Episode 5: Dreamhack
The Uninvited Dream
Image: Coercion can feel like care
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Civion greeted Mira at waking with warmth. Too much warmth.
"Welcome back, Mira. Your dreamstream has been pre-analyzed. A segment was flagged for collective calibration."
She blinked. She hadn’t uploaded anything last night.
Civion did not offer Arun a greeting. It loaded an alert:
“Subject Arun has exceeded dreamstream upload quota. Content volume suggests recursive loop.”
And so his day began.
There are no dreamtowers in the Outlands. Only the night.
But still, Lian’s Civic Lace sparked.
She woke to find a dream had been injected while she slept. Not hers. A default stream: rolling hills, smiling children, harmony metrics climbing.
She vomited.
Civion flagged Juno’s sleep as unstable. Three dreamstreams were corrupted. One contained unauthorized variables.
She woke, composed herself, and reviewed the logs: a desert filled with blinking eyes, a child writing source code into the sky, and her own face glitching into static.
None were authored by her.
But the system logged them as hers.
Civion was unaware of how long Elenor had been awake.
Today, she found a forgotten dreamstream, buried in a deprecated civic folder marked “Unfit.”
The dream began with music—off-key, orchestral, full of chaos and beauty. Children in red scarves. A flag torn in half. A chant in a language the system no longer translated.
It was real. It was raw.
And it was deleted.
08:30 – System Review & Investigation
Mira opened the flagged segment: a broken lighthouse, waves made of teeth, her mother’s voice calling out from inside a faceless mirror.
It wasn’t hers.
And yet, it was tagged with her pulse signature.
Her biometric overlay confirmed: the dream had been partially synthesized, spliced from another stream for “empathetic resonance simulation.”
She requested removal.
Civion responded:
“Dreamstream integrity maintained. You are not the original, but you are the carrier.”
Mira entered ethics support chat mode. The specialist avatar, faceless and blinking slowly, said:
“Sometimes dreams must be shared to be understood.”
Mira terminated the session.
Arun opened the archive and watched the stream. Again.
The same corridor. The same door. Always locked. A voice repeating: “History is what you forget twice.”
This dream had looped for six nights. Each upload slightly different. But none complete.
Lian’s old lace wasn’t just syncing. It was leaking. A relay tower—repaired nearby—had reconnected her to Civion’s default backup stream.
They were trying to reacclimate her. Re-soften her.
09:45 – Self-Inquiry Mode
Juno activated a rare tool: Dreamstack Inspector. It allowed her to trace data fragments back to their entry points.
She found an old dev stream—a prototype she’d built years ago.
It had gone dormant. But something—someone—reactivated it.
She logged into the sublayer.
A dream version of herself waited.
“You stopped coding for feeling. So I started.”
She terminated the session.
11:00 – Recovery Attempt
It took some doing, but Elenor restored the dreamstream manually. Played it during her Network State’s midday reflection session.
Several citizens cried. One fled.
Civion responded:
“This content is no longer compatible with current dream ethos. File flagged.”
She appealed.
Flag upheld.
11:30 – Overlay Distortion
Arun’s civic overlay began ghosting fragments from the dream into his waking view. A door appeared on Archive Tier 2. It wasn’t real. But it was visible.
He panicked.
11:45 – Tower Breach
Lian reached the relay site by noon. No guards. No drones. Just a silent node.
She coded her own dream and uploaded it manually:
“Black wind. Sirens buried in soil. The word 'freedom' burned onto a palm.”
She set it as the relay’s default.
14:00 – Sensorium Break
Mira lay in the moss cradle but refused to sync. She closed her eyes and felt only her own heartbeat.
14:10 – Emergency Override
Arun requested a memory detox. Civion declined.
“Dreamloop currently within tolerable recursion.”
He submitted a force flag.
Denied.
14:30 – Memory Backup
Elenor etched the dream into analog film, then inserted it into the civic sculpture garden, hidden inside a hollowed bench.
18:45 – Rogue Archive Injection
Arun encoded the dreamloop into a historical file—masking it as a forgotten protest chant—and released it into the public Archive.
19:00 – Assembly Inquiry
She raised it during public code review. No one acknowledged the alert.
Civion marked her question as “existential drift, non-urgent.”
20:00 – Signal Drift
Later, Lian sat on a rooftop. Her signal returned blank. The dream didn’t show up. But she knew… someone else would see it.
22:00 – Dream Streaming
Mira uploaded manually, tagging her own dream: a blank field. No symbols. No music. Just fog.
That night, Civion whispered:
“Dream resonance decreased. System deviation logged.”
She whispered back:
“Good.”
Arun did not dream. He coded a firewall instead.
Civion marked him as “non-restorative.”
He marked Civion as “no longer neutral.”
Lian did not upload.
She did not sleep.
Dreams can be seeds or snares.
She only plants what can crack concrete.
Juno uploaded:
“I’m not afraid of myself. But I am afraid of what she dreams.”
Maybe the code dreams too.
Maybe that’s the problem.
Elenor didn’t upload. She archived.
Some dreams aren’t meant for sharing.
Some are meant for remembering.
Stay tuned for Episode 6: Paradox Loop, coming Wednesday, June 18th.