Free Dreams in the Tower Part 1 by Andrew Vrana

of sunrise; it was dawn and for the second night in a row Steph had not slept.
    In her bed, where she had sat upright most of the night, Seito lay splayed out on his belly, naked beneath the covers. His eyelids fluttered and his leg twitched a few times. Steph wo ndered what he was dreaming about. Enjoy it while it lasts , she thought. The dream will end soon, for all of us. Or was it just beginning?
    She gently pulled the covers off her legs and got out of bed, carefully, so she wouldn’t wake Seito from whatever world he was in. She padded to the window and looked out at her li ttle portal to a brighter land. It was amazing, she had always thought, the view she had. She was living in a shit apartment, barely getting by on a journalist’s salary in one of the most expensive cities in the world; but despite all this, despite the cheap rent and shady neighbors, the musty smell in the hall and the plumbing that never seemed to stay fixed, the cockroaches and the cock neighbors, she had this breathtaking piece of beauty right here in her bedroom window. Through a few tall buildings she could just see the San Francisco Bay, and when the sun came up in just the right spot…for a few moments, occasionally, when she was up early (or late) enough, she felt like she was living the life she had always wanted.
    But then it ended, and she went back to having the same dreams she’d had all her life, the same ones that she could always imagine but never catch.
    A low bzzz bzzz told her that her tablet had received a message. It had been doing that a lot lately, but she had stopped paying attention sometime yesterday. Deciding it was time to reconnect with the outside world, she opened her recent alerts. There were various messages, a few missed vid-calls, the Anti-Corp com app had been going crazy, and…what was this? An app she hadn’t used in many years was showing recent activity; it was the one they had used for non-E in college, the one Jason had made. She had sent a copy of it to an AC friend who used it as a foundation for the current AC com app, but she had kept the original all these years for some bullshit sentimental reason or another. Only a handful of people had it, and two of them were in her room right now.
    Curious, she tapped the alert and selected the most recent entry: a video message sent just now.
    It was Jason.
    Before that fact had fully sunken in, the face on the screen began talking. “Steph, I…I guess you got my other messages. I just wanted to tell you, I’m leaving. I don’t know where to, but I’ll stay in touch if I can. Actually, I think we’re going to need your help. Someone could be mon itoring my tab, so we can only talk on the non-E app. I don’t have that new one you guys use. I—” He paused and glanced sharply off screen. “Looks like my ride’s here. Just pass along the info I gave you earlier to everyone you know. As far up the chain as you can go. And stay safe.”
    That was it. Steph was more confused than anything. Maybe she needed to watch his other messages, but not right now. Right now she was feeling strange—not bad, strange. She had felt bad, terrible in fact, which is why she hadn’t wanted Seito coming here at first. She had heard the rumors about a Silte bioweapon, some kind of disease or virus, and those tear gas canisters that had no tear gas in them had seemed to confirm it, to her horror. But she felt much better by last night, enough so that she had convinced herself that it was nothing, that no such horrifically indiscriminate weapon could possibly be used, even by Silte. There was just no way they would risk inflicting such massive collateral damage on the world.
    The strangeness must have begun sometime during her and Seito’s intense (by their normal standards) lovemaking, because by the time she had cleaned up and Seito had dozed off, the strangeness had become a powerful force that permeated every cell in her body and even the air around her. It went with