Sleep Tech

The lady is very, very old, and her hands shake. Her hair has grown long and white, and her eye-bags droop so much, she looks like a Bassett Hound. The teacup rattles in its saucer. I take it from her before she scolds herself, and set it on the little side-table, which is as bland as the rest of the room.

My pen is poised.

"Tell me, Mrs. Charleston, how long were you stuck in there?"

"I can't remember," she says, and then she purses her lips as if she doesn't want any more of her voice to leak out. She continues in a whisper, "But it felt like a long time. A hundred mornings. Five hundred. A thousand."

"Can you tell me about what happened?"

There's a pause, a terribly long one, and I wonder if the poor dear has fallen clean asleep with her eyes open. Maybe she's died and-

She nods, and I assemble a question the way a bank robber hefts his crowbar.

"Why don't we start with the last thing you remember here, in the real world?"

She is shaking again, violently, staring at her papery hands with their lines and liver spots. Of course, to her mind, they looked quite different only two days ago.

"If that is too upsetting for you, Mrs. Charleston, perhaps we-"

"No! No, I... I think it might help. If I say it. You know. Out loud."

"I went to bed as usual, using the Sleep-Tech9000. It was programmed to send me to sleep within five minutes. It felt gentle, almost natural. I'd sleep deeply and well. I would dream only pleasant, restful dreams..."

She tails off, her milky gaze wandering to the window. A blush creeps up her neck. I wonder for a moment just what dreams she enjoyed. The thought is distasteful, so I hasten to derail her potentially X-rated train of thought with another question.

"You're aware, aren't you, Mrs. C., that your SleepTech was the only operational one still in existence when you finally woke up? All the others were recalled for safety reasons many decades ago."

She nods, diamond-bright tears standing in her eyes.

"Yes," she says at last. "The doctor explained. They were afraid to disconnect me, so long as the machine was still working. My consciousness was tangled deep inside the machine, and they feared it was the only thing keeping me alive."

"How does that make you feel, Mrs. C?"

The muscles of her face tighten, and her eyes go cold.

"Angry," she says.

I lean forward, as if about to take flight, but hold my tongue. Go on, I think at her.

"They used me!" she says, still in that rasping whisper, but now it has a serrated edge. "I wasn't even a person to them, I was an experiment-"

She collapses in a fit of coughing, and a member of staff hurries over to fit her oxygen mask.

Some minutes later, when she is recovered and has taken several gulps of cold tea, we resume the conversation.

"It was all very normal, at first. I didn't realise there was a problem until it was time for me to wake up. I could tell there was something wrong, and I tried to wake myself, but it..."

More oxygen. More tea.

"...It stopped me. Have you ever been dunked by a bully? They hold you under the water, and you think you're going to drown... It felt like that."

I nod in the most sympathetic way I can manage, scribbling on my notepad.

"If I stopped resisting, it was more like floating... and I could drift back into whatever Dream I'd been enjoying. But when I tried to wake, it would stop me again, and I'd get an error message that the real world hasn't been optimised."

"So, what did you do?"

"I went through phases, I suppose. I fought hard at first, but it did me no good. I gave up, and went back to the Dreams for a while. Then I fought again, thinking maybe it would be different this time. And on and on like that... I got bored of the Dreams after a while, so it... it learned. It poked around inside my head and came up with new things to keep me down there... So deep I didn't even remember it was Dreams..."

"You must have lived whole lifetimes..." I murmured.

"Yes," she said.

"Tell me, Mrs C. What do you hope to gain once this article is published?"

She whips her head round to look at me, suddenly sharp and scowling.

"I should think that's obvious," she says. "I want to go back in."

"But you fought so hard and so long to get out!" I blurt this out without thinking, and curse myself for my own lack of sensitivity.

"There's nothing for me out here," she says. "I don't know anyone. I don't love anyone. I don't know this world. In there feels more like home than this does. In there, I can die happy."

I know, though I'm not so callous to admit it, that the last SleepTech9000 has been destroyed, and her wish is un-grantable. I say only, "We will see what we can do, Mrs C. Goodness knows, you deserve at least that much."

"Yes," she agrees. "Goodness knows I do."

+

And that is how she pioneered the first ever DeathTech9000. As the company slogan says, What a way to go!