Fiction: Sleeping Machines
Sleeping Machines
I woke up at ten fifty after fifteen hours asleep with a great sense of tiredness seeping over my body.
This is what I do: I am a sleep machine. I work for the insomniacs over at the University, science and engineering department. They provide me with a bed and food for waking hours and even books to read and machines for light exercise, to help me rest better. I am kept on a strict diet of bread and vegetables, and I live in this small, light blue room with a very comfortable and well-aerated bed. It is always a cool and refreshing 68 degrees Fahrenheit.
This is how the process works. In the morning, I wake up and go to the transfer chamber. The engineers at the University, the insomniacs, the ones who hire me, who stay up all night thinking of numbers and metal and equations, they climb in the other end of the transfer chamber. The needle enters my face just here, between my hair and just behind my temple, deep into my skull and my brain. I barely feel it anymore, after so many years. They extract the sleep from my brain--how, I don't know. Reproduce the patterns in brainwaves, get the chemical I excrete when I sleep, whatever. It goes from my brain into an identical hole in his head, whatever insomniac I'm exchanging with that day. And then there's a reversal, too: it flows from his head into mine, all of these things. I stagger out of the chamber drunk on numbers that don't mean anything, and then my head begins pounding until they give me my four ounces of red wine.
I stay awake for--oh, it depends. On how many people I'm sleeping for. If it's four people, then I stay awake for four hours, drinking water out of a very small glass and using the bathroom periodically, so my sleep is uninterrupted. If it's three people, then I say awake for six hours. It's better when I sleep for six people. I'm only asleep for eighteen hours, then: it's better for them, because they all get six hours of sleep too, and it's better for me, because it doesn't hurt as much. I can stay awake longer. When I was first starting out I slept for two, and got to be awake for eight hours a day--oh, it's glorious, eight hours awake. It was a couple, writers, both of them, and when they got the eight hours you could see the light come back into their eyes.
These days sleep machines are restricted to scientists and engineers only: doctors, who are too scarce to be allowed to sleep naturally, scientists watching experiments (constant constant experiments, I hear it even in my sleep), politicians who don't care to sleep themselves. My life used to be so much richer than this.
My room is above the laboratory. When I sleep I can feel the hum of machines from below, giant turbines humming with speed, generators that fail sometimes in the middle of the night, rising and falling with numbers and metal. I do not understand these numbers that go through my head all night, 2.71828182845904523536...I wake up with the sides of my head peeling apart and my hair falling out on my pillow, shining like gold in the light.
Back in the days when I worked for the writers, the couple (the good days), I could think that I felt like the girl in Rumplestiltskin, whatever her name was. Spinning straw into gold. Or perhaps Rapunzel, who slept and slept and slept and her hair kept on growing. Or was it Sleeping Beauty? But they had castles, and wicked stepmothers. I have a light blue room, an aerated bed and light classical music playing all the time, to inspire the best sleep cycles. During the day they let me watch programming. Not the news, because it might disturb me and give me nightmares. But safe things. Disney programming.
The days are getting closer together. I wasn't good in school. I liked pretty things, not the hard things, not the things that get you somewhere in this world. But I was pretty, and I was tired, and I used to sleep like the dead, and they pay good money for that, you know, or at least they did before the government started regulating it so much, so much that now I just get room and board and this is my life. Sleeping machines.
We used to live in colonies, before they broke us up there, too. Things kept happening, there. Strange noises in the night. They say that dreams got to be like viruses, that they would mutate and jump from person to person, wipe out a whole wing of machines, a whole crop of us. But when they laid us out in our white nightgowns, you couldn't tell the living from the dead.
"They are afraid of us," someone whispered to me in the hallways.
There are other sleeping machines in this building, too. Three of us. I can feel it at night when I sleep--something about a low-level telepathic field. I don't know if they breed it into us or if we're born with it. That's how the nightmares get passed on, they say.
But I have a secret, too.
Because I know how they hook up monitors to me while I sleep, insert that very thin needle into the side of my brain and sample my dreams, checking for maladies or uneasiness. I can feel it, like the taste of metal on my tongue, and these past few nights I have dreamt of a dark creature but did not let them know it.
I am tired of all these numbers running through my head, tired of endless nights and days with always half-muted lighting and drugged red wine and the endless supply of white nightgowns. My hair falls out onto the pillow in long strands of gold and though I do nothing but sleep I get more and more tired. My brain is folding in on itself, the creases smoothing out, and this happens with all sleeping machines, this is the life that awaits all of us once the blue walls smooth out too and we do not speak anymore. Already the little voices in my head are growing silent.
But there is a monster in there, too, a dark creature all billows and folds and red eyes. He is small, now, but growing, sticking back in the shadows, one misplaced molecule trickling from my head into theirs. And soon my brain will start to smooth out, and all my blonde hair will fall out and lay on my pillow, and then I will be buried in my white nightgown. But by that time the creature will not live in me, anymore. He is transferring himself molecule by molecule to these engineers, these minds that run the world, and at night he whispers among the sleeping machines. We roll over in our sleep in unison, sigh and breathe--in unison.
Our brains are growing smoother but he is growing stronger. And when we take our last breath, he will take his first, and then he will take these engineers who destroyed us.
no_colt
----
notes: this is a first draft. I am back at college and feel like my brain is going to mush and I cannot even do dimensional analysis anymore! I am sure I will fail out and go to community college and you will laugh at me. But at least I can still write, eh? also if you get bored feel free to extensively beta this. I wrote it while it was 100 degrees and thus it might not make much sense.
I woke up at ten fifty after fifteen hours asleep with a great sense of tiredness seeping over my body.
This is what I do: I am a sleep machine. I work for the insomniacs over at the University, science and engineering department. They provide me with a bed and food for waking hours and even books to read and machines for light exercise, to help me rest better. I am kept on a strict diet of bread and vegetables, and I live in this small, light blue room with a very comfortable and well-aerated bed. It is always a cool and refreshing 68 degrees Fahrenheit.
This is how the process works. In the morning, I wake up and go to the transfer chamber. The engineers at the University, the insomniacs, the ones who hire me, who stay up all night thinking of numbers and metal and equations, they climb in the other end of the transfer chamber. The needle enters my face just here, between my hair and just behind my temple, deep into my skull and my brain. I barely feel it anymore, after so many years. They extract the sleep from my brain--how, I don't know. Reproduce the patterns in brainwaves, get the chemical I excrete when I sleep, whatever. It goes from my brain into an identical hole in his head, whatever insomniac I'm exchanging with that day. And then there's a reversal, too: it flows from his head into mine, all of these things. I stagger out of the chamber drunk on numbers that don't mean anything, and then my head begins pounding until they give me my four ounces of red wine.
I stay awake for--oh, it depends. On how many people I'm sleeping for. If it's four people, then I stay awake for four hours, drinking water out of a very small glass and using the bathroom periodically, so my sleep is uninterrupted. If it's three people, then I say awake for six hours. It's better when I sleep for six people. I'm only asleep for eighteen hours, then: it's better for them, because they all get six hours of sleep too, and it's better for me, because it doesn't hurt as much. I can stay awake longer. When I was first starting out I slept for two, and got to be awake for eight hours a day--oh, it's glorious, eight hours awake. It was a couple, writers, both of them, and when they got the eight hours you could see the light come back into their eyes.
These days sleep machines are restricted to scientists and engineers only: doctors, who are too scarce to be allowed to sleep naturally, scientists watching experiments (constant constant experiments, I hear it even in my sleep), politicians who don't care to sleep themselves. My life used to be so much richer than this.
My room is above the laboratory. When I sleep I can feel the hum of machines from below, giant turbines humming with speed, generators that fail sometimes in the middle of the night, rising and falling with numbers and metal. I do not understand these numbers that go through my head all night, 2.71828182845904523536...I wake up with the sides of my head peeling apart and my hair falling out on my pillow, shining like gold in the light.
Back in the days when I worked for the writers, the couple (the good days), I could think that I felt like the girl in Rumplestiltskin, whatever her name was. Spinning straw into gold. Or perhaps Rapunzel, who slept and slept and slept and her hair kept on growing. Or was it Sleeping Beauty? But they had castles, and wicked stepmothers. I have a light blue room, an aerated bed and light classical music playing all the time, to inspire the best sleep cycles. During the day they let me watch programming. Not the news, because it might disturb me and give me nightmares. But safe things. Disney programming.
The days are getting closer together. I wasn't good in school. I liked pretty things, not the hard things, not the things that get you somewhere in this world. But I was pretty, and I was tired, and I used to sleep like the dead, and they pay good money for that, you know, or at least they did before the government started regulating it so much, so much that now I just get room and board and this is my life. Sleeping machines.
We used to live in colonies, before they broke us up there, too. Things kept happening, there. Strange noises in the night. They say that dreams got to be like viruses, that they would mutate and jump from person to person, wipe out a whole wing of machines, a whole crop of us. But when they laid us out in our white nightgowns, you couldn't tell the living from the dead.
"They are afraid of us," someone whispered to me in the hallways.
There are other sleeping machines in this building, too. Three of us. I can feel it at night when I sleep--something about a low-level telepathic field. I don't know if they breed it into us or if we're born with it. That's how the nightmares get passed on, they say.
But I have a secret, too.
Because I know how they hook up monitors to me while I sleep, insert that very thin needle into the side of my brain and sample my dreams, checking for maladies or uneasiness. I can feel it, like the taste of metal on my tongue, and these past few nights I have dreamt of a dark creature but did not let them know it.
I am tired of all these numbers running through my head, tired of endless nights and days with always half-muted lighting and drugged red wine and the endless supply of white nightgowns. My hair falls out onto the pillow in long strands of gold and though I do nothing but sleep I get more and more tired. My brain is folding in on itself, the creases smoothing out, and this happens with all sleeping machines, this is the life that awaits all of us once the blue walls smooth out too and we do not speak anymore. Already the little voices in my head are growing silent.
But there is a monster in there, too, a dark creature all billows and folds and red eyes. He is small, now, but growing, sticking back in the shadows, one misplaced molecule trickling from my head into theirs. And soon my brain will start to smooth out, and all my blonde hair will fall out and lay on my pillow, and then I will be buried in my white nightgown. But by that time the creature will not live in me, anymore. He is transferring himself molecule by molecule to these engineers, these minds that run the world, and at night he whispers among the sleeping machines. We roll over in our sleep in unison, sigh and breathe--in unison.
Our brains are growing smoother but he is growing stronger. And when we take our last breath, he will take his first, and then he will take these engineers who destroyed us.
no_colt
----
notes: this is a first draft. I am back at college and feel like my brain is going to mush and I cannot even do dimensional analysis anymore! I am sure I will fail out and go to community college and you will laugh at me. But at least I can still write, eh? also if you get bored feel free to extensively beta this. I wrote it while it was 100 degrees and thus it might not make much sense.