With nothing better to do, Natsuko tossed her bottle up and down, spinning it as she tossed it.
“Don’t accidentally force dimension-jump yourself, firecrotch,” Sofiane said from his comfy little hammock.
“I’ve had this bottle for years, I know how it works,” she replied.
Admittedly, her hand-eye coordination probably wasn’t in peak condition after killing half of the ship’s stock of grog, but by this point her bottle was almost an extension of herself. Every curve, notch, and ridge of that three-foot tall glass vessel was etched into her mind as though it was another limb.
Shuixing walked over. “Natsuko I really think…”
“Think what?” Natsuko said, flipping the bottle and catching it again. “Shui, you think too much, that’s your problem.”
“I know but…”
Natsuko went back to flipping her bottle. She didn’t like being told what to do. Even if it was supposedly good for her. If someone imposed a decision on her from outside, she would refuse on principle. Plus, Shui had no idea how in-tune she was with her weapon of choice. Nothing was going to happen.
“Hmm… What is a three syllable synonym for “mysterious?” Pechorin muttered, thumb stroking his chin as he wandered the decks. Du Bai’s advice had been invaluable, but now he needed to put together a proper Shikijiman poem as proof of his success. He had the concept down, he just needed to make the syllables fit and— bump! Pechorin’s pacing was interrupted by running into a small, red gremlin.
“Pech, what the hell—!”
Jostled by Pechorin, Natsuko missed the bottle, leaving it to fall, punt-down, directly on her head. She wasn’t sure what happened next because the world became a flashing, spinning void of colors and lights. The only thought which pierced through the psychedelic kaleidoscope of geometry was that this was it—this was what being dimension-jumped felt like.
It was like a bad dream you couldn’t wake from. She was a consciousness without a body to root itself in. Existential terror at the possibility that this void would be all she would experience into infinity washed over her.
And then, it was over.
Natsuko shot up in bed, a puddle of cool sweat clinging to her back. She gasped for air, feeling as though her real life was an illusion, and that the terrible falling nightmare had been real.
“Another dream about that video game place?” her husband Shinsuke asked, his voice filled with the gravel of recently-disturbed sleep.
“Yeah…” Natsuko replied.
As her consciousness grounded itself and her nightmares receded back into the darkness, she recalled that she’d been having the same nightmare for two or three weeks now. It was the same every time: She was a character in some kind of gacha game which revolved around having high stats and big numbers and she had been discarded for her numbers not being high enough. It seemed silly and childish when she described it out loud to Shinsuke, but the impressions it left on her were no joke. She was losing sleep because of these dreams and it was affecting her health and her husband’s sanity.
Shinsuke sighed deeply. “You should see if Dr. Mizuse can prescribe you something. There’s gotta be some kind of medicine for dealing with this.”
“I don’t want to resort to taking pills. I want to figure out the root cause of these nightmares and just deal with it already,” Natsuko replied.
The story has been illicitly taken; should you find it on Amazon, report the infringement.
“You can do both, but some kind of sleep aid could be good in the meantime. For both of our sakes,” Shinsuke said before rolling back on his side.
The clock on her phone read 2:35am. She chuckled quietly to herself. During their college years, Shinsuke wouldn’t have even been asleep yet, instead furiously writing songs for his punk band while she slept across the room from him in their tiny apartment. After getting an office job at an electronics manufacturer, however, he’d gotten more serious about his sleeping habits, and now he slept soundly from 12am to 6am on nights where his boss wasn’t dragging him out for a drink.
She could hardly fault Shinsuke for turning into a salaryman. Her own fiery, punk habits had been snuffed out around the same time. Her hair was now the color of unburnt coal after once being shot through with flaming red dye.
At some point, Natsuko fell back asleep. She felt even more tired when the alarm went off at six in the morning. She and her husband dressed in silence and departed in different directions for their respective jobs.
As she was getting on the commuter train, a haggard and sleep-deprived girl was getting off it. She was rather cute, with a short bob of hair and a small, somewhat androgynous frame. Natsuko had never spoken to the girl, but they’d passed each other getting on and off the train for years. The girl was clearly some kind of night entertainer by the heavy make-up, lurid clothes, and odd hours, though Natsuko had no idea what the nature of that entailed, nor had she ever thought to pry. Part of living in a large city like Tokyo was giving people their own sphere of privacy. The only thing she knew was the girl’s name, or perhaps stage name, pinned to her chest: “Kiyo.”
Natsuko mouthed a good-bye to Kiyo, who couldn’t possibly have seen or heard her, and went to take a seat. Bag clutched in front, Natsuko let herself be gently shaken by the rocking of the train car as her mind wandered. Hours removed from it, she still could not stop fixating on that strange gacha game dreamworld where arbitrary numbers determined her worth and value and the creators of the game rigged it so that newer, fancier characters would win.
A bump jerked Natsuko awake. She’d been half-asleep. Her eyes wandered up to the advertising poster running the length of the train car. A gorgeous woman was plastered across it, smiling down and winking at Natsuko. Words above informed her of an upcoming performance by Hinagiku, a mega-popular idol who had made the unthinkable jump into American and European markets to compete against k-pop groups. The open secret was that Hinagiku was only an idol because her father was an LDP diet member with marriage ties to one zaibatsu or another.
After more numb rumination, a calm, female voice announced they were arriving at Natsuko’s station and she disembarked. Melding into the crowds of students and office workers, she was swept away to her job at a natural gas importer.
Her work—mostly routing calls from clients and scheduling meetings for executives—asked exactly nothing of her, being so hard coded into her by now that she could perform from 8am to 8pm without ever needing to invest an extra brain cell. Instead, she just thought more about her nightmare game world.
What did it all mean?
Natsuko had brought the recurring nightmare up with her therapist, Dr. Mizuse, who seemed less interested in its psychological origins and more interested in giving Natsuko some basic behavioral changes to reduce the frequency and intensity of the nightmares. Drink less, don’t eat close to bedtime, less screen time, mindfulness meditation, and, if things got really bad, medication. In fact, Dr. Mizuse had already prescribed her an extra-strength sleep-aid, which she hadn’t told Shinsuke about because she didn’t want to take anything if she could help it.
“Mrs. Yumeno, do you have a moment?”
Natsuko’s eyes blinked open. She hadn’t even noticed she’d fallen asleep again. “Hmm?”
Standing over her cubicle was Mrs. Shikansogo, her direct supervisor.
“The itinerary for the Russian clients you submitted has multiple scheduling conflicts. The entire thing needs to be redone before they fly in tomorrow morning,” her boss said.
Natsuko looked down at her computer clock which read 7:32pm.
“Oh… Yeah, I’ll… I’ll have it done tonight.”
Mrs. Shikansogo patted Natsuko on the back and left her subordinate to pour over the giant table of numbers, dates, times, and accounts that all needed to be balanced before she could go home and get some sleep. Even though these numbers applied to other people, and involved sums of money she couldn’t even fathom being in control of, they were still her responsibility. As the lights of the office were turned off, these numbers continued to fill her vision, burning like black fire in her glistening pupils. With her free hand she fidgeted with a little plastic bottle of hand sanitizer.