The Bug on Ari's wrist buzzed. She had pressed it quiet and was out of bed before she could admit to being awake. How long did her dreams linger past the threshold into her waking life?
There was a scientific answer to this rhetorical question, Ari knew, even if she did not care to find it this morning. If she genuinely wanted to know, it would take nothing more than to ask the air.
The Hive on her bookshelf ordered the lights to fade in and began telling her the day's news so far. She didn't hear it, too occupied still with the dream she had been having moments before. She had the bodily sensation of being upset but couldn't justify why this might be. The dream was too slippery and escaped the more she tried to grasp it.
A minute elapsed of subdued lighting and newscasters' public radio voices. She waved her wrist in the air, pointing its face at the Hive. Its light stayed a cool blue, giving no acknowledgment of her consciousness despite having already listened to a directive.
"Hive, sync Bug," she ordered. From the small croak in her demand, she must not have slept well. She would see if Hive agreed, though it was not perfect by any extent. She found that, as long as she didn't move much or think too stressful of thoughts, her Bug eventually decided that she must still be asleep. She wasn't sure what it said about her that she wanted to trick the Bug.
The base unit said nothing in response, but the walls soon fractured into a projected mosaic, still images and actions in soft focus. Her eyes blankly skimmed them, not taking in anything tangible. Nothing obvious that would have bothered her just before waking.
When the all world was sad and new
I found you when your horse threw a shoe
Her limbic system seems to become brittle. "Hive! Stop music! Sleep report."
On the wall, in the center of dreams, appeared a box with her statistics. She had managed less than six hours, her heart rate elevated three times, she had four nightmares and an incomplete sex dream, and she used the bathroom once.
"Hive, close the stats. Suggest breakfast."
Based on last night and the empty box that would likely grow stale before she finished it, Hive told her that she should have high fiber cereal.
She made herself toaster waffles and ordered Hive to start the coffee.
"Caffeine is one of the main--"
"Hive, stop nag mode. Transfer dreams to the tablet. Add vanilla syrup to coffee." She stared at her dwindling supply of waffles. "And add blueberry waffles to the shopping list."
"Ari, please give me the passphrase to disable nag mode and duration."
"'I am a terrible person,' until five."
"AM or PM?"
"PM."
"Enjoy your breakfast." This still sounded judgmental to her.
The dreams mainly were gibberish with safe mode enabled. Ari clicked it off and watched the sex dream play out for a minute. It featured a crush from high school and a blurred celebrity. She clicked the trash icon.
She did not bother with the nightmares, though she saw the little boy in the thumbnail before the Hive erased them.
"Would you like to know this morning's interpretation?" Hive asked when she put the dishes in the machine.
"God, no."
The Hive chimed a moment later. Ari had set it not to bother her with the outside world until she was done with breakfast, but it took this literally. "You have one thousand, three hundred, and seventy-three new messages. Would you like to see them now?"
Ari froze. "Repeat?"
"You have one thousand, three hundred, and seventy-three new messages. Would you like to see them now?"
"Group by sender and push to the wall."
Her mother sent a dozen, the subject lines increasingly frantic, and then double that number of missed calls from her. Other messages varied from close friends to people she had only hazily remembered giving her address or phone number in college.
"Hive, group by words relating to death."
This command moved all but a few solicitations under that label.
"Hive, scan all messages for gist."
The wall dimmed then flashed. "In essence, the messages say, 'Are you dead?'" The robot began. "' Please call me immediately. I saw that video. Is that you?'"
"How many messages contain this?"
"Eighty-one percent contain some variation of these concepts." Ari saw another message drop into the box. "Eighty-one point zero seven percent."
"Enable notifications. What video are they talking about?"
The wall blossomed with greenery, leaves and trees. First-person perspective, moving down a barely trod path, the sound of breaking branches and a heavy breather trying not to be, not from the person seeing this. They moved through the woods without much effort in pursuit; the pursuer knew where they were and what they were doing. This was a hunt.
Then she saw herself in the foreground, more panicked than she had been in life, and life had given her cause enough for panic. The character in the dream was so twisted by it that she was barely recognizable. She was being stalked. Ari did not believe this person would escape the hunter.
The detail was stunning, better than life. When she screamed, and the light was just right, she could see the dark filling on her right molar. She zoomed, and even the clothing was high-res. She could pick out individual threads, the fraying where the branch had raked over her thigh.
The Ari in the dream screamed, begged, wept. It was embarrassing, then so sickening that actual Ari held up a hand to pause it while she heaved into the toilet without expelling her waffles and coffee. She should stop this. She understood all she needed to. Other people -- thousands, if her email was any indication -- had finished these last minutes.
The Ari in dreams begged even as the killer sliced open her belly. He was so precise that the act was almost empty of violence. The video showed this in perfect clarity. The tropes of their childhoods so influenced even the dreamers who specialized in horror movies that the gore was excessive to the point of ridiculously and the camera, such as it was, turned away before things went too far. It was better that the audience imagined, after all.
There was nothing to imagine here. The hands pulled out Ari's intestines as though links of sausages, all while Dream Ari wept and begged, first for him to stop, then for him to take mercy and kill her.
It was another five gruesome minutes before the shock silenced the Ari in dreams and five after that before it was clear she was dead. However, he did not stop enjoying cutting into her body until she seemed transformed into something that had never been human.
Ari had not had a panic attack in years, but she had never deserved one more than this.
The Bug registered this, calling her emergency contact, Oliver, and trying to soothe her in the meantime. She had the option to specifically program into the AI what it ought to do if she ever became this bad, but she had not wanted to plan that out. It seemed as though she would be inviting another panic attack to test out the protocol.
Even if not told exactly what she needed, the system had the information of anonymous billions and their dreams to draw upon. The walls went to a low green, the air filled with the sounds of songbirds and the babble of a brook. "You will be okay," it sang. "You will be fine. Just breathe through this. Take your time. What is happening now is not forever. You will be okay."
Never had she heard a robot with flimsier evidence tell her that she would be okay.
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Thomm Quackenbush is an author and teacher in the Hudson Valley. He has published four novels in his Night's Dream series (We Shadows, Danse Macabre, Artificial Gods, and Flies to Wanton Boys). He has sold jewelry in Victorian England, confused children as a mad scientist, filed away more books than anyone has ever read, and tried to inspire the learning disabled, gifted, and adjudicated. He can cross one eye, raise one eyebrow, and once accidentally groped a ghost. When not writing, he can be found biking, hiking the Adirondacks, grazing on snacks at art openings, and keeping a straight face when listening to people tell him they are in touch with 164 species of interstellar beings.