One of Us. Michael Marshall Smith

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СКАЧАТЬ 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 you erase a dream, all you destroy is the imagery, the visuals which would have played over the dreamer's inner eye. The substance of the dream, an intangible quality which seemed impossible to isolate, remains. The more dreams a client has removed, the more this substance is left behind: invisible, indestructible, but carrying some kind of weight. It hangs around in the room the dream has been erased in, and after thirty or so erasures it gets to the point where the room becomes uninhabitable. It's like walking into a thunderstorm of competing subconscious impulses – absolutely silent but impossible to bear. After a few weeks, the dreams seem to coalesce still further, making the air so thick that it becomes impossible to even enter the room at all.

      Unfortunately, the kind of client who could afford dream disposal was exactly the type who was turned on by litigation. After the company had swallowed a few huge out-of-court settlements on bedrooms which were now impassable, they turned their minds to finding a way out of the problem. They tried diverting the dreams into storage data banks, instead of just erasing them. This didn't work either. Some of the dream still seeped out of the hard disks, regardless of how air-tight the casing.

      Then finally it clicked. The dreams weren't being used up. Maybe if they were …

      They gave it a try. A client's transmitting machine was connected to a receiver placed near the bed of a volunteer, and two anxiety dreams were successfully diverted from the mind of one to the other. The client woke up nicely rested and full of vim, ready for another hard day in the money mines. The volunteer had a shitty night of dull dreams he couldn't quite remember, but was paid for his troubles.

      No residue was left in the room. The dream was gone. The cash started flowing again.

      ‘And that's what you did to me last night?’ I asked, a little pissed at having my mind invaded.

      Stratten held up his hands placatingly. ‘Trust me, you'll be glad we did. People have varying ability to use up other people's dreams. Most can handle two a night without much difficulty, three at the most. They get up feeling ragged, and drag themselves through the day. Usually they only work every other night – but they still make eight, nine hundred dollars a week. You're different.’

      ‘How's that?’ I knew this was most likely a stroke, but didn't care. They didn't come along that often.

      ‘You took four dreams last night without breaking sweat. The two you've just seen, and another two – one of which was so boring I can't bear to even watch just the visuals. You could probably have taken a couple more. You could make a lot of money.’

      ‘How much is a lot?’

      ‘We pay according to dream duration, with additional payments if they're especially complex or tedious. Last night you erased over three hundred dollars' worth – and that doesn't factor in a bonus for the dullest one. Depending how often you worked, you could be earning between two and three thousand dollars. A week.’ He closed the pitch. ‘And we pay cash. Dream disposal is still in an unstable state with regard to legality, and we find it more convenient to obfuscate the nature of our business to some of the authorities.’

      He smiled. I smiled back.

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