Jake Kirby woke with a start, breath sharp in his chest and mind buzzing like a startled beehive. The hotel room was soaked in that peculiar early morning stillness, where dreams and reality still shake hands before parting ways. A soft golden veil of sunlight filtered through the thick curtains, casting stripes across the sheets like jail bars. The faint scent of wood polish clung to the air, mingling with a hint of linen starch. But Jake barely noticed it—he was possessed.
Inspiration—no, revelation—had struck him like a thunderbolt. A sprawling, audacious idea had not only crept into his dreams but wrenched him out of sleep entirely, planting itself with wild insistence in his waking mind.
He didn't bother with a robe or slippers. Clad in only a faded T-shirt and boxers, Jake padded barefoot across the carpet, a man on a mission. The hallway outside was dim, silent except for the occasional creak of old wood and distant city sounds rising with the dawn. He stopped in front of Mr. Sullivan's door and knocked twice, firm but not frantic, though his heartbeat pounded like war drums.
There was a long pause. A muffled groan sounded from inside, then the click of a lock. The door creaked open to reveal Mr. Sullivan, hair tousled in all directions like seaweed adrift in a tidepool. He blinked, clearly dazed, his beard catching the faint morning light like a scatter of grey wire.
"Blimey, Jake," he muttered, voice hoarse with sleep. "Why're you stompin' around at—" he glanced behind at the digital clock, "—six bloody thirty?"
Jake grinned, eyes wild with excitement. "I've got it, Sully. I've figured out what the Machine could actually do."
Sullivan stared for a second, frowning, his brain slowly churning into gear. "The Machine? You mean the Memory Reader?"
"Exactly," Jake said, practically bouncing on his heels.
That sobered Sullivan faster than coffee. He straightened his back, rubbed his face. "Hold that thought. Let's get cleaned up and meet in ten downstairs. I'll pull Garfield in. Tell us both."
Jake nodded, heart thudding—not with nerves, but the urgency of raw, unfiltered creativity.
Ten minutes later, the three men sat in the hotel dining room, around a square oak table near a wide-open window. Morning drifted in on a breeze laced with warm bread, distant traffic, and the faint sound of a street musician strumming a banjo. It was a slow, deliberate tune—perhaps folk, perhaps blues—strangely fitting for the occasion.
Jake started without preamble.
"Yesterday, at the match, there was this guy sitting beside me—Leonhardt Baum. Said he was a fan of my show."
Garfield raised a brow over the rim of his glass. "German bloke with the tiny round glasses? I saw you signing on a note as an autograph"
"That's him," Jake nodded. "After each match, he'd close his eyes and sit quietly for a minute or two. I asked him about it. He said he likes to replay everything in his head, like a movie. He's done it since he was a kid. Said it helps him remember better."
Garfield snorted. "Strange birds, some people. Doing things others find strange."
"But what if he's onto something?" Jake leaned forward. "What if thoughts like his—vivid, structured, cinematic—could be processed by the Machine? Converted into actual visual files or audio, depending on how the subject thinks?"
Sullivan tilted his head, intrigued. "Wait, you mean... watch thoughts like Netflix?"
Jake grinned. "Exactly. The Memory Machine already reads memories when someone's unconscious. But what if we could go further? Not just read memories—what if we could feed coded thoughts into the brain while it's in a subconscious state? Dreams. Hallucinations. Induced narratives. And then observe how the brain reacts—like watching a live simulation of someone dreaming a story we planted."
Garfield set his cup down slowly, his brows knitting. "So... we hijack the stream of thought while the subject's unconscious, insert programmed content, and observe the response. Watch the mental reaction as though it's happening in a movie?"
"Yes!" Jake almost shouted. "We create the dream. We control the narrative. We watch how they interact with it—without them realizing it's artificial."
Sullivan blinked. "Bloody hell. So we'd be planting a script into someone's mind and letting their brain direct the film?"
"Bingo," Jake said, snapping his fingers. "It's a dream that we engineer—like planting a seed in fertile soil. And if it works, who knows what we could do with it? Therapy. Learning. Storytelling. Hell, espionage."
Silence followed, deep and strange. Even the banjo player seemed to pause, letting his final chord ring into the morning air.
Garfield finally spoke. "That's... bloody brilliant. Terrifying, but brilliant. We'd need to talk to the neurology team, of course. And ethics. But the science? If we can isolate subconscious processing from surface memory, we might be able to tap into what you're describing."
Sullivan was nodding now, fully awake. "And if we're right, this isn't just tech. It's the next leap in human storytelling. It would truly be beyond phenomenon."
Just then, Mrs. Garfield appeared with a smile and an apron dusted with flour. "Gentlemen, breakfast will be ready soon. Go freshen up before it gets cold."
As they stood to leave, Garfield muttered, "Time to call the lab heads. They'll want to hear this."
---
By noon, they were logged into the virtual laboratory. The space shimmered like a science fiction dream—whitewashed walls, glass floors over slow-moving data streams, and floating holographic interfaces responding to gesture and voice.
Jake watched in awe as Garfield's team worked like concert pianists, fingers dancing over invisible controls. Graphs shimmered mid-air, neural maps lit up like constellations, and terms like "cognitive vector mapping" and "sub-thalamic projection" filled the space like an alien language.
"This will take time," one of the scientists said. "Weeks, maybe."
"Take all the time you need," Jake replied. "Just don't give up."
"Nah. We don't do that in here."
While the scientists buried themselves in simulations and Sullivan juggled calls with labs and sponsors, Jake found himself with something he hadn't had in years: free time. And Leonhardt Baum, eccentric and ever-enthusiastic, was more than happy to play tour guide.
They began with the obvious: beer and bratwurst. Though Jake, now sober for over a year, opted for orange juice, to Leonhardt's comic disappointment.
"Juice?" Leonhardt had said, mock-scandalised. "You're in Berlin! That's a crime!"
"Let me be your designated dreamer," Jake replied with a grin. "I am just interested in observation.
They visited a countryside pub where the sauerkraut was homemade, and an elderly bartender sang war-era ballads with such emotion Jake was moved to tears. Then came museums—Pergamon's towering antiquities, the haunting narratives of the DDR Museum, and Jake's personal favourite: the Computer Games Museum, where he fangirled over vintage arcade machines and early-gen consoles like a kid in a toy store.
"You're a cult hero here," Leonhardt said, laughing over currywurst one night. "Your tv series is a bomb especially the episode with the time loop and the dog that speaks Latin."
"You're kidding."
"There are memes. Hundreds. Funny and entertaining. I'll send you some."
They explored flea markets where you could buy Cold War spy gear next to 90s vinyl, and stumbled upon an impromptu poetry slam in an abandoned theater. One night, they even braved a techno concert in a converted power station—pulsing lights, raw basslines, and humanity reduced to silhouettes in sync.
"It's a mad country," Jake said, almost shouting over the beat.
Leonhardt beamed. "We like madness."
Yet, amidst all this chaos and charm, Jake's mind returned nightly to the seed. The dream seed. It pulsed at the edges of his thoughts—this wild, perhaps dangerous notion of programmed dreams. He kept scribbling—on napkins, receipts, hotel stationery. Notes about consciousness layering, about neural inputs, about what stories would look like inside someone's subconscious.
One night, unable to sleep, he stared at the ceiling and whispered to himself, "What if we're not writing stories for people anymore? What if we're writing stories inside them?"
---
On the seventh morning, Garfield entered the hotel dining room looking like he hadn't slept—but with a glint in his eye that jolted Jake from his coffee.
"We've got a prototype," he said.
Jake straightened. "Already?"
Garfield nodded, sitting down. "The virtual lab managed to isolate a complete thought sequence during a chemically-induced subconscious cycle. It's blurry—like looking through a foggy window—but it's there. Visuals, audio, emotional resonance. We observed it on screen."
Jake stared, stunned. "You saw a dream?"
"We saw the skeleton of one," Garfield said. "Flickers of imagery. Shadows of story. But it means the Machine can not only read—it can translate. At least in theory. We are still working on it. Hopefully, we should get some real results in weeks."
Jake leaned back slowly, a deep, satisfied smile spreading across his face. His heart was pounding again, but this time with purpose.
The dream seed had been planted.
And now—against all odds—it had begun to grow and with time mature.