The Pursuit of Nappiness

A novella set in the Ontonauts multiverse, where everything anyone has ever believed is true. About a professional liar and her desperate quest for rest.

The sky is naked and impossibly far away, and for inexplicable reasons blue.

She is sitting on a riverbank. Someone else is there, to her right, but she is afraid to turn around and see their face and know their name.

“I want Hell,” a voice says to her right and she slides into the river and it carries her away.

The water is not like water, but clear and unblackened like a window freshly cleaned. Its gentle swells kiss her ears good night. She opens up her mouth to answer and words don’t come out but shapeless ink that vomits forth, a deep, black deluge of Murk that gushes from her mouth and when it blends with the water it boils and she can’t stay afloat on the black river’s froth so she shuts her mouth and all is quiet and clear and the sky so impossibly far away.

She’s … home.

“Know know know your knot,” chants a bankside voice and it’s Threpetta! The river stops running and she must say something but if she does the blackness will boil it once again.

Threpetta wades into the water toward her. But there is no fear, because she is a good little girl for her company and has earned her rest. And Threpetta’s eyes stare into hers and Threpetta’s mouth opens and from it oozes black, stinky Murk and dripping words: “Hear sure brie fish it …”

Her hands close around Threpetta’s throat and she is standing, now, and her hands are under water and Threpetta is thrashing and drowning and choking and everything is all a-boil.

And then, suddenly, her arms are elbow-deep in a still, black river. Threpetta is no longer struggling.

She yanks her hands back up from the darkness, but she is holding a rabbit. Sticky, black, dead, and crying. She needs to dry its tears, but all she can do is smear them out all over its face, its fur, its body, and the tears wash it clean, banish the black and reveal beneath it not a rabbit but a cat and the cat draws a breath of air and comes alive and looks at her and …

Smiles.

And suddenly she is again floating in the river’s quiet embrace, the sky so impossibly far away and time stretching out into eternity before her and—

…

Oh no.

The sky is falling.

The shock clock woke her with a jolt of electricity. Her hand rummaged blindly around the bedside table, then toppled over a stack of what it sought: murkcoins.

She slid one into the clock’s receptacle. The pain subsided, and in its wake rose a stone-solid weariness.

She did not open her eyes, though. Not yet. She wanted to hold on to the hallucination for as long as possible. Whenever she didn’t, they slipped from memory forever.

But not this one. Let’s see, there was … something wet, something that … whispered to her? And someone … Threpetta?

Terror gripped her gut. Threpetta was her boss and expected—

Her eyes flung open on a ceiling, gray and so oppressively close. The jigsaw of her life lay scattered in far-flung mental corners, obliterated by sleep. Little by little, she pieced it back together.

Threpetta was her boss. Her headitor. At the Gordian Guardian. Where she worked. And she lived in The Metropol. And the sky was not blue and impossibly far away, but hidden forever behind the city’s upper levels and its shroud of Murk exhaust.

Her name was Sofoosia o-Gordian. She was a diurnalist. She was late.

And she was so mucking tired.

#

Her wristclock read 4:36 as Sofoosia exited her slabscraper and slid into the moving mass of the morning commute. She didn’t own a railmobile, so was obliged to make her way to the Gordian Guardian’s offices on foot.

Beneath the brim of her Stetsbro hat Sofoosia hid her eyes from those of the gray pedestrians that swarmed The Middlings’ streets. Stetsbros’ brims hid their eyes from hers as well, and when they didn’t, what looked back at her were bloodshot orbs and murk-dilated pupils, the eyes of rats forever running a doomed and lonely race.

But what looked back at them? Could they somehow tell from hers that she slept … differently from them? She hoped not. Her night time hallucinations would no doubt be considered a madness, a surefire reason to be fired and shunted down to a short, brutal existence on The Muck.

A wave of vague feeling sloshed through her, like an echo of a once familiar voice. It repelled and attracted her in equal measure, and awakened both an oddly inflected sense of guilt and something safe and pierced with beauty, something for which Sofoosia’s language seemed to have no name. But a name stirred in the feeling nonetheless, a name a name a name …

A scream cut through the noise of traffic. Two men had bumped into each other, and steaming murkoffee now stained one’s suit and tie. He was weeping, lost, flailing at the other like a child’s pathetic puppet. The sharp scent of murkoffee lingered for a second, then dissipated into The Metropol’s eternal background funk of murkotine smoke, murkoil exhaust, and the sickly murkoal fumes that seeped up through access gaps from The Manufactory’s chimneys down below.

Sofoosia lit a murkarette, and pressed on through the throng. Nine blocks of bland The Middlings slabscrapers to go.

She had done okay for herself as a diurnalist. Her schedule now offered a grand total of six hours off per day, a luxurious four of which she would spend asleep. She had nothing to complain about, really, yet her aching bones and sluggish brain insisted on doing nothing but. She slapped her face. No one took notice; it was a common enough auto-stimulant among The Middlings’ Murk-deprived professionals.

Sofoosia glanced up. A vast concrete slab covered the sky, pockmarked with access gaps affording glimpses of The Management and its shiny glass slabscrapers, sleek and inspirational through the murky haze above. Occasionally a Stetsbro-clad head would tilt up from the crowd and drink in the aspirational sight, but to Sofoosia, the promise of those buildings held no allure compared to her sleep’s hallucinations.

Cassandy! That was the name that had stirred in the feeling. Stupid, crazy Cassandy, in whom Sofoosia had once almost confided the secret of her hallucinations. Owe The Man that she’d had the strength to hold back. Yeah, Cassandy would have given her up for sure. For sure. But even that wouldn’t have saved Cassandy from termination, only earned her Sofoosia as a bitter, broken travelling companion on the long and hopeless elevator descent to the city’s lowest level: The Muck.

Cassandy. Cassandy o-Gordian.

They’d first met as kids on The Manufactory, both working twelve-hour days in the Gordian Guardian’s printing presses. Sofoosia had been weeping from lack of sleep when Cassandy had smashed into her on jet skates, spilling them both and a stack of freshly-printed thruthspapers all across the floor. “I won’t tell if you won’t,” Cassandy had grinned, and thus had been formed between them a strange and advantageous pact.

“DON’T WALK,” the traffic light declared in screaming red, and like the rest of the gathering crowd on 4-M-Theta Street’s curb, Sofoosia obeyed. Before them the rush of passing railmobiles was relentless, a furious river of Murk exhaust and dirty steel. People nervously checked their wristclocks, cast anxious glances around the crowd, all hoping that someone else would be the first to break. Sofoosia dropped her murkarette stub on the pavement, let it smolder.

4:49. Eleven minutes. She yawned, blinked her eyes, looked around to keep awake.

Here and there in the crowd, tucked into armpits or nervously scanned by fellow stuck pedestrians, she spied copies of the Gordian Guardian’s morning edition. The front page headline read “Time’s Down” above a murkograph of a lone kamikazecutive’s body in freefall from The Monomint. Sofoosia smirked. She was actually pretty proud of that one.

Two days before, the bodies of four kamikazecutives had been seen falling through The Middlings, from The Management above down through the central access gap to The Manufactory below, each within minutes of the others. Dead kamikazecutives in free fall was not an unfamiliar sight on any of The Metropol’s city levels; such was the price of failure, according to their impossibly lucrative contracts. The ties around their necks were nooses, people said, the more easily for an underperforming kamikazecutive to kill themself.

No, not an unusual sight, but four in a row? Now, that signalled a high-level failure of epic scale and importance. So her headitor had called upon Sofoosia to construct a story to downplay it all, preferably to prove that the total number of kamikazecutive bodies to drop through the city that day, was one. And Sofoosia had written the story that today blazed below the truthspaper’s masthead. A story for which she had invented a mysterious malfunction that had briefly caused all The Metropol’s clocks to run out of synch with each other. And at that precise moment, Sofoosia had written, the kamikazecutive in charge of city-wide time piece synchronisation had been terminated from his position, hung, and dropped from The Monomint. But due to the clock synchronisation failure, observations of the falling body had evinced some apparent temporal variation, hence the confusion that would lead to the misapprehension that four different kamikazecutives had fallen from The Monomint that day. Bold-faced balderdash, of course, but oh-so cleverly crafted and convincing.

4:50. The murkcoins in her pocket jingled. She ran a finger across them, selected one just in case.

But then someone ahead of her inched closer to the traffic light’s post. They were about to break.

The crowd was filling up behind her, beginning to exert a gentle, but impatient pressure. It happened, sometimes, when for some reason no one broke and paid for green: The crush of trapped pedestrians would end up shoving the first row right out into the street, like meat into a grinder.

4:51. Nine minutes. Muck! Was no one breaking after all? Muckety-muck, Threpetta’d warned her once already …

Sofoosia fished the cold, black murkcoin from her pocket, elbowed her way to the light post and shoved it into the traffic light’s slot. The light dinged green, and the crowd burst out across the street, the railmobiles now restlessly rumbling before their own phalanx of red. “WALK,” the traffic light insisted, but Sofoosia did her best to run.

“We’ll never lie to each other,” Cassandy had proclaimed, and through sheer dint of exuberance and toothy charm, her proclamation had come true. The pact had given the girls an advantage against their paranoid, deceitful fellow newsrunners, and Cassandy had somehow turned that advantage into advancement—for them both.

So, some eight years ago now, Cassandy o-Gordian and Sofoosia o-Gordian had found themselves promoted to murkographer and nocturnalist respectively, and that was how they had taken their first, shaky steps into the Gordian Guardian’s truthsroom—on The Middlings.

A puddle of Murk reflected bright neon colors. Sofoosia looked up. A seductive, winking dragon smiled from a nearby brick wall, teasingly animated to appear to be forever flying away, forever just out of reach. A glowing neon cigarette jutted from its mouth, and words flowed below it: “Murkotine by Xingfu. You know you need it.” Sofoosia stamped through the puddle.

Something had changed for Cassandy, once she had realized just what their new jobs entailed. Their first few brief sheets had been innocent enough, calling for little in the way of creativity. Sofoosia had written her articles accordingly, and Cassandy had dutifully painted the murkographs to illustrate them.

But then they had gotten the 5-A-Epsilon inferno story.

The brief sheet had been unusually sparse:

VERIFIABLES:

• 20:57, Moneyday Yesvember 23: Fire at 5-A-Epsilon Green Residency (The Manufactory)

• Duration: Six hours, one minute.

• Residents: Necroil remurkery personell (unskilled)

• Surviving residents: 5 (2 mid-cred, 3 lo-cred)

• TMPD air/ground ops in area prior to event (2 copters, min. 4 officers).

DESIRABLES:

• No expl. or impl. TMPD involvement

• Cause: Residents’ professional laxity, demotivation.

• No mention Necroil leadership, strategy etc.—Manufactory problem, not Management problem.

Fingers smattering across the keyboard, she had woven a tale to tie the event’s observable facts together so as to deliver on the brief sheet’s desirables. She had cooked up an anonymous tip to explain The Metropol Police Department’s presence on the scene pre-fire, and had been in the middle of turning her idea into clear, effective prose when Cassandy had interrupted and demanded to know what she was doing. “My job,” Sofoosia had replied, wishing to The Man that Cassandy would just do hers.

A thunderous drone sounded from below, and with it rose a sticky stench of Murk exhaust. Across the street a city block-sized access gap yawned down upon The Manufactory, and through it a TMPD vehicle was now ascending: a ferrocopter, an 18-feet gunmetal pyramid borne on the murky jets of four powerful engines. A uniformed pilot scowled out through the copter’s apex cockpit, and the shape of his aircraft’s body echoed that of the city entire.

The copter rose on four thick pillars of Murk, and Sofoosia and the throng broke out in cacophonous fits of coughing. Owefully, the craft’s trajectory would lead it on through an access gap in the slab above, then up into The Management.

Cassandy, however, had left The Middlings in the opposite direction.

Her murkographs of the 5-A-Epsilon inferno had strained against the brief sheet’s desirables, depicting a shadowy group of arsonists who might as well be TMPD officers as Necroil roughnecks. A subheaditor had caught the mistruth in time to correct it, but not without the paper’s publication suffering an unforgivable delay. Threpetta’s justice had come down like a mallet.

Before the day’s corrected issue had hit the streets, Cassandy had been stripped of surname, job, and future prospects, then escorted out through the Gordian Guardian’s doors—these very doors, in fact, that Sofoosia now found herself fast approaching. She’d followed Cassandy to the doors that day, ordered down to the lobby to bear witness and then, just as security had ushered Cassandy out through these very doors—

Muck! The doors were locked. 5:01. Muck!

Another laggard stood over by the doors’ coin slot. He turned to look at Sofoosia, pulled empty hands from his pockets, shrugged and—

Smiled.

Just as security had ushered Cassandy through the doors … she had smiled.

5:02. Sofoosia looked back at the laggard.

Cassandy was gone, but her smile remained.

Sofoosia flashed it, then mirrored the laggard’s shrug.

His lip quivered for a second, threatening a snarl.

Then he pulled two murkcoins from his pockets and shoved them into the slot. The door dinged open.

#

Stetsbro in hand and stepping late onto creaky floorboards, Sofoosia found herself for once oweful for the truthsroom’s sonic avalanche of staccato murkwriter clicks. The noise perfectly camouflaged the floor’s announcement of her tardy arrival. The diurnalists and murkographers all remained oblivious, each sitting hunched over their own murkwriter or murkograph canvas in their own narrow cubicle, slurping murkoffee through straws or sucking ferociously at murkarettes.

At the center of the room throned Threpetta o-Gordian, the Gordian Guardian’s longtime truths headitor, surrounded by a cobbled-together 360-degree desk atop a towering dais of filing cabinets and murkoffee machines. Her elevated vantage gave Threpetta a clear, panoptical line of sight into every cubicle, including the empty one toward which Sofoosia was currently stealthing. Threpetta’s back was turned, and Sofoosia slipped unnoticed into the cubicle and onto her chair. It squeaked. As if in response, the cubicle’s intercom crackled to life.

“Productive morning, Sofoosia,” Threpetta’s voice threatened. Sofoosia could feel her headitor’s eyes boring into her back.

“P-productive morning, Threpetta,” Sofoosia replied.

“I must have missed you at assignments just now,” Threpetta said. “My most sincere apologies.”

Was … was she being sincere? Or —Ah. Sarcasm.

“That’s all my fault, Threpetta, I got caught at a crossing, you know, the one on 4-M-Theta? Yes, so we got clogged up there for a minute and I’m terribly sorry, but the truth is I … I, actually, I made the choice to pay for green. Because I … respect the company’s time.”

Static. Then: “Hmm. Yes, well, then let’s not waste any more of it. Saved you something special to start your morning off right.” A piercing squeal of feedback and the line was dead.

She heard Threpetta’s printer churn out her brief sheet. Sofoosia lit a murkarette and a rrrip sounded as Threpetta tore the brief sheet free, then the creaks, heavy and chilling, as she lumbered down from her dais and across the truthsroom floor. Crrrk … crrrk. The smatter of murkwriting slowed for a moment as if reigned in by fear, then resumed at a pace redoubled, spurred on by that selfsame sensation. Crrrk … crrrk.

Threpetta was like a stone, pressed into being by the tectonic weight of corporate expectations. Her arms darted fitfully as she lumbered and the brief sheet jittered in her hand.

What event or aspect of reality would it call upon Sofoosia to explain, refute, or concoct from her mind? Something dull, most likely, or revolting. But Sofoosia wouldn’t care. She wasn’t in it for the content, nor for the murkcoin. She was in it for the time. The extra hours of time in lieu, hours in which to sleep, hallucinate …

Mmm …

Surely she could rest her eyes just for a second time she’s been here or is it the first? A wooden platform afloat upon a stormy sea, swaying and creaking … creaking … creak—

“SOFOOSIA!”

Reality jolted back and her eyes sprang open. The truthsroom.

Threpetta o-Gordian stood before her like a mountain, but a short one. Her sharp jaw jutted down between thick jowls, and her murky pupils glinted. The brief sheet danced in her hand and Sofoosia’s half-smoked murkarette lay smoldering at her feet.

“Two minutes and forty-seven seconds,” Threpetta’s voice rumbled, “thereby obliterating your previous record of one twenty-two. Congratulations, Sofoosia. I always knew you had it in you.”

Sofoosia smiled and knew that she did so stupidly. What exactly was the correct reply in this situation? Should she pretend to take Threpetta’s words at face value, or … ?

“How long is it you’ve been with us, valued Sofoosia? Here in the truthsroom?” Threpetta said.

“Ah … I’m sorry, eight years now, Threpetta.”

“Eight years, eight years …”

“M-hm. Yup, that’s right. Eight years.”

“Eight years, eight years,” Threpetta repeated. “Know how long I’ve been here, Sofoosia? How long I’ve been part of the Gordian Guardian family?”

Was she … was she expected to answer … ?

“Twenty-eight mucking years, Sofoosia! Twenty-eight years in service to the Gordian Guardian and the Loopus Noos corporation and The Monomint and The muckerfloating Man himself! And in twenty-eight years, how many times do you think I’ve found myself face to belated face with a locked workplace door, forced to feed it hard-earned murkcoin in order to do my job?”

Oh no, not again. Should she answer, should she not answer? Surely this time—

“Ze-ro! Zero times, Sofoosia! In fact, back when I was your age, I used to pay it to open early!”

Threpetta’s growl lodged like a stone in Sofoosia’s gut.

Was this it? Was she … getting fired?

No, couldn’t be, there was still the brief sheet. The assignment. Maybe it would be some sort of test? One final, unearned chance to save her job?

“Twenty-eight years, Sofoosia, twenty-eight years of devoted, unfailing, and timely service, and yet … and yet …” Threpetta dangled the brief sheet before her, perhaps disdainfully. “And yet it is you for whom the doors have opened on opportunity.”

Maybe something to do with my sentence structure, Sofoosia managed to think before the jumbled statement’s meaning kicked in.

Opportunity?

“S-sorry, Threpetta are you … are you being—”

“I am,” Threpetta said, and thrust the brief sheet into Sofoosia’s hands.

It wasn’t a brief sheet.

Sofoosia stared at it. Threpetta breathed.

Sofoosia read. Threpetta breathed.

And then, the shock of the final sentence.

“Th-Threpetta, I don’t know what this means, I don’t have—”

“He’s expecting you at 5:30, valued. That gives you round 17 minutes by my estimation.”

Was there … Was there a tear in Threpetta’s eye?

“You know, if it doesn’t work out, I’ll always have a place for you here,” Threpetta said, and sniffed. “At twenty-hour shifts.”

“O-owe you,” Sofoosia said, unsure if she meant it.

On her way out, she read the invitation again.

Valued Sofoosia o-Gordian,

This request is cleared through channels. Meet me for a delicious cup of murkchai and discussion of your future prospects.

Thirstday 17 Clocktober, 235 The Middlings, Xingfu Corporate HQ, floor 11. Report at reception.

Adamantly,

Hanish o-Xingfu

Assistant Sub-Director for Innovation

Xingfu Corporation

PS: Your night-time secret is safe with us.

#

5:25 AM. Sofoosia flashed the invitation and her press card. A Xingfu security guard scanned the documents’ barcodes, and the bulbous bronze doors of Xingfu HQ’s Middlings-level entrance opened like a customother’s embrace.

The air inside was thick with murkincense and franticness, but high on a wall ahead she spied something bright through the haze and the bustle: a glowing outline of an ever-escaping neon dragon, staring back with a cutely tantalising smile. Below the familiar Xingfu logo shone the word “Elevator”, and Sofoosia made her way toward it.

She’d not had much time to reflect on to what, exactly, she had been invited. “Cleared through channels,” the invitation had said, but still. What could have possessed an assistant sub-director at The Metropol’s massive one-stop-shop for Murk in all its ingestible varieties to set up a meeting—by the looks of it an interview—with a junior professional in a totally unrelated field? What sort of opportunity was she here to discuss? And most importantly: how much time would the opportunity allow her to shave off her working day?

And second-most importantly: Her “night-time secret”? Could … could they possibly know?

Muck. So many unknowns. Owe The Man she still had an 11-floor elevator ride ahead of her. She would use it to mentally prepare, to chart out her best course of action given the limited data at her disposal. If she managed to stay awake.

Elevator access cost her three shiny, black murkcoins. She offered up the cash to the elevator door’s slot, then waited for the wall-mounted floor dial to count down to the ground.

Ding! The door slid open and a voice like treacle sounded from the elevator’s innards:

“Pr … pr’ive mornin’ …”

“Productive morning,” Sofoosia replied, then stepped inside, eyeing the operator’s bony, deflated body. He swayed oblivious on buckled knees, his baggy eyes were closed in near-soporific bliss, and his uniform hung crumpled from his frame. Blood-filled plastic tubes ran between the veins of his arms and a pump set in the elevator wall. To the same wall were attached two pill-dispensers, one marked “Uppers”, the other “Downers”. A name tag identified the man as Cookan. A thin pendulum of snot threatened to find purchase in the dribble on his chin.

“Ahem,” Sofoosia said.

No response.

“Ahem! Eleven!”

Cookan’s eyes cracked open, narrow, bloodshot, and dark. “Huuh … ? Oh … Right …”

Croesus Heist.

His hands trembled as they fumbled their way to the dispenser marked “Uppers”. A hand cupped below it and the other clutching its lever, he pulled and produced from the dispenser a sleek, black pill. He stared at it and after a while said, “One.”

Again he pulled and produced from the dispenser a sleek, black pill. He stared at the pills and after a while said, “Two.”

“Oh for Heist’s sake,” Sofoosia said and grabbed the lever and pulled. “Three—four—five—six—” She counted out loud until eleven black pills lay piled in the cup of Cookan’s palm.

“Elll … leven … hneh … goin’ up…” he slurred, then shoved his face into the pill-trough of his hand and started munching. The blood pump whirred, and at last the elevator moved. Sofoosia fixed her eyes on the floor display.

One.

All right. Ten more floors to go, ten floors in which to get her head around this meeting. Her ultimate goal, of course would be time, more of it. But—

Two.

But more pressing was the matter implied by the invitation’s postscript: “Your night-time secret is safe with us.” How could they possibly know? Sofoosia had never—

Three.

—never told a soul! In fact, she had even—

“Oh yeah … that hit it …” The croak shivered Sofoosia’s bones, then she remembered the elevator operator. Cookan o-Xingfu or whatever.

Four.

All right, all right. She needed to focus. So, it all boiled down to two possibilities: Either the postscript referred to some other “night-time secret”—which seemed highly unlikely—or the Xingfu corporation—

Five.

—had some way of knowing what played out in her solitary, hallucinatory mind when she slept—which seemed impossible. Her best bet would—

“Mm, yeah, that’s more like it.” Cookan’s voice was almost unrecognisable with its sudden clarity and diction.

Six.

“So,” he said, “eleven is it? Who’re you meeting?”

“Ah…Your assistant sub-director of innovation,” Sofoosia said, without turning.

“Oh, good old Hanish. Yeah, him and me go way back,” Cookan said.

Seven.

“You don’t say,” Sofoosia offered, hoping that would be the end of it.

It wasn’t.

“Yes indeed. Known him since he was an executive engineer down here on The Middlings, used to ride with me every day!”

Eight.

Sofoosia cocked a glance over her shoulder. For someone whose drugged-up circulatory system was permanently fused with an elevator’s control panel, Cookan looked surprisingly chipper.

“Oh? So, ah … What’s he like?” Sofoosia said.

“Old Hanish? Oh, great guy! Said he was gonna get me a promotion, he did! Promised it on the same day he got his!”

“Really? And when was this, exactly?”

“Oh, ah … a while ago now,” Cookan said, suddenly thoughtful. “Yeah, when you see him, m-maybe…maybe remind him for me?”

He was nervous, now, jittery. She looked back.

Ten.

“Sure. I’ll remind him,” she said. It wouldn’t be the last time someone told poor Cookan a lie, and it certainly wasn’t the first.

“Aww yeahs!” Cookan hollered, “And we’re here, lady! Eleven!”

The door slid open on a reception area, bland and sickly green. Sofoosia stepped out, and Cookan called out after her, “Owes, lady! Owe you so very m—” but was cut off by the closing doors.

Cookan o-mucking-Xingfu. What a schmuck.

But his schmuckery had been an education. Hanish o-Xingfu was evidently a man whose promises were not to be trusted, and that kind of uncertainty was anything but conducive to sleep.

#

6:15 and still no sign of Hanish o-Xingfu. Good thing, though: Fifteen minutes under the pallid receptionist’s glare had given Sofoosia time to perfect her refusal of whatever the assistant sub-director’s offer would turn out to be.

Still, she was nervous. Could they possibly know?

A frosted glass double door suddenly swung open to reveal a broad-shouldered person in a Xingfu corporate security uniform.

“Sofoosia o-Gordian!” the security guard bellowed, as if she wasn’t the only one there.

She offered a feeble wave. “Ah…Yep, that’s me! Right here.”

The guard’s eyes scanned her like X-rays.

“Get up. Follow me,” they said, and Sofoosia obeyed.

The guard led Sofoosia through a confusing maze of neon-lit corridors, then deposited her in a tiny meeting room furnished with a harsh steel table and ditto chair. The table held an empty cup and a steaming murkchai pot, both emblazoned with the Xingfu logo. Next to the corporate porcelain, a corporate quill pen jutted from a corporate murkinkwell. No corporate ashtray, though.

The rest of the room was empty and sterile, except for a large, blank telescreen set in the wall, a little too high up to be comfortably viewed. A camera lens stared down from above the screen, flanked by two audio horns that flowered from its sides. A wide, horizontal slot underlined the set-up like a tight-lipped mouth.

“I’ll be right outside,” the guard said, but not to reassure her. They closed the door, leaving Sofoosia in the company of her own misshapen reflection on the telescreen’s convex surface.

She felt momentarily sheepish that she had expected to meet the assistant sub-director face to face. He would, of course, be housed up there on The Management, with far more important things to do with his time than spend it slumming on The Middlings. No matter. Sofoosia was not here to network, but to listen to an offer, politely refuse it, then return to the Gordian Guardian and the breezy 18-hour workday that she enjoyed there.

“Better the level you know,” she muttered under her breath, then immediately regretted it; the old truism was anti-ambitionist, bordering on corporatreasonous. Had anyone heard her?

No, it appeared not; there was no sound but the overhead neon hum, which hopefully meant that the wall-mounted transmission array remained inopera—

CCRRRRZZZK!!!

A scream of static tore through the room as a black-and-white grain storm erupted on the telescreen, then settled into the bird-like features of an intense and scrawny-looking forty-something. His round Boodler hat identified him as a resident of The Management, but the hair it attempted to contain seemed uncharacteristically unkempt for a man of such position. And—were those polka dots on his tie? Was such a thing even legal?

“Productive morning, Sofoosia o-Gordian,” he squawked through the tinny metal speakers, eyes a-gleam behind the steam of his murkchai cup. “I must be Hanish o-Xingfu.”

“R-right, yes. Productive morning, assistant sub-director,” Sofoosia said.

Hanish o-Xingfu made an elaborate, swirly gesture. “Time’s a-wasting, diurnalist Sofoosia, and that I can’t abide. Take a seat, pour yourself a cup. It’s our finest murkomille, derived from the first ever formula I devised for our cozy corporation.”

She didn’t know what ‘cozy’ meant, but wrote it off as a Xingfu corpoquialism.

“Ah … Okay, owe you, sir,” she said and sat down. She touched the pot’s handle, then hesitated for a second. “Sorry, sir, how much …?”

“Two murkcoins fifty per cup. You may pay that ghastly thing in reception as you leave.”

Two fifty? For a cup of murkchai? Was there any way she could refuse?

Hanish’s eyes glinted. “Not to worry, valued diurnalist. Two fifty is positively prudent in light of the salary that I’m about to offer you.”

“Ah … yes, sir, about that,” Sofoosia said, but was interrupted by a sudden rattling of the pot’s lid.

Ah. Because her hand was shaking.

“Yeees?” Hanish demanded, his bobbing head marking time like a parrot’s.

“S-sorry, sir, I feel I should be honest from the outset here and inform you that I … That is to say, I … ah, how should I put—”

“Mucking Man-damn get to it already!” he shrieked, and Sofoosia jerked wildly, spilling some four murkcoins worth of murkchai right across the table.

Her gaze locked on the floor. Her face was burning.

“S-so-so-sorry, sir,” she managed, then: “I—I mean to say I—I find my current salary quite sufficient, sir!”

Oh no. Oh no no no no.

But yes.

She’d said it, and it was a blatant, damning anti-ambitionism.

The air between them was a thick soup. Her hands felt clammy on her thighs. She swallowed nothing, lifted her head back up to look at Hanish.

He was … crying? No, Man-damnit, he was giggling! But … silently? Why—

ZRCK!

“—hit the mute, how—… Ah, right! It’s okay then.”

He bubbled with mirth. “Haha, so! Well hello there, little miss Sofoosia o-Gordian! Some tits on you, declaring such flagrantly anti-ambitionist sentiments on an open line to The Management—and with corporate security posted right outside that door? Hooooh boy!”

Again Sofoosia tried to swallow, again Sofoosia failed. Muckety muck.

Hanish drew his face into a strange, manic scowl, bored his dark eyes into her.

“And that, my valued, dreaming diurnalist, is precisely the quality for which we are looking.”

She didn’t know what ‘dreaming’ meant, but also didn’t care. Suddenly she could swallow again. No immediate danger, it seemed, neither professionally nor otherwise. She stifled a yawn. “Okay–”

“That,” Hanish cut her off, “and, of course, a tiny, little sleepy-time secret.”

Oh muck. That.

His eyes bored even deeper.

“And … you go places at night. Don’t you, diurnalist Sofoosia?”

She couldn’t breathe.

“I—hk—I …”

“Yes, you do.” Again his head began to bob, marking time like a vulture.

She forced herself to inhale.

“I … I … Not exactly, sir, I … I hallucinate.”

“Do you, now?”

“Sir, it has no impact what-so-ever on my productivity, I assure you!”

His eyes laughed at her. He sipped his cup.

“Sir, I’m … I’m not crazy, sir.”

He put down the cup and grinned, flashing Murk-black teeth.

“No. You’re not crazy. And you’re not hallucinating. Your nightly—shall we say, experiences—are as real as those of your day. They just happen to happen … somewhere else.”

His eyes twinkled. Sofoosia’s stared.

“I don’t understand.”

“Heh-heh, you have questions? Yes.”

“Well, n—”

“I’m afraid, however, that I have already skirted the limits of what information I’m allowed to provide to an outsider.”

The slot below the telescreen began to whirr and click, and from it, freshly printed paper issued forth. The heading revealed it to be an employment contract.

“Now tell me, Sofoosia: In what you have believed to be hallucinations, have you ever encountered Murk?”

The endless paper ream kept ticking from the slot, riddled with tiny type in wet murkink. At least six feet worth of document so far, and still it kept on coming.

“Murk, sir? Ah, yes, sir. Quite often, I believe. In fact, I think I, ah, encountered it last night.”

“Hm. And how, precisely, did it appear?”

“It’s—Sorry, sir, it’s often hard to recall exactly, but I think I—I, uh … vomited it. Into existence. And there was … something boiling? I’m sorry, sir, I just can’t remember!”

“No no no, don’t be sorry! This is good, Sofoosia. It’s very, very good. It means that I am now at liberty to offer you a position with us here at Xingfu. A very special position in a very, very special project. And once you have signed the dotted line that should be printed right … about … now—”

The slot stopped printing and an invisible interior blade sliced the paper free. The ream fell to rest upon the floor.

“—then all your questions will find their answers. Not the least of which will be, I’m sure, ‘What in the name of the periodic table is that thing?’”

Hanish scooted aside to reveal a vast, white chamber behind him, and a strange, dark machine suspended from its ceiling. The thing was shaped like an inverted pyramid, the top of which looked lined with Murk tanks. A thick stack of paper lay underneath it.

Hanish scooted back into view. “Well?”

She looked at the contract, a serpentine pile covered in relentless, microscopic scrawl. She looked at the quill pen, Xingfu-emblazoned, murkink-loaded. Muck, she was tired. She looked at Hanish.

“Honestly, sir, I … I remain un-incentivized, sir.”

“Un-in-mucking-WHAT!?” he screeched and Sofoosia jerked back. “What precisely do you mean, diurnalist?”

“W-well … answers are all well and good, sir, as is cash, but … well, in all honesty, I’m more in it for the time.”

“The time,” he echoed, glowering.

“Yes sir, I like them, sir. The hallucinations. I …I …”

Oh muck it. At this point, what did she have to lose?

“I like to sleep,” she said.

Hanish glared at her. Then, little by little, his face cracked into a wide, murky grin.

“Oh, most valued Sofoosia. Just … just scan the first paragraph, will you?”

She read it, and—

“There, do you see?”

—and her jaw dropped.

“The job I’m offering you, diurnalist Sofoosia o-Gordian, is to sleep!”

#

Three hours later, a woozy oneironaut by the brand new name of Sofoosia o-Xingfu returned to her apartment and realised that she couldn’t remember the last time she had seen it in daylight. Granted, daylight on The Middlings wasn’t all that different from the darkness of night, layered as her city level was below that of The Management. Only the city’s upper levels—The Management, The Mansions, and at its very apex The Monomint—ever saw any real daylight, and even that came filtered through a shroud of murky smog. Really, the only light to make it in through Sofoosia’s lone window was the red of the glaring Mother’s Protectech ad across the street. Yeah, now that she thought about it, the apartment looked pretty much exactly the same as it did at night.

Still, though. To be working from home, and asleep? Sofoosia giggled.

Project Dream Job, is what Hanish had called it. The words had made little sense to her at first, but then she had learned what they meant.

She hadn’t bothered to read the contract, of course, but Hanish had summed up its salient points: salary (considerable), secrecy (absolute), schedule (flexible), responsibilities (to sleep). She had giggled then, too.

But even after she had signed, Hanish had refused to tell her how he had known about her hallucinations—or rather, as she now had learned to call them, her dreams.

She’d learned a great many things today, Sofoosia had. For the thirteenth time since leaving the Xingfu building, she counted her fingers. Ten.

Hanish’s briefing had been comprehensive, inspirational, head-spinning, world-shattering. He had begun by explaining the true, secret nature of reality.

Sofoosia stepped into her narrow hallway. She shut the door behind her, then locked it, latched it, bolted it, and armed it. She slogged into her small, single, bare-walled room and heard the bottle jingle against the murkcoins in her pocket. She reached inside, felt it cool and tingly against her fingertips, like something dead and yet alive.

She pulled it out.

“Your dreams are not hallucinations,” Hanish had said, “They are visits to somewhere else. Other markets, if you will.”

Hanish had unleashed upon her a slew of alien concepts. Her brain’s first struggle had been to grasp where these dream markets were actually located, which of the city’s seven levels could possibly contain their delirious strangeness. Her first guess had been The Monomint, given how their skies were unobscured by the street slabs of higher levels. But their landscapes—she seemed to recall all manner of them, and so many of them flat and wide and open to the point of acute agoraphobia. How could any of that fit inside the solid, hovering pyramid that made up The Metropol’s topmost level?

“Hahah! No, they’re not on The Monomint,” Hanish’d said, then gone on to considerably compound her confusion. “In fact, they’re not in The Metropol at all.”

The sentence had made no sense. “Outside The Metropol?” she’d said, “I don’t understand … Where else is there?”

“No, Sofoosia: These markets don’t exist outside The Metropol—nothing does—but they exist differently from The Metropol. And in them, you exist differently as well.”

Sofoosia’d stared at him, uncomfortably aware that her mouth hung open. “What?” she’d said, like an idiot.

The neon haze through her window cast the bottle in dramatic red. Impossible globules of light shone within it, shifting and floating about in black, viscous Murk. OneiroMurk, Hanish had called the compound, and as he’d explained its function, his every word and gesture had screamed with shopaternal pride.

But first, there had been confusion. So much confusion.

“Exist … differently?” she’d said, trying to sound as if she’d at least almost grasped the concept.

“I want you to imagine for a moment,” he’d said, “that The Metropol is not a city built of Murk and steel, but a signal. A radio signal, vibrating at one specific frequency. Can you do that for me, Sofoosia?”

Sofoosia had been surprised to find that she could.

“Good. Now I want you to imagine another radio signal along with the first, but this one vibrating at another frequency. Yes?”

“Y-yes … All right, I’ve got it. Yes.”

“You see? Both signals exist in the same space at the same time, but they occupy different frequencies, yes? If you’re tuned in to one, you can’t hear the other. Yes?”

“Huh … Yes …?”

“And thus is it also with the markets of your dreams: they exist alongside the market of The Metropol, each invisible to the other as it vibrates at its own, unique frequency. But you, when you dream—tune them in.”

“Meaning I travel to them.”

“Precisely so.”

But something had been nagging at her.

“Sir, I don’t fully understand; the thing is I don’t really do that. Travel, I mean. When I sleep, I never leave my bed, I don’t—”

“Aaah! Pay attention, valued oneironaut! I told you, didn’t I, that in them, you exist differently as well? Didn’t I, valued oneironaut? I did, and that is how you exist in your dreams: confusedly, fleetingly, alive and present in another market—while never leaving your own.”

Sofoosia placed the bottle on her bedside table, stroked a tempting pillow. The bed was her apartment’s uncontested centerpiece, as large and soft as she could afford it to be. Maybe a little more. And the sheets … She’d saved up for them for a year, then had them especially delivered from The Management. Their smoothness was like floating on water.

She loosened her tie, then counted her fingers. Ten.

“How many … markets are there, exactly?” she’d asked.

His eyes had twinkled through the telescreen. “How many dreams have you had? Too many to count, yes?”

No one knew how many dream markets there were, Hanish had explained. There they just were, vibrating at their own, separate ontological frequencies, in some ways similar to The Metropol, in others wildly divergent.

“Divergent? In what ways?”

“Well,” Hanish had said, “in each of them, different things are true.”

“What kinds of things, exactly?”

“The strangest things, the most fundamental things,” he’d said, then leaned in close to whisper, his beak-like nose absurdly enlarged on the screen. “Would you believe me, oneironaut Sofoosia o-Xingu, if I told you that there are even markets without Murk?”

And she’d remembered that she’d seen them, sometimes, at night: Hallucina—No, dreams, bright, sharp dreams of places unblackened, and of creatures and people that—

But no, that hadn’t made any sense at all.

“Sir,” she’d ventured, “I don’t understand: markets … without Murk? How does anything live there?”

“Oh, I’d hardly call it ‘living’,” Hanish’d said, and slurped his fourth murkchai. “Now, let’s charge on into the nitty-gritty of what I need. First of all, I want you to get into the habit of counting your fingers. All the time.”

Still ten.

The finger-counting would, when she was dreaming, help her remember who and where she was. Whenever her fingers were ten, Hanish had said, she would know that she was in The Metropol. Whenever they were some other number, or uncountable, she would know that she was in a dream market.

How was it supposed to work? Sofoosia didn’t understand exactly, but she trusted her new superior.

The OneiroMurk glittered darkly in its bottle on the bedside table. Sofoosia smoked a murkarette, then slipped out of her business suit and into her Iris Liberta Signature silk pajamas, and pondered whether to brush her teeth before or after drinking. Apparently the OneiroMurk would have a soporific effect, so maybe she should already be tucked in before imbibing? But she had always disliked the aftertaste of Murk, and would much rather wake up without it haunting her tongue.

Yes: drink, then brush. She sat down on her bed, grabbed the bottle, uncorked it.

“Bottoms up,” she said, and downed the OntoMurk in one tremendous gulp.

The taste was old and oily, yet fresh with overtones first sweet, then bitter, then salty, then sweeter still. The consistency was thick and sticky, yet bubbling with microscopic explosions that almost felt alive. The overall experience was neither pleasurable nor revolting, just … weird.

Huh. Anyway, teeth. She rose from her bed, turned toward the wall sink, and is falling from some impossible height toward a vast, flat city, a gigantic diamond of pink streets and little, white sugar cube houses and strange dots of green, and cutting through it all like a glittering letter Y is a river, but its water is not like water, it’s clear and unblackened like a window freshly cleaned. And she’s falling toward a basin just off and inside the glittering Y, and around and alongside her fall flakes of jet black snow that are also, somehow, flakes of frozen skin, shedding from her body against the rush of invisible air. And it comes to her that the flakes can save her from the impact of the water down below, and she reaches for them, tries to grab them, but they slip through her fingers and they are black feathers, now, and somehow she knows that they were once a bird and are trying to become one once again. All she needs to do is leave them be, despite the city and the river growing bigger down below, and despite the sudden terror she feels at the countless white-clad people on the ground, too languid, too lazy, too engrossed in song and conversation to lift their eyes and see her fall. A sharp, tall needle juts from the city’s heart, a gigantic white obelisk threatening to spear her, but the feathers weave a floor beneath her, and walls and a ceiling, weave them tight and dark and solid and dry, and they are no longer feathers, now, but an elevator car that’s descending at a controlled and careful pace. How far to go, she wonders, but the floor dial’s numbers are ones she doesn’t know, so instead she counts her fingers but they aren’t ten they’re four then six then twelve—…

By The Man.

She’s in a dream market.

And her name is Sofoosia o-Gordian—no, Sofoosia o-Xingfu is her name now, and she’s an oneironaut for the Xingfu corporation. And she lives in The Metropol, where she’s right now sleeping in her bed. And Hanish and Project Dream Job and the strangest meeting she’s ever had all flood back into her mind. She’s dreaming, and she knows it. Present in another market, while never leaving her own.

Amazed, she takes it in: the elevator’s walls and floor and ceiling are misty, transparent, solid like blackened glass. They’re made of hardened Murk, she realises; it must have come into this market through her. And outside, through the murky surface, she glimpses shadows of the dream market. Above, an impossible sky. Around, ancient feats of architecture, pillared, white, and wasteful. And below, the basin, coming closer, its surface like a boiling soup.

Suddenly, she’s afraid. The water’s coming closer and the elevator has no door! Will she … drown? Can she die here? She bangs the walls and floor and ceiling, but they all refuse to give. Then the basin swallows her up.

But still the walls refuse to give. The water seethes outside them, then quiets, grows darker as the elevator descends. None of it seeps in that she can see. She’s safe inside her murky diving bell.

At least as long as the walls don’t buckle.

She runs her hands across them, uncountable fingers probing for cracks.

Then she finds one, freezes. A hairline fracture, vertical, invisible, but her fingers tell her it is there. Owefully, though, no water is coming through. Not yet.

How long is the crack? Her finger traces it down to the floor, a straight line. Then up, higher than her head, and there it … ends? No, bends. It runs horizontally, now, about half the length of its height. Again a straight line, and again it bends. And as her finger traces it back down to the floor, she realises that it demarcates a door.

And the door opens. It swings out against her, she steps back in terror, shuts her eyes and holds her breath, but still there is no water.

She cocks open an eye.

Impossible.

Through the transparent Murk wall around the door she sees nothing but fish and bubbling water. But through the door itself she sees a room. An impossible room.

She enters it.

It’s big and lit by tubes of living neon, and fish swim past outside its dark, transparent walls, and at its centre stands a raven. The raven’s big, too, its height nearly half her own, standing, as it does, bent forward with its wings splayed out like a table.

And upon the table, a murkwriter.

She turns around. The door is gone.

And she remembers Hanish talking about her “oneirocubicle.”

So tired.

A six-wheeled office chair comes rolling out from nowhere.

“Time’s a-wasting, oneironaut Sofoosia, and that I can’t abide,” the raven croaks, its voice a ghost of Hanish’s. “Take a seat, pour yourself a cup.”

There are no cups.

But there is a seat. She sits down on the chair, lets it roll her over to the raven and the murkwriter on its back.

The beak is uncomfortably close to her knees.

The murkwriter’s letters jump from key to key.

Why a murkwriter?

Oh yes, Hanish told her: The OneiroMurk would create a conduit, he explained, a channel of communication between the dreaming Sofoosia and the mysterious upside-down pyramid machine up there on The Management, the machine he called the oneiroprinter. So whatever Sofoosia writes in here, Hanish will be able to read out there.

But what to write? Hanish told her not to worry, that it would all come to her. And now she’s here, in a dream market, with strange fish swimming past, in an oneirocubicle with a murkwriter, and what’s coming to her is nothing. Where’s her brief sheet?

“Verifiables,” the raven croaks, and fear shoots up through her nethers. “07:38,” the raven croaks on, “Slickday Yesvember 24: Gunfire at 5-E-Kappa Red Production Plant (The Manufactory). ‘F’-marked modified ferrocopter reported escaping scene (four witnesses, all mid-cred). TMPD ground ops in area (min. 6 officers). 0 casualties. Duration: 3-4 minutes.”

Ah. Here it is. Her uncountable fingers tap unreadable keys, and miraculously she takes the raven’s dictation.

“Witnesses: Approximately 50 Mother’s Protectech ammofacture personell (8% skilled, 92% un; 22% mid-cred, 63% lo, 15% no).”

Suddenly, Sofoosia becomes aware of a strange emptiness within her. Is this what Hanish expects her to spend her dream-time writing? No, that can’t possibly—

“Desirables: Event unrelated to terrorist activity, explicitly no F-Squadron involvement. Max. F-Squadron discredit.”

The croaking ceases.

So that’s it, then. Her brief sheet.

Fish swim by outside, and it comes to her that this market, with the oneirocubicle in it, is an inside-out aquarium, and something out there is looking in here, at her. With that a chill ripples through her, and she pulls the brief sheet from the murkwriter and finds that, strangely, she can read it. The words are even still the same ones that she typed. They are warm.

A fish swims by, its every scale a staring eye.

She shudders, lays the brief sheet on the raven’s back right next to the murkwriter, then begins to write.

“TOP COPS IN GUN RANGE TRIUMPH,” she types, then stares confounded as the words float off the paper into nothing. She types the words again, and again the words float off. What—

She jumps at the raven’s screech between her knees. “Time’s a-wasting!” it croaks, and hurriedly she types on.

“Derreck o-Peedee, Klarryheen o-Peedee share first place in annual marksmanship trials,” she types, and sees the murkink yet again escaping the page. The raven is silent.

Aha. She types on.

“Yesterday, Mother’s Protectech’s 5-E-Kappa Red ammofactury plant hosted the final round of this year’s TMPD sharpshooters’ championship.

“In fierce competition with six co-finalists, officers Derreck o-Peedee and Klarryheen o-Peedee proved themselves the best of the best, each shooting to a perfect score of sixty in exactly 3 minutes, 24 seconds.

“‘The trials are such a motivation for us on the force, says Klarryheen o-Peedee. “They inspire us to hone our skills to—’”

Something thuds against the dark, transparent Murk wall. She looks up and sees a fish floating outside it, large and shimmering and sporting the face of a man she does not know.

Hideous. She shivers, bends back over the keys.

“And this year’s winners look forward to putting their skills to productive use.

“‘Now I can’t wait to use my gun again to protect some private property,’ says Derreck o-Peedee.

“As astute readers no doubt recall—”

Thud.

This time, she doesn’t look up.

“—after last year’s TMPD marksmanship trials, The Muck-based criminal gang F-Squadron attempted to claim responsibility for an alleged terrorist attack during the event’s climax.

“‘They’ll likely do it again, but no upstanding consumer should credit such disinformation,’ says Klarryheen o-Peedee.

“‘Lazy liars the lot of them,’ Derreck o-Peedee chimes in, reminding readers that no F-Squadron thug has ever survived a run-in with the TMP—”

THUD!

The fish with the man’s face stares at her in horror. Its—his—nose looks broken.

“Time’s a-wasting!” the raven croaks and she bends back over her keys and THUD!

The human face contorts with pain as the fish body wiggles in reverse, then rushes forward and THUD! The face smashes into the murky wall, then retreats, mouthing bubbles of tortured despair, then THUD! What is this what is this mucking—THUD! THUD! THUD! The broken, bleeding face screams unheard words of horror THUD! THUD THUD! and the horror becomes her own “TIME’S A-WASTING!” THUD! THUD! THUD! THUD! “TIME’S A-WAAA—”

—ke and her jackhammer heart propelled her out of bed.

Sofoosia stood shaking on her soft apartment floor, her Iris Liberta signature pajamas stuck to a cold and sweaty back.

Trembling, she counted her fingers.

Ten.

A jolt of electricity as the shock clock went off. She fumbled a coin into its slot to shut it off.

4:15 AM. She’d been asleep for nearly eighteen hours. And still she was exhausted.

#

Her second meeting with Hanish o-Xingfu had been shorter than the first, and considerably less uplifting. No murkchai had been offered her, and the assistant sub-director, once he had flickered into grainy view on the telescreen, had opened the meeting with a heavy silence. Then the video feed had switched to a recording of the oneiroprinter.

Now, closer up, she’d been able to make out the Murk tubes and oily pistons of its inverted pyramid body, and all manner of electronic wiring she’d been hopeless to comprehend. A shiny print nozzle had sat at the machine’s bottom point, hovering above a blank sheet of paper. The video image had zoomed in, and Sofoosia had watched as the nozzle had squeezed out a sticky blob of murkink as if through a constipated sphincter. The blob had splotched onto the paper, transforming itself into a formless, creeping blot of black. And then, little by little; the blot had split apart into hundreds of tiny murkink droplets, and upon the sheet of paper they’d formed letters, then coalesced into words. Words that she’d recognised.

“Top Cops in Gun Range Triumph. Top Cops in Gun Range Triumph. Derreck o-Peedee, Klarryheen o-Peedee share first place in annual marksmanship trials.” And the text had gone on, melding into existence on the page, each word as she had written it in her dream.

The telescreen image had frozen on the article and Hanish’s voice had croaked like the creak of a catacomb’s door.

“What is missing from this picture?”

“M-missing … ? Nothing, sir, this is the article as I wrote it, down to the comma.”

“Really?”

A cold lump forming in her stomach, she’d stared at the telescreen, gazing intently at every word, trying to tease out of it the answer that Hanish had wanted. But it’d all been there. Unless, of course, he’d meant … Ah.

“Yes, sorry, sir. The ferrocopter that was seen leaving the area, I see that I have neglected to explain that particular verifiable. I’m terribly sorry, sir, it’s just that the dream was, ah, a fairly, ah, challenging one and I woke up before—”

“Oh look, it’s the excuses that I ordered!” Hanish had screeched. ”What’s missing is no less than eighty percent of your muckerfloating quota!”

“Q-quota?” she’d stammered.

“Yes quota!” he’d said, his eyes burning cold. “Must I truly remind you that your contract stipulates a production of no less than four articles per dose, oneironaut? Apparently! And you’ve so far delivered grand total of one—one—article! Which means you’re already three articles in the red, plus today’s four makes a total of seven articles on today’s dose. I recommend you deliver. Oh! Unless your ambition is to disappoint me?”

Her first instinct had been to protest. Nobody ever read their contracts, and Hanish’d made no mention of that particular clause before. But admitting ignorance of her contract would amount to admitting gross incompetence, which would earn her at best a return to the Gordian Guardian thruthsroom and a twenty-hour work day. So instead she’d suffered her shame in silence, collected from the security guard another bottle of OneiroMurk, and trudged her way back home.

Now, brushing her teeth in her apartment’s tiny hygiene alcove, Sofoosia’s face still burned. She’d have to read the contract at the first possible opportunity, but that opportunity was not now.

She rinsed, spat, sat down on her bed, counted her fingers. Ten.

The bottle stood on her night stand. The OneiroMurk inside it caught her gaze, held it. The concoction’s colored light globules oozed and shifted in a slow, hypnotic dance, like the continuous and leisurely birth of a hundred baby universes.

Hopefully, this time she’d be visiting somewhere more peaceful.

Seven articles. Muck.

“Bottoms up,” she said, then popped the cork and drank. The mysterious taste was the same as before: ever-shifting and impossible to pin down. She leaned back into her bed’s silky hill of pillows, and keeps leaning leaning too far and gravity turns a somersault and she slams her head into a cold, unyielding floor.

She’s in a place she’s been before, but it’s unclear to her exactly when. A room with dark, transparent walls, outside of which floats a distant shoal of fish. And on the floor stands a raven, bent over, with a murkwriter on its back.

She counts her fingers. Eight, no eleven, no nine—

And it all comes back.

As, apparently, has she. It’s the same market, the same sunken, murk-walled oneirocubicle, the same dark deep outside. The deep that wants her dead.

Seven mucking articles. She’s so tired.

She scrambles the chair back upright, takes her seat.

“Verifiables,” the raven croaks between her knees. She shudders, and begins to type.

The first assignment is a simple one: The remains of four Mother’s Protectech development executives discovered inside a malfunctioning incinerator. Desirables, as usual, include promises of zero impact on Protectech’s continued smooth operations and reassurances of its unimpeded growth. She has done at least a dozen of these for the Gordian Guardian in the past four weeks alone; she can write them in her sleep. Which is, of course, precisely what she’s about to do.

The brief sheet all typed-up and ready, she pulls it from the platen and places it next to the murkwriter. She briefly scans the transparent walls. No sign of the horrifically man-faced fish.

She begins.

How long does the article take her? She can’t really tell; time in the dream markets feels different from back in The Metropol. In however much time, though, she finishes it.

One down, she thinks as the last of its words disappear from the page. Let’s go.

“Verifiables,” the raven croaks, and her fingers rain like hammers on the keyboard.

A woman shot dead on The Meagers after claiming she’d survived four full days without Murk. Sofoosia invents a murderous rival and three hi-cred sources who attest that the woman was psychotic. Next!

“Verifiables,” the raven croaks. Rumours circulating that Xingfu’s CEO was born on the Mansions, and never worked his way up from The Meagers as he claims. Sofoosia invents the CEO’s long-lost, near-identical brother, plus a thrilling case of mistaken identity. Next!

“Verifiables!” Tall Mall staff on The Manufactory denied their Cleptember salaries, desirables include an irrefutable excuse. This one’s harder, until Sofoosia lets out a “Hah!” and blames the missing funds on a robbery perpetrated by the terrorists of F-Squadron.

Four down. This is going surprisingly well.

Drip.

…

What … what was that?

Drip.

She lifts her head.

The raven’s beak snaps between her knees, but Sofoosia cannot look away.

“Time’s a-wasting, and that I can’t abide!”

Drip.

The tiniest of puddles is forming on the floor.

Drip.

Oh, The Man.

“TIME’S A-WASTING!!!”

There’s a crack in the ceiling.

Drip.

Drip.

Drip drip drip drip drip drip drip drip—

She kicks off from the floor, sends the chair clattering.

Oh muck. The crack is widening. Can she drown in here?

“TIME’S A-WASTING, ONEIREPORTER SOFOOSIA O-XINGFU, AND THAT I CANNOT ABIIIDE!!!”

Muck! She has to do something! What the mucking—

The murkwriter. Despite its surreal, shifty keyboard it looks exactly like a Loopus Noos Standard No. 8. And if it is, then it’s bound to have a …

She digs her uncountable fingernails in beneath the murkwriter’s spool cover, forces it off.

There! A glass cylinder the size of a wine bottle, sloshing with black. The Standard No. 8’s murkcontainer. She rips it out of the housing, tears off a length of paper. Her hands are sticky and smeared.

But the ceiling’s too high, she can’t reach the leak. The only way is to …

She wrestles the chair upright, rolls it in beneath the leak. Croesus Heist, the chair’s so rickety.

The drip’s a steady stream now.

She steps up onto the chair, grabs the seatback and stands stock still as the chair swivels to a rest.

Her knees shake as she straightens.

Steady … okay. Now!

She dowses the paper in Murk, smears it out across the crack and somehow it…

It works. The dripping stops.

“TIME’S A-WAAAAASTIIIING!!!” the raven screams, and she stumbles off the chair.

Okay. Okay, now to reinstall the—

KA-SPLASH!!!

Suddenly she’s soaked in a bucketful of murkless water, but … a bucketful? Isn’t there a whole basin—

“Eye one telephooont …” The voice, from above, like a slowed-down, haunted tape …

She’s terrified to look, but does.

And there, squeezing through the crack in the ceiling, a mass of horrid tentacles. And trapped within their squirmy, swirling centre is a face. A face that, behind its twisted, mindless agony, is familiar.

A face that once belonged to Cassandy o-Gordian.

Her fired ex-colleague’s eyes drip with sickly need, trapped within the boneless confusion of that beastly body. Sofoosia shrinks away from it and—

“TIIIIIIME!!!” the raven shrieks, its wings flapping like a fire’s angry tongues.

Sofoosia can’t move, can’t think. The Cassandy-thing’s body squeezes further in, the tentacles lashing out and trying to trap Sofoosia in their slimy embrace what to do what to do what to do?

She grips the murkcontainer and sees her sleeve is stained with black.

Her sleeve … She’s wearing her suit. Does that mean—

“Soooo … fooochsiaaa …” howls Cassandy’s mouth, and the eyes weep tears of horror. A tentacle grazes Sofoosia’s scalp, sticks to her hair, and the rest of the monstrous thing oozes closer, its suctioned limbs reaching for her, trying to entrap her in a moist and deadly hug. What to mucking—

Her suit. Her pocket. She reaches in.

Her lighter.

Well, what do you know.

She crams a strip of paper into the murkcontainer, then lights it like a fuse. The fire’s enough to frighten back the tentacles, but not to slow the thing’s advance. So she rams the murkcontainer into Cassandy’s face, shoves it in, buries it there, inside the flesh of that skull-less visage, then throws herself to the floor as the murkcontainer explodes.

Burning Murk flies everywhere, then cools, solidified.

She pushes herself up and looks.

There’s no more crack. No more monster. Just a solid lump of rock-hard Murk fused into the oneirocubicle’s ceiling.

“TIIIIIIIIME!!!” the raven screams, and births a black, cylindrical egg.

She breathes, and gets to her feet. The egg is not an egg. It’s a murkcontainer. She loads it up into the murkwriter.

“Verifiables,” the raven croaks.

#

How could she still be so tired? Since the last meeting she had slept, now, for two days straight, and was—incredibly—two articles ahead of her quota.

The last meeting hadn’t been with Hanish, but with the Xingfu security guard, who’d provided her with a week’s worth of OneiroMurk doses. So far she’d done four.

The taste of Murk had been stronger in this new batch. She felt it linger in her system, haunting her muscles with a strange, polluted stiffness.

Sofoosia put out her murkarette in the bedside ashtray, then counted her fingers. Ten.

The adjusted formula seemed to be working. No monsters of the deep had plagued her dreams these past sessions, and she’d gotten an incredible amount of work done. Incredible, but also just sufficient. If she could only step it up a tiny bit more, get a little more ahead of the quota, she could buy herself a night off. A night of sleep without OneiroMurk, of rest, and of good old-fashioned dreams in vast and unwalled markets.

But she’d need to be at least four articles in the black to get there, meaning she’d need to do six if she was going to get there tonight. Croesus. Nothing to do but push on through.

Sofoosia lay back against her pillows, popped the cork, swallowed, and she’s sitting in front of a murkwriter, but its letters are jumping from key to key. The murkwriter stands on a giant raven’s back, its beak uncomfortably close between her knees. The room is neon-lit, with walls of solid black.

She counts her fingers. Thirteen, no eight—

Oh. Right.

At least now the Murk-reinforced walls fully block her view of the murderous deep. And, more importantly, its view of her. And even more importantly: with Murk walls bunker thick, there’s no way another monster is getting in to muck up her productivity.

“Verifiables,” the raven croaks.

Please The Man, let it be an easy one.

It is. And the second one.

But the third:

“Verifiables: 13:44, Moneyday Yesvember 27. Ex-headitor of Gordian Guardian escapes Muck elevator on The Manufactory, claims paper prints fake truths, distributes classified brief sheets to estimated 20 Necroil remurkery personell (5% no-cred, 15% lo, 50% mid, 30% hi). Location: Intersection 5-F-Gamma Street / 5-F Purple Avenue. Additional witnesses: estimated 166. Suspect arrested on-site by TMPD personell. 26 brief sheets recovered and destroyed, 14 unrecovered.”

Sofoosia takes ferocious dictation, but something about the verifiables is tugging at her memory. Gordian Guardian … Could … could it be …?

“Suspect,” the raven croaks, “Threpetta o-Gordian (hi-cred, seniority 28 years).”

Sofoosia falters. Threpetta?

Is she … is she supposed to feel something about this?

“Time’s a-wasting!”

Back on the keys. Feelings can wait.

“Desirables,” the raven croaks.

Her fingers hover over the keyboard, ready to pounce.

The raven croaks, “None of it happened.”

What?

None of it happened? With 186 witnesses? That’s … that’s inconceivable, unimaginable! They’re called verifiables for a reason! She can’t just … can’t just deny that they happened. Impossible!

No, there has to be a way. Hanish would never muck her over like that. There has to be way.

“Time’s a-wasting, oneironaut Sofoosia o-Xingu!” the raven croaks, but Sofoosia snaps back, “I know, just shut up already! I need to think!”

The raven glowers up at her, but its beak stays shut.

All right, there’s a reason she’s got this job. She can do this.

She pulls the brief sheet from the murkwriter, reads it, peers at every word to tease out an idea. There has to be something there, some aspect of the situation that she can magnify or explain away or twist to suit her purpose. Something, there must be something …

Muck.

She needs to pee.

It’s not an emergency, not yet, but the pressure on her bladder is already hard to ignore. And getting worse.

She tries to re-read the brief sheet, gets halfway through and gives up.

She needs to go. Now. But where? There’s nothing here but a chair and a raven, everything else is just bare, black walls. She can’t even see through them anymore.

Nnngh … It’s getting worse. She needs to solve this.

She gets up from the chair and no!

Was that a drop?

A warm, sudden moistness confirms it.

Oh no.

The pressure’s unbearable.

Oh no.

She hops away from the raven, as far away as she can, all while unzipping her trousers and pulling them down and … and …

…

Oh sweet Market, Murk, and Monomint …

Relief shudders through her like an orgasm. The sharp tang of urine rises from the floor, but its sting is as nothing to the bliss of her bladder.

There.

She’s squatting in the middle of the steamy puddle. Miraculously, her trousers are dryish, and the raven’s claws and the chair’s wheels are safe as well. But what to do about the—

“TIIIME!!!”

“All right, all right!” She zips up, leaves her shoes in the puddle, gets back in the chair.

All right, where was she? Threpetta o-Gordian—No, better to think of her as The Suspect. She can’t afford more distractions, not now. Okay. The Suspect. Can she do the psychosis thing again? No, of course not; The Suspect is a known hi-cred professional, she needs something more … more …

Shlp.

…

What was that? It came from … the floor?

Shlp-shlp.

Oh The Man. What now?

She lifts her gaze.

Ripples are forming across the urine puddle’s surface, but they’re moving in the wrong direction. Not outwards, but inwards. And the puddle seems to be shrinking, retreating in on itself.

But it isn’t shrinking. It’s changing. Something’s forming at its centre, rising, like a golden sculpture that is melting in reverse.

She kicks the chair back, gets to her feet. What the muck is this?

The puddle sucks itself into itself and rises, a slowly growing pillar of golden pee. It swells and oozes and continues to rise, as if the laws of gravity and motion somehow don’t apply to Sofoosia’s sour discharge.

Revulsion battles horror, but the feelings find a truce and take her reigns together. She shakes with disgust, nearly vomits with anxiety as she stares at the shimmering tower of her own piss, now almost Sofoosia’s height and owefully no longer growing. But it is changing: no longer just a shapeless pillar, now, the flowing cylinder of wizz slithers gyroscopically into the shape of some humanoid creature, wavy, widening streams of urine gimballing into a head. Amputated waterfalls grow into reeking, transparent arms, and the bottom of a sloshy, yellow trunk divides into legs, parted as if by an ancient prophet, or a lover.

Sofoosia stares, transfixed. It is hideous.

The liquid body squirms, its shape flowing into ever more distinct detail. Hands form—No, claws, huge, crablike claws that snatch at empty air. And the head grows the face of Cookan, the Xingfu elevator man, but its jaws are the jaws of a fish, opening and closing on a stream of sloshy, glottal sounds. The eyes are burning with ambition and despair.

Oh no, she thinks.

But yes. The monster of the deep is back.

The grotesque creature stands before her, staring at her with a desperate yearning, mouthing noises like a drowning language. Then it staggers forward, its feet slopping step by step toward her, its snapping, dripping claws reaching out for her like a baby’s arms for its prostimom.

All she wants is to get away, but the solid Murk oneirocubicle offers neither refuge nor escape. She needs to fight. But her only weapon lays locked inside the murkwriter.

She lunges for it, pries her fingernails into the spool cover crack. She pulls and pulls, but the cover refuses to budge.

The stink of pee grows stronger, and Cookan’s shimmering, yellow half-face is so very close to her, now, its ichthyoidal mouth gurgling sounds that, somehow, she remembers: “May … beery … mine … dim … formy …”

Tearing pain strains her fingertips, but still the Man-damned cover won’t give. She screams something, doesn’t know what. A golden drop hits her hand like an acid kiss and she gives up on the murkwriter, stumbles back, away from the monster and her only hope of defeating it.

Nothing exists, now, except the hard Murk wall at Sofoosia’s back and the sloshing, reeking monster trudging wetly toward her. The weight of her horror presses her body into a corner, curls it up into a ball of panic, and Sofoosia’s every cell screams that yes, she can die in here, but there’s nothing to do except to try and shrink herself into nothingness, to try at that with all her might and terror, to try at that and fail.

To fail, and let the stench overwhelm her, and the dripping claws close around her, and the fish-like jaws whisper her name into her ear and as the urine soaks her suit and skin and burns like acid into her body she screams awake and kept on screaming for the seconds it took her to realise where she was, and that her bed was wet. She lifted the covers and was met with the acrid stink of her own fresh piss.

Her trembling hands fumbled a murkarette into her mouth and lit it. She inhaled, and the fear subsided enough to let her think.

Two. Two articles, she’d done, meaning she was on quota, but only just. Still four articles short of her goal, and—as things currently stood in the dream market—hopeless to reach it. The oneirocubicle’s solid Murk walls no longer provided protection from the deep, because this time the deep had come in through her.

What the muck what she going to tell Hanish?

Heist, why the muck hadn’t she read that mucking contract before—

…

No. Wrong question.

Why the muck not read it now?

#

For the fourth time Sofoosia navigated the lobby’s throng by the light of Xingfu’s neon dragon. She put out her murkarette, paid her three murkcoins to the elevator, and rode it to the eleventh floor, oweful that Cookan’s increasingly manic attentions were focused, now, on another of his passengers.

By the time the security guard picked her up from reception, Sofoosia had smoked another three murkarettes. They and her adrenaline were all that was keeping her awake.

The tiny, white meeting room was at first too bright, its merciless neon glare tugging at her frayed sense of self. The harsh steel table was empty, the looming telescreen black. The harsh steel chair looked preternaturally inviting, but Sofoosia was afraid to sit. Sleep’s yawning maw was threatening to swallow her whole. If she allowed herself to relax now, she would doubtless fall right into it.

She stared at her reflection in the telescreen and baggy eyes stared back. Nothing but sleep for two days straight, and still she was exhausted. Exhausted, and deprived of her old dreams and their relaxing, playful strangeness. It needed to stop. She was certain that Hanish would understand.

CCRRRRZZZK!!! A blizzard of static erupted on the telescreen, then dissolved into the shape of—

…

Who the muck … ?

Murk-slicked hair crowned a hatless scalp, and the forehead below it bore a bar code tattoo. The eyes held a determined terror, and it took her a second to recognise the face as, indeed, Hanish o-Xingfu’s. His tightly buttoned suit was white, and his polka dot tie had been replaced with a noose.

“Productive morning, Sofoosia o-Xingfu,” Hanish said, his dry, creaky voice betraying a tense, tattered tremble. “You will no longer call me by my previous name. I am now kamikazecutive 9699-000-6666. You may address me as 9699.” He twitched, just ever so slightly. A glitch in the transmission?

“Oh … Ah … Right,” Sofoosia said. “Productive morning, 9699. And ah … congratulations.”

“Owe you,” he said, but didn’t smile.

“Evens. A … a well-deserved promotion, sir, I’m sure.”

“Yes,” 9699 said, and swallowed. “It is very exciting.”

9699 twitched again. It wasn’t a technical glitch. He had flinched, seemingly at nothing. That was new, as was his uncomfortable silence. His eyes wandered, lost in preoccupation.

Sofoosia had never before seen a kamikazecutive—well, that wasn’t strictly true; she had seen murkographs, of course, but never a live feed of an actual kamikazecutive actually speaking to her. Or not speaking, as the case currently was.

She cleared her throat and 9699 snapped out of his tormented reverie.

“Right, yes,” he said, gathering himself. “As is presumably apparent, our project has received some favourable attention on The Monomint. Our work is now Priority Alpha, and I answer directly to—” He seemed to choke, then swallowed. “To The Man.”

Fear tightened her stomach.

The Man.

His transcorporational presence high up there on The Monomint was felt by the city mostly in the abstract, as an unobtainable ideal of corporate ambition, an ever-present, pulse-pounding inspiration, and a guarantee of rich rewards earned from ruthless labour. Never before had she felt The Man like this, real, like a concrete force exerting His pressure so close to her own life. And that pressure lay directly and heavily upon the white-suited 9699, who up until yesterday had been called Hanish o-Xingfu, and it found its expression in his nervous tics and distraction, and in his forehead’s bar code, and in the noose tie tied so tightly around his neck.

“This does, however, not impact upon your salary, nor any other provision of your contract,” 9699 said, and flinched. “I, however, have many new … responsibilities. You will report with the utmost brevity.”

She counted her fing—

“Now, oneironaut!”

“Ah, sorry, sir. I’m, ah, I’m currently on quota, sir.”

“I know. As opposed to yesterday, when you were, I believe, two articles ahead. Do I smell yet another deliciously crafted excuse coming up?”

“Ah, no, sir.”

“So? What do you have to say for yourself?”

Surely he’d understand.

“Sir, I would like to resign my position, sir.”

He stared at her through the telescreen, his jaw slack and petrified. Had the transmission froz—

“So. You are crazy after all. Mad as a miser.”

He was trembling.

“Ha— … Sir, if you’ll allow—”

“Allow?” he screeched, and the video image shook as he slammed his fists on an off-screen tabletop. “Allow? Hoh, my valued oneironaut, you don’t need me to allow you anything! We live in a free city, do we not? Yes! And you are on quota! Hoop-dee doop-dee mucking doo! By all means, resign! But allow me to remind you that if you do so, you will find yourself A) in breach of contract; B) out of a job; and C) in an inter-level elevator wondering how much sleep you’ll be getting as you starve to death among the shit and cannibals of The Muck!”

“Sir, I will not be in breach. Section 16, paragraph 74, sir: My contract stipulates a trial period, at any point during which my employment may be terminated at zero notice.”

“Terminated by me!”

“S-sir, sorry, sir: It, ah, the contract does not explicitly specify which party is—”

“What?” 9699 muted his mic, then yelled and repeatedly snapped his fingers at someone off-screen. Seconds later the someone handed him a ream of tightly-printed paper. 9699 furiously scanned it, scrolling through its litany of terms and conditions. Suddenly he stopped, then read and re-read the same few lines again and again, sharply focused and increasingly enraged.

His eyes, as he turned them back on Sofoosia, were like gun barrels. He slammed his fists and roared, but the only sound on Sofoosia’s end was the hum of neon lights.

“Sorry sir, you’re still muted. Sir.”

9699 fumed and rummaged, then ZRCK!

Sofoosia braced herself for some bellicose rant, but only static filled the air.

9699 looked lost. His lip was quivering.

“Ah … Sir? Is everything all right?”

He unbuttoned his jacket, lifted his noose tie into view. From its end dangled a snap hook.

“What do you think?” he said.

Oh.

Right.

Of course.

He reported to The Man. The former assistant sub-director of the Xingfu corporation was now a kamikazecutive of The Monomint—with all that that entailed.

“Sofoosia … I c-can’t fail. He’ll make me kill myself.”

“Yes, no, I see that. Right. I, ah, I get it. Yeah, that’s ah … that’s a rough one.”

9699 seemed to be groping for some non-existent word, then gave up. “Don’t … don’t quit,” he said.

“Right, right,” Sofoosia said, “So, ah, I really realise that this is, ah, maybe not so great for you, sir, but ah … I’m going to have to go ahead and quit anyway. Sorry!”

“No! No no no no. Why? Why? What’s the problem, we can work this out, surely? Yes!”

“Yeah, I don’t think we can, sir. Sorry, it’s ah, it’s all just getting a bit much. In a sort of a force majeure sort of way.”

“What do you mean? Is this the dream market creature upon which you blamed your initial underperformance? But I was led to believe we had solved that problem, with my new OneiroMurk formula!”

“Well … Yes, in some sense I believe it is the same creature, and … well, in my last session it found its way in despite the new formula, sir. I’m not sure it’s a problem that’s solvable, you know … chemically. Sorry.”

A slow darkness encrusted 9699.

“Well, it had better mucking be, oneironaut Sofoosia o-Xingfu, because you’re going back into that oneirocubicle whether you quit here today or not. The only question is how many times.”

“I … I’m sorry, sir, what?”

“You are Project Dream Job’s first and only oneironaut, Sofoosia o-Xingfu. But really, it could have been anyone.”

Her brain blew a fuse. Could have been anyone? But … but surely she—

“Everyone dreams, Sofoosia. You dream. I dream. The security guard outside that door dreams. Your customother dreams, your prostimother dreams. Everyone dreams.”

Sofoosia counted her fingers.

Ten.

He grinned. “Useful, isn’t it? The counting? Yes, it is. But think: How would we ever have known it would work if you really were the The Metropol’s only dreamer? There’s no way.”

The cold clarity of his logic tied her belly in an icy knot. Her mind flailed, dizzy with weariness and narrow with fear.

“No … That can’t … I mean, if … Why doesn’t … why doesn’t anyone talk about it?”

His grin widened. “Why didn’t you?”

The thought of it brought a frantic blush to Sofoosia’s cheeks, an embarrassed heat that somehow both rose out of her gut’s freezing fear and fed back into it.

She opened her mouth. Nothing came out.

“And there’s your answer. For you, me, every single one of us, those somnambulant exiles from reality are so shameful that we can’t even stand to give them a name. Sleep—that blighted, unproductive, unconsumptive waste of time—is reprehensible enough as it is, but compounded by the sheer unforgivable anti-ambitionism of such workless, murkless visions of corporatreason? You wouldn’t go shouting about that from the rooftops, now would you? No. But what if someone”—he pointed at himself—“were to turn our deepest shame into the instrument of our most profitable victory? That would be very exciting.”

“Victory? What … ?”

“The Metropol is at war, Sofoosia, and our enemy is sleep. The great thief, stealing our workforce for hours each day, months every year. For centuries The Man has waged this war, wielding no weapon but discipline and Murk. Sure, murk a worker to his eyeballs and he’ll toil the whole night through, but keep it going just a little bit too long and suddenly he’s a write-off, either mad or plain, old dead. A biological thing, it seems: stimulants notwithstanding, the sleepless body will eventually shut down. You can imagine The Man’s vexation.”

All she felt was exhaustion.

“But now imagine His excitement at learning that a certain assistant sub-director of innovation had successfully, through OntoMurk, established an operational line of communication between The Metropol and a dream market, thus enabling a dreamer to do actual, The Man’s-honest work—in her sleep! Yes indeed, His excitement for Project Dream Job is tremendous. So tremendous, in fact, that He has ordered an urgent transition to full implementation.”

“Wait … Full implementation? What does that mean, exactly?”

9699 leaned in, loomed on the telescreen. He grinned. “My OneiroMurk is going in the drinking water.”

“What … so … OneiroMurk … ?”

“For everyone. Forever.”

So … she’d be trapped in that horrid, Murk-walled oneirocubicle every night … forever?

She counted her fingers.

Muck.

“And … what does urgent transition mean?”

“Tomorrow night. The Man feels … strongly feels that The Metropol has lost an extortionate number of work hours to its enemy as it is. He expects, now, a victory, one decisive and—most importantly—immediate. So, valued oneironaut, you can see where that leaves me, what with the issue of this creature sabotaging your productivity. Going forward, I have no reason to believe that such disturbances will be limited to only your oneirocubicle. We need to solve this problem, Sofoosia. You need to solve this problem.”

“B-but sir, I don’t believe that is possible!”

“Not possible, eh? Is that the attitude, do you think, that elevated me to the position that I currently … enjoy?” He flinched. “It is not. Not once in my career have I encountered a problem that could not be solved by pumping Murk into it. Or, in your case, water.”

“S-sir?”

“I am prepared to offer you a lifetime’s supply of bottled drinking water—purified water, not a trace of OneiroMurk in it—provided you remain with the project, find some way to banish this dream creature, and put an end to its sabotage. If you do so, Sofoosia, you alone among the Metropol’s workers will spend your life dreaming freely in a thousand different markets, just like you did before. If, however, you don’t, you will spend all your days in the Gordian Guardian truthsroom and all your nights in your subaquatic oneirocubicle, all your days and all your nights till death doth give you rest. So. What do you say?”

#

“Make sure you don’t lose it,” the 11^th floor receptionist said.

The suitcase weighed heavy in Sofoosia’s hand, chained as it was to her wrist. She paid her three murkcoins, then watched the elevator’s floor dial count down from fourteen. Heist, how she hoped there would be other passengers.

The door dinged open.

There weren’t.

“Ooooooh, whatever have you got there?” Cookan yelled, straining against his blood tubes for a better look.

“That … that’s classified,” Sofoosia said, shifting the suitcase behind her as if to serve it as a human shield.

Cookan’s jaw dropped scandalously into a smile of faux-conspiracy. “Sofoosia, you devious minx! Get in here and tell me all about it!”

She stepped inside. “Ground floor. No more questions.”

She heard the rapid-fire rattle of the “Downers” dispenser as Cookan yanked eleven little pills out of its spout, then a crunchy chomp as he shoved them all into his mouth. That would shut him up for some glorious seconds.

The elevator jerked into motion. She counted her fingers, then fixed her gaze on the floor display. Ten and ten.

Behind her, Cookan’s foot tapped like an engine’s piston, and he chewed and mm-ed with a haste that advertised an all-consuming need to chatter. She wasn’t worried. He’d cool off as they descended.

Nine.

“Mm! There!”

Oh. Wonderful.

“Now where the muck were we, Sofoosia my girl? Ey? Ey? Ey? Oh yeah! That’s right! Whatcha got in that suitcase, girl? Is it, like a big fat batch of murketamine? Hah? Is that it? That’s it right? Right? Right? Right?”

Still nine.

“I told you. It’s classified.”

Eight, finally.

“Aaaah! Okay, okay, okay! But hey, listen! Did you get a chance this time? Did you? With Hanish? About my promotion and that?”

Oh, Cookan. The poor, gullible fool. After all this time, how could he still believe—

Wait a minute.

Was Sofoosia being a gullible fool as well?

“Come on come on come on! Did you? You did, right?”

Seven.

Why did she trust 9699?

“Sorry, Cookan. There just wasn’t enough time.”

“Aaargh! There’s never enough time!”

What if … ? Hmm …

“You know,” she said, “I’ve got a couple of pieces of information for you. From up top.”

“What, like, like, valuable shit?”

“Oh yeah, absolutely. First of all: His name’s not Hanish o-Xingfu anymore, and he’s a kamikazecutive now, and his name is 9699 … something.”

“Oh yeah?”

Six.

She turned. He was calmer now, but sharp and alert.

“I guess that’s pretty good for me, right? I mean, I got plenty of friends in high places, but now I got one on the Monomint, and that’s the highest there is! Soon as he … soon as he remembers. Okay, what else?”

All right. Time to put 9699 to the test.

“He knows, Cookan. He knows what happens to you when you sleep.”

Cookan stumbled back as if from a rabid dog.

“No! What … no … it’s not true, I don’t … I don’t see anything when I sleep …”

Ha!

“I never said you saw anything, Cookan. But 9699 knows you do. The Man knows you do.”

He hid his face, sunk into his corner.

“No … n-no …”

So. It was true.

“Yes, I’m afraid,” Sofoosia said. “If I were you, I’d lay as low as I could from now on.”

One.

The door dinged open. She exited in silence.

#

Meanwhile, three city levels above Sofoosia and The Middlings, kamikazecutive 9699-000-6666 strode toward a tall, distant double iron door emblazoned with the logo “TM”, which, in truth, stood for pretty much everything in the city below. Dark, neon-scarred walls leaned in like a coffin’s lid, and above the door shone a single, red dot. 9699’s footsteps rang hollowly on the hallway’s iron floor as he approached. His slowly shifting angle revealed near the door a triangular window, through which, little by little, could be seen the screen-lit face of a security kamikazecutive.

His facade of professional resolve betrayed only by the slighest buckling of the knees, 9699 walked up before the double door and its piercing ruby eye.

“Scan,” the sec-kam said through her intercom, and 9699 lifted his trembling head to the heavens. A blood red ray shot out from the eye. Its sharp, crimson light caressed his forehead’s barcode.

“Proceed,” the sec-kam said. The doors slid open.

He hesitated, as if that would improve his odds of surviving.

“Proceed!”

9699 flashed a nervous smile in the sec-kam’s direction, then stepped through the door.

The chamber was vast and dark, and his footsteps echoed from distant walls that leaned in toward its apex. A narrow staircase curved up through the darkness. He climbed it on increasingly shaky legs.

Hundreds of chains dangled from the diagonal walls, and from each hung a limp bag of skin in vaguely human form. The Man had been many different men in His time. Many men, and many women too.

The staircase terminated in a large, circular platform up above. An aperture gate was visible in the platform’s bottom. A trapdoor, upon which 9699 would be expected to stand as he delivered his report. His sole objective would be to keep that trapdoor shut, and thereby himself alive.

A deep and greedy slurping sounded from atop the platform, and its tallest piece of furniture came gradually into view: a wine rack, stacked to capacity with countless bottles of the finest Murkot.

Step by trembling step he climbed the stairs. The slurping grew louder, more of the wine rack became visible, and the buckling of his knees became impossible to ignore.

Finally, he stepped onto the platform. His next step would place him squarely upon the aperture trapdoor.

“Come on. Don’t be shy,” a dark voice said, charming as a pocket calculator and sprightly as a corpse.

9699 lifted his gaze and shuddered as his eyes met those of The Man.

The Man’s current form was a little boy’s, but the body’s age was betrayed by nothing save its build and stature. Even dwarfed by His expansive, naked desk and the seemingly oversized wine glass in His underage hand, The Man still loomed there across the platform, loomed with all the gravity of a black hole drinking space. Pearls of perspiration glistened across His bald pate, ran in rivulets down His predatory scowl, down that recently young face that seemed to have never known a smile. His eyes were black, His suit was black, and the twin-tongued tie that of its own apparent volition danced around His neck was black. Black were the jutting bottles behind Him, black was the Murkot that sloshed in His glass, black was the back of the screen that lit His face, and black was the despair His very presence inspired.

He beckoned with His wine glass, a slow, all-encompassing gesture. “Step forward, 9699-000-6666.”

9699 did as ordered. Now the trapdoor’s closed aperture was all that separated him from a ten kilometre drop through the city’s levels, all the way down to the hard and merciless ground of The Muck.

Somewhere up above, a low, whirring hum began.

“Report,” The Man said.

9699 licked his lips. “The, ah, Xingfu plants are pumping out OneiroMurk at capacity, sir, and they assure me that all deadlines—”

“They … assure you?”

9699’s eyes widened in terror. The hum whirred on overhead. Then: “Sorry, sir. I mean just, just … that all deadlines will be kept, sir. Sorry sir.”

“And you are, as we agreed, confident in the deliverables of your pilot project?”

The hum ceased.

9699 swallowed. “Oh yes, sir. Most assuredly, sir.”

The Man scowled at him. “The lie detector behind you. Unhook it.”

9699 slowly turned around. A machine dangled there, suspended from the hooked end of a chain, fitted with blood pressure cuff, galvanometer finger sensors, and breath rate recording tubes.

“Unhook the Me-damned lie detector, 9699!” The Man barked, and 9699 hurried to follow his orders. He unhooked the machine as ordered, and set it down upon the platform. Then he tightened the blood pressure cuff around his arm as ordered, strapped the breath rate tubes around his torso as ordered, and, as ordered, clipped the galvanometer sensors to his fingertips. Then he stood there, trembling.

“Turn it on,” The Man said.

9699 searched frantically for a second, then found the switch and pressed it. The machine came to life with beeps and blinking lights, all echoed from the screen on The Man’s desk.

Effortfully, 9699 breathed.

The Man’s all-black eyes glowered. “You are, as we agreed, confident in the deliverables of your pilot project?”

9699 grimaced. Sweat beaded his tattooed forehead.

“Is not your pilot project—your Project Dream Job—completed?” The Man said.

“Ah it’s … No, sir, not in its entirety, so to speak. There’s just one thing, one tiny, little thing, that my oneironaut needs to test—well, to … to fix, I suppose would be the more precise … you know.”

“I do not know, nor do I care to know. See that it is fixed.”

“Yes, sir! I will, sir!”

“Very well. Oh, and 9699-000-6666: You are, as we also agreed, still confident in our project’s secrecy?”

9699 shuffled his feet, squirmed like a worm underfoot.

“Ah … sir I, ah … I was forced, sir, to reveal to my oneironaut that, ah …”

“Reveal what, 9699-000-6666? Not the project’s scope and true ambition, surely?”

“Sir …it—it was necessary, sir, for purposes of … of motivation, sir.”

“Motivation.”

“Y-yes, sir.”

“Hook your tie, 9699-000-6666.”

“Sir … N-no …”

The Man narrowed His eyes.

With trembling hands and a quaking lip, 9699 hooked his noose tie to the chain on which the lie detector had descended.

He looked at the trapdoor beneath his feet. It wasn’t the fall that killed you.

“What do you have to say for yourself?” The Man said.

“Sir I wish to promote her, sir!” 9699 blurted out.

“Promote her? To what, exactly?”

“The position of thanatonaut, sir. I believe we are ready for phase three. Immediately upon Project Dream Job’s completion.”

“Tomorrow.”

9699 swallowed. “Yes, sir.”

“I see. Interesting. And secrecy would be re-established.”

“Precisely so, sir.”

“Tomorrow. You would have to work awfully hard, I imagine?”

“A-always, sir! Heh, but if need be, sir, I’ll just chug a dose of OneiroMurk myself, sir! Heh-heh! Heh-heh ... Heh …”

…

A pin dropped.

“S-sorry, sir. New suit.”

Furious and empty, The Man’s eyes were like holes in reality.

After an eternity, He spoke.

“Unhook your tie.”

Tears of relief gathered in 9699’s eyes.

“O-owe you, sir.”

“We agree, then, that phase three will commence tomorrow, with your Sofoosia o-Xingfu as our first thanatonaut. And should she refuse? Then, 9699-000-6666, our first thanatonaut will be you.”

#

Meanwhile, on The Middlings, a woman stood on the edge of a slabscraper’s roof, lit from below by the red neon light of a Mother’s Protectech ad. Her binoculars scanned the neighbouring slabscraper’s facade and the teeming, distant sidewalk below.

She was tall and dressed in a thick military coat lined with wool, a violent affront to The Metropol’s strict sartorial regulations. A further, positively nuclear, affront was the dome-shaped, aerodynamic chrome helmet that covered her head, and the doubtlessly illegal chrome grill visor that covered half her face. Fingerprint-preventing leather gloves covered her hands, and the shoes that covered her feet were wheeled like an airplane’s landing gear. Leaned up against the roof’s handrail stood a ramshackle contraption sporting shoulder straps and folded wings.

The woman was called Comrade K, and she felt more at home inside her new code name than she ever had inside her body. Her life had been a constant battle to fit in, and now, with her recent recruitment to the freedom fighters known as F-Squadron, the war was finally won. But straight away, a new campaign had presented itself: the battle to prove herself worthy of replacing the Squadron’s current and inept commander.

Comrade F’s staticky voice crackled to life inside her helmet. “K, any sign?”

She sighed. “No, Comrade F. No sign. If there was sign, I would have called it in, wouldn’t I?”

“Easy, Comrade K. You’re new. I have to make sure.”

At least he was forthright about his distrust. Still, though. It should be her, there, calling the shots from the F-Bomber’s cockpit. Sooner or later it would be.

Through the binoculars she saw Comrade U and Comrade C treading the same stretch of sidewalk back and forth, all the while trying to blend in with the pedestrian throng. Stupid. They were drawing attention. They should be hiding near the building’s entrance. C behind those trash cans in the alley, U under the park-tracked railtruck that he was supposed to blow up.

But no. Back and forth before the entrance they marched and it would only be a matter of time before—

“Comrades,” Comrade F’s voice crackled, “I’ve intercepted a transmission you should know about.”

Down below she saw C stopping in her tracks and U touching his ear. Croesus Heist, what were they thinking?

Comrade F crackled on, “From Xingfu SecOps liaison to The Monomint Inter-Corporate Coordination. Verbatim: ‘Dragon Egg en route, suspect activity recorded. Covert sec team requests TMPD air support, four repeat four units. Over.’ And then, from TMICC back to Xingfu SecOps: ‘Copy, four units. Order issued, Xingfu, the boys in black’ll have your back.’ F-Squadron, thoughts?”

Comrade K had a thought. “Yes, Comrade F, here’s one: They’re mucking on to us! We’ve got to call it off!”

“C?” Comrade F said.

Static, then a whisper: “The Transmarines.”

“C, what are you talking about,” K said,”what Transmarines?”

“She’s talking about the code they’re using,” said Comrade F. “It’s a TMICC code. We’ve encountered it before, when U tried to infiltrate their Transmarine program.”

“What code, there was no code? They’re on to us and they’re sending in the TMPD to take us out! We’ve got to call it off!”

“I don’t believe they are on to us,” Comrade F said. “‘Dragon Egg en route, suspect activity recorded.’ Why not specify what kind of suspect activity, how many suspects, where along the route? Because no such details exist, Comrade K. They know nothing, but by transmitting that they do, any would-be troublemakers will believe themselves found out and panic. Which we, as F-Squadron, will not do.”

“What? That makes no … Well, okay, it makes a little bit of sense, I guess, except they said four! Four TMPD ferrocopters, there’s four of us …”

“If I’m right, four means zero.”

“What?”

“The code. If it’s the same code we ran into last time, the number four stands for zero. That’s how much backup they’re requesting. And covert sec ‘team’ means—if I’m right—one single covert officer. They’re reporting to TMICC that everything’s okay, and they’re doing it in a code designed to scare off trouble. One security guard, that’s all. Just like our guy said.”

What … ? Was this—

“We’re on a clock here, Comrades,” F said. “Go or abort? Let’s put it to the vote.”

“Go,” U whispered.

“Go,” C whispered.

“K?” F said.

What was the point? It was a go either way, she might as well join the winning side. Or perhaps she’d be better off, after the whole plan was shot to shreds, to be on the record as the lone voice of sanity who voted to …

“Abort,” K said.

“Noted,” F said. “We go.”

“Now!” U hissed.

“U, come again? What’s that?” F said.

“Now! Now! We go now!” U hissed, then C’s voice: “She’s here!”

Nothing for it, now. Comrade K trained her binoculars on the sidewalk, scanned it until the target was in sight.

And there she was: the oneironaut, slaloming the crowd and headed for the building’s entrance. Comrade C in her Stetsbro and Middlings business suit looked passingly similar to the target, except, of course, for the suitcase chained to the target’s wrist. What the muck was that about?

“Go!” F said, and C moved into position. U sidled up to the park-tracked railtruck and pulled the mag-mine from his briefcase. He kneeled down briefly, snuck the mine in underneath the railtruck, then withdrew his hand, empty. He scuttled away. The target was maybe thirty meters from the entrance.

“Thirty-one meters. Get ready,” Comrade F said.

K’s pulse pounded as she dropped the binoculars and shimmied the strange, winged contraption onto her back and strapped it to her torso. She lifted the binoculars back up.

“Fifteen meters,” F said. “C, start walking.”

C entered the stream of pedestrians right on the oneironaut’s tail, and K could see her mimicking the target’s gait. Okay, that was pretty good. Except for the briefcase, K herself would have had a hard time telling them apart.

“Five meters. Ready, U.”

“Always,” U said.

The target was at the entrance, stopped. She rummaged in her pocket.

“Ready…”

The target slid a murkcoin into the door.

“Ready …”

The door opened. She entered.

“She’s in! Now! Now! N—”

A flash of fire, then a deafening bang. But the shockwave was tiny, almost disappointingly so; the purpose of the bomb was not to destroy, but to distract.

Smoke shrouded the scene in obscurity. Screams of panic came through the helmet intercom, echoed from the street below.

Above the smoke, the F-bomber, the Squadron’s heavily modified ferrocopter, came swooping past on quiet engines. Its softguns smattered across the slabscraper’s facade, shattering windows and creating the illusion of a shockwave more powerful. She could just make out Comrade F behind the copter’s controls.

“C, report!” came F’s voice through her helmet speaker, and C’s voice cut through above the screams: “In position, F. Target’s inside, but door’s still open. No visual on security yet—”

“Sofoosia o-Xingfu!” a deep voice cut through on Comrade C’s line, muffled by distance. “Sofoosia o-Xingfu, where is the apparatus?”

The security guard.

The smoke was dissipating, but still too thick for a visual. But also thick enough, hopefully, for the guard to go on believing that the Stetsbro-clad woman lying sprawled outside the entrance was in fact Sofoosia o-Xingfu.

“Where is it?” the guard’s voice crackled.

C faked a groan.

“K, go now!” F said.

Comrade K kicked her shoe wheels in reverse, backed away from the roof edge.

“Come on, K. This is what we trained for.”

The shoes revved up, then propelled her at top speed toward the edge. And just before the handrail, K lifted her legs and thrust her body forward, folded out the glider’s wings and swooped into the neon red air.

23^rd floor, seventh window from the left.

“You can do it, K,” Comrade F crackled in her ear, and he was right.

She soared toward the target’s building.

#

A gust of wind greeted Sofoosia as she entered her apartment. The explosion must have blown out her window. Her pulse raced. She slammed the door shut, then locked it, latched it, bolted it, and armed it.

What the muck had happened? Had someone targeted her? No, not possible, must have been a coincidence. TMPD would sort it all out, and tomorrow she would read all about it in the Gordian Guardian. Maybe she’d even be spending her night writing it up.

Sofoosia yawned, then realised that a stranger was standing on the opposite side of her bed.

The stranger’s silhouetted coat billowed against the Protectech ad’s red light. Some sort of helmet glinted on her head and a gun was in her hand.

It was aimed at Sofoosia.

Sofoosia counted her fingers. Ten.

The stranger was smiling.

“Who are you, exactly?” Sofoosia said.

“Hello, Sofoosia. My name is Comrade K.”

“Oh. Hello.”

Strangely calm, Sofoosia took in the apartment. The window was smashed, and shards littered the bed. Leaned against a wall stood a strange contraption with straps and folded-up wings. That somewhat explained the how, but the who and the why remained obscure.

Suddenly, Sofoosia was afraid again. She lit a murkarette.

“I—I’m sorry, what are you doing here, exactly?” she said. “The … the explosion, was that you?”

“It was a diversion, to get your shadow off your back.”

“My shadow?”

“The Xingfu security guard who’s been following you since you got your oneironaut gig.”

Sofoosia stared.

“Yeah,” Comrade K said, “we know things. But I don’t have time to tell you all of them, what with your shadow out there. We’re holding him off for now, but it won’t last.”

Tired and fearful, Sofoosia’s mind struggled to piece the situation together. “What—” she began, but Comrade K cut her off with a raised forefinger, then pressed it against the side of her helmet and looked away, distracted. Unintelligible tinny chattering sounded from inside the helmet. Apparently satisfied with what she had heard, Comrade K looked back at Sofoosia.

“Okay, we’re still good. Listen, I’ll tell you what I can, but we’re going to have to keep this very brief. I’m part of a group called F-Squadron. You’ve heard of us?”

“F-Squadron? You’re … you’re terrorists!”

“Not true, Sofoosia. We’re fighting for the truth. And so should you be, because you know how the deck is stacked.”

“What—”

“This market, The Metropol, the way The Man has enslaved us all to His purpose. The more we toil for Him, the more we end up owing Him.”

“But … but that’s not The Man’s fault, it’s just the way things are!”

“No. That’s not true. You know, Sofoosia, you know that it doesn’t have to be like this. You’ve seen it, haven’t you? Those other markets? The markets without Murk?”

“The … the dreams? Yes, but—”

“The dreams are just one way of travelling to other markets, and there are so many markets, so many markets, Sofoosia, that can’t be reached in dreams—but there are other ways. More … physical ways. More permanent ways.”

“I don’t understand.”

“Because they don’t want you to. The OneiroMurk formula, do you know what’s in it?”

“Well, Murk of course, but other than that, no. It’s classified, is what my boss told me.”

Comrade K drew her mouth into a sly grin. “Then allow me to declassify. OneiroMurk is kind of a cocktail. Murk goes into it, yes, but the more interesting ingredient is something that The Man and his kamikazecutives call the ontoliquid. OneiroMurk contains just a hint of it, just enough to transmit the words you type in your dream market to the oneiroprinter here in The Metropol. But the undiluted stuff, pure ontoliquid … it creates a gateway to those other markets, a physical gateway. One that not only your writing can pass through, but your body and your mind as well.”

“What, like … like a door?”

“Yeah, essentially. A door into another market.”

“W-what kind of market?”

“Yeah, that’s kind of the thing. It goes to all kinds of markets, it changes all the time, unless you stabilize it.”

“With Murk,” Sofoosia said, and realised she’d failed to smoke her murkarette; it was nothing, now, but a crumbling cone of ash. She put it out.

“Yeah, and some other things. From what we know, The Man has so far used it only to send spies into those other markets. But we, the comrades of F-Squadron, have other plans for it.”

“W-what other plans?”

“We’re getting everybody out of here.”

“Uh … Out of where, exactly?”

“Out of The Metropol and into those other markets. Markets free of Murk and The Man.”

“But … that’s suicide, how—”

“Wait.” Again Comrade K’s finger pressed against the side of her helmet. Her mouth flashed a sharp grimace. “Muck. Okay, we’ve got to hurry here. Where were we? Oh, right! No, Sofoosia, it’s not suicide. People can survive just fine without Murk. It’s just that here, they’ve made it impossible.”

“You … you’re saying you’ll just … empty The Metropol of people?”

“All you need to know right now is that we need you. The people of this city need you.”

“Ah … Okay. And for what, exactly?”

“Isn’t it obvious?”

Should it be? Sofoosia was so damn tired. “Ah, no. Not really,” she said.

“We need you to secure us a batch of ontoliquid,” Comrade K said.

Sofoosia stared.

“You’re the only civilian with any kind of access to the stuff, even downgraded to OneiroMurk. But diluted like that it’s useless to us. We need you to get ahold of a batch of pure ontoliquid. Then we can get it analyzed and—with luck—reproduced, eventually at scale.”

“Huh. And how do you propose I do that, exactly? When I’m, you know, not even supposed to know that it exists?”

Comrade K shrugged. “The same way your boss did. Get promoted.”

Sofoosia snorted a laugh.

“Okay, so, supposing that was even a remote possibility, why would I ever want to? I mean—”

“Wait!” Comrade K said, intently listening to the chatter in her helmet. Then: “Shit. Muck. Shit shit shit. Okay, Sofoosia, say what you need to say, but do it quick!”

Sofoosia fumbled for the thread of her thoughts, recovered it. “Yes, so what I was saying was that a promotion—if such a thing were even possible—would mean working my behind off even harder, and you said it yourself: The more we toil for The Man, the more we end up owing Him.”

Comrade K’s mouth hardened.

“You may not believe this, Sofoosia, but there are those who would relish the opportunity to liberate their fellow consumers from this market and its addictions. I suppose I hoped you’d turn out to be one of us.”

“You know what?” Sofoosia said. “You’re right! I don’t believe that. And I also don’t believe that this is your negotiating tactic. Aren’t you supposed to offer me something that I actually want?”

Comrade K’s voice was ice. “And what is it you want?”

“Honestly? I just want to sleep, and not have anything to do with OneiroMurk or ontoliquid or any of that nonsense ever again. And I have, as a matter of fact, recently negotiated a deal with my boss to that very effect, so unless you’re going to actually shoot me, I suggest you just get packing and go cook up some new plan for your little terrorist club.”

Comrade K’s body stiffened with rage. But she held her tongue, breathed deeply, and seemed somewhat to regain her composure and semi-friendly disposition. How deep did that run, Sofoosia wondered.

“I hear you, Sofoosia,” Comrade K said, “and I’m not going to shoot you. We’re not terrorists, no—”

A stream of helmet chatter cut her off.

Her jaw dropped, then closed.

“Shit,” she said. “Okay, ah … Well, looks like we’re suddenly in less of a hurry than I thought.”

But a new and different shade of stress seemed to envelop Comrade K. She gathered herself and continued: “So yeah, not terrorists. Not at all, no matter how many times they’ve made you write the opposite in that truthspaper you used to work for. That’s what He does, you know. The Man and His whole apparatus: He lies. But what am I telling you for, you’re one of the ones doing the lying for Him.”

Sofoosia almost wished Comrade K would just shut up and put a bullet between her eyes. At least then she’d get some rest.

“Your point?” Sofoosia said.

“Nothing they say or write or draw or imply is ever true, Sofoosia. What in The Metropol makes you think that this deal you’ve made with your boss is any different?”

Sofoosia yearned to just fall forward, give in and sink into her bed’s soft, fluffy pillows. But Comrade K’s words had left behind a worry in her mind, and now it was gnawing around in there like some kind of mental vermin. True, 9699 had been a little less than forthcoming, at least in matters relating to her employment: the quota, the massive OneiroMurk roll-out … She’d found out about all these things only once he’d already secured her commitment to them. Why would the present deal be any different?

“Hmm,” Sofoosia said. “So do you have a better offer?”

“That’s not how we operate. Either you’re in it for everyone, or you’re not in it at all. I would like to point out, though, that you are one of everyone too.”

“What do you mean?”

“Oh, just that our goal of liberating everyone includes liberating you. If you do this for us, Sofoosia, you can get the hell out of the Metropol once and for all, and set yourself up in some relaxing, new reality where you can have your sleep all to yourself. And best of all: You’ll still be able to dream.”

Sofoosia bit her lip. It all sounded too good to be true.

“Okay. Okay, I’ll do it,” she said, sluggishly wondering whether or not she meant it.

#

Twenty minutes later, Sofoosia locked the door behind the third visitor to leave her apartment that evening. Seconds after Comrade K had glided back out into the neon night, a bullish, gun-toting TMPD officer had stopped by to question her about a murder that had, apparently, taken place right outside her slabscraper’s entrance within minutes of the explosion. Sofoosia’d claimed ignorance of the event, which was at least somewhat true; the news had, however, cast Comrade K’s sudden lack of hurry in a new and grisly light. Brusquely and repeatedly the cop had admonished her for failing to cover up the gaping, glass-toothed hole that was, now, her window, and wearily and untruthfully she’d assured him that she’d do so right away.

Visitor number three had been a Xingfu security man, fuming with fear and badly disguised fury. He was clearly not the “shadow” that Comrade K had mentioned earlier, but rather that unfortunate operative’s hastily deployed replacement. He’d told her very little, just made sure that the suitcase remained intact and unfiddled with. Then he’d disappeared.

Tired to the point of tears, Sofoosia now finally unlocked the suitcase and spilled its contents across her bed, then assembled them to the best of her fatigued ability. Soon, a rattletrap IV set stood ready and teetering next to the bed. The case had also held a bottle of high-grade Murk, which Sofoosia now emptied into the IV set’s drip chamber, then attached the tube and needle that would go into her arm.

Too tired for smoke or toothbrush or signature pajamas, Sofoosia plopped herself down upon her bed and let its silky softness accept her like a well-earned grave.

But seductive as the prospect was of just surrendering to sleep, Sofoosia forced herself to recall the importance of completing this one final task. If she didn’t, she’d be guaranteed a lifetime’s nights locked up in her oneirocubicle, writing endless reams of truthstories if she was lucky, driven to madness by the dream creature if she was not.

She pumped her fist and found a vein in her arm, then gritted her teeth and shoved the needle in. She opened the drip chamber’s valve and sticky, black sludge oozed down through the tube toward the needle and the circulatory system to which it provided ingress.

Her last remaining OneiroMurk bottle stood upon her nightstand. She uncorked it and swallowed the contents with all the ceremony of flicking a booger. Then she jumps at the creak of a seat back behind her and finds herself sitting in front of a murkwriter on a feathered desk in a room that is nothing but a solid black cube. She jumps again as something between her knees croaks “Verifiables,” and she wheels the chair back to reveal that the desk is, in truth, a pair of giant raven’s wings.

“VERIFIABLES!” the raven screams. The word stirs something within her, but she’s just too tired to scoop it into memory.

She should maybe stand up and see if the chair can serve as a weapon in case the magnum-sized bird should turn on her, but no. She’s just too Man-damned comfortable. Now if only she’d had a headrest—

“Time’s a-wasting, oneironaut Sofoosia o-Xingfu, and that I cannot abide!”

Wow. Somebody got up on the wrong side of the whatever this morning. But … Soofosia is her name, that’s right. And Xingfu is … a thing as well.

She has a sudden urge to count her fingers, but can’t be bothered.

How did she get in here? Is there something she’s supposed to be doing here? It feels like there’s something—

“SOFOOSIA I CAN’T FAAAIL!” the raven screams, and the piercing terror of it drives Sofoosia out of the chair. What— “HE’LL MAKE ME KILL MYSELF!”

Shit muck what—

And suddenly, she’s counting her fingers.

Ten.

No, eight.

No, thirtee—

Ah.

Aha.

This again.

“KILL MYYYSEEELF!”

A lump of exhausted hopelessness erupts up through her chest, her tear ducts. Just mucking make it end.

Then she sees that this time, something is different.

Over in the corner. Something’s suspended from the ceiling.

A …

A shower head?

Strangely, the sight beats back her burned-out despair, fills her with a sense of wry triumphalism. Nice try, mucking dream monster.

“KILL MYYYSEEELF!” the raven screeches, its wings flapping up a tiny storm. “ALL YOUR DAYS AND ALL YOUR NIGHTS! ALL YOUR DAYS AND ALL YOUR NIGHTS!”

She shoves the chair back to the raven and sits herself down. The letters jump from key to key.

“Verifiables!” the raven croaks.

But she’s so tired. So tired, and she searches for a word that doesn’t exist. “Make it stop,” she whispers. “Make it stop.”

And from her eye and down her cheek and down onto the murkwriter falls a single, shiny, salty tear.

Words are screeching between her legs, but she doesn’t listen. Every atom of her attention is focused on the drop, now, at rest upon an ever-changing strobe of letters.

The drop stirs.

“KILL MY—”

“SHUT THE MUCK UP!” Sofoosia shouts, and the raven’s beak snaps shut.

She moves to dry the drop from off the murkwriter’s key, then thinks the better of it; what if the moisture soaks into her suit?

The drop is growing. She shoves back from the raven, stumbles onto her feet.

The drop is growing into a … person. A tiny figure standing on the murkwriter’s keyboard. And as it grows, its shimmering water skin takes on the shapes and features of …

Of her customother? “Donkey rye’s off ozze ya …”

Her prostimother? “Donkey rye …”

Shapes and features slosh together, churning the mothers into a tempest of faceless confusion.

And still the monster grows. And she has nowhere to go. But …

That’s right. Her brain remembers it now: This is the problem she’s got to solve, if she’s ever going to get out of this draining, hellish oneirocubicle, be it through 9699’s route or through Comrade K’s. The Man’s route, or F-Squadron’s.

The growing, watery thing splits in two, then dances around the murkwriter in a furious mockery of … something. And still it grows. Both of it grow.

This is what she’s here for. She’s here to stop this mucking thing once and for all, that’s why she drank the OneiroMurk again and that’s why she—

…

That’s why she stuck an IV needle full of high-grade Murk right into her arm.

Valued The Man on The Monomint.

The leathermucking shower head.

She forces her body to lunge past the watery twin horrors, and she sees them … eating each other’s eyes? No matter, she’s seen it do plenty worse. She turns her back to them, stares up at the shower head. It’s glistening black, and a thin, flimsy chain hangs next to it.

She pulls the chain.

Nothing.

She pulls again.

The piping coughs.

She pulls aSPLOOOOOSH! A stream of sticky, black Murk explodes from the shower, and she is covered in its slimy viscosity like dark, smoldering armour—No!

Like dragonskin.

Its power seeps in through her pores, the power of lies and drugs and guns and fuel. It fills her, blazes in her, pounds through her veins and bones and muscles, and she turns and roars and grabs the horrors by their throats, lifts them from the ground. They garble-scream and splash against her murky carapace, and the Murk seeps into the water their bodies are made of, and dilutes it and pollutes it, and as it does, the double monster convulses, trembles, dissolves upon the floor, melting black and sticky from Sofoosia’s black and sticky fists. And the oneirocubicle absorbs the shimmering puddle, sucks it down into the floor to become part of the very cage it once attacked.

Sofoosia teeters, then falls to her knees, then to her hands.

She … she did it?

Relief shudders through her from spine to scalp to fingertips, and in its wake follows weariness. She is so impossibly, unreasonably, unendurably tired. Again she shudders, a wave of emptiness and hope and relief and suddenly undammed sorrow, and and and …

Tears form in her eyes.

She rushes to dry them off, but—

But with her Murk-draped hands, will she blind herself?

The tears remain in her eyes. No: On her eyes, growing to cover them like contacts.

She screams and shakes and runs like a madmuck along the oneirocubicle’s walls, but the watery lenses stay in and she screams and screams and falls to her knees and—

And will see another market.

She’ll float in a bright, glittering deep, the salty darkness around her aglow with the play of tiny water fairies. She’ll rise through the sprite-studded darkness, rise to the surface and break through, and then, bobbing on it, she’ll see a vast, blue nothing above her, and a pale, blinding light blazing down from within it. A gigantic, white cigar will jut up from beyond the tree-ringed basin’s shoreline, and two strange, floating vehicles will ride the surface toward her, powered, it will appear, by people pulling long, flattened poles in see-saw motions through the water. Her eyes will see and they will hear as well, and what they will hear is the sound of gentle waves lapping as she floats, rocking, rocking, rocking in the water’s warm embrace—

No! She shuts her eyes and that other market disappears, and again she feels her feet on a familiar Murk floor, hears the rustle of impatient feathers. The water lenses remain trapped between her eyes and Murk-covered lids, but starved of light they have no visual stimuli to distort.

But she feels them there, rippling across her retina, and she shudders in her darkness.

She stumbles across the floor, searches blindly for something, anything that can get those damned, living things off her eyes so she opens them and will see the strange, slow water vehicles approaching as she floats. But suddenly she’ll be submerged again, sinking in the basin’s cruel deep, then fighting her way to the surface and struggling there, flailing to keep herself afloat, then sinking, then flailing, and all the while gasping for air and puttering water.

And the floating vehicles will be there, then, one on each side of her, and above the hungry lapping of waves she’ll hear their pilots’ voices, see their hands reach out toward her.

The water will swallow her again, and again she will panic to the surface.

The sounds of their voices will ring out in her eyes, dry, spectral echoes of words she’ll have heard before.

From the right: “We’re getting everybody out of here …” It’ll be Comrade K’s voice.

And then, from the left, 9699’s: “The job I’m offering you, diurnalist Sofoosia o-Gordian, is to sleep …”

And their hands will be reaching for her, competing to save her, but which of them to grab?

And once again she’ll go under, and once again she’ll fight her way back up. And she will see their faces, then, their flesh-stripped skulls grinning assurances down through teeth that drip with Murk.

From the left: “You alone among the Metropol’s workers will spend your life dreaming freely in a thousand different markets …”

From the right: “Our goal of liberating everyone includes liberating you …”

And she’ll see their words become exhaust in the air, occluding it and filling it and burning through her gulping lungs, igniting coughs that will threaten to send her under.

And she’ll flail and fight to stay afloat and breathing, but every breath will be a wind of poison fire, and there’ll be nothing left to do but sink.

And swallowed in the dark and faerie-speckled basin she’ll freeze over in catatonic terror, because much rather that than let the spasms of panic wrench from her this last half lungful of air.

And as she sinks, she will notice a light. Not from the dozens of fairies that will be floating in the distance, but from …

But from herself.

And she will, for the first time, look down upon her body and see that yes, it glows like theirs, and—

“Aha!” she will roar, and release a triumphant storm of bubbles, the last of her air.

Her body will glow, indeed. Because Sofoosia will be a fairy too.

And she will know, then, which hand to grab.

And making fists, she will inhale the basin’s water.

#

Sofoosia rode the Xingfu elevator in unprecedented, blissful quiet. For the first time in forever, she felt refreshed.

The doors dinged open on the 11^th floor and the flummoxed face of the pallid receptionist.

“No! No!” he shrieked at Sofoosia, “This is all wrong, you’re supposed to be on 37!”

37? Sofoosia cocked a glance back at the jittering Cookan. Would his heart be able to take all those uppers?

“Go! Go!” the receptionist shouted, “He’s waiting for you on 37!”

“Wait, he’s … waiting for me? Here, on The Middlings?”

“Gooooo!” the receptionist howled, and pushed her back into the elevator. “Say it! Tell him the floor!”

“Croesus Heist, all right! I’m going already!” Sofoosia said, “Cookan, floor … 37.”

And twenty-six uppers later, Cookan was banging on the elevator walls like a madmuck, box-trapped and increasingly feral. The sad, frantic operator held his peace, though, no doubt still terrified by the knowledge that his night time secret was known by both Sofoosia and 9699, and—most horrifically—by The Man himself. His terror was, of course, more than fully justified. But not for the reasons he imagined.

Ding.

“Mmmmnnnngggh thirty-seven!” Cookan whined, and the doors slid open on a long and tubular corridor.

She stepped out. Up ahead, the corridor terminated in a double door flanked by two armed men in sharp-pressed purple suits and TM-emblazoned body armor. The silenced barrels of their submachine guns made a protective X before the door.

The elevator closed behind her, cutting off poor Cookan’s grunts and amped-up convulsions.

Eyes fixed on nothing, she strode up the corridor. The armed men scanned her identification. The door sprang open.

She stepped inside, and 9699 was a giant.

He throned there, at the opposite end of an intimidatingly long and deliriously checkerboard-patterned meeting room table. And he was huge.

Was that … was that part of becoming a kamikazecutive? Or had he always … ? How could a human being even—

“Sit,” he said, somehow making even that harsh, single syllable vibrate with the strains of his position.

She stepped forward, but suddenly her entire field of view vertigoed and dizziness overcame …

No. That wasn’t it. She wasn’t even tired.

Something was off. Not with her. With the room.

She saw, now, that the table’s checkerboard pattern—even the very table itself—grew narrower up its length, creating an illusion of distance, and thus of 9699’s exaggerated size.

But even revealed to her as it was, when Sofoosia sat down at the table’s widest end, the illusion regained its hold upon her perceptions. 9699 remained a giant.

“Productive morning, oneironaut Sofoosia.”

“Productive morning, sir.”

“Right, then,” said 9699, “Now, I am very … excited—one might go so far as to say … pumped—to hear your report. Are we … are we on track for full implementation?”

“Yes, sir. The dream creature will no longer be a problem.”

9699 collapsed like a doll. “Oh … oh … OOH! Oh, owe The Man! Is it … is it true?”

“Of course, sir. You are, after all, my immediate superior.”

“Right, yes … yes, of course.” He rose back up, the noose tie in his hand dabbing at tears of relief. “Ahem. Well done, oneironaut.”

“Owe you, sir.”

“Yes. You do.”

“What …?” She’d expected him to call evens. “Sorry, sir, I don’t understand … I solved the problem, like we agreed? The dream creature’s taken care of!”

“Quite. But, oneironaut Sofoosia, there remains the matter of your quota. You’re behind again, my valued.”

“Sir … sir, no. I was led to believe, sir, that I wouldn’t go back there again!”

9699 grinned. “You’re not going back there. You’re being promoted. To The Monomint.”

“The … The Monomint, sir?”

“M-hm. ‘Sofoosia o-Teemic,’ how does that sound? Pretty good!”

”TMICC …” Sofoosia said, “Inter-Corporate Coordination? Doing … doing what, exactly?”

“Oh, much the same as now. But based upon The Monomint, and with a salary that’s … Well, let’s just say you won’t want for anything for as long as you live.”

“Wait, so I’m going to be an … an oneironaut on The Monomint?”

“We call it something different up there. Your TMICC job title, Sofoosia, will be thanatonaut.”

“Thanatonaut? What … what does that mean, exactly?”

“Oh, it’s all just words, really. The important thing is that you will only be going in the once. From then on, you won’t need to work another day in your life.”

Could it … could it be true?

“But the … process?” she said. “It’s the same?”

“The delivery method? Oh yes, the same. More or less.”

“Meaning … ?”

“Oh, it’s more a matter of ah, partial submersion. You’ll be in a tank, so to speak, ah, inhaling the fumes of the OneiroMurk as it is being admixtured. Breathing the airs of its very concoction, so to speak.”

“Okay … So … How does this work, exactly? I’m in the tank and …?”

“Well, Murk and it’s … well, other, classified ingredient are pumped into the tank and—”

“Separately?”

“Separa—Yes, of course separately! Pay attention!”

“Huh,” she said. “Okay, that’s fine, I think I get it. So … and if I do this I’ll still have the water? The purified drinking water?”

As if on cue, he pulled from below the table a plastic bottle of colorless fluid. “A lifetime’s supply, like we agreed.”

He rolled the bottle down the table. She caught it, then smiled.

“More than this, I hope?”

9699 smiled back.

“Don’t worry, thanatonaut Sofoosia o-Teemic. You’re getting everything you need. Now come with me.”

#

Sofoosia o-Teemic, she signed, and took a swig of water. 9699 checked her signature, then nodded to his assistant, who promptly began rolling up the meters-long ream of contract. Sofoosia corked the bottle, lifted her gaze back to the thanatotank.

It stood upon a raised iron dais in the center of the pyramidal hall, and about it teemed a dozen technicians dressed in sharp TMICC-purple suits. The room was cluttered with control panels, data readouts, and telescreens, the largest of which displayed a grainy feed of a dark, cubic room and a murkwriter balanced upon a gigantic bird’s skeleton. A thanatocubicle, 9699 had called it.

“And you’ve … got a camera in there?” Sofoosia’d asked.

9699 had smirked. “Oh, those details remain somewhat above your pay grade.”

The thanatocubicle was, of course, where Sofoosia was intended to perform her one final task for the project. And she would access it and the market it was in via the thanatotank.

The tank stood some three meters in height, and maybe half of that in circumference. It was bolted to some complex system of sleek steel rings that surrounded it, the purpose and function of which momentarily eluded Sofoosia’s brain. The tank’s tall iron door stood open like a refrigerator’s, revealing space inside for a person to stand upright and strapped into a harness. Hoses ran into and out of the thing, most notably two that terminated in smaller containers attached to the thanatotank’s sides. One of these would hold Murk, of course, and the other the pure ontoliquid that F-Squadron hoped would initiate their Metropol-wide exodus. Comrade K and her band of revolutionaries had no doubt expected Sofoosia to spend months climbing the ranks to get within reach of the undiluted ontoliquid, but here she was now, mere hours after accepting the corporatreasonous task, with an empty plastic bag pressed up slick inside her bra.

“You’ll be waist deep in the admixture,” 9699 said, “so I suggest you change into this.”

A technician presented her with a TMICC-purple wetsuit-looking thing.

No no no. They’d see the bag.

“Ah, if it’s all the same to you, sir, I’d rather … I’d rather go in wearing this, sir.”

9699 stared, mollified. “Your suit? But it will be soaked in it!”

“Yeah, sir, I realize that, it’s just I … I kind of need to be wearing the suit, you know, when I dream in order for me to work properly in there, it’s … it’s hard to explain.”

“Really? So all these nights in the dream market, you’ve been sleeping in your business suit?”

“Pretty much, yeah.” For the previous night it was even kind of true.

“Really?”

“Yeah.”

“Huh. Well, suit yourself,” he said, then chuckled at his pun. “Now take your place in the tank.”

Her hands trembled as she stepped up onto the dais. Comrade K had never detailed a plan for how Sofoosia was getting the full bag back down from The Monomint. The dizzying ferrocopter ride up through The Management and The Mansions had made it all too clear that both sheer distance and TMICC security measures would make it almost impossible to escape with her loot undiscovered.

Almost.

Because Sofoosia had come up with a way.

She stepped inside the thanatotank and let a technician strap her into the harness. Muck. That would be a problem. It would have to come off.

The technician closed the door, leaving her only a small porthole through which to see 9699 smiling expectantly out there on the dais.

The tank’s insides were cramped, but not too cramped for Sofoosia to move her arms about a little. Apart from the porthole, the darkness was absolute, but her hands quickly mapped the riveted steel wall around her and—Yes! A nozzle, about level with her hip. And on the opposite side … Yes! Another nozzle. No telling which was which, though, not until the Murk and the ontoliquid finally started flowing.

Sofoosia’s fingers found the harness’s waist belt buckle and conducted a brief exploration of its snap lock mechanism. A thumb and a forefinger’s pressure, plus a little bit of wiggling, released it.

But the bigger problem remained the chest and shoulder straps. They would have to go as well, if she were to have any chance of liberating the plastic bag from inside her bra. Her hands probed the chest strap’s latch, but found its mechanism bewildering. It was not of the waist buckle’s snap lock type, but some sort of sliding thing with a stop on it that didn’t seem to budge. She pressed her thumb against it, pulled at it with her fingernails, but nothing made it move.

A sudden hum vibrated the tank’s iron walls. P-fssss, she heard from one nozzle, then immediately from the other. From each now trickled a weak drizzle. A quick examination conducted by touch and smell revealed the one on the right to consist of warm, itchy, pungent Murk, and the one on the left to be something else entirely. Its consistency was like liquid velvet, and its prickling on her skin felt refreshing and new, and as she lifted her moistened finger to her nose to smell it, she could see that it glowed.

The ontoliquid.

The drizzle was feeble still, but slowly gaining in both force and speed. Soon enough the nozzle would discharge the last of it into the tank, where it would mingle with the Murk and become worthless to Sofoosia’s plan. The OneiroMurk mixture was already now creeping up toward her ankles, and once it was level with her waist, the tanks would both be spent and all the ontoliquid uselessly dissolved into the Murk. She needed to get going.

She returned her hands to the chest and shoulder buckles, pulled, shoved and squeezed at them in ever greater consternation, then suddenly heard a click and snap and felt a constriction ease as the chest buckle opened. Yes! All that now remained was the shoulder buckles, and if she could only reproduce whatever—

A deep, mechanical trembling shook the thanatotank. It began to keel. Slowly and without mercy, the tank rotated to Sofoosia’s left, tipping itself and its occupant inexorably over and steadily around.

What the muck—?

The ontoliquid sloshed about her feet, then spilled up along her suit pant legs as the tank neared a horizontal position. Suddenly terrified, Sofoosia realised that this new predicament explained both the steel rings that surrounded the tank and the harness from which she was struggling to escape.

As the tank turned, though, she had no chance to keep fiddling with the buckles, her arms and hands being desperately deployed in an attempt to keep her body from tossing around at gravity’s shifting mercies. And still the Murk and ontoliquid seeped into the container at their slowly increasing rates.

The fluids kept flowing and the tank kept turning until Sofoosia found herself suspended upside-down above a slowly rising slosh of OntoMurk, the straps that strained against her shoulders the only thing to keep her from crashing head first into the freshly mixed concoction.

Then the rotation stopped, but the drizzle of liquids did not. They trickled down to pool with the OntoMurk that sloshed below her head, that sloshed and mixed and would eventually rise to … to soak her waist deep, like 9699 had warned. But he’d said nothing about which half of her body would be submerged.

A sudden conviction struck Sofoosia that the prefix thanato meant … Gulp. Meant death.

Her hands grabbed and yanked at the shoulder buckles, banging, coaxing, squeezing, clawing—

Cla-clack.

Her head slammed into the sloshy bottom as her body fell, liberated at last inside the tank. The pain of it threatened to black out her consciousness, but somehow Sofoosia managed to stay awake. Her head submerged in OneiroMurk, she held her breath and jimmied her hands against the bottom, and with all her might and more, Sofoosia pushed.

On her hands and leaning as much as possible of her weight against the thanatotank’s walls, she could breathe again. But it wouldn’t last.

With tremendous effort and a burning strain on her right arm, Sofoosia shifted her weight and lifted her left hand, then sent it rummaging inside her bra. She yanked the bag out, stuck it between her teeth, and shoved her left hand back into the rising puddle to take some weight off her burning, straining right arm.

But still the liquids flowed, and she simply had no time to catch her breath. Balancing on her left arm, now, Sofoosia lifted her right hand from the bottom and pulled the bag from between her teeth. Her panic rose along with the liquid; the slosh of OntoMurk was wetting her hair and the pain in her left arm’s muscles nearly unbearable.

But she was close now, so close! Her fingers found the bag’s tiny drawstring opening, teased themselves inside it, and strapped it around the ontoliquid nozzle.

But the strain on her left arm was too much, and again she had to return her right to the rising pool of mixed OneiroMurk below her. She shifted her weight, cursed and panted, and one last time she lifted her left hand to the bag, and she drew its drawstrings tight around the nozzle, and returned her hand to the pool below.

Glowing ontoliquid pumped into the bag, which slowly expanded to contain it all.

But both of her arms now buckled and burned beyond the limits of endurance, then gave, plopping her head back down below the OntoMurk’s rising surface. It stung inside her nostrils, seeped in between her teeth, and an eternal flash of panic scorched every thought and plan and stratagem from what remained of her rational brain. Nothing existed except burning muscles, burning lungs, and the blank, timeless terror of imminent, yawning death.

And her death held nothing but the thanatocubicle. Forever.

Then suddenly, the trembling of the tank resumed, and she felt her body’s weight begin to shift. The tank began to rotate.

Her lungs strained for air that still she could not reach, strained and threatened to inflate with a great, big gulp of drowning and—

A vision of sky flashed before her, empty and blue and impossibly far away. In it, her panic succumbed to steely resolution.

Sofoosia would mucking live.

Her head rose sideways from the liquid and her lungs filled up with air.

She breathed for a second, panted as her thoughts were reassembled. The tank kept turning, but the nozzles stopped drizzling. Sofoosia wriggled around to get a grip on the glowing bag of ontoliquid, pulled it from the nozzle and drew its drawstrings shut.

The thanatotank completed its rotation, its position again upright.

Okay.

She shoved the ontoliquid bag into her shirt, squished it up against her chest.

So far so good.

9699’s infuriated face filled the porthole, then a technician’s, bending down to release the tank door’s lock.

Cla-clank.

Okay.

Shhhlllrrrp. A drain below her feet drank the OntoMurk through the thanatotank’s floor.

Okay.

Crrrnnnk … The tank door opened.

Uh-oh.

Two guns were aimed right at her, their security guard wielders flanking a raging, hysterical 9699. Red warning lights were blinking on consoles all around.

“What the muck did you do?” 9699 demanded.

“N-nothing, I did nothing, sir, what seems to be the—”

“The admixture! It’s unbalanced, this is sabotage!”

“No! No no no, sir, I did no—”

“Oh! Nothing, is it!? And nothing is what released you from that Man-damned harness, is it? Of course not! What did you do? What did you dooo!?”

“Nothing, sir,” Sofoosia said, and snuck a hand inside her shirt. “At least nothing compared to what I’m doing next.”

9699’s eyes widened, white with fear.

She pulled the glowing, glittering bag up from her shirt, smiled and let it dangle.

“Shoo—No, take that from her! Now! Then get her back in that tank!”

The guards stepped forward, but had farther to go than her fingers did in grabbing the drawstring and undoing it. The ontoliquid splashed shimmering onto the dais, and the guards stopped short and jumped away from it.

They all just stared at it: A big, white, glowing puddle of ontoliquid, but white in the sense that it shone with every color. Sofoosia stood at its edge and looked at its glittering, bubbling surface. It mirrored not her face and the dark, pyramidal chamber’s ceiling, but a sky of distant blue. No: uncountable skies, each ripple across the puddle altering the reflection to another vaulted heaven, some blue, some gray, some black with pricks of white, some empty, some lonely, some crowded with winged things, winged things that were sometimes aircraft, sometimes beasts, sometimes people. The caleidoscopic visions flashed across the ontoliquid’s pearly surface, and though she had no way of knowing what the markets below those skies could possibly be like, she knew for sure that they all had skies. Most of them blue, and all of them impossibly far away.

“Don’t,” 9699 said.

“I won’t.”

Would Comrade K and F Squadron ever forgive her? Sofoosia found, to no great surprise, that she didn’t really sell a muck.

“Step back from the ontoliquid, Sofoosia. Do as I say.”

“Okay sir, I will,” she said, then let herself fall headlong into the puddle.

#

She fell through open air toward a distant, shining city below, and a lone, jutting tower that threatened, in a while, to impale her. The city lay bathed in golden light, and the gold of it glittered back from the basin and the Y-shaped river that cut across its low blocks and lush green walkways, and the falling was so peaceful, the rush of air on her face so relaxing, that her eyes began to flutter shut.

Rest …

A surge of sudden panic as she startled awake. The tower’s crescent-crested spire rushed closer by the second. Then she saw that she didn’t have the skies to herself.

Strange mechanical birds crossed the air down there below her, and a carpet that seemed to fly by some unseen means of propulsion. A woman stood atop the carpet, eyes fixed on Sofoosia’s falling body and seeming to guide its flight toward her.

Other things are true …

Sofoosia’s eyes flickered again, but opened with a jolt as the soft and yielding carpet caught her fall like a bed made of peace.

A face appeared above her, a woman’s face with a worried brow and three stars tattooed across its temple.

“Hello there! So where the hell did you come from?” the woman said, and it came to Sofoosia that her voice was made for song.

“The … The Metropol,” Sofoosia remembered, but owefully little else.

“The what now?” said the woman, and Sofoosia remembered that she’d made it.

“Sorry … just so Man-damned tired,” she said, as darkness reconsumed her.

“That’s okay,” said the woman, like a lullaby. “You just sleep now.”

And she is sitting on a plank inside something floating on the water, something creaking and wooden and open to a rainbow-colored sky. Poles of wood are in her hands, resting in metal U’s set atop a half open, oblong hull. The poles have paddles at their ends, and when she pulls them through the water, the open, wooden oblong glides along and moves across the surface, gently guided by the river’s current. A distant cigar rises from far beyond the river’s shore, distant and huge and white and pulsating, a monument to truths better left disguised.

Light beats upon her from above, gives warmth and joy and life itself to Sofoosia’s blossoming form. She laughs, and she laughs from the heart.

This. This is the life of her—

“Aye one telly few aunt …”

She mistook it once for the breeze, but now it’s unmistakable. A voice.

Someone’s on the riverbank.

“Aye one telly few aunt …”

Sinking into it.

“Wheelin’ ever light wheat shudder …”

It’s Cassandy.

And Sofoosia remembers everything.

And Cassandy’s face is beaming at her, tears streaming down those best-forgotten cheeks, all the while being slowly swallowed by a riverbank that’s churning black.

And Sofoosia turns her head away, but only to see upon the opposite shore yet another Cassandy, this one’s tears and smile and desperate predicament all exactly the same as the first’s. And Sofoosia watches as Cassandy is eaten by the very ground beneath her, to the very last her tears and her smile beaming nothing but things for which Sofoosia’s language has no name, until Cassandy’s mouth fills up with dirt and she’s finally swallowed up and gone.

And Sofoosia shivers and turns her head again to shake the vision off, but sees it all repeated there upon the other shore. Not by one Cassandy, but by hundreds, thousands, beaming, weeping, sinking to their deaths into that dark and hungry earth, sinking, smiling, singing, dying, all along those blighted, infinite shores.

“Wheelin’ ever light wheat shudder … Wheelin’ ever light wheat shudder …” they sing all together, as all together they sink and die, on and on and on for all eternity.

She tightens her grip on the poles. Wishes, for a moment, that she could use them to plug up her ears. Closes her eyes instead.

Lifts, drops, pulls the poles, pretends she doesn’t hear.

Surely not every night, surely not, surely not—

Muck, was that a tear?

No, no, no was just a pearl of sweat to sup.

Stroke after aching stroke’s bringing her ever more

close to waking up.