CHAPTER 43 : SHARED DREAMS
The two of them stood in my quarters at dawn, shifting their weight like children caught stealing.
Mors looked worse than usual—the tumors on his neck had grown visibly in the past week, and his breathing carried a wet rattle that Capable's clinic couldn't fix. The other Network member was one of the newer connections, a former Wretched woman named Sera who had volunteered three weeks ago because she wanted to learn mechanics faster than traditional teaching allowed.
"We had the same dream," Mors said.
I set down the maintenance kit I'd been using to check the Armor's condition. "The same dream?"
"Not similar. The same." Sera's voice was uncertain—she was still learning to trust the Network, still uncomfortable with the intimacy of shared consciousness. "We compared details this morning. Everything matched."
"Tell me."
They told me.
A highway at night. Six lanes wide, three in each direction, separated by concrete barriers. Headlights streaming past in both directions—not the scattered lights of wasteland vehicles, but an endless river of illumination, hundreds of cars moving in coordinated flow.
The smell of exhaust. Clean exhaust, the kind that came from engines with functional catalytic converters and fuel that didn't need to be hoarded. The sound of a radio playing music they didn't recognize—a woman's voice, something about a man named Jolene.
Orange streetlights overhead, casting pools of amber across the asphalt. A skyline in the distance, towers of glass and steel glittering with a million windows.
I recognized every detail.
I-94. Detroit. A drive I'd made hundreds of times before the transmigration, commuting from the factory to the apartment where I lived alone and watched movies about the apocalypse as entertainment.
The dream was my memory.
"How long did it last?" I asked. My voice sounded normal. I was proud of that.
"Maybe a minute," Mors said. "Hard to tell in dreams. But it felt... real. More real than most dreams."
"Like being somewhere instead of imagining it," Sera added.
I nodded slowly, buying time to construct a response that wouldn't reveal everything.
"Deep Network connections produce echo effects," I said. "Your subconscious minds are more linked than they were before—you're sharing mental background noise. Dreams that feel vivid probably mean the connection is strengthening."
"But the same dream?" Mors pressed. "The exact same details?"
"The Network creates a kind of collective unconscious. Images get shared, remixed, combined. You probably both picked up fragments from each other or from me and your minds assembled them into the same pattern."
It wasn't a lie. Not exactly. But it was a deflection—a redirection away from the truth that the highway, the music, the skyline were all MY memories bleeding through the Network into minds that had never known a world where such things existed.
Blackbird in Nux's head had been concerning. This was worse. This was two people dreaming my past life simultaneously.
"Should we be worried?" Sera asked.
"No. It's a side effect, not a problem. Let me know if it happens again."
They left, still uncertain but willing to accept my explanation. I was the Network's architect, after all. If I said something was normal background noise, who were they to argue?
The Dag was standing in the doorway.
She didn't speak. She just looked at me—that clear, unsettling gaze that seemed to see through every pretense and into the soil of a person's soul.
"How much of that did you hear?" I asked.
"Enough." She stepped into the room, moving with the unhurried grace of someone who had learned patience tending things that grew slowly. "Six lanes. Hundreds of cars. A city that glitters."
"Dreams are strange."
"That wasn't a strange dream. That was a specific place." She stopped a few feet from me. "You knew exactly what they were describing. Your face changed when they said 'orange streetlights.'"
I said nothing.
"I'm not asking you to tell me what you are," the Dag continued. "I stopped asking that a long time ago. But I'm telling you that I saw your recognition, and I'm going to remember that I saw it."
"What are you going to do with that memory?"
"Water it." Her smile was thin. "See what grows."
She left. I stood alone in my quarters, the Armor pressing flat against my skin, and tried to calculate how many more memory fragments would need to leak before someone assembled them into a picture of a world that had never existed here.
The highway dream had felt real to Mors and Sera because it WAS real—as real as anything in my fragmented past life. They had experienced a memory, not a fantasy. And if they shared it with others, compared notes with other Network members, started mapping the patterns of what bled through...
I should investigate. Should trace the leak's origin, find ways to strengthen the boundaries between my consciousness and theirs.
Instead, I went to the motor pool.
There was a truck waiting that needed to be Awakened.
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