Excerpt: Perfect Sleep

I stare up at the headquarters of Reverie Institute. It's an impressive building, reaching up at the sky as if it's about to tear a hole through it. Grey steel and silver-reflecting windows. It's far more foreboding than I expected - but I heard they were a big operation, after all.

Ah, who cares, I just want to get into the program.

I walk in, and the lobby's all mirrors and marble. Expensive stuff, and definitely very cutting-edge, but where's the goods? I can barely find anything in this mess of sophistication and image. Oh, here's a reception desk - rising out of the floor, a hollow block of steel with smooth round corners. The receptionist sits inside, looking over the edge of it like some sort of gatekeeper. And, well, I guess she is one.

Her eyes look me over coolly, searching, making a cursory assessment, and then wrinkling her lip just a tad at the corner. I apparently didn't measure up to something. Fine, I don't go for pinchy-faced dames in oldie glasses. She hands me a clipboard with a sheaf of papers attached to it that's about as thick as my thumb.

"You're applying." It's not even a question. Well, I guess it's obvious what I'm here for. My rumpled apearance and the deep bags under my eyes can only point to one thing, really. I take the clipboard with one curt nod. I look down at the papers.

"All of this?" I say.

She just smiles, the bitch. I sigh and turn. Time to find a seat.

Well, there's a lovely-looking girl over here in a corner, with a chair empty on each side of her. I take the left, casually grazing her leg with mine as I sit down. She scrunches her knees further together and scoots her feet in. She looks... well, bookish. I'm sure there's a girl somewhere under that thick sweater and to-the-heels skirt, but she's doing a damn good job of hiding it. She's already most of the way through her paperwork. Looks like she's heading to the same program as me - I can tell the look of our type by now. It helps to find others of your kind. Ones to commiserate with. Helps make the life less miserable.

Damn, but this is a lot of paperwork. By the look of it, it's all waivers and insurance. Kinda stupid for a silly little study, but I guess everyone's gotta cover their asses in this day and age. You can get sued for getting bumped into on the subway, it seems like. I run through the forms, not paying too much heed to the text, it's mostly triplicates and disclaimers. Stuff's not worth reading. I'm just here to get something for free - I'm not hoping for much else. At this point, things like this are another thing for me to do while trying to ignore how dreary life is.

I sign the last form, then look up to see the girl looking at me. She's like an owl, staring through those big round glasses, face framed by long black hair that's pushed back from her eyes by a pale pink headband.

She sticks out her hand as an offering. "Milieu Ashling," she says with the intonation of someone reading a word from a dictionary.

I take her hand without missing a beat. "Kenneth," I say. I give her a shake, then release. "Kenneth Olsen. You staying here long?"

That makes her give me a genuine smile. She might not be so bad. Most of us aren't, really - we've just been worn ragged by our condition. "No, not long. Have you finished all your forms? You seem to be much quicker about it than I was. I've been here almost an hour!"

I grin. "I'm a fast draw," I say. I rise, then extend my hand. "Onward to victory?"

"Yeah," she says. We walk to the reception desk together, staying a bit slow about it. We each want to say something, I think, but neither knows how to bring it up. We definitely understand what the other is, though. Like I said: our types gotta have camaraderie because we don't have much of anything else.

The receptionist sighs, takes our papers, and then starts feeding them into a little slot under her terminal. It scans both batches in under a minute. She checks the readout it gives her in response. "You can go ahead," she says. "The door's in back. Sorta to the left."

We walk forward.

"No, not you," she says. "Just her."

I blink. I look back at the receptionist. "But I'm what you're looking for," I say.

She shakes her fhead. "Forms don't lie. Now get out if that's all you were here for."

Milieu looks back at me with sympathy, then walks bak to where I'm standing. "You have a biz card, right?"

I nod. "Yeah. Wanna swap?"

She shakes her head with a smile. "I'm not giving you my number, but I'll take yours." She takes a small keyfob out of her purse, then extends it. Raising her eyebrows and smiling, the question's asked without too many words.

Well, I certainly can't turn her down. I take out my own fob, then roll my thumb over the side in a certain rhythm that it's programmed to recognise. She nudges her own to recieve the data. It only works when one fob's next to the other, and the authorities say the data's encrypted. Not that I trust them much, but I've got better things to do with my days than wonder about it. Not that I'm sure what those things are, mind, but it's the principle of the thing. What's important is that she has my biz card in her fob.

"I'll call you, afterward. Maybe," she says. Then she turns and walks away.

Maybe? Well, better odds than the lottery at least. I sigh and turn, then walk out of the knife-like building that stabs the sky. Time to go crash.

* * *

Home's not so much of a thing I want to describe. I sort of live in a box. You laugh, yes, but for me there's just no worth in buying anything better than a Cube in the low-rent district. I've got enough room to sit and play the vidyos. That's enough to get me by. I don't need stuff. Don't want to try affording it. And the last time I got a pet fish, it killed itself. Yes, I know - my life is so hard.

All I'm really doing is staring at the wall-cubby that is my fridge unit and food preparation center. It's pretty amazing how it knows what to heat and what to keep cool. Sort of like a thermos. Except you can't keep cool stuff and warm stuff in the same compartments. Also like a thermos. I decide soup is in order. Food I can drink.

The lazy du jour. I'm a bit less motivated than usual to work for my sustenance right now. Couldn't imagine why. Couldn't at all be because I'd set my hopes on a sure thing and now that's gone.

You see, nothing's in my future. I just live day to day. I give the think tank power over the raywire network sometimes, I unscramble codes sometimes. That gets me credit to get by on. I can do it all from home-Cube, though sometimes I take a neural hookup and do it all during a walk in the park. Keeps my legs healthy, but it's a damn good way to get jumped. What can a guy do, though? I've gotta light up sometime.

Anyway, I'm not even looking forward to lighting up now. Reverie hit me that hard. What do I have to look forward to now? That girl's not gonna call me. I'm a rumpled-up nobody. Nobody wants me, not even other nobodies. The only people that would ever want a sod like me were, I thought, in the Reverie building.

They sent out fliers and ads, put out posts across the raywire. I know they're looking for our kind, I just know it. Looking for us special sorts that are always twitchy, can't stop our minds from wanting something, can't calm down long enough to catch a nap's worth of winks. We walk it off, most of us. Lighting up helps a lot. Vidyos are almost like sleep, you zone out enough in the right one and you might as well be counting those mythical sheep everybody else keeps talking about. But it's not enough. There's never any... well, literally there's never any rest for us!

And I know it's just not me, that there's others like me who can't sleep because their minds are moving like fucking lightning. I know because I can tell they see things too, hear things--

This is useluss. I could at least be racking up points in Zombie Rancheros. Five more sessions and I can buy a new raywire avatar hat. It's a pretty cool sombrero, and I've been aching for some respectable headwear. Attracts the ladies.

Three sessions in, there's an odd buzzing in-game. I ignore it, figure it's just some glitch. I tighten my knees around the horse I'm riding and urge it forward, pistols waving above my head. We charge over grasslands. There's another one now - one of them zombies has gotten out. Ha! I pick off the sucker.

Zombie Ranchero's an excellent game. Here's the plot: you're a zombie rancher. Not a rancher who's a zombie, but a rancher of zombies. Occasionally one of your shamblers gets out of the corral and you have to pick it off before it infects all of humanity as we know it with a flesh-eating virus of decay.

No, I don't know why you're ranching zombies at all, but they keep saying they'll install the backstory in a memory patch one day soon. Right now, I still am drawing a blank on it, though. Fucking developers and their empty promises.

My horse snorts and flicks its tail to brush off a fly. I can't blame that fly for hanging out - we sure smell like a bunch of rotting meat here. Comes with the 'cattle'. Still, there's more buzzing I hear. What the heck is that, anyway?

Oh, the fob in my pocket, it's--

My brain crashes as the self that's riding a horse over green pastures and the self that's sitting in my Cube in front of the vidyo terminal can't resolve. I mentally roll my eyes through the jumble of thought conflicts and give my brain a hard boot. Always happens. I never expect a call and I never turn the damn fob to silent. Damnit, I hate hard boots. It only takes a couple moments, but whenever I wake up I'm cold, there's a fuzzy wool taste in my mouth, and I have morning wood like you wouldn't believe.

Fob's still buzzing. I roll over, groan, and answer the call without checking the ID on it.