“Try this,” Abrahem Winklemann said as he leaned across the table, placing his fist down firmly. He opened his palm. Nestled against the hardened leather of his glove was a small stim-chip. Louis looked up at the dealer's dirt-dusted features. A grin stretched over the man's face. The dealer tossed the poet his pitch: “Better than the best endorphin-inducer, I swear. It's called dreaming. It's a new thing.”

Louis examined the dealer, noting the wan look about his eyes, a ferret-like poise about his bearing. “Seriously, try it.” Louis tapped the table's scratched synthetic wood surface, thought, If it can't make the words come, I won't take it. But what would make the words come? Louis didn't know. His hand itched for the feel of a pen. But when he held a pen, placed it on paper, no ink ran. The poetry had faded into stygian evanescence; some part of him had died.

No more stim-chips. That had been the oath. No more code matrices to fool his brain. No more morphine-hacks, no more endorphin-suppressors, no more black market malware downloaded through his wrist-port. None of it. That had been three weeks ago. He'd broken his promise a week in. Louis van Romensen, the great repressionist poet, empty, like an overturned bottle or an unmodded brain--vapid and without substance. He needed substance. I'm nothing without the words. But the words wouldn't come.

Abrahem Winklemann ordered a beer. “Mining doesn't cut it, Louie. You can't keep going forever. People like you, they sweat and bleed and wake up to do it all over again. You get worn out.”

"I know." Louis' gaze surveyed the crowded mess hall for the hundredth time. This used to be inspiration enough: sweat, grime, dust-covered faces, broken backs, curses and gambles, uncut diamonds hauled up the tracks, smell of industrial exhaust and coal. It used to feed him. A year ago Louis would be brimming with emotions to describe and faces to paint in ink. Now there was nothing. Just forlorn features. “I can't, Winkle. I'm trying to go clean.”

“Liar,” he said, pausing the let a taskmaster walk by before continuing. “Bastard,” the dealer muttered as the master strutted past, his strides long and arrogant, a curled neuronic whip at his belt--with that weapon he could freeze a brain at a whim. To prove a lesson. That was the usual excuse, at least.

Winklemann turned back towards me. A waitress arrived with his beer mug. His countenance cracked into a large uneven grin; as his lips peeled back Louis saw blackened teeth and rotten gums. “Liar,” Abrahem repeated. “You want it. I know you do.”

“I decided—”

“F*** your decision,” Winklemann said, gulping down his beer and setting the mug down hard on the tabletop in a fluid motion. “F*** it and all your preachiness, Louie. You think I care?” He snorted. The waitress collected his mug. “I don't. You're stuck in hell. Hell isn't a place for poets.”

“Still,” Louis said, “I can't.”

Abrahem shook his head. “Writer's-block, that's what they call it.”

“What?”

“Writer's-block. You can't write your pansy poems anymore, can you?” He ordered another beer. “Well, I'm not a stupid Fed. I still read. The psychologists call it writer's-block. This'll free you up, Louie. I'm telling you.”

“I'm not a stim-chip junkie.”

“To hell you're not,” Winklemann said sarcastically, roughly yanking his refilled beer mug from the waitress's hand. She stood tall, her head capped with dark brown curls. She had full lips and a plump body stuffed into a servingwoman's dress and apron. “I remember last year. Every day, you'd come by asking for another chip.” He paused. “You're a moron. This, right here, is how you get away. Try it.” He gestured to the chip. “It'll save you. It makes you . . . imagine. It's crazy. It's not a sim; its your own thing.”

“I—”

“Don't think about crossing me.”

“I wasn't.”

Abrahem smirked, sloshing the contents of his mug around before taking a gulp. “Businessman, I am. Good one. Now, let's get this strait: two days ago a man died. Bullet to the head. Fried his cortex. Couldn't get him to the hospital in time because no one gave two damns. Guess who shot 'im?” His rugged northern Namibian accent came out strong.

Louis shrugged. Intimidation. It wouldn't work.

“That one,” Abrahem said, pointing to a gruff miner fresh from the shaft lift. Louis twisted in his chair. The muscled man bore tattoos along his skin. Then he noticed they weren't tattoos; they were ridged tribal scars. “And guess who pays 'im?” Again the blackened grin. Winklemann pointed a finger at his chest. “Me. We all gotta eat. So let's get this clear: you pay me, like the deal, you take my chip, you use my chip, and you come back for more. Right? And take this on my word. Morpheus ain't gonna let you down.”

Louis registered a faint click, felt cold metal press against his kneecap. The poet swallowed. He'd pulled a gun. “I'm your friend, Louie. I don't want to do this. But if I gotta, I will.” The words bore steel resolve.

The poet's vision contracted, tunneled. He looked around the crowded mess hall. Computational processors whirred to life in the back of his skull; vibrations ran through his cranium. He blinked. And in that instant saw fractal infinity. Anything and everything that could happen appeared before him as strands of binary vanishing to an unknown, unseeable singularity point. Even as he watched, strands died and others spawned. Predictions did not bode well. Resistance would cause mutilation, even death, the cold computer cognition informed Louis' brain calmly. If he got shot no one would care. His body would be disposed of quickly, probably tossed down the lift shaft and left to rot in the darkness. The Feds wouldn't investigate, there'd be no arrests or charges. Just a cadaver dropped in a diamond mine.

Hand trembling, the disheartened poet reached for his wallet buried in his pocket. “No quick motions,” Abrahem said sharply. The barrel dug into his knee. It'll bruise, Louis thought grimly. “Calmly, calmly, there we go.” Louis pulled his wallet out, flipped it open on the tabletop. The acrid scent of smoke wafted into his nostrils. Louis' eyes teared up. Through the watery haze he saw the dealer's sunken black pupils twinkle like unearthed diamonds. Such quaint metaphor. The biting metallic cold at his knee vanished; the dealer took what he wanted from the wallet then hunched in his chair, grunting nonchalantly, as he forced his gun down his boot. It wasn't smart walking around the outside unarmed.

“Take it,” Abrahem said, dropping the chip onto the table. He slid five ten-credit bills into his pocket. He placed the wallet next to the chip.

Louis' hand jerked forward, caught the chip between thumb and forefinger, and raised it to eye-level. “Not much,” he whispered. Louis slid the chip into his pant's pocket along with his wallet, thought: Maybe I'll forget it.

The dealer grunted. Behind him, a line of miners exited the shaft lift, closed the grated door. The lift gears began to whir, and the cage vanished into the dark bore. One man shook his shift. A fine mote of dark coal dust clouded the air around him. He got a few angry glances, one from Louis. Keep the filth were the filth should stay: underground.

Sirens rang three sonorous calls; the sonic dissonance rattled and reverberated through the mess. Lunchtime was up. Back to work. Abrahem got up, donned a miner's hat, and joined a group of workmen headed back down. Grumbling, Louis stood, hoisted his briefcase, and set off. The board of the DePiest Corporation wanted to see him: their indolent manager. So Louis started to the elevator that would take him up to ground level, into the sprawling steel hulk of DePiest Corporation Headquarters, where he could stand in an air-conditioned room and rant to a board of blank-faced suited men about how to skimp on safety regulation without being caught.

Damn.


#


Louis van Romensen trekked along the parched dusty roads of Alldays with a satchel swung over his back. He'd personally seen that the bag looked overused and torn despite its moderate value. Too much money on the streets of Alldays brought more than robbery; it brought resentment and public execution if the con-gangs found out. He kept his gaze down to avoid attention as he walked through the slums.

Alldays had risen as a mining town around the newly-reopened Alldays Diamond Mine, now under the control of the DePiest Corporation. Fathers had brought their families here when they went off to work the mines. Most were promised a better lot in life. There'd been smiling executives and white-picketed fenced-in lots. The fences had become concrete walls, the smiles replaced by the more reliable shoulder-slung shotgun. A mercantile market arose in alleys. In backstreets and behind taverns. There worked the whores and the rogue programmers, the cult hackers and the contraband-sellers. What slim police force existed was kept bottled up in its battered bullet-ridden compound. They kept their badges for show. At day policemen patrolled the 'good parts' in group clusters, their bodies heavy with blast-armor, their weapons drawn and ready. At night they vanished, back into their hide-y-holes, and let the gangs take up watch.

He trudged up the long palm-lined drive towards an heavy concrete wall riddled with bullet-holes left there a decade ago. A large African hired gun opened the iron gate into the main courtyard. “Good day,” he said in his rich northern accent.

Louis nodded towards him. Cautiously, Louis stepped into the inner courtyard. The harsh sun baked the old flagstones. He felt the radiant heat through his rubber sandal's thin soles.

He surveyed the guardsman. The man called himself Bullfrog. Stuck into his belt were an array of knives, and strapped over his stolen chestplate was a rifle. Turning, the hired gun sauntered back to an overturned bucket in the shade of a wall. He unsheathed one of his knives and removed a whetstone from his pouch, he began to run the stone over the metal. It rasped.

A cloud blotted out the sun for a second as Louis moved across through the courtyard's inferno to the shade beneath an overhanging eave. He unlocked three locks, and pulled open the first door, the one made of rusted bars. Then he unlocked the second door--the hard wooden one, its face scratched by feral cats. It opened to a long corridor foyer, walls covered in peeling flowered wallpaper, empty picture frames stuck on nails imbedded in the wood. The poet shook his sandals off and started towards the main room.

Louis sat at his desk, staring out past his barred windows at an empty alleyway; graffiti had been scrawled onto the side the bordering tenement's cracked plaster wall. Placed delicately on an antique wrought-iron coffee table to his left was a large handgun, its serial numbers filed off and its stock worn by repeated firing. A case of ammo rested beside it. Virgin paper lay on the table before him. Not synthetic wood. No. This table was real. Old mahogany, scratched and dented, once a tree somewhere to the east across the Indian Ocean. Forests that didn't exist--barren metropolitan wastes once lush jungles and plains. Don't think about that, he thought, absently twisting the cap of his pen. It popped off, clattering onto the hard cement floor of his apartment.

The apartment bore signs of neglect: an overflowing wastebasket, unwashed clothes heaped at his bedside, food-stained dishes piling high in the sink. He'd lost water some time back. Some carrier pipe had cracked and started leaking; the government failed to repair it--typical. Any water he got came from the communal well a block away; he only took enough to drink, buying decontamination pills off the black market. The air bore a foul odor--the stifling stench of decomposing human excrement. Louis feared opening the windows for worry of thieves and gun-toting thugs stopping by for a quick visit and a few shot rounds at midnight. No air came in or out. He'd grown accustomed to the heavy litany of sweat and soil that pervaded his apartment; it was just another necessity to survive in Alldays. One he bore with stoic resoluteness.

And yet, he could feel the titanium carapace he'd built around himself slowly rift, steadily fracture. The silence gnawed at him. No longer were nights peaceful. They were terrifying. Because in between the drab waking hours there was only the void--impermeable, omnipresent, intangible. It was the absence of thought, of emotion, of physical and mental drive.

Dreaming. What was that? He had half a mind to command his implanted computer to look up the term, then decided against it. He wouldn't take the chip anyway.

He stood. His chair grated harshly on the rough floor. Languorous strides took him to the built-in wall cabinet which he swung open on rusty hinges. Inside gleamed a row of bottles, standing out in contradictory juxtaposition to the accumulated dust and grime of the cabinet entire. “Which one?” he thought aloud. His voice carried, amplified in the closed room. Unsure, he picked out two bottles and poured two shotglasses, downed each. A sigh parted his lips.

Good. Maybe the words'll start coming.

A smile crossed his visage as he put the bottles back into their cabinet; he closed the cabinet, turned the rusting lock mechanism, and returned to his seat before his desk. He grabbed the pen. Its tip touched the paper, leaving an ink blot. Sweat beaded above his eye. He bit his lip, concentrated. He wrote feverishly for a moment, growled in disgust, and crumbled the paper. Worthless. Meaningless. He tossed the paper away. It missed the wastebasket, landing instead on a crack in the cement floor.

Try again. And he did. Failure.

Another crumbled paper sailed through the air, this time landing in the basket.

Again. He spat, grimaced.

Sunlight faded. The western horizon glowed a violent, bloody red. Carmine light lanced through his window, highlighting dust motes that circulated in the air. Louis raised a protective hand to his eyes. Five pages had been discarded. One had gotten down halfway. Then the inspiration dried up. The dying sun glimmered, glinted, and fell below the horizon. He peered through bars of his window. Across the alleyway, in the tenement, a few naked bulbs flickered to life. But that was all. The ruddy glow in the east subsided, replaced by dark twilit gloom. Dogs barked somewhere in the distance. Heat dropped noticeably.

He went about lighting candles. They filled the apartment's main room with a deep sultry red luminance. Exhausted, Louis collapsed on his bed, staring up blankly at the cracked plaster ceiling.

There was a knock on the door. Louis rose, stretched, and reached for the handgun atop the coffee table. Grumbling, Louis grabbed it, let his hand settle into its worn grip. He edged toward the door, flicking on the hallway light as he did. Bright illumination flared along the corridor. Louis ran his hand over the mortared walls, fingers brushing lightly over imperfections. He crept along the wall. Never a need not to be subtle. A motto he lived by.

Louis pulled the peephole cover aside, peered out into the darkened courtyard. A form blotted out sparse moonlight flitting down from the slate expanse of cloud above. Bullfrog.

He opened the first door. Light coruscated out into the shadowed courtyard from the bulb in the corridor. The thew African gun stood beyond the barred door. Nervously, Louis noticed the man's hands rested calmly on his many knives, fingers drumming against ivory handles. “What do you want, Bull?” he asked, gesturing with the gun.

The heavy African crossed his arms, surveyed his employer with calculating eyes. “Money,” he said. “No money for two weeks. Your incompetence . . . .” He shrugged.

“Look,” Louis said, “I'll get you the money when I can. Next week is payday.”

“I want the money now. There are other employers. They have money. I am valued. Others come to me, ask me for guns. I wave away; I have master. But if the master does not pay, the gun does not work. This is the way.”

Louis remained silent. The night wore on.

“You have no money,” the guard said finally, flatly. “Then I do not work. You have lost me. I am sorry. You were good.” He turned away, leaving the poet's house unguarded in the dead of night. The gate creaked shut as he closed it behind him. Louis stood alone.

Gunfire chattered into the night. Far away, he heard the screams. He turned back inside, locked both portals behind him, and leaned against the cool wooden door, breathing heavily. Would the gangs come in the night? It was always a risk. Before, Bullfrog had been there. A few warning shots fired off by his rifle usually sent the gangsters scampering. But now he wasn't. All this building's firepower was vested in a single handgun prone to jams. And it hadn't been fired in a year.

The chip rested in his pocket.

An itch started in his wrist-port. It grew, spreading up the nerves in his arm, tickling him, until the tickle became a flame, and the flame a fire. It raged, burnt him.

I . . . am . . . not . . . a . . . junkie, Louis thought, his teeth set and gritted. His right hand began to tremble, began to inch its way towards his pocket. No. Yes, the sinister inner temptress said. Do it. No. But his fingers had already grasped the chip, pulled it out of his pocket, slipped it into his wrist port. Electronics began their whirring.

Sleepiness hit him. Numbly, some part of his logical brain registered the effects: Melatonin production booster. Basic cyber-neural programming. Then blackness overcame him.

#


It felt something yank it. Good, it thought, another duplicate of his digital essence detaching, morphing, condensing into strands of binary that shot through the downloader's enhanced cybernetic-neurological weave to lodge in deep white matter, festering there. It called itself Morpheus, and it hungered, pried at the sleeping mind, contorted reality. Men should know fantasy.


#


Louis awoke. Or did he?

The world twisted, flexed, expanded, then diminished. It operated in a temporal flux, resembling the properties of an unstable liquid element--constant evolution advancing towards inevitable systematic entropy. It was as if the world was a pond, and someone had tossed a pebble into it. Alternate reality simulator, a faraway reasoning processor thought.

The small self-essence that was Louis van Romensen shrugged. 'I don't know.'

A shadowed moved. Louis twisted. It vanished. Two more shadows appeared, dancing just at the edge of his periphery. He twisted his neck, trying to see them. They dissolved back into program strands. Or he thought them strands. If this was a program, it was the most complicated he'd ever seen. Some programmers could play with facets of reality; make a brain believe in time travel or unaided human flight. Those programs required full-system immersion. This was not one of those programs. This was different. A downloader in immersion knew his implanted reality a beautiful hoax. Yet now, only a sliver of his brain told him that. The rest truly believed the lie.

Before him, the shadow solidified. Its pixels digitally condensed, becoming a recognizable humanoid form. A form that lacked features. No face, no distinguishing sex traits, nothing. A blank slate of imitation-humanity. It smiled. Louis could see any visible crease in the face, but he knew it smiled. 'Hello. I am Morpheus. I am your dream.'

'My dream. You're a program.' The fragment of sane inside Louis ordered his central cortex to find the meaning of 'dream.' What was it?

It chuckled. 'Do not mind trying to look up the word, Louis. I disabled your internal processors, firewalled it off. You only have basic cognitive awareness. And, yes, I am a program. A very smart one. More a system of channels and filters that decode the transmissions between your neurons to transcribe upon your sleeping frontal lobe . . . another reality, if you will. Not my creation. But your own.' The shadow moved without moving. It swelled, expanding in the room, then shrunk, traveling through inarticulable space without traversing. 'I can make fairytales; I can make nightmares.'

Nightmares? Fairytales? What where those? Program settings, no doubt. Louis settled on the one that sounded most intriguing.

'Give a nightmare,' Louis said.

The Morpheus program chuckled. 'A demanding one. Very well.' It moved towards him. The poet cringed, shrank, let whatever thing this was pass through him, envelope him, become him. Then he was falling . . . falling . . . falling . . . .

A voice in his head whispered, 'You are in a dream. Soon to be a nightmare.'

'Who are you?'

'I am you. A program meant to mirror a lost neurological function.'

'But what are you?'

'That is a different question. Let us not worry about that. I am about to make you very, very afraid.'

Louis stood up in the hallway, the handgun shaking in his freezing hands. The foyer, he realized. Dead wallflowers looked down at him, judged him. A loose shift was wrapped around his body, a weak warden against the night's pervading chill. His teeth chattered. His jaw hurt. His throat was dry. He ached for water. But there was no water. The faucet just screeched painfully when he twisted it. The noise set him on edge. What if someone heard it and came? What if he got shot? Who would find him? Not Bullfrog. Bullfrog was gone.

'Oh no I need the gun without the gun I'm all alone all alone no gun what if they come if they come they'll shoot me and no one'll find me I'll rot and the rodents will get to me before the corpse crews do.'

'Shut up,' a quieter, more sure voice said.

The unfiltered tirade raged on.

'Shut up,' the voice repeated.

Louis spewed the thoughts, the emotions. There was no mental bulwark, no mind-regulation. Everything came out. Primordial, unrefined. The pain and aches. Everything.

'SHUT UP!'

Dead silence. The handgun trembled in his hand. 'Who are you?'

'I am you,' the dream said. 'Now shut up and experience.'

The poet nodded, glancing nervously around the darkened room. Though the naked bulb shone its bright radiance from its ceiling fastener, shadows clung to the corners, slunk under tables and chairs, lurked beneath the bed. They'd always been there, the sliver of rationality reminded Louis. Always. That didn't help. The undefinable darkness seemed more sinister, more malignant--a festering, cancerous tumor slowly devouring him from the back of his mind.

Three knocks in quick succession came from the door. Louis whirled, handgun rising to chest-level. The knocks repeated. Loud, demanding, authoritarian. He stepped forward, inching down the hallway.

“Open up!” a command came from beyond the plated wood. “Five second's before I start shooting.” Whoever was there grew silent. The silence remained, broken only by the muffled sound of Louis dragging his feet across the hallway's carpeted floor. His head pounded. He needed to breath; the exhalation caught in his chest--it didn't budge. Good, the voice said softly, silkily. 'Very good. Feel the adrenalin. Feel the sharpened senses. You are you. You at your purest distillation. Drink the fear.'

A gunshot broke the stillness. It came from behind. The window above the desk, he knew instinctively. He whirled. A second gunman; the gangs had arrived. Again the shooter fired into the empty room. Louis saw bullets splinter his precious wooden desk, saw paper scraps drift to the floor.

“C'mon!” the harsh male voice behind the door said. A second wore by; an eternity. “I'm shooting.”

Louis stepped back. Not before the shotgun discharged.

Again, the sliver of rationality buried beneath layers of manifold augmented dreamscape told him the truth: No shotgun could blast through that door. The core is a solid sheet of steel, two inches of hardwood on either side.

But Louis didn't care. He cared about the rush of senses. Slowly, he realized he was falling.

His head hit the cold floor. Blood filled his mouth. He twitched, spasmed, lay still. Straining his muscles, he raised his head just a few centimeters. It was enough to see the gaping holes in his chest: both shotgun shrapnel and wooden shards.

Something hit his legs with a resounding thunk. The door. A weight pressed upon the door, crushed his knees. He opened his eyes against the blinding light from the foyer lightbulb. The light flickered, sputtered, died. Only the pressure on his legs remained. He groaned.

A click in the darkness. He tried to squirm, the primal instincts kicking in. Nothing, not a budge. He stared up haplessly into twin shotgun barrels, counting away the seconds left to live.

'It's a programmed hallucination,' sanity stated.

'Quiet,' Morpheus said.

The firing mechanism spat out a spark. Two demonic eyes appeared down the shotgun's boreholes. They grew and grew.

Then his head exploded.

The light turned back on. Some one had spilled a strawberry smoothie on the foyer rug.

#


'It's all just a dream.'

#


Louis awoke, cold sweat covering his body. His torso cramped. Fear raced through his veins. He was alive. Alive. His hands felt his body, reassuring their brain that, indeed, he lived. A forced chuckle parted his lips. At his wrist, the port's chip-flap slid open, the chip popped out. Morpheus fell to the ground, clattered onto the cement.

So that's a dream, Louis thought, amazed.

Numbly, the poet went to his desk, turning on the bedside lamp in the process. The lamp's red covering made the light a deep crimson hue. It splattered on the walls like blood. The poet sat, uncapped his pen, and set it to paper.

The words started flowing.