One of Us. Michael Marshall Smith
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over the dreamer's inner eye. The substance of the dream, an intangible quality which seemed impossible to isolate, remains. The more dreams a client has removed, the more this substance is left behind: invisible, indestructible, but carrying some kind of weight. It hangs around in the room the dream has been erased in, and after thirty or so erasures it gets to the point where the room becomes uninhabitable. It's like walking into a thunderstorm of competing subconscious impulses – absolutely silent but impossible to bear. After a few weeks, the dreams seem to coalesce still further, making the air so thick that it becomes impossible to even enter the room at all.
Unfortunately, the kind of client who could afford dream disposal was exactly the type who was turned on by litigation. After the company had swallowed a few huge out-of-court settlements on bedrooms which were now impassable, they turned their minds to finding a way out of the problem. They tried diverting the dreams into storage data banks, instead of just erasing them. This didn't work either. Some of the dream still seeped out of the hard disks, regardless of how air-tight the casing.
Then finally it clicked. The dreams weren't being used up. Maybe if they were …
They gave it a try. A client's transmitting machine was connected to a receiver placed near the bed of a volunteer, and two anxiety dreams were successfully diverted from the mind of one to the other. The client woke up nicely rested and full of vim, ready for another hard day in the money mines. The volunteer had a shitty night of dull dreams he couldn't quite remember, but was paid for his troubles.
No residue was left in the room. The dream was gone. The cash started flowing again.
‘And that's what you did to me last night?’ I asked, a little pissed at having my mind invaded.
Stratten held up his hands placatingly. ‘Trust me, you'll be glad we did. People have varying ability to use up other people's dreams. Most can handle two a night without much difficulty, three at the most. They get up feeling ragged, and drag themselves through the day. Usually they only work every other night – but they still make eight, nine hundred dollars a week. You're different.’
‘How's that?’ I knew this was most likely a stroke, but didn't care. They didn't come along that often.
‘You took four dreams last night without breaking sweat. The two you've just seen, and another two – one of which was so boring I can't bear to even watch just the visuals. You could probably have taken a couple more. You could make a lot of money.’
‘How much is a lot?’
‘We pay according to dream duration, with additional payments if they're especially complex or tedious. Last night you erased over three hundred dollars' worth – and that doesn't factor in a bonus for the dullest one. Depending how often you worked, you could be earning between two and three thousand dollars. A week.’ He closed the pitch. ‘And we pay cash. Dream disposal is still in an unstable state with regard to legality, and we find it more convenient to obfuscate the nature of our business to some of the authorities.’
He smiled. I smiled back.
Three thousand dollars is an awful lot of bar tending.
It wasn't a difficult decision.
I signed a non-disclosure contract. I was leased a receiver, and had it explained to me. Basically I could go anywhere in the continental United States, as long as I kept the machine within six feet of my head while I was asleep. I didn't have to go to bed at any particular time, because the dreams booked to me were just spooled into memory. As soon as the device sensed I was in REM sleep it fed the backlog into my head. When I got up in the morning my nightwork would be there on the screen like a list of email messages: how long the dreams had been, when they started and finished, and whether they qualified for bonus payment or were just hack work.
And at the bottom of the list, the good news. A figure in dollars. I found I could take six or seven dreams a night without too much difficulty. Some days I'd be groggy and find it difficult to concentrate on anything more complex than smoking, but when that happened I'd just take the following night off.
After six months I was recalled to REMtemps' offices and asked if I'd like to volunteer for a higher proportion of bonus dreams. I said ‘Hell, yes’, and my earnings took another jump upwards. I met a hacker called Quat in the Net, and hired him to write me a daemon which would circulate my earnings around a variety of virtual accounts: every now and then the IRS or some other ratfink would close in on one of them, but when that happened I'd just swallow the loss and keep the rest of it on the move. I also paid him a lot of money to erase a particular incident from the LAPD's crimebank, which meant I could go back to California.
It was a good life. I travelled from place to place, this time as a person with money instead of someone looking for a score. After a while it came to seem natural to wear better clothes, to head for the upscale hotels. I got used to the other things that money gets you, like a modicum of respect, and bed companions who don't issue you with an invoice in the morning. I kept in touch with the few people I cared about through the phone, the Net and occasional flying visits. I dropped in on Deck in LA a couple times, and the city began to lose its darkness for me. I began to think of moving back there, of letting it be my place once again.
There were occasional downsides. Boredom. The exhaustion which came after a night full of bonuses, and the emotional flatness from being forever on the move and never having a relationship which lasted longer than a few days. There were periods when I'd go a little weird, and I came to realize that was because I'd spent so many nights having other people's dreams that I hadn't had time for any of my own. When that happened I'd clock off, let my mind catch up and do the subconscious boogie. After a few days I'd be fine again.
I'd found some action which was safe, which I was good at, and which paid big-time money.
That should have been enough.
Then five months ago I got a call from Stratten. It came very early in the morning, and I was crashed out in a king-sized bed on the top floor of a hotel in New Orleans, the debris of a hard evening's pleasure spread all around me. By then I was back more or less full-time in LA, and had an apartment in Griffith which I called home. I wasn't supposed to hang in one place, however, so I took enough trips out of town to convince REMtemps I was still itinerant.
I couldn't remember the name of the woman beside me, but she was a whizz at answering the phone. By the time I'd realized it was ringing she already had it up out of its cradle and at her ear. When she passed it over to me I sat up, head foggy and full of half-remembered tasks and confusions. I suppressed the urge to look at the receiver to see how much I'd earned. From the way I felt I knew it was going to be considerable.
‘Mr Thompson,’ said that voice, and I instantly became more awake. ‘Who answered the phone?’
‘I don't know,’ I said stupidly. ‘I mean, why? What difference?’
‘I assume she's someone you've met very recently?’
‘Yes.’ I glanced across the room to where the woman was standing. Candy, I think her name may have been, though she may well have spelled it with an ‘i’. At the end, I mean. She seemed nice, and I got the feeling she actually liked me. I was wondering whether she might be interested in hooking up with me for a while. A whole week, maybe, until I went back to LA. At that moment she was making coffee with no clothes on, and I was hoping Stratten would stop talking soon.
‘You met her last night, correct?’ he asked. I admitted that was the case. ‘And she's in your hotel room. But she answered the phone after a single ring.’
I took a sip from the beer bottle by the bed. ‘So?’
‘Think about it.’
I watched as Candy stirred just the right amount of sugar into my coffee. I got what he was driving at. ‘Don't talk shit,’ I said. Candy winked at me and slipped into the john.
‘Get rid of her and come to the office,’ Stratten said. ‘I have a proposal for you.’ The line went dead.
I got out of bed and put the dream receiver in my bag. The readout