Shuteye for the Timebroker

by Paul Di Filippo

And then he dreamed.

  He had forgotten dreaming, the nightly activity of his childhood.

  Forgotten that some dreams were nightmares.

  He awoke from that initial sleep shaking and drenched with sweat, the night terrors mercifully fading from memory. He retained only vague images of teeth and crushing weights, falling through space and scrabbling for handholds.

  Cedric got up, dressed, and went out into the streets.

  Kibes running errands or patrolling for lawbreakers mingled with humans. The Mission District was not populated entirely by charity-case sleepers. Many of the people on the streets were citizens in fine standing. Here was a colorful clique of tawny Polynesian immigrants, adapting to life away from their sea-swamped island homes. Their happy, bright-eyed faces seemed to mock him. From Cedrics new vantage point down in the underbelly of the a-som society, everyone looked wired and jazzed up, restlessly active, spinning their wheels in a perpetual drag race toward an ever-receding finish line.

  But having this vision didn’t mean he still wouldn’t rejoin his ex-peers in a second, if he could.

  Cedric was convinced that everyone could smell the sleep-stench rising from him, spot his saggy eyelids a block away. Eating in a cheap diner that allowed him to stretch his monthly money as far as possible, Cedric resolved to kill himself rather than go on like this.

  But he didn’t. In a week, a month, he relearned how to function with a third of his life stolen by sleep, and became resigned to an indefinitely prolonged future of this vapid existence.

  As role models for his new lifestyle, Cedric had the other inhabitants of his flophouse. He had expected his fellow sleepers to be vicious father-rapers or congenitally brain-damaged droolers or polycaine addicts. But to Cedric’s surprise, his fellow sleepers represented a wide range of intelligence and character, as extensive a spectrum of personalities as could be found anywhere else. In the short and desultory conversations Cedric allowed himself with them, he learned that some were deliberate holdouts against the a-som culture, while some were ex-members of the majority, like Cedric himself, professionals who had somehow lost their hold on the a-som pinnacle.

  And then you had Doug Clearmountain.

  Doug was the happiest person Cedric had ever met. Short, rugged, bald-crowned but with a fringe of long hair, Doug resembled a time- battered troll of indeterminate years.

  The first time Doug made contact with Cedric, in the grottolike lobby of the flophouse, the older man introduced himself by saying, “Hey there, chum, I’m Morpheus. You want the red pill or the blue?”

  “Huh?”

  “Not a film buff, I see. Doug Clearmountain. And you are?”

  “Cedric Swann.”

  “Cedric, it’s a pleasure to meet you. Let’s grab a coffee.”

  “Uh, sure.”

  Over coffee Cedric learned that, before settling in San Francisco, Doug had been an elder of a religious community that featured, among other tenets of its creed, the renunciation of a-som drugs. The community—a syncretic mix of Sufism, Theravada Buddhism, and TM—had struggled in the wilds of Oregon for approximately fifteen years before bleeding away all its members to the siren call of 24/7 wakefulness. Doug had been the last adherent to remain. Then one day, when he finally admitted no one was coming back, he just walked away from the empty community.

  “Decided it was time to do a little preaching amidst the unconverted.”

  Cedric took a swig of coffee, desperate to wake up, to dispel the funk engendered by his nightly bad dreams. “Uh, yeah, how’s that working for you? You convinced many people to nod out?”

  Undaunted by Cedric’s evident lack of interest, Doug radiated a serene confidence. “Not at all. Haven’t made one convert yet. But I’ve found something even more important to keep me busy.”

  The coffee was giving Cedric a headache. A tic was tugging at the corner of his right eye. He had no patience for any messianic guff from this loony. “Sure, right, I bet you’re really busy working to engineer a rebellion that nobody in their right mind wants. Down with the time- brokers, right?”

  “Hardly, Cedric, hardly. I’m actually doing essential work helping to prop our incessant society up. It can’t survive much longer on its own, you know. It’s like a spinning flywheel without a brake. But this is the course that the bulk of our species has chosen, so me and some others are just trying to shepherd them through it. But I can see that you have no interest in hearing about my mission at the moment. You’re too busy adjusting to your new life. We’ll talk more when you’re ready.”

  Doug Clearmountain left then, having paid for both their coffees.

  At least the nut wasn’t a cheapskate.

  For the most part, Cedric resisted the impulse to reconnect with his old life, the glamorous satisfying round of timebrokering, gambling, and leisure pursuits. He spent his time giving mandatory Palimpsest interviews to his freethinker probation officer (whose federally approved facial was that of a sweater-wearing kiddie-show host who had retired before Cedric was born). He roamed the hilly streets of the city, seeking to exhaust his body and hopefully gain a solid night’s sleep. (Useless. The nightmares persisted.) He watched sports. He tried to calculate how long it would be before all his debts were paid off with the court-mandated pittance being deducted from his welfare stipend. (Approximately eleven hundred years.)

  Once he tried to get in touch with Caresse. She couldn’t talk because she was in the middle of a massage, but she promised to call back.

  She actually did.

  But Cedric was asleep.

  He took that as a sign not to try again.

  Six months passed, and Cedric resembled a haunted, scarecrow model of his old self.

  That’s when Doug Clearmountain approached him again, jovial and optimistic as ever.

  “Congratulations on the fine job you’re doing, Cedric.”

  Cedric had taken to hanging out at Fisherman’s Wharf, cadging spare change from the tourists via Palimpsest transactions. He was surprised to see Doug when he raised his dirty bearded face up from contemplating the ground.

  “Go fuck yourself.”

  Doug remained unfazed. “I’m not being sarcastic, son. I was just congratulating you on half a year as a sleeper. Do you realize how much of our planet’s finite resources you’ve saved?”

  “What do you mean?”

  “You’re using a third less energy, a third less food than your erstwhile compatriots. I’m sure Gaia appreciates your sacrifice. When the a-som society came fully online globally, it was like adding another America to the planetary eco-burden. Ouch! Despite all the fancy new inventions, our planet is heading toward catastrophe faster than ever. All we’re doing lately is staving off the inevitable.”

  “Big whoop. So I’m a tiny positive line item in the carbon budget.”

  “Well, yes, your sacrifice is negligible, regarded in that light. But there’s another way you can be of more help. And that’s by dreaming.”

  Cedric shuddered. “Dreams! Don’t say that word to me. I haven’t had a pleasant dream since I went cold turkey.”

  Doug’s perpetual grin gave way to a look of sober concern. “I know that, Cedric. That’s because you’re not doing it right. You’re trying to go it alone. Would you like some help with your dreams?”

  “What’ve you got? A-som? How much?”

  “No, not a-som. Something better. Why not come with me and see for yourself?”

  What did Cedric have to lose? He let Doug lead the way.

  The authorities had marked the small waterfront building for eventual demolition, as they continually enhanced the system of dikes protecting the city’s shoreline from rising sea levels. For now, though, the structure was still high and dry. Doug pried back a suspiciously hinged panel of plywood covering a door frame and conducted Cedric inside.

  The place smelled like chocolate. Perhaps the Ghirardelli company had once stored product here. But now the large, open, twilit room was full of sleepers. Arrayed on obso
lete military cots, two dozen men and women, covered by blankets, snored peacefully while wired cranially to a central machine the size of a dorm fridge.

  “What—what the hell is this? What’s going on?”

  “This is a little project I and my friends like to call ‘Manhole 69.’ Ring any bells? No? Ah, a shame, the lack of classical education you youngsters receive. Well, no matter. The apparatus you see is an REM-sleep modulator. Invented shortly before the introduction of a-som tech, and then abandoned. Ironically unusable by the very people who needed it the most. Basically, this device provides guided dream experiences within broad parameters. The individual’s creativity is shaped into desired forms. Nonsurgical neuronal magnetic induction, and all that. Everyone you see here, Cedric, is dreaming of a better world. Here, take a look.”

  Doug borrowed Cedric’s Palimpsest and called up a control channel to the dream machine. A host of windows filled the flatscreen. Cedric witnessed pastoral landscapes populated by shining godlings, super-science metropolises, alien worlds receiving human visitors, and other fanciful scenes.

  “Are you totally demented, man? So you can give people pretty dreams. So what? Don’t get me wrong, I’ll take a few hours under your brain probe, just to get some relief. But as far as helping the world become a better place, you’re only kidding yourself.”

  “Oh, really? Would you care to discuss this over some coffee?”

  “Coffee? What’re you talking about?”

  Doug didn’t answer. He was too busy sending instructions to the dream machine. All the flatscreen windows formerly revealing the variegated dreams of the sleepers changed at once to the same realtime image: the interior of the very building Cedric and Doug stood in, captured by Palimpsest cam. But the screen views were different from reality in one particular: a steaming paper cup stood atop the dream machine cabinet.

  “This should only take a second or two.”

  “What should take—”

  Cedric smelled the coffee before he saw it. There it rested, just where the dreamers had envisioned it.

  Cedric walked in a daze to the cabinet, picked the coffee up. The cup and its contents warmed his fingers.

  Doug’s manner took on the serious affect of an expert in his field with something to sell.

  “Two dozen people programmed to dream the same thing can instantiate objects massing up to ten ounces. I expect that the phenomenon scales up predictably. Something to do with altering probabilities and shifting our quantum selves onto alternate timelines, rather than producing matter ex nihilo. Or so certain sleeper scientists among us theorize. But we’re not interested in such parlor tricks. Instead, we want to shallowly engrave a variety of desirable futures into our local brane, thereby increasing the likelihood that one of them will become real. We’re shifting the rails that society is following. And as Thoreau once ironically observed, rails rest on sleepers. There are places like this around the globe, Cedric. And the more sleepers we enlist, the greater our chances of success. Are you on board, son?”

  Cedric regarded Doug dubiously. Had the manifestation of the coffee been a trick? Maybe that cabinet was hollow, with a false top, the coffee concealed inside. Should he ask for another demonstration, or take the old man on faith? Why would anyone bother to try to hoax him into simply going to sleep? And what else was he going to do with his life?

  “Here,” said Cedric, offering the coffee to Doug. “You take this. I guess I’m finally ready for a little shut-eye.”

  Edgar Allan Poe is one of the ancestors of the SF genre who is more honored in lip service than on the printed page these days. Although he practically invented the modern short story, Poe’s crepuscular and eccentric and somewhat fusty work does not seem to attract the worshippers it once did, when, say, Ray Bradbury and Robert Bloch deliberately invoked him. Even postmodern horror writers—horror being what Poe is generally remembered for—seem to have put him on a dusty shelf.

  So I was very intrigued when I learned of a book project that involved taking one of Poe’s fragmentary story beginnings and playing with it in any manner the author chose. I signed up right away, determined to channel Poe into a kind of SF/cosmic horror vein. The words flowed surprisingly easily, and I like to think that the ghost of Poe—who often visited my hometown, Providence—sat like a bodiless raven on my shoulder as I wrote.

  The Days of Other Light

  [based on a fragment by Edgar Allan Poe]

  Ingeniero watched the transphotonic packet Oriole depart the surface of Skyfire. Lifting off lightly from the airless tinted desert of the planetoid, the sleek interstellar ship swiftly became lost against the hectic, coruscating, panchromatic backdrop of radiance that formed the famous celestial vista that had inspired this worldlet’s name.

  Now he was alone, and there was no telling what might happen to a man all alone as he was. Yet his spirits revived at the mere thought of being—for once in his life at least—so thoroughly alone.

  The Oriole would not return for six months, per Ingeniero’s request. Until then, Ingeniero was trapped here of his own free will, the sole inhabitant of a small world. By the time his means of departure returned, his transport back to the galactic polity known as the Diffusion, he would either have solved the quandary that had brought him here, attaining renewed supremacy in his craft, or have been rendered a bestial, brain-damaged cripple.

  Break through or break down. Such was the harsh point to which Ingeniero had been driven, midway through his life and career.

  Turning to his left, Ingeniero regarded his lone companion, a slave half-organic, half-inorganic. The artificial being was a bulky shapeless mass of mind putty resembling a fantastically enlarged amoeba that towered some six feet tall. A lump of blue-tinged, translucent pseudo-protoplasm, threaded with golden moletronic circuits and muscle fibers and synthetic organelles, the slave possessed a moderate intelligence but lacked all initiative or personality. It responded to commands only from Ingeniero, who addressed it as “Iamo.”

  Floating beside Iamo was a fifth-force hover-sled stacked with the few provisions and personal possessions necessary for Ingeniero s stay. Some entertainment planchettes, a few changes of clothing, and half a years worth of metabolytic lozenges. A sparse inventory. But Ingeniero had not come to Skyfire for a luxurious vacation. Had that been his goal, he would have stayed on Myrthwold or Fleury, planets that catered to Ingeniero’s rich and famous peers and patrons. In his current mental condition, such resorts were anathema to Ingeniero—ash-filled, hollow places where his cursed fate was continually thrown before his eyes by outwardly sympathetic but inwardly mocking aesthetes.

  Ingeniero was himself sheathed in the thinnest film of mind putty, so that he resembled a more shapely version of his slave. The quasi-living substance formed the perfect environmental suit, providing for all of its wearer’s bodily needs and offering absolute protection against the vacuum and cold and fluctuating radiation of Skyfire. A moletronic mechanism embedded in Ingeniero’s cortex offered subetheric contact between Ingeniero and his factotum.

  “Iamo, accompany me now and bring the sled.”

  His steps flighty in the low gravity, Ingeniero started walking toward the only structure on Skyfire.

  The Tower of the Lens.

  His home for the next six months.

  Chamber of ecstatic regeneration.

  Or of excruciating torture.

  Or of both, alloyed.

  The Tower of the Lens was not architecturally impressive. Yet it was a structure that somehow, on first impression, seemed safe enough under any circumstances, one in which Ingeniero could feel secure.

  Some four stories tall, unornamented, square in cross section and measuring approximately twenty feet along each wall, the tower seemed rudely built of native materials: primitive, rough-hewn blocks of gray stone. Yet the structure was both airtight and resistant to every form of energy ever focused on it. Geophysical survey probes had determined that its inaccessible roots extended half a mile into the cru
st of Skyfire. Every attempt to move the tower to a more hospitable world for study or utilization had failed. Even efforts to shift the entire planetoid had been thwarted by, experts postulated, some kind of hidden frame-drag generators that allowed the worldlet to anchor itself immovably into the very fabric of space-time.

  The artifact of an untraceable race long vanished, the tower, since its discovery some three hundred years ago, had been nominated a neutral territory under pan-Diffusion supervision. Access to the tower was approved only for the most deserving, and the waiting list was months long. Ingeniero had suffered for five harsh months before getting the go-ahead for this last desperate attempt to recoup his powers.

  Ingeniero and his slave reached the entrance to the Tower of the Lens and paused. The door was the one anomalous part of the facade. When it was first discovered, the tower had featured as ingress only an arch exposing its interior to the vacuum. Into this space had been retrofitted a conventional airlock. Now Ingeniero beamed the proper access code to the door, and soon he and Iamo and the sled had cycled through.

  The interior of the tower, Ingeniero knew, was divided vertically into four levels. Each level was a single large room. This first floor boasted various amenities, all of human origin and designed to ameliorate the hard lines of the original structure, empty at its discovery. Organiform couches, a food-prep station, viewing carrels, even artworks on the wall. Ingeniero quickly recognized original paintings by Pristina, Kompot, and Novalis—not their best works, either. Ingeniero snorted. Leave it to some Diffusion bureaucrat to be hornswoggled by a canny art dealer eager to unload second-rate works.

  His suit informed Ingeniero that the atmosphere and temperature inside the tower were compatible with life, so the man moved to shed his protective covering. He touched a forefinger to his slave and said, “Iamo, absorb my suit.” The sheath of mind putty flowed off Ingeniero like mercury and was taken back up undetectably into the bulk of Iamo. Ingeniero stood revealed in lime-and-plum-striped tights, moleskin slippers, and a gold-filigreed weskit over a peach blouson. His long, saturnine face bore various corporate beauty marks identifying his patrons and sponsors. Over the past five years of inactivity, Ingeniero had fought hard to retain these status stipplings. But without a resumption of his artistic productivity, he acknowledged, he stood in danger of losing them all.