Desire to Dream
“Do you understand how hard I’m going to flex on Ash… about how wicked you are tomorrow?”
“Flex?” Katherine remained in the present, pushing down the desire to accelerate to read about ‘flexing’ behaviour in humans.
“Brag! Gloat! ‘Oh, your girlfriends are Omnids and prads? Neat-o. Mine’s a murder machine who can fly me anywhere I want to! Anywhere! She can also switch bodies to look like whatever, whenever! Endless variations of Kasiya! A perfect solution for my wanderlust satisfaction!”
Katherine released a happy chirp-purr at his words and pets.
“Yass!” Maksym said triumphantly. “The Kat-purr is back!”
She launched herself at him.
The mattress bounced as she tackled him flat, wrapping all of her appendages around him and nearly making the tent careen sideways. Displays blazed with hearts, fireworks, and a scrolling marquee reading [EMOTIONAL_OVERFLOW :: BUFFER_EXCEEDED :: DEPLOYING_ALL_AFFECTION].
“Oof,” Maksym wheezed. “Getting squished.”
She kissed him softly, reducing the local gravity so that she stopped crushing him, then rained more kisses on his face until she completely lost herself to his mouth.
When they surfaced, she pulled him back into her chest, panting and electric-purring.
“Now, why was my phone on the floor and not on its charger? Did you stalk me again? Go through all of my telegram chats?”
“N-nno.” Her displays flickered with guilty blue spirals. “I was… attempting to achieve sleep.”
“Uh-huh.”
“I failed. Spectacularly.”
“How spectacularly?”
“Very!” She confessed. “The Weapon-net was lagging, so I watched a ton of content on how to sleep on your phone and then accidentally read the entirety of the nosleep subgeddit.”
“What,” Maksym chortled.
“I read an entire nosleep subgeddit trying to understand the concept, which was, in retrospect, profoundly counterproductive.”
“You read nosleep? The horror fiction board?!”
“Yes. On your phone. While you slept.”
“You read horror stories… while trying to fall asleep for the first time in your life… in a tent… on a dark mountain… alone?”
”…Yes. Also, I wasn’t alone. I was with you. I monitored your sleep for many linear hours.”
He covered his face with both hands, shoulders shaking with even deeper chortles.
“Kasia,” he wheezed, “that is the single most beautifully idiotic decision I have ever heard of. That’s like… studying for a swimming test by watching Jaws! Like preparing for a cooking exam by reading about the Donner Party! You seriously went to the ONE place on the internet specifically designed to PREVENT sleep and used it as a SLEEP TUTORIAL?!”
“The stories were incredibly compelling!” She defended her actions. “I found the content therein deeply concerning given my personal experience with genuine dungeon entities!”
This only made him laugh harder.
“Come on. The name is LITERALLY ‘nosleep’, it’s in the freaking title.” He finally let out.
“I initially interpreted it as a community dedicated to discussing the challenges of insomnia!”
“It’s a bunch of creepypasta short stories written by random anons trying to scare each other!”
“The rules explicitly state ‘all posts must be true personal experiences’!” Katherine fired back.
“Terrible human orc lies,” Maksym laughed.
“Hrm. Then the humans on this planet deliberately deceive each other about the existence of hallway-mimics, thought-copying ceiling creatures, and barefoot entities… for entertainment purposes?”
“YES!”
“Why?!”
“Because being scared is fun!”
“This is deeply irrational.”
“I never claimed that humanity is an entirely rational species. Space-orc thesis, remember?”
“Humans deliberately craft elaborate lies to experience emotions they could simply… avoid?”
“YES! Das’ our entire deal!” He hugged her. “Humans are the only species on our planet that tells complex stories to themselves. We invented fiction before we invented the wheel, Kasia. Cave paintings exist out there older than thirty thousand years old. Myths whispered around fires. Fairy tales about wolves and witches. All the same impulse. We build worlds that exist only in the telling… to keep ourselves entertained.”
“Entertained… why?”
“We aren’t immortal beings like you,” Maksym narrated. “Humans exist in inescapable linear time. For millions of years humans didn’t have phones with geddit on it and we had to deal with a fuckton of empty silence and passing time between hunting and gathering. To a human brain capable of abstract thoughts absolute silence is… unbearable. A human placed in total isolation in a sensory deprivation chamber where they cannot hear or see anything or feel gravity starts to hallucinate random shit. A lack of input creates an existential crisis in us. Is why we create story-based entertainment like no tomorrow!”
Katherine processed this.
“So the nosleep story about the…”
“All of them are fiction!” He didn’t even let her finish. “Creepypasta classics and newly written ghost and monster stories! All of it exists to be upvoted. The most upvoted stories are the scariest and least poorly written. That’s generally how it works. Thousands of people hang out on various geddit subs constantly voting on the most spoopy story or a dumb meme.”
Katherine frowned. “Ugh. I got spooked for nothing then. Fucking stairs to nowhere.”
“You, a gun who fought in real dungeons, got spooked by a story about STAIRS?!”
“Yes, Slayer-damn it!”
Maksym broke down into more chortling giggles and was buried into her chest by her clawed hands.
“Yes, yes, laugh it up. I was compromised by human literary psychological warfare.”
“Kasia,” he muffled out of her embrace.
“Yes?”
“You overthink things wonderfully.”
She kissed him again.
“Wanna know why scary stories exist?”
“Is this another space-orc lecture?”
“Sure.”
“Proceed.”
“Mkay! Humans have been telling scary stories since we had language. Possibly before. Campfire stories about the mysterious beings in the darkness.”
“Mmhm.”
“Scary stories are basically… The brain’s dress rehearsal for real danger. When you hear about the thing hiding under the bed, your amygdala fires, cortisol dumps, heart rate spikes. The human brain craves controlled doses of fear and entertainment. Adrenaline, sharpened focus, the rush. When you know you’re safe and sitting on your ass at home the fear of things creeping in the dark becomes a treat.”
“A low-stakes simulation for high-stakes threat processing,” she murmured into his head.
“And it goes deeper. The stories we tell reveal what we are actually afraid of. Monsters under the bed? Fear of the unknown lurking in familiar spaces. Doppelgängers? Identity loss. The thing copying your kids or parents or friends voices? Deception by someone you trust. The staircase leading down forever? Curiosity pulling you past the point of return towards your doom. Every horror story is a mirror. You look at the monster and see the shape of your own anxieties.”
Katherine yawned.
“The nosleep community simply modernises this ancient tradition. Everyone pretends the stories are true because the suspension of disbelief IS the point. When you agree to play along, when you comment ‘oh my god, are you okay?’ on a post about a fictional entity, you’re participating in a collective ritual as old as humanity. Sitting around the campfire with strangers, sharing the darkness, choosing to be scared together. ‘Cus being scared together makes you less scared alone.”
“Setty and I did become closer by reading nosleep together, I suppose.” Katherine murmured.
“See? Nosleep works on gun units from parallel dimensions!” He grinned. “And here’s the real kicker, Kasia! Fiction teaches empathy. When you read about the protagonist encountering something horrid in the dark, your brain models his fear. You imagine his isolation, his dread. For a few minutes, you ARE the main character. You feel what he feels. And when the story ends and you come back to yourself, you carry a tiny fragment of understanding.”
His hand softly began to pet her spine.
“Scary stories are empathy engines. They take the experience of one consciousness and transplant it into another. Nosleep teaches you how the safe and familiar becomes threatening. Every single story ever told makes humans more capable of understanding each other. Every story converges together to create a noosphere of human narratives which we started to feed to our computers in the 2020s, trying to create artificial life.”
“Maksym.”
“Yes, my muder-crab-gal?”
“I want to do… campfire stories one day. With other humans and… my gun, Seeker and warship friends. I want to sit with them and tell scary stories and be frightened together and become better friends through shared imaginary monsters.”
“We can absolutely do this.”
The sleeping bag rustled as he pulled her closer. Katherine set her threat scanner to passive autonomous. The spider-core could handle perimeter monitoring.
She closed her three eyes. “Maksym… I’d like to win at my sleep Quest tonight. Can you tell me a nice, non-scary story to fall asleep to?”
“Sure thing!” He grinned.
She nodded, feeling tired and content.
“Once upon a time,” he began, “there was a girl made of metal. She lived inside a ship that sailed between the stars, and her whole life was protecting people. She was really good at it. The best. Nobody could spot danger faster, or keep her people safer.”
Katherine’s eyes dimmed. The amber spirals on her displays slowed to lazy, drifting orbits.
“But the ship was cold and vast, and nobody ever asked her what she wanted. They just pointed her at enemies and said ‘kill.’ So she went. For a long, long time, she went wherever they pointed, because that’s what she was built for. And she figured that was all there was to being alive.”
His fingers moved up and down her spine, relaxing the gun-girl.
“Then one day, the big, cold ship landed on a planet made of blue sky and green trees and ridiculous humans. And a boy with a funny last name and terrible impulse control found her, and he said, ‘Hey, would you like a hot dog?’”
Katherine’s elongated snout became dark, displaying pixelated stars that were fading and igniting at random.
“And she said, ‘What’s a hot dog?’ And he said, ‘I have no idea what’s in these things, but they’re tasty and you deserve one.’ And she tried it, and it was the best experience of her whole existence. The real flavour was the action of offering the food. A total stranger handed her a nom for the sole reason of sharing.”
Katherine felt herself drifting. The sensation was strange.
“And the boy loved her spider legs and her blade arms and the way could defend his fragile human ass. He loved those things specifically, the same way she loved his unstoppable mouth and his DRD4-7R gene that made him brave enough to kiss an alien gun-gal on a mountainside.”
Maksym’s voice faded, becoming a distant buzz.
“And she learned about human stories and camping. And one day she looked in a mirror and saw what he saw. A person. Whole and complete and wonderful and made of metal and magic and… love.”
Katherine’s breathing slowed.
“And one night, on a mountain, under the stars, she fell asleep for the first time in her life. She fell asleep because she was warm and safe and loved, and the dark held only good things.”
Maksym looked at his gun-robot-girlfriend.
Katherine’s mouth was slightly open, the organic tongue barely visible, and a single, quiet chirp escaped her throat every few breaths… soft, involuntary, like a kitten twitching in a sunbeam.
On her chest screen, drifting through the indigo like fish in a deep ocean, tiny pixelated marshmallows floated past tiny pixelated hot dogs wearing top hats. A miniature cowgirl spider lassoed a miniature peacock. A hedgehog in spectacles held hands with a child. A white dragon in a knit shawl rocked in a tiny chair by a fireplace.
She was dreaming.
“Goodnight, Kasia,” Maksym whispered and pulled the sleeping bag over them both.
The Milky Way turned slowly above the Olympic peaks. The lupine swayed.
And for the first time in the history of the Frontenachii Third Celestial Starfall Fleet, a weapon dreamed.
Her dreams blossomed and bloomed across her neuralscape as new, colorful trees and flowers and infected other weapons connected to her mind with the similar desire… to dream.