I felt a little guilty that I had spent so little time exploring the Dream then. I spent all my time defending it, but also I avoided it.
“Are you going to introduce your friends?”
“Oh god! I’m sorry. Maya, this is Miranda, a materials scientist at UC Berkeley who we’ve been working with, and Robin, who is my assistant,” I said.
Andy then cut in, “It’s really good to see you, Maya.”
“It’s good to see you too.”
If you want yet another example of what a shit I am, I hadn’t even considered that I’d basically made Andy choose and that he had chosen me. Another wave of heat and sweat hit me. Luckily, Andy took over and told Maya the situation with Petrawicki.
“Oh, yeah, do not give into that rat-faced shit. Seriously, if every person got a nickel every time someone else thought something nasty about them, that guy would be the richest man on earth.”
“Right, no one wants to give in, but we have to do something or he’s in control.”
“First of all, no, he’s not. All the more complicated clues require collaboration now anyway. Yesterday there was a passcode uncovered and the key was to have someone who spoke a particular dialect of Hindi and had knowledge of their region’s creation myth working with someone who knows abstract mathematics. I was following the whole saga and I still don’t really understand. It was something about circles, both geometrical and mythological. It really shows an amazingly detailed understanding of human culture. And, for all their strengths, the Defenders don’t necessarily seem like the most culturally aware group of people.”
There was a round of agreement.
“But more importantly,” she continued, “we can fuck with them.”
“Oh, I like the sound of that,” I said.
“It takes time to check a passcode to ensure that it’s real. You can’t just pop into the Dream, say the passcode, and get the data. You have to go through the whole puzzle sequence, get the password in the Dream, and then deliver it. Some of the puzzle sequences take hours.”
“Oh, this is delicious,” I said. “So we just have to set up a racket of people who send Peter Petrawicki fake puzzle sequences and hex codes hundreds of times a day.”
“No,” Maya said, “you don’t need to do anything. People active in the Dreamer community are already working on it. When I say ‘we’ can fuck with them, I mean us, not you. No offense, but I don’t think you could come up with a convincing fake puzzle sequence to save your life.”
I did not take offense. I saw myself as a leader of the community, not a member. I had no idea what a messed-up perspective that was at the time. “Oh, so, we don’t have to do anything. This problem will solve itself.”
I saw frustration bloom on Maya’s face. “No, April, this problem will get solved by people who just happen to not be you.”
Everyone got a little wide-eyed with that rebuke. Miranda blushed bright red, while my guess is that my face went a shade whiter.
“Right,” I stammered. “Of course. God, I’m sorry, that was a dumb thing to say.”
Maya just made that face where her lips disappeared in consternation. I hadn’t been called on my bullshit in a while. It was unpleasant but also a little refreshing.
“If you don’t mind me asking,” Robin said, “how did you get so involved in the Dreamer community?”
“Well, the first night I solved the forty-ninth-, fiftieth-, and fifty-first-floor puzzle sequences. The forty-ninth floor, that’s the floor you started on, was solved by hundreds of people by the time people realized that it was a shared experience. I had worked out those three and even a few outside the building when the first Dreamer communities started popping up. It made me a bit of a celebrity in those communities. It also didn’t hurt that I had the connection to April.” She nodded at me. “Now, I just like it, and the people are amazing, and from all over the world with different ideas and worldviews, all working together toward a common goal. It’s a pretty beautiful thing. In fact, you all should spend a little time in the Dream. Just look up one of the solved sequences on Wikipedia and go through it. It might give you a better appreciation for the Carls. I know it has for me.”
Then she sat there for a few moments with a thought on her face before saying, “And, yeah, I dunno, I probably wanted to stay involved in this stuff in some way. It wasn’t as easy for me to leave it behind as I thought it would be.”
I could tell she was looking right at me. I couldn’t find any words to say, and I was worried that, if I said them, she would be able to hear the lump in my throat.
“Speaking of which, I didn’t originally want to ask, but there’s something you guys could maybe help us out with, if you wanted to.”
* * *
—
That night, after mulling over Maya’s proposal, I decided to take her advice and spend some time in the Dream. First, though, I read through some of the more recent puzzle sequences that had been worked out. The one I picked was one of the last ones ThePurrletarian had credited, though there were two other names I didn’t recognize listed beside hers. They didn’t uncover it simultaneously, I found; they did it together.
When I fell asleep and found myself in the Dream’s lobby, I turned around and punched the down button on the elevator. The door opened, and I walked in and pushed the button for the lobby. I walked out, past the massive super-sized Carl, out the door, and onto the street. The Dream’s streets were not on a grid like Manhattan; they would spur off in diagonals, coming together in three-way or five-way or even six-way intersections. Alleys shot off in surprising locations, and none of the architecture made any sense.
I looked back to see the office building where the spawn point was located—so high that, from my vantage point, it looked like it went on up forever, more than two hundred stories. It’s weird to talk about these things as if they are fact since they were in a dream, but the fact that everyone experienced it in precisely the same way made it feel concrete. What is reality except for the things that people universally experience the same way? The Dream, in that sense, was very, very real.
Directly across from the exit of the office building was the Arby’s. This magnificent dream location was the best branding Arby’s had ever gotten; they’d become the unofficial fast food of Dreamers everywhere. Next door to that was the old wooden church and on the other side of the Arby’s was a train car that was definitely not modern, but I couldn’t tell you when it was from. Maybe the 1920s?
I headed straight across into the Arby’s. It was empty, as everything in the Dream was. This sequence relied on a fairly detailed knowledge of how the equipment in an Arby’s worked. Maya had worked at an Arby’s in high school and was also one of the first people to try this sequence.