One of Us. Michael Marshall Smith
in a suitably soul-destroying typeface. Underneath it said, ‘Sleep Tight. Sleep Right.’ I walked the way the sign pointed and ended up at another reception desk. The girl had a badge which said she was Sabrina, and her hair was done up in a weirdly complex manner, doubtless the result of several hours of some asswipe stylist's attention.
I'd thought the girl downstairs was a top-flight patronizer, but compared to Sabrina she was servility itself. Sabrina's manner suggested I was some kind of lower-echelon vermin: lower than a rat, for sure, maybe on a par with a particularly ill-favoured vole, and after thirty seconds with her I felt the bacteria in my stomach start to join in sneering at me. She told me to take a seat, but I didn't. Partly to annoy her, but mainly because I hate sitting in receptions. I read somewhere it puts you in a subordinate position right off the bat. I'm great at the pre-hiring tactics – it's just a shame it goes to pieces afterwards.
‘Mr Thompson, good morning. I'm Stratten.’
I turned to see a man standing behind me, hand held out. He had a strong face, black hair starting to silver on the temples. Like any other tall middle-aged guy in a sober suit, but more polished: as if he was a release-standard human instead of the beta versions you normally see wandering around. His hand was firm and dry, as was his smile.
I was shown into a small room off the main corridor. Stratten sat behind a desk, and I lounged back in the other available chair.
‘So what's the deal?’ I asked, trying to sound relaxed. There was something about the guy opposite which put me on edge. I couldn't place his accent. East Coast somewhere, probably, but flattened, made deliberately average – like an actor covering his past.
He leaned forward and turned the console on the desk to face me. ‘See if there's anything you recognize,’ he said, and pressed a switch. The console chittered and whirred for a moment, and flashed up ‘PR/43 @ 18/5/2016’.
The screen bled to black, and then faded up again to show a corridor. The camera – if that's what it was – walked forward along it a little way. Drab green walls trailed off into the distance. On the left-hand side was another corridor. The camera turned – and showed that it was exactly the same. Going a little quicker now, it tramped that way for a while, before making another turn into yet another identical corridor. There didn't seem to be any shortage of corridors, or of new turnings to make. Occasional chips in the paint relieved the monotonous olive of the walls, but other than that it just went on and on and on.
I looked up after five minutes to see Stratten watching me. I shook my head. Stratten made a note on a piece of paper, and then typed something rapidly on the console's keyboard. ‘Not very distinctive,’ he said. ‘I don't think the donor's very imaginative. And you lose a great deal, just getting the visual. Try this.’
The picture on the screen changed, and showed a pair of hands holding a piece of water. I know ‘piece of water’ doesn't make much sense, but that's what it looked like. The hands were nervously fondling the liquid, and a quiet male voice was relayed from the console's speaker.
‘Oh, I don't know,’ it said, doubtfully. ‘About five? Six and a half, maybe?’
The hands put the water down on a shelf, and picked up another bit. This water was a little smaller. The voice paused for a moment, then spoke more confidently. ‘Definitely a two. Two and a third at most.’
The hands placed this second piece down on top of the first. The two bits of water didn't meld, but remained distinct. One hand moved out of sight and there was a different sound then, a soft metallic scraping. That's when I got my first twitch.
Stratten noticed. ‘Getting warmer?’
‘Maybe,’ I said, leaning to get a closer look at the console. The point of view had swivelled slightly, to show a battered filing cabinet. One of the drawers was open, and the hands were carefully picking up pieces of water – which I now saw were arrayed all around, in piles of differing sizes – and putting them one by one into different drop files. Every now and then the voice would swear to itself, take out one of the pieces of water and return it to a pile – not necessarily the one it had originally come from. The hands started moving more and more quickly, putting water in, taking water out, and all the time there was this low background noise of the voice reciting different numbers.
I stared at the screen, losing awareness of the office around me and becoming absorbed. I forgot that Stratten was even there, and it was largely to myself that I eventually spoke.
‘Each of the pieces of water has a different value, not based on size. Somewhere between one and twenty-seven. Each drawer in the filing cabinet has to be filled with the same value of water, but no-one told him how to figure out how much each piece is worth.’
The screen went blank, and I turned my head to see Stratten smiling at me. ‘You remember,’ he said.
‘That was the dream I had just before I woke up. What the fuck's going on?’
‘We took a liberty last night,’ he said. ‘The proprietor of the hotel you stayed in has an arrangement with us. We subsidize the cost of his rooms, and provide the consoles.’
‘Why?’ I reached unthinkingly into my pocket and pulled out a cigarette. Instead of shouting at me or pulling a gun, Stratten simply opened a drawer and gave me an ashtray.
‘We're always looking for new people, people who need money and aren't too fussy about how they get it. This is the best way we've found of locating them.’
‘Great, so you found me. And so?’
‘I want to offer you a job as a REMtemp.’
‘You're going to have to unpack that for me.’
He did. At some length. This is the gist:
A few years previously someone had found a way of taking dreams out of people's heads in real time. A device placed near the head of a sufficiently well-off client could keep an eye out for electromagnetic fields of particular types, and divert the mental states of which they were a function out of the dreamer's unconscious mind and into an erasing device. The government wasn't keen on the idea, but the inventors had hired an attorney trained in Quantum Law, and no-one was really sure what the legal position was any more. ‘It depends’ was as near as they could get.
In the meantime a covert industry was born.
The obvious trade was in nightmares, but they don't happen very often, and clients balked at buying systems which they only needed every couple of months. They'd only pay on a dream-by-dream basis, and the people who'd developed the technology wanted more return on their investment. Also, nightmares aren't usually so bad, and if they are, they're generally giving you information you could do with knowing. If you're scared crapless about something, there's often a good reason for it.
So gradually the market shifted to anxiety dreams instead. Kind of like nightmares, but not usually as frightening, these are the dreams you get when you're stressed, or tired, or fretting about something. Often they consist of minute and complex tasks which the dreamer has to endlessly go through, not really understanding what they're doing and constantly having to restart. Then just when you're starting to get a grip on what's going on, you slide into something else, and the whole cycle starts again. They usually commence just after you've gone to sleep – in which case they'll screw up your whole night – or in the couple of hours before waking. Either way you wake up feeling tired and worn out, in no state to start a working day when it feels like you've already just been through one.
Anxiety dreams are much more frequent than nightmares, and tend to affect precisely the kind of middle and high management executives who were the primary market for dream disposal. The guys who owned the technology changed their pitch, rewrote the copy in their brochures, and started making some serious money.
But there was a problem.
It turned out that you couldn't just erase dreams. That wasn't the way it worked. Over the course of eighteen months the company started getting more and more complaints, and in the end they worked out what was going on.
When