He missed sleep. Crawling into a cold bed, slowly feeling the heat radiate out from your foetal ball, then edging out into other, unexplored areas and repeating the trick. Changing the world around you, making it warm and comfortable, a suitable theatre for the dreams to come.
None of it was necessary now. The technology was there to simply lie back and let the field grab your consciousness by the hand and lead it away. Adlai preferred tradition, believed that every step taken was a necessary one. You don’t skip ahead to the good stuff without sacrificing something.
People, users, were often left wondering why their dreams had become so predictable. The fact was you had to force feed most of them. Very few ever came up with something original, ever showed the wherewithal to break out on their own. And then there were those you just had to point in the right direction.
People weren’t put together like they used to be. Take himself. In the past a great war or pestilence would have culled a weak man like him from existence. Instead he had thrived. Become powerful. Become a God in VR, a leader in a universal session of psychoanalysis. He had changed people. He had done some good.
When he first started he’d write everything down, capture it in his notebook so that no angle, no shimmer was lost. He knew he could be vague, that his memory was a sieve. A misleading analogy, really. His memory was an ocean, when new drops were added they simply dissolved away, lost in its sheer size. So he wrote things down, constructed little paper boats for them to float on the surface.
In time this led to more confusion. You weren’t meant to remember all the details, there was a good reason you used to forget. Leave them there on the surface and they begin to bump into each other, to bustle and fight, force each other under. Better to let them sink on their own. If they become important later you dredge them up, like a dream. Leave the surface clear, clean and sharp. Glassy. Like this window.
He had hesitated for a moment, they all had, when faced with the darkness. Gretchen had been the first in, and they’d had to hurry to keep up once she’d stepped through. They didn’t really know where they were going, but none of them could afford to get left behind.
The sounds of fighting had faded off into the distance. Strafe and Hound would buy them a few minutes at least, but still they had to hurry. There had to be a logical way in towards the centre, probably more than one, they just had to keep going until they stumbled onto it.
Madigan found the door. He cracked it open and let the light from the other side leap through. Through it was a waiting room of some sort, a large, well furnished one with comfortable chairs and couches arranged around its walls.
Adlai broke the silence. “Well, at least they have taste.”
Gretchen pushed past him then and strode into the room, looking around and daring anyone to come out to challenge her. Adlai was just about to follow when he felt a tug on his arm.
“You don’t really need me anymore, do you?”
Madigan’s face was still in shadow, but Adlai could imagine the expression. A small, sheepish smile, with a glint in the eye that was bit too knowing.
“No, I suppose not.”
“I doubt we’ll meet again.”
Adlai gently pulled his arm free and walked forwards into the room. It was for the best. Perhaps he could make something of himself in the twisting streets off-Grid.
“One never knows out here. Take care of yourself.”
“Oh, I always do.”
With that he was gone, back into the shadows, back through the walls to the relative safety of the wet, dark streets that he knew.
Rainwater washed over the outside of the window and Adlai allowed himself to think of Madigan again for the first time in he didn’t know how long. He must still be out there, stranded, scratching an existence out with his knowledge and his tools. He hoped he didn’t regret turning back. Perhaps he was lucky and simply didn’t remember.
Adlai gulped the last of his drink down and waited for the next.
Memory is the most dangerous thing of all.
