The Daily Grind - Chapter 167 (Patreon)

Every review that complains about the gay stuff only makes the story even gayer.  I'm powered by spite and too powerful to stop now!

Also enjoy the chapter!

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“Unseen in the background, Fate was quietly slipping lead into the boxing glove.”  - P.G. Wodehouse, Very Good Jeeves! -

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James rolled over in bed, pulling the blankets around himself like a cocoon.  They’d gotten new blankets recently - recently, to him, meaning sometime in the last two years - and he still wasn’t fully used to the feeling of them on his skin.  The sprawling bed that took up most of the room’s floor space currently held himself, an Anesh who was reading under the warm light of a desk lamp, and a dramatically snoring Alanna.  It was a little too warm, a little too crowded, and also perfect.

It had struck him suddenly, earlier in the evening.  That his life felt perfect.  Lived in, occupied, and fully his own.  He had challenges, but they were ones he took on of his own volition.  He probably had enemies, but they existed in the abstract for now.  And he had partners.

To say that James didn’t have much experience with relationships would be a bit of an understatement.  He had pretty much no experience with romance.  And his time with Alanna and Anesh had, for a while, been plagued with him constantly worrying he was going to screw something up.  He’d poked fun at Anesh for that same feeling, but he should have just been honest and shared that he felt it too.

But their relationship hadn’t actually *changed* much, had it?  They were still the closest companions, still trusted each other with their lives.  They just… also shared a bed.  And kisses.  And other things.  More comfort, both emotional and physical.  They could be vulnerable around each other, in a way they never really had before.

James hadn’t really thought any of this, exactly.  Not now, buried in blankets and on the nicest bed he’d ever owned. Instead, he’d more felt it, a settling ember of warmth in the core of his soul.

Then he finished rolling over, and was asleep almost instantly.

Some time later, James dreamed.

It was a strange place.  An upstairs attic, segmented into blocky cubes of space, perched atop a snow capped peak but also deep within the sewer complex that ran under an endless road.

He was everywhere he had ever been, and nowhere that mattered.

He was also running from something.  Running in that ineffectual dream state way, where your legs burned but you didn’t move, where the pursuer was always gaining on you, forever, even if you were never caught.

It was a black shadow, studded with stars and impulses.  It stalked after him.  It was always stalking him.  Even as he failed to run, and the landscape shifted underfoot, cycling through bad footing and sharp edges.  The shadow was always there, waiting for him.  Dreaming or not, it was always there.  But it had changed, somehow.

It was aware of him now.  Before, his depression was a natural consequence of brain chemistry.  A parasite that James couldn’t really be that mad at.  It just did its job.  But now…

It was aware.  In a grim, predatory way.  Somewhere deep below the surface of chemistry, psychology, and biology.  His depression had been transformed, into a being that *hated him*.  That was trying as hard as possible to erase James, and replace him with itself.

Which wouldn’t work, really.  Even dreaming, and terrified, James knew that he was stronger than it.  But it was still trying.  And he was still running.

He passed by a crumbling wall, covered in etchings of all the different things he had learned to advance his Lessons.  He passed a precipice that showed him golden streamers out of the dream, links to Anesh and Sarah.  He walked over a bottomless foul pit that sparkled with the points of light from his Skills.

And the creature followed.

James passed by another figure.  An orange glitter, that spoke in directions and destinations.  The words were strangely real, and his sleeping mind woke slightly, folding a wall of stabilized dreamspace around them.

“Thanks.”  James told the Map.

“Anytime.”  The Map replied easily.  “Especially if that time is spent on the road, and not waiting around.”

James rolled his dream self’s eyes.  “To be fair,” his mind woke a bit more, but held within the dream, “I’m not really ‘waiting’.  I’m just not covering geographical distance.”

“Same thing.”  The Map rippled.  It wasn’t a person yet.  Not really.  But it was getting there, and apparently it was learning snark as its first language.  Though James knew that it wouldn’t be free to make that choice until he completed the task it was created for.  Which meant, at least a little bit, a road trip.

He would have grinned, but the last road trip he’d gone on had been *a problem*.

“Time’s up.”  The Map said, pointing at the failing dreamwall and the nightmare seeping through.

James sighed, and felt himself toss and turn in the real world slightly, as his lucidity was pulled away and he fell back into the terror of endless flight.

Dark rooms, slippery falls, always running from a monster that wouldn’t die.  Rejection, failure.  Failing the people who trusted him.  Failing the world, before it had a chance to thrive.  Anxieties piled on fears, dragging James downward.

The nightmare stretched on.

James fled to somewhere else.

_____

Elsewhere.

Simon dozed on a cot in the Response hall.  “Hall” was a high minded way of saying “the basement they’d taken over”, but it still worked.  They had a couple rooms here, set up as communal sleeping spots for people who were on call, but maybe needed a rest.

It was a forward looking precaution; Response was growing, for sure, but they currently had more people than problems, and the fact that they often saved on telepad usage by staying out in the field until the next call came in meant that there often weren’t a lot of people around here to take advantage of the beds.

But Simon was pretty much always on call.  Even when he wasn’t scheduled, he stayed here, dozing lightly, and waiting for the next problem he could solve.

Dozing, and being someone else.

It had taken about three days after the assault on the Lair from Status Quo, and the death of his partner, for Simon to notice that sometimes he looked in the mirror and saw the wrong face.  That he’d seen James - his James, he always rolled his eyes at the people who apparently couldn’t tell from context clues which James they were talking about - looking back at him.

A month later, and sometimes he forgot which one he was.  He’d look down and see hands that weren’t his, because in that moment, he wasn’t Simon.  Someone would call a name, and he wouldn’t know if he was meant to respond or not.

And when he slept, which he did rarely these days…

“You really need to sleep more.”  James told him.

Simon wasn’t as good at dreaming as a lot of members of the Order inexplicably seemed to be, so he couldn’t exactly scowl.  But he wasn’t fully asleep anyway, so he gave it a shot.

“Don’t give me that look.”  James flicked his nose.  “Especially not with our face.”

Simon tried to say something.  He was sitting against a tree, looking out over a river that he’d never seen before from atop a small cliff.  He’d been here a lot as a kid, it was a spot his parents had always loved, and he’d never seen it before.

He glanced down, to where James sat next to him.  His right arm, and James’ left, were overlapped, blurred together into the same shape.

“Sorry.”  James said sheepishly.  “I’m not keeping away very well.”

Simon didn’t know how to tell him that he didn’t need to do that.  That he’d caught this chunk of him, at the moment of death, explicitly so he could be here.

“Yeah, yeah,” Simon’s James sighed, “but this brain isn’t built for it.”  He trailed off, and the two of them just sat and watched the river.

And bit by bit, Simon familiarized himself with it.  With the muddy bank that always crumbled slightly before you thought it would when you stood on it.  With the underwater plants that absolutely weren’t eels, but sure felt like it.  With the water that was too cold, especially when it was sunny out.

With all the things that the ghost of James remembered.

Until there weren’t two thoughts; one of recognition, and one of alienation.  Just familiarity.  Still split; one of them had *lived* this, after all.  But there was less of a divide.

James lifted their shared arm, and flexed intermingled fingers with raised eyebrows.  “Neat.”  He said.  “Why?”

Because, Simon wanted to tell him, I am getting tired of being me.

“Not a good reason, man.”  James shook his head.  “It’s okay to let me go, you know?  I dunno how.  But the support group could probably help.”

The sun set on the river.  You’d die, Simon said.

“Eh.  Yeah.  I mean, it sucked the first time.”  James laughed, and Simon felt the dream shudder around them as he made light of his own demise.  “But I’ve got practice now!”

The night cooled around them.  It’s not fair, he told James.

“Nothing in the past three years has been fair.”  James’ ghost shrugged.  “What’re you gonna do about it?”

“Maybe you can take over.”  Simon finally said out loud.  “And I’ll sit here, and watch the trees.”  His friend and partner gave him a shocked look, full of fear and unplaced anger.  “Or maybe, I should stop running.”  Simon suggested, almost to himself.  “Maybe we should just double down, on what we were always doing.  Being one person.  Maybe this mind isn’t built for it.  But so what?  Magic.  That’s all.  It’s magic.”

“You might lose yourself.”  James whispered, the ghost shivering with regret. “I don’t want to kill you, just so part of me sticks around.”

“What is ‘me’, anyway?”  Simon asked.

And the question, even in this half-awake dream, sparked something in him.  What *was* he?  Who had he become?  He’d been a delivery driver, before being stolen by a dungeon monster and held prisoner for over a year.  Then he’d become a survivor. Then a delver.  Then a teacher, a fighter, a partner, a part of something bigger.  A Response member.  A Knight.

And for all the parts of that which mattered, James had been there with him.  The two of them spending so much time in a full link through the skulljacks that they’d almost ceased to be two people.

So why did Simon care now?  Why did either of them? Especially James, who was dead, and had nothing to lose anyway.

The dream shook, along with Simon’s body.  He wanted to stay, to say more.  But… maybe he didn’t need to.  Also he was out of time.

He woke up to someone lightly shaking him awake.  “Hey.”  The kid, Marcus, stepped back.  “Everyone’s tied up and we need a medivac. You awake enough? Orange-Summer-Evening is ready to go now.”

Simon and James looked down at their hands, and flexed familiar fingers.  “I’m good.”  They said, swinging their feet off the cot and rapidly waking up as they jammed them into shoes.  “Let’s go.”

The dispatcher didn’t stick around, trusting Simon to hustle once he was ready.  And, striding down the hallway to the main room as he pulled on his coat, Simon passed by the small security office that had a window into its interior.

He caught his reflection in it.  His partner’s face looked back at him, apprehension evident on it.

Simon smiled, and a second later, James did the same.  Then he winked at Simon, and the two of them moved.  They had places to be, right now.  People to save.  They’d catch up in the next dream.

But after all that had happened, they were still here.  Still themself.

_____

Elsewhere

Myles sat in the front seat of his car.  Well, not *his* car.  Another rental, another city.  He was getting good at adapting to different feelings of acceleration and potencies of brakes.

He was getting good at a lot of things.  A lot of weird, esoteric things.  Like how to identify the caliber of a gun by the sound of a shot.  And then, how to pull up the menu for the bracer on his arm and toggle it to intercept that bullet.  Probably wouldn’t save him from the first shot, but if that one didn’t kill him, he’d gotten fast  enough at it to make sure the follow up shots absolutely didn’t connect.

Or other things, like getting good at subtly mimicking accents in a way that made people just a little more comfortable talking to him.  Or, hell, even just asking questions in the first place.  Starting conversations with random people, asking strange things, but using a lot of little tricks to not stick in their memory.

He’d asked once why they didn’t just get Planner to blip their presence out of people’s memories.  Nate had just rolled his eyes, but James had given him a real answer; it was kind of evil.  But also, it wasn’t practical.  On a very real level, Planner *was* the act of scheduling and allocating time to projects.  And Myles… was not a good carrier, for that particular infomorph.

When he’d asked why they didn’t make an infomorph that was raised on Bond movies, Nate had gone into a *very* in depth explanation of all the ways that Bond was a bad spy, while James had just quietly slipped out of the room and left Myles to his fate.

Right now, he was wishing that he’d bought coffee.  Any kind of coffee, magical or otherwise.  Though, after a few months of this kind of thing, Myles had started to develop a belief that cheap gas station coffee was, in fact, some kind of arcane substance.  But he hadn’t even thought to pick up any of that, and now he was stuck here.

‘This kind of thing’ and ‘here’ were a bit interlinked.  He’d been catapulted away from helping JP with the cleanup of Townton, and set back on what he had figured were more typical Rogue duties.  In this case, following and snooping on a particular individual.

Who was an Alchemist.

Or at least, a member of the Guild Of Alchemists.  Or the Alchemists Guild?  Myles couldn’t, and on principle wouldn’t, remember the difference.  Either way, this guy, who was about seventy years old and who drove like he was a teenager with their first car, was the person Myles had been tailing all day.

It was, in brief, a bit surreal.  The man wore custom fitted hand tailored shirts.  He also shopped at Dollar General, and carried his own bags to his car.  His car, which was some kind of BMW, that had been waxed to a mirror shine.

The man who lived in a goddamn hillside mansion, the sole building perched up a winding trail into the wooded realm.

Myles hadn’t even bothered to follow him; he knew a trap when he saw one, even if it was a very pleasant looking drive of a trap.

Instead, he’d backtracked slightly, and parked in the small strip mall down the street.  Unless his target had an interest in visiting one of the dotted farms along the road, or had some kind of secret access tunnel - not out of the question, honestly - he’d probably pass by here when he left anyway.

So Myles waited, keeping an eye out for that ridiculous car, and his window of opportunity to go ransack… *carefully search* the mansion of an ancient alchemist.

Of course, while he thought the word ‘ancient’, Myles was pretty aware that this guy was just regular old.  By this point, the rogues had been made aware of the existence of things like the Old Gun or the Last Line Of Defense, and the fact that the latter one at least probably predated the existence of this country.  So ancient was getting a lot more relative.

There was a stray thought, the kind that he couldn’t keep away sometimes, that maybe one day he’d be that ancient.  Myles wondered if he’d be able to keep his perspective.  Would he still be… this? Sitting in a rental car, planning to turn some guy’s sock drawer inside out looking for secrets?

Would he still be having fun?

Because no mistake, this was *fun*.  Even just sitting in a car, waiting, had turned into a heart pounding game of chicken with fate.  Although it was stretching on a little bit, and the warm car interior was more comfortable than it maybe should have been, compare to the chilly, dark, rainy day outside.

Myles didn’t really *intend* for what was supposed to be a long blink to turn into a short nap.  And yet, that’s exactly what happened.  When he woke up, he’d swore as he realized he’d missed his window of opportunity, and was going to have to try again tomorrow.

He’d dreamed of being very old.  But still having fun.

_____

Elsewhere.

Ava’s bedtime had become something of a running joke around the Lair.

Jeanne, her mom, had decided after a long conversation with a few other survivors that made their home here, to reject the offer of a hotel room somewhere or even a trip back home, and to stay in one of the guest rooms the Lair had on offer now.  Jeanne and Ava weren’t actually *from* Townton; they had survived the disaster there relatively unscathed, financially.  Jeanne still had a small apartment around Chattanooga, though apparently she was being fined a half month’s rent for being late on rent, in a move that would have crippled her two months ago.  And yet…

Going home didn’t feel right, at the moment.

Partially because she didn’t feel safe out in the world.  James had said, offhandedly once, that her daughter was one of the safest people on Earth.  Because humans, you see, did not have natural defenses against infomorphs.  She had extrapolated this, without realizing it, to mean that there was a whole ecosystem of things that killed humans out there, and no one knew about it.  No one could stop it, or fight back.

Except, of course, the people in this building, where she had chosen to stay for a while, for completely coincidental reasons.  Probably because her daughter had made friends with several of the camracondas, and she didn’t want to disappoint her daughter, obviously.

The camracondas had terrified Jeanne when she’d first gotten here.  And then, after talking to one of them for more than two minutes, had broken her heart with how horrible their story had been so far.  By this point, if she was being honest, she stuck around probably because she had as many friends in their small community as her daughter did.

It also helped that there were not any outside obligations at the moment, since her two week absence while she’d been mind controlled by an apparently-not-hostile patch of highway had led to Jeanne losing her job.  She couldn’t even blame her employers for that, much as she wanted to blame someone, anyone, for *something*.

Being here, she could keep busy.  She helped out in the kitchen, mostly.  Or helped Karen with whatever the eternally moving woman needed.  At one point, she found herself in an attic that went on for too long, being instructed on the proper care routine for a living raincloud.

Sarah had given her a small wooden dowel after that, and told her to share it with someone important to her.  Though Jeanne had instantly thought of her daughter, she hadn’t actually gotten around to it yet.  Partially because, despite her newfound free time and all the quality time she was spending with Ava, the girl was remarkably good at vanishing when she didn’t want to be found.  Or, like now, when she sensed that she was supposed to be doing something.

Jeanne poked her head into the mostly empty kitchen, nodding to Knife-In-Fangs as she scanned the half-lit room for her daughter.  There was no sign of her, and the camraconda shook his head when she gave him a questioning glance.  Jeanne sighed.  It was two minutes after nine PM, and she *knew* that it would be another half hour until this was resolved.

Ava’s bedtime was something of a running joke for the Order.

Currently, the young girl was absolutely not in bed like she was supposed to be.  As someone who would be turning thirteen on her next birthday, the concept of a bedtime was frankly rather insulting.  Not that she’d really thought that deeply about the indignity of being assigned time to be asleep; it was more a prevalent ongoing sense that she was somehow being disrespected for wanting to stay up until midnight doing more fun things.

Ava had once told James that she could stay up *very late*, up to and including midnight.  For some reason, he’d just laughed at her.

Right now, though, no one was laughing at her.  Right now, Ava was *sneaking*.

The basement that Response occupied was constantly busy.  It was apparently plucked from a university somewhere, according to Harvey; lots of maintenance corridors and bits where wire grates had walled off small storage spaces before they’d been cleared out, all of it occasionally coming together in one of the two larger open spaces.  One they used for all the phones and stuff, the other as a kind of hub for the Response people to relax in.

But there were a *bunch* of small hiding places around, and Ava was having fun exploring them.

There was a storage area here that was way off in the corner, that hadn’t been cleaned out yet, that just had a bunch of rugs in it.  The carpet was scratchy and unpleasant, but crawling through them like a forest of padded trees, surrounded by the smell of old fabric, was still fun.  There was a cabinet in the break room that was bigger on the inside than it should have been, and Ava could fit inside and poke around for a while.  And of course, there was the dispatch floor itself, which she absolutely wasn’t supposed to be in.

But she slipped in anyway, Hidden perched on her head just under her hood, keeping both of them stealthed against prying eyes.

Ava still had to be careful to be out from underfoot.  But she really loved coming down here and listening in.  Watching Response teams joking with each other, hearing the tension in the dispatcher’s voices go up and down as they took calls and sent out solutions.  Sometimes, a team would come back injured, and Ava would hold her breath as they were checked out.

Often times, they would be checked out by Nikhail, who would come running, something green and complex sitting on his arm as he turned serious injuries into minor inconveniences, or minor wounds into nothing.

Ava had decided that Nikhail was cute, which was a first for her, but it didn’t diminish the intensity of her goal to one day do what he did.

She hid in her corner and watched Response operations for a while, just sitting and feeling like she was as cool as they were just to be here.  But, for all her sneaking around, Ava was still a kid.  And she was asleep sooner, rather than later; Hidden still perched on her head also dozing off and fading into her hair as she did so.

Upstairs, Jeanne opened the door to the supply closet looking for her daughter, found nothing, and turned to close the door and continue down the hallway.  As she eased it shut, though, she revealed a member of the Order standing there looking a little awkward.

“Message for you, ma’am.”  Davis said politely.  “Planner wants you to know your kid fell asleep on schedule, and…” he cleared his throat, “‘would you please fetch her from the back left corner of the Response dispatch floor?’  Uh, if you’re not too busy.”

Jeanne stared at the older man for a while, who had the good grace to look at least a little uncomfortable with the situation, before she sighed.  “Thanks.”  The exasperated mother shook her head.  “And tell Planner thank you, too.  Which one is Response?”

“Third basement.”  Davis told her.  “Have a good night!”  He called over his shoulder, walking off to deliver another message from the infomorph that was primarily hosted by Research.

By the time Jeanne found Ava, she and Hidden were fast asleep.  They dreamed of flying.

_____

Elsewhere

Anesh had been asleep in the rather spartan studio apartment that he rented near his second job for most of the night.  Soon, he’d have to wake up.  Go to work.  Do brain things. But right now, he just rolled over, and pushed himself back into dreamland.

He’d been having a dream about an unreal future.  Some sliver of it yet remained, and he tried to will himself back to that moment.  Of standing on the edge of an orbiting stardock, watching some impossibly large ship unmoore itself and begin to slide out into open space.   It carried, he knew, the collective hope of Earth.  Why, he couldn’t say.  Anesh didn’t know if the dream was a happy or a sad one.  He just wanted to see how it ended.

Dreaming alone had actually become kind of novel for Anesh.  Not *this specific* Anesh - there were four of him active currently - but for the collective Anesh in general.  Most Anesh’s, when they slept, tried to do so at the same time, so they could resync their personalities and memories while they were unconscious.  And yes, this Anesh would teleport back every week or two to link back up.  But more nights than most of the others of himself, he slept alone.

It was strange, to be the one doing the sleeping alone, when he had parallel memories of spending most nights sleeping with James or Alanna.  And yet, he had exactly as much personal space as he wanted; he got to sleep with his partners every night, and sleep alone every night.  And due to the human mind’s preference for remembering the nice parts of stuff, he never felt crowded or lonely respectively.  Instead, he got the best parts of both; warm and loved, and *also* with no one stealing his blankets and all the leg room he wanted.

Dreams were an exception, though.  Each Anesh always knew which dreams were their own.  It was part of how they all knew that they were copies of the original, how they knew that the *first* Anesh had died a while back.

And dreaming alone was somehow becoming novel to him.  What a strange life.

His dream came back into focus.  He was talking to people.  The time-dreadnaught was complete.  The endless pathway had been breached.  The admiral needed something.  She always needed something. And there was a ringing… somewhere, distant, a ringing that got louder and louder and louder…

Anesh woke up, glaring at the ceiling.  It was still dark out, but there were a cluster of glow in the dark star stickers staring back at him that James had gotten him as an unnecessary housewarming gift.

“God dammit.”  He groaned, reaching out and expertly slapping the button on his phone that disabled the alarm, before flopping that arm over his eyes and trying to get the blood moving to his fingers.

The dream was gone.  No one else with him to stabilize him into sleep, to create a shared end with.  Just an alarm clock that woke him up with brutal efficacy and the longing for a conclusion that wouldn’t come.

Dreams, for this Anesh, didn’t have satisfying endings.  They were a lot like real life in that way.  Interesting stuff happening, and then an abrupt cutoff.

He wasn’t as masochistic as James was, thinking that nightmares were part of the fun of being a dreaming human. But there was a certain thrill to shared dreams, where you never *quite* knew if the other minds you were dreaming with were going to go the way you expected.  With his own dreams, though? Anesh always knew how they ended.

With him waking up, and being frustrated that he couldn’t stay in bed longer.

It was a Monday.  Which meant that relatively soon, members of the Order would once again venture into peril for the betterment of themselves and the world.  But it also meant Anesh was going to be late for work if he didn’t get off his ass.

He might be a genius who was getting *really* good at orbital physics.  But he worked with a hundred other people who were all smarter than he was, and while he wasn’t the *most* replaceable person in the world, there were only so many times he could tell John that he had a ‘family emergency’ before his immediate supervisor would start to get annoyed.

Anesh swung his feet out of bed and rubbed at his eyes.  And then, he smiled.

Because even though he had to get out of bed, and experience all the downsides of a Monday, he still got to go work on a goddamn space program.

It was, all on its own, a special kind of dream.  And it made him feel a lot better about not getting to go dungeon delving personally.

_____

Elsewhere.

Clutter Ascent lived in a dream.

People were real, she knew this.  But they were white smoke and dim lights moving through her.  Nothing like the warm sparks that she had made herself.

Walls were real too.  Her own walls were more real, but there were other walls outside.  They stretched on forever, they were labyrinth paths and deep secrets that she could not understand.

Certain actions were also real.  Moments frozen in time, bits of happy glass that caught the light and smoke and made it glitter for an instant, gone in a blink if she didn’t catch them.

But just because they weren’t as easy to see in her drifting sleepy state didn’t make them any less precious.  They were all important.  Even the ones that she couldn’t feel, but could ‘hear’ moving around ‘below’ her.  They didn’t come into her self; somehow, she knew it was an old fear that she couldn’t quite understand but had been told about by someone.  But they were still here.  They protected her.  And because of them, she didn’t have to make any war-sparks.  So they were also real, and important.

Clutter Ascent was almost always dreaming, but that didn’t make her not aware.  Her dreams were everything that happened, and everything shared with her.

She dreamed of sugary breakfasts, awkward attempts to learn the guitar, laughter, and stories.  *So many* stories!

The important and very real people would read to her, when they visited. Or read to each other.  Tales that they seemed to pull out of nowhere like she pulled her sparks.  At first, she had thought they were trying to influence her somehow.  But then, over time, she started to understand.

Stories were both real, and not real.  And also something else!  They did not happen, but it didn’t matter, because they could still be real anyway.  And they weren’t pulled from nowhere, but pulled from *books*.  Books were real, in an incredibly dense way.  They were real much like the people were real, lights and smoke.  But the more she listened to them, the denser and more solid the smoke became, the brighter the light shone and multiplied.

And so Clutter Ascent had listened, enraptured, to a hundred different stories.  Drawing meaning and truth from tales of distant cities, strange creatures, kind wizards, and daring adventures.

Many of the stories talked of colors.  She didn’t know exactly how colors could be described, but she took what she could from it, and made more sunsets.  The smoke and lights of the people that visited her stopped often to observe the new sunsets.  Which was good!  They were quite nice!

Clutter Ascent stirred in her sleep, as a thought echoed through her self.

She should *write* a book!

Apparently, people did it all the time, judging by the seemingly endless library that was growing in her depths!  She should add to it!  Share a story in turn!

But how?  She had no stories.  This was a problem.

Clutter Ascent turned in her dream, and, mostly out of an unknown reflex, pulled the smoke of reality out of several of the stories she had been told.   Then, she collapsed them down into the format that had become familiar.

Pages, a cover, several images and several more words.  A beginning, middle, and end.  Mmm.  No.  No end.  Endings were always sad, because even when they were happy, the story was over.  No end.

The dream receded, and the book hissed into reality.  It didn’t have the same smoke and light that the other books or walls or people did.  It looked like her own walls, or her own sparks.  But it was there!  Sitting with the stack of other stories they had brought her.

Clutter Ascent gave a multidimensional yawn.  That had been *exhausting*.  She swirled in satisfaction, though, as she drifted back to the dream.

_____

Elsewhere.

Frequency-Of-Sunlight slept in an unfamiliar bed.

Which is to say, she slept in a bed.  For the last several years, ever since waking up to the reality of being truly alive, she’d mostly slept in a pile of other camracondas.  Or curled up in a corner under a desk somewhere.

Even upon being teleported out of the body of her creator, and into the freedom of the true world, she’d spent a lot of time sleeping curled up under things.  Though James had, in his own words, ‘raided every Bed Bath and Beyond within a ten mile radius for pillows and stuff’ to provide a mass of collective bedding for her people.  It had taken her a month or two to figure out what a Bed Bath and Beyond was, and then another week to think of looking up how many there were within that distance.  There was exactly one.  And she’d assumed it was another endless space just judging by the volume of blankets, until Deb had explained human logistics.

Human logistics was its own brand of terrifying, really.  But it was one of the first conversations she’d had with Deb.  Which made it special.

Shortly after that, she’d chosen a name.  Someone had told her that a name should be something either important to her, or that she wouldn’t mind hearing for the rest of her life, or that she pulled out of a hat.  She didn’t have a hat, and didn’t really know how long her life would be anyway.  So she’d picked something that was as important to her as possible.

Which was the way the sunset looked.

When they’d first teleported her out of the tower, out of the prison, it had been night.  And the next day had been a buzz of indoor activity and naps.  By the time she actually got a chance to go outside and look at the sky, it had been all oranges and pale blues; an almost perfect sunset.  Colors she’d never seen before, never knew could even exist like that, painted across the entire *massive* world.

Her eye didn’t work like human eyes.  But she could still see in color.  She could see the patterns and textures and frequencies of the light.

Frequency-Of-Sunlight had named herself the most important thing she could, with a nascent grasp of how language worked, and accidentally started a tradition for her entire people.

Life had gone strangely since then.  A sentence that she’d heard a lot of the humans of the Order say regularly, but it seemed to fit her too.  She’d grown closer to the human that would become a partner to her, explored strange places, eaten a *lot* of strange foods, and, strangest of all, drifted away from the people she’d grown up with and become a far more independent serpent than she’d ever expected.

Not that any of them had really expected much of anything.

And now, she lay in a curved arch, back  pressed against her *girlfriend*, sleeping without fear and dreaming of seeing new colors.

Frequency-Of-Sunlight’s dream self craned her neck to follow a dot of something on the edge of yellow but not.  Frequency-Of-Sunlight’s physical self flopped over Deb’s chest, eliciting a muffled “Oof” from the woman.

Next to her partner, laying on her back and now mildly crushed, Deb’s eyes instantly flicked open with the practice of someone who had gone through a nursing internship.

“Sunny.”  She muttered, tilting her head down to look at the camraconda stretched across her and turning in her sleep.  “Why.”  Deb glanced sideways to the digital clock on the dresser; well, she had to get up in twenty minute anyway.  May as well take the early alarm as a sign.

The camraconda didn’t answer.  Just gave a low hissing snore, pinned down the color she was trying to find in her subconscious, and went limp as she drifted back to a deeper sleep.

It took Deb five minutes of careful movements to free her arms and slide out of bed without waking her snoring girlfriend.  Though part of that might have been the comfort of the warm weight, and less the fact that she was actually trapped.

_____

Elsewhere.

Rufus was having a nightmare.

He was back in hell.  Back in the deep places, where death was common, violence was frequent, and trust was an illusion.  Where the walls never had clean lines, where the hiding places were always occupied.  Where nothing grew that wasn’t angry, and fertile spots to set down roots were fought over with a fury.

And yet, he had companions.  Others, some like him, some not.  They didn’t have names.  He didn’t have a name then, either.  They weren’t important.

There was a boxy one that he got along with well, and another frame like himself that liked to play-tackle him.  There was a larger one of them that was always alert, and another who was always trying to understand the world around them.

In reality, they were long gone.  Part of Rufus knew that.  But for a moment, his nightmare was a dream, and he saw them again.

Then it was a nightmare, like he knew it always would be.

One by one, they died.  Their desk shattered by something so much larger than them; his little farm crushed.  They were pushed into hunting for sustenance, pushed to fight and kill.  They got good at it.  But it cost.

There were fourteen of them, in his band.  Then twelve.  Then eleven.  Then, two weeks of survival and safety.  And then, a single accident, and in blood and pain, their numbers dropped to three.

The other one, like him, his friend who enjoyed play fighting, just… stopped.  Sat down one day, and didn’t get up.

The big guy left shortly after.  Or maybe Rufus had been the one to leave.  He couldn’t remember, but he relived it both ways anyway.  Dreamed the scene a hundred times, over and over, the pain of being alone again, and it was always his fault.

The nightmare skipped.

He was no longer alone.  He had gone to one of the tall places, in his quest for survival and isolation.  And there, found others like himself.  Well, not like him; they were bulkier, and there were other forms.  But they were his size, and moved as a pack.  They were truth seekers, looking for the answers to the world. The tower held the truth, for them.

Rufus had never been a believer.  But he had been their friend.  The eager one, the one with the paper blanket, the tool user.  Together, they had climbed the tower, to where Rufus could see the entirety of the world he’d known, and more besides, in the distance.

They hadn’t even come close to the top.  A beast of liquid darkness had been unleashed, rolled over them like a wave.  None of the others had gotten away.  Rufus had only lived because he’d held back from the door they were sure they’d find truth behind.

The nightmare skipped.  He was on a metal island in the middle of the grim sea.  His raft had worked.  He was alone out here, alone to farm and think and not remember.

A coiled thing from the sea found him.  So did a flock of white sheets from above.  They brought him a couple survivors on the waves.  Rufus was no longer alone.

Eventually, they traveled together.

Rufus was alone again.

If the nightmare kept going, it would eventually take him as far as he could go.  Until, eventually, he would find a door that could never open, using the tricks that he’d learned from the truth seekers.  When that door opened, Rufus would not be alone anymore.  He would try to save these new ones, using the tricks from the islanders.  But it wouldn’t work.

Or maybe it would.

Rufus woke up before the nightmare went that far.  Before he went from remembering the past to projecting the future.

He was alone, but not alone.  He had his garden, of plants both terrestrial and otherwise, and he had his own space.  Not a *lot* of space, but it was pleasant, and safe.

Outside, there were others.  Others that would accept him, share with him, protect him.  Friends.  He hesitated even now to call them friends.  But they were.

Rufus just hoped that this time, he wouldn’t find himself truly alone again.

_____

Elsewhere.

“Planner.”  One of Momo’s dream selves got the infomorph’s attention.  “Need your advice on something.”

“Yes, ma’am.”  Planner’s dreamform was a simple rotating white and blue cube, and Momo considered rolling her eyes at it.  She could do that; she was pretty deep in her own head right now.   Feeling exasperated while dreaming was a trick when you weren’t intentionally crammed down to a floaty subconscious level through a mix of skulljack tricks, red totems, and acid.

Momo had never been into ‘the drugs’, honestly.  Aside from, like, getting drunk once at a friend’s house, and getting stoned repeatedly at a different, cooler and more responsible friend’s house.  But she had made the jump to a world where drugs gave you superpowers pretty easily.

If asked, James would deny that drugs gave you superpowers.  But the sort of floaty disconnect between your omnipresent anxieties and your appreciation for the beauty of the world that Momo got from a small dose of LSD was critical to shaping and understanding the lines and patterns of the totem shapes she designed.  So James could shut up.  Besides, he’d built a mech that needed a hypnotic dissociative episode to pilot, so he was in no position to talk.

“Don’t call me ma’am.”  She reflexively said, waking mind and dreaming self mixing together effortlessly.  “I need help here.  What am I looking at?”

Momo was looking at what she was pretty sure was a mental imprint of an Authority.  But it was dormant, maybe even dead.  She couldn’t tell, her human mind wasn’t built for this kind of information patterning.  But that’s why Planner had a summer home in her cerebellum.

“Nothing.”  Planner said, humming with the scritching of pen on paper.  “I cannot see it.  But. It is there, in its appointed place.”

“Okay, quick check.  Can you not see it because it’s too different from you, because it’s dead or dormant, or because it’s abstractly ‘not on the schedule’?”  Momo pried, one of her secondary dreaming selves poking at Planner’s angular bit.

“The second option, part one or two.”  Planner dryly replied.  “I am not ‘in the abstract’.  I am capable of seeing beyond the schedule perfectly…”

“Cool.”  Momo nodded.  “So, why isn’t it moving?”

“This is a strange place.”  Planner rotated, making an idle comment.  The first Momo had ever heard them say, actually.  Planner was a stickler for precise language.  “I do not know why it is dormant.  According to you, all the proper steps were taken, all the proper resources allocated.  It should be live.”

Momo examined the Authority’s form.  It almost looked like a larva, if tools had a larval form.  Half insectile shape, half smooth metal and waiting potential.  One of her other selves, the one that was the input from the red totem that showed her personal connections, could see a slight line forming between it and herself.  But not, crucially, between it and anything else.

“Why?”  She couldn’t even sigh properly here.  Momo was so tired, and so close to despair, and she couldn’t just sigh like she wanted to.  “Why won’t it work?  Does it know Nameless is dying, and just can’t link up or something?”

“It does not appear to know anything.”  Planner gave a written hum again.  “This I can see clearly.  Unshielded in any way. It is waiting for something, looking for a command.  Yes.  There, deeper in.  It waits for an order.  It isn’t dead at all.”

Momo glared at the dormant Authority egg.  “So *why* then?”  She scowled from a half dozen dreamed faces.   One of Momo looked over at Planner, still politely perched over the flat ground that stretched off to an off-color sky over the horizon.  “I don’t know what to *do*.”  She pulled back from the dream to adjust her arm a bit, pushing away a muscle cramp before diving back in effortlessly.  “What options do we have left?”  She asked Planner, who had shifted positions while she’d been gone.

“I think,” Planner said, affixing one of its flat faces on Momo, “that this has very little to do with what you yourself are doing.”

“You think Nameless is doing this?”  Momo asked, already knowing the answer.

“Yes.”  Planner replied.  “The deeper I look at the Authority, the more I understand.  It is not like me, but its complexity is elegant.  It requires orders, and it feeds off of a strange form of acceptance.  And this one appears to be healthy, as much as I am qualified to determine that.  However… when I look at the mind we are visiting, I find no drive to give those orders.  Nor does your friend appear to have accepted its own place in the Order’s structure.  Both of those thoughts are alien to it; there is no complexity or subtly here for an infomorph to feed off of.”

“You’re saying Nameless isn’t a person.”  Momo accused, anger rising through the haze of her subconscious.  “You don’t think it’s real.”

“I believe the artificial mind is as real as you would find a desert real.”  Planner rebutted.  “It exists, but it is unique in the limit it has on supporting life.”  The cube folded and unfolded nervously.  “I could not survive here.  I do not believe the Authority could either.  I am rather surprised the nameless one has managed to come so close to what you call personhood with the resources it has.”

Momo sent a ping out along the skulljack connection, almost out of idle reflex.  The AI didn’t even reply with a denial; simply ignored the request for a deeper link.

Abruptly, the young woman shook Planner away from her active thoughts, shoved herself out of the dream, yanked the plug out of her skulljack, pivoted in her sitting position and punched her desk so hard it cracked the wood and broke two fingers.

Then, she sighed.

Then she got up to go find Reed and see if she could get any of those ‘remove broken bone’ purples, because holy shit her hand hurt now.

_____

Here

James rolled over, throwing the blankets into a haphazard pile.  His nightmare receded as he woke, fleeting memories of a dozen far away dreams leaving his head like butterflies.

“Wha time’zit?” He muttered to Anesh.

“You’ve been asleep for two hours.”  Anesh told him.  “Go back to sleep.  I’ll wake you up when it’s time to go buy mountaineering gear, okay?”

James nodded.  Or tried to, anyway.  “Kay.”  He said, face down in a pillow.  He stayed there for a good twenty seconds, Anesh watching him with a raised eyebrow, before he pulled a blanket up over his shoulders and rolled over to fold an arm around Alanna.

Anesh just smiled and went back to his book.  It looked like James was having a fun dream.