Charlie Huston - Sleepless

He was looking at the gamers again.

“They’re creating perceptions out of whole cloth. They don’t work on the canvas of themselves; they work from pure imagination. There’s a palette they have to paint from: the races and character classes and all the elements that the game limits you to, but the variations, once you start manipulating them, are near infinite. And players around the world are constantly adding to the palette, building new artifacts, designing clothes, founding communities, breeding new races, starting fresh guilds. These artists, they use those materials to create second skins, and employ them to tell stories.”

He was looking at the screens, at a landscape stretching without physical limits.

“They’re creating myths and legends, founding empires.”

He focused his gaze on Park.

“They’re slaying dragons.”

He turned.

“Bandoleros!”

One by one, heads peeked out from the mouths of the ball chairs, only the gamer who had been swallowed whole staying hidden. Park stared at them, and they stared at things unseen, eyes focused deep in the spaces between matter, necks at stiff angles, pupils narrowed to pins, seeing otherwise.

Park winced.

“They’re sleepless.”

Cager shook his head at something wonderful.

“Utterly lateral. They do things in there, twist the whole Chasm, make moves that shouldn’t be possible. Because they’re relentless. And seeing something we aren’t. They’ve been someplace we have not and have special knowledge because of it. Like when I went to Japan.”

He touched Park’s hand with the end of the comb.

“But they need focus. To be able to create.”

He opened the flap of his bag.

“I don’t have fifteen thousand dollars.”

He reached into the bag with one hand, waving at the air with the other.

“The club, it breathes money. What comes in, it gets taken apart to keep the place alive; what’s left over goes back out. I can’t interrupt that flow. If I do, I’ll choke off what’s going on down here. The heart of the place. I won’t do that.”

He fumbled with something in the bag, something large and heavy shifting. Pointing now at the audience, where Tadj was pouring the last of the sake.

“These guys, they’ve paid to see something special. They’ve paid to see the artists create. They’re here to see an epic written before their eyes. What they pay, it goes to the costs of keeping this room up and running; that includes paying the crew for their artistry. Any profit I make off recordings of their quest, that goes back into the room as well. It all zeros out.”

He shaped his hair.

“They have to perform tonight. And they need the Shabu to make it happen.”

His other hand came out of the bag.

“This is what I have to offer you, Park.”

He placed his closed fist on the bar, fingers wrapped around a small cylinder of some kind.

Park watched the fingers uncoil, blinked, and lifted his hand from the dragon, releasing it to Cager, who smiled, picked it up with great care, rose, and walked to the sleepless players of the game.

“Bandoleros! “We ride tonight!”

Park didn’t watch them as they broke up the dragon, placed slivers in glass pipes, ignited the pure Chinese crystal meth, and sucked down the perfumed smoke. His eyes remained fixed on the small white bottle on the bar, reading the label again and again to be sure, before picking it up carefully wrapped in the tissue that had cushioned the dragon, Dreamer in his grasp.

FATAL FAMILIAL INSOMNIA AND THE SLEEPLESS PRION ARE strikingly distinct from each other. The most essential of their many differences is that whereas FFI is a genetic disorder inherited by mischance of birth, SLP is communicable through a number of agencies.

Nearly immortal, if that can be said of something that is not entirely alive to begin with, the malformed protein that joins with healthy proteins and influences them to twist as malignantly as it has can be inherited. But it can also be communicated in exchanges of fluids, accidentally consumed when present in tainted meat, or, in fearsome concentrations, inhaled.

It can also be loaded into a syringe and injected.

If one should be inclined to do so.

The second most essential difference between the two is that the insomnia brought about by FFI does not manifest until the prion’s work is well under way, forming amyloid protein plaques, literally eating holes in the brain, leaving star-shaped astrocytes.

With SLP, insomnia does not follow months or even years of other symptoms, as it does with FFI, but is almost always the first definitive indication that one has been infected. One could easily clear physical space around oneself with some alacrity by mentioning that one had been sleeping poorly of late.

The lack of sleep, the absence of rest for the body or the mind, is the final twist of FFI’s dagger. By that time it has already eaten vast holes in the brain, leaving a cratered landscape, one of the side effects being the loss of sleep. Once insomnia does set in for sufferers of FFI, the end comes quite swiftly, if no less grotesquely. Twitching and covered in sores, sweating puss, nearly all homeostatic functions of the body malfunctioning at some level, FFI’s victims lose the ability to communicate, may or may not lose their sense of self, but never become senseless. And as the body rots around them, the breakdowns become so complete that traditional pain relief no longer has any application. Chemical receptors no longer accept soothing shapes that might dull the agony.

It is, with no irony intended, a hell of a way to die.

SLP is somewhat worse.

Primarily this is due to the fact that it takes longer to do its work. When SLP lodges in a healthy body and begins the process of conformational influence that mutates the proteins around it, it attacks the thalamus directly. The seat of sleep, the thalamus is also a switching station for communications and telemetry within the brain, a key target where a terrorist of the mind with only one bomb at his disposal might choose to blow himself up. In doing so, said terrorist would be particularly successful in the ultimate goal of his trade. For there is nothing quite so terror-inducing as the loss of sleep. It creates phantoms and doubts, causes one to question one’s own abilities and judgment, and, over time, dismantles, from within, the body.

SLP could not be more effective if it entered the body wearing a balaclava and a vest packed with C-4. Detonated, it spreads, instead of shrapnel, copies of itself. The copies chain, reproduce, and the thalamus forgets how to sleep. Signals are sent, telling the body and varied territories of the brain what to do and when, but they are hopelessly scrambled. And there is no rest.

Once the bomb has gone off, the infrastructure of the body begins to degrade as a result of sleep deprivation. But the greater portion of the brain is untouched. Nights of restless sleep turn into hours of wakefulness staring at the ceiling, punctuated by the occasional sudden plunge into deep sleep, jarred back to the surface by dreams of stinging vividness. Segue to pacing marathons, pitiless channel flipping in the wee hours, aimless drives to no destination. And when no denial can possibly remain for comfort, end in absolute insomnia, shuffling out to join the wakeful millions, burning the midnight oil.

What was left of it.

I watched them, in the light cast from the glass face of the Staples Center, as they shifted and wandered through the Midnight Carnival.

Despite the hunger for entertainment and distraction, professional sports were not being played. Not on their previous scale.

At a certain point, leagues and owners had realized that uninfected fans had become gun-shy about enclosing themselves in massive venues with tens of thousands, a significant number of whom were statistically predetermined to be carrying SLP. Add to that fear the quite natural disinclination to be in such a place should there be one of the ever-increasing blackouts, and one found some remarkable bargains available at online ticket exchanges. The teams played on, TV revenue still being a big enough carrot that could draw the beast toward the unreachable end of the stick.