Michael Conniff
All Rights Reserved
The cloud had been around from the dawn of time. Someone named Jobs invented it a hundred years ago and there was a law made up by someone named Moore that made it cheaper by half every year. By now the cloud was so cheap Federated was practically giving it away—on some days, we actually did give it away.
No one could think of a single reason not to put everything on the cloud: all your music and moving pictures; your business records; your calls and appointments; your genetic log and virtual footprint; even your Keepsakes; anything you could think of. That was a given in our business but it was only a start. Most of the experts said the cloud was yesterday’s news but I knew better, because my job was to make Federated’s Dream Recovery option a reality for next to nothing a month or less. The idea was dirt-simple: after the standard brain scan, Dream Recovery would be the only way to have your dreams stored and accessible in the cloud regardless of your virtual location. Actual memories had to be captured, of course, and there would be no way to store all of them in your lair even if your dreams were a grey mush with almost no storage requirements. If you went for our Dream Premium option on the cloud, you could make your dreams available throughout the known universe, where beings of every provenance could share and share alike for almost nothing more per month.
The big shots in our company were over the moon about Dream Recovery because the brain would be producing content at no cost, a new reality Federated could monetize on every planet by just flipping a switch on the cloud.
Mrs. Big Shot herself, the head of Federated, was virtually over my shoulder every day and there’s no way I could blame her. Turning dreams into money on the cloud had been the Holy Grail since before my Keepers matched me into being. No one had broken the code but now the dream exploration business was taking off like the space business 150 years ago. Naturally, Federated had to study the thing to death before hitting ignition, worrying themselves sick with what ifs beyond human comprehension. Some of our brightest bulbs at Federated thought we were venturing into the belly of the beast, so to speak, because not even our psychological or cognitive experts from all over the galaxy had any idea what would happen once the lights went down and those dreams came to life.
We were about to change the world by turning the brain into a rocket ship. There might be consequences.
“Anything you need, Dean?” Mrs. Big Shot said to me more or less every day.
“No, ma’am,” I said because my Keepers raised me in the old way.
“If you think of anything,” she said, “you come to me.”
“Appreciate it, ma’am,” I said.
Mrs. Big Shot was from a different planet than me and about as beautiful as a human could get. She smelled like flowers after the rain and she was nice and twice as smart as anyone else at Federated.
I wondered if she ever dreamed about her mate.
***
We had our own lab rats—people, I mean—because the human brain was our primary destination before moving on to other species. We asked a simple question: how does a brain, deep into deep sleep, come up with the pictures and accounts of some things that happened, and some things that don’t. For me this line between fact and fiction was the most interesting of all, because it meant your own free will was going to take you for a ride whether you wanted to go or not. Free will was the one thing the Matchers had never been able to take away from any of us.
I started to think about the old movie theatres long gone—people watching something together—and I remembered Edison’s first systems projecting moving pictures on a screen, first without sound then with: maybe we needed a projection system for the brain. If we could project dreams then Federated could capture them on the cloud for further monetization.
That’s what I was building with an unlimited budget and all the best people we could find from the Quadrants. Despite our resources, what happened between the ears during sleep was still uncharted territory—at least until Federation Day, when Mrs. Big Shot volunteered her own brain for our ongoing experiments.
At that point in time we were getting exactly nowhere with Dream Recovery For The Cloud, as Federated was calling it, even though our brain projection-and-capture system was flying high. The brains in our study were just too small to elevate the research. With our projection system, you could see the storm coming in their grey matter and you could hear the thunder, but the dreams from our plebes ended up as a puddle, a big messy glop of no use to anyone, let alone trillions of people on the cloud for a few pennies per month.
The brain was smarter than we were.
When Mrs. Big Shot first went to sleep in our lab, we had every scan pulling data from her like the oxygen required for life on Earth. The system worked so well we could see she was dreaming of Federated transports and rocket ships, of dishes of food from all over the galaxy, and of a tiny little kitty cat in her lap, on her bed, at home. Mrs. Big Shot’s brain produced dreams with sharp edges—a start/stop—a specific beginning and an end that we could nail down like clockwork every time. She was the perfect subject: the woman of our dreams.
There was no sign of her mate, which I took to be a sign.
***
Thanks to Mrs. Big Shot’s big brain, Dream Recovery For The Cloud was in business. I had every reason to be proud of my Dream Projection-Capture System, Universal Patent pending. I was gloating, or coasting, or just enjoying a regular peek into Mrs. Big Shot’s brain. You can’t blame a man for looking.
Then Federated promoted me. The Big Shots in global marketing called the future of Dream Recovery For The Cloud “the next frontier,” with melded or commingled tiers for a dream matching system soon to be available in the cloud here on this Earth.
Like it or not, Dream Match For The Cloud was on the launching pad, and I was supposed to pilot the ship. At first I was angry because promotion was the Federated way to eject you from the cockpit just as you reached for the stars. I had a dream about it that night—no fooling—a dream where Mrs. Big Shot was scolding me and then holding me and then: well, you can imagine. I woke up dripping from the dream and that’s when I really woke up. Federated already had most of the technology. A few tweaks and I was sure I could make my way into Mrs. Big Shot’s dreams, the same way Keepers fertilized eggs after The Great Rise. Now I had a personal stake in the outcome and her name was woman.
The key was a pattern recognition technology that had been around forever, the kind they used to find terrorists in silos back when terrorists stood half a chance. First you find the face and then you could map the body parts in a fail-safe way: Federated’s commingling system was that old idea, times a million, one hundred years later. Not only could we identify a person and their movements, we could simulate all of the above in real-time in any environment, made-up or real.
That was the key to the Dream Match universe: once we knew it was you, we knew everything: we were God incarnate.
***
Mrs. Big Shot was having sex in her dreams with someone in the old way though I could never quite see his face. She was wild and loud and she was happy, like a hungry animal without the bother of a conscience. All the lines around her eyes were gone and she looked young as can be and ready for the long haul.
I saw my opening right away: if Mrs. Big Shot were making love to a man with no face, then why shouldn’t I be the face of that man?
Mrs. Big Shot was still looking over my shoulder every day, sometimes twice a day, sometimes touching me on the arm and leaning in, so it was not so big a leap to think she had feelings for me. There was chemistry, or something, at work between us, something that had nothing to do with who owned what at Federated.
Face it: Mrs. Big Shot had every reason to keep me happy. I had become one of Federated’s most important employees overnight. People in Universal Resources (UR) had already been discussing increased compensation, access to company transports, a Dream royalty, even a new research facility anywhere in the cosmos dedicated to my most far-flung notions.
The top people in UR told me the sky was the limit at Federated.
***
Mrs. Big Shot’s dreams were so real I put them off limits to my team—but not to me. The man in her dreams still had no face so my window of opportunity was wide open. All I had to do was to make my own dream with Mrs. Big Shot so Dream Match For The Cloud could come into play. Unfortunately, making your brain pay attention to your mind is not the easiest thing in the world. I got to first base a few times in my dreams, pecking Mrs. Big Shot on the cheek, leaning into her soft self at my desk from real life—that was a no-brainer—but I was a long way from Neverland until I finally asked her why she always smelled so good.
“Eau de Gal,” she said.
I bought a spray bottle in the cloud and I had it in my hands that night. One whiff administered at bedtime was all it took to bring Mrs. Big Shot to life in my dreams. It was better than real life could ever be, because we were weightless, beyond the yank of gravity. Warp and woof went missing. Time went away, too: we could make love in the old way and it never had to end until we mutually decided to blast off. The limitations of mortals did not apply to our commingled dreams.
We were endless.
As the largest shareholder in Federated, Mrs. Big Shot was more than happy to give Dream Match For The Cloud a trial run herself, with my dream of her as the raw material.
“I think I’m going to like it, Dean,” she said.
“You have no idea,” I said.
I threw everyone out of the lab. This was a private matter between Mrs. Big Shot and me. My Projection-Capture system, Universal Patent now granted, was working like a charm. I took one of Mrs. Big Shot’s wilder dreams and ran it against mine through my new commingling system, Universal Patent pending. As you might expect, the result was the best of both worlds, with just the right amount of the hope stored in our deepest recesses.
In the lab, dead asleep, her dreams were our dreams and they were a sight to see, as wild and unpredictable as the gods who landed on Mount Olympus. There was writhing and groaning in our commingled dream—we were mainly human, of course—but together we were not two but one entirely new creation not even we completely understood, as if we had flown past recorded history to that time before time when there were Titans.
The brain has a mind of its own. People used to call it a soul.
Mrs. Big Shot stayed in that dream forever in the lab, but when she woke up she came across the room and kissed me twice on the lips. I could smell Eau de Gal and it was the sweetest smell in the universe. We lay down together and slept like babies. I knew she had to be heaven-sent.
You can guess the rest if you have half a brain.
I was becoming a wealthy man and my patent pending on Dream Match For The Cloud was about to send my compensation through the roof. I got strapped in with Mrs. Big Shot at Federated for the long haul. There was nowhere to go but up.
