Dreamfever (19 page)

Josh began to feel a sort of dread as they passed through the door labeled “Applied Physics Department.” Her shoulders sagged when they entered Bash's office without disturbing the door to room 327, which Feodor had unlocked every morning when he came into work. Josh didn't know if she felt relieved or disappointed.

“Help yourself,” Bash said. “I'm sure there's a pot in the break room.”

Josh blinked at him. “What?”

“You said you wanted coffee, right?”

No, she had turned over her shoulder and barked, “Cree, where's my coffee?” just like Feodor had done every single time he'd come in to work.

This confusion resulted in Josh ending up sitting in front of Bash's desk with a large mug of coffee, which she didn't drink and had doctored into a warm milkshake.

“So, as I mentioned, I loved your paper,” Bash told her. “Particularly the part where you performed your experiment without any sort of supervision or permission. Sometimes I think that the Nicastro encourages young people to get into trouble.”

Bash laughed. Josh made herself smile again.

“I'll be frank,” he said. “You look anxious. What did you want to talk about?”

Josh swallowed; the drink did nothing to relieve the bitter taste in her mouth. Reluctantly, she opened the manila envelope she'd brought along and drew out a handful of pages. “I was reading your paper, and you talked about using trimidions to monitor the state of the Dream at various points, then sending radio signals back to a central location.”

Bash nodded, apparently unsurprised that she had followed the paper.

“I've—” She struggled with the first word, since it wasn't quite a truthful one. “I've been working on sort of the opposite idea, that a central device could broadcast signals to various points within the Dream.”

His aristocratic brow furrowed. “To what purpose?”

“Well,” Josh stumbled again. Somehow she had been hoping to avoid telling him
why
she wanted to do this. “I've been … I mean, it might be possible to … The central problem is how to create fixed broadcasting points on the surface of the Dream, since it's constantly expanding and contracting.”

Bash didn't protest the leap in topics. “Which is exactly why nothing in my original paper has proven applicable. We'd need to place trimidions throughout the Dream at fixed locations, so that we'd be able to know exactly where the signals were coming from. But the Dream is always changing shape, like…”

“The sea,” Josh suggested.

“A sea without a bottom. How can you fix something to the surface of the sea?”

Josh fiddled with the papers, not sure which ones to show him. “What if … we could change the polarization of Dream particles to prevent them from shifting?”

For the first time, Bash seemed surprised.

“That would be quite an accomplishment. That isn't actually what you're working on, is it?”

Josh pushed forward one of the pages she'd torn from her sketchbook. Bash immediately drew it toward himself.

“What is this?” he asked, but then he began reading and stopped asking questions. Josh anxiously checked over the calculations again, once grabbing a pen to scratch out a couple of words in Polish, hopefully before Bash noticed them.

“Where's the rest of this?” Bash asked, the lighthearted tone in his voice gone.

Josh showed him the next page.

For the next forty minutes, he read, sometimes tapping the equations with a capped pen as he worked through them in his mind. Finally, he sat back in his chair and blew out a long, marathon-runner breath.

“This is mind-blowing,” he said. His voice was very serious. “You wrote this?”

Josh hesitated before nodding.

“How? I mean no offense, but your Nicastro paper wasn't anywhere near this. Who have you been studying with?”

Josh squirmed in her chair. “I haven't been studying with anyone. I've just been reading a lot.”

Bash wasn't buying it. “I find that impossible to believe.”

She was going to have to tell him
something
. “You probably heard that I had a run-in with Feodor Kajażkołski a few months ago.”

“Yes, I did hear that. You're telling me that this is his work?”

That would make more sense, wouldn't it?
Josh thought.

She'd considered telling Bash at least part of the truth. The problem was, if she admitted she had gotten her ideas from Feodor, how would she explain when she kept coming up with new ones?

“No, the work is mine. But I hit my head while I was in his universe. I fractured my skull really badly, and since then … I've been thinking differently. Dream theory just sort of makes sense to me now.” She tried to give Bash a light smile, like it was no big deal. “My dad's really confused about why my grades have improved so much.”

That part, at least, was true. She'd been accused of cheating twice in the last months of her junior year, and she'd resorted to taking proctored Saturday exams to prove herself.

“I bet,” Bash said. He flipped through the sketchbook again. “I would have been surprised if you had said this was Feodor's work. It's too orderly, too much hard science.”

She smiled for real then, even as she wondered what Bash's comment might imply. Were Feodor's ideas being filtered in some way as they passed through her brain, altered and made more orderly, possibly even less dangerous?

“I didn't get the impression he was a super orderly person,” she said.

“What
was
your impression of him?” Bash asked, looking up at her.

No one had asked Josh the question that way, but the answer poured out of her mouth before she could give it a thought. “I think he was a luminary whose light was distorted by the shadow of evil.”

Where had
that
come from? Was that how Feodor saw himself? Josh had never said anything so poetic. She added, to break the strange tension she'd created, “What did the monarchy say before they exiled him? That his genius was matched only by his madness?”

“I hadn't heard that one.” Bash gave himself a little shake. “Unfortunately, if we come back to this brilliant work you've written, we're faced with a problem that perhaps only Feodor could have solved. How are you going to stabilize the Dream particles in their new polarity?”

“I was hoping that was where you could come in.”

“Flattering.” He tapped the pages with his capped pen and thought. “Give me a while to work on it.”

“I would be grateful if you would.”

“I'm excited, honestly. I haven't seen anything like this since— I don't think I've ever seen anything like this. May I keep these pages?”

Josh nodded after a pause. “I'd appreciate it if you wouldn't show them to anyone else, though.”

Reluctantly, he said, “It's a temptation, but I'll respect your wishes. I wouldn't want anyone showing my work around before it was ready.”

“Thanks.”

As she stood up, though, he added, “Josh. You must realize the implications of what you've created.”

Suddenly she felt his excitement, not just at the ideas she had given him, but at the thrill of this secret.

“If you could build this machine and find a way to anchor transmitters in the Dream, you could transform Dream particles in any way you wanted. You could alter the Dream.”

Josh swallowed. She knew only too well.

“Let's not get ahead of ourselves,” she said. “One step at a time.”

By the time she reached the elevator, she was trembling.

 

Sixteen

Long after everyone
else had gone to bed, Will remained sitting at the desk in front of his stalker wall, trying to put together the pieces of Feodor's last manuscript.

Combining the copies from Mirren's archive with the four copies of the manuscript the presenter at the Grey Circle meeting had given Will, he had seven total copies. None of them were complete individually, but put together they appeared to make a whole manuscript.

Except … When Will went to check a page number on the last page of one manuscript to see how much it overlaped with another, he noticed that the last words were different on what should have been identical pages.

Maybe one is a revised copy,
he thought, but he lacked the knowledge of dream theory to make heads or tails of either version. Instead, he reexamined all the copies he had, page by page, to make a list of places where they diverged.

The longer the list became, the more certain Will felt that the discrepancies had nothing to do with revision. He was still poring over the pages, trying to make sense of the words, when Mirren came downstairs in a green silk pajama set.

“Oh, hello,” she said. “I thought everyone had gone to bed.”

“So did I. Trouble sleeping?”

“I'm nervous about tomorrow.”

The next day was her dream-walking trial.

She perched on the corner of Will's desk. “I'd never been nervous before I came to the World. I had nothing to be nervous about. Now I'm finding that I don't like it very much.”

“No one does,” Will agreed.

“I keep wondering what nightmares the junta will pick, and if I'll have any idea what to do when I face them. I know that if I can just get over the hump of figuring out an approach…”

Will decided not to tell her that after six months of training with Josh, he was still learning the same thing. Instead, he said, “Why don't we go pull up some nightmares in the archway, and we can toss ideas around about how to approach them? We can't go into the Dream, of course, but—”

“I would be extremely grateful,” Mirren said. “Would you mind?”

“Not at all. Playing the teacher instead of the apprentice is sort of fun.” He started to rise and then realized the opportunity he was passing up. “Oh, wait, before we do that, could you take a look at these copies of Feodor's last manuscript?”

He explained to her about the numerous versions of the text, and she pulled up a chair beside his so that she could examine the pages more closely.

“How much dream theory do you know?” Will asked.

“Quite a bit. Of course, that in no way means I'll be able to read this. I've read some of Kajażkołski's earlier work, and it always took me hours to parse it out.” She read over a page of which they had four copies. “This doesn't even sound like his other work. And the first paragraphs on these two versions are the same, but the equation that follows them is radically different.”

“Are either of them right?” Will asked.

Mirren required a calculator and scrap paper to figure it out. “I don't think so. This one is pure nonsense. But…” She tapped some more. “The second equation is much better, but it only fits with the explanation given on this Xeroxed copy over here.”

“So you're saying that none of these pages make sense by themselves, but if you take parts of each one and fit them together, they start to make sense?”

“They might,” Mirren said. She copied out the explanation and the equation it referenced onto a new sheet of paper, then two more paragraphs—from different copies—and another equation from yet another source. “Now
this
makes sense. This I could believe Kajażkołski wrote.”

“What does it say?”

“It talks about evidence of the subtle body in our DNA. The subtle body is what he called—”

“The soul, I know. The part of us that enters the Dream universe when we sleep.”

“Some people prefer to think of it as our consciousness. He says that our consciousness is present in our DNA, and he's written an equation to measure the subtle body's vibration based on DNA content. He compares how our souls function to our ability to see stars. When the sun sets, you can see the stars, but the stars are always there regardless of whether or not they're visible. He thought that when the body dies, part of the soul remains in the DNA.” She frowned. “I shouldn't have said this made sense. ‘Reads coherently' would have been a better description.”

“You don't believe in souls?”

“I do, but what does he mean by saying that our souls can be found in our DNA? There's a passage here about how if your arm gets cut off, your consciousness is still attached to your arm. This equation at the bottom of the page appears internally consistent, but I have no idea what it does.” She shuffled through the pages, seeming to grow more frustrated. “Sorting all this out will take days.”

Will felt reluctant to let the subject drop, but he knew Mirren needed to focus on her dream-walking trial.

“Well, we aren't going to manage it tonight,” Will said. “Let's go watch some nightmares.”

Mirren nodded, the relief plain in her face.

The archroom was cold this late at night. Whim and his father were on nightmare duty, and Will fetched a second chair so that he and Mirren could sit comfortably and watch through the arch as a kitchen tried to eat their friend and his dad. Will attempted to provide some educational commentary, but most of the time he was pretty sure Whim had no sort of plan at all.

When the nightmare ended, Whim and his father left Will and Mirren alone to work the looking stone. “Less than an hour, we promise,” Will said, knowing that the middle of the night wasn't a great time for dream walkers to go on break.

“No rush—I'm famished,” Whim said as he left.

Will pressed his hand to the looking stone and enjoyed the eerie sensation that the powdered red glass was pushing back against his palm. Touching the looking stone activated the archway and caused a section of the Dream to appear within the archway's confines. The first nightmare to pop up within the archway involved a gunfight on a small fishing boat.

“So I guess the first thing I'd do,” Will said, “is make sure I know who the dreamer is. And then I'd try to distract the dreamer away from the guns. I'd say, ‘I found it!' or, ‘This way!' so they'd think I had something they needed or I'd found an escape route. But Josh says I try to influence dreamers too often.”