What was conspicuously absent from the whole thing was people. Office building lobbies are central stations of human activity and movement. This place looked like it had been sucked out of reality and put into some kind of museum exhibit: “Here is an example of early twenty-first-century high-rise lobby design and decor. You can see the emphasis on stonework contrasted with meticulously maintained flower arrangements. The hard and the soft, the permanent and the ephemeral, but both costly, giving those who occupied the space a sense of high-class luxury.”
In fact, I would later note that the Dream’s entire landscape looked like some kind of diorama, constructed as a place to observe, not as one to occupy.
Anyhow, I overcame the desire to explore and instead moved through the giant room and then through the door. Outside was, again, a tremendous stillness, but an assault of conflicting styles. Directly across the street was an Arby’s, but not, like, a city Arby’s smashed into a row of retail storefronts. A free-standing normal-America Arby’s surrounded by its parking lot. Next door to the Arby’s, surrounded by a swath of knee-high grass, was a wooden church-looking building. No cross capped its steeple, but the slatted wood and the double doors centered on the front of the building made the sense that it was a house of worship clear.
None of these buildings alone looked weird; they were just dramatically out of each other’s context, especially considering the massive marble lobby I had just walked out of. I turned around to look at the building. After a few years living in New York City, you look up less, but now I craned my neck up and found that as high as I could see, there was no end to the height of the building I had just exited. I kept leaning back to try to see farther. Suddenly I stumbled, and then lurched to the side, and then was awake.
My phone was ringing. It was Andy.
“Why did you wake me up, dick! I was out of the building. There’s a whole city. There’s an Arby’s!”
“Yeah, I know. Look, it’s not just us, and it’s spreading. It’s spreading fast.”
CHAPTER TEN
The sequence you solved . . . they’re calling them sequences . . . the one on the floor with the receptionist, that one’s already been solved, but it’s pretty cool that you did it on your own.”
“What? Goddamn it, Andy, you have to explain things before talking.” I was still groggy.
“The Dream, it’s full of these weird riddles and puzzles and clues. Somehow we missed it, but there are dozens of communities online talking about it already. The one you solved was the first one that got solved—no one’s sure who solved it first. It’s weird because it’s a dream and it took a while for people to realize they weren’t the only one. But now people are out in the city solving these puzzles. There’s already a wiki and a subreddit and a bunch of semiprivate chat rooms.”
This hit me pretty hard. I mean, not that there was a subreddit, just the realization that I was behind. I had been ahead of the game for so long. The fact that the world knew things that I hadn’t figured out . . . that I should have figured out! It was unpleasant for reasons that I, in the moment, did not understand.
“Hold on, I’m getting another call.” It was Jennifer Putnam. I clicked over.
“Is this about the Dream?” I asked.
“It both is and is not,” she said with absolutely no nonsense in her voice.
“I want to get on some shows today—can you talk to Robin about that? I’m also going to need to get debriefed on this Dream.”
“Yes, I can make that happen. In the meantime, the president would like to talk to you.”
After about ten seconds of silence I said, “The president of the United States?” just to clarify.
“That’s the one. She is going to be calling you soon.”
“Why?” I suddenly felt calmer, which was bizarre.
“I got a call from the White House asking for your phone number and that is 100 percent of what I know. I wish I had more. Best of luck, April. This is a pretty wonderful occasion. Expect a bottle of champagne from me.”
“I’m more of a hard-lemonade kind of girl.”
“Yes, well, maybe it’ll be a chance to develop a taste for finer things. I’m going to clear your line so they can call you. Good-bye, April.”
I switched lines back to Andy.
“Tell me everything you know about the Dream,” I said. “Quickly.”
“Your wish is—”
“QUICKLY!” I interrupted.
“Sheesh, April, OK. Some people have been having the Dream for as long as three days, but most people have only had it once. Miranda and I have been having it for four days, so I get the feeling that it started when we messed with Hollywood Carl. No one knows how it spread, but it starts out the same for everybody everywhere. You’re in an office lobby, the same music is playing, the same robot receptionist. Everyone is compelled to ask the same question, though in different languages if they speak different languages, but if you don’t have a passcode when you ask the question, you wake up with nothing.
“If you go to sleep right after waking up, you won’t have the Dream again. But if you stay awake a while, you will have it again.
“Outside of the office building there are hundreds, if not thousands, of buildings. People are trying to catalogue them all, but it’s complicated because the city is so fucking big. There are buildings of all different eras and styles, and at least some of them appear to have real-world analogues. The office building that the spawn point is in definitely doesn’t. It’s a massive building, over two hundred stories high—bigger than the Burj Khalifa.
“People are guessing that every building has at least one puzzle in it. And some of the puzzles are impossible unless you speak a certain language or know a lot about Shakespeare or the rules to some obscure Iranian sport.
“But if you solve a puzzle you get a passcode, and if you speak it to the receptionist in the building you get a string of letters and numbers that people think is hexadecimal, or hex.
“And like Miranda said, hex is a computer-programming thing. So you know how there are ten single digits, zero through nine, before we put the one in the tens’ place and start over again?”
“Uhhh . . .” I said.
“Like, after nine, numbers become two digits long.”
“Sure,” I said, not entirely sure about my sureness.
“Well, computers don’t like ten for some reason and, agh, Miranda should explain this, but basically, instead of going to two digits at ten, hex goes to two digits at sixteen. And the numbers after nine are letters . . . A, B, C, D, E, F. So, zero through fifteen would be zero through F. And then sixteen would be ten.”
“Maybe?”
“Whatever, the point is that people think that the bits of information that are being spit out when people discover a passcode are hex code, and that if they’re strung together correctly and inputted into the right computer, it will be a program and that program will do something or contain some information. At least, that’s the idea.”
“How many of these code chunks are there?”
“No idea. Hundreds, maybe thousands.”
“Thousands?!” I said. “Thousands of passcodes? If you got one every night, that would be years!”
“Maybe, but people have already figured out a couple dozen of them, and they’re sharing. One person—ThePurrletarian is their screen name—has figured out six of them all by themselves.”
My heart jumped into my throat, but I didn’t make any noise, so Andy just kept going. That screen name was . . . familiar.
“There’s no way one person could do this alone. People are taking credit, of course, but there’s already a Wikipedia page of discovered puzzles, their locations, and the code they spat out if they’ve been solved.”
“Oh, that’s pretty cool of them,” I managed.
“Yep, not everybody is as stingy with information as we’ve been, it turns out.”
My phone booped, causing my already-elevated heart rate to shoot higher.
“OK, thank you, Andy, I’ve got to go.” I clicked over.
“Hello?” I said, praying that I had tapped the correct bit of glass on my phone’s screen.
“Hold for the president,” a female voice said. This was followed by about twenty-five excruciating seconds.
Finally, a little clicking noise, followed by a voice that was absolutely, without a doubt, that of the president of the United States: “April May, thank you for making yourself available so quickly.”