Lorien sat at the dining room table in the spacious but bare, anonymous rooms that he’d been put up in by his employers, waiting out the timer until he could climb back into his bleeding-edge customized dream rig in the other room. To help kill the time, he made another attempt at a condolence letter to Saifulazman’s family. What could he really say, though? Your son was tremendously talented, honorable, and made the ultimate sacrifice to keep dreams free and safe. Also, I’m the reason he’s in a permanently vegetative state. He looked down and realized with horror that he had actually written that. He crumbled the sheet into a miniature boulder and flicked it off the table, where it landed amid a growing pile of other similarly failed attempts.

He’d been there before. All those letters after the explosion. None of it had made a microturd of difference to him then. He assumed Saif’s family would feel the same way. But maybe not. Maybe believing that their son had been some hero would make it easier for them.

It hadn’t for Lorien.

Saif had been his recruit, his Wisp, to train, and he’d failed him, like he’d failed a half dozen others that he still visited from time to time at the farm. Lorien’s Wisps did not tend to make it through more than a few ops, at best. And still, his employers kept sticking him with fresh meat. Wisps. The redshirts of the dream hacking world.

They all knew the risks, though, and apparently felt they were worth taking. He wasn’t sure what kind of carrot or stick DreamOps within the intelligence branch of the Union of Democratic Countries (UDC) was using these days. He’d never asked, and Saif had never volunteered that information. Most didn’t. Lorien wouldn’t, if anyone had asked. No one did though.

Looking back now, Lorien was surprised at how powerfully he felt the loss of Saif. Must be going soft, he thought. With each trainee, Lorien got a little bit better at preparing them, and they tended to last longer. Still, the eventual outcome was always more or less the same.

He always began with the history and theory, how the world they lived in was shaped by the unintended consequences of technological innovation. Specifically, how dreamtech had started with the space program, looking for ways to create an improved form of cryosleep so that they could colonize planets farther and farther from earth. Entrepreneurs had borrowed (or stolen) that tech to create home sleep chambers – perfect for the busy professional who wanted to maximize every waking moment. Just twenty minutes in the chamber was a full night sleep. Which naturally led to ten, then twelve, then fourteen-hour workdays. Productivity skyrocketed, the prices for sleep chambers dropped, and soon everyone had one.

But that was where the unanticipated consequences came in. After a few years, there was a noticeable spike in mental illness, psychosis, suicide, and so on. Turned out that twenty minutes in the chamber might have felt like a full and restful night sleep, but there was one tiny little problem: no dreams. You closed your eyes, dropped into a deep unconsciousness, opened your eyes, and kept going. But even if you felt refreshed physically, mentally something was missing, some critical nutrient was being lost. Dream Sickness, it was called, and it quickly came to have its own full chapter in the DSM-XII.

Leave it to an entrepreneur to solve the problem created by another entrepreneur (while managing to spawn yet more problems for someone else to address). Lorien and others started recording and programming dreams.

“Wait up,” Saif had interrupted. “As in, you were one of the original dreamdevs?”

“Yeah,” Lorien had admitted. “I was.” Until the bomb went off.

At first the dreams they programmed were uncomfortable, glitchy things that felt like a cross between being unexpectedly cast in a foreign film and being subjected to someone else’s fever dream. But they got better, smoother. Eventually governments created standards and requirements. And true to the endless cycle of human advancement, this solution spawned yet a whole new slew of problems. This time it was good, old-fashioned crime—a black market for every flavor of warped fantasy that would never receive approval. Without the same quality control, you could catch a corrupt dream, one in which you understood everything even though all the dialog was in Chirean or Russostani. But sometimes what happened was more subtle, and far more insidious.

There were really only two kinds of dreamhacking: through windows and through gateways. Windows allowed a hacker (or a Morph, as they were called) to look through, scan, and steal data like shameful moments for blackmail, trade secrets, classified military information, and the like. Gateways let Morphs physically commandeer a sleeping body. Though the control that gateways provided over a sleeping body only lasted for a minute or two at most, that was time enough to have some elected official speak a coded word or message during a press conference (which had happened at least twice that Lorien knew about). Dreamhacking in all its forms was immediately outlawed everywhere, which did nothing to stop it. So, intelligence agencies and private security businesses got more proactive about prevention. They “employed” (read as captured, tortured, flipped) Morphs to go after their criminal colleagues.

“The ones like me,” Lorien had told Saif, “who hunt down Morphs, we’re called Wraiths. And the ones like you, who want to be one of the ones like me, you’re called a Wisp.”

“Oh, wow,” Saif had responded. “So, what, you’re like teaching me the art of boring people to death with shit that everybody already knows? Color me impressed,” he yawned.

Saif had been a smartass, which Lorien took as a promising sign. There had been legitimate if brief and dim flickers of interest in Saif’s eyes that first week, going through the whole long backstory, but he was young and impatient. Listening to Lorien drone on about “the old days” was about as exciting as sitting through a sixty-hour seminar on the causes of the second civil war. Saif was itching to get on to the exciting stuff, the tactics and tradecraft and simulations.

Still, Lorien had anticipated the moment that his pupil would begin to mouth off. He switched the view on a screen to what they called the farm—endless rows of beds in which former Wraiths and Wisps were hooked up to various monitors and life support systems. Some twitched, muttered and moaned, locked in the endlessly changing not-so-much-funhouse corridors of their own dreams and nightmares. Others just stared vacantly at the ceiling, their brains permanently fried. The list of ways one could end up a vegetable were too numerous to count, and ever increasing. Faulty chambers or rigs, poison apple coded dreams, and, of course, being unprepared for conflict with a Morph.

“Oh, look—they have a vacancy. See that empty rig way back there?” Lorien tapped the screen. “That one’s got your name on it. You want it?”

“Fuck no!”

“Good. Then pay attention.”

Fear never failed to motivate, and Saif was a quick study. Arrogant (God, weren’t they all anymore?), but sharp. He whizzed through strategy in six months, then it was into tactics. They dreamswapped and trained in each other’s internal terrain until they knew every square inch of it like their own. Lorien poked and prodded at every potential fear and insecurity, every imaginable scenario, pummeling Saif with everything he could pry lose from the darkest folds of the kid’s psyche. And Saif studied Lorien like the mirror reflection he was to become. Of course, anyone could be made to look like anyone else, but if Saif was going to convince anyone that he was Lorien, he had to play the part hard enough to win an Academy Award. This meant knowing the things that made him react, even with the faintest smile or cringe, the way he walked (slightly hunched over, hands in pockets, maybe just a barely perceptible hint of swagger on the rare occasions when someone recognized him).

Once Saif could hold his own and do a passable impression of Lorien, they began tandem dreaming, connected by a livelink while their non-dreaming monitors watched over them. Lorien rode shotgun, speaking through Saif’s mouth and maneuvering his body until Saif could anticipate his words and moves before he made them. With tandem dreaming, it was all about matching reactions in extent and duration. More than the smallest difference could cause a small glitch, something that most sleeping dreamers would never notice. But any halfway competent Morph would spot it like a blinking neon sign. A dead giveaway.

They trained until the line between one another became blurry, in both the dreaming and waking world. They were each assigned a pair of monitors who would be with them while they went under. The monitors combined two key skillsets—that of real-time data analysts, tracking, reviewing, and responding to anything and everything that Lorien and Saif experienced in the dreamworld; and that of paramedics, in the event that things went sideways in some way that endangered the dreamers’ physical bodies. Things went sideways a good bit more often than most recruitment sites and brochures were comfortable talking about. Especially when it came to working with Wraiths, like Lorien.

Lorien returned to himself and checked the timer. Twenty minutes to go, and then he’d be out of the cool down period, when it would be safe to climb back into one of his homemade dreams. He imagined the feeling of his son’s spiked up hair between his fingers, and he ran a hand over his head. His wife’s hand clasped in his. Pale sunlight making him squint, turning the streets of New Milan into a warm ambient whiteout. The simple pleasure of being with Halia and Finn, of having a family. Back when he did.

As he replayed things in his head, Lorien had been doodling on a piece of paper. Weird, zig-zag patterns that wouldn’t have meant anything to anyone who hadn’t seen Feynman diagrams before. It was all he could think of since the last op, but he had to be careful. This sheet he did not crumple up into a ball like the others. This one he took over to the stovetop and burned. Just because you’re paranoid, he said to himself, doesn’t mean they’re not out to get you.

Like subatomic particles in a theoretical physics equation, Lorien’s thoughts shifted direction again from present to past. One day, after he’d been training with Saif for a few months, Lorien found director Reichenback waiting for him. The director looked exactly like what he was, a man tasked with winning multiple simultaneous chess games played in the dark. “Is he ready?”

“Nope.” Lorien believed in giving honest assessments.

“New assignment came in today. Somebody you know,” the director informed him. “You have two weeks. Make him ready.”

The following morning Saif and Lorien were called into the conference room. There with them were their two pairs of monitors, a couple higher-level intelligence types, and the director. Dossiers were passed around as the director started talking.

“As you all know, over the last six months there’ve been a series of very ballsy, high-profile military and scientific facilities attacked. None of the typical groups have claimed credit. What they’re after hasn’t been the usual financial and government data. They’ve been taking weird shit,” he looked directly at Lorien as he said that, as if he were personally responsible for all weird shit globally. Lorien took it as an unintended compliment. “Particle accelerator schematics, experimental physics lab equipment, things that make the folks above me get twitchy. We don’t know who’s behind it, but we’ve been listening to the chatter in both the dream and waking worlds. We believe that this individual is involved.”

Lorien flipped open the folder and stared into a familiar face.

“Anand Khayal Agarwal, alias Anon-C, alias Trickster, alias…” The director continued to rattle off a list of names, but Lorien had stopped listening. Anand would always be just “Tricks” to him. They had spent a good four years, on and off, working together on projects when dream development was still the new new thing. Other than Lorien himself, as far as he knew, Tricks was the last of the old school devs still active. Well, maybe one other, but that was only whispers and rumors. He tuned back into the briefing.

“Thirty-nine years old, last employed by the New Mongolian Empire.” Lorien continued to flip through the pages, and then he stopped cold on a piece of information that was news to him.

“Wait, he’s dying?” Lorien raised a burn-scarred hand and interrupted.

“We’re coming to that, but yes. As near as we can tell from what medical and prescription data we have, we believe he has glioblastoma multiform. Likely just months left, if even that.” Then, as a veiled swipe at Lorien, he added, “Quite possibly the result of continuous exposure to experimental dream tech.”

Reading the genuine surprise and sadness on Lorien’s face, the director changed his tone. “You two were close? What can you tell us about him?”

Lorien nodded, noticing that Saif was appraising him with a newfound respect. Admiration, maybe. “He was good. He and I are probably the last ones still out there doing ops. He’s an old school guy, into games, uber clever. He kept a pet spider that always creeped me out. He was big into history too, mostly prewar North America. Oh, he’s a genexiphile.”

“Genexiphile?” Saif asked.

“Yeah,” Lorien continued. “Everything Gen X. Anything from the 1980s and 1990s. That was his thing.”

“Well,” the director said, “he’s reached out to us. Asked for you specifically, Lorien. Alone. If he thinks you’re riding shotgun on anyone,” he turned his steel eyes on Saif, “things will go badly. He wants to meet in neutral territory, so you and Saif start running scenarios for a meeting in Interzone.”

They all stood up to leave.

“Don’t fuck this up please,” the director said, more as a plea than a jab.

*     *     *
Ten minutes left on the timer. Lorien had continued to scribble while he thought back through the meeting with Anand. He inspected his own scribbles more closely and realized they weren’t just meaningless looping doodles, but rather one word written over and over.

Thule.

He ran a scarred hand, short two fingers, through the hair that still grew from patches between the burned-smooth mounds on his head. His once-good looks had been the least of what the car bomb had cost him. In just ten minutes though, he’d be reunited with his wife and son. He always started with the same scenario—the one in which they decided not to get into the car after lunch but went for a walk instead. From there he would launch into one of a thousand different scenarios that never happened—seeing his son’s high school and college graduation, vacations he never took with his wife, the two-story house set far off from civilization, in which they hadn’t lived and grown old together.

Lately he’d been focused on not just programming and indulging in such unmade memories, but rather how the dreams could be transmitted across what he’d assumed until just recently was an unbridgeable gulf. Now though, with what Anand had told him, maybe not so impossible …

Anand. The room dissolved around him again and he was back in his memories, taking Saif into danger he could never have been adequately prepared for, no matter how long and deep they trained together.

*     *     *
The day of the meet, they had entered Interzone as one, Saif doing the walking and talking with Lorien driving behind the scenes.

Interzone was the seedy, liminal world born in the cracks between approved dreams. It was the dreamworld’s own dark web, where neither the laws of governments nor those of physics applied. The section that Lorien and Saif entered appeared to be some crumbling, partially ruined combination of Madrid, Tokyo, and maybe Upper Detroit. It was a sprawling and constant street fair. Vendors whispered and shouted their wares from miniature castles, pillow forts, renaissance fair wooden booths strung with bright banners, shipping containers. They walked past a clown and a mutant strongman in a leather harness taking turns smacking themselves in the face with a mallet to the cheers of the onlookers who ringed them.

Digital billboards and holographic projections flashed and flicked. Vendors pitched them every form of illicit dream as they walked on.

“Want to fuck a celebrity? Want to be a celebrity … chased down and torn apart by wild dogs?”

“Bodymods. Get your body made of Lego. Made of Eggos. Photons. Seafoam. Silicone. Sand …”

“Want to be a Birkenau prison guard? See the new world as a conquistador alongside Cortez? Bondage. Rough Trade. You name it. Three for the price of two. If you can dream it, I can deal it. And if I can deal it, you can dream it …”

“Visit Narnia, Hogwarts, Atlantis, Fillory, Norrath, Uqbar, ancient civilizations, alien civilizations, Knowwhere, Neverwhere, Everville, anywhere …”

“Whips and chains more your speed? Got just the thing for you. Take a cruise through the ancient Americas along the middle passage …”

Lorien and Saif paused in front of a mirror, examining the body they were sharing. Lorien cringed at the sight of himself. Even with a hat and a long-sleeved jacket, he was a monster, burns coving nearly eighty percent of his body. Transformed far deeper than his physical body.

They continued and turned off the main thoroughfare and down a narrow alleyway, the walls of which had been layered over again and again by graffiti murals and tags. Lorien almost missed it, a hyperrealistic black and white spiderweb strung from the corners of several different spraypainted letters and images. It looked like a large black widow with the red hourglass on its abdomen replaced by the letter “C.”

“Stay sharp, we’re getting close now,” Lorien said to Saif and by extension to the monitors in the room with their bodies.

When he looked back at the spiderweb, it was empty. The spider had crawled off somewhere.

The alley opened up into a small park. Under a stunted, blackened tree, a grey-bearded man in a patched and faded purple bathrobe called to them. “Greatest moments in human history. Relive any time, any place.”

“That’s our guy,” Lorien said.

They approached the unshaved, potbellied purveyor of dreams as he puffed on a cigar. He stared at Lorien, probably running a quick scan, and smiled. “Got something special for you,” he said, reaching into the folds of his robe. Saif tensed, unaccustomed to this sort of exchange outside of controlled test environments.

“Easy,” Lorien cautioned.

The man pulled out an antique plastic DVD case, the front of which advertised the World’s Columbian Exposition, Chicago, 1893. They nodded as one body and went over to a sad-looking green bench. The paint was peeling away, and the wood underneath was in an advanced state of rot in places.

It was time to test some new tech.

They had been given a new tracking code in the form of a clear spray. Saif sprayed it a few times on the bench before setting the DVD case down on top of it. Whatever touched the spray could be tracked through Interzone, so if Anand got spooked and took off, they could follow him.

They sat down and waited, expecting someone to approach, see the DVD case, and take a seat at the other end of the bench. But that wasn’t how it happened.

The DVD case rattled and bounced a few times, then came to a stop and flipped open. No DVD inside, just a square pit of writhing black shadows. From over the edge of the case, a thin black arachnid leg extended. It hung there hesitantly, teasing the air as if asking, “Is it safe?”. Deciding that it was, it climbed over to the space on the other end of the bench and pulled its legs in tight. Behind it first a trickle, then a torrent of other arachnids of all shapes and sizes followed, some smaller than a fingernail, others as large as a fist. They all climbed atop one another, fusing until no space remained between their bodies and they assumed a human form that Lorien recognized. Of course, it had two extra sets of arms. Once the figure had completely assembled itself, it opened its yellow eyes and gave a broad smile with bright white teeth.

“What’s up Luzor? Been a minute.”

Luzor (loser) had been Anand’s snarky version of Lorien’s old handle, Luzifire, from the time when they had worked side by side. When Lorien had the luxury of youthful arrogance, thinking that it would be illumination he brought to the world and those he loved. Instead he’d brought them all something else.

“Tricks,” Lorien acknowledged in kind.

Anand paused and waited for something. Finally, he fished for the compliment he wouldn’t get otherwise. “Dude, just once can you say something like, awesome coding man! Radical entrance!”

Lorien chuckled. “It’s solid coding. Smooth. Very impressive. But you know how I feel about spiders.”

“I know, I know. Nobody likes spiders anymore.”

“You look good though,” Lorien lied. Anand’s body seemed to have shrunk; his eyes were sunken too far into his skull, skin pulled too tight over his bones.

“Yeah, for a dead man, I guess.” He sighed. “Half the governments still functioning are on my ass. Between you and me though, I’m betting the brain cancer gets me first.”

So, Lorien thought, it’s true. What he read in the file.

“I thought you were working for the NME. Can’t they do anything to help?”

“What, the Mongols? Nah, that’s over anyway. It was only ever a means to an end.” He leaned in conspiratorially close. “I’ve been working with Thule on something big. Feynman diagram type shit.”

Lorien took in the information like a mental one-two punch. Saif had no idea of the significance of what he’d just heard, and the monitors back at the bunker were probably puzzling over the sudden spike in his heart rate. Keep it together, he thought, taking deep, slow breaths.

Ultima Thule. That was a name he didn’t expect to hear. And it wasn’t even the part about what Anand had said that blew his mind most.

“Bullshit,” he said. “Thule’s dead.”

“Nah, it’s been lying low. But it’s alive.”

“She, you mean. She’s alive.”

“You know, we are just never going to agree on this, are we?”

*     *     *
Thule had been there at the beginning, showing all the rest of the first wave of dreamdevs how to transform their ideas into reality. Providing schematics for the hardware, writing the language for dream coding, building the testing environments. The first handful of devs might have been smart, maybe gifted, some of them, but Thule was in a class alone. A pioneer among pioneers, pushing the boundaries and forging a path ever farther into the unknown. Thule was the only one Lorien had ever heard of who was so outrageously talented that they could actually code and hack dreams from within their own. That was the legend, anyway.

And from the outset, is seemed that Thule had seen and anticipatedeverything that would unfold. The value in dreams—enough to build empires, enough to kill for and wage covert wars over. Certainly enough to blow up a car with a husband-and-wife team of developers and their young son who were planning to release all of their tools and data to the public—to opensource dream development.

While some of the developers hungered for the spotlight, Thule remained cloaked in shadow, maintaining obsessive anonymity. What seemed like laughably insane paranoia to a group of young punks out to change the world was retrospectively nothing short of oracular.

No one had ever met Thule in person, and Thule only ever communicated via a secure dreamspace the devs had set up, and even there mostly just through text or through a voice modulator tweaked to sound like the one Stephen Hawking had used. Since Thule had never actually been seen, predictably everyone had their own idea about who or what was behind the name.

Anand was convinced that Thule was actually a highly-evolved, neuroadaptive AI program, hence the reason that no one had, or could, ever meet Thule in person. Based on his assumption, he assigned Thule the pronoun “it.”

Lorien, however, had a different idea. He always felt in his gut that Thule was a woman—possibly because whenever he had been confronted by what he considered an unquestionably greater intelligence than his own, it had turned out to be female. His wife in particular.

He hadn’t communicated much with Thule, but he always recalled one brief exchange, in which Thule had asserted confidently that no one on earth at the time could possibly find her sleeping body. Coming from anyone else, Lorien would have taken that comment as bragging, but Thule had never exhibited a hint of ego (one more reason Anand was sold on the idea that Thule wasn’t human), so he reasoned it had to be literal. No one on earth. An idea came to him then, something so farfetched as to be just barely this side of impossible: What if Thule wasn’t on Earth at all? What if Thule was in deep cryo, packed in among hundreds of others like sleeping sardines, on board one of the “icebox” ships heading for a new and distant planet to populate? With nothing but time and access to dreams from a top-shelf sleep chamber. That such a thing would push the limit of what was imaginable felt right, somehow, for Thule.

*     *     *
“If you’re working with Thule, you’ll need to prove that to me,” Lorien challenged Anand.

“Funny thing, Thule said you’d say that. Here,” he handed Lorien and Saif a folded piece of paper. “You know, it’s weird, you kind of sound like it sometimes.”

“What, like Thule, you mean?”

“Yeah … I never noticed that before.”

Saif began unfolding the paper in the hands he shared with Lorien.

“Wait,” Lorien screamed silently, “Don’t open it!”

Too late.

The crudely drawn image was of a car exploding with a comic book–style “Boom” in the center of it.

Saif didn’t react strongly enough, whereas Lorien’s blood pressure and heart rate shot upwards. As intended, it was enough to momentarily separate Lorien and Saif—a ghostly outline image of Lorien appeared superimposed over his own dream body, which Saif currently occupied.

“We’ve been made,” Lorien groaned out loud in the room where his monitors watched over him.

At the same time in Interzone, Lorien and Saif felt something clamp around the neck they shared. Eight vicelike legs. A spider, ready to plant its fangs and god only knew what else into them.

Anand shook his head in disappointment. “I trusted you Luzor, I came out to meet you here, and this is how you show up? Riding shotgun in some newbie?”

Saif stared straight ahead. From the side of his face another set of eyes and mouth appeared, through which Lorien spoke directly. “Look, we go in pairs. You know that. Now let’s not do anything rash here, okay? I’m here, let’s talk.”

“Nah, I think we’re done talking. You want to talk, you come talk to me alone.”

“You know I can’t just leave my …”

Lorien’s words were interrupted by a searing pain as the spider bit into him and Saif. He could feel the toxic code pouring into his Wisp and had no choice. Survival instincts kicked in, and he did the one thing he’d always trained his Wisps not to. He severed the cord, their livelink, and materialized separately in Interzone.

*     *     *
Back in the windowless room of a UDC bunker, where Lorien was in quasi sleep and Saif was all the way under, in some twitching, frothing meltdown, and their bodies were connected to displays and computers and each other by tangles of cords, one of two monitors assigned to Lorien sighed. “Strap in, here we go.”

“Oh no,” the other smacked his palms against his cheeks, mouth open in an “o” of mock disbelief. “Lorien’s severed the livelink to his Wisp. Whoever could have possibly anticipated that such a terrible and dangerous thing would happen. Again.”

They both chuckled at that one, then turned back to their respective screens. The two monitors attached to Saif ignored the chatter from their peers, consumed as they were with trying to stabilize their Wisp until a crash cart came rolling in from the infirmary down the hall. Lorien’s monitors, meanwhile continued to follow his fluctuating outputs, serotonin levels, respiration, pulse, eye movement, and other stats as he pursued his target through the nonsensically and impossibly designed labyrinth of Interzone.

*     *     *
Lorien looked at a streak of light that led away from the bench. The tracking code fluid had worked; he took off after the streak, winding his way through an abandoned brick building, then out into a hillside where an old man on horseback went charging full speed towards a windmill. Overhead three figures astride broomsticks twirled and looped through the air, narrowly averting collision with an elaborately decorated Victorian-styled steam-powered dirigible.

The streak wound back through one of the main streets of Interzone. Lorien rushed past vendor stalls, elbowed shoppers out of the way, and leapt at one point over some kind of prehistoric lizard. Overhead grey clouds let loose, and rain pelted him as he splashed through oily puddles that reflected neon lights and gothic castles.

The streak of pale light disappeared into another alley, and the alley terminated in a spiderweb, atop which was a giant spider. Lorien was caught off guard for a second before he realized the spider was just a carnival-style cutout. Between its two longest front legs, what he had taken at first for a web was actually a tunnel of mirrors angled in such a way to appear weblike. It was the opening to a funhouse mirror maze.

Spiders. Carnival funhouse mirror mazes. Fucking genexiphiles, he thought.

If Anand wanted to do this like it was the 1980s, Lorien would oblige him. He reached for his belt and drew from it a metallic cylinder. At the touch of a button, a glowing red beam extended outward. He gave the lightsaber a twirl, feeling its satisfying weight in his hand. It hummed and wooshed appropriately. The rain was heavier now, the droplets sizzling and evaporating against his weapon as he entered the maze.

The corridor twisted and forked, throwing Lorien’s own image back at him, twisted and distorted in a hundred different ways.

The tracking fluid was fading now, leaving him to find his own way through Anand’s pre-programed domain. Clearly he’d been planning this for some time.

Something leapt out to his left, and he swung his saber and sliced apart a dummy dressed up in a plaid shirt and hockey mask. A flicker of shadow caused him to jump to the right as one of the mirror images of himself swung its own saber for him. It drew sparks from the ground where he’d been standing a second before. He spun around, but his saber connected with nothing. Anand was already gone, deeper into his web.

He followed the prerecorded sound of demented clown laughter through the twists and turns, every so often striking and shattering one of the mirrors.

After a time, the hallway opened up into a round room, the walls paneled with full-length mirrors. Lorien saw himself distorted, elongated, shrunk, two- and three-headed. Dozens of arms, all flashing the same red lightsaber. He took a breath and remembered the most important thing he’d learned from his days of blind fighting. It wasn’t about closing off to what appeared to be, but rather about opening up to what didn’t. He inspected each mirror image of himself, top to bottom, found the one he was looking for, and then turned his back to it.

A quick three count, then he lifted his lightsaber as if to slash in front of him.

And instead plunged it directly behind him over his head, where it made a series of crackling pops as it pierced through the plexus of his adversary.

“F-f-f-Fu-Fuck!” Anand stutter-screamed.

Lorien turned to face his old friend, held in place, suspended a full foot off the ground by the code imbedded in the tip of the blade. All six of Anand’s arms held glowing sabers, all just microseconds from having driven them into Lorien’s back. Lorien’s blade was only ever set to stun, to capture. He assumed that Anand’s were not.

A smile curled one side of Lorien’s mouth. With a few strokes he severed first the left and then the right three arms from Anand. The limbs fell in a heap. Then, with a swift spin, he separated the head from the neck.

Anand’s head rolled to a stop at his feet, looking upward. It blinked, and then spoke. “Come on now, was that really necessary?”

Lorien shrugged. “Nah. Just fun.” Realizing he was still being monitored, he kneeled beside the head and whispered to it, “Did you mean what you said before?”

“About Thule? And the Feyn …”

Lorien pressed a finger to the lips. “Yeah, that.”

“Yes. What I said, it’s all true.”

Lorien nodded, opened the replay panel he’d tampered with weeks before, and deleted the last few seconds of dialog from any recording that his monitors or anyone else might ever find.

Feynman diagrams. What they’d theorized about all those many years ago. If that was true, then suddenly anything was possible, and everything had changed. Who other than Thule could even attempt to bend the rules of physics? That was intel he planned to keep to himself.

“Hey, Luz,” Anand’s head said from the floor.

“Yeah?”

“Hey, how did you know which one was me?”

“It was the shadows.”

“What? No way man. They were perfect! I coded and tested every single pixel and vector.”

“Oh, they were. The shadows were perfect in every way.” Lorien grinned; it had been the sort of detail that only someone who knew Anand would even think to look for. “But only one of them had six arms.”

“Wait, what?” Then, after a brief pause, “Shit, I never thought about that.”

They both lapsed into silent reminiscence.

“What about the kid back there?”

“On the bench? Collateral damage. Sorry man, you know how it is.”

“Yeah, I figured.” It took some of the wind out of Lorien’s sails. The way he saw it, whether he’d done it directly or indirectly was just a matter of semantics. Either way, he was the reason another body would be plugged into a rig on the Farm.

“It’s been nice to see you one more time. I’m glad it was you they sent to bring me in. Feels right.”

“It does.”

Lorien looked at the severed head of his old friend and realized that he was trying to say goodbye. Had the cancer progressed that far, he wondered. Or was it something else …

“They’re good at tracing bodies from dreams. They’ll probably find you pretty soon, wherever you’re plugged in. You could make it go a little easier if you told us where …”

“… Thanks but no thanks. I think I’ll make them work for it. I’ll enjoy the fireworks more that way,” he smiled.

Fireworks. Something else then. Lorien remembered how Anand had more than once talked about placing improvised proximity mines around his sleeping body so that he could never be captured in the waking world. It sounded to Lorien like he had made good on that threat.

If Lorien’s monitors were doing their jobs, paying attention to the dialog coming across their screens, digging for the meaning behind the words, they could figure it out and pass along a warning. He could do it himself, of course, but as he thought of Saif, convulsing, drooling on himself, eyes reflecting endless nothing, he decided that he wasn’t really in the mood to be of any more help to the UDC today.

“Will you wait with me?” Anand’s head asked him.

“Sure.”

And then, after what seemed like forever, Anand’s head, body, and funhouse all vanished in a blindingly bright flash of light. Lorien was back on the streets of Interzone, heading for an exit.

*     *     *
When they pulled Lorien out and he came to, the rig next to him, the one that had been Saif’s, was empty. His monitors administered a sedative, hoisted him out of the rig and into an ice bath, and then into a soft suit and a real bed, where he would rest. The postop, along with their litany of questions, would wait.

But then, as now, he had just two words playing endlessly through his mind.

Feynman diagrams.

That had been their code for it, back in the early days, when he and the rest of the old dreamdevs were first learning their way around terra incognita. When they weren’t sure what the limits of their new art was.

It had started with a conversation—one of them had been studying physics, trying to understand what dreams really were. Maybe it was Keisha, with her ubercool mirror shades and purple dreadlocks. Maybe it was Q, forever scratching at his painful-looking psoriatic skin rashes. Someone had mentioned how Feynman diagrams showed the path of subatomic particles not just forward in time, but also backwards. Which suggested that whatever didn’t adhere to Newtonian physics could, possibly, theoretically,travel backwards in time. And dreams—while they were born of Newton’s particles and waves, technically, weren’t they something different than either of those things?

Everyone had gone dead silent, coming to the same conclusion.

Did that mean dreams could be sent back in time?

No one had any idea how that would be accomplished, and what ensued was a six-hour, drug-fueled discussion and debate about time travel.

At the time Lorien had been concerned about all the implications, paradoxes, disruption of the fabric of reality, creating a world where history was as mutable and therefore meaningless as the future.

Now though, as he prepped himself for another round of dreams, he couldn’t even pretend to give a shit about any of the moral and philosophical implications. All that mattered was the idea that if a dream could be sent back in time, then the possibility of precognition existed. Somehow this could be done. Thule was probably already working out the design of new rigs built for temporal dream transmission. And if any or all of this was real, then he could send himself a dream, a nightmare, an image of the explosion, a vision that would compel him and his wife and son to go for a walk or a bike ride. To do something, anything, other than open that car door.

Whatever else came along with it, he would accept the consequences. None of it mattered if he could change the outcome of that one event and have his family back.

No doubt back at the UDC offices, his monitors had already flagged for follow-up words and phrases like “Thule” and “Feynman diagrams.” He would have some difficult questions waiting for him when his leave was up.

He slipped back into his rig, lowered the lid, and felt himself going under with a name from another time resurrected on his lips.

*     *     *
The sun was casting pale light from behind the clouds, bathing the streets of New Milan in a white haze, like moving through a cloud. Halia there next to him as they approached the car. Lean, tan limbs emerging from her white liquid Kevlar vest and jeans that hugged her curves. Long brown hair parted over a small scar on her forehead from a motorcycle accident as a child. Glittering brown eyes hidden behind a pair of thin, wraparound Gucci Deus X mirrorshades. Her smile revealed the slightest gap between her top front teeth. Beautiful. Even better than perfect for those minor flaws.

Lorien had not bothered to mask his own disfigured form. He was wearing a Runner leather biker jacket of the type that had since become popular with the NME’s silicon horde and, for a season or two, with the members (and critics) of the Datamancer Art Collective.

It could have been the hundredth, the thousandth, the ten thousandth time he’d relived this moment. He didn’t know and didn’t care. All that mattered was feeling this—the dream that had once been real. That maybe could be real again.

In this opening sequence, one of a dozen slightly different scenarios, Finn was absent, maybe with a sitter or playing with a friend. This particular version, involving only Lorien and Halia, opened up a vast range of pleasant directions in which the dream could go.

She reached for the door handle and Lorien seized up as he always did.

“Let’s walk,” he suggested, giving her hand a squeeze.

“Because if I open it,” she smiled, “it unleashes a fiery inferno that sears half the features off your face and blows me to hell, right?”

Lorien froze. Of all the many outcomes he had accounted for, the one that had been painstakingly excluded was that any harm could come to her and Finn. Furthermore, Halia wasn’t supposed to be remotely cognizant that such a thing could occur. He had made it, literally, unthinkable. Had someone tampered with his code? Or worse yet …

The world around and including him stopped, held suspended. A glitch? Jesus, was he glitching? It was always a risk with experimental dreamtech, though he disassembled and reassembled every hardware component, scanned and recompiled his code obsessively. It was such a stupidly easy way to end up in a bed on the Farm—locked inside your own head forever. Would that be poetic justice? Tucked in at the end of a row of too-familiar faces, while gazing helplessly at Halia forever?

“Relax, you’re not glitching,” a voice he recognized spoke into his ear.

With those words Lorien was freed from his paralysis, though his wife and the rest of the world remained paused. He turned in slow motion towards the speaker and found himself looking into his own face. A version of it, anyway. One that had hair laced through with silver, face carved into a subtle cutaneous map of crow’s feet and crevices. One that had never been reshaped by fire.

As far as masks went, it was perfect.

“Damn, you’re handsome,” Lorien said. “But who, or what, is behind the disguise?”

“I think you already know,” his dream doppelgänger replied.

“Thule.”

His double nodded. “We weren’t always called that, of course.”

“You’re saying, what, no mask? That I … that you? We …?”

“One and the same. Of course, I am a little bit better looking.”

Lorien’s mind reeled. Was he, could he become, Thule? His mind’s fingers fumbled their way around this information. It could just be a trick, some hotshot Morph out to make his bones, using Lorien’s own thoughts against him. Something Anand had planted, maybe.

“Prove it then. Something only we, only I, could know.”

“What if some day or night a demon were to steal after you into your loneliest loneliness, and say to you, ‘this life as you now live it and have lived it, you will have to live once more and innumerable times more’?”

Lorien recognized it as Nietzche’s quote about eternal return. Ever since the car bomb, it played on a background loop in his head. He thought about it all the time.

“Nietzsche’s eternal return,” Thule said, echoing Lorien’s thoughts. “We think about that all the time.”

It took a beat for Lorien to realize his mouth was agape. “Okay, okay, let’s say I believe you, that you and I, that we’re really the same. Isn’t being here, talking to each other, ourselves, some kind of paradox?”

“Conveniently, it turns out that dreams are exempt from that. Sort of. It’s tricky, but I’ll show you the way. All you have to do is take my hand and let me in.”

“Let you in … what, as a hitchhiker in my head? Are you joking? Um, yeah, I’ll take a hard pass on that, thanks. No way that’s happening.”

“We did say that we would do anything, right? Absolutely anything to get our family back, didn’t we?”

Lorien clenched and unclenched his fists and chewed on one scarred corner of his lower lip.

“And that … can really happen?”

“That and so much more.” Thule smiled, backed away a step, and extended his hand. “But we’ve got a shit ton of work to do, and it has to start right now.”

Lorien looked over at the frozen facsimile of his dead wife.

Thule’s hand hung in the air between the two men who might be one.

“Come on. Don’t you trust yourself?” Thule asked.

Lorien thought of row after row of occupied beds at the Farm. Saif and all the other Wisps that he had planted there, directly or indirectly. Every single one of them had misplaced their trust in him. So, no, he did not trust himself. Not at all.

Thule’s smile was wearing thin. “Hmmm, okay, I get it. We’re maybe a little bit more damaged than I remember. But this is it, this is the one way I know to get us back what we lost. So, I’m going to start walking and you can come with, or not …”

Thule let his hand fall back to his side, spun around, and began sauntering off toward a partially designed side street.

“Damnit,” Lorien said under his breath, filled his eyes one more time with Halia, and took off after Thule. Together they navigated a maze of alleys, based on maps of New Milan, as the buildings around them became less corporeal, dissolving into partially rendered transparencies and wireframes.

“What about the director?” Lorien asked.

“Reichenbach? He’s not our enemy. He’s not exactly our friend, either. Think of him as a neutral party. Better yet, think of him the way he thinks of us, as a very powerful tool that should be used only with extreme caution. Actually, we’re going to need him, or more specifically, a certain file he has …”

Lorien stopped short. “And there it is folks. The ask. ‘Just this one little thing,’ right? And just like that, I take my first step down the road to supervillainy …”

Thule exhaled, no longer bothering to hide his exasperation. “A bit melodramatic, don’t you think? Let me ask you this, why do think we need that file? What’s in it?”

Lorien shrugged.

“It’s the location of a classified facility where the UDC will be constructing an experimental rig with a prototype temporal chipset.”

“And that’ll work?”

“It will for us.”

They continued walking until they reached a mirrored door set into an invisible wall, one that Lorien had never fully coded.

“Decision time,” Thule said and tapped the door’s mirrored surface. From where his fingertip landed, ripples spread across the door as if it was a pool of mercury suspended sideways in defiance of gravity. He held his other hand out towards Lorien. “The only way through is together.”

The hesitation was gone, and Lorien wondered briefly how many different ways and times he had already lost this debate with himself. He reached out, clasped hands with who he would become, and together they stepped through the illusion.

The mirror spit them out into a long, dimly lit hallway, sloping and curving, the walls all shards of mirrors fit together like cyclopean masonry. Far above, the sky itself was mirrored, and he watched himself and Thule progress, side by side, like twin subatomic particles through a strange, looping design that he recognized as one of Feyman’s diagrams.

“What the hell is this place?”

“You like it?” Thule said from up ahead. “We’ll build it together over the next few years. Turns out that inside the dreamshrine we built to our dead family is the absolute perfect place to hide something more …”

“… nefarious?” Lorien offered.

“I was going to say extraordinary. You know, you’ve really got to stop thinking of our future in terms of criminality.”

Lorien said nothing. His head was spinning as he fought blindly not to drown in this fathomless new sea of cold shadow and incongruous data.

The hallway reminded him of the fun house into which he had not long ago followed Anand. Had Anand been inspired by this same hallway? Which, if built by Lorien/Thule, must have been previously inspired by Anand’s funhouse? It was exactly the sort of temporal paradox he hated, the kind that was sure to produce a catastrophic migraine if he thought about it too much.

And then, up ahead, he heard Thule start whistling something he recognized. It conjured images of Gene Wilder in a top hat and a plum-colored jacket, singing:

“… Come with me, and you’ll be

In a world of pure imagination …”

He shook his head as the corners of his ruined lips curved up into the most minimally perceptible hint of a smile.

“Fucking genexiphiles.”