The Sleep Switch

By Abigail Falanga

The voices in the workroom rise until they carry out into the rest of the house, shattering my unpleasant dream.

“I never wanted it out on the market!” Father says, with more anger than he’s had energy for in a long time. “It’s not stable. Not finished!”

“There was nothing you could do to stop it, Liddel,” another man says, matching the tone. “The investors—”

“To hell with the investors! The sleep switch isn’t safe. I thought I made that clear after what it did to my daughter.”

Silence. Has the other man gone away?

I’m close enough now to put my eye to the chink where the door doesn’t close completely. No, the other man is still there, one hand pushing his AR spectacles halfway up his forehead to rub his eyes. Father leans over his desk across from him, his face red in the light from the screens.

“I didn’t say these were legitimate buyers,” the visitor says, so quietly I almost can’t hear. “The investors presented the project four months ago, after the—the accident. We think one of the interested parties hacked the specs and was able to recreate the prototype somehow.”

Father mutters something, then sits down so hard his chair creaks. “It doesn’t work. It was meant to work with basic neural implants to trigger hormonal release, inducing sleep, controlled via app, but it was too hackable, too volatile. The prototype wasn’t finished. We couldn’t test it safely. How much damage is it doing on the black market?”

“You won’t be held liable.”

“That’s the least of my worries! My daughter has been nearly catatonic since being exposed…”

I stop listening, memory becoming clearer than the present.

Tedious lessons were over that morning, and I slipped away from the tutorbot as soon as I could. It was raining, so I couldn’t play in the garden and went to Father’s workshop instead. I was not allowed there alone, but it was always filled with interesting things, and I was careful not to touch anything.

Except that morning.

The wafers on the low tray looked like cookies, and when my skirt brushed some onto the ground, of course I tried eating one.

Nightmares came next. Horrible dreams filled with monstrous walruses, rabbit holes, gardens, and more and more. A cat grinning at me until all I could see were its teeth.

They woke me.

It wasn’t real. I knew it wasn’t real but couldn’t get out…

This is now. Standing by Father’s workshop door. I make myself listen.

“Six deaths traced to it,” the visitor is saying.

Father jumps up again, his voice strained. “How many people are using it? Don’t they know how dangerous it is?”

“It’s not voluntary.” The visitor types on the table’s keyboard and a holographic house-of-cards appears on the table screen—a stack of data that I can’t understand, though it makes Father gasp. “Whoever this is, they haven’t sold anything. They’re using your sleep switch breakthrough to trigger death at a distance. It’s clearly your tech, given the biochemical signature. It must have been one of the potential buyers. We were hoping you could help us figure out who.”

“How?” Father waves a hand through part of the hologram, and a set of bios shuffle past like face cards. “The sleep switch was intended for therapy, not assassination. Where can I even begin to track the person perverting it?”

One of the faces is familiar. I know that smile, those teeth. It might look like a man, but it’s the cat-face from my nightmares.

The doctors woke me, but the dreams stuck. Even in my normal house, with Father and the tutorbot and school and breakfast cakes—the dreams curled themselves in like color flooding a grayscale pallet. I couldn’t fight them. Couldn’t tell Father or the doctors about the phantasms that seeped into reality. I couldn’t talk at all.

I’m not catatonic. I am nonverbal.

Rehabilitation specialists have come every day, trying to help me speak again. Nothing works. I still do my lessons and move through the house and watch everything. But the dreams come even when I’m awake, and I haven’t been able to fight them off.

Until now.

The cat-grin haunted me most, and now I know why.

It was real.

A real man, breaking into my dreams.

The visitor is gone. He must have left through the workshop’s outside door when I wasn’t paying attention. I push the dreams away firmly, waving off dizzyingly bright tendrils and concentrating on the carpet and walls and my blue dress until they are all I can see. Taking a deep breath of electricity-stale air, I push open the door of Father’s workshop.

He’s still sitting at the table and turns when he hears me. “Alice! You shouldn’t be in here. Go back—”

I shake my head firmly and point to the hologram. Father moves to close it, saying something about how it’s nothing I should see, but I reach up and pull his hand away, holding fast.

Words still won’t come. But maybe I don’t have to speak. I lean forward and select words from the hologram, pulling a phrase here and there and arranging them on the edge of the projection until I have a message that matches what my head wants to say: “That man was in sleep dreams. Know his smile. He took sleep switch technology. Using it to break minds.”

Father looks at me but not with the disbelief I feared. “Alice…” His eyes are wide and filled with tears. “You’re better.”

I shake my head just a little and then somehow find words of my own that I type on the table’s keyboard, adding them to the hologram: “I can help.”

“Maybe you can,” he says with a smile that reminds me of how he used to be. “And then, maybe this is how I can finally help you.”

ABOUT THE AUTHOR

Abigail Falanga may be found in New Mexico creating magic in many ways—with fabric, food, paper, music, and especially with words! She’s loved fantasy ever since playing out epic adventures of swords, fairies, and monsters with her siblings, and loved sci-fi since her dad’s stories around the dinner table. Besides sharing mad little stories on Havok, she is busily trying to launch approximately five hundred novels into the world. Some of them are even finished!

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