6. DreamScape
DreamScape
Playlist: Bad Dream - Cannons
Lyra
I know they say TheKast is for “updating” and “safety scanning” but that’s complete nonsense. We’re not as stupid as they think.
What it really does though? It keeps the population compliant.
We know why the corporations want to prevent gatherings or unauthorized VR sessions through a nightly curfew. Anyone caught outside after TheKast without corporate permission is hauled away by our “friends” the Corporate Integrity Corps or the CIC, as we like to call them.
A brilliant, but underhanded way to force the gifted or the rebels to out themselves.
“Straight to bed,” I remind Eli. Because the temptation to escape into other worlds better than ours is always there, always stronger than our need to feel safe.
“Yes, ma’am!” He gives me his best drunken salute.
Technically, we shouldn’t even be in DreamNet or GameNet during TheKast. The city’s mainframe system floods the airwaves with a pulse of static strong enough to rattle the bones and boil the blood. There’s no pain, just discomfort, more like...exposure.
Easy to locate means easy to capture.
In the very few times I’ve been inside DreamNet during TheKast, it has taken all my strength to squash any signal my magic may be giving off. I’ve even pushed to try it after a few drinks...a girl’s gotta know what she’s up against.
Look, I wasn’t that drunk. I tell myself, my inner voice trying to break through that last stem-cocktail haze.
Okay, fine, I was plastered. But in my defense, TheKast hit mid-cocktail, and trying to hide your magic during the whiteout, while hammered, is basically expert-level wizardry.
Tonight, I’ve had enough cocktails to basically glow like a glitching Christmas tree.
One foot carefully in front of the other and I only just make it into bed, stripping off my wet leather jacket and smoke-saturated pants. I look over at the webs of rain traveling down my window, streaks of neon colors reflecting from the city below. I focus on them as I lie down.
I close my eyes, breath shallow, world spinning and wait for the three robotic beeps that chime at two a.m. on the nose.
I feel it before I hear it, the way my magic recoils, tightening deep in my chest. It always feels like someone’s sliding cold fingers down my back, hooking into the tattoo that appeared down my spine during StarFell.
It’s a gentle tugging which immediately makes me pull the sheets up close and bury myself, every piece of me wanting to flare bright but forced to dim.
TheKast bathes my room in a glow of peaceful white light. Audio devices begin to emit a low, continuous hum or “psychoacoustic static” designed to suppress thought and prevent unauthorized dreaming or magic activity.
Those of us powerful enough to flare know how the pre-programmed static interferes with our magic, refracts it across the surveillance grid, and lights us up like a beacon.A bright, blinking ANOMALY DETECTED on some corporate nerds radar.
Said nerd then calls the CIC and a team of armed corporate assholes show up at your door. No one talks about what happens after. Some say you get “relocated,” some say you disappear, others say you wake up a corporate lab rat, experimented on, different, hollow, and wrong.
Personally? I kind of like it. Not the whole capture, pokey, labby thing...but it’s the only time Oneiro City ever shuts up, ever goes quiet. The only time the hum of tech, the buzz of ads, or the roar of crowds slips into silence.
A brief moment where I’m not being watched or measured or hunted.
I love the few minutes of peace before the lights snap back on, and the city starts devouring us again. TheKast is their way of reminding us we don’t own our magic.They do.
Tell us you didn’t engineer StarFell without telling us...
But still, there’s something strange I always feel in those few seconds before the city restarts.
I would be kidding myself if I didn’t admit the curfew has become its own twisted little time-pressure device.
Every night, I find myself racing home, either to beat the moment reality gets smothered in white noise, or to lie in bed waiting, counting down the slow, torturous seconds until I can activate my DreamNet band.
Because TheKast doesn’t just shut the city down. It shuts us all down.
For the rebellion, it’s a window to move unseen, to illegally organize, and plan. For the non-rebellious U21, it’s a guilty-pleasure countdown.
We’re all waiting for the minute the static fades, and the grid re-ignites with all the things we’re not supposed to have: GameNet on hacked servers, late-night VR hookups, whispered secret messages, and the kind of holographic sexual explorations we pretend we’re definitely not doing.
We’re not able to dream, but somehow, the curfew makes us want to even more.
When I’m in DreamNet, I can be whatever and whoever I want. I can dream that I’m not part of a hunted generation, that the despair carved into us after StarFell didn’t swallow us whole.
Ugh. Thoughts interrupted. That noise.
I can hear it again tonight. Despite being passed out drunk across his bed, Eli is making that noise again.
A quiet call or echo from his mouth, sounding otherworldly and unsettling.
It doesn’t quite belong in the physical world.
It comes in waves, not one echo but a thousand splintered versions of the same note folding in on themselves.
A chill travels down my skin like an ice cube being dropped into a glass. It isn’t just sound, it’s a reverberation through my bones and blood, a vibration that leaves my teeth aching. I can only compare it to glass being scraped against glass.
I don’t dare reach for my EarLINKs during TheKast, even though music would deafen the sensory input.
Come on...come on...I shake my foot while staring at the clock. I’m anxious, eager to immerse myself in a world made just for me.
Chill, Lyra. Trying to use DreamNet bands during TheKast risks detection, death, or permanent AI absorption.
No thank you to all those.
I begin tapping my foot on the mattress, but it doesn’t help the unease.
I crawl, no, fall, out of bed and make a desperate attempt to pull the blind. A wave of nausea hits. I find myself leaning on the windowsill surveying the neon signs, holo-ads, and the VR kiosks flickering with digital snow. A gray wash over the street that’s normally blindingly bright, now dull.
What I wouldn’t give to see real snow again, feel the coldness of tiny flakes hitting my cheeks as I stare up at a white endless sky.
A low buzz vibrates in my hands and begins to crawl up my arms. That would be the “sweet hum of compliance” tugging at my magic, muted and restless.
I know this...
I whisper, counting the seconds until TheKast lifts. My fingers twitch, ready to turn my DreamNet band and bend the gray into my own version of light.
A flash then a crackle and the lights slam back on. The ads scream. The streets roar.And the magic I’m forced to cage claws at my insides again.
The world wakes up, hungry and empty again. Everyone starts living only when the grungy whirring and machine-like sounds of the city begin anew.
I jump into bed like a toddler on Christmas Eve.
Anxiously, I twist my DreamNet band and a pulse of bright cyan light surrounds my entire arm, its cool metal pressing against my wrist. We call it “jacking in.” The Corporation explains it as a neural trigger in the band that activates a full sensory cascade, a descent into a virtual realm.
One blink and the real world softens. One heartbeat and it fractures.
For a moment, I lose sense of gravity, a brief vertigo, as my consciousness is uprooted from my physical body and replanted into an avatar.
The room melts like ink in water, and suddenly I’m in the lobby.
Three doors float freely in front of me, each one representing the “flavor” of the experience it holds, acting as a portal to realities more promising than the one I’m leaving behind.
Rain still falls here. It sparkles in silver threads, each drop a pixel dissolving before it hits the ground. Neon signs pulse in slow motion above my head, their words warping: WELCOME becomes WOULDN’T YOU LIKE TO STAY? A fuzzy, rainbow-edged blur forms around them, like a lens out of focus.
Yes, I’d quite like that.
I’m barefoot but warm, the air tastes sweet like candy, and I feel happiness seeping into my soul.
No gaming tonight, instead I enter another door, cloud white with a sign above that illuminates the word DREAM. I easily open it with the shiny silver doorknob and step inside to an open world where my thoughts have the power to come alive in any manner and shape I will them too.
Cherry blossoms line the path I’m walking on, and I can see a tall mountain with a fine mist trapping the sunlight inside like liquid swirling in a glass globe. The pink petals drift lazily through the air as if the world itself has slowed down to watch me move.
The DreamNet band pulses against my side, soft and rhythmic, like it knows my heartbeat better than I do.
The sky is a blocky prism of blush and lavender, and the mountain in the distance seems to breathe with the warm wind, trees swaying back and forth, spasming against the pixels surrounding them.
Someone catches my eye, appearing in the distance. It’s Kael. The guy I just met at the club.
Not Ash, just Kael, alone. The man whose eyes were so dark they were drowning me in them like ink spilling into water, endless, and impossible to escape.
At first, he’s just a phantom between the trees, dark and ominous against the blossom haze. His jacket moves like it’s made entirely of shadows. Shadows that seem to curl around you before you’re about to be swept away by them and lost forever.
When his eyes find mine, they gleam black with blinding flecks of gold that pulse while he’s analyzing me. Not entirely human.