Dream Thief

Ari lives on stolen dreams.

They’re other people’s dreams, yes, but they’re also his — in that way that stolen things become yours if you love them enough, if you need them enough, if you care about them more than their previous owners. He steals his dreams them from advertisements and movies, TV shows, triggergames and fleshreels, anything loud and bold and glorious, anything bright enough to stun his half-waking mind into submission. Really, it might be more accurate to say that Ari lives on stealing dreams: the rush of it, the careful thievery, the splicing of his senses, the nearly edible nothingness that fills his head as his eyes roll back. He loves swimming through the Cloud, hearing its colors; the reckless tide of images is the only thing that can sustain him some days. He hates it, and he loves it. He is the Cloud. He’s become it, in some ways, whether he wants to or not. And on his worst days, it feels as if he can’t be anything else.

Ari has no memories before age eleven. His uplink operation — standard for state wards in Sol, his brutal, beloved Electric City —  carved a trail of sparks through his brain, and the data that was supposed to processed through his subconscious flooded his mind, leaving a broken boy in its wake. Broken became cobbled together over the years, as he learned how to live with himself, though he’s more cobbled than together some days. Ari can’t dream by himself, hence the thievery, and there’s no back to his mind anymore, no place to store awful things. He has a perfect memory, stolen space on Sol’s server farms — but it’s all image-memory; he can’t store his emotions, the sensations his body receives. And it’s a lot, in general. Just a lot. He grips tables, walls, his own palms when the images start surging inside him, when his secret bubbles up to the surface like a blister, just waiting to pop. The worst part is that he wants to. He really wants to. But even his partner in crime Ernesto, the dealer for all of the chem-stim Ari synths, a boy who exists as thousands of snapshots in Ari’s fractured mind —  even Ernesto would sell him out. Ari would count on this fact. Crosslinks like him are dangerous. There is not one secret, one corporate blockchain, he couldn’t breach, and he knows no one in the Electric City would hesitate to use his mind against him. He counts his days there like he counts his heartbeat: unconscious, steady, bound to end.

The resistance are the ones who come for him, in that end. A splinter group. Bombers. Ari will swear to himself that he didn’t have a choice, but he knows he did, he did, he did. He’s both surprised and unsurprised at how much it hurts when they tear into him, the memory leaving him the moment it comes in. And yet he knew they would come, years before it happened. However strange, however improbable, he saw it in his dreams.