Dara, Page, and the Secrets of the Multiverse

▷ 16.2

By the time she was what felt like miles from this corridor's rim, dread had wrapped itself in her senses and never let go. She kept glancing back, straining her mind's eye for something—anything—that might have followed her inside. Images of the horror films she watched with Page tickled at the back of her consciousness, but she tamped them down. Focus on the journey. This corridor was meant for something.

Page remained quiet, so this detour might not have come from her. Was this from the connection being snipped, then? Dara was no fool. She was a firm believer that the human body knew how to communicate with itself. The corporeal fleshbag has systems that can influence the conscious mind and get it to pay attention to things it would miss had reasoning taken over.

The corridor was an addition to the cramped dreamstate she and Page experienced whenever Dara did a probe. Page could hypothesize the opposite all she wanted, but Dara had enough proof of the phenomenon. Besides, who knew her body better than anybody? It was always going to be her.

But what was her mind telling her this time? The corridor stretched on to forever, and Dara needed to get back to the main vein of the dreamstate so Page could pull her out faster. Something has gone wrong on the surface—that much became clearer with every inch Dara went deeper into the corridor's darkness.

Page better get the device up and running soon. In the meantime, Dara should gather everything she could. These probes shouldn't be wasted. Maybe it would be harmless, and she'd see the dream she had forgotten this morning. Page liked it when Dara had her weird dreams to tell. Their dream journals never ran out of colors and strange tales to last them a lifetime. Perks of dating a dream scientist, truly.

The corridor bled further, her consciousness zipping through without resistance. She imagined it to lead into a forgotten chamber in her brain, something that even the scientists weren't able to peer into despite being in this modern, technological age. Page's research was groundbreaking by many levels, but if Dara discovered a rare brain part, perhaps she would get worldwide recognition too.

Or maybe this corridor was just her mind leading her to the dreamstate's end. The exit. Perhaps Dara's mind didn't like the probes and was actively doing its job of ushering unwanted guests like a passive-aggressive hotelier.

She didn't get either. Instead, the corridor opened up into a wider cavern filled with mirror-like surfaces. At first, the shimmering sheets of glass remained motionless and lifeless. Then, as if someone set off a thousand projectors inside, color and light sparked inside the darkness, almost blinding her mind's eye. When her vision cleared, she found herself looking at a spread of scenes upon scenes, showing her faces upon faces.

The cavern continued into a hazy maze, picking up where the dim corridor left off. Stalking farther, she glanced at the walls and noted each panel playing an image on loop. Were these every dream Dara had stored over the years? Where was that striped, flying elephant she saw when she was five?

If she could sigh in her dreamstate, she would have. What choice did she have? Something was happening here. With Page's connection gone, the only logical thing to do was snoop around. The end should be around here. Somewhere.

A flash of green and red caught her attention. She whirled to find a scene at an elaborate hotel. A woman in a stark green dress collided with a woman in red. Both apologized for the incident and were about to go their separate ways, when the woman in green blurted, Wow, we look as if Christmas arrived early.

Amusement curled in Dara's gut. She remembered that as vividly as the scene playing out before her. Mostly because she was the one in green. The scene was her first meeting with Page. It was at an international technology conference. Both of them didn't want to be there to represent their respective university's best research from their graduating batch. Dara was about to present her coding algorithm while Page, the beginnings of her dream research. After their presentations, something drew them to the nearby cafe where they talked for real.

Since that collision, Dara's life had never been the same.

This place...it wasn't the dreamstate anymore. For some unknown reason, Dara wandered straight into a trove of her memories—things that happened in real life and her brain had recorded during the times she was awake.

The hypothesis only crept closer to being the conclusion the deeper Dara moved through the maze. The arrangement varied, sometimes jumping back and forth her childhood years, to her highschool and university days, and finally, her long-term relationship with Page.

There was Page gifting her an absurd sweater one Christmas, Dara slamming a handful of cake frosting into Page's face two birthdays ago, Page showing up behind the apartment door with a box of kittens she rescued from her field work in London, Dara pulling up to Page's office in a sleazy dress for Page's inaugural ceremony as a prank, Page buying Dara the same dress as a joke...

The list went on. All of them were fresh in Dara's mind as if they were yesterday. The years flew by in an erratic timeline before looping back to the beginning. Was there no end to this maze? Where was Page? Shouldn't she have gotten Dara out already?

Her mind answered by making the entire maze quiver. The scenes blurred and shook, threatening to dislodge from the walls and crash on top of her. Then, everything went dark—a thousand lights flipping off at once.

Silence.