Folie de l’âge

Noah had been watching his sister when it happened. He had been dreading it for weeks. She had been sitting at her terminal, trying to work like everything was normal. They had both been exhausted. She lent back and closed her eyes, just for a moment, just like she had done a dozen times that day. Only this time she didn't open her eyes. She'd caught it. She was in the Dream.

That had been two weeks ago. He had fallen asleep every night since then, sitting by her hospital bed. Every night as he felt himself going under, he almost wished he would fall into the Dream too. Sometimes he even thought he saw flashes of it as he slept. But each morning he woke up, watching as the med crew brought in the latest batch of Dreamers.

When they had come to him, he hadn't wanted to leave her side. But they said he might be able to help. And so he went with them.

He sat now semi-reclined on a rubber-backed chair. It reminded him of a dentist chair, which it probably had been before someone had hurriedly converted it. He was naked, except for a pair of briefs and the electrodes and monitors he had been instructed to strap to various parts of his body.

The compartment was small, with beige bulkheads. He must have been somewhere on the upper decks. The wires from the electrodes ran off his body and into the chair. Three cameras had been set up above him, but otherwise he was alone.

"Thank you for agreeing to this, Noah."

Noah jumped at the sound. The cameras had been placed awkwardly, just below his line of sight, so he had to crane his neck to see the green indicator light next to the middle camera.

"Apologies we have to meet like this. We would introduce ourselves but, well… you know the situation."

The voice was heavily modulated, but he thought it was female. Despite himself, he instantly started thinking of the names of all the female researchers he knew. He shook his head quickly and started mentally reciting the items on the cafeteria menu instead. Item one, scrambled eggs.

"Good," said a second voice approvingly. Older male, Noah thought, then, item three, ham and baked beans. Not real ham, of course. They would already be monitoring his thought patterns, of course. He tried his best to forget about them.

"Do you know why you're here?" a third voice cut in roughly. Item six, pancakes with syrup. Noah shook his head.

"Goddamnit it, he hasn't even read the damn brief," Voice 3 growled. Noah felt his eyelid twitch.

"I wasn't given a brief," he stopped himself from adding 'sir'. "They asked me to help with the Dream. I was told to come here and I came here. That's it."

There was a moment's silence, and then Voice 1 came back on smoothly.

"We apologise for that, Noah. An oversight on our part. As you know, the situation is... rapidly evolving."

Noah laid back in the seat, staring at the ceiling. Rapidly evolving. That was for damn sure. Two months ago there were rumours of a disease spreading amongst the colonists in stasis. A month later it jumped to active crew. Now a third of them were sleeping in neat little bunks in the same med ward as his sister.

"The Dream, as you call it, seems to be some sort of shared psychosis. A consciousness virus, similar in some regards to the technology we use to induce stasis. We're not sure yet exactly how it spreads, but due to the nature of the disease it is possible it is via the neural network. Thinking about another person may be enough to transmit it to them. Hence our effort to remain anonymous."

Noah nodded absently. He was onto the lunch menu now, but he couldn't remember what came after the sandwiches. A list of salads? Voice 1 continued.

"We believe we have a treatment. We can broadcast a simple image into the patient's subconscious, a remettre we call it. Inside the Dream, the patient sees the image, follows the instructions, and wakes."

"If the images even work," Voice 3 muttered.

"The remettre should work fine!" Voice 2 burst in. "The theory is sound. Whether they're seeing it to begin with is—"

"How many have come back?" Noah interrupted. The Voices lapsed into silence. He felt a bead of sweat cheat down his neck.

"None." Voice 1 said. "Yet. That's the purpose of this exercise. The images should be working, but they're not. We need to find out why. Perhaps we're sending them to the wrong place. Perhaps the Dream is altering them somehow. The Dream has a way of… distorting things."

Noah shuddered. Distorting wasn't the right word. The Vitre machines were more curse than blessing in that regard. He had watched the Dream on screen in real time as it destroyed his sister's mind. For her, it had been a quaint garden. A wrought iron gate ran around the outside, a forest perched in the distance. He had watched as she tried to leave the garden again and again — to come back, he thought hopefully — only to get lost in the forest and end up back in the garden each time. He would talk to her then. Keep trying. You'll get it next time. And she would cock her head and look around, like she could almost hear him, beyond the Dream. And then she would try again.

Within a few days the garden had become a colourful, oversaturated meadow, with a bubbling creek and woodland creatures. The iron gate disappeared, but the forest had crept thickly to the edge. His sister would still try occasionally to leave, but the moment she entered the forest darkness would crash down and monstrous leviathans would chase her back to the meadow. He kept talking to her, kept encouraging her to try again, but she just shook her head in irritation and lay down in the meadow. Every day it got worse; the meadow becoming more saccharine and cartoonish, the monsters more grotesque and horrifying. She never moved from the meadow anymore.

He felt his hands start to ache, and realised he was gripping the arms of the chair tightly. He closed his eyes and breathed deeply, unclenching his hands.

"What do I need to do?"

---

Noah woke to a dream.

He was laying on the grass, under the night sky. His arm prickled in goosebumps in the cool air, and somewhere in the distance music was playing. Above him, fairy lights ran neatly along the branches of a tree, bathing everything in a soft blur.

A pear tree, he remembered. This was the farewell party, after they had been offered roles onboard the colony ship. He sat up, feeling his head spin slightly. He could smell the barbeque they had been cooking that night.

Why am I here again? He frowned, concentrating. Everything felt a little fuzzy. The image. He had to find an image and… and return. That's right. This was the Dream. He hadn't expected it to feel so real. He pushed his hand to the ground, feeling the damp earth cloying to his fingers.

He looked up, out across his family's backyard. There was the tree he used to climb as a kid, and his mother's vegetable patch, and at the far end the pine fence. And beyond it… nothing. No neighbour's house, no street lights, just… inky, black nothing.

"Noah! Noah, goddamnit!"

Noah's stomach flipped. He pushed himself to his feet, his heart beating painfully in his chest. Slowly, he turned around.

She was standing on the verandah, gesturing in frustration at him. The beer in her hand was sloshing around, spilling a little on that ridiculously big hand-knitted yellow sweater she used to wear everywhere. It had been the first time he'd ever seen her drunk, he remembered. Her hair was all messed up from where she had taken a tumble into the hedge earlier in the night. Without thinking, he started walking towards her.

"What are you smilin' at," she demanded, swaying slightly.

"Nothing," he laughed, taking the steps up the verandah two at a time. "It's just good to see you again. I never got a chance to—"

He saw it, and the words died in his throat. Over her shoulder, plastered on the brickwork of the house: a large, poster-sized image. He didn't read the message, but he knew it was what he had been sent to find. It had to be. Compared to everything else, it felt too sharp, too clear.

"Noah? Earth to Noooo-aaah?" His sister waved her hand in his face. "Somethin' wrong?"

He blinked, then shook his head.

"No, I'm fine. Just… thinking of something I have to do later," he smiled. She was still waving her hand in front of him, and he grabbed. He took one last look at the image, then turned away.

"Come on, let's go check out that barbecue."

---

"Were there any blemishes on the remettre? Any mistakes, distortions?"

"No," he repeated tiredly. "It was perfect. "

Their initial relief upon his return had quickly worn off, and they had begun dissecting his Dream immediately. He had gone over every little detail with them again and again, from the pear tree, to the image, to the colour of his sister's jumper.

He hadn't been able to get them to understand how real it felt. Even though he had known it was the Dream, even though he could even hear the Voices, it still felt so real. He kept checking his fingernails as he sat in the converted dentist chair. He hadn't felt real soil in nearly ten years.

"It was six hours from when we induced stasis to when you returned. What prevented you from returning earlier?" Voice 1, or was that Voice 3? It didn't matter. They had asked him the same question a dozen different ways for hours now. He gave them the same answer as before.

"Nothing stopped me. I just didn't want to read it. The Dreamers, they just... don't want to read it."

The Voices started arguing amongst themselves, but Noah felt himself tune out. He'd lost interest. He had done what they had asked. He had told them why the images weren't working. Whether they believed him or not, well, that was up to them. He breathed out slowly, and closed his eyes.