Sleep doesn’t come easy. I toss and turn in my bed, the sheets always too hot or too cold. The artificial light from the streetlights outside casts the whole room in an eerie shade of orange. My mind turns back on the events of the day. Drake. Mandy. CyberCorp. It’s been a long day.

Eventually I pass from uneasy awareness to uneasy sleep. For a while, my sleep is mercifully dreamless. The first moment of calm I’ve had in quite a while. The god of sleep is obviously a sadistic asshole though, so eventually the dreams come fast and heavy. At first it’s just a series of vignettes, senseless images. There’s me in front of a vast metal wall with nothing else around me, then I’m being attacked by a swarm of bees which suddenly become machine guns. In one scene, I’m Tess, slicing through people with my cybernetic claws.

Then the images slow down and give way to a steady stream of action, or at least as steady as a dream can be. I’m floating in a mass of something liquid, sticky. Some sort of syrup, maybe. I’m swimming through it and there is no up, no down, just me floating. But it’s not just me. Mandy is at my side, swimming along, going faster, straighter than me. She looks for something, her eyes flitting around nervously. Drake stands in front of us, in a parking lot. She’s swimming towards him but I know she’ll never make it. “Stop!” I call. “Mandy, stop!” But she’s not paying attention to me so I try and swim after her and all of a sudden the syrup is blood and it’s in my eyes, my mouth. I’m drowning in a sea of blood and there’s no way up, there’s no way out, I can’t swim, I can’t move, all I can do is let the blood overtake –

My eyes fly open. I’m panting, my sheets wrapped around me like snakes strangling their prey. The clock says 3:52. I’ve gotta pee.

Get up and pee

Ignore it, go back to sleep