Natalie: Earth, 2035

Darkness bloomed behind her closed lids, then slowly she opened her eyes, adjusting to the lightless room: all the electronics seemed to be off including her companion bot and the warm glow of the night light in the corner. It was unnaturally quiet.

The feeling of the dream lingered, undefined yet insistent, somehow in the room itself, dreadful and present. The lively dark, stitched with shards of neon, Impressions, holographic afterimages pressed out of negative space.

Fear and a strange longing combined to form some new emotion only a dream can create. Longing for another place, another time, the feeling that she must return.

And the knowledge that there was something important she must remember!

Pamela the companion bot hadn’t come back online, the unaccustomed silence of the predawn creating an interstitial space where something else existed. Moving through this stillness, the shifting territories of the dream; its impression still clung like a residue behind the eyes. The feeling still present, remembered somewhere in the body, then making its way out into the silent room, transformed into its own un-exorcised construction.

Taking a notepad and pen from the kitchen drawer of unused things, the pen coaxed with jagged scribbles before it would write, she put the dream down onto paper, drawing it from the day.

Dream:

I find myself in a city, buildings like large vessels, others like tall sentinels, glowing with something that covers them, it might have been reflected light or it might have been something living. It seems like the buildings are closing in, I realize they are forming a maze and I must find my way out. By every alley I turn down, I meet with a dead end and every time, the sense of dread grows stronger. I hear laughter and I am drawn to it, not in the way I’d be relieved or happy, but inexorably like a moth to a flame. With every step the fear grows stronger, I find myself walking down yet another alley, then I hear it, the voice:

“Well, well, look at that! another dead end” it mocked “a rat in a maze!”

“To find the way out you first have to do a little thing for me. Can you do that?”

“Yes” I said, knowing I would die here if I didn’t figure it out.

“All I want you to do is write down a few little words. That’s it! Soo easy” it crooned, I feel sickened.

“I have nothing to write with” I say.

“Look around, I’m sure you’ll find something” it purrs, mocking me.

I find myself wildly looking around for something to write with, I see there is a man on the ground. He has soot for eyes, I know that I must take this soot and write with it. So I take it and I use it to write on the wall, I know somehow that this is what I must do. But somehow the words don’t work, they become tangled in my mind and I can’t write them properly, the letters are all back to front.

“Try again” the voice says with what I know is triumph..

“You have two more tries” it warns me harshly this time.

I somehow know that if I don’t get it right, something very bad will happen, either to me or maybe to the man on the ground. He can’t see but I too, feel strangely blind: the periphery of my vision is dark and I don’t see the full picture, the letters I write are blurred. I try harder to get them in order.

“Write as I say” the voice threatened. somehow the words still wouldn’t form. An impression of flashing teeth in the light of a halogen lamp. The growing sense of dread, an inexorable thing.

The voice repeats them again, I hear them clearly but I can’t seem to write them, I know now this is a trick.

***

558

He thrashed in the chair cradling him with the petal-like bindings and tried to rip the headset off his face. He was sweating now, his clothes felt damp and the sense of panic and claustrophobia was consuming.

“A moment please” said the pod concierge in its flat, gentle voice as it unfolded him, tilting him to an upright position.

Something had seriously fucked with him, the deja vu experience wasn’t supposed to show dreams, or it could have been some real-ware artifact interacting with the pod’s tech? Possibly the suit? Could it even do that? He needed to find the cobbler and find out what was going on, but how? He only came to you!

What in the fuck was that? It had seemed like a dream, Natalie’s dream, but that wasn’t possible. Him laying in an alley in her dream was not possible. Knowing he was blind yet seeing everything perfectly in his mind's eye was possible but outside of his experience, an overlay within a dream: a hallucination within a dream?

He had wanted to go to the deja vu parlor just to erase his mind for a while, ease some of the strangeness of the last few days. He had thought he could never go back or wouldn’t make it back.

In the dream or Natalie’s dream, he was laying in an alley, a monstrous thing hung there as if it were a cartel construct, something from a game. A grin in the darkness, preternaturally white teeth revealed by a red sensuous mouth, there was something obscene about it, just the way it existed there, a real thing as valid as any other, yet it didn’t respond to the light in the alley, it seemed it existed in its own conditions. A thing that shouldn’t be there, a wrong thing.

It smiled revealing the slightly pointed incisors, he got the impression it could ‘see’ him.

“Are you enjoying my game” it said “Just wait, there’s so much more, you’ll see” and like a sense of deja vu, he felt as though this scene had played out before and he knew every move in the sequence, he knew someone was coming before he heard the footsteps, then she appeared, as he knew she would. A feeling of recognition creeping up his spine.

He knew the thing was speaking to her but couldn’t make out the words. Dream Natalie put her fingers to his eyes, her fingers came away sooty. Was he blind? With that she was writing on the wall but he couldn’t see what she was writing, the words in his mind's eye were smudged somehow.

***

He made his way to one of the unregulated zones in the outer regions and found himself looking up at the hulking, familiar shape of the WTF - one of the origin ships, its initial entry, a miscalculation or malfunction resulting in an unconventional landing. It stood now like the great humped back of a prehistoric creature. 7787’s workshop lay on the ground floor in a corner of the colossal vessel’s market. The notorious code broker looked busy at work fitting a real-ware device to a man who bore the unmistakable bounty hunter tattoo: a rabbit in a triangle bisected by an arrow, visible on his exposed neck. Even these guys had to buy their gear cracked. He hung back in the shadowy overhang near the entrance, becoming absorbed by the market, a place servicing both flesh and machine.

Avatars wandered by in their newly minted forms: two designed to look like 1980’s fashion illustrations, their blade-like angles creating a delicate yet savage elegance, one was crafted to look like Sherlock Holmes and another like Marlene Dietrich, rendered in black and white with the quality of an old film noire, always lit mysteriously from above. She paused to look at him through heavy lids, a mysterious smile playing on her lips. A nasty flash of white teeth, a smear of red imprinted itself onto the moment. He staggered, colliding with the concrete edge of the shop’s door frame.

The avatar of Marlene Dietrich raised an arched brow in amusement and stalked catlike into the crowd: the curse broken - for now.

The man who had been 7787’s chair got up and left the shop shouldering past 558. Still feeling uneasy from the intrusion of the flashback, he felt his palms sweat and his nervous system spike again as the man passed by, although he had not given him a second look.

He walked into the interior his old friend’s shop with its miscellaneous array of hardware and instruments, some for operating on electronics, some for operating on the human body, modified and otherwise. 7787 looked up at him, “what can I do you for today?” He asked blandly, wiping his hands on a rag, it could have been blood or machine grease, one couldn’t tell. His real-ware flickering in one eye as it scanned 558, the glowing readouts streaming in his visual display. Not even 7787’s gear could penetrate the layers his real data had been folded into by the zip.

“It’s 558” he said in a low voice not wanting to be overheard by prying ears - one never knew who was watching and listening, especially around here: everyone was just looking for an edge.

“What? Who did you say you are?” Said the broker, peering at him suspiciously now.

“It’s 558” he said again quietly. “I’ve been zipped!”

7787 took a long and reverent pause “You mean a ‘Cobbler’ zip?” He let out a low whistle “fuck me! The fuck you gotten yourself into buddy?”

“Yeah! And fucked up part is, I don’t even know? I don’t know what’s going on, but some weird shit’s been happening. I thought maybe you could take a look under the hood of this thing, see what it's really doing, see what it’s been picking up if you know what I mean?”

7787 shook his head in bemusement, “you want me to go in there and fuck with the cobblers work? You and I will be dead men my friend!”

But 558 could tell there was no way he was going to pass up an opportunity to get a close look at the legendary Cobbler’s craftsmanship, even if it was the last thing he’d ever do.

7787 paced around the shop, chin in hand, deep in thought. Then finally, he closed the shutters, putting the closed sign out in front. “Ok” he said at last “get in the chair, I think I know a way to access this thing’s data without too much interference.”

“So, from my understanding, these zips create a proxy persona that no real-ware or avatar can see through, your real data is folded into a private layer. Something like that?” Said 558.

“Yeah something like that. But obviously never taken close look at one” he said with a wink.

“Ok” said the old code broker “put these on, they’ll read any data from your real-ware optics and we can maybe get something from that” and placed a slim pair of goggles over his eyes, plugging a cable into a port in the telescopic, Monocle-like contraption he wore over one of his own eyes. He tapped his fingers over something in his visual display then focused one of the interchangeable lenses of the optic device.

“Just processing the data from your real-ware. Then we’ll see what we’ve got.”

“How have you been getting on with the optics I installed for you last time by the way?” He said apparently changing the settings on the display.

“Works ok, some pretty strange stuff coming up though, maybe from the dark layer or it’s tapping into some folded layers? Dunno? But they’re doing strange things with the zip too”.

“What kind of strange stuff? I mean some interference is to be expected, always get weird stuff with cracked real-ware, artifacts, stuff on the dark layer, but you know that” he said with a shrug.

558 wasn’t sure whether to tell the older man about the cube…