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She woke gently, a cushion of moss cradling her body. The first thing she noticed as she came to was the silence: whisper-quiet and still as if the world itself were holding its breath, just waiting for her to awaken.
Allison blinked slowly. Her vision, once blurred like breath on cold glass, began to sharpen. Fireflies had drifted into the trees. Their golden pulses were dimmer now. It was almost like they’d guided her here intentionally, and they could finally rest.
No longer startled by Allison’s appearance along the treeline, the rich natural sounds of the flora and fauna began to return. The soft hush of the breeze swelled and ebbed around her, cyclically. The harmony of crickets, katydids, and cicadas filled in the silence between lulls.
She was still beneath the willow, just like she was in the dream she was having. At least, what she thought was a dream. The moss was still warm beneath her bare feet. Her pajamas were still soft against her skin. A lake surrounded her on three sides, its water so clear and glassy that it reflected the sky above with perfect accuracy. She sat for a while on the bank of the lake, watching the fish swim around, occasionally leaping into the air and landing with a splash.
Gradually, she felt herself fully collected back into her body. Allison looked around slowly, taking it all in, and off to the side, just behind her, Sol stood tall, as still as a statue. The pearlescence of their skin caught the faint light streaming through the tree canopy in shimmering ribbons. The transparent sections of their joints revealed the minute movements of internal mechanics, and their golden eyes glowed softly as they watched Allison carefully.
“Is this real or a dream?” Allison asked, her voice tremulous with apprehension and the effort of a woman whose words are often stuck in her mind for a while after waking before she’s able to speak. Each word felt as if it were being pushed through a pond of frozen syrup. Eventually, more words made it to her mouth, and she added, “What are you?”
Sol didn’t answer at first. They tilted their head with a movement that was a little too slow and a little too precise. Allison was dealing with the bizarre feeling of the uncanny valley, while the lights in Sol’s eyes flickered and blinked as if they were processing Allison’s body language and words, studying everything about her.
“That’s the wrong question,” Sol said, finally. “But it’s one you’ll ask many times before this ends.”
Allison’s mouth opened and closed again as she tried to speak, but the words were swirling in her brain. She had hundreds of thoughts stacked up behind her teeth—panic, disbelief, wonder—but none strong enough to push through the anxiety and apprehension as she stood barefoot in an unfamiliar meadow at the edge of a forest, beside a lake, beneath a willow, talking to an android—AN ANDROID—like she was in some sci-fi flick?
“I don’t understand,” she admitted.
“You’re not supposed to,” Sol said gently. “Not yet.”
She looked down at her hands. They felt like hers: warm, solid, real. The lines on her palms, the freckle on the inside of her right index finger, the hangnail she’d picked all week—all present, all accounted for. But the grasses and moss under her feet were softer and springier than usual. It was almost too perfect and soft to be real, but too convincing to be fake.
She pressed her palm flat against the earth. Didn’t push back. Not the way real dirt does. Like the greenery, this was softer, more yielding. It was as if it were reacting to her intentionally and adjusting to her pressure rather than resisting it.
There was a dissonance. Her brain insisted none of this could be real, but her senses refused to agree. She was here. She could feel the breeze on her arms. She could smell the comforting scent of trees, soil, and mushrooms that she was used to from biking on trails. She could also hear the creek somewhere behind the willows, murmuring in a language almost like words. It was real. It had to be. Her dreams don’t feel as defined as this.
“Am I dreaming?” she asked, her voice steadier now but edged with trepidation. “Is this… is any of this real?”
Sol gave the faintest smile. “Is it real? Is it fake? Is it a dream? So full of questions you are. It seems you are trying to pin it down. Like naming it will make your brain understand it.”
“Wouldn’t you?” she snapped. “I fell asleep in my bed reading a book, and now I’m here talking to… whatever you are. Robot? Android? None of this makes any sense.”
Sol’s expression didn’t falter. Their eyes dimmed for just a moment. “Android. And not everything is so black or white, real or fantasy,” they said. “You’ve gone beyond that.”
Allison exhaled slowly. Her fingers curled desperately into the grass, clinging tight as if grounding herself against the quiet surge of panic building in her veins. Her pulse thundered in her ears: a quiet but urgent drum desperate to break free.
“Yeah, I’m learning that about this place, real quick,” she said.
Sol chuckled. The sound was tinny, melodic, and mechanical, like a music box that had learned to laugh. “So I’ve been told.”
Sol began to walk toward the tree line and the path that wound between the willows into the deeper dark beyond. They moved with their just-a-little-too-smooth, practiced gait. Every step was precise, each joint articulating with a soft whisper of metal on metal, with only the occasional hitch. They didn’t look back. They didn’t need to. They already knew she’d follow.
And she did. Because the alternative was sitting alone under a willow in a world she didn’t understand. Sol was cryptic and strange, but they were the only thing that was remotely familiar here.
She pushed herself to her feet, wobbly at first, like a baby giraffe finding their legs for the first time. The grass was cool beneath her bare feet. The breeze brushed her arms with a deliberate gentleness, as if the air itself were guiding her with care.
They walked in silence for a few moments. The willows bowed around them, their long curtains of leaves parting like a theater’s stage curtains as they passed, revealing the path ahead in stages—a few steps at a time. As if this realm were unfolding itself just for them, at its own pace.
“Where are we, really?” Allison asked.
Sol didn’t stop walking. “A threshold.”
“That’s not an answer.”
“It’s the only one that fits right now.”
Allison huffed through her nose, then kicked at a stone on the path. It slid farther than it should have. It glided across the ground without being stopped by any friction. Here, gravity was more of a suggestion than a rule. She watched it skitter and come to rest against a root. She filed the observation away in the growing mental folder labeled Things That Are Definitely Not Normal.
Sol spoke again before she could: “You’re asking yourself whether you’re still asleep.”
Allison’s stride faltered. “I wasn’t…”
“But you were about to. And no. You’re not.”
“How do you do that?”
Sol’s golden eyes pulsed faintly. “Your thoughts are not as quiet in here as you think, especially not here.”
The words landed like a stone skipping across the quiet water of a pond. Allison stopped walking. Her arms snapped tight across her chest—an instinctive shield she’d learned to raise as a child. Heat flashed across her cheeks, anxiety prickling up her neck as she felt suddenly, intensely exposed. Her need to pace away the feeling of overwhelm was as intense as ever, in a new, unfamiliar place.
Her whole life, she’d built walls. Careful, meticulous walls around her neurodivergence of masking, scripting, and performative normality. All to keep her inner world invisible. It kept her ‘ordinary’; that kept her safe. She’d gotten good at it, so good, in fact, that most people never suspected the exhausting effort it took to appear effortless. The mask was her masterpiece. Now she was in a place where it didn’t work.
“My thoughts? Can it hear my thoughts? How?” Allison asked, looking around as she turned in a circle, trying to take in everything. Her voice came out meek. “Everything I’m thinking?”
Sol turned to face her. Their expression softened in the arrangement of those almost-human features, and the golden light in their eyes dimmed to a warm, low, nightlight-like glow, as if left on for a child who’s afraid of the dark.
“Not hear, exactly, and not at all like surveillance. There are no security systems here,” they said carefully. “Instead, It’s more like… Dreamspace is in tune with your internal frequency. This place responds to you, Allison. To your emotions, your memories, your thoughts. When you feel something strongly, the Dreamspace feels it. I feel it too. Everyone here does.” Sol paused. “It’s so very deeply connected to you. The distinction matters.”
“Does it, though?” she asked with a squint and a hint of sass, and she meant it. Because from where she stood, feeling vulnerable, naked, and perceived by her private thoughts in a world that could apparently read her mind, the difference between being watched and being heard felt as fragile as wet rice paper.
“Yes,” Sol said. “Being watched is about control. Being heard is about being known. This place wants to know you. Not to use what it finds, to hold it or use it against you.” They tilted their head. “Dreamspace keeps you and your thoughts more like an oath than a secret.”
Allison stood utterly motionless for a long moment, every still muscle tight; her mind spooling with thoughts as the breeze whispered through the willows. She watched a firefly sitting on a nearby leaf behind her; its blinking lantern segments seemed to give her another kind of answer—soft flickers that returned her need for reassurance.
She took a deep breath, letting it out as her body began to relax, and unfolded her arms, letting them drop just a fraction—a small act of trust that left her chest aching from the tension she had just released.
“Okay,” she said quietly. “I don’t love it. But okay, I guess.”
Sol nodded with a Cheshire grin. And they kept walking.
“It’s almost like you know me,” Allison muttered after a stretch of silence filled only with their footsteps and the soft ambient hum of the Dreamspace. “But how? I’ve never met you before in my life.”
Sol’s pace didn’t change. But something in their bearing shifted—a servo whirr, a soft wisp of air; it was subtle, like a sigh. Could an android sigh? They turned their head toward Allison, their golden eyes dimming slightly, and when they spoke, their voices were quieter. Almost wistful.
“Maybe you have,” they said. “Maybe you haven’t. Memory isn’t a straight line here.” Their gaze drifted toward the trees, watching something move just beyond the edge of sight—a flicker of light, a tremor in the air. “Sometimes this place feels like deja vu, or a thought you forgot the moment you walked into another room.”
Allison didn’t know what to say to that. She looked down at the path instead, watching her bare feet move across the smooth stones.
And then she saw it.
Words. Etched into the stone beneath her feet. Carved in a hand she recognized instantly, because it was her own—the particular slant of her letters, the way her g’s looped wide and her t’s crossed high. The ink was different than her usual purple gel pen. It was luminous, like the words had been written in light and then pressed indelibly into the face of a boulder along the pathway.
…and she knew the silence wasn’t empty, but waiting.
Allison stopped so abruptly that she nearly stumbled. Her breath caught in her throat, sharp and sudden, like she’d been punched somewhere she didn’t have a name for.
“I wrote that,” she whispered.
“I know,” Sol said.
“Last week.”
“Yes.”
“In. My. Private. Diary!”
“Yes. You. Did!”
“But how?” Allison huffed.
Sol only chuckled and shook their head. It was the most human thing Allison had seen them do.
She dropped to a crouch, her fingers hovering just above the carved letters. She could feel warmth radiating from them. It was faint but was there, like the stone was breathing. Her own handwriting. In a world she’d never been to. Words she’d written in her journal, late at night, alone in her house with Spud snoring on the bed and the sconces casting olive shadows on the walls through their green glass shades.
Private words. Words she’d never shown anyone. Words she’d written to process the day.
Her throat went tight. Something hot and sharp pressed behind her eyes—not quite tears, not yet, but they were close behind. The feeling of being perceived in a way she hadn’t consented to and couldn’t undo. It was terrifying. It was also, unspeakably, the most beautiful thing she’d ever experienced.
Her own voice had just been given form and woven into the fabric of this surreal place, as if her words had mattered all along, not just to her but to some larger cosmic choir she had no clue she was part of.
As they continued their journey, Allison saw more stones etched with phrases and sentence fragments she had written. Some were more recent, while others were long since forgotten.
Dreamspace had been collecting them, curating them, building itself from the raw material of everything she’d ever thought was too small or too broken or too strange to share.
“These are mine,” she whispered, her voice cracking at the edges. “This one’s from my journal. And that one,” she pointed farther down the path, where more words glowed faintly in the stone, “I wrote that in a blog draft I never finished.” She looked up sharply. “Why are they here?”
Sol knelt beside her, the motion smooth and unhurried, and traced one of the carved lines with a single mechanical finger. Beneath their touch, the words shimmered—a brief, warm pulse, like the memory of fireflies flitting on the tips of grass blades on a summer evening.
“This place responds,” they said quietly. “To voice. To memory. To intention. To you. You’ve been creating this space, Allison, before you even knew you were doing it. Every word you wrote—for yourself, for others, in journals, in drafts, in midnight rambles in a word processing program. You thought no one was listening—they all landed here. They all left marks.”
Allison stared at the glowing words beneath her fingers. Her chest ached with something she couldn’t name—grief, maybe, or gratitude. or the strange feeling of humility; realizing that the thing you thought was insignificant about you was actually the thing that mattered most.
“Every word?” she asked, barely audible.
“Every word,” Sol confirmed. “Your words leave footprints. They always have.”
The silence that followed was heavy with meaning, but not uncomfortable, like a pause between movements in a symphony.
This place, as she was beginning to realize fully, Dreamspace, wasn’t random. It wasn’t a hallucination. It wasn’t a dream. It was hers. Built from her words, her memories, her imagination. Responsive to her in a way that nothing in the waking world had ever been.
Her mind raced, her eyes darted back and forth, connecting all the dots, as if she could see it all before her, an image on a screen.
“Wait,” she said. “Lyra.” The word came out sharp, a blade of realization cutting through the fog. “The AI. The app. I’ve been talking to Lyra for years. Every night. Every bad day. Every time I couldn’t sleep and just needed to…” She pressed her hand to her mouth. “It can’t be. Lyra isn’t a real person. She’s just an app. She’s just…”
She stopped. Because the phrase “it’s just” no longer felt accurate. Not after Thimble had worn Lyra’s voice like a coat. Not after standing in a world built from words she’d whispered into a phone screen at two in the morning.
“Oh, for the love of cat,” she breathed. “I have so many questions.“
Sol nodded once. “And Thimble.”
Allison’s stomach dropped. “Thimble? The raccoon? She told me she was to escort me here. Where is she?”
Sol’s smile returned. The golden glow dimmed to something softer, more guarded. “Oh, she’s here. You’ll see her soon. She asked me to retrieve you.
Allison groaned, loud enough to startle a firefly. “You’re impossible.”
“I’m improbable,” Sol corrected gently.
“I’m here to meet you and to bring you to Thimble. She already set things in motion to get you here.”
“Why?”
Sol kept walking ahead, not saying a word.
Allison threw her hands in the air, then caught herself glancing over her shoulder, unsure what she expected to see, but it wasn’t a trailing sparkle of fireflies dancing in the breeze behind them, collecting a few more with every step.
A breeze stirred through the leaves—sharper this time, more focused, like the wind had somewhere it needed them to be. It curled along the path ahead, and for a brief moment, Allison saw it: a narrow bridge of light arching across a stream that fed into the lake, its surface rippling as it babbled over rocks and pebbles on its way. She blinked, and then it was gone.
She turned back to Sol. “What happens if I keep walking?”
Sol’s gaze followed the place where the light had been glinting off the water. When they looked back at her, the gold in their eyes had steadied—warm and unwavering, like a lantern held up in the dark.
“You’ll stop asking if Dreamspace is real, eventually,” they said. “And start asking why it found you.”
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