He could hear the footsteps clearly, hear the bedroom door creak open and the steps walk around the side of his bed. She was here. The dark corners of his room bent and shied away from the presence approaching him. He could feel the air thicken, the dread slow every molecule down.

It was all he could do to pull the sheet over his head. The shadows moved across the material, reaching out to them, reaching out to rip them back. He closed his eyes and began to pray.

The ice hit his lips and brought him back to the bar. The prayers, he remembered the prayers.

Never any specific request to rid the world, and his bedroom in particular, of ghosts and demons, just rote, standard prayers that ran off his tongue. A rhythm of words, almost meaningless. The sound itself, exhaled out in a whisper, was strengthening. There was no concentration required, it was like reciting the alphabet, one sound just followed another. You didn’t need to understand every word.

It was like a magic spell, an incantation to summon up a great force to protect you, to cover over your bed and deflect any evil away. It was a lullaby, a strong brick wall around his mind, keeping out the darkness and watching over him. He could actually feel the light in his head get brighter the further he went, as if God had cracked open a trapdoor and was slowly raising it up the more he heard.

When the opposite happened, when he woke up out of a dream he didn’t want to leave, when he kept his eyes closed and tried to rip the dream world back open, dive back under to where he had been happy, then too prayers were useful tools. They calmed his mind, allowing him to sink back down, back to the place he left off. Their rhythm, the fact that your brain was hardly involved, seemed to stimulate that part of his mind connected to dreaming. He could drift away, safe in the knowledge he was being watched over.

“Here’s to them, Jack.” Adlai raised his glass to the bartender, who of course ignored him. Perhaps his name isn’t Jack. Who cares? His name is whatever I tell him it is.

“To prayers and dreams, dreams and prayers. May they live together happily ever after.”

You didn’t have experiences like that without making some strong connections in your mind. He doubted he was the only one. Perhaps just the first with the knowledge and will to do anything about it.

The others had shied away whenever the subject came up. No-one liked talking about religion. He’d mention something and they’d roll their eyes, then he’d go away and create them anyway, just use different names. Safer names. It was everywhere. Don’t mention heaven, call it VR. Souls? Call them proxies. God? Call yourself a programmer.

Besides, he knew he didn’t need to listen to them. They needed him, not the other way around. He’d create entire worlds, populate them with physics and possibility, they came along and filled in the details. It was important, but not necessary. Not like him.

Maybe they became a little jealous. Adlai rolled the edge of his glass on the bar and watched the brown liquid circle around the inside, desperately clinging to the glass. Maybe that was a good thing. Led to them striking out on their own, creating things they never would have thought possible without that push. Never would have dreamed of.

He grinned at that. It all came back to dreams.