Take No Prisoners

by John Grant

  Even so ...

  "OK," I said. "I'll try it. I assume it's safe."

  "Completely." He patted the couch. "You might feel a little nauseous afterwards, because it's sort of like being on a mental rollercoaster. But there are no physical consequences – no hidden brain damage, anything like that. And no psychological risks, either, although I'd not like to try it myself if I'd just taken a hit of LSD. You haven't" – a mock-serious look in his eyes – "been dropping acid today, have you?"

  I forced a smile and made myself comfortable on the couch. The leather smelled of dust and age and polish, all mixed. Above my head, as I lay flat, the opening of the ScanFast – or whatever the playback device was called – looked like the gaping mouth of a lamprey; the lack of teeth offered little consolation.

  "And you're sure this machine can't pull any information out of my brain?" For obvious reasons, this wasn't an idle question.

  "Quite sure," he said calmly. "If you're worried about it, just focus your mind on something you don't care about. I told you, your dominant thoughts drown all the others."

  I remembered once reading a story that relied on the fact that, if you're told on no account not to think about a horse, the one thing your mind can hardly stop thinking about is horses. But I took his point.

  "It'll take me a few minutes to set this up," he said, moving out of my view.

  "Whose dream will it be?" I said, hoping my nervousness wasn't translating itself into the sound of my voice.

  "I don't know, and I can't know," he said. "It'll be a random selection – well, reasonably random. We weeded out all the psychopathic ones, the truly insane ones, the overly violent ones. Then, though we kept the rest of the dreams, we ... um ... we lost all our records of the volunteers. Well, Alex lost them for us."

  I grimaced. Homeland Security. The business of losing data permanently had become a lucrative one. If Alex had taken it as his personal responsibility to lose these records, chances were they'd stay permanently lost. Some of the commercial systems on offer – clandestinely on offer, of course, because the penalties were severe – were less reliable.

  The lamprey's mouth lit up; a low, almost grey light. There was a low hum from it. With a creak the apparatus began slowly to descend towards me. I gripped the sides of the couch tightly. This was suddenly too much like a visit to the dentist. All my primitive instincts – the ones my reptile ancestors had learned – were telling me to bolt. Irrelevantly, I found myself wondering if my skirt were riding too high up on my legs, making me appear less dignified than a DDO should be. I unpeeled a hand from the edge of the couch and checked.

  Oh, hell, he's not going to jump me, for chrissakes. He's got a photo of his wife and kids in his office. Yeah, and some guarantee that can be ...

  The mouth paused an inch or two above my face.

  "You'll find it easier if you shut your eyes," said Tim. "The transition, I mean."

  Swallowing my fears, I shut the world out of my consciousness.

  "Ready?" he said from a million years away.

  "Get on with it before I change my mind."

  A low murmur of sympathetic laught—

  ~

  you are watching the pirates you are among the pirates they are shouting and singing "boil her in oil boil her in oil" you are one of the pirates you are their victim they are seizing you hands between thighs rich brown glow of the smouldering oil you are being held above it the cathedral is on the horizon a distant speck you walk towards it and already you are there and you're naked with the tall guy at the newsstand on the short grass in front of the cathedral one of the gravestones has fallen over you're opening your thighs for him and for his erection you know it's enormous but you can't see it however much you look for it he's lost his erection somewhere but it's inside you and he's moving it back and forth and your legs are curling around him and you're among the fluffy grey clouds bouncing from one to the next of them as you couple only he's gone now and you think he might have vanished inside you the same as his erection did only the skies are pulling open like the shell of a lobster to reveal all the steaming glory of heaven and the air's full of celestial musical instruments which are like harps and flutes and they're playing that stupid jingle from the recruitment ads on tv you can never get it out of your head and your mother's very angry with you for showing your open crotch to god and you try to cover it up as much as you can but your hands won't do what they tell them to do and now they're flying away through the pillows of the clouds like cumbersome lopsided birds and your arms have become wings but however hard you flap them they won't hold you up in the air because of the weight of the newsstand guy's erection pulling you down but that's all right because now you're a telephone ringing and ringing but no one ever comes to answer and you know the only words you'll ever speak again are the words of other people but the message is so urgent and the world has to know about it but you can't pass on the message if no one answers the phone which is on the sidewalk on 41st Street just outside the kosher deli and it's ringing as you climb out of the taxi except your dress has stayed behind stuck to the seat because of the heat of the driver when he was beating his meat to make himself complete which is why you're climbing out of the car when you really wanted to go to the lincoln center getting out of the car getting out of the cat the cat you've not seen since he was run over by a harley fourteen years ago it's good to see he's alive and well even though he's grown a lot so he can hardly squeeze his marmalade sides between the buildings and

  ~

  "Not much of great use to a would-be predictor of the future, as I'm sure you'll agree," Tim was saying sardonically. "Here's a bag, if you need it."

  I grabbed the bag from him and put my mouth over it. My stomach tried to decant its contents, but I kept my throat clamped shut. My chest and shoulderblades ached as I fought the heaves.

  Finally I looked up at him, my wet eyes making him into a darker smudge against the distant red wall. For a moment that seemed more in keeping with my – someone's – dream than the real world. The transient images had been so bright, the emotions so powerful, as if there'd been nothing to insulate me from them. And maybe that was what had really happened: decades of self-education shielded me from the full force of my thoughts, but when I was unconscious, when the me was no longer in control, I had no such protection. I felt as if I'd casually drunk down a big gulp of what I'd thought was cold water, not thinking about the action, and poured concentrated sulphuric acid into my mouth instead. My mind was burning, bleeding, raw.

  I tried to make a joke of it.

  "Ten minutes of that and I think the most obdurate terrorist would be begging to confess."

  "You'd be surprised," he said quietly. "Some of the people who've dreamed other people's dreams actually like it. It could get addictive."

  I gulped air. "Not me." My throat hurt like hell. "Have you got a drink of water ...?"

  I half-expected to smell acid when he held a paper cup to my lips, but it was just water. Cold water that tasted of nothing worse than a plastic container. I drank it eagerly, and he fetched another cupful, which I sipped at more slowly, sitting on the edge of the coach, my unshod feet dangling above the carpeted floor.

  "Well," he said after what seemed like quite a long while, "now you know what it's like to be inside someone else's unconscious mind. Inside your own unconscious mind, come to that, because there's not a huge generic difference in dreaming from one person to another, except at the psychological extremes."

  I'd been just about to say that the person who'd had that dream must have been truly insane. Now I realized some of its elements had seemed familiar to me as I'd emerged from it. Yes, he was right. My own dreams weren't so very different.

  I shook my head, trying to clear it. I still couldn't rid myself of the feeling that the dream had been realer than reality. What was it Chuang-tzu had said? "I do not know if I was a man dreaming I was a butterfly or a butterfly dreaming I was a man"? Something like that. He'd added that "betwe
en Chuang-tzu and the butterfly there must be some distinction"; right at the moment I was finding it hard to work out where the distinction was between myself and my butterfly.

  Between myself and someone else's butterfly.

  "This is all ... very confusing," I said.

  Tim put his hand on my shoulder. "It's that way for everybody, first time they do it."

  His voice was intentionally comforting, which meant it was hardly any comfort to me at all.

  "I don't think I'm game for a second time," I muttered.

  "We'll wait a while before we try the next thing," he responded, planting himself down on the couch beside me.

  I wished he hadn't done that – I wished he hadn't put himself to close to me. The cotton of my short summer skirt wasn't quite touching the denim of his jeans, but I could feel the pressure of his flesh anyway. The dream had filled me up with undiluted emotions – fear, self-doubt, uncertainty, dread, guilt, lust – and none of them had fully abated. I'd not been lying when I'd told Tim I was like a nun. I hadn't had sex in eleven years, not since Alex and I had decided to terminate our liaison, a somewhat degrading matter of lies and furtively double-booked hotel rooms; after we'd finished it, I hadn't needed or wanted sex. I'd never been terribly good at it – never able wholly to abandon myself into it. Not like in the dream. In the dream I'd been on the brink of orgasm, and I hadn't cared if God and my mother both were watching. And now there was enough of that lust left that I was within an iota of ripping off Tim's clothes and mine and straddling him where he sat. I felt as if there were a weight in my womb.

  ... the weight of the newsstand guy's erection ...

  Not that. Just near-uncontrollable horniness.

  "I think I should have another cup of water," I said hoarsely.

  Mercifully, he stood up to go fetch it.

  As he did so, I felt my self beginning to take full control of me again. The naked feelings weren't being banished, exactly; just suppressed by my returning intellect.

  Whoever had dreamt that dream originally had been a woman, like myself. There could hardly be any doubt about it, could there? Yes, maybe people could dream themselves into being of the opposite sex, but surely only a woman who'd had sex with a man could feel everything I'd felt ...

  Which of course led me on to wonder what it'd be like sharing a man's sex dream. Having a hard cock and ...

  Yeah, I could understand how some people found this hijacking of dreams addictive. A few moments ago my psyche had felt as if someone had been ransacking it with a chainsaw; now I was becoming really quite seriously interested in repeating the experiment.

  No, Cello. No.

  My inner censor was right. Inside my mind there were dangerous terrains I had no wish to revisit.

  Tim must have had to open a new bottle of water, because it took him longer this time to fetch me a cupful of it. The heat had gone from my chest and cheeks by the time he returned. Oh, Jesus, he probably saw the flush ...

  I tried to take command of the conversation.

  "As you say, all of this is interesting, but useless," I said. "What did Alex see in it? Why did he want you to pursue your research? What did he think was in it for us?"

  Tim sat down beside me again. This time his presence wasn't unsettling.

  "A dream like that," he said, "and I'm assuming it was a fairly typical one, doesn't seem to show any signs of usable information content at all. Oh, sure, I'll bet it'd give a psychoanalyst fits of delight – there'd have been information in that sense. But nothing anyone else could make use of. No data. Certainly nothing that could give us clues about future events – or distant ones, either, because initially we were almost as interested in clairvoyant dreams as we were in precognitive ones. People like Ingo Swann and G.M. Glaskin had written about dream experiences which had seemed to them to be showing scenes and events in other parts of the world, or even on other worlds. We think" – he gestured to show he was making an aside – "we think what happened in Swann's instance, fairly definitely, was that his unconscious was particularly adept at the reading-back trick."

  "It'd have had to be very adept to get anything out of the mishmash I just experienced," I said, mustering a grin. "How long was I, um, 'under', by the way?"

  "Eleven or twelve seconds."

  "What?"

  "Yeah, it always feels like a lot longer. Anyway, where was I? Oh. Yes. Well, you said it yourself. Unless you're a lucid dreamer – or, even better but also even rarer, a controlled lucid dreamer – that's basically what all your dreams are like. A mess. A rapid succession of images and emotions that don't make any sense when they're all strung together and which, even taken individually, still probably don't make any sense."

  "So ...?"

  "It was Alex who gave us the insight." Tim stood again and walked across to the nearest cubicle. He turned in my direction, leaning his back against its blood-red wall. His dreadlocks fell forward over his face so that when he spoke, because of the curiously flat acoustics of the place, his voice could have been coming from somewhere else entirely.

  "When you listen to the radio, what you're wanting to hear is the main signal – the piece of music, the speaking voice, whatever. There's always a bit of noise, of course, that you hear in addition to that: signal hiss and that sort of thing. Everyone – the radio station, the radio manufacturer, you as listener with your finger on the tuning knob – conspires to try to reduce that level of unwanted noise as much as possible. The trouble with an individual dream, like the one you just experienced, is that it's virtually all noise. There could be a main signal in there, a genuine informational content, but it's such a small component of the whole that it's impossible to pick it out among the static. It's like your radio was giving you something that sounded like just white noise. You can't get anywhere by trying to tune it one way or the other, because you've no idea what it is you're looking for."

  I propped myself up on one elbow. "Which is why you get the phenomenon of reading back."

  Tim grinned, looking more than ever like a schoolboy. He nodded, encouraging me to keep speaking.

  "When you listen to white noise," I said, "you can hear whatever you want in it. Think of a favourite piece of music, and that's what you'll start hearing in among all the hiss. Think about a dream afterwards, and you can make whatever story you want to out of all the scrambled story elements. What you're doing in both cases is making sense out of something that doesn't have any. It's a quality wired into our brains, and most of the time it's really helpful."

  I hesitated, waving my free hand in the air to indicate not just the cavernous chamber around us, not just the structures above us, but everything beyond those. "We look at a universe that's mainly chaotic, and we're able to isolate the elements of it that make sense to us until we've built up logical strings; and eventually we can link up some of the logical strings with others until we get a network that explains a part of what we're seeing."

  "We tell the universe's story," he summarized, still nodding. "Sometimes we get the story completely wrong for a while – we produce complexes of those ... What was it you called them? Oh, yeah, 'logical strings'. We produce bits of false story. They seem OK on their own, smaller scale, like the idea that God made everything in just a few days several thousand years ago, but then the self-correcting part of the process comes in, because those complexes don't match up at all with the other complexes we've constructed. It's like you'd slung a random chapter from a Jane Austen novel into the middle of a Jules Verne adventure. It soon becomes very obvious indeed that it belongs to a different story."

  We were batting the line of thought back and forth between us now. "Except that in a dream," I said, "there is no main storyline. Each of the complexes we construct when we think about the dream is as valid as the next one."

  He held up a finger, reminding me he was the schoolmaster and I was merely the bright student. "But that's only the case with an individual dream," he said. "We were prepared to accept that this was all th
ere was, but then Alex stepped in, as I told you. He asked us the question: What if there are components in dreams that aren't completely random? What if there is a main storyline in there somewhere? If that's the case, it's going to turn up in other dreamers' dreams as well. While we mightn't be able to separate it out from a single dream, we might be able to detect it as a common factor in a whole bunch of different dreams."

  I made to speak, but he gestured I should keep silent while I digested the implications of what he'd just said. Time for the student body to stop making its precocious contributions and start reflecting on what wiser, more experienced heads had already worked out. I swung myself up on the couch and, hands on my gingham-covered knees, stared past the bright colours of my skirt to the drabness of the floor, using it as a blank blackboard onto which I could chalk my thoughts.

  "So," I said slowly, "what you could do is play the whole bank of dreams you've got here at once, and hope the common elements would sort of reinforce each other until you could pick them out against the randomness. Sort of like they were making the dark fringes in an interference pattern. Then you could, well, sort of ..."

  Tim snapped his fingers to make me glance up at him. "A lot of 'sorts ofs' in there, but that's the general idea."

  "But it's not as simple as that?"

  "Too right." He chuckled. Using his ass to shove himself away from the wall, he strolled back to rest his forearm on the lamprey again. "I can give you the long, technical explanation or ... well, you've already given yourself the short one designed for the layperson. Choosing at random, we boost some of the shared elements in a few thousand dreams and see if the result is, uh, coherent and meaningful when we play them all together. Once in a thousand times or so we get some coherence; most of the time, though, the meaningfulness score is low or zero. Oh, meaningful to the dreamers, of course. But not useful. Sometimes dangerous, too. We accidentally boost one of the strands relating to the deeper shared human sexual impulses and someone experiences the playback, we got trouble." His face had lost its grinning. "Two heart attacks, three people in terminal psychiatric care. I suppose the score isn't bad by government standards. And, anyway, the subjects we played the composites to were from the education camps, just like the dreamers, so maybe we did them a favour."