Dreammaker, a Sci-Fi fanfic - FictionPress.com

It was all a dream.

We've all met the prodigy of the slums in our minds. Her name was Emily, and we don't know when she was born. She looked no older than seven when we saw her, yet people claim she was there as much as forty years ago. Her house as my generation knew it was an entire block, but before we were born, other people used to live there too. From the outside, that area looked like any other part of the slums- gray, dirty, the only colored lights being the cheap neon ones taken from the more respectable neighborhoods when no one needed them anymore. All that set it apart from where one was standing was the fact that not a soul could be seen.

Most kids ended up going there at some point, and if you lived in the slums like I did, it was sooner than later. Back when I was maybe five years old, half the neighborhood had already met Emily and openly talked about their experiences in her block. The others- my parents and even a few schoolteachers included- refused to go themselves, the worst of them claiming that the devil lived there and deceived your mind to no apparent purpose. More rational avoiders just said it was a local glitch in the system that Authority hadn't gotten around to fixing. And who knew what a glitch strong enough to make dreams could do to you as a person, right?

But hey, I turned out fine, and I went in younger than most first-timers. We're cops for Authority now, Jace and I. Way back when, we overheard a couple of the older school kids talking about the block and asked one of our teachers about it. When he told us not to go there, Jace basically took it as a sign that we had to, and when I mentioned that it could be dangerous, he took me by the shoulders and said, "Tom, you a wimp?" For a five year old, that was pretty good incentive. We skipped lunch after school and were standing at the broken gate soon enough (some avoiders had tried to close the block off years earlier, but it was a waste of time. No one ever bothered to move the remains of the gate afterwards).

I wasn't the bravest of kids back then, so trust me when I say that if I'd found the dark, empty street ahead scary, I wouldn't have gone in no matter what Jace said. There wasn't a sound out of there, and nothing moved at all- almost like staring at an image on a screen. Yet, there wasn't anything foreboding about it. On the contrary, it was almost inviting, like there was someone in there calling us into her home. I took the step in even before Jace did.

This was where it got weird. For a while we walked down that street, the surroundings looking the same as they had before we crossed the broken gate, the only sound being that of our footsteps. But somewhere along the way, it just... changed. We found ourselves in a wooden hallway, with red carpeting and paintings on the walls. Toys were scattered about, and we even heard people laughing around the corners. The lighting had become warm, sunlight coming in through the tall, grand windows with embroidered curtains. Our likes had never seen anything like it even in pictures. The odd thing was that we didn't know when it had changed. Sure, we realized it wasn't the place that we thought we'd walked into, but that didn't stop it from feeling completely natural, like nothing at all was out of the ordinary.

We were well aware that the things around us were different with every step we took as we walked through the house's many rooms, for who knows how long. It didn't seem strange that even though we could hear voices around us, no one came into view for the longest time. When objects weightlessly sailed through the air- clothes, papers, hell even translucent streams of color! - we didn't bat an eyelid. When we turned around and a seven-year-old girl in white pajamas was standing there smiling, we just smiled back and followed where she led. She didn't say a word, and at the same time, she said her name was Emily and she welcomed us to her home.

I was five, and there's no way I could recount everything my wild imagination saw at the time. When Jace and I left the house, the world changed back into the cold streets of the slums, and when we looked back, the static image had returned to its place. It was all a dream we said, but how could we know what we were talking about? We didn't know what a dream was.

In my later years of school I learned about the matrix, formed of the minds of every citizen in the populace through the computers they put in our brains when we are born. The net isn't a commodity to make the world smaller and information available- it is the keystone of civilization. It is the means by which Central Authority senses the patterns of thought that move through our society, and adjusts things accordingly so that the clock can keep ticking. But please, don't go off thinking of our system as techno-fascist. Authority is far from an absolute, tyrannical head that uses the power of the matrix to probe individuals' thoughts- as far as anyone knows, that's not even possible. It's the net flow of our ideas and feelings that ultimately dictates what direction Authority steers us in, and by virtue of this, ours is a democracy beyond any that was possible before. But the price of this is that we can't dream; to allow us to dream would cause the net to overflow with trivialities, false ideas, garbage. The system would collapse. The computers in our brains are as much to link us to the matrix as they are for housekeeping- what we consciously perceive is what directly forms our thoughts, and machines weed out anything we make up.

So what was different? Who was Emily, and was she making us dream? Why?

I visited the block at least once a month since that first time, and I'm twenty-five now. I haven't lived in the slums for six years. I have access to the comforts of the city- things I never imagined having when I was younger. The world I live in, by comparison to Emily's house, is nonetheless cold. I love the people enough that I chose to serve in the police force, but there wasn't a day that I didn't prefer that seven-year-old girl's company.

So why didn't I go there more often, you ask? There lies another oddity, and it applies to me, Jace, and everyone who's ever experienced Emily's- it didn't take control of us. We all found it warmer and more pleasant than anything in our lives. As if she could read our minds, it was exhilarating when we needed something to brighten the day, and serene when all we wanted was to wind down. Most of all, it allowed us to experience something that had otherwise been eliminated by Authority because of the danger it posed- the ability to lose ourselves in the unreal. It was an escape, and one that we ideally should never have wanted to leave.

I don’t know if it was the strength of the matrix or our own nagging sense of reality that kept us from yearning for the block every second that we weren't in there. No one knows. Me, I suspect it could even have been Emily behind the scenes, reminding us that we had lives and responsibilities. It might be farfetched to believe that a child knew so much about our world and understood what her house could mean to it if people went in and decided they never wanted to leave. But then, you never met her, never had full conversations with her. In a naïve, very odd sort of way, she had an intelligence well beyond that of any adult, much less any child that I've ever met.

And in case you've already forgotten, I'll mention again that she was there fifteen years before I was born, and didn't age a day since the block was emptied. The question of what she was had as much importance as any of the mysteries surrounding her.

Authority claimed that investigations into "The Anomaly in the Slums" had all hit dead ends, and that we were better off not asking about it. Was there any indication as to what might be going on? "It is likely that it's a glitch in the matrix coding, although we cannot confirm this just yet." Was it safe to leave it there? "There's no reason to suspect that the anomaly in the slums poses a danger." Who was Emily? "We do not know." And that was that. Naturally, many of us decided to take matters into our own hands.

As a passive thing, the matrix could exist without anyone knowing about it. Authority would draw what it needed from the streams of data and the little people would go about their lives, oblivious to what goes on behind the scenes.

That would be a life unimaginable.

Around the time we reach high school, we're given our first pair of 'trodes. Of course, everyone's had access to the basic functions of the net for years by then, and the concept of being online in your head seems too fantastic to wait for. But steal them, borrow them, use your parents' pair, the 'trodes don’t work until you're of a certain age. I don’t know the details of it, but the human mind is apparently incapable of handling cyberspace in one's early years, and Authority makes damn sure that no kids go insane from information overload. By the time you're ready, they literally have to wait till the last second to hand you your pair, since you're otherwise likely to jack in without letting them finish reading the safety precautions.

If Authority won't tell you something, as was the case with Emily's block, the best alternative is to go online yourself and investigate. So, with no reason to think I'd succeed where innumerable others had come away with nothing, I jacked in.

Thing about cyberspace is that once you become familiar with it and get the frills and ads out of the way, you're basically left with an unintelligible stream of raw data. Since you're looking at it through the implants in your brain, you then have complete freedom to make it look the way you want it to with a simple thought. Personalized color-coding, pattern recognition, all the stuff that makes your life a little easier. With enough practice, you can eventually arrange things in such a manner that the patterns form a warped, surreal version of the very world you live in.

Now imagine me, stepping into the street while in cyberspace. I'm looking at the blood and guts of the city. I can see stacks of flowing numbers reaching high to reveal the shapes of skyscrapers. Unintelligible clumps of data pour in and out of the people walking around me- so much data that you can see the entire human form, glowing brightest in the head where everything is processed. Look up at the sky, which is an acid trip of colors representing all the pathways of the net, a huge web weaving in and out of everything and anything hooked up to it, and all of it filtering through that unimaginably huge tower at the center of the city- Authority. In the matrix, I can raise myself high above the streets, above the skyscrapers, above even Authority, and look at the entire city (and if I wish so, the continent), 'fly' wherever I need to look, and my flesh and blood body doesn't need to move an inch.

In this phantom state, I went over to Emily's. From high above, a city block in the matrix generally looks like a dynamic, color-coded satellite image of itself. The block in the slums was pitch black. Not only that, but the entire sky above it was black. It was a huge, lightless tower, whose perimeter were the four edges of the slums around it, and whose upper boundary couldn't even be seen, like it stretched into space. I'd seen massive firewalls before, but nothing like the behemoth around Emily's house.

The result of trying to enter the black tower was no different than any of my other attempts to break through firewalls- I woke up in my room two hours later with a massive headache and blown fuse in my 'trodes. Now I'm no hacker- hell, part of my job is putting hackers behind bars- but I know for a fact that professionals tried for years to find out what was wrong with the matrix in Emily's house, and never found so much as a clue.

When I was around eighteen (about a year after my first attempt to fly in), I dragged Jace with me to the slums and tried option number two- enter the block and then jack in. Jace was always the more adventurous of the two, so it was no trouble getting him to agree. 'Trodes in hand, we walked in to the usual fare. When we came out, we still had the 'trodes, but had never used them. This happened every time we attempted option number two, and it hadn't only happened to us.

The only remaining idea was to walk in while jacked in to cyberspace. Moving around with the 'trodes active isn't impossible; it's interesting as hell, and you can usually tell when someone's trying it. But it takes a lot of experience to make the world in cyberspace take the exact shape of the real world- even when you get it right, there are flaws, and you're pretty likely to trip over something before you've gone three steps. Still, we had to know. By the time we were nineteen we'd had sufficient practice, so there we stood in the slums, staring the black wall of the tower in front of us. Taking deep breaths, we walked in and, quite unconsciously, immediately turned off the 'trodes. We tried again and again, but like every other exhausted option, it was to no avail.

For whatever reason, Emily did not want us to know her secret.

Disheartened, I eventually gave up searching for the answer. Over the next six years, I moved up to Lieutenant, started a business with Jace, and married a beautiful woman named Kari. We visited Emily's together, and when our daughter was old enough, went as a family. At this point, I stopped caring entirely about the how and why of the block. Imagine being able to literally share you dreams with your loved ones, if you can. For us, there was no experience in the world like it, and I guess at that point I almost didn't want to know the science behind the magic. It was there, and that was all that mattered.

But of course, it was at exactly this time that things started to go wrong.

Two months ago, in the case that made waves throughout the city, Michael B. Early- a longtime visitor at Emily's house- went to the block in the early evening after work and then came home to his family. He jacked into the net, went over his work, tucked his kids in and before long went to bed. The next morning, his neighborhood was swarming with cops and his house was quarantined by firewall. Jace and I weren't dispatched, but the whole force knew what was happening. When the first people were sent in, they found Early himself with a hole in his head and a gun in his hand, and his family all brain dead from hemorrhages. His immediate neighbors, some brain dead and others in deep comas. The lucky ones all claimed to have experienced intense, vivid dreams the night before- some of them had never been to Emily's.

And as Authority continued to investigate that massive, one-night anomaly in the matrix, a danger of dreaming to the system was revealed that went far beyond what had been expected. Early, they said, had come away from Emily's house with significant changes to his mind, changes that allowed him to override the systems that restricted unconscious though. For the first time since the matrix went online, a man had acquired the ability to dream while hooked up to the vast expanse of the net. As a result of this he had, without any way of knowing it, imposed his dreams upon those around him. His imaginings of them had, using the connections in cyberspace, forced their way into their minds and overlapped with their own mental processes. They had been unable to handle the trauma, and eventually, he succumbed to the backlash himself and took the only way out. That the incident had been restricted to one locality was only out of sheer luck- had Early been a more social person with a larger group of acquaintances, the situation might have affected even more than just his neighbors.

People had been wondering for years why Authority had been so accepting of Emily's house when she represented such a danger to our society, and they never commented on it. It was only after the incident with Early that I began to understand the necessity of the black tower. Whether it had been put in place by Authority or Emily herself, it had prevented the dream world from making its way into ours- as long as it served its purpose, the threat within could be overlooked.

But now those barriers were coming down. Not a week later, residents in the houses around the block woke up to find themselves in the dream world, all its oddities and even Emily herself present in their very homes. They left easily enough, but their dreams persisted and they had to be quarantined; the other implications were already clear. Sure enough, a quick look in cyberspace revealed that the black tower had expanded.

The cases got worse, and people soon avoided Emily's house altogether. Still it expanded, and that whole section of the slums had to be evacuated. Riots started to break out, demanding that authority do something, or at the very least find out what was happening. Nobody really believed that Emily could have suddenly turned malicious, and I know firsthand where they were coming from. Her house was a place of refuge. Without having to hear us speak, that seven-year-old girl had known our sorrows and helped us alleviate them. She'd done so for four decades. The fire that had driven me to find out her secret was re-ignited, and that same fire now drove a whole city of people who Emily had shown love to.

We had spent years dreaming. Now we needed to know the truth.

We soon learned from Authority that the black tower was, in fact, both sides' creation. On the inside was Emily's firewall, unmoving for forty years but now rapidly expanding, and on the outside was Authority's to keep Emily's world contained from cyberspace. To even attempt to get inside without being taken for a trip, the outer firewall would need to be dropped- the danger, of course, was that the dream world would expand even faster as a result, but we were out of options. Five days ago, the most elite of the city's professional hackers readied themselves for the run of their lives- to punch through the inner barrier. Jace and I were jacked in, along with the rest of the force, and watching from high up as the outer wall of the black tower dissolved.

Almost immediately Emily's domain burst out, like a flood after a dam had been broken. Before overrunning the entire slums, it seemed to stop almost reluctantly and drew back just a little, but it was clearly unstable and the crew had to work fast. Tense, we watched their apparitions dart towards the black wall-

-And disappear immediately. We hurriedly turned off our 'trodes and made our way upstairs to operations, where commotion was already building up. It didn't take long to confirm what we'd feared- the firewall had thrown back the team almost immediately. They were all burned out, and didn't come out of their comas for days.

The next attempt at the run met a similarly disastrous end, and Authority was forced to put the outer wall back up and regroup. Three days ago, I sat at home with Kari, unable to shake the image of that blight spreading across cyberspace. But even more so, I remembered being able to see its reluctance. I was still firm in my belief that Emily wasn't doing this out of malice. In fact, I'd begun to think that her world was now beyond her control, and that she was using all her power to stop it from conquering ours.

"Who are you, Emily?" I said out loud.

Kari's worried look hadn't left her face all night. "Or what..."

I was silent for a long time. Then, I said, "She needs our help, Kari."

"Tom..." But she knew I was right. That was why I married her- she'd always understood where I was coming from, and when she knew I was right, she gave me all her support no matter what it was. I called Jace minutes later.

"You know I'm in, bud. What'd you have in mind?"

So at dawn the next day we stood outside the boundary of the black tower, preparing for what would be the last run into Emily's house forever.

"Only difference between now and that first time?"

I raised an eyebrow and looked at Jace. "We're looking at a different street?"

He shook his head. "Now our side's empty too."

"True." I took a deep breath. "Think this'll work?"

"No, but when's that ever stopped us?" He powered up the 'trodes. "Besides, if she really does need help, she might not make us jack out."

"I hope so. You ready?"

"Always." He activated the 'trodes and I did likewise. The world turned into streams of data and dead in front of us was the black wall. Through the matrix, we told our bodies to move forward, and they did.

For a brief moment, I felt my arm moving up to my temple to switch off the 'trodes, but I arrested it quickly, made it feel unnatural. My body obeyed. I looked to side to give Jace a reassuring glance, only to find that he hadn't had the same luck. He'd jacked out, and now wandered the house in the dream state.

Ah, but the house! I was almost disappointed- imagine being dazzled for years by a magician's shows, only to have his tricks laid bare before you. On the other hand, the patterns of code themselves were something to behold. All the visuals in every corner of the city could not have matched up to the spectacle here- the underlying framework of the house was all there to see, a web so colorful and complex that it was like observing the entirety of the matrix in this small space. Languages of code that I had never once seen outside weaved through this brilliant software that was so powerful it could crack Authority's programs and give back to the human mind something that was innate, yet so easily taken away. So intricate was its design that I could find no patterns, nothing that would lead me to the source so I could help Emily or even find out who she was.

"It's called Dreammaker."

And there she stood. The seven-year-old girl, a mass of dancing numbers and equations, even her long hair giving off the appearance of wires tied into this great machine.

I smiled at her. "I thought it was Emily?"

"I'm Emily, silly!" She paused. "But we're one and the same."

"Emily... what's happened here?"

"Take off your 'trodes."

"No."

"I won't let you get lost, Tom. Don't you trust me?"

"I do. But you can't control Dreammaker anymore, can you?"

"I'm Dreammaker, silly!" She paused again, thinking about what she was saying. "I've helped you all your life. Now it's your turn!"

"That's why I'm here."

"Take off your 'trodes."

Reluctantly, I complied and jacked out of the matrix. What had been a mass of numbers just a second before took on the form of the little girl I knew and loved. She had tears running down her cheeks.

"Follow me. And don't get distracted."

I never took my eyes off her. If I had, I would have been lost in the dream world, and I'd never have been able to do a thing for her. The house continued to perform its tricks, the lighting took on different colors, the very floor I walked on changed with each footstep, but I didn't let myself dream. Only the halls she traversed had any semblance of being constant, and I tried not to cry myself as I watched. Her feet became bare and dirty as they walked down the slum roads. Her spotless white nightgown became wrinkled and gray, like it was all she had to wear. The streets were filthy and the houses empty, a splitting image of the slums I'd once lived in, but it was almost unbearable to watch with that lonely girl walking through them. Her long, brown hair was matted and frayed. She was trembling from the cold. I wanted to look away, wanted to be lost in the dream instead- it would have been so easy! But how could I? Who could?

She took a turn into one of the houses, a dwelling with no lights inside and no doors or windows. She disappeared from sight and I picked up pace, entering the doorway lest I lose her.

And there she lay on the broken bed, the girl named Emily Waters. I walked over to her and stared at her face, at the sunken cheeks and closed eyes, her small mouth slightly agape. I rested my fingers on her bony hands, looked at her ruined nightgown with sadness. She'd had no one to tend to her in her final months. Her parents loved her, and God knew she loved them, but it wasn't enough and fate took them too soon. The young girl fell ill as well, and when the sickness was forcing the neighbors to leave their homes, who would take in this doomed child when an act of charity was a risk to their own lives? I sat on the bed and broke down, holding close the remains of Emily Waters, crying at the utter cruelty life had shown her, crying at her abandonment and despair when she had no hope left.

Most of all, I cried at her final words to a world that wasn't listening.

"I love you all."

I emerged from the slums a day later, carrying Emily Waters' body. A whole crowd was present, held back only by the strong police force that Authority had sent. Kari and Jace were the first to run forward, and other friends from the force were close behind. As soon as they'd taken Emily from my arms, I collapsed.

I regained consciousness just this morning. Once Kari and my daughter welcomed me back, teary-eyed, they filled me in on what had happened, although none of it came as a surprise. The day I walked out with Emily, the black tower had dissolved completely and for the first time in forty years, the block of the slums that had been Emily's house was visible in the matrix. Authority had found nothing strange about the area- Dreammaker was gone.

A search into Emily Waters' file revealed that she'd officially 'died' six days before her seventh birthday. I almost broke down again, thinking of those six days when she was very much alive and alone, but I held my peace for the time being. In remembrance of what she'd done for all of us, Authority announced that the old block in the slums was being converted into a memorial. They promised that they would eventually create a local region of the matrix there, where one could once again go to dream. It was the least they could do in the light of this tragic event.

Emily was cremated this afternoon. The funeral lasted only an hour, and was attended by thousands from all over the city, and televised to countless others. I sat alone with Kari afterwards, and finally broke my silence.

"To think that she still loved her world so much... even after they'd abandoned her."

Kari was crying by now as well. "But what went wrong?"

"I don't know. For forty years she hid the truth and lived inside the matrix. She let us dream because she knew it made us happy.

"I guess at one point the grief became so unbearable that she lost control."

Kari said, "But she wouldn't just fade. People had to know."

I nodded. "She never wanted us to feel guilty, but before she died, we had to know the truth." I looked out at the rain. "Now we do."

Now I end a chapter of my life that began when I was five-years-old, and along with countless others I start to move on. The memorial will be erected in time, and I know that Authority will deliver on its pledge to create a dream world there when possible. I look forward to that day.

But deep down, I know that I'll never dream again