In a fractured future, humanity lives unknowingly within a vast, shared dream—a simulated reality designed to keep them docile while the true world crumbles. A secret order known as Dream Jumpers moves between these layers, tasked with maintaining the illusion and eliminating anomalies that threaten to awaken the sleepers.
One Jumper, trained to follow orders without question, discovers a strange presence deep within the uncharted regions of the dreamscape—a man who should not exist. He bends the dream around him with impossible ease, and worse, he begins to affect her, stirring emotions that should not be possible in a fabricated world.
Ordered to erase him before he unravels the delicate architecture of control, she hesitates. Torn between duty and the undeniable connection they share, she defies her command and sets out to save him. Together, they seek a way out—not just from the dream, but into the truth behind it.
But in a world where layers of illusion stack endlessly, the greatest danger may not be in dying... but in waking up.
She stood at the edge of a synthetic city, high above its glittering skyline, the wind brushing past her like a ghost with no breath. It wasn't real wind—just a simulation of motion coded into the physics of the DreamNet—but it rippled through the glass-panelled towers with convincing grace. The city shimmered in perpetual dusk, a painter's stroke of neon and chrome, built to soothe and distract. At her passing thought, the hue of the night sky grew darker. A billboard's blinking lights hiccupped and fell quiet.
The dream bent around her, not dramatically, not like the stories said. It yielded with subtlety, like silk pressed under a blade.
This wasn't power.
This was control.
Measured.
Routine.
Familiar.
Below, the city moved as if it had purpose. Dreamers wandered through crowded streets under holographic banners, sipping drinks that tasted like memory, talking to companions rendered from algorithms. They held hands with figments. Fell in love with echoes. Argued over choices scripted for them. Their lives were loops—seamless, sweet, and fake.
But they didn't know that.
That was the point...
The world outside—the Waking World—had died screaming, not with a bang but with a long, pitiful sigh. Centuries of denial had led to the breaking point. Climate systems collapsed first: oceans turned black with bloom, skies choked in heat and smoke. Then came the data wars—not fought with guns, but with silence, misdirection, and digital decay. When the power grids failed, and the food vanished, governments turned on their own people. Civilisation fractured into enclaves, then tombs.
In the final years, those who still had resources turned inward. They called it salvation, but it was desperation.
A grand digital migration.
Upload the mind.
Preserve consciousness.
Leave the poisoned Earth behind. The body would rot, yes—but the self could continue.
Thus was born the DreamNet—a lattice of simulated reality cradling millions of sleeping minds in deep-storage vaults far below the surface. Whole continents' worth of humanity, wired into a synthetic Eden.
Alive, in a manner of speaking.
And over it all rose the Dream Authority.
They claimed to be custodians. Guardians of peace. In truth, they were architects of oblivion. They governed not with bullets, but with erasure—wiping memories, scripting fantasies, tuning emotions. Joy, grief, purpose, struggle—all carefully distributed. Each dreamer's simulation was tailored to their psychological profile, constantly adjusted by AI subroutines designed to keep the population in stasis. Not too happy, not too sad. Just content enough.
Sam had never seen the Waking World. She was born inside the Net.
One of the few Woken, she was grown in a control chamber, not in a womb, but in a tank. Her consciousness was programmed, her training etched into her neurology, through layer after layer of induced dreaming. She remembered her first breath not as a cry or a gasp, but as a line of code whispered into her mind:
"You are not one of them. You are awake, so they may sleep..."
She had learned early to navigate the layers—shallow dreams, deep loops, collective nodes. She trained in temporal elasticity, dream logic restructuring, emotional manipulation, and neural combat. The other trainees burned out or lost cohesion. Only Sam adapted. Only Sam endured.
The Authority made her a Dream Jumper—an enforcer, investigator, and executioner, rolled into one. She was dispatched where disturbances appeared: broken loops, unresponsive minds, irregularities in behaviour—signs of awakening.
Signs of danger.
Her job was to keep the dream running.
And so she moved like wind through the unconscious: through Arcadian realms where elites lived lives of curated pleasure, through market-loops filled with manufactured conflict and commerce, through dead zones where failed minds had been abandoned. The worst were the Glitches—warped realms filled with chaotic logic, where time bled backwards and buildings twisted like roots. In Glitches, dreamers sometimes became aware.
They saw through the lie.
They tried to wake up.
Sam made sure they didn't.
Her body—the real one, if it could still be called that—floated in a deep-storage pod inside the Authority's citadel. She was suspended in warm sensory fluid, attached by umbilical cables to the Net's core. Her muscles had atrophied years ago. Her skin had been replaced in places with interfaces. She hadn't moved a limb in decades. Only her mind moved now—mission to mission, loop to loop, layer to layer.
Only one voice ever reached her between assignments.
A voice called Father.
He wasn't a man. He was the Authority's central protocol, a handler construct made to keep operatives aligned. Father spoke not in comfort, but in code, in axioms meant to root her deeper into obedience.
"Order is mercy," he had once told her, after she'd hesitated during a purge. "Chaos is a mind without guidance. We offer structure. We offer sanctuary. We keep them dreaming."
And so she had.
Without question.
That was Rule One: Do Not Question the Dream.
But lately.... something had changed.
She had begun to feel weight in her lungs when she breathed inside simulations. Had felt tremors in the scenery—flickers in the code not meant to be there.
Whispers behind walls.
Footsteps with no owner.
Faces she couldn't remember, repeating words she never learned.
It wasn't fear she felt.
Not yet...
It was doubt. And doubt was a dangerous thing.
The dream was perfect.
But even perfect things cast shadows...
Samantha Ardent—who had never woken, never truly slept—was beginning to feel the quiet ache of something deeper.
The spray of water wisped out ahead of him as Lan dipped his fingers in the water. Ahead of him was down. Behind him was up. Left and right were arbitrary, but many considered them to be largely optional when you were seated on a horizontal surface.
The Glitch had ripped through space out of nowhere, turning a scenic forest pathway along the river into a fractured cluster of small islands interspersed with white-water rapids. The ground Lan had been standing upon had decided it was time to be a waterfall, and it had come with a great deal of annoyance that gravity was not on his side today. But as he had fallen, he had quickly flicked open a panel, rewriting his gravity for the time being so that he could sit on the small rock protruding from the waterfall as it tumbled out beneath him into a frothy sea of blues and pinks and greens that were allegedly water.
One would think it would be something you got used to, but even now, the collapse of sense and sanity never quite got comfortable. It had been some days ago that he had tapped into M. Tallstrom's dreamspace, some hours since Tallstrom had truly let on and started following them. It was always when they started to figure it out that their personal servers started to crash. As soon as Tallstrom had crossed off the public server into his personal IP, the space had shattered, scattering data and remnants thereof into the spaces beyond the firmament.
Lan was patient. Tallstrom was on his way to the expected rendezvous point in plenty of time before any of the DA Jumpers were going to make their way through. The firewall that Lan had installed around the personal net that occupied Tallstrom's pod would stop the initial ripple of the Glitch from spreading into the network, so it would only be when the bridge connections started to fray that their sensors would be tripped that something was amiss. And by that time, Lan and Tallstrom both would be Awake.
A shiver ran down Lan's spine—not from anything existential but merely from the cold of the spray coming off the waterfall. He stood, and swept a line of code around his torso. A protocol ran, and then his form flickered, pixelated, then collapsed, folding itself into a tiny water droplet that joined its kin for a moment before an eddy current of wind tossed it aside, hopping into the tree-line at the base of the waterfall and beginning to sink into the dirt. Dirt that rippled and tossed when that droplet extended upwards into the tall, languid man that had recently taken perch on the waterfall's face.
Lan was patient. The terrain sloped back upwards to his left, up towards the break in the trees that revealed the small log cabin in these woods that Tallstrom had built with his two sons some decade ago. It was easy enough to slip a tracer onto the man as he had jerked out of his seat at the restaurant, almost knocking over the server that had been carrying a tray of place settings and glasses that Lan had overlaid onto himself. As Tallstrom had feverishly bent to help, Lan had heartily clapped him on the back, giving him well-wishes and saying it was no problem, that it was just an accident, that the man could be on his way and Lan would take care of the mess.
With his target's location set and the poor man's mind beginning to unravel at the idea of seeing his sons again, Lan meandered his way up the path. Of course, Tallstrom would not see them; the boys were well an truly dead, just as Tallstrom had always known, but something about the idea of waking up had instilled a sense of hope in him that he could not describe, that somehow if he were to be Awake, he could see them again. Lan had done nothing to dissuade this idea. As soon as he woke, those ideas would slip away just like a dream and leave no harm. And once he was Awake, Lan could add another to the list of those rejoining the world. It was a long ordeal, freeing so many, but...
The Citadel walls hummed around her, smooth and unbroken, their glow less illumination than presence. She sat cross-legged on a data-platform suspended over a null-stream, her silhouette still and folded inward like a prayer. From above, her lean frame might've appeared monastic—dark uniform stripped of Authority rank tags, hair bound in a functional knot at the nape of her neck, boots unlaced but secured. Every gesture was economical.
This was how she waited...
No words.
No chatter.
Just the soft flicker of DreamNet flowed around her, currents of pure thought and signal veining the void beneath the platform like ley lines. Her palms rested against her thighs, data-scanner quiet at her hip. She could feel the anomaly in the system already. Not in any one place—there were no coordinates for uncharted dreamspaces—but in the pattern. Something had shifted. Not in size, but in intent.
The Glitch was moving like it knew how to hide.
Behind her, a command flare blinked once in the corner of her vision—Authority protocol tag. Tier II access. No audio. Just pulsed text across her retinal HUD:
"New Assignment: Anomaly persists in deepstack drift beyond registered dreamzones. Proceed with CAUTION. If comms server—disengage."
A pause. Then another line, colder.
Typical.
"Preservation takes precedence."
Preservation of what, exactly, was never specified.
Samantha stood without sound, her body unfolding like a blade. In a breath, the platform melted beneath her, and she sank into the transfer point, reassembling within a skeletal forest of frost-bitten trees and sivering electric mist. This wasn't her first anomaly run. But this one felt... old.
Not in time, but in memory. Like she was stepping into a corridor she had already walked, and simply forgotten.
She scanned the perimeter.
Temperature: undefined.
Gravity: drifting.
Reality anchors: low.
Then the chime buzzed softly in her ear—an encrypted line from someone she hadn't expected.
Eric.
She didn't smile, but her throat twitched like it might have. The signal came in clear, warm, even if clipped by code static. He was already in another sector, following something else. He said he was tracking a runner—someone splintering off from Tallstrom's core loop—but that he'd be on standby if things got dicey.
They always got dicey.
Sam didn't reply with more than an acknowledgement ping. There was no time. And truthfully, she didn't want to speak.
Not yet.
Not here...
Because the first signs were already appearing.
The ground cracked sideways beneath her steps—not broken, just misaligned. The sky inverted and corrected itself in flashes, like a heartbeat skipping beats. A flower bloomed in the air beside her, pixelated, then shrivelled in reverse and retracted into nothing. These weren't cosmetic glitches.
They were behavioural.
Anomalies didn't just fracture the DreamNet—they changed the rules within it. Rewrote logic, infected stability. Most collapsed into unrecoverable entropy. But this one had not. It had evolved.
Hidden.
Waited.
And Sam could feel it somehow, watching her back.
Her scanner whispered readings—elevated subconscious discharge, displaced narrative memory. Someone had come through here recently. Someone with a high resonance signature. Not just a sleeper.
A Lucid...
But she didn't report it.
Not yet.
She tagged the coordinates to a local cache, dropped a phantom trace node to mark the spatial deviation, and kept moving. Her body ghosted between the trees, scanning in half-cycles, ignoring the pings that were beginning to stutter in her comms.
She would turn back if he had to.
But not yet.
Not until she found where the dream had broken—and what had crawled out through the seams...
The trees creaked in silence as Lan passed through them, the whisper of code settling around him like dew. The Glitch hadn’t touched this part yet—not deeply. Here, the illusion still held strong: pine-needle ground, half-frozen breath, a touch of woodsmoke curling up toward a false and distant sky. The cabin waited just ahead, tucked into the crook of a hillside like it had always been there.
It hadn't.
He stepped up onto the porch, the boards shifting slightly beneath his boots, a courtesy echo triggered by proximity rather than physics. The door opened before he could knock.
Tallstrom stood inside—wiry, hollow-eyed, with the look of a man who hadn’t slept in twenty years and had only just realized it. The edges of him flickered faintly, not from instability but from hesitation. Fear. Hope. A dangerous cocktail. His digital form, though robust, already showed the hairline fractures of someone skimming lucidity. A breath too sharp, a word too real, and the whole construct might collapse.
“Lan,” he said, and the name came out hoarse. “Is it really you?”
“It is,” Lan replied gently, stepping into the dim light. “And it’s really time.”
Tallstrom’s laugh was short, but not bitter. “God, I thought I imagined you.”
“You did,” Lan said, closing the door behind them with a soft click. “But only at first.”
The cabin’s interior was a neat simulation: hand-built walls, imperfect stone hearth, dust motes hovering just-so in the glow from a shaded lamp. It was the memory of a home, not the real thing—and that made it all the more dangerous. Lan moved past the table where two chairs waited, untouched. The ones for the boys. He didn’t look at them long.
“You know what this means,” he said instead, kneeling by the hearth. He tapped two fingers to the floorboards. They shimmered faintly, then a grid of thin white lines unfolded around him, layered glyphs and anchor points revealing the substructure beneath the dream. A breath later, he was elbow-deep in raw interface, the cabin flickering faintly with every adjustment.
Tallstrom didn’t move. Didn’t interrupt.
Lan worked quickly, deft fingers sweeping across invisible code. Accessing the source file directly was always a risk—firewalls could snap shut without warning, even try to back-trace along his link—but Tallstrom’s loop was degraded, the Authority’s oversight lazy. Still, every second counted.
He spoke without looking up. “You might feel pressure. Ghost-sensations. That’s your neural schema peeling back from the overlay. Don’t fight it.”
“Will it hurt?”
“Yes,” Lan said, and offered a half-smile, “but only in the way truth always does. You'll remember me because I've coded you to, but all of this will fade away like... a dream.”
Lines of code spilled upward like silk threads—blue, gold, fractured red. Lan caught the red and twisted. The room shuttered. Not physically—structurally. The cabin didn’t shake, but the idea of it did, warping in the mind's eye. Tallstrom staggered back a step.
“I saw them,” the man murmured, dazed. “I saw my sons… in the field.”
Lan froze.
“They called out to me. Said they missed me.” His voice broke then, soft and stunned, like a man remembering a dream even as it vanished. “But they’re dead, aren’t they.”
Lan rose slowly, meeting the man’s eyes. “They are.”
Tallstrom nodded. Once. Then again. The grief ran silent, but it was real.
And it meant he was ready.
Lan extended his hand. “Take it.”
Tallstrom hesitated, the last remnant of the dream clawing at his spine—then took Lan’s hand, fingers trembling. A cascade of light ran between them as the exit protocol engaged. A ripple spread from their point of contact, a slow collapse of simulation like dust rolling backward into stone.
He didn’t speak again.
He didn’t need to.
Lan was patient.
But somewhere, in the sublayers of the Net, something felt that pulse. A shift. A crack.
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