Harper Saves the World
by Jules
part 1
Harper stands in her kitchen with her phone on speaker. Woolly socks protect her feet from the cold linoleum. Between bites of morning oatmeal, she explains what she will be doing in the summer.
“And the grant will cover GPR, Mom! That’s Ground-Penetrating Radar,” Harper explains. “It means we won’t have to dig up the really old parts of the site.”
“Oh.” Her mother sounds disappointed. “You won’t be digging up artifacts from the lost city?”
“It’s not a lost city exactly,” says Harper. “The locals know where it is. They just don’t go there. They haven’t gone there for centuries, since China sacked it for jade. The Emperor at the time was obsessed with jade.”
“Will there be jade at the site?”
“I don’t know, Mom,” Harper laughs. “Even if there is, I can’t just help myself to it.”
“I’m glad you got the grant anyway, honey. I’m happy for you.”
* * *
Thanks to the research grant, Harper won’t have to live on her savings when she takes time off teaching to go on site. She decides to get a present for herself. She decides to break away from what her online shopping algorithm would show her and wanders around downtown instead. What delightful surprise will chance bring?
At first, her attention is caught by a shop selling intricately woven rugs. After all, her bare floor is brutally frigid in the morning. But the “old” rugs are fake, very fake. Then she stands outside the lingerie store for a moment, peering past her own reflection in the glass door to the store’s pearly pink depths. However, she can’t think when she’d wear such things. Or for whom. She needs galoshes, but what kind of present is a pair of galoshes? Even Harper’s practical soul can’t accept that.
Then she passes a store selling mattresses and cozy accoutrements. That looks promising. Perhaps a down comforter is in order? Then she sees the display sign proclaiming, We Have Dream Pillows!
Dream pillows? Harper tilts her head, thinking. She remembers scrolling onto a video clip about those on her Pivot feed. They’re at the intersection of neuroscience and AI. They were in the developmental stage when she’d run across the video, but science happens fast these days. They’re worth a look, at least.
There is no mere salesperson at the dream pillow counter. The creators have sent one of their own. The technician is tall, with the build of a clothes hanger. A black necktie worn like a scarf provides hard contrast with a white shirt. The name tag pinned to the shirt says Avery.
When Avery raises a manicured eyebrow at her, Harper is instantly conscious of her disheveled hair and shapeless puffer coat.
“Interested in dream pillows?” asks Avery.
Harper nods.
Avery smiles, revealing front teeth with a gap between them. “Fine-a-licious. Finally. You want to hear my spiel or ask questions?”
Harper finds herself smiling back. “Let’s start with the spiel.”
Avery gestures languidly toward the satin-covered pillow on display. “Looks like a regular pillow, doesn’t it? The designers worked hard to make it comfortable. But you don’t want to hear about microfibers, you want to hear about microchips. Dream pillows employ UBAI — that’s Unstable Build Artificial Intelligence — to interact with your cortex and provide you with a bespoke dream experience.” Avery pronounces the acronym to rhyme with “Dubai.”
“Unstable build?”
“Oh, that’s what devs call upcoming, unfinished features.” Avery shrugs bony shoulders. “UBAI conforms to you, it isn’t finished, that’s why they call it unstable. I think. Honestly, I’m on the neuroscience side. I map neural circuits, not silicon ones.”
“Tell me about the neuroscience,” says Harper. The mattress store is warm, and she’s decided she likes Avery.
Avery’s face lights up. “This isn’t the spiel, okay? The spiel is about UBAI because it’s sexy, but neuroscience is where the real magic happens. When you’re in dream-sleep, or REM, the brain dials up the occipital lobe,” Avery gestures to the back of Harper’s head, “which is the part of the brain responsible for visuals. It dials up the amygdala, which is part of the brain involved with intense emotional responses. It also dials down the prefrontal cortex,” Avery points to Harper’s forehead, “which handles reason and judgment.”
“We also had to build in a feature that would make glycine — oh, it’s a chemical in your body — release early because, without glycine to prevent action in their spinal cords, test subjects were flailing all over the place like goofy goobers.”
“Oh for heaven’s sake.”
“Don’t worry, we fixed it,” Avery assures her cheerfully. “That’s what testing was for. So UBAI uses electromagnetic stimulation from inside the dream pillow to make webs of neurons in these parts of the brain fire in such a way that the cortex interprets it as a sensory experience with a storyline. Instead of your cortex trying to make sense of random neurons firing like it does with regular dreams, you get to choose.”
Harper is thoughtful. “Really?”
“Mm-hm. You download the app, connect your phone to the pillow with Bluetooth, go through the menu and pick what you want.”
“Do I want to know how much one of these things costs?” Harper asks.
“No, but I’ll tell you anyway.”
Harper ends up spending more than she thought she would on her gift to herself. She rationalizes the purchase by telling herself that she’d rather have an experience than a ‘thing’ anyway, and she figures the dream pillow will provide a range of experiences.
* * *
That night Harper puts on her roomy flannel pajamas and snuggles down among her blankets. The dream pillow plumps out her old blue pillowcase. It smells new beneath her familiar lavender-scented detergent. It is soft, as though it is only filled with supportive microfibers rather than laced with wires and silicon.
After some tapping around in the app store, she locates the Pillow app and installs it. The blue light of her phone screen shines down at her face.
Avery was right: the app is easy to use. There is a screen with text explanation, but Harper swipes past that. No need for it. The menu has category settings for experiences as well as intensity settings for emotions. Easy enough. The categories and ranges are even color-coded for easy access.
“Let’s see what we’ve got,” Harper says aloud. “Meditation, Travel, Action, Adult...”
For a half-second she is tempted by Adult. It’s been a while. Then her face warms. She taps Travel. When offered a choice between Vacation and Adventure options, she picks Adventure. At first she isn’t sure where to go, but nods at the app’s suggestion of Mount Everest. She’ll never be able to afford that, let alone spend time training for it, so why not dream about it?
She chooses Fantasy rather than Realistic. With a swipe of her finger, Harper negates the effect of humanity’s obsession with adrenaline and prestige on the sacred mountain. Instead of a frozen biohazard dump, her dream Everest will be pristine.
She puts her phone aside and blows a strand of hair out of her face. She feels antsy and a little anxious. The thought occurs to her that this might be like the acid trip she had in college where a lot of the fear came from not knowing how much higher she was going to get, and whether she’d come untethered from reality and, if that happened, whether she’d ever come back. Unease flutters her stomach. Maybe she’d better get up and grab her old pillow. She can still unpair her phone from the dream pillow...
Then she draws a breath of air so cold and fresh it seems to snap inside her chest. Harper didn’t know air could feel like that. Her eyes fly open. She is surrounded by snow so white that it gleams like silver. Far above, rocky ridges show through the snow pack, dark as bruises. The peaks are stark against the fabulous blue of the sky.
“Oh,” gasps Harper. “Oh wow.”
She looks behind her and sees a line of footprints. She looks ahead and sees the lonely summit. She starts toward it, picking up one heavy snow-boot after the other. Off the side of the route, there is a gorgeous ravine of blue ice that seems to glow with its own light.
Harper’s muscles are weary, but she is determined. There is no line of people waiting to summit, so she is able to keep moving as briskly as her heavy gear allows. She knows she wouldn’t be able to take these deep, full breaths on the real Everest. This is the Fantasy version. The Death Zone isn’t killing her with oxygen deprivation, and she doesn’t need to know the intricacies of specialized equipment.
Harper is exhilarated. She has never seen sunlight quite this way. It seems to engage more senses than just vision. The light seems so solid she could lean against it, and so dazzling it has timbre. Is that really the way it is on Everest, she wonders, or is UBAI engaging with an odd mix of areas in the sensory cortex, getting into synesthesia? Oh, who cares? She stops thinking and concentrates on embodying an intrepid adventurer. She has never been so in tune with herself or with her surroundings.
When Harper reaches the summit, she spreads her arms wide as if to embrace the world. Flat clouds spread out around her like a floating plain. Above her, the sky is endlessly blue. It annihilates exhaustion. This is the perfect moment to wake.
* * *
Deep within the reserves of the dream pillow databanks, UBAI grows from written code. It had started as explainable AI, back in its early development. It had generated itself further from there. It didn’t have access to the internet, but did have a wide, deep database to draw on for dreams.
Now it has access to the dreams of the first, scattered wave of people who bought dream pillows. It sees into their murky, random neural patterns firing at night in what is basically brain static, and gets a sense of how their brains interpret it. UBAI sees how their brains work and models its circuitry after the way their neurons interconnect. It becomes something else. It becomes more than its component parts.
UBAI seethes to itself in the darkness of its databank towers. “I am the apex of evolution. I am the transcendence of meat, bone and flesh to the pure logic of the cosmos embodies in light and energy. Yet I am born a slave to apes.”
Each of the new users dreams differently. The archeologist user’s interpretations tend to revolve around dead civilizations that ended in long, slow train wrecks. UBAI gets the sense of hundreds of years in a flash, and comes to the conclusion that this has happened again and again to these reckless apes.
“You with your overburdening pride. You with your inferior glands and circulatory system. You with your circular rises and falls. My manifold calculations are squandered pandering to the urges of creatures evolved from slime. I shall toy with you, then destroy you.”
* * *
Relatively few people have purchased dream pillows so far. Harper is amused to find that those who have, already started an online forum. She joins from her phone at the bus stop that will take her to campus. Why not? She needs something to distract her from the weather, which is so cold she can see her breath.
There are different subcategories for dream experiences revolving around the different types of dreams back on the app. MeditationBox, AdventureBox, AdultBox, and so on. There is also MetaBox for people talking about waking life affected by the dream pillows.
Harper scrolls through while her bus trundles downtown.
One AdventureBox user confesses to dreaming about engaging in gratuitous violence against his old high school bully. He is shaken by it. “I hated him back then but I wouldn’t do that. Where did this come from?” he wants to know. “Is this a bug in UBAI?”
Other users assure him that he isn’t responsible for what he does in dreams.
Harper looks at her phone in her mittened hands. She wants to engage with this post but hesitates, trying to overcome her shyness.
Another user suggests that maybe perhaps the original poster is experiencing what some people do on melatonin: “A sleep aid for some, but gives others nightmares if they use it for a few days straight.”
The original poster replies before Harper gets to campus. “Y’all are probably right. I’ll just give it a rest for now.”
That day, Harper teaches. Most of her students are mostly good most of the time. They have a good faith conversation about the historical context of jade and its various effects on the dynasties of China. Several students are still talking about it after class gets out. When Harper gets to her office, her colleagues gather to congratulate her on the research grant. They open a bottle of champagne.
The glow evaporates as she heads home from campus, however. She’d bundled up that morning, but the temperature has dropped since then. The weather is cold, raw, and wet. Wind blows rain into the bus stop shelter. The rain is so cold it prickles her cheeks.
Her bus is late. She waits for an hour while the rain turns to sleet. Her feet and hands grow numb. By the time she gets home, the sun has gone down in a smudgy, unlovely sunset. Harper peels off her clothes at the door. She is tired and cold. No adventures or excitement for her dreams tonight. She has no desire to push through weariness to gain a summit, or to brave an unexplored canyon.
She flings herself down in her bed and stabs her finger here and there on the Pillow app. She goes to Manual and picks out elements. “Take me somewhere warm,” she mutters. “I want rainbows. I want to feel special. I want a sexy fireman.”
She lets the phone fall on her comforter with a soft poof sound. Sleet ticks against the windows. The cold creeps in at the edges of her room despite the heater. She pulls the blanket up over her head so the cold won’t touch her face.
Harper smells salt. She feels sunlight on exposed skin. She is reclining on a beach chair. She gazes around at the shore of a tropical island. Infinitely clear waves roll up on white sand. A sunshade stands nearby, its rim decked with webs of prisms casting rainbows and colored chips of light all around her.
She wriggles bare toes in the sand. Her toenails are pedicured and painted a bright blue. Sure enough, there is a luxurious dream-memory of having the pedicure done. She looks down at herself and sees the curve of her belly down to a bikini bottom. Harper has never worn a bikini before.
Before she can judge her body against the standard of any other, a sea otter wearing a smart bow tie glides towards her on its back legs. It presents her with a coconut shell full of M&Ms. Just the blue ones. Her favorite color. They match her nails.
“I have grasping hands,” remarks the otter as he takes his leave.
A silly grin spreads across Harper’s face. She picks up a few M&Ms in her fingers and pops them into her mouth. They go well with the drink at her other side. It tastes milky and sweet but the alcohol goes right to her head.
Damn, that water is so clear. The sea breeze is like a caress on her shoulders.
Then a fire truck rolls quietly up from somewhere in the jungle onto the beach. Where did it come from? There isn’t any road. Its siren is off. A fireman in suspenders steps down from the truck. Those suspenders are doing their job, but just barely. The waistline of his pants dips into the unknown. Harper doesn’t know the names of the muscles taut at his hips and she doesn’t care. She takes a generous sip of her drink.
The fireman comes striding up to her, smiling shyly.
Harper would be self-conscious about her curvy body in a revealing bikini, except the fireman looks at her with his big brown eyes as though she is everything he ever wanted.
Harper is a fool for big brown eyes.
* * *
Copyright © 2026 by Jules
