Waking Dream

Lars woke to the sun streaming onto his face. For a while he simply lay in bed, his mattress conforming to his body like a hug, watching the light catch in the crystals of the chandelier above him. The ocean outside was the most vibrant blue. It was another beautiful day.

"Good morning, Lars!” Erika rolled into the room as if she’d heard him wake. She was a little powerhouse of a robot with a fixed, cheery smile and big bright eyes, adorable as anything.

"Do you have any plans for the day?" she asked, handing him a brimming cup of honey tea.

"Not really," Lars confessed, taking his first sip, letting the warmth fill him.

"You know," Erika said, the smallest hint of concern tinging her animatronic voice, "You really ought to go out today. Get back into the swing of things."

Since his mother passed away, Erika had been keeping an eye on him. He appreciated the concern, but really, it was a little stifling at times.

The day it happened, Lars had come back home and found the house far too silent. Mother religiously liked to watch her soaps in the afternoon before cocktails, but when he entered the living room the wall-to-wall projector was off, and Mother was lying on the couch, hands crossed over her chest, smiling a little like she was lost in a good dream. An Engineer was leaning over her, and he stood quickly at Lars’s entrance.

“We got a call,” he explained gravely. The funeral was the very next day, filled with festivities and tales of Mother and dancing.

Sure, the house felt a little lonely sometimes and Lars’s eyes got a weird prickly feeling, but he just hit the optimization button when that happened and he felt normal again in a flash. It was true he’d been avoiding parties lately though. Lars decided he’d go to one tonight, if only to get Erika off his back. But first, breakfast.

The new croissant shop just down the boardwalk was busy, as expected. Lars scanned the QR code at the service window and watched the creation portal jump up on his phone. He scanned the list of ingredients and suggestions, and put something together, pressing send. The site processed his request and asked for two credits- a steal! Lars pressed accept and watched them disappear from the balance that fully regenerated from the last day's activities while he slept. He was standing in a perfect slice of sunshine, waiting for the robo-bakers to whip him up something divine, when someone ran smack right into his back.

.

Patrick staggered down the boardwalk, trying to put as much distance between himself and the Institute as possible. All around him people were talking and laughing, the sea breeze playing with their hair. But there was something wrong. Their smiles were a little too big, their laughter canned, like they were on a movie set.

He didn’t have much time. He’d narrowly escaped the procedure, twisting his knife into the throat of the Engineer who'd attempted to administer his port. He’d set off the alarm and used the ensuing confusion to run. Now he looked around him and saw all of these impossibly beautiful, serenely smiling people like an uncanny valley nightmare, tapping their fingers to the buttons under their clothes. Drug addicts, all of them.

He might have once felt some level of sympathy for them, but he was unable to summon any now. He'd watched as his mother and brother had toiled day in and day out at menial jobs, until the day they weren't useful anymore and they were taken from him, euthanized in the back of some sterile van.

It happened to his brother. John twisted his back and just like that he was fired from the factory where he worked. His only recourse was to become a Donor. For the next month, they took continuous plasma donations from John until he grew thinner and paler, until one day they found him stiff and cold in his bed. He'd only been eighteen.

Patrick's mother wasn't sick; her crime had been getting old and depressed after her youngest son’s death. One day the Engineers came for her and she didn't resist. Patrick wasn't home when it happened.

The very next day, the Engineers came to his home with placid smiles and steely eyes and told him they were sorry for his loss but that they were offering him, in turn, a once-in-a-lifetime opportunity. That was how he came to Paradise.

Paradise was the star project of the white-suited men and women who ran the country, an ultra-technological utopia in which lucky citizens could flourish without a care in the world. No jobs necessary, they were afforded credits that were replenished every day in place of money. Robots and AI ran every business entirely in Paradise, leaving the people to pursue pleasure exclusively, and the main source of this pleasure was the opiate known as Optimization Serum. It was this serum that the Engineers harvested their plasma to make, and it was the promise of one day being chosen for Paradise themselves, that kept them willingly giving it.

Patrick knew they'd given him his ticket as a way to tamp down any rebellion. They expected him to just let go of his anger and grief and to let them dope him up and feed him sweet treats to pacify him. The thought stoked his anger. If they thought that would work on him, it wouldn't. He'd smiled and taken the offer, making a pact with himself right then. He'd go to Paradise. And he'd take as much of it as possible down with him.

The first step was the most challenging. He'd escaped the Institute of Induction wearing the white clothes of the woman who'd started the procedure on him. When he'd stripped her he felt no shame, only pausing to notice that she didn't have a pleasure port of her own. Of course not. It wouldn’t do for them to get high on their own supply.

As Patrick walked down the boardwalk now, his plain clothes shoved hastily back on his body, he tried to paste a smile on his face, but he couldn’t keep from looking over his shoulder every few minutes. It was this that ultimately led to him running smack into the back of a man standing at the edge of a small crowd in front of one of the shops.

"Ooof.” He stumbled and fell to one knee. Patrick looked up to see that the human blockade was wearing sunglasses, his dark, full head of hair elegantly coiffed back. As he gaped, the man took off his glasses to reveal eyes as clear and blue as the ocean around them. Those eyes were eerily guileless in a way that shouldn't have been possible for a man of his age. He knew immediately that this was no transplant, no matter how long ago. This man had been born and bred here in Paradise. He knew nothing else.

"I say!" the other man exclaimed, sounding exactly like a character in one of the soaps Paradise was famous for. "Where's a handsome guy like you off to in such a hurry at this time of day?"

Patrick absurdly felt his face heat a little. He'd never been faced with such shameless, casual flirtation, and he found himself observing that the stranger was very attractive himself, if in an artificial kind of way.

"Sorry," he muttered, recovering his voice, and pushed to his feet, aiming to detour around the man, when a breathless woman ran right over to them.

"Lars! It's been ages!"

She was blonde and leggy, pretty in a vapid way like an underwear model. Behind her puffed a man with the build of a football star.

"Kate! Darren! What a pleasure!" Lars crowed. "I was just thinking of contacting you, I swear-"

"Suuure," Kate drawled, pushing her curls over her shoulder and pressing the button beneath her clothes automatically as she did so. "We were getting a little worried, truth be told-"

The hunk beside her interrupted. "Kate," he chided. "Let's not bring the mood down. We were just headed to the Engine Room, if you’d like to join. You can bring your friend if you want.”

Lars waved a hand. “We don’t actually know each-“ he began, but Patrick, seizing on Darren’s words, reached out to shake his hand.

“Patrick,” he said. “I’d love to if you’ll have me.”

.

The Engine Room was a tower of a building with multiple floors featuring bars with different themes. The entire building was made of glass, so that no matter what story you occupied, you could look out over the city on your left or the ocean on your right. A spiral staircase went straight up the center, and Patrick’s new companions went to the very top as if by implicit understanding. There was a fountain installed in the center of the rooftop lounge and a constant mist flowed over tables with flowers set in the center. It was like being in a giant greenhouse. Robots wheeled through the organized chaos of half-drunken revelers, some of whom were cutting it up on a grassy dance floor. Lars, Darren, and Kate found an open table on the periphery of the room. Seconds after they'd seated themselves, one of the robots arrived by their table. Patrick's heart quickened, and he avoided contact with its shiny, silver eyes.

Darren and Kate put in their orders for drinks and when it was Lars's turn Patrick saw him hold his phone out for the robo-server to scan. Oh no. He hadn't thought about this part. Since he hadn’t actually been inducted, he'd never received any credits. When the others turned to him, waiting, he said, "Oh...I'm not thirsty. Saving my credits."

Lars waved a hand magnanimously. "Oh no," he said, "I insist!" He held his phone out again for the robot to scan. "He'll have the same as me," he announced.

"Thanks," Patrick said as the robot glided off. Kate and Darren got up to go dance, and he and Lars were left at the table alone.

"You're new here, aren't you?"

Patrick froze, a fight-or-flight instinct poking up inside of him like the head of a spear.

"What makes you say that?" he asked.

“I can tell you’re not optimized, not yet really," Lars answered. "It takes a while for people to adjust, to find their right dosage.

The robot zipped back over in record time, depositing their drinks. Lars lifted his to his mouth and took a languorous sip from it. His hands were the pale white of someone who'd never worked a day in his life. He really was surreally beautiful. Patrick suddenly hated him with a vengeance.

.

He was fascinating, this stranger with the dark complexion and the callused hands. Even as far as newcomers went, this man felt different. His dark eyes weren't the normal confused, wondering orbs of the others. They were furtive and somehow closed, like curtains beyond which something much more interesting than any show was taking place.

As Patrick raised his drink to his lips, Lars noticed his hand was shaking just the slightest bit. He’d also noticed that he kept looking over his shoulder, towards the top of the stairs they'd arrived from, though when Lars followed his gaze he didn’t see anything.

A couple yards away, Darren whooped as he spun Kate on the grassy dance floor. He wondered if Patrick had dancing where he was from. He leaned forward to ask if he'd like to join him on the floor, but when he met Patrick’s eyes again they were hard and dull as stones.

"Does it ever bother you," he asked, "that you're living a lie?"

Lars felt a chill come over him, though the Engine Room was perfectly temperature-controlled.

He chuckled awkwardly. “Whatever do you mean?”

“None of this is actually for your benefit, you know. It's so they can have total control. All these robots, they're here to keep an eye on you, to make sure you don't get any ideas."

Lars shook his head. He lifted his drink but there was nothing left inside the glass. He was thinking of Erika’s wide button eyes.

"Look at the people here,” Patrick went on. “Everyone's stupid-pretty, no one's over maybe fifty. Why do you think that is? What do they do when you get older, less attractive? Maybe you don't care that they're killing us on the outside, but they're killing you too and you're too blind to see it, too complacent."

Lars pushed back from the table. He was feeling strange; he wanted Patrick to stop talking. He thought of his mother lying still on the couch, the figure in white rising, looking at him. The split second in which he’d felt he’d stumbled on something he wasn’t supposed to see. Why was the Engineer there?

Lars's hand went to the button on his chest and Patrick followed with contemptuous eyes.

"Sure, drug yourself whenever something feels the slightest bit uncomfortable. That's the problem with you people. You know on some level, don't you? You keep the poison flowing because somewhere deep down you know something isn't right. Your whole life, Lars, has been just a splendid dream, but the time for sleeping is over.”

Lars's shaking finger hit the button once, then twice, then a third time, though he knew the third did nothing- it was timed release, to keep him safe. To keep him happy, just like all the wonderful things the engineers made, and how was it that Patrick didn't see that?

As the double dose of optimization melted over him, the troubling heaviness in his chest fell away, and all he could think was how beautiful the turning lights of the club were, the people in one another's arms, laughing and swaying. Through their bodies, he saw a flash of white. Patrick saw it too. As the engineers strode toward them with purpose, he ripped open his shirt, and Lars saw that there was no port on him whatsoever. He saw instead a different device, strapped to the man's lean waist, equipped with a different button that he pressed now. A red, blinking light appeared like an eye, opening and shutting in rapid-fire succession. Watching it, his vision started to blur pleasantly. Patrick shouted something- the room had gone still now, everyone staring at their table.

The engineers reached Patrick and grabbed him by the arms. When they saw the device, they stepped back, faces as pale as their clothes. Lars closed his eyes. One of his favorite songs was playing over the speakers of the club. It started off slow, but at a certain, unexpected point it hit a crescendo so thrilling it spun him out of his body and into the music. It was coming. One, two, three.

Now.