New Short Story: The Dream Service
- Dan
- 2 hours ago
- 2 min read
Well, not actually a new short story… more like one I've been wrestling with for a long time.
New Short Story: The Dream Service
My wife's old job was the inspiration for The Dream Service, the story germ, so to speak. She worked as an electroencephalogram (EEG) technician, which meant she recorded patients' brain waves. The patterns recorded by the instrument could then be interpreted by a neurophysiologist or a medical doctor. I thought, what if a totalitarian government monitored the brain waves of the sleeping populace using AI to root out malcontents? I thought that sounded properly dystopian.Â
The story has gone through many iterations since I first drafted it back in 2019-ish. Only recently did I finally get it accepted somewhere. On top of that, it's a "featured story" on Spillwords, which is a nice bonus.Â
Excerpt
Antoinette grimaced, bored by the mundanity of the dream, but reviewing them was her job as a junior auditor. All dreams involving the government were flagged by the Artificial Intelligence for Subconscious Criminal Activity, ASCA for short, and colloquially known as The Dream Machine, which monitored the brain waves of the sleeping populace, nearly five million souls in total, for any propensities that might swamp the life raft adrift in a storm-battered sea that was Bastion City. The Dream Machine and The Dream Service were essential arms of a surveillance system that kept the city afloat. There was no need for neighbor to betray neighbor, or son to turn on father. Such quaint informants weren’t required, not when your own home—what else were HomeAIs for— watched, listened, and scented at all hours of the day and night, silently reporting anything at the fringes of the bell curve of normalcy and beyond for further analysis. While citizens were out and about, cameras watched and microphones listened for anything transgressive committed or uttered. Why the malcontents could even self-report in their dreams, their subconscious revealing antisocial, or more importantly, in the eyes of the authorities, anti-government proclivities.