Dream Machine

By Christian Hayes

Dream Machine is the latest page-turner from the bestselling author of The Fat Detective trilogy and The Fading Man.

Life is stuck on an endless loop for Alex Clark, a sixteen-year-old who spends his days suffocating at school but his nights exploring a vast virtual world that is far more addictive than reality. While all his classmates are asleep Alex is walking through wheat fields and forests and mountainous landscapes. But when a doorway leads him to a perfect replica of New York City, he finds it harder to return to real life.

Zoe is his only reason for going back to school. With new-found feelings for her, he really wants to get to know her better. When he tells her of the world he has found, she is a little sceptical. But once she too finds herself at the centre of a living, breathing New York City, it does not take much to convince her and she wastes no time having fun and living out her dreams.

They are finally free to do whatever they want, whenever they want, without any teachers or parents around to spoil their fun. But when they can't find their way out, it soon becomes hard to determine whether they are trapped in paradise or in a nightmare of their own making.

From the bestselling author of The Fat Detective and The Fading Man, Dream Machine is a gripping, fantasy-infused adventure that explores the thrilling possibilities and darker sides of a technology that is fast approaching us all.

• Language: English
• Publisher: Christian Hayes
• Release date: Dec 6, 2022
• ISBN: 9798215827956

Book preview

Part 1

One

The cord of his blinds had not been touched for weeks and both daylight and fresh air had become strangers to his room. Dust had settled on untouched surfaces and his sheets had not been changed in over a month. There was not an inch of space on the floor due to strewn clothes and other stuff, but no more than in the room of any other teenage boy. But unlike many other teenagers’ bedrooms, the thing that was unusual about this one was the sheer amount of electronic equipment that whirred away.

Alex Clark’s room looked like an engineer’s laboratory. His sizeable desk held an array of screens which gave a simultaneous overview of all the desktops, laptops and games consoles connected to them. These included Nintendos, Segas and Playstations, as well as a ZX Spectrum and a Commodore 64, which were currently not hooked up. He had some obsolete Macs and a huge array of PCs, some of which were second hand and some of which he had built himself. He nicknamed his main machine The Brain, Frankensteined together using only the best parts he could afford. He salvaged the RAM and hard drives from PCs he no longer used and saved up for a new processor and graphics card. It was fast and powerful, and could handle any game he threw at it.

Of course all this equipment needed a host of accessories, which explained the keyboards, mice, trackpads, wrist-rests, hard drives, floppy drives and CD-ROM drives that were connected by metres of USB, HDMI and ethernet cables, all of which created a monstrous tangle of cable spaghetti beneath his desk. Sometimes he swore he could see the cables squirming together in the dark, oddly alive.

Accompanying these machines was a twenty-four seven hum generated by the rush of fans, and the glow of the monitors and the variety of colourful LEDs were often enough to illuminate the room without having to turn on a lamp.

His room was actually quite large but so much space had been taken up that it now seemed confined. It only really consisted of a single bed, unmade, the large desk that took the weight of all the computers, a wardrobe, and an entire wall of bookshelves. But the only books it contained were about gaming or coding. The rest of the space was stacked with games three layers deep.

There were metres of cartridges from a variety of consoles, as well as CD-ROMs, some in their original boxes but many that were now in replacement cases. He even had a collection of floppy discs containing some early games for his Macintosh Classic such as Shufflepuck Café, Stunt Copter and Prince of Persia.

At sixteen years and eight months, Alex had already played his way through almost the entire history of video games. He had bounced that little square between two paddles in Pong, eaten millions of cookies and fled thousands of ghosts in Pac-Man, had saved the princess over and over again in Super Mario Bros., Super Mario Bros. 2, Super Mario Bros. 3, Super Mario World and Super Mario 64, and had memorised every secret, every Easter egg, and every warp zone along the way. He had collected all the rings in Sonic the Hedgehog 1, 2 and 3, had cleared millions of lines in Tetris and had explored every inch of The Kingdom of Hyrule in The Legend of Zelda, The Adventure of Link, A Link to the Past and Ocarina of Time. He had studied the world of Myst closely, kicked and punched the hell out of everyone in all the Street Fighters, and had killed thousands in several Call of Dutys.

In his spare time he had flown from London to Hong Kong on Flight Simulator, driven across America in Truck Simulator and had even whiled away a good few hours on four legs in Goat Simulator.

In all he had been a crack shot sniper, a blue hedgehog, a squat Italian plumber, a hungry yellow circle, and a goat. All from the comfort of his cluttered bedroom.

But he was tired of playing other peoples’ games. Now he wanted to play his own. It was something that came naturally to him: ideas popped into his head at all times of the day and infiltrated his dreams. He had come up with many ideas for games, some of which were half-baked, others which were fully formed.

Out of a frustration of not being able to create a game himself, he had taught himself how to code. He spent hours studying books and gleaning what he could from videos online, focusing on C++ and C#. It was a frustrating process, but he stuck with it. His earliest experiments were unsophisticated little games, rip-offs of better-known classics. His first was a top-down puzzle game where a man had to escape a room by pushing boulders around on a grid. He called that Prison Escape. His second was a maze game where a figure had to make its way out through an underground labyrinth by picking up keys and unlocking doors. That was called Maze Escape. His third was one where a guy had to find material to construct a raft so that he could make his way off a desert island. Island Escape, naturally.

But for almost a year he had been working on something far more sophisticated. He had dreamt of creating a world, a world he could almost see himself living in. The only objective would be to explore and to experience. Aesthetically, he wanted to pay attention to colour, light, texture and movement.

He had an A4 blue, spiral-bound notebook, each page adorned by a grid of light blue squares, and in that book a world grew. It contained notes, sketches, diagrams and maps. He took that book everywhere with him. If he ever had an idea, he would ensure to write it down. And the more ideas he recorded, the more the world came to life and the more precious the book became to him. He took great care of it. And then, he started coding, giving life to the world he had envisioned within the pages of that notebook.

He spent night after night bringing his design to fruition, writing lines of code until the clock had ticked well past midnight. He hit many dead ends and made many mistakes, but the night came when he was able to plug his headset in for the first time.

He found himself in a wheat field. All around him, rushing wheat, and far off in the distance, mountains. It was a vivid and utterly absorbing world.

But then Alex had an innate ability for immersing himself in a game. Even when the graphics were not particularly realistic or the controls were crude, he had the ability to invest himself completely. Perhaps all his experience over the years had provided him with a more elastic imagination than most and he had become more adept at seeing, hearing and feeling everything more acutely.

And that Monday night, a school night, he was deep within the game. His headset covered his dark eyes and the straps partly tamed his wild brown hair.

He had to leave his room eventually. He knew that. The hunger pangs were telling him to open his door, go downstairs and eat something. Besides, he knew there was a microwave meal waiting for him.

When he left his room it was almost ten. The rest of the house was in darkness and a profound stillness had settled in for the evening.

He didn’t turn the light on in the kitchen; the blue glow from the fridge was enough to illuminate the room. He looked at the microwave meal that had been left for him there: cod in parsley sauce.

Dad knew he hated that one. Out of all the options at the supermarket, he had no idea why he insisted on buying the blandest, most tasteless meal known to mankind.

He tapped his fingers on the fridge door, formulated a plan and grabbed the milk.

He took down a bowl, filled it to the very top with Cheerios, drowned them in milk, and gingerly walked the brimming bowl up to his room where he sat on his bed and shovelled the cereal into his mouth. When it was all gone, he drank the milk directly from the rim. He thought there was an ingeniousness to cereal, the fact that it was an entire meal in a bowl and all you needed was a spoon.

It was getting late and he had to drag his books out of his bag. His homework felt particularly heavy that evening.

With all the computer equipment taking up his desk, he had to balance his books on his knees. Tonight it was English, maths and physics, and he thought he would start with maths as he suspected he would be able to rattle through the equations. However, he stared at the first equation for so long that it ceased to make sense. He tried some workings out, scribbled down some notes, punched in some numbers on his calculator, but he could not for the life of him figure out what x was.

He thought he would leave that one and come back to it. The only problem was that the second equation, if anything, was more baffling than the first. He couldn’t even get close to it. He knew his exams were coming up and he was a little concerned that he couldn’t figure out simple algebra, as were his teachers. He’d been trying his hardest this year, he really had, but sometimes he felt that he was finding his schoolwork harder than he should. Other kids in his class seemed to breeze through it.

It had become his little secret, how difficult he found it, and he was going to do everything he could to hide that fact from his teachers, as well as his fellow pupils. He just hoped that when the time came, he would revise all this stuff back into his head. The only problem was, and this was another of his little secrets, that he had paid such little attention in class, that it would technically not be revision. He would really just be learning most of it for the very first time. Surely, he thought, he would be able to teach himself.

It didn’t help that he had, over the past few weeks, been up until one, sometimes two, every night, ever since his dad had taken on the night shifts at the power grid where he worked. He felt he deserved that time otherwise his whole day was taken up with school. He didn’t just want to work all the time; he wanted to be able to actually appreciate his own life. For one thing, he wanted to spend more time gaming. Well, it wasn’t really a case of wanting, it was more that he just couldn’t help himself, whether he liked it or not.

At half past ten he convinced himself that he could finish his homework the next day, before school. All he had to do was get up extra early. He set his alarm, thinking it through as he set it. He needed maybe ninety minutes, he thought, to get it all done, and he had to leave the house at seven forty-five at the latest. He needed five minutes for a shower and ten minutes to get ready (if he raced). So as long as he got up at five forty-five, adding a fifteen-minute lie-in time, he would get his work done and be in school on time. No hassle, no stress, no detention.

But before he went to sleep he thought he would pay one final visit to his game, to the world he found so absorbing, and with his headset on and controller in hand, he found himself back in that wheat field.

Two

A straw-coloured sky, fringed purple at the horizon, stretched out overhead as rays of golden light shone playfully across the wheat field. From where he was standing the landscape stretched out in every direction. He pushed his way through it, moving aside the tall crops with his hand.

To the east there were mountains, snow-capped and faded by sheer distance. To the north, a thick forest of dark green. And emerging from above those trees, a thin plume of black smoke rose almost entirely undisturbed by the distinct lack of breeze.

That wispy black line was the only sign of inhabitation and he thought it would be best if he made his way towards it.

As he continued through the wheat field he realised that the light was fading fast and that it would soon be night, and sure enough, just as it crossed his mind, a bone-white circle of moon slid down from the sky and hung solidly above the trees, and by the time he was leaving the wheat field and entering the forest, all he had to illuminate his way was the light reflecting off that disc, a light that turned everything around him cool and silvery.

Winding his way through the tightly packed trees, he noticed a faint orange glow visible through the foliage. He didn’t have to travel far before he found a clearing and discovered where the smoke was coming from. He found himself in an opening, at the centre of which was a solid stone building that resembled a church with a tall steeple and a bell tower that mingled with the tops of the trees. The forest around it looked like it was closing in, getting closer and closer to its door, threatening to take it over.

Its most eye-catching feature was the large panel of stained glass at its front, lit by the warm glow from within, made up of intricate, interlocking shards of colour.

He approached the wooden door and turned the large brass ring, lifting up the latch and pushing the heavy door. It creaked as though it had not been opened in a long time.

And inside, where he had expected to find a church, he found something altogether different. Its pews had been replaced by rows upon rows of shelves, each one filled with books. There were further shelves built into the alcoves around the perimeter, and books were stacked where the altar would have been. The entire place was lit by flames with once-tall candlesticks now sunken and withered with its dripping, drooping wax, some in candlestick holders, others encased in lanterns. And a large fireplace was dying out, its final glowing embers struggling for survival.

Alex slowly circled the room and ran his eyes across the books: hardbacks, paperbacks, some leather-bound and refined, some printed on paper so cheap you could still see chips of wood trapped within its surface.

There were classics pressed right up against potboilers, high and low culture mingling easily together. And all of it was fiction. There wasn’t a textbook or biography or self-help book in sight. They also weren’t just in English but in all kinds of languages: Spanish, Polish, Finnish, Japanese. And around the room he found all kinds of secret, hidden-away areas. One alcove contained a comfy leather armchair, another a large writing desk.

He soon discovered that the books had not been organised in any way at all. They had not been categorised by genre, by year, by publisher, nor alphabetised by author or title. They seemed to have been placed on the shelves at random, as though whoever had placed them there had no interest in anyone finding what they were looking for. This meant that on one shelf you could find The Invisible Man alongside The Maltese Falcon alongside The Catcher in the Rye. Where a shelf wouldn’t do, they were stacked up in piles on the floor, some of which acted as makeshift tables upon which lanterns sat. In one alcove four piles of thick hardbacks supported a tabletop.

Alex sank into the leather armchair he found in one of the alcoves. Shelves had been built into the alcove too so that when he sat down he was surrounded by a vast selection of books on all three sides. He spotted some he recognised, such as Pinocchio, this time in its original Italian, and a copy of Alice in Wonderland which, when he opened it, he discovered was in Japanese. From the illustrations Alex could see that Alice met the Queen of Hearts at the front of the book and fell into the rabbit hole at the back.

Another book caught his eye that he had never heard of before. It was called The Key to the City by an author called E. H. Quinlan. On its spine was printed an image of a key and its cover presented an illustration of a city skyline. But when Alex opened it he discovered that the pages were blank.

It was only when he investigated the back of the book that he realised a space had been carved out through the centre of the pages, and he soon found the key hidden there. He turned to the back of the book and removed it, turning it over in his hand. It was a plain-looking iron key, quite long, with a simple ring at one end and three short teeth at the other.

He walked around the library looking for a keyhole to compliment this key. Maybe it was the key to a safe, or maybe it just locked the front door. But the keyhole on the front door was far too big. He then tried the back door but that keyhole was far too small. He looked all around the library but he couldn’t find a single keyhole in which his key would fit.

He added some coal to the fire, and some wood, and he pushed it around with the poker until the fire was ablaze again.

He sat back down in the armchair and basked in the heat that emanated from the fire. That was when he spotted something. Just beyond the edge of the rug on the floor by his chair, there was a line that cut across the tiling. He flipped the corner of the rug over and discovered the square lid of a trapdoor.

He grabbed the handle and had to work hard to lift it due to its weight. And once the lid had been flipped open and had slammed down on the floor he was faced with a square hole that only seemed to be filled with pitch-black darkness. An icy air came up from below and, looking into it, he didn’t know if he had seen anything so black before.

He reached one arm into the hole and quickly hit something. Stone. He realised he was touching a step.

He picked up a large lantern that was sitting on a table nearby, inside of which was a thick candle, and he began his decent, carefully placing one foot in front of the other into the darkness. And he stepped further and further beneath the earth and soon began to wonder whether it was leading anywhere at all, whether it was a dead end or perhaps even just a spacial anomaly, an empty, dark abyss that went on forever and led nowhere. He looked back and found that the square of light was now so small that he wondered how he ever made it through there in the first place.

He had decided to turn back a couple of times, but each time he was compelled to continue on just a little further. The flickering light from the candle was dim and all he could really see was a couple of steps ahead of him. But it was the lantern that discovered it first, that came into contact with it. Clang. He had reached the end of the darkness and all he found was a metal door.

He lifted the lantern and read the words that had been scratched into the metal: The Corridor of Many Doors.

And when he illuminated the handle, he was certain that he was about to find it,