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I shudder. So this is how he got that scar.
Bernard shoves his attacker away. The malnourished man tips backward but instantly begins crawling back toward Bernard, growling like a demon.
Hand trembling, Bernard reaches into his pocket and pulls out a gun.
Bang.
The growling stops, but the guy still crawls forward.
Bang.
The crawling stops as well.
Bernard keeps shooting until his gun is empty. Then he falls onto his hands and knees and vomits.
The dream shifts at this point. Bernard is staring at the empty walls of his apartment.
I swallow down the bitter tang of the previous dream. Okay, so his trauma loop is over. That’s a good thing. Now that it’s handled, I could in theory perform my job.
This dream is a memory, though, and I’m curious to let it play out.
The phone rings, and he lets voicemail pick up.
It’s the ex-wife. “Your daughter’s birthday is today. She misses you. Call her.”
A shiver ripples through Bernard. “Why?” he whispers raggedly. “Why would she want to talk to a monster?”
The next dream is also a memory but takes place years later. Bernard watches his daughter from afar, his eyes filled with regret.
The next dream is later still. Bernard is sitting in a large conference hall surrounded by other humans. I recognize the keynote speaker.
It’s Valerian.
In this memory, Valerian looks exactly as he appeared to me. Does that mean this is what he really looks like?
“By the end of next year, Bale Inc. will take virtual reality to the next level,” the gorgeous illusionist says passionately, channeling Tony Robbins. “Further down the line, the world you see around you”—he clicks his remote control, and a space view of Earth appears on the screen behind him—“will be one of the many possible places people can inhabit. My hope is that most will thrive in these limitless illusory worlds that we will create for them, worlds undistinguishable from vanilla reality. It will be the biggest…”
I stop listening because something dawns on me.
What Valerian is trying to do. And why.
He wants to bring illusory worlds to billions of Earth humans. More than that, he wants his name—his and his company’s—to be the name everyone associates with these worlds. He wants his name to be synonymous with illusions.
It’s a mind-boggling ambition.
There’s a relationship between Cognizant powers and the human belief in said powers. That’s how Lilith, a vampire who declared herself a goddess of blood on a world she subjugated, became nearly unstoppable. By making his company synonymous with illusions, Valerian might become the most powerful illusionist on Earth, if not throughout the Cogniverse, all without declaring himself a god—something that would get him executed by the local Cognizant.
This must be why he hires me for shady jobs such as what I might be about to do: He needs to keep his nose clean as far as the Earth Councils are concerned.
Bernard’s dream shifts to a time some nine months later. He’s sitting in a meeting room with a bunch of people. Valerian is there too, looking at Bernard expectantly with those hypnotic blue eyes.
“The VR motion sickness is the most urgent issue to resolve before we go live,” Valerian says. “Has your team made any progress on that?”
Bernard glances at his notepad. “We’ve been slaving at it for months, but we don’t have much. We don’t even know if the problem is caused by sensory conflict or postural instability. You’re against removing body visualization…”
I ignore the rest of Bernard’s speech. It’s time to decide if I want to finish the job Valerian hired me for. Given this dream, it would take almost no effort to do so, as the dream happens to be about the very issue in question. Valerian is working on producing VR products that don’t make people nauseated, a major hurdle facing the industry at the moment, so he’s hired me to secretly provide Bernard with an inspiration—a solution to come “in a dream.” The task is trivial, of course, since Gomorrah is light years ahead of Earth when it comes to all technology, but especially anything to do with virtual reality.
Fine. Given how easy this is, I’m just going to do it.
I leave my body and jump into Valerian’s, then stride up to the drawing board. “What if we tried this?” I proceed to present a comprehensive solution, from hardware to software tricks.
Bernard’s eyes light up greedily as I draw an algorithm that’s particularly ahead of its time. I can’t help but grin; the most difficult part of this job was actually memorizing all this.
When I’m done, I exit Valerian’s body and wake Bernard with a jolt of my power. If I allow him to dream more, he could forget what he’s just learned.
Pom is waiting eagerly in Bernard’s nook in the tower of sleepers.
“That’s it,” I tell him when I reappear. “I’ve gone Inception on his ass.”
