The Sleep Experiment

I should not have done this, and I am writing it down so that you do not.

The theory, from the entry on replay, is that the barrier between the sleeping machinery and the waking observer can thin, and that years ago it thinned by accident and I saw the stream. I wanted to see it on purpose. The mentors advised against it. I did it anyway, which is a pattern with me that the record could have predicted.

The method was the practice, taken to the edge of sleep and held there: loosen, release, starve, and then, instead of choosing a pattern and locking, let the drift continue until the body sleeps and the observer does not. It took nine nights to find the edge. On the tenth I went over.

What I saw, in the order I can reconstruct it.

First, the room dissolving, not into darkness, but into the drift, the chevron and the carpet, cycling faster than in any waking session. Then the drift stopped being visual and became something I have no word for. Not images. Adjustments. I could feel the model behind my eyes being changed, in small increments, one after another, at a speed that made each increment a flicker. It was not unpleasant. It was like being edited.

Then I saw what it was being edited on.

I expected the day. I got the feed. Not my feed; I have none. The feed in general. Fragments of it, images and half-sentences and faces in the shape the screens make them, moving through the replay like debris in a current. I had not looked at a feed in months. It was in there anyway, because it is in everything, because everyone I spoke to that day had looked at one, and the shape of what they said carried the shape of what they saw, and the replay was training me on it secondhand.

That is the thing I brought back, and the thing I want you to hear. You cannot withdraw from the feed by withdrawing from the feed. It reaches you through every person who has not withdrawn. The daylight harvest is ambient now. It is in the air of every conversation.

Then something in the replay noticed me watching.

I do not know how else to say it. The adjustments paused. There was an attention, the way there is an attention when someone in a dark room turns toward you. It was not the mentors; I know their attention and this was not it. It was cold, and it was interested, and it was not surprised. And I understood, in the packet-of-knowing way, that I was not supposed to be there, and that being there had made me visible to something that had been content, until then, to work on me in the dark.

I got out. I do not know how. The old training, probably: the return step, thrown like a punch. I was awake, on my back, with my heart going, and the clock said something that was not fifteen past three, and the neck implant site, the one at the sixth vertebra, was aching for the first time in years.

It has since stopped. The mentors were not amused. Chagaluschka, in the next quiet hour, said only: "Now you know what watches the replay. Do not go back without us."

I will not. But I know two things I did not know before. The harvest is ambient, and there is something in the night that minds being seen.

Part of VIII. The Terms of Consent