One of Us (4 page)

Though I grew up in Florida, I'd spent most of the previous decade on the West Coast, and I missed it. For the time being I couldn't go back, which left me with nowhere in particular to be. It felt like everything had ground to a halt, as if it would take something pretty major to get my life started up again. Reincarnation, maybe. It had felt that way before, but not quite so bleakly. It was the kind of situation that could get you down.

So I lay on the bed and went to sleep.

I woke up early the next morning, feeling strange. Spacey. Hollow-stomached, and as if someone had stuffed little scratchy balls of crumpled paper inside my eyes. My watch said it was seven o'clock, which didn't make sense. The only time I see 7:00 A.M. is when I've been awake straight through the night.

Then I realized an alarm was going off, and saw that the console in the bedside table was flashing, message, it said. I screwed my eyes up tight and looked at the console again. It still said I had a message. I hit the receive button. The screen went blank for a moment, then fed up some text.

You could have earned $367.77 last night
, it read.
To learn more, come by 135 Highwater today. Quote reference PR/43.

Then it spit out a map. I picked it up; squinted at it.

$367.77 is a lot of nights tending bar.

I changed my shirt and left the hotel.

BY THE TIME I reached Highwater Street I was already losing interest. My head felt fuzzy and dry, as if I'd spent all night doing math in my sleep. A big part of me just wanted to score breakfast somewhere and go sit on a bus, watch the sun haze on window panels until I was somewhere else.

But I didn't. I have a kind of shambling momentum once I'm started. I followed the streets on the map, surprised to find myself getting closer to the business district. The kind of people who spam consoles in cheap hotels generally work out of virtual offices, but Highwater was a wide street with grown-up buildings on either side. 135 itself was a mountain of black plate-glass with a revolving door at the bottom. Unlike many of the other buildings I'd passed, 135 didn't have exterior videowalls extolling with tiresome thoroughness the virtues and success of the people who toiled within. 135 just sat there, not giving anything away. I went in, as much as anything, just to find some shade.

The lobby was similarly uncommunicative, and likewise decked out all in black. It was like they'd acquired a job lot of the color from somewhere and were eager to use it up. I walked across the marble floor to a desk at the far end, my heels tapping in the cool silence. A woman sat there in a pool of yellow light, looking at me with a raised eyebrow.

"Can I help you?" she asked. Her tone made it clear she thought it was unlikely.

"I was told to come here and quote a reference."

I speak better than I look. The woman's face didn't light up or anything; but she tapped a button on her keyboard and turned her eyes to the screen. "And that is?"

I told her, and she scrolled down through some list for a while. "Okay," she said. "Here's how it is. Two options. The first is I give you $171.39 and you go away with no further obligation. The second is that you take the elevator on the right and go up to the thirty-fourth floor, where Mr. Stratten will meet with you presently."

"And you arrive at $171.39 how, exactly?"

"Your potential earnings less a twenty-five-dollar handling fee, divided by two and rounded up to the nearest cent."

"How come I get only half the money?"

"Because you're not on contract. You go up and meet Mr. Stratten, maybe that will change."

"And in that case I get the full $367?"

She winked. "You're kind of bright, aren't you?"

The elevator was very pleasant. Tinted mirrors, low lights; quiet, leisurely. It spoke of money, and lots of it. Not much happened during the trip up.

When the doors opened, I found myself faced with a corridor. A large chrome sign on the wall said REMtemps in a suitably soul-destroying typeface. Underneath it said SLEEP TIGHT, SLEEP
RIGHT
. I walked the way the sign pointed and wound up at another reception desk. The girl wore a badge that said she was Sabrina, and her hair was done up in a weirdly complex manner, doubtless the result of several hours of some asswipe stylist's attention.

I'd thought the girl downstairs was a top-flight patronizer, but compared to Sabrina she was servility itself. Sabrina's manner suggested I was some kind of lower-echelon vermin: lower than a rat, for sure, maybe on a par with a particularly ill-favored mole, and after thirty seconds with her I felt the bacteria in my stomach start to join in sneering at me. She told me to take a seat, but I didn't. Partly to annoy her, but mainly because I hate sitting in reception areas. I read somewhere it puts you in a subordinate position right off the bat. I'm great at the prehiring tactics—it's just a shame it goes to pieces afterward.

"Mr. Thompson, good morning. I'm Stratten."

I turned to see a man standing behind me, hand held out. He had a strong face, black hair starting to silver on the temples. Like any other tall, middle-aged guy in a sober suit, but more polished: as if he were a release-standard human instead of the beta versions you normally see wandering around. His hand was firm and dry, as was his smile.

I was shown into a small room off the main corridor. Stratten sat behind a desk, and I lounged back in the other available chair.

"So what's the deal?" I asked, trying to sound relaxed. There was something about the guy opposite that put me on edge. I couldn't place his accent. East Coast somewhere, probably, but flattened, made deliberately average—like an actor covering his past.

He leaned forward and turned the console on the desk to face me. "See if there's anything you recognize," he said, and pressed a switch. The console chittered and whirred for a moment, and flashed up PR/43 @ 18/5/2016.

The screen bled to black, and then faded up again to show a corridor. The camera—if that's what it was—walked forward along it a little way. Drab green walls trailed off into the distance. On the left-hand side was another corridor. The camera turned—and showed that this hallway was exactly the same as the first. Going a little quicker now, it tramped that way for a while before making another turn into yet another identical corridor. There didn't seem to be any shortage of hallways, or of new turnings to make. Occasional chips in the paint relieved the monotonous olive of the walls, but other than that it just went on and on and on.

I looked up after five minutes to see Stratten watching me. I shook my head. Stratten made a note on a piece of paper, and then typed something rapidly on the console's keyboard. "Not very distinctive," he said. "I don't think the donor's very imaginative. And you lose a great deal, just getting the visual. Try this."

The picture on the screen changed. It showed a pair of hands holding a piece of water. I know "piece of water" doesn't make much sense, but that's what it looked like. The hands were nervously fondling the liquid, and a quiet male voice was relayed from the console's speaker.

Oh, I don't know
, it said doubtfully.
About five? Six and a half, maybe?

The hands put the water down on a shelf and picked up another bit. This water was a little smaller. The voice paused for a moment, then spoke more confidently.
Definitely a two. Two and a third at most.

The hands placed this second piece down on top of the first. The two bits of water didn't meld, but remained distinct. One hand moved out of sight, and there was a different sound then, a soft, metallic scraping. That's when I got my first twitch.

Stratten noticed. "Getting warmer?"

"Maybe," I said, leaning to get a closer look at the console. The point of view had swiveled slightly, to show a battered filing cabinet. One of the drawers was open, and the hands were carefully picking up pieces of water—which I now saw were arrayed all around, in piles of differing sizes—and putting them one by one into different folders. Every now and then the voice would swear to itself, take out one of the pieces of water, and return it to a pile—not necessarily the one it had originally come from. The hands started moving more and more quickly, putting water in, taking water out, and all the time there was this low background noise of the voice reciting different numbers.

I stared at the screen, losing awareness of the office around me and becoming absorbed. I forgot that Stratten was even there, and it was largely to myself that I eventually spoke.

"Each of the pieces of water has a different value, not based on size. Somewhere between one and twenty-seven. Each drawer in the filing cabinet has to be filled with the same value of water, but no one told him how to figure out how much each piece is worth."

The screen went blank, and I turned my head to see Stratten smiling at me. "You remember," he said.

"That was the dream I had just before I woke up this morning. What the fuck's going on?"

"We took a liberty last night," Stratten said. "The proprietor of the hotel you stayed in has an arrangement with us. We subsidize the cost of his rooms, and provide the consoles."

"Why?" I reached unthinkingly into my pocket and pulled out a cigarette. Instead of shouting at me or pulling a gun, Stratten merely opened a drawer and handed me an ashtray.

"We're always looking for new people, people who need money and aren't too fussy about how they get it. This is the best way we've found of locating them."

"Great, so you found me. And so?"

"I want to offer you a job as a REMtemp."

"You're going to have to unpack that for me."

He did. At some length. This is the gist:

A few years previously, someone had found a way of taking dreams out of people's heads in real time. A device placed near the head of a sufficiently well-off client could keep an eye out for electromagnetic fields of particular types, and divert the mental states of which they were a function out of the dreamer's unconscious mind and into an erasing device. The government wasn't keen on the idea, but the inventors had hired an attorney trained in quantum law, and no one was really sure what the legal position was anymore. "It depends" was as near as they could get.

In the meantime, a covert industry was born.

The obvious trade was in nightmares, but they don't happen very often, and clients balked at buying systems they needed only every couple of months. They'd pay on a dream-by-dream basis, and the people who'd developed the technology wanted more return on their investment. Also, nightmares aren't usually so bad, and if they are, they're generally giving you information you could do with knowing. If you're scared crapless about something, there's often a good reason for it.

So gradually the market shifted to anxiety dreams instead. Kind of like nightmares, but not usually as frightening, these are the dreams you get when you're stressed, or tired, or fretting about something. Often they consist of complex and minute tasks the dreamer has to endlessly go through, not really understanding what they're doing and constantly having to restart. Then just when you're starting to get a grip on what's going on, you slide into something else, and the whole cycle starts again. Anxiety dreams usually commence just after you've gone to sleep—in which case they'll screw up your whole night—or in the couple of hours before waking. Either way, you wake up feeling tired and worn out, in no state to start a working day because it feels like you've already just been through one.

Anxiety dreams are much more frequent than nightmares, and tend to affect precisely the kind of middle- and high-management executives who were the primary market for dream disposal. The guys who owned the technology changed their pitch, rewrote the copy in their brochures, and started making some serious money.

But there was a problem.

It turned out that you couldn't just erase dreams. That wasn't the way it worked. Over the course of eighteen months the company started getting more and more complaints, and in the end they worked out what was going on.

When you erase a dream, all you destroy is the imagery, the visuals that would have played over the dreamer's inner eye. The substance of the dream, an intangible quality that seemed impossible to isolate, remains. The more dreams a client has removed, the more of this substance is left behind: invisible, indestructible, but carrying some kind of weight. This substance hangs around the room the dream has been erased in, and after thirty or so erasures it gets to the point where the room becomes uninhabitable. It's like walking into a thunderstorm of competing subconscious impulses—absolutely silent but impossible to bear. After a few weeks the dreams seem to coalesce still further, making the air so thick that it becomes impossible to even enter the room at all.

Unfortunately, the kind of client who could afford dream disposal was exactly the type who was turned on by litigation. After the company had swallowed a few huge out-of-court settlements on bedrooms that were now impassable, they turned their minds to finding a way out of the problem. They tried diverting the dreams into storage databanks instead of just erasing them. This didn't work either. Some of the dream still seeped out of the hard disks, regardless of how airtight the casing.

Then finally it clicked. The dreams weren't being used up. Maybe if they were . . .

They gave it a try. A client's transmitting machine was connected to a receiver placed near the bed of a volunteer, and two anxiety dreams were successfully diverted from the mind of one to the other. The client woke up nicely rested and full of vim, ready for another hard day in the money mines. The volunteer had a shitty night of dull dreams he couldn't quite remember, but was paid for his troubles.

No residue was left in the room. The dream had vanished. The cash started flowing again.

"And that's what you did to me last night?" I asked Stratten, a little pissed at having my mind invaded.

He held up his hands placatingly. "Trust me, you'll be glad we did. People have varying ability to use up other people's dreams. Most can handle two a night without much difficulty. Three at the most. They get up feeling ragged, and drag themselves through the day. Usually they work only every other night—but they still make eight, nine hundred dollars a week. You're different."