The Man in the Black Suit knew a great detail about the room he was in. That wasn’t the issue.

Rather, he was concerned by the fact that the room he was in was the only thing he seemed to possess any knowledge on whatsoever. He stretched a hand out towards the brickwork. Speckled brown and black, the kind that would catch on the fibres of your woollen jumper when, in a crowded hallway, you rubbed up against it.

He looked at the windows. Old, with the white-painted softwood frames that you could dent with a fingernail, and a half-glaze that did little other than muddy the midday light.

He took a breath. The smell, biting, of industrial-grade lemon-scented disinfectant, that was as welcome as it was repugnant.

Above all, with every breath, and gaze, and gesture, the Man in the Black Suit knew something was  wrong about the room, in the same dull, detached way that he knew, he knew, without looking, that the mustard-yellow carpet was immaculately clean, and smelled faintly of vanilla. Precisely what was wrong kept escaping him; a faint shadow in the corner of his memory that vanished every time he turned his attention towards it.

He thought back to earlier in the day – it must be daytime; he could see the sunlight through the window – to how he’d ended up here.

Nothing.

The date.

Nothing.

His name.

Nothing.

The Man in the Black Suit took a deep breath and shifted his gaze, staring at the blue door, covered with a double coat of paint for durability because heaven knew the children were always scratching at it–

Children. The thought came unbidden, and the Man in the Black Suit latched onto it before it escaped. It was a preschool. The knowledge settled uncomfortably into the back of his mind, almost a memory; as if he’d known from the minute he’d walked into the room just what the building was, but had waited until that moment to cognize it.

And now he saw other things. The melamine-paneled shelves full of picture books, all facing cover-forward like a row of so many supermarket items. The toys strewn haphazardly across the floor as if in some bizarre augury, some missing limbs, or wheels. Above all, the room was suddenly bright, and always had been.

The Man in the Black Suit screwed his eyes shut to block it all out, thinking furiously, trying to tie this sudden awareness to an event, or place, or person. Something, anything, that gave context to the situation.

Nothing.

The Man in the Black Suit screamed, a feral, deep-throated scream that dragged on, and on, and left him doubled-over and gasping for air in the overwhelming silence.

The silence.

The Man in the Black Suit flinched at the sudden comprehension.

It was a preschool, but there were no children. No carers. No staff. No cars in the driveway, nor sounds of traffic in the distance, nor wind rustling through the trees, no birds in the garden, no people, no movement, no sound.

Nothing.

And with this realisation, finally, like an ocean held back by a wall now breached, came a flood of memories. A moment in a café, a conversation, with another man in another suit.  A moment where the whole world had distorted, and a moment where the whole room had folded back in on itself, and then unfolded into nothingness.

And then the moment he’d found himself here, in this dreamlike room, unknowing and alone.

The Man in the Black Suit looked up.

There was a knock at the door.
 

---

Diaz walked at a brisk pace, glancing furtively to the side.

What set him on edge, more than the way the whitewashed buildings all blended together, more than the how the long, narrows streets all lead to the same place, and more than the way the evening sky stopped just before it reached the horizon, leaving an ever-changing void between land and the cloud that was at any given moment filled by a backdrop of mountains, or a dark, smog-covered city, or whatever other fragmented memory Pablo had conjured up, were the occasional trees on the sidewalk.

Perhaps it was the way each leaf seemed to occupy two or three places at once, and the way the shadows always seemed to take a few seconds to catch up. Perhaps it was because they were the only ‘living’ things in the dream, save Pablo, Diaz and their mark. Perhaps it was the fatigue starting to get to him.

Hell if he knew.

Pablo must have caught him staring, because the next moment Diaz felt a thick arm patting him on the back, and turned to see Pablo giving him a toothy grin.  

 “Gotta problem with ‘em, Di? Rememba what happened last time we let you be the Drafter, eh?”

Diaz kept walking. He was too tired to play that game today.

Drafter and Seeder. Two men, one job, and some bloody good pay. The Drafter’s job was to make and hold the dream together; the Seeder’s was to cover interactions with the mark.

The whole process was terribly illegal, of course. Terribly, terribly illegal. First and foremost were all the obvious reasons; the invasion of privacy, violation of the sanctity of the individual, yada yada yada. You could say those about most petty crimes.

Dreamjacking, though, was especially frowned upon ‘cause of how often it left the mark without any of their seeded memories. Seed a guy to have dreams about his holiday down the coast last spring? After waking up, he’d swear he’d never heard of the place. Seed a guy with memories of his wife? His kids? Odds were he wouldn’t even remember their names, let alone recognize them.

And that was the bit that turned Diaz’s stomach.

But he’d never walked out on a job.  Yeah, largely because of the pay, but also ‘cause it wouldn’t actually change anything. Whilst good Seeders were about as uncommon as good Drafters, they were hardly a rarity. Diaz knew he was replaceable. Hell; Pablo, as good a Drafter as he was, was hardly the poster boy of job security. The way Diaz saw it, he either he did the job and took home the cash, or some other thug did. Poor soul on the receiving end was going to get it anyway, so there was no use in getting worked up about the whole thing. Business was business.

Course, that didn’t mean he had to enjoy it.

Sck.

Diaz glanced over at a grinning Pablo, and then quickly back other way as Pablo’s face suddenly distorted, his nose sinking into his face, his jaw contracting and lengthening. His whole body followed, muscles and tendons and bones rippling and changing beneath his skin. In a few short moments, paunchy, buck-toothed Pablo was gone; a slim, tan-skinned black-suited man in his place. “You used to laugh at that, you know,” Pablo said after a moment.

“No, I didn’t,” Diaz replied, his gaze firmly on the footpath.

“I’m sure you did.”

“Nope.”

“Not even once?” Pablo said plaintively.

Diaz raised an eyebrow, and shook his head in bemusement.

The first step involved…well, the first step was getting close enough to the mark, and that was a whole other ballgame in and of itself. But once you were close enough to get to work, the first step was to set up the seeding dream. Pablo created the dream, and Diaz went to work.

The whole purpose of the charade was to influence the mark’s next dream; a conversation with Diaz, combined with a little technological trickery, would subtly shape the places within the mark’s next dreamscape, and the associated emotions and memories. Any sufficiently expensive wetware could create a dream, and fill it with places and memories from the subjects mind. But that was akin to sitting around living through your old memories; fun at first, sure, but nothing new. Dreamjacking allowed the acquisition of authentic, emotionally coherent, lucid dreams that sold for a hefty price.

Diaz glanced at the one around him, noticing how the houses were distinct buildings now, and the gap between sky and ground had vanished. They were getting close.

“Last one, yeah?” he said, as much a statement as it was a question.

“Correct,” said Pablo. “One more, and you can go on your merry way. How does it feel to be retiring, old man?”

“Good grief, I feel old today.” Diaz replied. “Lost track of how many we’ve run tonight.”

And truth be told, he was tired. Dreamjacking was never just the seeding and harvesting of a single dream; rather, the mark would be seeded, harvested, and reseeded over and over in the one session. Whilst the mark lost his knowledge of the situation after every round, the Seeder and Drafter retained full comprehension. Unless you were as god-forsaken tired as Diaz was, and started forgetting anyway.        

“Five, by my count,” said Pablo. “Which makes this the last. Ready?”

It wasn’t a question, not really. Of course he was ready; what other choice was there?

Diaz took a breath, released it, gave Pablo a thin smile, and nodded.




The settings for the conversations with the mark were more influenced by the mind of the mark than by the choice of Pablo or Diaz. This particular one took place in a small café in the middle of the town, as the previous five had. It was nice enough; a white wood-and-glass construction that sat at the top of a hill overlooking rolling suburban mass below. Pablo silently took a chair by the door as they entered, Diaz approaching the solitary patron.

Martino he thought. That was right.

“Buenas tardes, Martino!  How go things?”

Diaz watched the other man’s expression shift from confusion to elation, and could almost see the cogs spinning in his head. Of course they were friends. Good old Diaz. How could he possibly have forgotten him?

“Buenas tardes, Diaz! It’s been too long; I almost didn’t recognise you!”

It was that easy.

“Too long indeed, friend. What ?”

“Oh, you know, same old place up near the point,” said Martino, gesturing in in the direction of what was, currently, a coastline. “I’m not a huge fan of it myself, but mi vida gets what mi vida wants.”

Fuck. If Martino had noticed Diaz’s reaction, he didn’t give any indication of it. “And how go you and yours, hmm? “

“Same old,” said Diaz, trying to steer the topic away from family. No point damaging the man any further than they had to. “The place isn't half bad, mind you but not nearly as nice as the one you’ve got.”

Martino laughed.

The rest of the conversation passed without incident, until Diaz saw Pablo signalling out of the corner of his eye. Diaz nodded to him, standing up. Martino caught his gaze as he did so.

“So soon? Another time, perhaps?” God, but it sounded so genuine.

“Another time,” affirmed Diaz, biting his lip as he pushed his chair in and walked over to Pablo. Behind him, Martin blinked, having lost all awareness that the two of them were in the room.

During any ordinary sleep, the transitions from one dream to the next were seamless – individual ‘dreams’ were often just twist and turns of the same unwaking narrative. During dreamjacking, though, the transitions were anything but.

Diaz watched as Pablo closed his eyes, and vanished. Diaz knew that somewhere in the waking world, he was adjusting the machine that kept the three of them held together in a stable dreamscape. Diaz closed his eyes in anticipation. He hated this part. A second passed, and then a rush of air marked the moment that the room distorted, and then folded back in on itself, and then the rush became a rumble, a roar, and then thunder –

And then, silence.

---

Diaz awoke to the dream with a start.

The second step, now that Pablo had drafted the dream that Diaz had seeded, was finding Martino in it.  At which point Pablo would jab him with the Anchor, another piece of dreamjack tech, Diaz would pop back to the world of the wakeful, flick a switch, and the tech there would do the rest of the work.

Diaz looked around at where he’d appeared, rubbed his eyes, and looked around again.

Shit.

He fished a small phone out of his pocket, and hit the call button. He didn’t bother dialling. That wasn’t how these phones worked.

 “Pablo? We might have a small problem here.”

“What is it?”

Diaz told him.

There was a pause on the other end. “Shit. Where are you right now?”

“Where do you think?”

“Stay there. I’m on my way.”

Click.

Diaz looked around the interior of the building he was in, a clash of old sandstone archways and modern teller booths. It looked like a bank, sure. And on the surface, in the waking world, it was. But it also covertly served as the location that Diaz and Pablo’s employer was based, and having it show up in a mark’s memories was enough to arouse Diaz’s suspicion.

The dreamjacking of another Seeder or Drafter was usually a case of tying up loose ends in a rather permanent fashion, and was only done in the most outstanding of circumstances. And doing so without having explicit permission made Diaz very uncomfortable.

Might as well make sure.

Diaz walked across the tiled floor, footsteps ringing out in the quiet hallways. If Martino was a fellow dreamjacker, he’d be familiar with the small token placed at one of the counters to indicate which person the Seeder or Drafter was to conduct business with.

Diaz walked past the counters, giving them all a once-over.

There. A small, circular disk, an inch and a half across and a quarter of an inch thick, dark grey iron, the image of a ram with upturned horns embossed into its surface.
 
He pulled back, startled. The only time he experienced memories that vivid were in misshap dreams of his own, when he and Pablo had tried switching roles on a whim.  And it suddenly occurred to Diaz that there was another possibility he hadn’t considered.

Like a kid who gingerly bent down to check under the bed, cautious even though of course there were no monsters there, Diaz tried to summon up in his mind memories of his wife, his children. Their faces. Their names.

Nothing.

He tried again, but got the same result. Nothing, nothing, nothing.

Oh fuck. They were tying up a loose and, all right. He thought he’d just been tired; last night on the job and all.

But how? Diaz thought back to the conversation at the café, where he’d thought he’d been the one doing the seeding. But it worked both ways, didn’t it? Diaz had answered just about as many questions as he’d asked, and hadn’t seen the harm in it. Usually, there wasn’t any.

Footsteps echoed down the corridor, and Diaz ducked into a branching hallway that led out of the main foyer. He could still be wrong. It could all be a misunderstanding. It wasn’t unusual for some memories from the Seeder to leak into the dream; things they’d described in the conversation that had instilled ideas in the mark’s mind.

There was one way of checking.

Diaz followed the streets outside, not bothering to look where he was going. If he was wrong – and he fervently hoped he was – he should end up at the house Martino had described. If, on the other hand, he was right…well, he had no idea what he’d find.

Time was a difficult thing to track in dreams, and by the time the street finished in a small cul-de-sac, Diaz wasn’t sure if it had been mere minutes, since he’d been at the bank, or hours. The house at the end stood out from the others, lucidly vivid.

It was a single story brick-and-mortar design, with a rose garden out the front that took far more effort to maintain than Diaz personally thought was worth it, and large eaves that kept the sun out and the shadows long in the height of summer.

It was his house.

Retiring my ass.

Diaz walked quickly inside, and slammed the open door shut behind him.

During natural sleeping, the dreamer could easily wake themselves up, provided they were sufficiently lucid. Which, ideally, Diaz would be doing right now. ‘Course, things weren’t that simple in seeded dreams; both the dreamer and the Seeder needed to wake up at the same time, or they’d pull each other back into the dream like a pair of drowning monkeys.

The only way out of one was through the use of the Anchor - which meant that Diaz needed to find Pablo, jab him with the Anchor, and then get the hell out of dodge.

He looked mournfully around the room. The oven gloves belonged to –

Nobody.

The old jewelry box, a fabric and pearl container, made by –

Nobody.

The portrait, that hung at the end of the table, of him and –

Nobody.

Good god, but he wasn’t going to let them take this too.

Diaz forced himself to calm down, and to think. He had another problem; whilst he could make modifications to the dreamscape, and himself, he couldn’t make modifications to other dreamers. Their personal reality within the dream wouldn’t allow it to occur. So you couldn’t just will the other person dead, or injured, or unconscious; you had to do it in a way that convinced them they were.

And whilst the most obvious solution might’ve been to, say, collapse a building on them, or flood the whole place, or what will you, people similarly knew that events like that just didn’t happen.

Diaz glanced over at the pile of sports gear in the corner. Blunt trauma, on the other hand…




Pablo stood at the end of the hall, his back to Diaz, leaning against a pillar as if idly waiting for someone.

Diaz hefted his baseball bat. He started to swing, thought, and then he was next to Pablo, bat in mid-arc, the blow catching the other man on the shoulder joint. Pablo cursed and clutched at his shoulder, spinning around to face Diaz. But Diaz was already gone, catching Pablo with a blow to the back of the head from behind. Pablo dropped to the ground, stunned, and Diaz hit him with a third blow to the face for good measure.

Diaz quickly crouched over Pablo, riffling none too gently through the other man’s coat pockets for the Anchor. “You nearly bloody got me,” he said. “There never was a Martino, was there? You made him, just like every other bloody thing in this place. Why’d you do it, huh? For the pay?”

Pablo went to speak, but Diaz talked over him. “Doesn’t bloody matter. Let’s see how you like it without a family, hmm? How many times have we done this tonight?”

Clutching his head, Pablo gave Diaz a pained grin. “I told you earlier, if you were listening,” he said. “And you were wrong on one count.”

Why was he grinning?

“Oh?”

Sudden, searing agony coursed through Diaz’s entire body, every nerve on fire, and he collapsed in a heap. In the corner of his vision, Martino clutched the Anchor in an outstretched hand.

Pablo had been waiting for someone. Son of a bitch. 

Martino glanced down at the two of them, looking mildly amused.  “He was barely coherent last time, and now he’s running at us with a baseball bat?”

“Oh, stop whinging and just get it over with,” Pablo said irritably, rising to his feet, head in hands. “He wasn’t meant to dream the bank in. So what. My mistake. Hardly going to happen again, especially after a dream like this. Just get this one over with; my head’s killing me.”
Diaz watched, paralysed, as Martino shrugged, closed his eyes and vanished.  He closed his own eyes for a moment before he spoke, his voice barely more than a whisper.

“Why?”

Pablo walked over to Diaz’s prone form and squatted down in front of him. “Because the big guy upstairs called for it.” Pablo gave a pained shrug. “Hell if I know why.”

“But –“

“Look, I’m sorry Di. I really am. But it’s like you always said: if I didn’t do this, someone else would. Might as well be me getting the pay, eh?”

As Diaz went to respond, the world around him cut to black, and the buzzing of so many insects filled his ears. Scratch that, filled his head, making his mind sluggish, and slow.

So this is what it feels like. Being harvested.

The insects were everywhere. They began tearing things out of his mind. Memories. Opinions. Pleasures. Hatreds. He knew what these were as they were seized, but then the things vanished as concepts. Everything he knew about his house, his neighbours, his neighbourhood, the insects picked clean, just as they’d done with his wife, his kids.

At some point, near the end, they pulled out his comprehension of the situation itself. The seeding, the discovery, the betrayal. For a fleeting moment, he knew the magnitude of his defeat. That this was worse than dying. He would be himself no more, after this, with no idea what had been taken from him, or by whom.

And then, the Man in the Black Suit did not know even that.

---

The Man – no, Diaz, that was his name – blinked and looked around groggily, shaking his head in an attempt to clear it. Ah yes, the job. That’s what he was doing.

God he was tired.

“One more, yeah?” he asked, more to himself than anyone else.

“Correct,” said a man next to Diaz. Pablo, that was it. Good old Pablo. “One more, and you can go on your merry way. How does it feel to be retiring, old man?”

“It feels terrible,” said Diaz, yawning. “How many have we done tonight, now?”

“Six, by my count,” said Pablo. “Which makes this the last. Ready?”

Diaz blinked himself awake. He knew it wasn’t a question, that. Not really. What other choice did he have?

“Yeah,” he said. “Let’s get this over with.”