Dominoes 107c: Finally

Jervis trooped down the stairs, glad to have finally gotten his room in a condition where his mom felt it would pass for company, whoever these people were. He had so much to do. He had followed the experiment while it was going on, of course, but it had been so huge, and raced by so quickly, that he had hardly been able to follow more than a few snatches of it. And he had only been able to interject himself into a few scenes, and even those he hardly knew how they had gone. It wasn’t like he could keep track of the action in dream time, and the interface, well, it was difficult to know exactly what the subjects were dreaming. He had succeeded with almost all of the cross-dreams tho. Of that he was sure.

He stared at the files on the computer. This data would take months to process! He flipped through the files and then pulled down one of them. “Roberta” This was the most interesting file, anyway. The only couple that had gone cross sex. It had been a demon to find two universes to pull a couple like this from. Lives practically identical except for one was a boy and one was a girl. The boy in his universe, he remembered, had already married and was living in an apartement on campus with his new wife. That had caused a bit of a stink. In fact it was how he had gotten interested in the guy, and done the research to find his girl counterpart. The name ‘Bobby’ had helped, of course. The two words ‘Bobbi’ and ‘Bobby’ were pronounced the same, making one more point of similarity between the two universes, and making the pull a little less difficult. Still Robert/Roberta had been his most ambitious dream connection he had pulled off so far. It was so annoying he couldn’t ever see the ‘real’ Robert (or, better, Roberta. He had enjoyed hooking up with that part of the dream! Not that pictures came through that clearly.)

He pulled up the file and scrolled randomly to a spot in the middle, watching the girl fall artfully out of the treehouse and then land all akimbo. It had been so interesting watching them react to his ‘enemy’ persona, which they had read as a government agent. Probably libertarian types. Definitely Christians.

Idly Jervis wondered what would happen if he reversed the polarity of the dream, but that would be about as hard as setting up these connections had been in the first place. Far better to play with the connection again, once he really had an idea of how this had worked and what weaknesses he could exploit. Soon the ‘dream’ would become more of a nightmare and he, Jervis, would get to play Freddy, or whoever he wanted to be…

“Jervis!” his mom said, startling him. “Your father just called, and says they are on their way. And they do have a girl about your age, I thought I had remembered that. And father says that she is a bit fat and he doesn’t want you to say anything it.”

“Mom!”

“Well, you remember how you talked to that one girl about her acne.”

“She had horrible acne, and I knew a good cream…”

“Whatever. And you may not have her in your room with the door closed!”

Jervis went white. His mother almost never alluded to that incident. His father had cleared the incident up, beat him half to death, and bought him a subscription to playboy, and then never said anything else about it; but his mother would, every once in a while, like today, bring it up. Subtly, or so she probably thought.

Jervis pushed past her in a rage and went up to his room, slamming the door and bringing a yell of protest from Suzy, who was probably painting or something. If only his mom knew what he was really up to in the basement…