Silk Dreams, Velvet Nightmares

Silk Dreams, Velvet Nightmares

When Glyph slides into the conscious dream that is the MindNet, he doesn’t find the silken embrace it’s been in the past, but something darker, smothering. More like a thick velvet, soft and warm and wrapped around his face. Something’s wrong.

His family is there, all of them, little brother Kaleb and sister Zoë, parents both, and they shouldn’t be. They’re never there; he deleted their avatars after the accident off-net. Yet here they are, in a family dinner scene like they used to have on Sundays, waving Glyph over to his open seat, the second on the right, where he always sat. Steam rises from the bowls on the table. Beef stew, his favorite. The rich aroma seems too real for MindNet. 

“Kaz, what’s going on?” he asks.

“Please clarify your inquiry,” says his netnav Kaz, a voice in his head, but really, everything’s in his head in the MindNet.

“What the fuck is this?” It can’t be real--even for definitions of MindNet real. There’s simply no way for anyone to have gotten into Glyph’s head. No software patches since his last slide, and no new hardware in his skull, not since his memchip went haywire and needed tuning. He hasn’t yet connected to the wider MindNet in this slide, and his perimeter protections are the best--he coded his own firewalls, and he alone can break them.

And yet someone is fucking with him. He’s the one who usually does the fucking with, or at least he used to be. Is this payback? He only ever pranked people, harmless stuff, never anything serious, like forcing them to relive Sunday dinner with their dead loved ones.

“This is your family,” says Kaz, so helpfully.

“Yeah, I know. What are they doing here? Who’s responsible for this?”

Meanwhile, Kaleb and Zoë are both waving and smiling at him, and the velvet feels like it’s going to smother the life out of him. This is the first time he’s seen them since...

He should have been with the four of them. The disappointment in his mother’s eyes, when he refused to come along. But he stayed home that day, skipped the family outing, the one they’d never returned from. And for what? A slide. Always a slide. Now sliding is all he has.

“You are responsible,” says Kaz.

That’s not right. Glyph needs to upgrade Kaz’s code next time he gets a burst of motivation, which has been happening less and less often lately. Doing so requires spending time off-net, and nothing much fun happens there anymore in general, never mind in his specific circumstance. It’s why he’s so often in the MindNet, why he’s in the MindNet now, except he can’t seem to escape reality even here.

His parents are waving to him. The velvet has shimmied its way down his windpipe, into his lungs, suffocating him from the inside. Glyph can’t breathe. But that’s not even possible, in the MindNet, where there is no breathing. 

He shoos Kaz, and the netnav disappears into the far ether of his mind.

He wills the scene to change, tries to open external connections, to slide to a different scape, anywhere else, but he’s blocked, trapped in here with his family. With people he’d do anything to see again in real life, but this is not real life, and that makes all the difference.

Maybe the culprit left a backdoor where Glyph can access the code. How would he do it, if he were to inflict this on someone else? He’d hide it in plain sight, in the exit subroutine, and so he calls it up (thank God that hasn’t been disabled, he’s not in the mood to perform any hacker moves more clever than the basics), and he shifts the underlying binary, and there: there’s the option to see source code. He selects it, and symbols flood his vision.

Kaz was right.

Glyph himself coded the scene, along with a comment to his future self--his current self--about never forgetting the times like these. For them to look back on, when they were older, except younger Glyph couldn’t have known what was to come, that they’d not be looking back on anything together.

“Gabriel,” says his mother, softly, and no one ever calls him that now, he thought it was gone, but it’s not gone.

Glyph sends the code off the side of his vision. He silently curses his younger self--then thanks him. Maybe he’d had a little more wisdom then, just one more thing he’d lost along the way. Gabriel takes a small step toward dinner with his family, and the suffocating velvet begins to slide away.

END