And me? I’m going to kill him. It won’t be a fantasy.
Secret Diary of a Dreamhacker
Entry #56
Codename: Chaplin
Date: 27 September 2027
Client: Martin Elstree
Payment in advance: N/A
Session Goal: Kill the client
Location: O’s sofa
Narcolepsy status: Strangely OK
Nutrition/stimulants: At least a pint of Stoli
Start time: 4:35 a.m.
End time: 4:59 a.m.
It takes me a while to locate Martin’s building in the Dream City, not because it’s hard to find but because I’m drunk. It’s there in dream-Convoys Wharf, reality mixed up with imagination in some whacked-out cocktail. Martin’s building is juxtaposed with a giant tree and a cycle-superhighway beside a building site with a crane. At the foot of the crane is the hedge maze where I got lost, and there’s a stone staircase winding around the outside of the building itself. I climb right up to the window of his bedroom and break it open with my Thor-hammer.
He’s in bed, asleep. He’s not even in REM sleep, but nevertheless when he rolls on his side I see the big wind-up key sticking out of his back, just like Bernard when Daphne hacked him. This is my moment.
He’s vulnerable. He’s asleep.
Am I really going to do this?
Apparently I am. I reach out and turn the key, and suddenly the scale of things changes. It’s as if either Martin Elstree has become a giant or I’ve become a homunculus, because a door swings open in his back and I step inside into a control room. It’s like something out of Willy Wonka. On a small monitor in front of me appear the red and purple blobs of blood vessels that represent the view from inside his eyelids. A second monitor shows his dream content, but this is switched off now because he’s no longer in the Dream City but rather on the verge of wakefulness. I can pull levers and wind cranks to move Martin Elstree’s body. There is a twisting horn of an old-fashioned megaphone that I can talk into. To give him instructions.
He’s breathing fast and shallow, like he can’t catch his breath. I know that feeling. It’s how you feel when the Creeper stands on your chest and tries to choke you out. Only now I’m the Creeper.
I flick on the second monitor. Its content is determined by me. I let him dream his own flat, so that he thinks he’s awake but he isn’t.
‘One of the birds just came in,’ I whisper into the mouthpiece. ‘It’s an important message. Don’t fuck this up like you fucked up getting rid of Charlie Aaron.’
I see through his eyes as he opens them in real life. He rises out of bed, stumbles through his bedroom, across the vast open-plan main room to the balcony doors. It’s still dark out there. He tries the handle of the balcony door.
‘It’s locked, remember?’
Blearily, he punches a code into the system. I can make him do whatever I want. This is sick.
He opens the door and goes to the pigeon coop. The balcony is not large. Most of it is occupied by the pigeon coop and feed bin, but there are two chairs looking out over the river. The birds shuffle around, disturbed.
While he’s fumbling about, I suggest, ‘It’s not in the coop. It’s on the balcony railing.’
I put the dream bird there, a carrier pigeon much like Sidney with the same tiddly backpack. He makes a grab and misses; the dream bird takes wing. Then it lands on the roof of the pigeon coop, out of reach.
‘You can get it. Just put a chair by the coop.’
He’s too stupid to realise I’m doing the same thing to him that he tried to do to me. He’s clumsy and when he grabs for the chair, I change the shape of it so that its dream form is different from its real shape, and he drops it on its side. I show it to him as if it’s standing solidly on four legs.
He climbs on. The chair spins out from under him; he grabs for the railing, misses and pitches head first over the balcony.
And here is the air beneath him, splaying his limbs, whipping his clothes about his skin, stretching his hair. Martin Elstree hangs there wide asleep and he’s still asleep as his head slams into the concrete.
I’m in darkness. Silence. I can’t hear my heart. I can’t feel myself. I don’t know where I am or who I am.
The dream is gone. The Dream City is gone. I’m nowhere.
I flash the realisation that I’ve been cast into outer darkness for my crime. I can’t come back. It would be just my luck not to get away with this. I hang in nothingness, surrounded by my own guilt and triumph, for a stretch of time that I’ve no way of measuring. Then there’s an earthquake sensation as the undisclosed dark material around me and inside me begins to erupt, to slide, roar, shift – and I rise through layers of consciousness until I feel Roman grabbing my shoulders and shaking me.
‘Charlie! Charlie! Wake up!’
My heart is thundering. How could I not hear that? I’m gasping for breath. My legs kick out. I throw Roman off and he flies across the room, crashing into O’s fireplace. I hear a weird, guttural sound that is me.
‘Charlie! Are you OK? You stopped breathing.’
I roll off the sofa and vomit on the floor.
‘Sorry,’ I say, holding what’s left of my hair out of the way. ‘Sorry, sorry, sorry, sorry.’
But the thing is, deep down I’m really not sorry.
I’m really not sorry at all.
Moose reserve
Before I even know what’s happened, Roman’s cleaned up my vomit and brought me a glass of sparkling water with lemon in it.
‘I live with my sister and her three kids, remember? Vomiting is routine. You OK now?’
I sip the water.
‘I’ll give you my Secret Diaries for analysis if you’ll put me in contact with the other people in my study.’
‘I think you’re still drunk, Charlie. What’s made you change your mind?’
My head hurts so much. And no wonder, what with the infection technology growing in my skull.
‘I need to be in contact with other people like me. I need to talk to someone who understands what I’m going through.’
‘Yeah, well, about that.’ He runs his hand over his stubbly jaw like a guy in a razor ad, but it’s a nervous gesture. He’s ashamed of something, or . . . ‘Charlie, I don’t know how to say this.’
‘Just spit it out, Roman.’
‘Those people. They’re all dead. You know the sleepwalkers I was telling you about, the suicides we investigated? Many of them were participants in your study. In some cases I tried to make contact with them before . . . well, before they died. But I failed.’
The room stops spinning while I take it in. I’m the last one?
‘And me? You treated me like a criminal! Why didn’t you make contact with me?’
‘We tried! But you moved out of Shandy’s place with no forwarding address, your room-mates were not forthcoming, and we didn’t realise you were in the study until after Melodie was killed.’
‘But you could have talked to me, you could have explained . . . Why . . . ?
He’s rubbing his eyes, pacing up and down, waiting for me to work it out. It takes me a few moments.
‘You thought I did it!’
His whole face clenches and he sort of cringes.
‘Try to see it from our point of view, mate. O was connected with Little Bird. You were living with O and she was running your dreamhacking business. O and Little Bird have been embroiled in this war with BigSky, nobody knew how it would turn out. Can you blame us for being cautious?’
I may just be hyperventilating now. I try to get up off the sofa but the whole room is pitching and swaying again. Stupid vodka.
‘Can you blame me for being . . . what am I, even, right now?’
He glances at me. ‘Apoplectic?’
‘Apocalyptic, more like. This is a disaster. Just leave me alone, Roman. Take the fucking diaries. I’ll squirt them to you right now, do what you like. I don’t even care. I’m going to move to Canada and work i
n a moose reserve. Fuck this shite.’
‘Do they have moose reserves, or did you mean a national park? No, please don’t throw things at my head. I’ll just go now.’
I hurl myself back on the sofa and put a pillow over my face.
‘Don’t go,’ I say through the pillow. ‘You were right. You can arrest me now. I confess.’
‘Confess what?’
The pillow is covered in Edgar’s fur. I sneeze.
‘I killed him.’
There’s a long silence. He sits down on the coffee table. I can feel his knees pressing against mine but I keep the pillow on my face.
‘Charlie. What are you talking about?’
‘I think you’ll find that Martin Elstree has met with an unfortunate accident. It was me. Go ahead and call Donato, I’m sure he’ll be pleased. He was right about me all along.’
Roman reaches over and takes the pillow away.
‘Don’t be stupid. Just tell me what happened. And send me the damn diaries, because believe it or not they can still be useful.’
* * *
So I tell him the whole thing: what I did to Elstree, what Daphne said to me, everything in no special order. He is a good listener. I cry a bit with relief, I send him the diaries, and then we put a load of washing in and do the dishes like an old married couple. Then Shandy wakes up and shambles in like a bear. We make coffee and take it on the roof, where Shandy and I scowl indiscriminately at London and Roman thinks aloud.
‘You know,’ he says, ‘BigSky doesn’t really operate the way you think. It isn’t a normal corporate structure. It’s more like Minecraft. Nobody’s really controlling it. There’s shadowy stuff going on but there is no big conspiracy, there’s no Board of Directors playing at being potentates. That’s not to say there aren’t dangers, because there are.’
‘He has a point,’ Shandy says. ‘The tail does occasionally wag the dog at BigSky.’
‘I think you were right about the Creeper,’ I tell Roman. ‘I don’t think it was Martin Elstree. When I went after him, he was defenceless. He said he was going to have me removed, but I think he was giving orders to someone else.’
‘Maybe there are other Daphnes who don’t share her scruples,’ Shandy says.
I snort. I’m not sure what scruples Daphne has, exactly.
‘I think if we follow the data trail, we’re going to find that Elstree was taking money from both O and BigSky,’ Roman says. ‘BigSky may not even care about the IP, they may have just been trying to get the measure of O and Little Bird. A technology that implants upgradable AI into your actual skull is a fairly big deal. Much bigger than the Council for Alternative Therapies, Charlie. Much, much bigger.’
I have a splitting headache and my stomach feels like a zoo.
‘What about the last pigeon?’ I croak.
Roman is smiling. ‘We’ve traced it to Brittany. There’s a country cottage. It’s not in Olivia’s name, but it’s been customised to be accessible for wheelchairs.’
I feel a surge of hopeful expectation accompanied by stabbing pain in my head. Stupid vodka.
‘Donato is already on his way.’
‘Don’t let her get wind that he’s coming,’ I mutter, rubbing my temples. ‘She’ll just move on again. Maybe you should go, too.’
‘Can’t. I’ve got a meeting with some BigSky developers to talk about security risks in The Dark Side. I’m going to try to convince them to delay the launch. The death of Martin Elstree will spook them.’
I wince. I killed a person. But I’m no killer. Ergo, there must be someone to blame besides myself.
Mustn’t there?
‘I’m getting you a painkiller,’ Roman says, going into the kitchen.
‘Charlie,’ Shandy says, ‘do you know for a fact that O doesn’t use any of the BigSky platform? Because if I were a hacker and BigSky were my enemy, I’d be all up in their files no matter what I told anybody. How else would she know what they’re doing?’
I need to lie down. Why are people still talking to me?
‘So?’ I grunt.
‘So if these guys hunt her down in France, do you really think they’ll catch her? Do you really think they’ll get the truth out of her? Ten to one if you look on Sweet Dreams, you’ll find her there. Disguised as a lamp-post or something, but she’ll be there.’
‘How can you be so sure, Shandy? I know her. She doesn’t use BigSky.’
Shandy takes my arm gently and leads me back inside.
‘Love, don’t take this the wrong way. But it would seem you don’t know her at all. What harm could come from trying?’
What harm indeed?
Secret Diary of a Prawn Star
Entry #57
Codename: Chaplin
Date: 27 September 2027
Client: O
Payment in advance: I never seem to get paid any more
Session Goal: Find her and make her tell me everything
Location: Sideways Gravity Hotel, Dream City
Narcolepsy status: Some sort of remission at the moment?
Nutrition/stimulants: N/A
Start time: 11.20 a.m.
End time: 12.03 p.m.
I’m standing at the foot of the building with the sideways gravity, the one that’s always caught my attention. The one where I thought I saw O the night I dreamed without my earring. In this dream-night I can see many people, fifteen or twenty storeys up, dining at tables scattered across the black glass surface of the windows. It’s dark apart from a tiny candle flame at each table and the faint neon glow of the canal’s ribbed bridges.
The tulip concierge tries to stop me entering.
‘We don’t take your sort,’ it says.
I’m not in the mood. I produce a pair of garden shears and chop its head off.
In front of me, the swanky revolving door to the building disappears. I rap on the wall with the butt-end of my garden shears.
‘Oi!’ I yell. ‘Don’t make me get explosives.’
There’s a groan of machinery and what had been a glass wall becomes the open door of a freight lift with a battered, rusting metal cage instead of proper walls. I can’t see any shaft walls, but this is a dream so I don’t worry about it. I get on and haul the doors shut manually. There’s no panel with buttons for each floor, just a pull-cord.
I tug it.
There’s a series of popping sounds like fireworks, and then the floor of the lift punches into the bottom of my feet and I stagger, grabbing on to the wire cage as the lift goes hurtling into the sky, shuddering, jerking and making the most godawful bird-of-prey screams as metal grinds on metal. As it rises, the cage begins to bank to the right, and I feel my wrapped hair tugging sideways on my skull as if I’m on a roller coaster.
Then, without warning, all sound ceases and I’m momentarily weightless. The cage is now perpendicular to the canal and I’m floating with my face towards the sky, its deep-purple skin freckled by constellations that light pollution can’t erase. Now my feet are level with the sprawling sideways-restaurant and I smell seafood.
The lift cage jerks once again and my sense of weight returns. I am at a ninety-degree angle to the side of the building, with its walls acting as the new ground beneath my feet. The entire Dream City appears to be sideways. I don’t entirely trust my own senses, but I can stand just fine.
A rude buzzing sound coincides with the flashing of an old-fashioned incandescent red light bulb over the door. Then silence. I try the cage door. It opens with a grinding noise and I step out onto the polished black glass of the building’s exterior.
The open-air restaurant is spread out over the side of the building, but all of the chairs and tables are orientated so that the patrons are facing the sky. Delicacies from every continent clutter the tables, while the candles burn sideways. Most of the people are beautiful, and I stare rudely. I am barefoot and my PJs refuse to turn into a better outfit despite all my efforts. A waiter comes up out of a hatch in the floor, sees me, lifts his eyebrows
and makes a point of skirting wide around me.
I find O sitting alone at a banquet table. There’s no food in front of her, just a half-finished glass of red wine. I pull up a chair next to her and she glances briefly at me, gives the slightest shade of a nod before turning her attention to the sky. As if it’s just an ordinary evening. The righteous fury that has been burning in my belly is quenched as abruptly as if someone tossed a bucket of piss on my campfire. I don’t know how to begin.
‘I don’t even know what to say to you.’
‘Then don’t say anything. If you’ve come to kill me, you may as well get on with it.’
‘Kill you? No, I came to talk to you. To try to understand.’
‘You’ll never understand me. We are fundamentally different kinds of creature.’
‘Did you send Daphne to kill the other people in my study?’
‘No. But I did use Martin Elstree to patent the technology that gives you your abilities. BigSky tried to take it back from us, so I removed everything from their reach. They’ve only been able to create software that performs minor functions. They don’t have the biotech, and they can’t even make a proper dreamhacking bot.’
‘Yeah, about that. This thing that’s growing. In my head, O. You’ve patented it. You are the silent partner in Little Bird. You worked with Bernard and Meera. You’ve been using your own sister. And you’ve been using me.’ My voice catches and I swallow hard on a tightness that wants to become a sob.
She nods once. Matter-of-fact.
‘It started out for medical reasons. My sister. I was looking for a therapy that could slow down the progress of the disease, let her die of something else to spare her the cognitive deterioration. And of course, to spare myself if I ended up with the same affliction in time. I started Little Bird and convinced Meera Bhango to come in with me as a partner. I provided the funding and gave her free rein.
Sweet Dreams Page 27
