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...
Your support makes Blue Moon possible (Patreon)
