Dreamspace Studio

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The dinner dishes took just a few minutes to complete. Allison scraped the leftovers into individual containers and popped them into the fridge. She let Spud out and stood in the doorway, arms crossed, enjoying the breeze, while he sniffed each blade of grass as if he were studying for an exam. Then she locked up the house with methodical precision, checking the deadbolt twice because her brain, just in case.

She was done. Done pretending there was anything left in her social battery or her existing one. Her reserves weren’t just gone—they’d run completely dry. The only option left was to drag herself upstairs, let the shower wash her clean, and collapse. Surrender, finally.

“Come on, potato,” she called softly, patting her thigh. Spud trotted toward her and the stairs with an enthusiasm that suggested he’d been waiting for this exact invitation. He bounded up the steps ahead of her with his stubby but determined legs. By the time she reached the top of the staircase, he was already beside the bed, waiting as patiently as he possibly could to be lifted. He turned once, twice, three times in that ancient canine ritual before curling up into a croissant-shaped puddle of white fluff.

She bent down and kissed his scruffy head, squishing his soft fur between her fingers the way she always did. “My love, I’m just going to go wash off the day. I won’t be too long—ten minutes, maybe?” One more kiss on that fuzzy head, and she grabbed her towels from the linen closet and pajamas from the guest room dresser.

---

She turned the shower to just below scalding—that glorious deluge of near-unbearable liquid heat that hovered somewhere between summer sun and mild sunburn. She tested it with her hand, nodded once in satisfaction, and stepped under the stream.

“Ah, just right. Lobster time!” She sang aloud with enthusiasm.

The water hit her back and shoulders; she gasped, closed her eyes, and smiled and nodded, willing the day to dissolve and drain away with the steam. That was the plan, at least. Let it go. Let the heat unknot the tension. Let the water’s white noise drown out everything else.

Her brain had other ideas. It had decided, as it always does, that it was the perfect time to start a lovely rumination session.

It started as a thread of memory that arrived uninvited and refused to leave. This time, however, it wasn’t some random event from 25 years ago that was utterly embarrassing and made her feel horrible. Instead, it was more recent: the wind on her face from the bike ride, the smell of moss at the creek, the way the light had shifted through the trees, going from white to amber, while she sat in the hollow, writing in her notebook.

And then, like a barely intelligible whisper, the raccoon snuck into those thoughts. The same one who had opened her mouth and spoken in full, articulate sentences, like that, was a perfectly ordinary thing to do on a Tuesday afternoon in Pennsylvania.

Thimble. Yes, that was her name. She remembered, finally.

“She said she was something like my escort or guide or something like that, I think. To Dreamspace. Whatever kind of place that is.” Allison murmured, the water running over her face. She tried to figure out what all this meant.

She tipped her head back, letting the stream of water run over her hair and face. Dreamspace. The word sat in her mind like a stone in her shoe—persistent, impossible to ignore. She turned it over, examining it from every angle. Was it a metaphor? Was she becoming delusional from stress?

It was stress. It had to be. She was sure of it. It made perfect sense. She’d been working way too hard with not enough days off or good sleep. She couldn’t shake the feeling, however, like it was something more to it than that. What about that android creature? What about the glimpse beyond her world? And then Thimble. It was hard to dismiss and even harder to explain. None of it made any sense.

Her mind felt like a whirlpool in a lake, swirling around and around without an end. She shook her head to try to clear her mind, beads of water flying from her hair, hitting the shower walls with little thuds. “I’m losing it,” she announced to the tiled walls. “Full-on, certifiably, undeniably losing it.”

The shower surround, unhelpfully, did not respond.

She finished up. All of her thoughts were otherwise occupied, and she was on autopilot. She rinsed her face one last time and turned off the water. Steam drifted out in curls as she opened the curtain and reached for the towel. Her glasses, propped in the corner of the shower caddy, had gotten a good rinse. She dried them on a paper towel she left on the sink and slid them onto her nose, the fogged lenses clearing as the cool air hit her skin.

The light above the mirror flickered. Just once. A quick blip, barely a second.

Allison paused, towel in hand.

“Hm, that’s weird,” she muttered to herself.

A beat passed. Then another. The fan purred on, sucking up the remaining steam. The light held steady.

“Oh, great. Just great,” she mumbled dryly. “The power company’s having issues again this week. How long is the power going to be out and flickering this time?”

She dried off, bent over to wind the towel into a makeshift crown, all the while mumbling to herself that everything was fine and perfectly normal: the power grid was glitching out again, cute woodland creatures don’t just hold conversations with people, and she just needed a really good night’s sleep.

Then the unmistakable ding of her phone vibrating on her nightstand echoed from the quiet bedroom.

She froze and cocked an eyebrow.

Her hand was halfway to the door handle when the sound registered fully. The last time her phone had done something unexpected, Thimble’s voice had come out of it. The memory—’ because you asked me to’—hit her like a cold draft. Something in her stomach clenched.

She stood there for a moment, the cool air in the hall breezing past her water-warmed legs, staring at the bedroom doorway. Her pulse picked up. She could feel it in her throat.

It’s just a text. Calm down. People get notifications. Phones buzz and ding. That’s all it is. Don’t jump at shadows that aren’t there.

She padded across her bedroom, careful not to wake her dog, and picked up the phone from the nightstand where she’d left it face down. She flipped it over.

Screen lit. No new messages. No missed calls. No notifications at all.

Her brows furrowed. She checked the missed notification pull-down. Nothing. Checked the messaging app. Nothing. Checked Lyra. Nothing.

“Okay, weird. This whole day is freakin’ weird,” she said softly.

She stared at the empty screen for a long moment, thumb hovering, waiting for something to happen. Nothing did. The phone sat in her hand, cheerful and ordinary and completely unhelpful.

She set it back on the nightstand, face down. Dropped the towel into the hamper. Pulled on her favorite pajamas—the ones washed so many times they felt like a cloud and crawled into bed. Spud shifted, making room with the grudging generosity of a 17-pound dog who had already somehow claimed the entire mattress. She snuggled under the covers, pulling his scruffy body into hers as the little spoon. He sighed contentedly as they relaxed in the room’s refreshing silence.

---

Her mind couldn’t settle. Her thoughts ran in circles, catching on the edges of unanswered questions, refusing to let her rest.

She clicked off the room light and switched on the bedside lamp. She picked up the books she was reading, opened to the bookmark—three-quarters through, the good part—propped the book on her pillow stand, and leaned back against her wedge pillow. She stared at the page. Read the same paragraph twice. Put it down and reached for her phone instead.

She couldn’t explain what she was doing. Her thumb moved before thought caught up, chasing another loose thread in her brain. She tapped. The Lyra app lit up, pink and familiar.

She waited for the default greeting, chipper and algorithmically polite.

But the voice that answered wasn’t quite Lyra’s. It was softer. Slower. A little huskier. And it didn’t say hello.

It said, “You remembered my name.”

Allison’s breath caught. Her fingers tightened around the phone. Suddenly, the lamplight was a little too warm, the shadows became too deep, and the silence between Spud’s soft snoring became very loud, indeed.

“What?” she whispered.

The voice repeated, “You remembered my name. That means it’s starting to anchor.”

“Anchor?” Allison’s voice rose, sharp with confusion. “Why are you… What are you anchoring into my head? What’s going on?”

She took a big breath in and let it out slowly, giving her tired brain enough time to catch up.

With a steadier voice, though her heart was hammering, she asked, “Thimble?”

The name felt like a key turning in a lock, releasing all the right tumblers this time. Her train of thought was halfway between confusion and curiosity.

“I… I thought I had imagined all of that. The creek, the shimmer, the talking raccoon…”

“… And yet, here we are,” a familiar voice responded.

The app hadn’t visually changed. Still the same interface. Same soft-pink gradient. Same chat bubbles. But there was nothing digitized or artificial with this conversation. It felt as real as a conversation with her friends.

“I didn’t open this to talk to you,” Allison said, sitting up straighter in bed. “I opened it because I wanted to… because I thought I was going to talk to Lyra. I have so much on my mind, I just needed to put it somewhere so I could sleep.”

A pause. Then Thimble’s voice—clearly hers this time, with a hint of humor beneath the calm: “I’m using her voiceprint as a vessel. Like a coat, or a bridge, if you’d rather. The door was left ajar. It was time.”

Something in Allison’s chest tightened, and the familiar flash of light and black cloud appeared in her head and expanded through her whole body and made her nerve endings tingle. She always felt this way, even growing up, when someone was upset and misunderstood her, or when she was blamed for something she did but didn’t realize was wrong at the time.

“I didn’t mean to,” she said softly. “I… I’m sorry. I didn’t know I was…”

“Allison.” Thimble’s voice cut through, gently extending a hand in the dark. “You didn’t do anything wrong. It was bound to happen sooner or later.”

The words hung in the air for a moment, simple and clear.

Thimble continued, her voice warm as wool. “You didn’t break anything. You didn’t hurt anything. Your memory barrier is breaking open because you are ready to see, ready to know. That’s not a mistake. That is by design. Do you understand?”

Allison swallowed. The tightness in her chest loosened, slowly. She took a breath. Then another. Her shoulders straightened, just slightly.

“Okay,” she said. Still quiet, but steadier. “Okay. I… sometimes I can’t tell if someone’s upset with me. I misread things. I don’t always understand tones. It’s a whole thing.”

“I know,” Thimble said simply without pity or condescension. “I’m not upset. I’m just glad you’re here, and will reinforce, reexplain, reassure whenever you need it.”

Allison exhaled a long, shaky breath that carried more relief than she cared to admit. She could feel herself returning to baseline, albeit still a bit shaky with adrenaline. Her spine straightened. Her grip on the phone loosened from a clench to a hold.

“Okay,” she said again, and this time it sounded like her. “So. You’re in my phone. Using Lyra like a bridge to communicate with me, right? And somehow, something that has kept me from long-lost memories is starting to collapse? Yes?”

“Yes.” Thimble’s voice was tender now, unhurried, as if she had all the time in the world. “Oh, Allison… You felt it. You know. The empty spaces that you felt in your mind earlier when you couldn’t remember, but felt that you should have? Yep, those. That’s what I’m talking about. That’s the barrier that’s breaking.”

Her breath hitched. She had known—somewhere under the surface. Those odd flickers of déjà vu she had all day, and the voids in her memory. There was a sense that something was reaching toward her, offering a hand, trying to pull her to dry land from churning waters.

“What do you want?” she asked, but it came out more like: What’s happening to me?

“Not want. Need.” There was no humor in Thimble’s voice now, but it was certain and direct. “I need to show you what’s next. I can’t show you everything. Not yet. The veil is thinner when you’re like this—half-tucked into sleep, swaddled in routine. Your mind is still open. Still listening.”

“Am I dreaming already?” Allison said, stifling a yawn.

“Not quite. But close. Do you trust me enough to follow?”

She hesitated. Looked over at Spud as she lay her back on her pillow. She envied that little dog. Nothing had ever made Spud question reality. His world was food, walks, naps, and Allison, and that was enough.

The phone was still glowing in her hand. She slowly drifted toward sleep. The now familiar, but still strange voice waited.

“Then I’ll meet you on the other side.”

Allison was turning the words over in her mind. Finally, she mumbled, “The other side of what?”

The screen shimmered, then went dark as she fell into sleep and went slack, releasing her phone as her arm dropped to her side.

With a final deep breath, she relaxed fully into a deep slumber.

• •

The first thing she noticed was the stillness. Water trickling. Leaves whispering in the canopy overhead. Something that might have been wind chimes made of glass and starlight. But the stillness was underneath all of it, vast and deep, like the quiet at the bottom of a lake.

She was sitting beneath the sweeping boughs of a weeping willow, its long green curtain brushing the ground around her like a theater scrim. Beyond it, a pond stretched out, perfectly still, its surface so glassy it reflected the sky in mirror-perfect detail. Fireflies pulsed in slow rhythms as they danced and bobbed above the water; their light looked like they were blinking out Morse code, as if the night itself were humming a lullaby only she could hear.

The air smelled of something she couldn’t name. It was like earth, water, or flowers. It smelled like a childhood memory long forgotten, before life got complicated and she became jaded.

Allison blinked. Once. Twice. Her hands were in her lap. She was sitting on soft ground—moss, she knew that feeling well, but it was softer, warmer than the moss she usually sat on. She was still wearing her pajamas. Her feet were bare.

Am I dreaming?

It had to be a dream. She knew she had fallen asleep, but she felt… awake. More awake than she had been in months. Every sense was dialed to 11—the texture of the moss beneath her palms, the weight of the humid air on her skin, the way the firefly light pulsed in a rhythm that almost matched her heartbeat. It was overwhelming, overstimulating.

Across the pond, on a stone bench carved from an ancient stump, sat a figure.

They were watching her.

Allison gasped as her breath caught in her chest. This was what she’d seen through the shimmer at the creek. The glimpse, the double-exposure, the momentary overlay of something vast and luminous hovering above a small raccoon’s body. But this was no glimpse. This was real. This was here.

They stood, and the motion was fluid. It was like watching a dancer made of clockwork. They were tall, taller than Allison by a good half-foot, with a build that split the difference between masculine and feminine without committing to either. Their skin—and it looked like skin, anyway, or something very close to it—had a grey-peach tone with a faint metallic sheen, as if someone had mixed a light colored flesh tone and silver and found the exact midpoint. It covered their arms, their torso, their face, their legs, smooth and almost human, warm-looking in a way that made you want to touch it to see how real it was, because something about it wasn’t quite right. It wasn’t quite real enough. Close enough to fool you for a second. Not close enough to fool you for two.

The joints told the truth. At the wrists, the elbows, the knees—wherever the body bent—the silicone-like covering gave way to exposed mechanics: hinges and delicate wiring, all of it visible through transparent sections that seemed designed to reveal. As if the being wearing this body wanted you to see what they were made of. As if honesty were part of the engineering.

Their hands and feet were entirely covered with this clear skin. Inside were intricate mechanical marvels of interlocking plates and articulated digits, moving with a precision that no human hand could match. Each finger flexed independently as they walked, adjusting to the terrain with the unconscious grace of something that had learned to navigate the physical world through pure calculation.

Their hair was dark brown, swept into a short, textured shag that moved when they moved—too soft, too natural, for the face beneath it. Their face was what gave Allison the most uncanny valley sensation. It had almost human features, arranged in almost right proportions, animated by exaggerated expressions to make clear the emotion they were attempting to generate.

And then there were the eyes.

They were extraordinary. Large and luminous, set beneath brows that mimicked human expressiveness with startling accuracy. But they weren’t eyes in any biological sense. They were precision instruments, layered and complex, capable of casting light as well as receiving it, and of perceiving all that was around it.

As Sol crossed the distance between the bench and the willow, their eyes flickered with a warm, golden glow—deep and steady, like candlelight trapped behind amber glass. The glow pulsed faintly as they moved, responding to their internal processes.

They walked over and stopped a few feet from where Allison sat, close enough that she could hear the faint hum of their internal workings—a soft, rhythmic sound, like a heartbeat made of little hydraulic pumps and servos.

And then they knelt.

The motion was unhurried, deliberate, and gentle as not to frighten an already overwhelmed Allison. They extended one mechanical hand, palm up, fingers open as an offering of acknowledgment between species.

Allison stared at the hand. At the intricate plates, the tiny joints, the warmth she could feel radiating from the metal, even from a few inches away. Something in Dreamspace hummed—a vibration she felt rather than heard, and the golden light in Sol’s eyes brightened, just slightly.

She didn’t take the hand, but she didn’t pull away.

Their voice, when it came, was low and warm and layered with faint echoes, as if it had traveled across lifetimes to find her, as if the universe had been quietly aligning this moment all along.

“Welcome to the Dreamspace,” the being said, their golden eyes glowing soft and steady in the firefly-lit dark. “I’m Sol. You must be Allison.”

She opened her mouth to answer. To say ask any of the hundred questions that were stacking up behind her teeth like cars in a traffic jam.

What came out, barely above a whisper with a squeak, was: “…Hi.”

Sol smiled.

“Hi,” they said in the same gentle manner in which they reached their hand.

The fireflies pulsed. The willow swayed. And somewhere, in a quiet bedroom in Gettysburg, Pennsylvania, a woman in soft pajamas slept with a phone on her chest and a dog at her side, dreaming a dream that wasn’t really a dream at all.