A glittering late-night cityscape, a disturbing encounter, a dragon?

The Dream Journal of Madeline Johnston

Tuesday, June 18th, 2019–6 hours of sleep (on a plane)

Sex. Again. And not with Darwin (again); it was my new assistant. How old is he, twenty-four? Remember to act normal next time you see him. I wonder if he’s had similar dreams about me. Or the same one. That’d be a trip.

Why do these dreams make me feel guilty? It’s not like I have control over them. I suppose I could try not sleeping on my stomach, which allegedly causes more erotic dreams because…friction. But a thirty-six-year habit is hard to break. Am I afraid these nighttime fantasies are what I really want, when Darwin says my overactive prefrontal cortex — my ‘CEO brain’ — in charge of executive functions like judgment, planning, and moderating behavior is offline?

Boy do I need to ensure he never reads this, for more reasons than one.

In red letters comprised entirely of right angles, the hotel clock on the nightstand informed Madeline it was five minutes after three a.m. She could still get almost four hours of sleep if she fell asleep right now and skipped breakfast. It was far from ideal but would at least get her through the coming day’s presentation. There were various prescription pills she could take that would probably knock her out — her travel bag was full of the downers, uppers, lefters, and righters needed to get through modern life — but she couldn’t afford any subsequent grogginess. She had to be perfect. The company was on the brink.

Madeline had awoken to an alarm seven days a week for the past fifteen years and carried a perpetual sleep deficit. She’d never had any trouble falling asleep for most of her life and could get seven hours by being in bed for seven hours and five minutes. Her sleep efficiency was close to one hundred percent. She often joked it was her superpower.

But now, jet-lagged after a flight across the Pacific, she was sharing in the ancient human experience of lying awake in the dark thinking strange thoughts. It was an experience she had become increasingly familiar with over the past few years, since taking the reins as CEO. The ‘patented sleep-assist technology’ embedded in the rooms of her preferred hotel chain was apparently just marketing. She could respect that. But sometimes her travel schedule made it feel as though she’d come unstuck in time, her circadian body clock and the ones on her iPhone and elsewhere having no relationship at all.

She took solace in the fact that things would radically change soon. She would have a real superpower.

She tried to clear her mind and meditate, but mere moments later forgot what she was supposed to be doing and was again lost in whatever images and words bubbled up out of the ether. After twenty more minutes of regrets about the past, anxieties about the future, and sanity-straining thoughts, she’d had enough. Why did everything seem so much worse, every problem so unsolvable, in the middle of the night? Better to make the most of the extra time than lie in bed with her eyes closed in a downward mental spiral.

For Madeline that meant work. Her job was an infinity pool into which she could dip anytime and for as long as she wished. There was always more to learn about a new technology, a competitor’s product, a relevant historical anecdote. She could always be better.

Madeline dove in, running through the deck for the twentieth time. Good presentations were like a story, with an initial hook then building to a climax. But when she reached the crescendo (the live product demo), the application crashed. Madeline sighed. So much for ‘fail elegantly.’ Last week the DDoS attack, now this.

It was almost lunchtime yesterday in San Francisco, her ‘home’ time zone and city, if you could credibly call them that. One upside of an internationally distributed workforce was that there was always someone running with the baton, chasing the sun. The number of unread emails in her inbox was a constant reminder. She looked forward to being able to run with the baton for as long as she pleased.

“The whole team is working on it. We suspect it’s a memory leak, which can be a particularly tricky kind of bug to fix,” said her CTO Vipul over the video chat. He appeared nervous on the bright screen, his face illuminating her hotel room.

“What?” Madeline asked.

“A memory leak is when a program fails to discard memory after using it, resulting in less memory being available for other programs that do need it. It can cause degraded performance and ultimately system fail — ”

“I have a degree in computer science,” she interrupted. “I know what a memory leak is. I meant how is this happening now. The product has been stable for days. I can’t sell vaporware up there.”

“To be honest I’m not sure what caused it. Not yet, anyways. We’re in code freeze. We haven’t pushed any changes since Thursday. But don’t worry — it’ll be fixed by the time you wake up.”

With her side of the video chat off, Madeline smiled to herself; you can’t wake up if you never went to sleep in the first place. “Thanks, Vipul. I know you’ll figure it out. Please keep me posted,” she said as she closed the MacBook and sighed. There was nothing she could do to help; fixing a memory leak usually required editing a program’s critical source code, and she hadn’t written a line of code in years. The benefits of specialization had been drilled into her in business school. It was best to let the full-time engineers figure it out.

With the laptop closed, the only light in the room came in through the fiftieth-floor window from Tokyo’s twinkling late-night cityscape. She felt like she was in the movie Lost in Translation, except she was fluent in Japanese. The view reminded her of another infinity pool she fancied taking a dip in. It was surely closed this time of night but was worth a shot, if only to get out of this damn room.

A few minutes later she wore a plush, white robe over her red, one-piece swimsuit and watched the elevator count its way up to sixty-five. She felt free with her phone back in the room; it was hard to truly relax with it nearby.

The elevator doors slid open, and she was pleasantly surprised to see that the one to the rooftop pool was itself ajar, though on further inspection it looked broken, possibly forced. Strange. It should have been fixed right away with what she paid per night to stay here — the property was part of the Stasis Hotels Suspended Animation Collection, after all — but for the same reason, she also felt entitled to use the facilities whenever she pleased, even if they were technically closed. There were probably cameras; they were everywhere in the panopticon of modern society. But so what if in ten minutes the graveyard shift security guard came up to politely tell her she couldn’t be here? She had plausible deniability.

Madeline walked through the broken door and out onto the vast, empty terrace. It was a still, comfortable summer night, the only sounds the sparse traffic far below and soft splashing of water. Most of the light came from inside of the large rectangular pool. It contrasted starkly with the rest of the roof and looked like it ran right off the side of the building and into the night. Recently opened, she’d read it was the world’s highest, surpassing the Marina Bay Sands in Singapore, except here the view wasn’t marred by oil tankers for as far as the eye could see.

She untied her robe and let it fall on top of her slippers. She noted the marked depth, then disregarded the ‘no diving’ sign and plunged head-first into the cerulean water. The temperature was perfect. She swam to the far side and rested her arms on top of the glass wall as she took in the bright night comprised of other skyscrapers in the Shinjuku district and beyond. How many pictures had she seen of others in this exact same pose?

Almost forty million people, the most populous metropolitan area in the history of the world, she thought. Why do we live on top of each other like this? Even in a relatively small country like Japan, slightly smaller than California, every individual person could in theory live on their own thirty-thousand-square-foot plot of land, three-quarters of an acre. Globally there was enough biologically productive land for each human alive to live on that much. She’d done the math. And yet, rural towns in Japan, like in much of the world, were dying. She knew the reasons why, of course — economics and opportunity — and that those in wealthier countries consume several acres worth of resources every year. But she couldn’t help wondering if perhaps on some level we craved the paradoxical sense of loneliness and anonymity found in an overcrowded metropolis.

Madeline sure did.

“Quite a view, is it not?” The sound of a male voice with a slight Japanese accent startled her. Security must have arrived faster than anticipated. But when she turned her back on the nine-hundred-foot drop, ready to play dumb and apologize, the man standing at the edge of the pool did not appear how she expected.

He was about her age and wore a fitted black suit, but that was where any semblance of being put together ended. Everything was wrinkled, his white shirt untucked and stained with what she hoped was red wine but looked distressingly like blood. The bags under his sunken eyes were visible from fifty feet away as the floodlights in the pool shined through the gently rippling water and danced on his disheveled face. His left hand tousled his long black hair, and his right held a half-empty bottle of Yamazaki whiskey he must have raided from the rooftop bar.

Well, that explained it, Madeline thought, a little relieved. A salaryman who’d had too much to drink trying to impress his boss, then perhaps got his hands on a little coke. But what was he doing at one of the most expensive hotels in the city? Come to think of it, she thought she recognized him, but his unkempt appearance made it hard to place him.

“Ou peut-être en français — tout à fait une vue, non? O en español — toda una vista, ¿sí? O italiano — abbastanza una vista, sì?” he asked in French, Spanish, then Italian.

“I understood you the first time. Nihongo o tsukau koto mo dekitadeshou,” she replied in English, then Japanese. “Yes, the view is lovely.”

“Ah, American.” He continued in English, “Some people are afraid to look down from such heights, but there is no difference between five stories and fifty. Either way, if you fall you’re dead, which is preferable to surviving such trauma.”

“Can I ask what you’re doing up here at this hour?”

“I could ask you the same thing. You showed no hesitation walking through the door I broke open. You’re welcome, by the way.”

“I can’t sleep.”

The man burst into laughter. He dropped the bottle of whiskey, shattering it, but did not seem to notice. So much for ‘no glass allowed in pool area.’ He sat down on the edge of the pool and dipped his feet into the water, still wearing tattered designer dress shoes like a goddamn psychopath, and sighed. “Can’t sleep. Ain’t that the truth.”

Madeline became hyperaware of just how alone the two of them were on the roof. This stranger wasn’t a big guy; he couldn’t have been any taller than her five feet eight inches. And she had years of kickboxing and Krav Maga classes under her belt. But the prospect of fighting in water was distressing and not a scenario for which she’d trained. If only security would in fact arrive about now. She was no longer a spring chicken and didn’t receive the kind of male attention she had in her twenties, but the look in this man’s eyes was unlike any she had seen before.

“I fancy your swimsuit. It reminds me of…” he looked down at the red stain on his shirt, then back up at her and said, “…that old American show Baywatch.”

“It brings out my eyes.”

Hysterical laughter again, this time ending in a yawn. Then he seemed to notice her looking past him towards the elevator, no doubt telegraphing her concern, and said, “Security already came. They won’t be bothering me again tonight.”

What did he mean by that?

“But there is no need to worry, Miss American Pie. The only person currently in physical danger is me. Do you know what is the longest anyone has intentionally gone without sleep?” He glanced at his expensive-looking watch and continued without waiting for her to answer. “Twenty-two days and just about six hours.” He started laughing and shaking uncontrollably, then abruptly stopped. “Those who stay awake for half this long end up dead as a result.”

“Are you ok? Do you need help?” This wasn’t the behavior of someone who was simply drunk. More importantly, Madeline took shit from no one.

“I do need help, but not the kind you can provide.” He yawned again, then shook his head violently as if trying to shake off drowsiness. “Even the strongest of stimulants no longer work. I’m just…so…tired…” he said quietly as his eyes closed. Then he slumped forward and splashed into the pool. A moment later his head surfaced, coughing up water, bloodshot eyes looking around wildly.

For a terrifying second it appeared he was going to swim towards her. Instead he slowly and painfully pulled himself back up out of the pool, leaving behind red whisps in the water. His soaked suit dripped all over the terrace when he got back to his feet, and his white dress shirt clung to his torso, revealing a heavily tattooed chest. He swept the wet hair off his face with a hand missing most of its little finger to stare at something beyond her, blinking intently every few seconds. His head was steady, but his eyes still darted around.

“Tell me…do you believe in dragons?” he asked in an awed voice as he began walking along the length of the pool, his shoes squishing and the glass shards crunching underfoot. His gaze was still fixed somewhere behind her, off the roof. He picked up his pace as he rounded the pool’s corner and was at a full sprint by the time he approached the edge.

“Stop!” yelled Madeline, but it was too late. In a surprisingly athletic maneuver, he bounded with his left foot off the last chaise lounge chair and over a bed of stargazer lilies, then planted his right on the top of the railing and launched himself out into space. From her position on the glass wall, she saw him clear the ledge that caught the infinity pool’s overflowing water and plunge silently to the street below.

He didn’t move at all on the way down, almost as if he fell asleep as soon as he leapt.

This is an excerpt from Circadian Algorithms, a techno and psychological thriller about the dreams we have while both awake and asleep, now available on Amazon.