Epigraph

content/read/038.md

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-# Dr. Carter Ramirez --- 2112
+# RJ Brewster --- 2112
 
-Carter could not explain why she had created the throw-away account to talk with Sasha. Nor could she fully explain that panic that had washed over her, strong enough for her to flee, to log out and wipe both account and sim.
+The relief of finding emself sitting in eir own bed, ey supposed, should have been immediate and intense.
 
-All she could explain was that Sasha's simple questioning had thrown her estimate of what might be going on both within the dynamic of the team as well as within the 'net as a whole into utter turmoil. The woman...skunk...skunk-woman had been correct: while there were occasional reports on their findings published to a scant few reviewers and advisors within the UCL itself, there had been none since RJ had gotten lost. No papers published in any journal, public or private. The phenomenon of the lost was new, and so was the study of them.
+Instead, seeing eir room around em once more rather than the clinic, all AwDae could do was close eir eyes and shift down in bed until ey was able to draw the covers up over emself, a mirroring of this morning. The weight of the blanket atop em, the feeling of being surrounded, covered, supported by the mattress seemed to be more important than...than what, relief? Joy?
 
-So how was it that the grantors were throwing their weight around in terms of the directions her team was taking? How would they know to do so? An informant? A mole?
+Ey didn't feel despair, didn't feel hopelessness.
 
-After logging off, she picked up a sandwich at a nearby M&S, but could not bring herself to eat more than a few bites of it. When she lay down, sleep would not come easily, and when it did, all it brooked her was the same stress-dream of shadows.
+AwDae wasn't sure what this emotion was. It was a non-emotion. It was a sense of swelling, of being too full. Of having words and images and colors flooding through em and yet wholly out of reach.
 
-How does one encompass all of this in one mind? How does one take in the knowledge of being spied upon, of having decisions made --- made by the unseen and unknowable --- that impact one's life on such a base level and some how make that work? Make it fit? How does one do these things, and still go back to a workaday life?
+When ey had awoken this morning, ey had supposed that ey would head down from home to the clinic and magically find some sort of success. Or, if not success, at least another clue. Another step along the way. A fraction of success. Some piece-of-eight that, when added up, would save em.
 
-Work felt impossible. Everyone around her was a suspect. Everyone around her was suspicious in their own way. Everyone around her was someone who was in secret communication with others, and, without any knowledge of those communications, what guarantee did she have that she was safe?
+This wasn't a puzzle, though, was it? This wasn't a set of steps that could be followed to some logical conclusion. There was no end to the road, because there was no road.
 
-And was she not communicating with others? She was the one who had contacted Sasha. She was the one who had contacted Johansson. Was she not worthy of suspicion?
+Dreams, after all, have no plot.
 
-The worst was the lack of answers. She could ask all the questions she wanted, and there were no answers to be had.
+Ey curled beneath the duvet. Resting in the fetal position in eir childhood bed beneath eir childhood blankets, ey could not even pretend that ey was dreaming. Had ey been asleep, this would have been one of those confusing dreams of too much meaning. Not nightmare, not blessed peace. Just neurons firing at random, conjuring images up from dust, from nothing. Mere breath.
 
-Finding it impossible to get down to the business of actually working, she paced between rig and coffee station. If, perhaps, there was some way that she could think harder, think better, then perhaps she might be able to fit all of this within her newly updated worldview.
+If history played out as it promised to, there would be no waking. Ey was in a world of dream, eir every thought mirrored back against the inner surface of eir cortices, both cerebral and exo.
 
-All the coffee did was up her heart rate. It did not wake her any, did not make her more efficient. It simply kicked her anxiety up another level.
+The data ey had received on the note, still nestled snugly within eir pack, was not some hidden clue. It never had been. It had been an artifact of a dreaming mind leveraging the data that had been stored in eir exocortex. Some part of em, already in the mindset of rummaging through data that afternoon before the rehearsal, was primed to dream of clues, of mysteries to solve.
 
-All her rig had to offer was the work at hand.
+Find this note.
 
-She delved in all the same. If nothing else, she could use the dark. She could use the cool *Eigengrau* of her workspace, the order of information neatly delineated by thin cotton twine. Perhaps numbers would sooth her anxious mind.
+Find this mic.
 
-A soft ping. A notification. A small bell still loud enough to jolt her out of her reverie, or non-reverie, or whatever this caffeine-tinted haze was. *Avery would like a meeting.*
+Find this solution and perhaps you will achieve your goal.
 
-Carter found it hard to sit still in the small room. It was all she could do to keep from pacing agitatedly, and she focused instead on keeping her steps more within the realm of slow and contemplative. *Is this out of the ordinary? Is me walking back and forth out of the norm enough to report to some higher authority?*
-*Is Avery on my side?*
+But what goal was that? Was it to solve the riddle of Cicero's loss? Was it to become unlost, to be found?
 
-"Dr Ramirez, sorry for bothering you."
+Or was it to become unstuck? Was it to find something new? Some way to move on? Move forward? Move, period?
 
-"No problem, Avery. What's up?"
+*"You seem kind of frozen, kind of stuck, in a few ways."*
 
-They shrugged. "That's just the thing, I'm not really sure. I started digging into what we were talking about, about how e8 was looking into DDR records before eir disappearance, and on a hunch, I decided to look at all of our other candidate cases. Turns out most of them, even the ones who weren't heavy politics junkies, had a massive uptick in the amount of engagement they showed prior to getting lost."
+The laugh that came to em was choked. More sob than anything.
 
-Carter frowned. "Wait, so not just e8? All of them?"
+Well, hard to get more stuck than this.
 
-"Well, sort of. Of those who are just the junkies, it's hard to pull apart just how much of their interactions were actually off baseline for them, you know? A set that large, a slight increase might not be that out of the norm. Still, it is there."
+Ey drew the covers up over eir head. Perhaps ey wished to blot out the dream with darkness and silence, but this darkness was dream. The barrier: dream. The silence: dream.
 
-"Do you have a starting point for these increases?"
+Ey slept, then. Not the restless, confused sleep of the night before, but a dreamless sleep of an hour. An hour? A day? What mattered time? It was the sleep of a mind demanding that very blessed nothingness. Was that something ey could request, as ey had requested to dream eir way back home?
 
-"Nothing in particular. In absolute terms, no." Avery's smile was wry. "Perhaps obviously. After the initial rush of cases, everyone got lost at different times. Relatively, though, maybe. It looks like everyone who had this uptick had it within seventy-two hours of getting lost."
+It wasn't a long nap, of course. Or perhaps it was. Perhaps ey could will it to be as long as ey wanted. Perhaps ey were bound to a rhythm, but the scale did not matter. Perhaps ey could bend time.
 
-"How confident are you in that?"
+Either way, when ey awoke, the corners of eir eyes gunked up with dried tears, the funk of the morning had largely passed. The numbness still lingered around the edges, vignetting curiosity, but it was not so all-consuming as it had been.
 
-"Are you asking how strong the correlation is?"
+AwDae sat up in bed, folding eir legs beneath em to keep eir tail from cramping. Ey teased a thread loose from the edge of the duvet, tugged. A habit from youth made easier with vulpine claws.
 
-"Sure." She hesitated. "Though I'm also curious about your confidence in this line of reasoning."
+Habits in dreams. Dreams that were more than dreams. Dreams one knew about and nevertheless was pinned beneath: nightmare demons sitting upon one's chest, upon one's mind. Upon one's exo, perhaps.
 
-They looked up to the ceiling. "Well, in terms of the line of reasoning, I'd say that it's strong enough that it's got me actually interested in looking deeper into it. Not that I wasn't interested in these cases before, but this is really intriguing. I like the sort of...well, mystery aspect of it."
+"If I dream, if I dream," ey murmured, words coming unbidden to eir lips. "If I dream, am I no longer myself?"
 
-"Yeah, it does have that going for it, doesn't it?"
+The vignette of numbness throbbed, narrowed, then faded once again. The words seemed to carry import beyond their plaintive query. Ey could not stop emself from speaking.
 
-"And it always did before, too." Avery dropped their gaze once more and shrugged."Just that now, I feel like I was handed a big bone in terms of what could actually be going on. It's not an answer, but of all the correlations we've been looking until now, this is one of the bigger ones."
+*Dawdling.*
 
-"That strong of a correlation, then?"
+Ey stretched eir way out of bed and padded to the door of eir room, closed.
 
-"Well, look." They summoned a snatch of workspace, pulled a vcard from one of their decks, and tugged on the corners to expand it to presentation size. A table filled the page, but after a few commands from Avery, it shrunk, slid up to the corner, and in its place, a graph appeared, showing a series of correlation points and a trend line. "It's fairly strong if we leave everyone in, but if we filter...out...there. If we filter out the junkies, you can see how high it spikes."
+"Wait," ey commanded emself. Hand on doorknob. A count to three. A promise to emself. *I will open this door and will find the open space across the road instead of the hallway.*
 
-Leaning in closer to the page, Carter scowled at the graph, then up at the minimized table, and back to the graph. "That's higher than anything else we've gotten, right?"
+Could one dream within a dream? Do so with such a detail that ey would not notice the transition? Had ey dreamed the trip to the clinic? Had ey perhaps slept through the return?
 
-Avery nodded, tapped in a few more commands on a keyboard Carter could not see. They frowned at some mistakes they made along the way, but then the graph was overlaid against other correlations they had been investigating previously. "Just over one standard deviation, yes, though...wait."
+"I do not know. I do not know."
 
-Carter had started to nod along with Avery, then frowned at her subordinate's growing confusion. "What?"
+A supplication. A mantra against hopelessness.
 
-"Do you see that?"
+Ey turned the knob and stepped out into the shortgrass prairie of the open space. The packed dirt of the trail welcomed eir paws. The scent of dust and rattle-dry stalks of grass washed over em. Warm, yellow light hemmed em in through the fog of war.
 
-She looked back to the graph. "See wh--wait, what?!"
+"Wait," ey said once more. Kept eir hands at eir sides. Loose. Relaxed. No menu to reach for, no gesture required.
 
-"Do you *see* that?" Avery said, louder. It was as though they themselves needed the convincing, that they needed to have this witnessed right along with them.
+A promise to emself. *I still have will.*
 
-And it *was* worth witnessing. As both of them watched, wide-eyed, the graph shifted. The strength of the correlation started to dip. Not smoothly, but in fits and starts. Avery's hand darted up and, with a fingertip, they dragged the table out to fill more of the card's surface. There, along with the graph, the numbers of the correlation were beginning to change. Row by row, the 'interactions DDR by hour 72 lim' values were dropping. They were still high, yes, but perhaps more reasonable. The correlation was still there, but weaker.
+The fog receded upon eir request, thinned, disappeared. Mere breath. The prairie of the open space stretched out before them. A valley, and then a ridge of hills to the east. The mountains behind eir back.
 
-"What--"
+Not a sim. No limitations other than those eir dreaming mind had set upon them. Ey had spent so long in sims, lived eir life out in worlds bounded by the edges of invisible properties that, upon getting lost, ey had imagined the same must be true inside. More so, eir unconscious reasoned, for was ey not constrained by the processing power of eir exocortex?
 
-"Do you have this data backed up anywhere?" Carter was shouting. Didn't know how to keep from shouting.
+But it was not a sim. It was a dream, eir dream, eir exo a mirror, and in the end, ey held control.
 
-"I-- maybe. Sec." A few hasty commands, and the data was dumped to another card, the column name changed to a keysmash. The numbers stopped dropping on that card, even as they continued on the first. They handed the card to Carter. "But what--"
+No commands, then. No promises. Ey knew that, were ey to take a step forward, eir foot would come down on the dinged hardwood floor of eir London flat. Priscilla would meow her hellos and twine around eir ankles.
 
-"Pull me back and hit my panic button. Quick!"
+Ey did not rush. Ey stood still. The breeze fingered eir fur and teased along the hem of eir skirt as a breeze must. There were the turbines on the far ridge, three blades turning laconically as turbines must. There was the highway across the valley, the gas station squatting low alongside it as gas stations must.
 
-Avery stared, open-mouthed.
+No commands in dreams. No promises required. Ey would take that step and all would be as it must.
 
-"*Go!*"
+And then ey took the step.
 
-There was the pleasant animation of a user logging out and Avery disappeared.
+And then Prisca meowed her hello and twined around eir ankles.
 
-Carter braced herself, but even so, the jolt of pain running in a sparkling thread down along her spine was stronger than she remembered, and she came up gasping, hands shaking from where Avery held them just above her contacts. With their knee, they hit the panic button on the rig, and the flip-up screen began ticking off cores dumped and suggesting that an official report be filed.
+And then AwDae fell to eir knees and let the cat step up onto eir thighs, and ey lifted her in eir arms and buried eir snout in her warm, purring side, and cried.
 
-Still shaking, she looked around the office. Everyone was delved in except her, Avery, and Prakash, standing startled by the mini-fridge.
+Cried because this was not London. Cried because this was not eir cat. Cried because ey could dream anything ey wanted and it would never be anything beyond a dream.
 
-"Everything alright?" he asked, brow furrowed.
+This was a memory. This was something dredged up from eir own mind. Prisca, eir very own Prisca, was purring against eir face because that's what Prisca must do. She was squirming out of eir grasp because ey knew that, had ey held her like that in the waking world --- and ey had --- that that is what cats do.
 
-Carter waved her hand dismissively, trying to look calm. She doubted that she did. "Was in a meeting. Crashed or something."
-
-Perhaps picking up on the anxiety of the last minute, perhaps experiencing their own terror, Avery nodded. "We were in a meeting, uh...trying something. She started..." they trailed off and shrugged.
-
-Prakash nodded. "Need to file a report? Anything like that?"
-
-Carter stood, wobbled, and regained her balance. "I will after some water. Getting yanked hurts worse than I remember."
-
-"I haven't done it since training."
-
-Avery shrugged. "I don't think many have. It's not all that common."
-
-Rinsing her mug free of coffee residue --- additional caffeine at the moment being contraindicated --- Carter attempted a laugh. "Right, yeah. I've had sims crash before, but not myself."
-
-The laugh didn't seem to soothe either of her coworkers.
-
-"Well, either way, I'm kinda shaken up. I think...uh," she trailed off, looking at her phone. "Maybe a walk. Yeah, I think maybe a walk."
+It was eir dream. Eir own, eirs alone. All the lost must perforce be dreaming their own dreams. Ey dreamed of homes and clues and boundaries, of cats that squirmed, of emself as a fox --- and that one ey would keep --- and could not begin to guess at others' dreams.
 
+Could ey will Prisca to stop? To hold still and be eir pillow to cry into? Ey did not know. Eir mind resisted the question. Resisted, because ey did not want that to be the case. Did not want to will eir precious cat to be anything other than she was. To ask that question was to admit the idea that ey could dream anything other than that which ey must.
 
+Ey let the cat down so that she could stalk self-righteously to her favorite spot and groom the tears out of her fur.