Dreams Must Die

by J. M. Porup

  Could he also, he wondered, convince the Collective he was lying in his bunk with the tanning booth on, when in reality he was in the Hall of Dreams?

  Now that he was “sick,” his sensory input would be low priority. It would still be processed eventually, of course. But it only took one Information Factory worker to notice something was amiss…and Shade would never make it out of the Hall of Dreams with his brain intact.

  Assuming he managed to get out of there at all.

  Shade stepped out of his mind into the head of a passing node, and looked at himself: Jimmy Shade, Dream Policeman, lay sick in bed, tanning lights on. He popped back into his own head, climbed down from the bunk, then head-hopped into another passing node. Would he raise the alarm? But that node, too, saw only Shade in bed, sick—even though Shade was no longer there.

  What was he doing? How was he doing it? He had never imagined such a thing was possible.

  Whatever it was, the Collective accepted it without a murmur. Sick days happened. Three doctors had inspected him, after all. What more was there to think about? It was not worth the Collective’s valuable processing time to look more closely into the matter. They had the world to save, after all. The great mass of mankind would continue on its way until Shade could be useful to them once more.

  And now?

  Shade popped a food and water pill and armed himself. He strapped on the squawk box. He was surprised the Collective had not reminded him to return it to Dream Police HQ. Good to have, though. Without it he would be unable to communicate with the Prime.

  Go to the Hall of Dreams, preferably without attracting attention. Gain entry, find the Dreamer Prime, interrogate him. Then figure out how to kill the dream, and get back under the tanning lights before anyone notices my absence.

  Simple, really.

  And, he knew, so impossible.

  What choice did he have? He had to kill his dream, this disease—before it consumed him. Before he infected others. The future of the world was at stake. His dream could spell humanity’s doom. How could he live with that on his conscience?

  He stepped quickly to the elevator. He had to hurry. He could not hide—not for long. He could not run—there was nowhere on Earth the Collective would not find him, nowhere they would not go to kill his dream.

  To kill his Linda.

  Fury raged inside him, and the sadness ebbed. Killing Linda was a small price to pay. What was more important? His diseased fantasy? Or the entire Collective?

  No. He had to kill his dream before they did it for him.

  His only hope was to find the Prime. He chewed his lip. The only node in the world who could help him was his enemy.

  Dreamer Prime it is, then.

  Right.

  Chapter Five

  For all his time in the Dream Police, Jimmy Shade had never been to the Hall of Dreams. Why would he? Judgment by the Collective was immediate upon capture. Sentence was carried out on the spot, and the dreamer either ChemLobbed and released, or unplugged and interred in the Hall of Dreams for life. The Collective’s decision to keep the Prime as a specimen, he mused, was unusual.

  Shade took a flying train to the outskirts of the city, and transferred to a moving box. Across from him sat a ChemLobbed node, a farmer on his way to the hydroponic gardens outside the city. The man stared at Shade, drool trickling down his chin. With a start, Shade recognized him—a former Dream Policeman. What was the man’s name again? He forced a smile and lifted a hand.

  The man stared at Shade, but said nothing. The drool dribbled from his chin into his lap.

  Shade shifted in his seat. He probed the man’s mind.

  Nothingness. Blackness. No—grey. A mush of goo, a walking brain-dread half-wit.

  If your errand isn’t successful, this could be you, he told himself.

  The moving box continued away from the center, dropping passengers as it went. Here the groundscrapers sank only a floor or two beneath the kilometer-thick Crust, and the streets were wide black corridors.

  Then he was there.

  Without looking at the drooling farmer, Shade got down from the moving box and stood before the Hall of Dreams. The building, he knew, scraped the ground to more than four thousand floors, the only groundscraper for kilometers around—a security measure to prevent the remote possibility of escape. Dreamers went in, they didn’t come out.

  Shade took a deep breath, forced himself to relax. He waited for the moving box to trundle off, then went in.

  No guard manned the door. No security camera tracked his progress across the lobby. What need? His own eyes and ears betrayed him.

  No time to waste. With more confidence than he felt, he strode to the bank of elevators and pressed the call button.

  Linda was here, he knew. His one true love, unplugged, infected, sentenced to suffer and die in a padded cell, forever cut off from the Collective. Should he look for her? He might never have another chance like this. He had never seen her face to face, never looked her in the eye in real life. What was she like? Would she recognize him? Or would she be so crazed from solitary mental confinement that she would no longer even know her own name?

  The elevator doors opened. He stepped inside. Four thousand buttons covered the walls.

  Now what? There must be thousands—tens of thousands—of unplugged dreamers in this maze. How would he find Linda, even if he wanted to? How would he find the Prime?

  He could hardly ask the Collective for the Prime’s cell number without reporting his own activity.

  Find the Prime, get what you need, get out of there. But how was he going to do that?

  Panic bubbled up inside his chest. The elevator doors stood open. If you go down there, he thought, you may never leave.

  Get in, a voice said.

  Shade could recognize billions of different voices, but this one was—unique. That was the only word for it.

  Unique.

  It reminded him a little of the Prime. Although the man had said so little that day, it was hard to tell.

  He looked around. He was alone. So far as he could tell, the Collective was unaware of his presence in the Hall of Dreams. So who was talking to him?

  He shuddered in fear. This was a stupid idea. Go back to your bunk and get some sun. Stupid, stupid, stupid.

  Shade turned to go.

  I said, get in, the voice commanded. We don’t have much time.

  Shade’s feet hesitated. He willed them to go back to the street, to summon a passing moving box, to get as far away from here as he could—but his feet would not obey him.

  This isn’t happening to me, Shade thought. This isn’t real. You’re tired. You need more sleep. You’re sick. That’s it—you’re sick. The doctors said so, didn’t they? Go home and catch some rays. You’ll feel better, then. This is all just a delusion, nothing more.

  Get in! Hurry!

  Shade’s feet turned and carried him into the elevator. Whoa! His limbs no longer obeyed him. He felt like a puppet on a string.

  The buttons stared at him. The silence around him was total.

  Now what?

  Floor 3, the voice commanded.

  So close to the surface? And why there? How do you know? And who are you, anyway?

  You know who I am, Jimmy Shade. A soft laugh inside his head. We met, you and I, the other day. Remember?

  Shade stifled an intake of breath. But that could only mean—?

  The voice did not fill in the blank. Shade’s finger moved, not of its own volition, it seemed to him, and pressed the indicated floor number. The doors slid shut. The elevator dropped. For an instant, his feet felt light. His stomach floated near his chin.

  Ping.

  Gravity returned.

  3.

  He got out.

  Still no guards. No police, no doctors, no interrogators—nobody. Strange, he thought. Didn’t Boss say the Collective wanted to interrogate this specimen?

  Shade felt cut off from humanity in that moment, worse than ever before
. Apart. Separate. How he longed once more for the Collective’s sweet embrace! How he hated the Prime for doing this to him, tormenting him with this false vision of Linda, a diseased fantasy that even now seemed to impel him onward to actions not of his own choosing.

  He wanted to run, to go back, to do anything but go forward. But the only way back to the Collective, he knew, was to deal with this Prime, and solve his dreaming problem once and for all.

  Shade walked down the hallway, glancing through window slits in the doors as he passed. The cells were empty. He came to a branch in the corridor.

  To your left, the voice said.

  He passed another fifty or so doors. Again, all the cells were empty. He probed the floor, then the building with his mind, tentatively at first, then with greater force, but found no one else there.

  That didn’t mean much, though. Maybe there weren’t doctors on duty at the moment, for whatever reason, but there were surely thousands of floors packed with unplugged dreamers, rocking back and forth in their padded cells, devastated by the loss of their implants.

  And the Prime…

  The Prine still had an implant, he supposed. Shade would not be able to enter the man’s diseased mind, thank the Collective, but would only hear what the Prime chose to say. And that was assuming he could find the man.

  At the end of the hallway he came to a door.

  In here.

  Shade tried the door. It had no doorknob—in fact, none of the cell doors he’d passed had doorknobs. The door locked from the outside. Anyone could go in, but without a key they’d be stuck inside. The system made sense, actually. After all, who would ever open a door without the Collective’s knowledge and consent? He pushed open the door in one swift movement and jammed it against a wall latch.

  A man in a dream jacket sat on a bunk. He stared at Shade with curious grey eyes.

  It was the Dreamer Prime.

  Chapter Six

  Shade flicked on his squawk box. The crackle of his angry, incoherent thoughts startled them both.

  “Are you the one inside my head?” Shade demanded.

  The man smiled. Yes. I am.

  Shade reeled. “But—but how are you thinking at me? You’re wearing a dream jacket!”

  The Prime lifted an elbow. A shiny bit of metal caught the light. A nail protruded through the man’s restraining garment just below the armpit.

  Inside his head, Shade clucked his tongue. How could the paramedics have missed that? Every dreamer who entered the Hall of Dreams received a thorough search.

  “Then how did your thoughts escape the Hall of Dreams?”

  Maybe the Collective made a mistake when they built it.

  “The Collective doesn’t make mistakes.”

  A shrug. If you say so.

  “Fine,” he squawked. “I don’t care about that. I just need to know: What have you done to me? Is it a dream infection? Is that it?”

  The man opened his mouth and spoke, and the sound of his voice was as shocking and obscene to Shade now as it was when he first apprehended the man.

  “I’ve done nothing to you,” the Prime said. “Now please. Listen to me. I’ve got a message for you.”

  The words grated in Shade’s ears. “Talk normal,” he complained. “With your mind. That’s what the nail was for, right?”

  “The Collective struggles to process the spoken word,” the man replied. “They are of course listening to every word I say, through your own ears, but by speaking out loud we slow them down.” He laughed. “A little, anyway.”

  Shade took a step backward, eyed the door. “You mean they know I’m here? They’re coming for me?”

  “I told you, we don’t have much time. Will you listen?”

  The panic returned. “I don’t want to hear your message, whatever it is,” Shade squawked. “Don’t poison me any further. All I want,” and his voice cracked high, “is for you to cure me of this dream infection!”

  The Prime shook his head. “Dreams are not an infection, Jimmy Shade.”

  “Save your breath.” He paced the room, one fist raised. “You infected me. Cure me, kill it, take it back—whatever, I don’t want it!”

  The man laughed. “Your dream, Jimmy Shade, is not mine to give or receive.”

  Shade stopped his pacing. “What are you talking about? Of course it is. You gave it to me!”

  “I gave you nothing that was not already yours.”

  He stepped closer to the Prime, his fist raised, heart pounding with rage and fear, but the man just sat there, looking up at him.

  “I’m Dream Police, you understand that?” Shade squawked. “I kill dreams. It’s my job. To protect and defend the Collective with my life. If it weren’t for people like me, the world would end.”

  The Prime snorted. “The world isn’t going to end because you dream, Jimmy Shade.”

  “Dreams are false,” Shade thundered. “They are lies.” He pounded his palm with his fist so hard it stung. “First you infect my wife. My Linda. Take her from me. Now you taunt me with her in my sleep.” Shade bent down over the man. “But that is not my Linda.” He shook his fist in the man’s face. It’s a mirage. A disease. A drug!”

  The man took this abuse without a word.

  Shade straightened up. “I reject that drug,” he said. “I love the Collective. I would never do anything to hurt them. They are my world. The only world that matters. The only world that should matter to you.”

  The man shook his head and chuckled. “You really believe that, don’t you?”

  “Our world stands in crisis—and you laugh?” Shade said. “We must work to save our planet or we will all die!”

  Still the man chuckled.

  Shade bit his lip. This was it, then. He was out of options. He had hesitated before, but now…he had no alternative. He drew a ChemLob jabber, held it to his own neck.

  “In the name of the Collective and all humanity, I demand you take back this false dream, or I will be forced to kill it, no matter what the cost to me personally.”

  But the man just looked at him, laughing and shaking his head.

  Shade’s thumb felt the smooth, plastic plunger, readied himself for the final push. He didn’t want to wind up a drooling half-wit, but what other choice did he have?

  He bent down, screamed in the man’s face, “Take it back!”

  The laughter stopped. The man said, “I told you, your dream is not mine to receive. If you choose to kill it, that is your decision, not mine.”

  “But you’re the one who gave it to me!”

  “No,” the man said, and the word sounded sorrowful. “I keep telling you but you won’t listen.”

  “So tell me!”

  The Prime’s grey eyes studied Shade. “I returned to you what was rightfully yours. What had been stolen from you.”

  Shade pounced on the unfamiliar word. His neck muscles throbbed against the jabber. “Stolen?”

  “An ancient concept. Meaning to take without permission.”

  “What are you talking about?” he demanded. “You’ve given me a dream. A disease. If you can’t take it back, then at least give me the antidote. Surely you must have some idea how to kill a dream without destroying a dreamer.” Shade went down on his knees, plucked at the man’s dream jacket. “Please, I’m begging you!”

  “Every man has a dream, Jimmy Shade,” the man said. “A dream he lives for. A dream he is willing to die for.”

  “Well I don’t.”

  “You do now,” the man said. “The only question is, what are you going to do about it?”

  An alarm blared inside Shade’s head. The ceiling lights flashed red. The door behind him unlatched itself and began to close. He jumped and blocked it with his boot.

  They’ve found me, he thought, and the squawk box translated the words. “They’ll hunt me down and unplugg me or ChemLob me for sure.” He spun around to face the Dreamer Primer. “Now what do I do?”

  The man’s face betrayed no emotion. “I sugg
est you run.”

  Shade could not fit between the door and the frame. He braced himself against the wall and pushed with all his strength. The door gave a centimeter, then a few more, enough to squeeze by.

  The man, to Shade’s surprise, made no move to follow.

  “Aren’t you coming?” he panted, holding the door wide.

  The man shook his head. “I have played my part. It is your turn, now.”

  The alarm blared louder than before.

  “But why me?” Shade asked.

  “Because you have a destiny, Jimmy Shade. Even as I do.” He smiled. “That is my message for you. You are destined to dream great dreams. Even if you don’t know it yet.”

  Shade turned and ran. The voice called after him, the vibrating sound waves bouncing off the spotless obsidian walls of the corridor.

  “It was an honor and a privilege to meet you, Jimmy Shade. May we meet again in the City of Dreams.”

  Chapter Seven

  The alarm blared louder inside his head. Ten billion voices shouted at him. JIMMY SHADE! JIMMY SHADE! WHAT ARE YOU DOING, JIMMY SHADE?

  He ran down the black corridor, and the voices followed. Shade struggled to think beneath the din.

  Trapped inside the Hall of Dreams, and every human being not locked in a padded cell was now looking for him.

  Shade swung around the corner and came to the elevator. He thumbed the call button.

  Go up? And then what? the Prime asked, amused. The Dreamer Prime hopped into Shade’s head.

  Shade ignored the man, tried to tune out the Collective’s clamor, forced himself to think straight.

  Go up? And be arrested, put on trial, sentenced to ChemLob or unplugg, maybe even spend the rest of his life right here in the Hall of Dreams, trussed in a dream jacket?

  The elevator hummed. The door pinged open.

  He hesitated. If he took the elevator, they’d just turn off the power, leave him trapped, ready for capture.

  Of course, he thought, he could just turn himself in. It was the right thing to do. But his dream! He couldn’t will himself to do the right thing, and he loathed himself as a result. Some uncontrollable part of himself was in control, and forced him to turn his thoughts once more to flight.