Maya groaned a long, low, quiet groan. She leaned her head forward and her locs fell over her face.
“Did I do something wrong?” I asked. Not defensive, but concerned. I was getting a feeling from Maya that I screwed something up.
“April.” Maya looked up at the camera, and then her face flickered through like twenty different emotions. Frustration, fright, excitement, back to frustration, curiosity, excitement again, and then yet more frustration.
“Maya,” I said, after it seemed like she needed to be snapped out of it.
She threw her arms up in frustration and then literally facepalmed.
“OH MY GOD WHAT?!” I was actually a little scared, like I had some kind of dream cancer or something.
“Nothing moves in the Dream, April. But weirder than that, worse than that, nothing is different for anyone in the Dream. The receptionist moves, and the receptionist speaks the native tongue of the dreamer, but other than that, everything is exactly the same. EXACTLY. People have counted the number of blades of grass in a house’s front lawn. It’s exactly the same for every person. Every person on earth.
“So when you say something happens in your dream that doesn’t happen in anyone else’s, it is a mixture of extremely exciting and extremely frustrating. Exciting, because you and I are going to work on this mystery, which may very well be the last puzzle the Dream has to offer, as we’re quickly reaching 4,096. And frustrating because, good lord god almighty, I know that you are a good person, but the last thing you need is some other sign from heaven that you are special.” She sighed.
That pissed me off a little. I put on a stern face and said, “Maya, I didn’t ask for any of this.”
Maya took a long moment to think before she said, “Is it OK with you if I retract my previous statement and we keep this conversation to business?”
“That might be a good call.” I was annoyed that she was avoiding the fight, but I also didn’t want to fight. “I’m just going to be someone with an unusual Dream problem, and you are the expert who needs to help me. Let’s role-play!” I immediately regretted that joke. But Maya, courteously, laughed.
“OK, it frustrates me to no end that I cannot be in your brain to figure this out, but here’s what you are going to do. The moment you spawn, you are going to make a beeline for the edge of the city. The fastest way to get there is probably to run straight down Broadway—that’s the street that you exit the tower onto. The moment you see the plane, you’re going to run—DO NOT WALK—toward it. If you see the plane, or if you’re able to get on board, here’s what you look for.
“First, anything unusual. You need to spend the next few hours and maybe the next few days learning everything you can about airplanes. Try to figure out what kind this is in your first go. Is it a Boeing? An Airbus? A CRJ? You can start broad and narrow it down doing research between sleeps. You might just have a sensation that something is a little off. Dream clues are often omissions, things that aren’t there that should be, but you might not be able to spot them if you don’t know what the plane’s cockpit is supposed to look like.
“Second, any broken repetition. Usually repeating units in the Dream are identical, so anything that makes one thing different from others of the same type is probably important. If one of the seats isn’t in its full, upright, and locked position, or one of the windows is single-paned, or one of the bathrooms smells weird. It could be anything.
“Third, don’t try to do this on your own. Talk to me. I’ll get together a few people I trust who might have relevant knowledge. I know that it can be really appealing to you to win independently, but there haven’t been any puzzle sequences solved by a lone Dreamer for over a month now. These things are complicated, and it’s clear to me that the Carls want us to be working together. Find what you can find and report back to me. I know what I’m doing.”
I had been taking notes. I tabbed over back to Skype. “Any other sage wisdom, O Guru of the Dream?”
“Yeah,” she said. “Don’t mock me or I will leave you alone with this mystery and your failure to solve it will eat you alive.”
“Right!” I said.
That entire conversation had the feeling of a pleasant stroll inches away from the edge of the Grand Canyon. It was really quite nice, wonderful, even. But it was impossible to forget that I was one stumble away from some serious unpleasantness.
“I will report back in the morning,” I said.
“If you’re lying to me about any of this, I will set fire to your apartment building,” she said.
It was not particularly easy to fall asleep that night. Anticipation always negates grogginess, even if you’ve become the kind of person who is perpetually groggy like I had. But I kept reading a biography of Rodin that I’d been working my way through for the fourth time until I finally found myself in the lobby. I did just what Maya told me to, and soon I was running toward a plane that was headed for a landing somewhere in the city. After having done some preliminary research on airplanes, I could tell that this was a big plane but not a huge one. It didn’t have two stories like a 747 or an A380, which meant it was, like, one of twenty-five different types of planes that all looked practically identical.
As I ran toward where I thought the plane was landing, I noticed that I wasn’t getting tired, I could run at full speed for as long as I wanted to. I guess that’s not weird for dreams, but being in control and aware the way I was in the Dream made it a thrill. So I let my feet carry me as fast as they could, which was about as fast as I could go in real life. Which is to say, not particularly fast.
After I lost sight of the plane, I had to make an educated guess at where it landed. It would keep moving after it touched down—planes did that—so I headed off roughly to where I thought it might end up.
I failed. I got lost, wandered the city for forty-five minutes, had a thought, and then slammed my head hard against a tree. On purpose, of course. There were a number of ways to wake up from the Dream, but the easiest was to try to hurt yourself. It never actually hurt and you found yourself lying in your bed.
Getting back into the Dream required that you spend some time awake. If you just went straight back to sleep, you’d have normal dreams all night.
So I groggily checked Twitter, read a couple of top posts on the Som, and then, judging it to have been long enough, went back to sleep.
This time, I headed toward the edge and then walked around a bit until I found what I was looking for: a building that was taller than most. It was maybe seven stories high, some dope Japanese pagoda. It was only a few blocks from the edge of the city, and it was higher than the vast majority of buildings around it. I scouted it and found that the stairs indeed led all the way to the top story.
So I went all the way to the edge of the city, saw the plane, and then ran like mad to the pagoda and up to the top floor. I still couldn’t see where the plane was ending up, but I got a much better idea of some nearby landmarks. It dropped below the skyline in front of the main skyscraper, so it was in my part of town. An experienced Dreamer would have been able to walk straight there, but the city’s winding, angled, narrow streets still baffled me.
But I got there.