He couldn’t wake up.

He wasn’t sure exactly how long he’d been like this. Days? Weeks? Too long. Lying in the old army cot, staring up at the backs of his eyelids, not seeing anything. Lost in other worlds, dream worlds.

He knew he was asleep, knew he was dreaming, knew the field was active around him. He knew none of it was real, but that knowledge didn’t make it any easier.

The earliest nightmare, back when he was still learning to speak in full sentences, was in black and white. It was grainy, too, like the old televisions. Unreal. That only seemed to make it more terrifying.

It was so simple too. Two large blobs jumped up and down on each other, sucking each other in and expanding, growing bigger every leap, until they towered above him, threatened to crush him with their sheer size. The scale of them, that was the thing. He was so small, and the world around him so huge.

Later, his fears became more focused, more real. A pale skinned killer with long claws hid under a sheet in a room with all of its furniture covered. He had to walk through the room to get to the bathroom at night. One of the pieces of furniture hid the killer. Maybe the killer would wait until he walked past, then sneak up behind him. Maybe while he was looking back the killer would slip out and be standing right there, claws glistening, waiting for him. He never saw the killer, but that only made it worse.

A child’s lullaby floating through his head brought these visions, dragged out each nightmare, reminding him of every fear he’d ever had.

Darkness. Lost in a dark wood, only a weak flashlight to light the way. Strange cracks and snaps leaping out to him from all sides, secret movement everywhere, and somehow the beam of the flashlight, the way it frames everything it does not see in even deeper blackness makes it all much worse. But you can’t switch it off. You can’t switch any of this off. You’re lost here forever.

Why couldn’t he unplug? Had he lost himself in some depraved corner of the Boulevard, lost himself somewhere off Grid? Why couldn’t he wake?

Fear of animals that slither and slide. Sitting on an old toilet, in an outhouse somewhere. Something primitive and old moving up the pipes towards you. Forcing its way up and consuming you from the inside. He could feel the sweat building up on his forehead, trickling down into his eyes, falling down his cheeks like tears. He couldn’t wipe them away, couldn’t move at all.

La la, la la-la la.

That lullaby, taking him by the hand again and leading him somewhere else. Into other fears.

He was a camera, following a little girl dressed in white, skipping through a forest. Every now and then she turns around and smiles, but her smile has an edge, like she knows more than she’s letting on. She’s leading you somewhere, you want to call out to make her stop, you want to protect her, but you cannot make a sound.

A wooden cabin appears, on the edge of a lake. The girl giggles and leads you on, turns a corner around the cabin and you follow, but when you get there she’s disappeared. Then you feel the dread begin to rise up, and you look across the clearing and see the woman staring at you, pure hatred in her eyes, freezing you to the spot. She walks towards you.

Run. Turn away and run from all of this, through the trees, away from the spectres and sounds, away from the nightmares. Wake up.

He could feel his eyes twitching back and forth in REM sleep, but couldn’t control them. They kept seeing things.

His body hung across the cot, drenched in sweat, tensing and shifting with each dream. His hand trailed almost to the floor, dangling above the darkness under the bed, the unknown spaces where all the childhood demons hid. They’d come out now and captured him, pinned him down in a paralysis of sleep and dreams.

If they could do that, could they come out further, fed by his fears? Were they simply strengthening themselves, was he losing strength as they gained it? Did they become more corporeal as he melted away?

One of the oldest fears, that of fear itself. Its power to control you, take you over. Once the idea springs in your brain you’re powerless to stop it. A virus of fear, taking over your body and striking you down, leaving your brain in a constant adrenaline rush and your hand twitching in the breeze.

And then something grabs it.

Adlai sat very still, watching the prone body in front of him. They’d captured him days earlier, another spy for the Grid. They were coming in regularly now, small time users who wanted a shortcut to the top, coders who came in too late, young hot shots who wanted the power to twist the world around them to their liking, but found all the tools locked away, the usual tricks already sealed off. There were two choices, either start at the bottom with everyone else, or slink over to the Grid and offer your services. They always accepted.

Adlai could understand, he knew the frustration of being just like everyone else. At least, he used to know. Now he was one of the few they sent saps like this after.

They’d caught him far too easily really. Another raid on one of their war scenes, trying to hit them while they were distracted with their games. It never worked. The powers behind the Grid didn’t care, there were plenty more where he came from.

He wondered if this one at least had a chance to experience something of what he was helping to destroy. The freedom, the possibilities, the pure pleasure of losing yourself in someone else’s fantasy. More than pleasure, illusion was a necessity, you had to escape reality in order to survive this life. VR was a place to do that, a place to chase God across the heavens of consciousness.

It was the only place left. Back on the other side, God was long gone. Euthanised by technology.

You know what you’re going to do, you may as well get on with it.

They’d decided together, but he knew he’d pushed them along. The code was simple really, a simple feedback loop. If he hadn’t discovered it, someone else would have. Better to do it this way, as a warning.

Adlai activated the code and watched as the world around him changed.

It was an ancient idea. Since the time of the shamans, before religion itself – to understand life you first have to die. Death is a part of life, a necessary part. The threat had to be there.

With this code it was now possible to feedback up the ports, back into the dreaming body on the other side. Death was now more than just a continue point. It was final.

The body in front of him didn’t move, but he knew he’d doomed it. He stood up and left the room, headed for his own region, far away from this front line. Someone else could take care of the final rites for this one. There were plenty here who would be happy to deal with it after he’d gone.

“’Every human being is equally unfree, that is, we create out of freedom, a prison.’ You know who wrote that?”

His voice was clear and strong again, but his eyes were still vacant and lost in the past.

“You really do give me nothing, you know that? How does it feel to be God’s bartender anyway?”

The bartender just stood and stared and kept his mouth shut. He was good at his job.

Another reason to stay here. Alcohol was an answer because it meant you no longer had to pull the strings. Your consciousness is no longer your responsibility. You’re no longer responsible at all. For anything.

He raised his hand for another drink and noticed a fresh one sitting on the bar, smiling up at him.

He really was good at his job.

Cass woke to the sound of applause and rolled over. It was just the rain hammering down outside her window, so hard you could feel it in your fingertips. Her brain was still foggy from sleep, lost in forgotten universes and selves. She lay still in bed and stared at the rain as her mind sorted itself out.

She felt wretched, guilty almost. She wasn’t hungover, there was no one else in the room, so it wasn’t the obvious. What is it then? This dread that seeped through her, making her toss and turn in the dark and wake up feeling strained and more tired than when she went to bed.

It was Monday, that had to be it. Monday meant work, meant a whole week of work in fact, drudgery stretching out in front of you. Every Monday was the same. Tuesdays weren’t much better, in fact it wasn’t really until Thursday that she slept the whole night through, untroubled by dark dreams. They’d been getting darker too, at least, so she thought. She could no longer remember them.

That hadn’t always been the way. She’d had very vivid dreams when younger, she used to wake up and roll over to the side of the bed, reach under it to the pad of paper stored for just such an occasion and scribble down every last detail. Often it flowed over more than one page. These days she neither wrote nor remembered. Nothing more than images and flashes, fleeting and dark. Rain. Monsters. Blood.

It had been that way ever since the accident. Dreams were no longer a place to escape to. She didn’t want to see what they brought up from the depths.

Maybe it was just that she hated her job. Everyone hated their jobs though, at least, everyone she knew. Jobs were dull. They seemed to have gotten duller over the years, or maybe she just knew more now. Someone at work had told her they thought it was all part of the scam to make you spend more time plugged in. They made the real world so unattractive that you just had to tune in and drop out.

Cass wasn’t that paranoid. But the dreams, the way they flashed in and out now, that had something to do with VR. It was too vivid and strong now, too bright and shiny, pushing everything else back out of your brain, leaving it a polished surface with nowhere for dreams to cling on to. That was why she tried to leave it alone. Turned off the field before crawling into bed and lay staring in the dark, wishing real dreams back into her, no matter how dark.

It didn’t work. Maybe it was part of ‘their’ plan, whoever they were. Make you miss the dreams, the time spent plugged in. Bring you to a point where you couldn’t stand to spend a day without at least a short visit. She looked around the office each day at the glazed eyes and knew that for most people it worked. They couldn’t resist it.

It wasn’t good for you, Cass was convinced of that. She’d enjoyed it, had her fun, but knew when something wasn’t right. VR felt wrong. Your dreams multiplied on top of each other, and the sick separation, the tear when it all ended. It was too much.

Cass turned her head and watched the raindrops slide down the window. Life should be lived on this side, in reality, no matter how dull and grey it made itself out to be. The drops streaked together and pooled at the base of the glass, warping the image outside.

No matter how lonely.

Babbage let the boy lead and slipped his hand inside his coat to rest on the hilt of his gun. He didn’t want to have to use it, but then he didn’t want to end up dead in a gutter either.

There were worse things out here than pickpockets.

The first thing Babbage noticed was the smell. It lay heavy over the entire building, soaking into the wood, curling through the shattered windows and crawling into every crack in the walls. Something was definitely not right about this place. As for the sort of person who chose to live in it…

He let the young pickpocket lead him further inside the dark doorway but then halted to allow time for his eyes to adjust to the gloom. It was far darker than out on the street, as if whatever was causing that stench had decided to alter the natural light for added effect. Babbage was getting more and more interested with every step.

It had been his experience that most crimes of the modern age were best solved by diving in head first and waiting to see where the current dragged you. If not solved, the crimes would perhaps at least be understood. Crime wasn’t simple these days, or rather, it had become so simple as to dumbfound all but the most brilliant or naïve. Babbage was proud to consider himself both.

In a world where most people spent increasing amounts of time plugged in to another reality, material goods and therefore material wants faded. So too did material crime. What was the point of stealing anything when you could just plug yourself in and find the right corner of the Grid? As a result criminals tended to be far less simple and predictable. Where once you were almost guaranteed to get your man simply by following procedure, a more creative approach had become necessary.

Over the years Babbage had come to trust his instincts, especially the more eccentric ones. He was proud of his achievement. Eccentricity was underrated.

Babbage reached out through the ink and touched the boy’s shoulder. Onward.

The building itself was a complete mess. Even in the darkness he could make out the partial walls, sagging frames and streams of rainwater washing down from higher floors. There had to be better options around. It’s not like there was a shortage of abandoned buildings out here to choose from.

And the smell. It was getting stronger as they wandered further in. A rotting sweetness, it gave Babbage a disturbingly familiar twinge. He knew what that smell signified. Death.

The pickpocket had evidently come to the same conclusion, as round the next corner Babbage felt the cuff wire tighten momentarily before snapping back at him. He heard the young boy scuttle away and let him go. Must have had another blade on him, or hidden one here. Still he’d led him this far.

There was an orange glow further up the corridor, and Babbage continued on towards it. He was only mildly surprised when he noticed his gun was in his hand.

“Breathe in softly son, it’s only a smell. No need to imagine what could be the cause. No need for gag reflexes. Just air, just molecules sucking down your throat, into your lungs and out again.”

Finally he rounded a corner that opened up into what used to be a kitchen of some sort. The room was lit by a fire in an old oil drum, surrounded by piles of trash. Scraps of food and wrappers were littered everywhere, and in the far corner was the reason everything smelt so bad. A drawn figure of a man, completely emaciated, slumped across an old army surplus cot. He looked like he’d been dead for weeks.

Babbage wondered when the kid had been here last, and whether he’d ever come back. He hoped the dead man wasn’t actually his father.

The smell was lessened by the fire – who’d been feeding it? – and the earlier sense of dread was gone now that the cause was here in front of him. He walked forward to get a closer look, but a yard from the body suddenly stopped.

“Now what do you make of that, young Adlai?”

He leant forwards to get a closer look at the man’s face without blocking out the light of the fire. Something was off.

“There.”

A flicker of movement, underneath the eyelids. He stared again, trying to soak in as much information as he could before his brain attacked it. There it was again, his eyes were definitely moving underneath their lids, snapping back and forth.

“This man, my young friend, is asleep.”