Ramira paused by the automatic doors, allowing the invisible sensors to scan her retinas. After a moment there was a soft beep, and the doors slid open, letting her step into the building’s quiet marble lobby.
The secretary looked up at her from its desk in the center of the room, and as always, Ramira had to marvel at how well it had been disguised. The robot’s smooth felt skin, real wig, and remarkably life-like eye-sensors made it look exactly like a human woman as it watched her approach.
In a bright, natural voice the secretary said, “Good morning, Dr. Castille. Dr. Lathe requests your presence in Room 1000, Floor 9. Your subordinates have been sent a message excusing your absence.”
Ramira frowned as she turned towards the elevators. Room 1000? People said that that room had been sectioned off for a special Borderline project for the past year or so. Most ninth-floor workers weren’t even allowed in there. Even she, the head scientist of the fifth floor, was far from qualified to go in. So why would Warner – or Dr. Lathe, as he was known professionally – send a message telling her to? Why was he there, anyway?
Well, she thought, pressing the button to call the elevator, the last question was the easiest to answer. She and Warner had been friends since they were children, but he was a Borderline scientist and she a fifth-floor one, so their paths never crossed. It was quite possible that he was working on whatever Room 1000 contained.
But even so, that didn’t explain why he had asked her to go there, Ramira thought as the elevator doors opened. She didn’t belong there; after all, abstractthinking was not her forte. She was good enough at it to do well at her work in neuroscience, but she was nowhere near the standard expected of a Borderline scientist.
Ramira stepped into the elevator and pressed the button labeled 9. She’d never pressed it before; each floor number corresponded to a field of neuroscience. – the higher the floor number, the more complex the field, and scientists were generally supposed to stay on their own floors (and nevergo into a higher one without permission). Hers was, of course, the fifth, sandwiched between basic brain function on the first and Borderline on the ninth, at the top.
Ramira took a firm hold of the railing by the wall as the doors closed and the elevator shot upwards, many times faster than one in a normal building would. Modern appliances like the fast elevator were some of the benefits of working here, as scientific research facilities could use innovations the rest of the world was denied.
It had been about fifty years since the government had decreed that discoveries in certain scientific fields should be – well, they had put it as, “unavailable to the public” but it was easy to tell that they meant “secret”. These fields were astronomy, physics, chemistry, neuroscience, and a few more. Secrecy wherever possible. That was science’s new motto.
And nobody protested. It was reasonable, after all; your average man or woman didn’t need to know the names of all billion quarks and gluons – and what would they do with the knowledge of the Woodworth Specks that made up the Higgs Boson particle? Of course, discoveries that did benefit public health and welfare were publicized, but the higher-level, deep-laws-of-nature ones were kept secret. Like Borderline work.
Ramira knew what Borderline was, but it was such a high branch of neuroscience that even she didn’t know the full details. To her understanding, Borderline was what it sounded like: a branch of neuroscience that went so deep into the foundations of nature that it hit the border, the line between science and unreality. Once, Warner had jokingly called Borderline magic, but she knew it wasn’t really. It dealt with the most innate parts of the universe, deeper than Einstein’s theories or any of the laws that the outside world knew of. But lower-level neuroscientists like Ramira weren’t allowed to know what those parts were.
Ramira was brought back to herself by the ding of the elevator as it stopped and the doors slid noiselessly open. Ramira, feeling a pleasant rush of excitement, stepped out into the ninth-floor hallway.
It looked like any other floor from where she stood outside it – marble tiling on the floor, with white paint all down the hallway and doors on the left and right sides with numbers next to them. The numbers increased to the left, and she turned that way. She was already at number 989, and the numbers increased and increased until she was standing in front of a door at the very end of the hallway – Room 1000. There was a sign on the door that read: “Authorized Scientists Only.”
The door opened as she came up to it and a short man with messy, straw-colored hair stepped out, wearing a milk-white lab coat, blue gloves, and goggles, the same as she was wearing.
“’Morning, Warner,” Ramira said.
He smiled at her. “There you are, there you are. Come in, I’ve had you authorized.”
They stepped inside, and Warner closed the door behind Ramira as she stood and took everything in. Against the rightmost wall was a table with computers on it, displaying strange, unintelligible symbols. On the left were ordinary brain monitors, the kinds she used. Three of the walls were pure white, but the one opposite Ramira was made of glass, looking into a bright, empty room. But what really caught her attention was the machine that sat in the center of 1000.
It was a seventh-floor machine (seventh-floor scientists studied sleep). As far as Ramira knew, the machines were used to let scientists see snippets of people’s dreams, some of the most advanced showing entire scenes. This was an advanced one, Ramira could tell, and had a few small instruments attached to it, ultra-detailed ones that she had never seen before, and that stuck out at odd angles. A scientist lay on the table, her head within a small, extra-sensitive tube, as in an MRI. She was asleep.
“This is what you do in Borderline?” Ramira asked. Her eyes traveled from the seventh-floor machine to her own brain monitors, to the empty white room beyond the window. Everything was spotless clean and glistening, and certainly it was an impressive room – but not what she would expect from a Borderline one.
Warner smiled, as if he was reading her thoughts. “Not exactly,” he replied. “This is something new I’m attempting. I – I don’t know if you’ll be able to understand.” He went around her to get to the machine.
“But this seems so simple,” Ramira protested.
“You’re right, it’s a bit basic,” Warner admitted as, bending down, he squinted at one of the additions to the dream machine. “More like something they’d do on the seventh floor, actually. But what we’ll get out of it will be far beyond basic.” He chuckled as he tweaked a knob on the machine, and then stood up and looked her in the eyes. “One of the concepts we study in Borderline is making something out of nothing. We don’t really concern ourselves with it here, because those techniques are being worked on by scientists in other fields. But a few years ago, I was thinking about it, and I realized it has a lot more potential, especially in neuroscience, than anyone ever gave it credit for. I’ve been researching and planning this for years – and this is the result.” He gestured dramatically at the machine.
“But what is it?” Ramira asked. “And why do you need me?”
“I’m getting to that,” he said. “Simply put, this machine makes dreams really come true.”
“What do you mean?”
Warner sighed. “The machine is connected to Room 1001.” He pointed out of the window, then down at the woman. “She’s dreaming already, so once we turn the machine on, whatever’s happening in her dream will happen there. Everything in it will appear there – they’ll be real; physical people and objects.”
“What?” Ramira gasped, staring at him with wide eyes. “But-but how? And why?”
“You wouldn’t understand how – it’s complex Borderline science. As for the why – well, anything can happen in a dream. The laws of everything are disregarded and the people and things in it can do whatever they want. This machine brings dreams to life in that room – so there are people and things in real life disregarding nature. If we emulate what’s happening there, study and reproduce it, it would be the biggest scientific advancement ever made.”
“Can’t you already defy the laws of the universe?”
“Of course not!” Warner cried. “That’s just silly gossip! No one can defy the laws of the universe! It seems like we defy them because we go deeper into them than any other scientist could possibly understand. And there are so many laws we can’t do anything with, and so many things we can’t do at all, only study and discover! But this could be the way to do all of that! With this machine, we’d soar above everything we’ve ever done before! We wouldn’t be in Borderline any longer, Ramira; we’d be beyond the border – into a region of the universe we know nothing about. Ramira, if you help me with this test, you could be part of the most influential discovery in scientific history!”
His eyes were wide and gleaming, staring at her as if he expected her to be thrilled. But Ramira frowned.
“I don’t know about this,” she said slowly. “Doing what you do is okay, but this is more than just learning about the depths of existence. You’re trying to change reality. That’s not something that someone can just do.”
“Please, Ramira,” Warner begged, his face falling. “I’ve done so much work over the past few years – I can’t throw it all away now. I’m positive this will work.”
Ramira bit her lip. “And if it doesn’t?”
“Well, I’ve fortified the room, we can turn the machine off at a moment’s notice if need be,” Warner said. “and I’ve got our top medical staff waiting on hand in case something goes wrong. But it won’t, Ramira – please, don’t make me give up on this now. I’ve worked so hard – I can’t just throw it all away.”
Ramira sighed. “Fine. I’ll help. I hope you know what you’re doing.”
Warner’s face lit up, and he grinned at her. “Great!” he cried. “Let’s start!”
“What about her?” Ramira pointed at the woman in the machine.
“I checked her status before you came. I chose you to help me because I wanted a friend with me – and because you’re a genius in your field. You need to monitor her brain status during the experiment – we’re drawing a lot of information from her and something could go wrong. There are some other jobs I need help with, too – but those will happen after the test, when, hopefully, we’ll have an alternate reality over there in Room 1001. For now, just look over the monitor and I’ll turn the machine on.”
Ramira sat down by the main brain monitor, resting her hand on the mouse. After carefully examining the diagrams on the screen, making sure that everything was normal, she told Warner to go ahead.
Her friend went excitedly to the machine and, his hands visibly trembling, pressed a red button on one of the add-ons. Room 1000’s lights switched off and a beacon-like beam shone upwards from the tube-like part of the machine as it delved into the woman’s brain, analyzing her brain activity.
Ramira anxiously checked the monitors again, trying to see if there was anything out of the ordinary happening. Her eyes raked the screens, taking in everything in front of her. It was only because she was looking so hard that she noticed it, the most minute of changes in the diagram: somehow, the brain seemed a tiny bit more compressed than it should. She frowned, opening her mouth to tell Warner, but at that moment he cried, “Look!”
Ramira turned, then ran to the window.
There, inside Room 1001, stood a woman, the spitting image of the one lying on the table. She was standing in the middle, fiddling with a silver watch on her wrist. Ramira glanced back at the real woman and saw that the same watch was on hers as well.
As Ramira and Warner watched, cars began to appear on the other side of the room, with asphalt beneath them. The cars appeared, drove across the room, and then disappeared just before they hit the opposite wall. Ramira knew they weren’t an optical illusion; she could hear them and smell their exhaust.
The dream-woman looked up from her watch, then started walking towards the cars – it seemed that she was trying to cross the street. Ramira suddenly realized that the woman’s shoelaces had come untied – one moment they were tied, and the next, they weren’t. Near the road, the woman tripped over them, catching herself before she fell with a little exclamation. She bent down to tie the laces.
Then a car suddenly swerved out of its path, heading full-tilt towards the woman. She kept tying her shoe, quite oblivious. Then another car, moving in the opposite direction, swerved too – straight at the first one. Ramira winced.
The cars crashed violently into each other, throwing themselves and the woman across the room. The other cars in the room disappeared and reappeared, then disappeared again, like a glitch on a computer screen.
Within 1000 there was a rumble, like an earthquake. Ramira staggered backwards as the floor underneath her shook and heaved, making her tilt and wobble. Tripping over her own feet, she fell with a yelp, landing hard on the floor.
“It’s alright!” Warner cried from where he, too, had fallen. “The room is fully fortified! It’ll stop in a moment!”
But Ramira wasn’t listening; she could hear something. It was faint over the rumbling of the tumultuous room, but loud enough to chill her blood: a beeping from the monitor. As the room stilled, she scrambled up and stared at the image on the screen.
The woman’s brain was imploding. Different brain centers seemed to crumple as they were sucked towards the center of the diagram, seemingly vanishing there. It was like a whirling vortex in the center, dragging the brain into nothingness, pulling everything in like a black hole. For a moment Ramira stood motionless, then panic seized her, and she screamed.
“What?” Warner cried, running over.
“Her brain! It’s – it’s shrinking! Stop it, stop it, STOP IT!” She turned and lunged for the button on the machine, slamming her fist into it as hard as she could. The beacon immediately disappeared and the room’s lights turned back on. The machine shut off.
Trembling, her breath coming in gasps, Ramira turned slowly back to the monitor, hoping wholeheartedly that, by some miracle, the woman’s brain had stopped shrinking, that she could still be saved, but-
The brain was still crumpling, fats and grey matter being ripped apart and pushed back together as the organ caved in on itself. Every electrical signal was pulsing, as though the brain were screaming for help. And in the center, tissues were disappearing, being vacuumed into oblivion.
Warner and Ramira stared at the screen, their eyes wide, unable to look away from the image in front of them. On the table, the woman gave a sound between a groan and a scream. They still didn’t move.
A terrible scream from Room 1001 startled them out of their trance. They both jumped, swiveling towards the window. Within 1001 the road had disappeared, but the crashed cars lay in a mangled heap against the far wall, their parts strewn about the room. The dream-woman was lying flat on her back on top of them – and Ramira and Warner saw, horrified, that her limbs were mangled and destroyed. She was lying in a pool of her own blood. Dark red and glistening, it pulsed away from her, dripping slowly onto the blank white floor. She screamed again – but weakly this time.
Ramira looked helplessly around her. Her eyes moved from the dying woman in 1001, to the motionless one in the machine, to the monitor, from which the brain had vanished entirely. Finally, she looked at her friend.
“What have we done?”