Chapter 29: Better One Day in a Cubicle Working for Neo
Jenny Madox was a decent person, the kind that gave you hope in the face of growing support for fascism. A special needs assistant at St Joseph’s School, Derry, she’d been on a training course in Limerick hosted by Vision Ireland and RNIB Northern Ireland because she had responsibility for a blind child. I liked her voice and I realised, as I listened to her talk, just how much you could tell about a person by the vibrations they made in the air with their vocal chords. I don’t mean like Professor Henry Higgins, able to place a person two within two streets of their home by their vocabulary and accent. I mean that you can hear something deeper than geography and social background.
If you listened, really listened, like Celine could, it was all there in the cadences and music of her voice: the loved infant; the uneasy school years; the loss (a parent? A miscarriage?); the anxiety about the future. She didn’t mind the long silences while I booked an Air BnB and changed the personal information on my recently obtained social media accounts. And she didn’t ask any intrusive questions. Jenny even went out of her way to drop me off at Currys, where I could buy an Explorer cap.
‘You’re an angel,’ I opened the passenger door.
‘Are you sure you’re all right?’
‘Right as rain, thanks. I have the Air BnB booked and I’ll get a bus home tomorrow.’
‘All right love, take care. And you have my number if you need it.’
My rented home was only about twenty minutes’ walk away from the shops, but as the streets changed from wide and busy to narrow and quiet, I realised I’d made a mistake. The curbs here were painted red, white and blue. So too with the bottom parts of the streetlights and even the telecom and traffic light boxes. It had never even crossed my mind to take into consideration whether the address was in a catholic or protestant area and I’d booked myself into potential trouble. Could you tell by looking at me that I was an outsider? Surely not. And even then, you wouldn’t assume I was a nationalist, right? Wine-coloured, buttoned up winter coat; teal, woollen bobble hat; navy trousers (with subtle, shining stars) and short, fawn boots. Kind of normal, or at least, abnormal only in that my colours were more varied than the dark, plain jackets that I had seen during my walk.
I arrived at a mid-terrace, two-storey house with pebble-dash on the street-facing walls. Perfectly ordinary. Not at all the kind of place to which people with southern bank accounts were lured and murdered. Celine was scornful of my concerns and by the time I’d made a peppermint tea (thank you, my hosts) and looked into all the rooms, I was able to laugh at myself too. It was a plain house with a harmless history. A motherly house even. I gave it an affectional pat on the wall.
Calibrating an Explorer cap was tedious. Is the green line to the left, right, or directly over the red dot? Left. Now right. Now spot on. Dot on. Is the top car moving faster or slower than the bottom? Is this tone higher or lower than this tone? All in all, it was two hours and two more cups of peppermint tea before I able to progress to the registration process and I felt as though I’d spent even longer with the headset, given that the sun had set during the process. At last, sitting in the dark on a well-worn couch, I was able to register, create my avatar, and send a friend request to SharkSamurai19.
At once, a circle with the head of Velma from Scooby Doo appeared in the top left of my vision offering me a tag: a little purple square. Yes, I thought and a 3D environment unfolded all around me. Wearing an Explorer cap is basically the same experience as wearing a 3D headset, except you control your choices with your thoughts rather than eye and hand movements. Plus, you can move your mind in and out of seeing your real environment without taking the cap off. This requires a bit of practice and is somewhat nauseating if you do it too often in a short space of time. For now, I let the link enfold me into Amanda’s chosen virtual space.
Blue, cloudless sky. A woman and a man, both tall, attractive and dressed in smart clothes were standing beside me. We were on top of a ziggurat and the pale-stone city below was shimmering in a suggestion of heat that made me feel warm.
‘Cyn,’ said SharkSamurai19, ‘this is Daniel. Add each other.’
RedRunner offers you friendship. Do you accept?
Yes / No
There wasn’t an option that said, of course, my love, so “yes” would have to do.
‘Hey Cyn, how’ve you been?’
‘Good. But non-stop. I need to paint soon. How about you, sweetheart?’
‘Sweetheart is it?’ Daniel laughed. ‘Are you really Cyn?’
‘Just someone on their own in completely the wrong part of the wrong town.’
‘You’re safe though?’
‘I think so.’
Daniel’s muscular Daniel-Craig-James-Bond avatar put his arms around me. I swung the camera out of the default eye-based perspective so as to get a better look at our hug. My avatar had been assembled with quick choices and I would have liked to have adjusted her face in a dozen ways, still, she was a pretty, little redhead and we made a charming couple.
‘Right,’ said Amanda. ‘About tonight’s test. Who wants to be the dreamer? It’s not going to be me.’
Daniel broke our embrace to look into my eyes and I hastily snapped my point of view back into my avatar’s head to better appreciate it. ‘I don’t mind,’ he offered. ‘I want what Cyn has, a more direct communication with my poetic soul.’
‘It would be interesting for me to visit a dream for once,’ I said.
‘Fine. Daniel will be the dreamer. If you go to apps, you’ll see dream free in the health folder.’
‘DreemFree? With a double ee?’ I had flicked my mind quickly along the branches of the app tree.
‘I had to avoid a clash with existing businesses. Open it.’
A screen appeared which reminded me of the home page of a gaming system. It had a list for friends (currently just two), a column labelled “Scheduled”, and another “Live”.
‘Do you have the app Daniel?’ Amanda asked.
‘I do.’
‘Set up a room for when you next dream and invite us or make it public. Actually, this time make it public. I will test that with another account.’
‘Done.’
A box had appeared in the scheduled column: Electric Sheep, owner RedRunner.
‘Now you join it Cyn.’
You have joined Electric Sheep. The dream has not begun yet. Do you wish to get an alert when RedRunner is dreaming?
Yes / No
‘I’ve joined and accepted alerts.’
‘That’s it. Daniel, go to bed!’ Amanda ordered. ‘See you in your dreams.’
For some people, like Neo perhaps, entering another person’s dreams was a thrill. A chance to see their hidden secrets and desires. Not me. Daniel – everyone – was entitled to privacy in regard to the thoughts he had suppressed during his waking hours, but which might well be circulating in his unconscious mind. What did interest me, though, was the possibility of meeting the equivalent to Celine. It was Celine who had smashed to pieces the efforts of DreamAds to control my dreams and this gave me hope for humanity. The fascists could use their wealth and control of technology to rewrite history, to invent new stories as though they were facts, to drown independent thoughts in a tsunami of AI-generated spume. What they could not do was control our imagination, our creativity, our dreams. Deep in the human psyche was a person as real as the language-using surface being. And that person was resistant to being manipulated from above.
After two hours, the alert came. I accepted the link and immediately found myself in the cabin of a ship that was lurching through sizable waves. A fragmentary riff from Kashmir was looping in the background, whether from a broken sound system in the cabin or as a structural feature of the dream, I couldn’t say.
‘Hello. Are you a figment of Daniel’s dreams or Cyn?’ The speaker was a middle-aged woman sitting on the far side of a table that was welded into the floor beneath a round, spray-covered window.
‘I’m Cyn,’ I replied, looking down at myself. I was a short male, wearing a thick jumper with a design of black and yellow zig-zags; on feeling my face I was surprised to touch a thick beard.
‘I’m Amanda.’
‘What now?’ I wondered aloud.
‘We should celebrate. The app works.’ She turned her head and I noticed a small bar at the end of the room. To walk there, however, would have been too much of a challenge, what with the floor dropping down, or lifting up, or throwing you to the side.
‘I feel seasick,’ I said.
‘Same.’ Her hands, gripping the metal surround of the table, were white.
‘I wish he’d dream about some pleasant tropical beach, or a concert.’
‘If he doesn’t change this soon I’m going to log out. It’s quite horrible and we’ve proved the technology works.’
A door behind me opened and for a moment a howling wind filled the room with the sounds and the buffeting blows of a furious, invisible djinni. Slamming the door shut with a heavy bang and twisting a round metal ring to fasten it, Daniel staggered over, his olive plastic poncho shedding streams of seawater.
‘It’s bracing out there!’ Upon looking at me his face became quizzical. ‘You’ve changed, Pete; for some reason I want to hug you.’
‘That’s because I’m Cyn, your girlfriend.’
‘Oh, so you are.’
My beard disappeared from under my fingers as I transformed into someone approximating the shape I was used to. My scent, even, was more like my own.
‘You are dreaming Daniel. Can you change the scene for us?’ asked Amanda.
‘Oh, I am?’ For some reason, he looked disappointed. ‘I suppose I am.’
‘Where do you want to be?’
‘Some place where the ground doesn’t move. And while you’re at it, can you change the music? It’s stuck on repeat.’
We were facing a mountain, standing in its shade. Many backpackers, perhaps a hundred or so, were walking towards the golden skyline. There was no sound other than the natural ones created by a gentle wind and bird cries.
‘Thanks Daniel, that’s better.’ Although remaining in the form of an older woman, Amanda was now wearing hiking boots and socks .
I walked effortlessly up the mountain and, cresting the ridge, entered a realm of sunlight. I could have been another star, floating there like the sun opposite me. I could have painted any subject and it would have been just as radiant. All the joy of the world was flowing through me. I didn’t move; I didn’t paint; I didn’t even raise my little finger; I simply was there, in the light.
A while later Amanda joined me. ‘God, this is heavenly. So warm.’
‘It’s what he’s looking for. It’s art.’
‘Where is he?’
Poor Daniel. When I withdrew from the flow to look, I eventually found him, barely a tenth of the way up the mountain, deep in shadow.
‘I’m going to help him.’ And even though the severance was cruel, I pulled myself away from that state of lucid ecstasy and turned back.
‘You’re a better person than me, Cyn.’
‘It’s different. I love him. Otherwise, you’d have to be a saint to give this up.’
I found Daniel trudging over bare rocks and dusty earth. I took his hand and he looked at me gratefully.
‘It’s a beautiful dream Daniel. At the top of the mountain is everything you want. There’s poetry up there. Such beautiful poetry.’
‘I know.’ Yet he was walking slowly downhill.
‘What’s wrong, why don’t you join us there?’
‘I’m terrified. It’s like surrendering to a black hole. It’s going to suck me in, until I dissolve. And whoever writes the poetry I’ll find there won’t be me.’
We walked on while I thought about this. ‘You know when you have an orgasm, a proper one, an all-consuming one?’
I could see that the thought cheered him up. ‘Go on.’
‘It’s not you either is it? Not the person having to plan grocery shopping, and laundry, and all the practicalities of keeping the body alive. It’s a surrender into bliss and it only occurs to me now that there’s something universal about that bliss. Like the way all the walkers are up there sharing the sunlight. Let’s join them. You’ve nothing to be afraid of, no more than surrendering to an orgasm.’
He sighed. ‘I can’t.’ Then he held up his right hand with the three middle fingers pressed together, thumb and little finger extended and it seemed to me I’d seen that exact shape of a hand in a painting, one in which the skin of the palm and middle fingers was covered in esoteric symbols. All the while looking at me, Daniel turned his hand, so that it pointed downwards and dipped the tips of the three fingers in a mug of water that had appeared on the rock beside him.
Bathtime in the tenement. At least the water in the otherwise cold, heartless room was warm. Naked and full length in the bath, submerged all the way to her cheeks, Amanda remained as happy as she’d been on the ridge. Daniel and I leaned on the white ceramic edges of the bath watching her.
Ill-defined children ran in and out, firing nerf guns at each other. I found that I desperately wanted a cup of tea and I wanted it in the Everton mug that I had bought as a teenager (to annoy my dad, who was a Liverpool fan). It was the mug that Daniel had dipped his ominous fingers into; only it wasn’t.
‘I’m sorry Cyn.’ Instead of a blue tower on the side of the mug Daniel gave to me there were faded, pink Moonmintroll drawings, as though a colour sketch by Tove Jansson had been left facing towards a sunny window for a year. There was nothing wrong with Jansson’s Moonmintroll drawings, I rather liked them normally, now, though – as a red foam dart flickered past close to my nose – everything was wrong. I felt so sad. Such a loss. And I knew this grief had nothing to do with the mug but was because Mum was dead.
We left Amanda enjoying her hot bath and walked down a corridor where there were open doors, but only on the left side. At the entrance to every dark room was a famous musician, starting with Prince, then Bowie, then Freddie Mercury, the corridor streaming towards infinity like it was formed by two nearly parallel mirrors.
‘Listen,’ they told Daniel. ‘Celebrity is nothing. Nothing but dust. Nothing but vanity. Do not waste your life. Better one day as a wage-slave in the cubicles of Neo’s offices than to be forever King of Rock in the land of the dead.’
That was him! The collective ghosts of the dead musicians was David, Daniel’s inner being.
‘Listen to him, Daniel. Listen carefully. Remember this dream. Your unconscious self is warning you not to waste your life.’
I was alone in a dark house in a loyalist estate in Derry. The dream had collapsed.