WARNING by Luke Mitchell

Author:Luke Mitchell [Mitchell, Luke]
Language: eng
Format: epub
Publisher: Whale Press Books

Entry 8

You wanna know the fucked up thing about sleeping without the link?

No preset dream control.

Try to picture that.

You slip off to sleep, listening to the dirty water dripping in the corner of your shitty little apartment hidey-hole, and to the rats fighting in the walls, and then suddenly you are one of those little bastards, scuttling happily along your little wall cavity, whisking away for a tasty crumb or two. And the damndest thing?

You don’t even know you’re dreaming.

Your poor sleeping noodle brain can’t tell the difference.

I only realized all of this after the fact, of course. At the time, outlandish as it all was, I didn’t have a freaking clue none of it was real. I’d never dreamed off script before.

All I knew was that I was content in my infinite stretch of dusty wall cavity, right up until the voice of Zeigler himself shook the air, booming and godlike to my little rat ears.

“What is an economy?”

I froze, frightened, then whisked the walls and sniffed the air, curiosity growing. I poked my head through the hole that may or may not have been there a moment earlier… and found myself face-to-whiskers with Andreas Zeigler himself.

The legend was slight of figure—grayed and distinctive, and frankly rather ridiculous-looking with his smart gray business suit topped by the same rose-pink apron one of Deborah’s girlfriends had once bought her as a gag gift. (Or maybe as some kind of moral judgment. We’d never known which. “Mama knows best,” it read.)

“Can you tell me?” Zeigler asked, arching one slender silver eyebrow.

“What?” I asked, my voice surprisingly human for a rat.

“An economy. What is it?”

“Supply and demand?” I said. “Mouths to feed? People need to feel—”

“Safe?” he demanded, leaning closer. “Protected? Tell me, Ciri, do you feel protected?”

I dropped my gaze to escape his stare and realized I naked—human once again, and completely exposed, sitting there on Desmond’s little rolling stool, slouched pathetically in front of the Father of Modern Humanity.

Only he wasn’t Zeigler anymore. He was Desmond. Spectacled. Pockmarked. Utterly condescending as he pushed his glasses up to the bridge of his nose and recited from memory, “An emergent property is a property which a complex system exhibits, but which the individual members do not. Now buck up, Little Neuron.”

I opened my mouth to argue. A crimson river of blood burst from his throat and washed over me, sweeping me off of the stool, down the hallway. Down, and down, screaming bloody murder, drowning in the stuff, until I fell out the other side. Fell out into a dark, cavernous space. Endless. An endless network of spider-web-thin threads, dancing on the bruise-colored thermals of some great storm. Utterly silent.

At the center of it all stood a humanoid figure of pure incandescence, the threads aflutter all around it—dull strands drifting down by the thousands, falling lackadaisically under their own weight only to be sparked to megavolt brilliance as they brushed against the glowing god.

I watched those brilliant waves cascade through the network,

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