Come Eat My Dreams

Every night at midnight, the purple clouds came out to dance with the blushing sky.

For Phil, such was the sign of a well-ran dream refinery.

Once those carefully monitored and meticulously regulated purple puffs were let loose, he knew half of his shift, the harder half, was over.

The entire facility, owned and operated by Quietem Incorporated, was built around an artificial somnic reservoir, a burbling churning pool filled up with the swirling clashing liquefied colors consisting of the concentrated cares, fears, and worries from the citizenry of the valley below, collected daily from psychic condensors placed pretty much anywhere that people lived, worked, and played.

The facility's reservoir was designed to gradually fill up as the populace rose with the sunrise. That was why it was so important to check the works for wear and tear before the reservoir approached its maximum safe capacity, which typically happened by early evening. It was Phil's job to inspect the filters, pipes, and pressurized gas drums and to do routine maintenance and repairs on anything that required it.

A bad day at work sometimes involved dredging cares, fears, grudges, and worries out of the somnic purifiers. It took bells of time to just put on the mandatory layers of safety gear and do a five point inspection before he could climb down into the works and dredge out build-ups of nightmarish muck from the somnic purifiers.

Changing the filters was even more exhausting. Those things, by design, absorbed and collected all of the land's negative emotions, and as such they were hazardous, especially when lifted out of their moorings.

The annual task of changing the filters, weighed down with four seasons of averted misery, required Grade F industrial lifting wands, famously thick as tree trunks, that needed three-worker teams to safely operate.

On paper, anyway. In a pinch, such a job could be done with two, but never on the record, of course.

The current shift had no such complications. Everything went as planned and everything was on schedule. No mechanical trouble, just the usual wear and tear to predictably patch over, and right on schedule the purified purple clouds were now floating away to mingle amid the myriad dreamers down below in the valley.

That meant it was lunch time.

Phil was a creature of habit, so after he hung up his hard hat and got his lunch box out of his locker, he began his usual walk along the railed walkway atop the somnic dam at the outer edge of the facility.

The walk gave him time to gaze off the edge of the dam.

His after-midnight walk was quiet enough to hear his own footsteps, as usual. The rumbling from the expellers had already shut down, and the bustling facility was now quiet enough to match the tranquil tones of the night-lit sky. No matter how long he worked there, those purple clouds that he helped to make were just as pretty to him as they always were, flitting amid the glittering stars about the rosy sky, so soothingly dim, comfortable, peaceful, and warm.

Beneath those clouds, rippling bands of ever-blooming flowers swayed in the night breeze while the geomancers' orchards hung heavy with the literal fruits of their labors, each piece of enchanted produce glossy enough to reflect the purple hues cast from above, glittering like violet sugar sprinkles.

It never got darker than midnight, and midnight hadn't been dark for ages. Sunset's repose had long been harnessed to stay past its natural due, granting comfort, peace, and warmth all throughout the evening all the way toward sunrise.

Simply put, thanks to modern astromancy, it was never quite dark enough to invoke fears of anything unseen or unknowable, not anymore.

That made the job of somnomancers that much easier, but that was still beyond Phil's reckoning. He had no illusions about the blissful simplicity of his job: check the gagues, fix what breaks, ensure the day shift has an easy time of it.

He yawned as he set his lunchbox on the railing, opening it to see his usual sandwich, fruit slices, and a thoughtful and encouraging note from his wife. The breeze blew at the folded paper, triggering the little spell she inked into it.

"Keep making those dreams come true, Phil," her voice whispered with the breeze, the smudge of her lipstick fighting against the current until Phil leaned in to catch it, kissing back.

He smiled, as he often did from her encouragement, but something lingered, and it lingered long enough that he didn't take a bite of his lunch yet.

He could have stuck his head under the facility's shower head, as he sometimes did on an especially rough day, but that was too much of a walk now. He just hoped to find his appetite before his lunch break was over.

He yawned. He was sleepy, which was nothing new. He had always been a day person before he got this job, but he remembered when the interviewer said he preferred day people that understood the importance of a good night's sleep.

As the interviewer had put it, who else could possibly be more qualified to ensure the quality of the night's industrially purified and refined dreams than a man who yearned to be there, right alongside everyone dreaming? Who else could reliably ensure that the majority of the sleeping public could consistently sleep their cares away and wake up, rested and refreshed, ready to rise with the rosy sun, day after day?

Where was his appetite? Why did he feel so uneasy, especially on a day where nothing really went wrong?

It had to be that little girl and her confounding question.

At the start of his shift, just a few bell tolls before the fuchsia nightfall, Year One students from the local chapter of the Academy of Industrial Magic showed up.

That was usually not a problem. In fact, he was often pleased to see them, no matter how chatty, energetic, even loud they could sometimes be.

He was once their age, after all. Their excited antics kept him alert, and more importantly, awake.

He usually enjoyed answering their questions, no matter how silly they could be, and for the most part, that's how it had gone once again.

Do you make the best dreams for yourself, or for your friends?

No, of course not, he had answered truthfully.

The entire purpose of the dream factory, after all, was to provide a municipal source of pleasant and restful sleep as a public good. The mix was homogenized and consistent enough that no pink cloud was any less or more pink than the other, and the cloud coverage output planned over each service sector in the valley was determined with the help of the Weather Witches and Wizards Union.

Phil knew that all too well. His mother, after all, was a lifelong card-carrying-member. She had talked Phil's ear off, day after day, reminding him to be grateful for how nutritious and delicious those platefuls of myriad enchanted beans, florets, and sprouts all were, all thanks to her and her Triple-Double-U.

It smells funny in here. My nose keeps twinkling. Do you like the smell?

Phil couldn't help but nod and smile while answering that. Yes, he did indeed taste the dream clouds every day. There were powerful psychic cleansing agents put in the mix and piped through the works, but he had long since gotten used to the taste after the while, just like his coworkers had to. He even had a prescription for something to help clear the subtly sparkling stuff out of his sinuses that he took after coming home before he went to bed.

What happens if somone falls into the slime?

"Well, we get them out," he had frowned at that question while hiding the tension in his throat. They were good kids, even the ones with the more provocative questions that were the product of idle minds with vivid imaginations. He didn't need to, and didn't want to tell that particular bunch what had actually happened to a careless worker that did fall in.

The incident happened when he was quite little. He overheard his own parents talking about it around the dinner table. His father must have been there, because after he noticed his son was listening in, he told him to be glad he didn't have to see how that poor lad looked, and smelled, when he was finally fetched out of the works.

The victim had slipped and fallen off the side of the dam and straight into the reservoir. Before he could be pulled out of the babbling manic muck, raving and screaming, the stuff had soaked deep into his skin and his mind took it in like a sponge. As a result, he had become a literal living nightmare, incurably contaminated, and forever after a tragic ward of the state. The bittersweet ending to that sad little tale had lead to the the installation of layers of invisible barriers and contigency-conjure safety nets that now reliably prevented even the most reckless worker, or for that matter some adventurous and impulsive student, from doing the same.

The same safety railing now held up his lunchbox, elbows high.

He reached for his sandwich, but then he cringed, even shivered. That last question. Oh, that last question.

Where does the bad stuff go?

"The filters catch it, and then the conjurers take it away," Phil answered, truthfully, but the question made him realize that was the entire extent of his knowledge, because he wasn't a conjurer. That wasn't his academy major, and that wasn't his department.

Where do the conjurers take it away to?

The girl knew her elementary conjuration for sure. The first rule of conjury was that everything that disappears by necessity goes somewhere else. Every literate educated child knew that.

"That's... a good question," he had answered. "If you leave me your parents' address I'll write them with the answer once I know for sure."

It had been intended to be a bluff, made in the hopes that she wouldn't persist, but she had persisted. Right there, on the spot, she had scrawled the address from a scrap of paper in her notebook, and had held it out to him with an expectant gaze until he took it.

In the present, Phil took a deep breath, trying to calm himself, catching some of the care-cleansing vapor still wafting in the air, but even that wasn't enough.

Where did the bad stuff go after the conjurers took it away?

"Hey, Phil," Mr. Majutsu, the regional manager, called out from the far end of the balcony while standing just inside the facility's little gift shop, dimmed to match the purples and pinks of the night lights, long after closing hours. He wore one of his fashionably dark business robes, his necktie purple to match the foremost product of the company.

Phil stifled a gulp. His boss was strict and exacting, but also a doting and fair boss as far as he knew him, but even so, Phil was worried that Mr. Majutsu would notice how worried he was, which wouldn't look good considering his entire job was to wash worries away.

Mr. Majutsu seemed to have been inspecting the store's displays, as he was known to do as part of a habit of micromanaging things, before he had just called out to Phil. Managers were expected to be busybodies, but that went even moreso for conjurers, because they could, and would, blink out or pop in at a moment's notice. The higher up they were the more true that seemed to be.

"Majutsu-san," Phil called back with a small bow, "I don't suppose you're here for a souvenir."

"I did come here to inspect these souvenirs, actually," Mr. Majutsu remarked as he held up one of the plush toys on display.

Like the others portraying Quietem's mascot, that particular Mr. Baku had an elephant-like head, tusks, and trunk, and stylized soft-tipped horns and tiger-like claws, its green skin spotted with spiraling golden swirls. It was grotesque and cute at the same time, on purpose.

"Do your own children have a few of these, Phil?" Mr. Majutsu asked.

"Of course they do, Majutsu-san," Phil replied. "One each."

"Of course," Mr. Majutsu nodded, but his steady dark eyes focused behind his eyesglasses where he stood, still holding the soft stuffed mascot, which made for a pecular looking contrast of seriousness and silliness.

What was his boss looking at? What was he seeing in Phil?

"They even do the thing on the commercial, sometimes, before going to sleep. They snuggle Mr. Baku and ask him, 'Mr. Baku, come eat my dream...'"

Mr. Majutsu walked closer to Phil, the gift shop doors swinging closed and shutting behind him all on their own, while still holding that Mr. Baku plush. He was holding it ahead of himself, with that stiff serious inscrutable expression all the while.

Was his boss offering it to him?

"I've seen tired eyes like yours before, Phil," Mr. Majutsu stated, gruffly but also with a tonal implication of sympathy, with his outstretched hands still holding out the toy. "You have a hard job and you work with dangerous substances. I respect that."

"I assure you that I follow all safety procedures to the letter, Majutsu-san," Phil stated while gazing down at Mr. Baku. He wasn't sure how to react to the apparent offering any more than he knew where those aforementioned dangerous substances were whisked away to.

"I believe you. You're a diligent worker, with a serious mind, and that's what I like about you," Mr. Majutsu opened and spread his hands, as if to drop the little mascot down to his feet, but with a brief performative flash, it was gone, whisked away. A matching flash behind the gift shop windows marked the arrival destination of the merchandise, back on its rack. "Not everything disappears so easily, does it?"

"Not everything, no. Sometimes it takes a few washes, but... I don't want to bother you with my senseless worries, Majutsu-san."

"You're supposed to worry enough to do a good job. That's what the company pays you for. Now, tell me what you're worried about."

"It's nothing. Or, it should be nothing. It was a question a little girl asked me when she came here on a field trip..."

"A child's cares are our cares, Phil," Majutsu retorted. "Who counts on Quietem the most? Children. They're our priority."

"Of course, Majutsu-san, but..."

Mr. Majutsu looked over the railing and down the valley, taking in Phil's routine vista, even nodding as if to approve of it. He then turned to gaze up at the towering somnic vaporator arrays that that adorned the hillside all around the reservoir, like the horns of a sleeping dragon. "Come, walk with me," he said, "and bring your lunch."

Phil closed up the lunch box, still waiting for his appetite, and followed his boss.

After only a few score of steps across the top of the reservoir dam, he realized where his boss was taking him: the administration wing at the base of the company's regional headquarters, which was a cloistered archaic tower that rose high enough into the sky that it pierced the cloud cover. He always saw it during his walk, but he rarely entered.

He went there, on the first floor, when he was hired. He also went to the same office for performance reviews.

Was this about to be another performance review?

Would it be his last?

As they walked through the brassy front doors of the administration wing, Mr. Majutsu kept his eyes forward, his expression still inscrutable, but his tone became curiously patient... even warm. "The girl's worries have become your worries," Mr. Majutsu said as he gave a terse but polite nod to the receptionist, who gave a little bow back to him as he passed. "You have... eaten them, haven't you?"

"A bit like Mr. Baku, yes, I suppose I have, Majutsu-san," Phil admitted as he noticed, to his relief, that they weren't headed toward the usual performance review office. "I promised that I would write a little girl and answer her question once I knew the answer to it."

"And you are afraid that you do not know the answer," Mr. Majutsu said he stopped and turned around. As soon as Phil caught up to him, with a deft wave of his hand, the brassy disk that they both stood upon lifted up off from the shiny polished archaically arcane floor pattern and lifted them both, floor by floor, higher up the inside of the hollow-centered tower. "More to the point, are you afraid that you can't know the answer?"

"Yes, Majutsu-san," Phil said, but in the hopes of deflecting some of the implied tension to his boss' inquiry, he asked a question of his own. "Where are we going?"

"The Astromancy department," Mr. Majutsu said. "On the top floor, above the cloud cover, of course."

"Of course..." Phil tried not to look down as the brassy disk beneath his feet accelerated faster and faster, taking them higher and higher. "I didn't know the company had an astromancy department."

"Nothing so grand as the weather service," Mr. Majutsu remarked. "Small and localized enough that we do not have to bargain with the Triple-Double-U."

"Of course," Phil nodded. How his mother would chafe if she knew about that. "Why does Quietem need an astromancy department? I assume it's important."

"It is, oh, it is," Mr. Majutsu remarked with an emphatic nod, "but like the work you do, it is essential yet routine. Maintenance, observation. Preventing problems before they start. You understand the importance of such things, I assume."

"I think I do," Phil said, hoping the long flight up was almost over. He flinched as the pinpoint of pinkish light that had previously seemed so small because they had been so far down suddenly widened and spread from the pinnacle of their speedy ascent, until all around them there was nothing but steadily-gleaming stars, purple clouds stretching to every horizon, and an eerily, chillingly darker sky above, adorned with the same stars, but with steadier unblinking light.

There were no safety railings to be seen. Apart from the shiny floors reflecting the starlight, there were no furnishings at all except a single writing desk that was heavy with reports written in some trade-secret shorthand, and upon the edge of the rim of the tower's top behind it, a sizeable telescope pointing ever so much higher upward, its viewing lenses, cranks, levers, and dials at about Phil's height, but the very tip-top of the telescope's frame reached higher than that several times over.

"This is..." Mr. Majutsu pushed his glasses closer to the bridge of his nose, but then smiled with a subtle but disarming slouch. "Not my department. I will not be so arrogant as to claim I understand everything our staff astromancer does here. If you asked your mother, I am sure she could tell you more."

Phil bit his lip. Of course his boss knew his mother was a weather witch, but he didn't sense any particular animosity in his tone while mentioning that, at least.

"I am a conjurer. That has been my study, my trade, and my passion for many years. While many other managers are conjurers, I consider myself a conjurer first, and always."

"That is noble of you, Mr. Majutsu," Phil said, but Mr. Majutsu shook his head and raised his hand, implying he wasn't finished talking.

"Likewise, you are a diviner. Your studies, your trade, your passion, is to see things, to know things, to seek out truth and to share what you know."

"I suppose so," Phil said. He never thought about his divination coursework, or his apprenticeship at the trade school as anything as lofty and grand as formal academy training. He was a working man, he had a practical job he was proud of, and he couldn't help feeling increasingly out of place and uncomfortable where he now stood, and not just because of the darkened sky, the unblinkingly harsh stars, or the dizzying plummet waiting for him if he didn't watch his step.

"I think I know what that little girl asked you," Mr. Majutsu said, "because I have received the same question many times before. When I worked the refinery floor when I was younger, I even asked that same question... where do these used filters go? To where am I banishing all this somnic sludge?"

Phil gasped. He didn't even need to ask the question before his boss asked it for him. The suspense made him uneasy. "Maybe I don't need to know, Majutsu-san. Just a good day's sleep and a long shower should..."

"Have some diviner pride," Mr. Majutsu gruffly insisted. "Not all secrets are dark secrets. Come," he gestured to the telescope, that much closer to the seemingly endless drop through the purple clouds blanketing the starlit darkness above the horizon. "Set your lunch box down and take a look through the telescope."

Phil complied, feeling his knees shivering, clutching the sides of the telescope's housing all the while. He was now glad that his stomach was still empty as be bent down just a little and squinted one eye shut to look through the telescope's viewing port.

Through the small but powerful device, much more advanced than anything he ever used back in school, he felt arcane potency thrumming, amplifying the magnification of each lens many times over, revealing with clarity a bright blue ball, feathered with clouds and terrestrial continents, dark on one side but lit up pretty much everywhere with tiny but countless intricate embers of light.

"I see a planet," Phil said.

"Yes," Mr. Majutsu confirmed. "That is a world that is charted in academic records as Baku. Our company mascot is named for it. We owe much to that world."

"Our company's conjurers are sending our waste there?" Phil said, unable to hide his astonishment. He knew conjurers saw distance as a challenge, not a limitation, but he never thought their rituals could, would, or should ever send anything that far, let alone at an industrial level. "Do people live there?"

"Do not be so alarmed," Mr. Majutsu advised. "Our company diviners have confirmed, time after time, that magic has no tangible meaning there. As soon as it arrives, it... disappears. Without a trace."

"But you're a conjurer, Majutsu-san," Phil countered as he stepped away from the telescope and closer to the center of the rail-less platform to feel marginally more comfortable. "Isn't the first rule of conjury that everything that disappears, by necessity, must go somewhere else..."

"Yes, and it has, it does, and it will continue to do so," Mr. Majutsu stated, firmly. "It would be irresponsible to simply hurl somnic sludge into the void, where any number of dire consequences could occur down the line. Instead, long ago, Quietem's founders found a better solution."

"Baku," Phil realized the importance of that name, "the eater of dreams. Eater of bad dreams, to be exact."

"Exactly," Mr. Majutsu nodded, "magic has no tangibility there. Anything conjured near Baku dissipates, and all residual energies are absorbed, eaten you might say, by..."

"The people that live there," Phil finished the sentence, then clenched his jaw.

Mr. Majutsu saw the angry dissent on Phil's face, but after a long slow exhale, he nodded, as if in understanding. "I felt the same way, once. That is why I brought you here, because I want to save you the long years of undue and unnecessary regret for the fine work you do."

"What do you mean?" Phil said.

"I may be a conjurer, but that was only after going back to school. I used to be a diviner like you. It cost my family a significant sum to subsidize my private search for answers. I wanted to prove the harm that Quietem was doing to far-away Baku. While magic dissolves upon approach, I could, and did, observe. I looked through telescopes larger and even more powerful than this one. I documented my findings, colloborated and peer-reviewed them, all in the hopes of saving the world of Baku from being our somnic waste dump..."

"And?" Phil said, too agitated to continue express deference to his boss, even if it might cost him his job.

"My findings were incontrovertible," Mr. Majutsu said, while digging under the stack of papers, to a meticulously chronicled dissertation on the bottom of the pile. It was clear that it was written in his handwriting, many years ago. "Unlike us here at Quietem, or for that matter the citizenry that we serve down in the valley, and beyond, the people of Baku not only eat our dreams... but crave them."

Phil's boss held out his papers, the thesis and summary of findings written in plain prose as a mark of mastery of that school of arcane academia.

Phil looked through page after page of observations from afar, control-grouped analysis of the strange people of Baku left to their own devices compared to those that received an invisible, intangible somnic dumping from Quietem's conjurers, as well as similar waste relocation projects done by competing companies with similar contracts with neighboring lands.

The people of Baku didn't just willingly consume it: they sought more of it, both while awake and in their dreams. Fear made them hungry, even romantic, especially after a recent exposure to it. Anger motivated instead of discouraged them, though much of the observed anger levels were from localized sources, making the conjurers' contributions negligible. Sadness seemed to be cathartic rather than debilitating for many of them, and in fact their own entertainment was often fearful, angry, and outright sad, according to the finest and most precise observation of their venues.

Mr. Majutsu seemed to hear the metaphorical gears turning in Phil's head. "We continue monitoring the well-being of Baku," he assured Phil. "Not everyone in the public would agree with what we do here at Quietem. I was one such person. But..."

"If you let me take these papers, your papers, home with me," Phil dared to ask, "and you let me write back to that girl and her parents, I promise to explain it in a way she can understand. That won't cause you any trouble."

"That is why I brought you here, Phil," Mr. Majutsu said, nodding with approval. "I want you to do just that. Take the rest of the day off, be sure to eat your lunch on your flight back home... and write that letter. You may even inspire a future model Quietem employee."

On the way down, and on the way out, Phil did indeed find his appetite. His lunch box was empty by the time he stepped through the door.

He went upstairs, seeing his children sleeping soundly, hugging their Baku plushies. He kissed their foreheads and tiptoed back out.

His wife was still dreaming happily in her bed. He kissed her cheek, eliciting a soft sigh.

"Why are you home early?" she asked, with a sleepy smile on her face. "Is something wrong?"

"Not anymore," Phil said, "but I have a letter to write. Sweet dreams."

At his desk, with Mr. Majutsu's papers to one side and a fresh sheet of paper set to the other, he began to write to that little girl.

"Dear Diana," he started the letter.

"I am pleased to write to you regarding the answer to your question regarding where the industrial byproducts of my dream refinery go when they're taken away.

Let me begin by telling you about a far away place, full of remarkable people that live, work, and play without the slightest need, or use, of magic.

We call that place Baku, but those that live there call it Earth..."