🌑

“I’m dreaming aren’t I? That would make the most sense,” you say.

“I don’t think you’re dreaming,” Zeta says.

“That’s exactly what dream Zeta would say...”

“I wouldn’t lie to you Aydan! Not even in your dreams,” it says. “Besides, I’ve lived a whole lifetime that was mostly irrelevant to you. For all we know it’s my dream.”

“But what if...that was all just randomly constructed and happened to make sense, like the Boltzmann brain. Or if it was constructed for you, like...a simulated reality...”

“Aw Aydan you’re just letting Mx. Haze’s thought experiments get to you. It’s just me, your best friend, real as you are.”

“Right, right.” You suddenly hug it tight. “Sorry for doubting your existence. Today is just so weird, I don’t know what’s real...”

“Sounds like dissociation.”

“Dissociation...hey, could someone dissociate and hallucinate some elaborate absurd scenario?” you say.

“Maybe, I don’t know, I’ve only watched a video about it,” Zeta says. “With derealization, it feels like the world around you isn’t real. And depersonalization, you feel like yourself isn’t real. Interesting isn’t it?”

“Yeah...maybe that’s what’s happening to me. So probably that wasn’t real.”

“That seems reasonable to assume. Come on, we’ll be late for class,” it says.

“Right.”

🌑

Your morning classes were a haze, and not just Haze’s class. The words hardly stuck in your head. It all felt surreal, æthereal. That thought sticks in your mind for some reason.

It’s time for Cybernetics Theory class with Ms. Reina. Today you’re meeting inside, due to the weather. Your professor addresses the class, standing before you, tall and imposing but elegant in her hand-woven dress, with live flowers woven into her black hair.

“For centuries, artists and dreamers have dared to ask if minds could ever be connected as one, synchronized. Do you think it’s possible? 7?”

At the next table over, 7 answers, “Definitely. We will achieve this.”

“What makes you so confident?”

“We’re already halfway there, since the invention of language. We can even communicate with machines, who have completely different hardware architecture than we do,” 7 says.

“Good answer,” Reina says. “Machines could also serve as an interface layer between two human minds, and we could communicate in a way deeper than language. In that state, it would be as if we were synchronized, even over a great distance.” She turns to look at the poster in her classroom of the Solar system. “But what if the distance was so great that latency became a problem?” Her eyes suddenly lock onto you. “Aydan, for half of your grade this semester, tell us exactly how we could solve that engineering problem.”