"It makes me dream," she said as he leaned forward to turn on the headlights, her voice barely audiblc above the turbine.
"What does?" He pretended to be lost in his driving, careful not to glance her way.
"The thing in my head. Usually it's only when I'm asleep."
"Yeah?" Remembering the whites of her eyes in Rudy's bedroom, the shuddering, the rush of words in a language he didn't know.
"Sometimes whcn I'm awake. It's like I'm jacked into a deck, only I'm free of the grid, flylng. I'm not alone in there. The other night I dreamed about a boy [Bobby], and he'd reached out, picked up something, and it was hurting him. and he couldn't see that hc was free, that he only needed to let go. So I told him. And for just a second. I could see where he was, and that wasn't like a dream at all. Just this ugly little room with a stained carpet, and I could tell he needed a shower, and feel how the insides of his shoes were sticky.
"Some of them tell me things. Stories. Once, there was nothing there, nothing moving on its own, just data and people shuffling it around. Thcn something happened, and it . ., it knew itself. There's a whole other storv. about that, a girl with mirrors over her eyes and a man who was scared to care about anything. Something the man did helped the whole thing know itself.... And after that, it sort of split off into different parts of itself, and I think the parts are the others, the bright ones. But it's hard to tell, because they don't tell it with words, exactly...."
Turner felt the skin on his neck prickle. [CZ 158, 159]
