The Faculty of Matter

Meetings & Messages

Jay Maison forced himself back into the dream space. He'd been relentless in his quest for answers, every morning since the night he had once found himself unexpectedly caught up in Abby's nightmare. He closed and slowed his mind. While in her nightmare, his perspective was locked to hers and he could not change it unlike when he replayed his own dreams. To keep focused he would clench a dream muscle using discipline he had tenaciously learned in his short life so far, and relying unknowingly on millions of years of dormant dream evolution locked in his genome he would go chasing the nightmare of the girl he loved. He had seen the entire nightmare only once, that first night, and so he knew at the end of it she got to meet her nemesis. The epicenter of all her anger and hate, however well she hid it, he knew this nightmare was what drove her on every day, a dark emotional coil keeping her steady. Piecing the nightmare back together was no easy task, every fragment had to be searched for in his own lucid dream world. Once he had won the battle of finding a lost fragment, he grasped it with his mind and fled to his dream tower and the plateau level at its very top. There in the center stood a cold slab of stone to support his body. Connecting with the stone was always his cue he had made it back safely from the uncertain, seemingly ruleless land of dreams. His dream tower; his own construction within dreams, a solid artifact of rationality he had carved out over the years of his life. His own refuge in the black bottomless void of dreams. After arriving on his plateau, he would breath and relax before very slowly flowing out of his energy state into a cavern he had created specifically for this nightmare of hers. Here he would occupy a more familiar looking dream avatar, the one he always used when not on a specific task. As if in a crime scene replay, he gathered the evidence. The work was painstakingly slow and hard, even for a person of his dreaming abilities. The method he used was to float in the dreaming void, a stream of people's subconscious thoughts, colliding violently together in the space where everyone went when they dreamed or daydreamed. The void had many layers but this influx layer was chaotic. He would leave his normal avatar on his plateau and raise his body up slowly into the influx until it was buffeting through his own subconscious like a ghost metro car on some out of control theme park ride. New dreams came and went, but he'd noticed over the years, much of the influx was on repeat, as if in a long loop. People's dreams seemed to match patterns, some of them very uniform and very clear to him, almost like a familiar taste or smell that you didn't know you remembered until you experienced it again. Others were wild spirals of chaos with no rhyme or reason, but even these had familiarity, an index. He couldn't read dream sequences all at once, it was too overwhelming, but if he felt one rattle through him that he could relate to, or saw a repeat frame of one he had witnessed before, he could hone in on it and experience it. Just the section, not the whole dream, he could replay the section like a flick, and eventually he learned how to glue them together. It was this sampling process that enabled him to interrogate the loop of dreams and find lost fragments to Abby's nightmare, fragments that she didn't remember. Abby knew a lot about his dreaming abilities but not all of it yet, and she certainly didn't know about this project. The more he had investigated the looping dreams, the ones that stayed in the flux night after night, he realized they were mostly manifestations of real events that had happened in people's lives which they were now trying to escape or free themselves from. He guessed that for many reasons that were still mostly unclear to him, the dreams remained locked tight into their subconscious; only to come out for exercise when the mind went into a subconscious state. He felt deep sadness in many of these loops, a fleeting crash of emotion, violating his own emotional sub structure as he sampled them. His desire to rush after the loop and try desperately to help whoever was in such suffering was almost too much to bear sometimes. He would often wake crying real tears for them. Danger also lurked in the dark corners of these dreams, sometimes so deep was the fear and danger it chilled him to the very bone. For this sojourn, at least he'd had enough and he woke with a start, his sheets damp, and his heart pounding. Lying back down, he tried to focus as hard as he could on the details before they could slip away. Things hadn't gone exactly to plan again and he needed to remember everything so he could make changes later with Max. Despite all the work Max had put into modifying his DNA so he could properly control others dreams, the precise control still wasn't there which was frustrating. Frustrating because it was a control he enjoyed in his own dreams so why not other people's? Max was on a CRISPER sponsored degree specializing on forcing DNA manipulations to take hold in the body much more quickly than today's doctors were able, and with the help of artificial intelligence it was revolutionizing medicine. Their real end game was to enable Jay to have more predictable dream control by modifying his genome, tinkering with DNA patterns that clearly already had their secrets locked and loaded into its primal core. Early on they had made good progress, big changes, big results, and more stability. Not the complete control needed to land in other people's dreams though and time had passed, and now they were down to their best guesses. He could sample, view and experience; but not enter people's dreams yet apart from that one time with Abby. Jay knew that intruding on people's dreams was immoral, but he had a burning desire to try to set some things straight in the world, and he knew from his own dreams that it was possible. He wanted to use this ability to get into the dreams of corrupt, bad people, find out what their secrets were, then somehow expose the person or provide evidence the world could not refute. Fake news was in his opinion one of the modern world's worst crimes. The Nest assured the humans they had all but eradicated the problem by applying filters against the news-pods. Underground networks, comprised of many thousands of hackers and volunteers puppeting millions of fake online personalities to promote opinion. Jay wasn't at all convinced the AI story of applying smart filters was even remotely accurate. Perhaps in time, he could even find out what burned in the core of NEST AI, did they have a subconscious too? He needed more time and for Max's genome mods to work so he could penetrate deep into people's dreams, to witness the crimes, then he could act.