing as their mental energies were siphoned away and banked somewhere deep in the pulsing core of the city.
She walked into the living room, enjoying the way the soft material of her pajamas shifted across her skin with each step. She crossed over to the window, looked out across the square to the tower blocks, identical to hers, on the other side. Or, to be more specific, the dark outlines of the tower blocks. There was only enough starlight to limn the edges of the darkened city, another new context for Tayla to view her world in.
There were places, however, where it looked like there were stars below the horizon, here and there, fleeting twinkles that lasted only long enough for her to turn their direction, but were gone before she could fix on them. She pressed her cheek to first one edge of the kitchen window, then the other, trying to catch one in action, but soon realized she needed a better vantage point. As quietly as possible, she opened the front door of the apartment and stepped out onto the long balcony.
It was breathtaking how quiet the city was. During day, the hum and whir of its vast machines -- which, she realized, she was not doing a thing to contribute to at the moment -- overlay everything, numbing the ear until they were absent. But now they were utterly silent. Tayla could actually hear the breeze blowing through the trees down in the plaza below, the motion sensors on the ends of their branches adding their miniscule kinetic motion to the power load that the city's living creatures conspired to give back every night...
A flicker of motion caught the corner of her eye, and she jumped a little, enough so that the sound of her feet reconnecting with the balcony concrete made a little slapping sound. She turned toward the movement, and saw a low, light-colored shape, slumped against the iron railing three doors down from her apartment. Even with the breeze blowing, it moved in a way that betrayed it as something alive.
It was Mr. Cheong. He was sitting on the edge of the balcony, sticking his legs and head through the bars like a child, so that all Tayla could see from her shallow angle was his torso. But now he drew his head back through so that his spectacles, tightly wired to his graying temples, caught some of the starlight.
He had seen her. There was no running away, which was Tayla's first instinct. It took her a moment longer before she realized that he was being just as rebellious as she, sitting out on the balcony while everyone else slumbered.
For a moment, they just looked at each other. Then Mr. Cheong raised a hand and motioned her over. Out of sheer habit, Tayla actually looked around to see if maybe he was beckoning someone else, causing his shoulders silently shift with silent laughter. Then she walked over. She knew who this neighbor was, but had never actually talked to him as an individual. They had only ever met at block meetings or community events, and always with either Cammy or Hugh by her side. Talking one-to-one was something Tayla never felt particularly good at.
"Hello, Mr. Cheong," she whispered, and sat down next to him. He had made no indication that was what he wanted; it just seemed like the polite thing to do, to bring herself to his level. She stuck her legs through the railing, and let them join his in dangling over the sixty-foot drop to the plaza.
"Lovely night," he said, in his lightly accented voice. "You couldn't sleep either?"
"Mm-hm," Tayla noncommittally answered. Of course, she knew that it was an archaic phrase; being unable to sleep was hardly an option in the modern world. She didn't know what else to say, because she was a little intimidated by the man. He was older than her by at least thirty years, his hair still full but almost entirely gray, spiked up in a way that looked very natural. He had the thin muscularity of some bookish people, whose exercise regimen overcompensated for the way they spent so much time in study.
"I have never seen you out here, Tayla," he said. "And I come out often."
Tayla shrugged. "Well, I never... stayed up this late before." She hoped that her actions didn't sound as illegal to him as they felt as they came out of her mouth.
He nodded, and took a long look out over the city, considering, before replying, "We're not the only ones. You see?"
He was clearly indicating the infrequent flashes of light below. "Yes," Tayla said. "Are all of those people like us? Others who.... can't sleep?"
"Yes," he said, a cautious tone creeping into his voice. "Although some of them, I believe, put aside their sleeping duties... on purpose." The way he said it made a guilty chill creep up Tayla's spine. "They are up and engaging in some activity best left for night time, when there are less eyes watching."
In the night's stillness, she imagined she could hear the goose bumps rising on her skin. "Why would they do that?" she asked, trying not to sound judgmental, as if they were truly talking about other, hypothetical people.
"Various reasons," he said, not looking at her. "Perhaps they feel a need to revolt. I myself sometimes like to listen to old, long symphonies. Or perhaps the dreams have too much of an allure."
Her spine stiffened. Now it felt like he was pointedly *not* looking in her direction. She had to know more, but wasn't sure how to ask, without doing so directly. "I remember dreams," she said.
"Do you?" he asked. He looked hopeful for just a moment, but then turned back to the city's black tableaux. "You are young. Surely you mean from your childhood."
Tayla took a deep breath, and said, "No. This was just a little while ago. I... I think I must have put the sleep mask on incorrectly, or maybe it had come loose, because..."
"You dreamed," Mr. Cheong said, in a whisper so quiet it would have been utterly lost in the ambient noise of the day. "And tonight you were hoping to do it again."
"Of course not," she replied, giggling as if shocked that he could suggest such a ridiculous thing, but Tayla hoped the way the laugh quickly faded gave him a more truthful answer.
They sat side by side in their pajamas, looking out over the dark blocks between them and the dimly glittering harbor, for a long while. Several times she felt him gather himself together next to her, as if he were about to say something, but then backed away from it, until one time, without warning, he whispered, "Tayla, may I show you something?"
She turned to him, and there was something in the way his eyebrows raised behind his wire-frame glasses that reminded her of the way she had felt earlier, bounding her way up the stairs to Cammy and Hugh because there was something she felt she had to say, something she needed from others, a connection they ultimately could not give her. The yearning arch of those gray caterpillars told her he was feeling much the same thing.
"Okay," she whispered back.
Mr. Cheong stood and extended his hand to her. She took it with surprisingly little hesitation. He drew her up to her feet, and they walked together to the door of his apartment, just a few feet away. For a moment, he stood before it, as if in indecision.
"Tayla," he finally said, still facing the door, so she was looking at that massive upsweep of silver hair from behind, "do you know why we are supposed to give our sleeping minds over to the city?"
It would have been very easy for her to recite the answer she had been told since childhood -- "Because our harvested mental energy is what makes our city machine run. It is our way of giving back to the society that gives us freedom from unwanted toil, so that each may follow their unique hearts and creative passions." Instead, she said what she had been thinking about since she had been unable to fall asleep, "Because it keeps us from dreaming."
Mr. Cheong let out a long, slow breath of relief. "I think so too," he said, finally turning his head back over his shoulder to look at her.
Then she asked something that she didn't even knew she had been afraid to ask until that moment. "Did they do it on purpose? I mean... did they know what it would do to us?"
Mr. Cheong sighed. "I don't have an answer for that. It must have seemed like the perfect solution when this form of energy was discovered. There are too few ways for too many of us to make money in order to survive and keep the city machine turning. Everything difficult is taken care of for us, and so this must have looked like the easiest way for us all to live comfortably, without us being too idle or causing too much trouble. The only price to be paid was that of our dreams. But with them went our ability to feel more, to yearn for more. It may not have been the original intention, but in any event it is the truth."
Tayla thought about all the aimless wandering she had done in her life, before these last few days. She had not been unhappy, but she also couldn't remember the last time she had wanted anything the way she wanted to dream again. She thought of Hugh and Cammy, and their endless cycle of waking, eating, gaming, and having sex until it was time to sleep again. They would plug into brainwave harvesters that siphoned off their dreams -- and their deepest selves along with them -- for mere profit. The day ended, and they would wake again not remembering it, because another day just like it was already lying ahead.
Mr. Cheong had been silent for several seconds, and he seemed to be waiting for Tayla to say something more. So she did. "I just forgot about the beauty of things until I started dreaming again. I'm starting to think that dreaming is just as important as living. Maybe, some of the time, it's more important."
Mr. Cheong lifted a hand, and lightly slid three of his fingers down the wood, three times in succession. A miniscule click came from the doorknob, and it swung open, revealing darkness.
A soft, pleasant female face arose on the other side, a slight bemusement playing about her lips when she saw Tayla. "Off break so soon?" she whispered to Mr. Cheong, and eased the door open.
At first, Tayla could not make out anything inside the front room. Her eyes had fully adjusted to being outdoors at midnight, but there was an even deeper dark where she was following.
As soon as she was far enough into the room for the woman to shut the door behind her, Tayla stopped. She turned her head from side to side, trying to contextualize the low, pulsing lights she was seeing, and she found to be in a large room with perhaps two dozen of the ubiquitous sleep masks ranged about, their edges throbbing with the deep blue resonance of human mental activity. As soon as she imagined where the people connected to them should be, they materialized. They were barely above the level of the floor, in loose groups surrounding central pockets of darkness. She squinted, trying to figure out they were huddled around...
Mr. Cheong was whispering almost directly into her ear. Strangely, the sudden sound of his voice didn't make her jump. "We gather here to give each other turns dreaming. We link our sleep masks to help cover the fact that one of us is not contributing." Tayla could just barely see his arm, extending past her shoulder, pointing to the center of the group closest to her.
Her eyes finally resolved what was before her, almost as clearly as if someone had introduced a new light source. Each group consisted of five people, lying on low cots around a center one, on which there was a sleeping person, face uncovered and beatific.
"So the person in the center...?" she began to ask.
"Is allowed a full night of dreaming. Their attending group pools their energy, each contributing a little more deeply, so the team makes up the slack."
Now Tayla could see it, barely visible lines of thin blue light extending from the surrounding sleep masks. They converged on the unused mask on the dreamer's chest. Tayla checked the rest of the room, and there were four such arrangements in total. It was crowded but pleasantly peaceful, the only sound the ocean-hiss sound of breathing sleepers rolling in and out.
Tayla stepped closer, looked into the face of the person dreaming closest to her. She could see his eyes rolling ceaselessly under their lids, and found that burning ache returning to her chest, wanting to know what he was seeing, and to have a chance to see it for herself.
She turned around to the shape of Mr. Cheong. In the dimness, she could only see the rims of his spectacles and his white, upswept hair. "You'll be caught," she whispered. "I can write off a few nights of inactivity as a mechanical problem, but no matter how well you disguise it, someone will eventually catch on to what you're doing. You'll be arrested."
His shape of his hair and glasses nodded, and a faint, gleaming curve of a smile joined them underneath. "But until then... we dream."
She smiled back at him. "I'll go get my mask."
