Author: Colin Jeffrey

It’s not that I have anything against our new alien companions, especially considering the technology they’ve given us. They just give me the creeps. It’s their eyes – opaque white, motionless orbs that never blink. And their voices! Like rocks dropped down drainpipes. You can’t tell if they’re talking to you or choking on their lunch.

But plenty love them. Whole online communities track their movements, trade pictures. Though, given they have zero facial expressions and move at the pace of comatose snails, I don’t get the appeal.

Me, I just work for them. Well, “work.” I sleep eight hours a night, five nights a week, and I’m paid more than most CEOs got before The Arrival. The aliens need human dreams. Something about our REM cycles help them regulate emotions. Or something like that. I just lie in a pod, hooked to cables. It’s painless.

Or it was. Now I get headaches, muscle aches, flashes of things I don’t remember doing.

I went to the company doctor – one of the aliens. Enormous in a comically expanded white lab coat the size of a small circus tent, his bedside manner nonexistent.

“Your illness is a delusion,” he rumbled without examining me. “Drink more water. Evacuate your bowels frequently.”

Unsurprisingly, despite drinking gallons of water and attempting more frequent lavatory visits, the symptoms persisted.

I kept working, but things got really strange. I woke up bruised, sometimes with dirt under my fingernails. Once I awoke soaking wet, as if I’d been swimming in my pajamas.

Finally, curiosity won out. I brought in a camera – an old GoPro I’d rigged to start recording once the pod sealed. It was against the rules, but the techs had stopped paying attention. We were just meat that dreamed.

I hid the device in the pod’s corner, lay back, and let the sleep cables connect to my head.

I didn’t remember dreaming. When I woke, the camera was still there. I took it home and reviewed the footage.

At first, there was nothing. Just me lying there. Occasional twitches. The slow rise and fall of my chest. I fast-forwarded.

Around 2:17 a.m., something changed.

My body moved. My eyes opened, blank. I sat up, removed the cables, slid the pod lid open – things I didn’t even know were possible.

The camera’s view was limited, but it caught me walking stiffly past rows of pods. Another figure appeared. It was one of them. It didn’t stop me. Just turned slightly, like it was checking I was going in the right direction.

I returned at 4:29 a.m. Same slow, mechanical walk. I closed the pod, the cables reattached, I shut my eyes.

I paused the footage. I sat watching the image of my own blank face for a long time.

The next day, I called in sick. I installed a deadbolt and piled furniture against my door. It took me a long time to fall asleep that night.

In the morning, there were fresh scratches on my forearms. They were thin, symmetrical. Deliberate. I found dirt in my bathtub. Not regular dirt. It was fine, powdery, with a faint acid smell.

I haven’t been back to work, but the messages keep coming. My “absence has been noted.” And my “pattern disruption is becoming non-optimal.”

I haven’t told anyone about any of this. I don’t know who to trust.

Tonight, I’m bolting and locking the door again. Wearing gloves to bed. And I’ve set cameras up all over my apartment.

If I leave again, I want to see how.

Or worse, *what* brings me back.