Fearsome Dreamer Read Free Page A

him so far, it was the cold that was the hardest to bear. Hunger was a creature whose ways he understood. His childhood had not been a rich one; hunger he had learned to deal with. A food unit might be free; credits to buy food from it were not. And life had been made harder than necessary for people like him.
    Even as a child, White had been aware that there was something about him that didn’t fit. The other children he knew were so unlike him that he found them incomprehensible and alien. They cared about pointless things like games he had never heard of, famous people he had heard of but couldn’t muster up any interest in, and the latest holographic shoes that his family would never be able to afford.
    Each time his father had suggested that White should try to get to know the other children at school, he had found the idea so absurd he would choke on it and be unable to speak. He felt bad, sometimes, because all his father needed was for him to agree, or comfort him with trying, and he would be happier. But instead, when he sat White down and told him that those children were not so different from him, that he should ask them who their favourite GameStars player was or which Life worlds they liked the best, he just looked back at his father, choking silently.
    The truth was he had really grown to hate other children, and the truth was that at first they made fun of him and then ignored him totally as if he wasn’t even worth their spite, and the truth was that even if any of them did like the same snack that he did, that would only make him hate them more. He didn’t want to be anything like them. The idea had made him feel ill.
    It was so cold, here.
    Endless cold was insidious. You only got used to it for periods at a time, and to cope you carved your existence into blocks. Over this block and fine for a while. Barely even noticing it. Then it would stroke you gently over the arms and set you shivering with misery. You endured by begging each second to be the last, and when it was, you basked in the numbness, begging desperately for each extra minute, just another, and just one more, until the shivering began again.
    So were his moments spent.
    Back in the time pre-prison (as he liked to think of it, his entire life now firmly divided up into BEFORE and NOW), he had often thought about how he might cope if he were ever really and truly imprisoned. It was quite hard to imprison someone with his talent for escape. He had decided that the best way to cope would be to separate his mind from his body, and spend his time creating another life inside his head.
    He would dream.
    He was very good at that. It was part of the reason he was here in the first place.
    But here and now, and just when he needed it most, his talent for dreaming had utterly deserted him. His thoughts were broken and confused, consisting mainly of thinking about how hungry and cold he was, and trying not to think about how hungry and cold he was. There was no energy left for anything else after that.
    It would be easy to blame his mother for this. She was the one who had passed on the freakish abilities that had landed him in here. She was the one who had taught him about his gifts, and urged him incessantly on.
    But there was no one to blame, not really, no one except himself, and the defect he had been born with that meant he could do things that others could not.
    His mother had told him that there were others like them, but he hadn’t yet met a single one. He had been the only one in his school, the only one in his district. As far as he knew, anyway. If there were others, they hid it better than he did.
    He didn’t want to hide it. Hiding meant shame. He would not be shamed.
    When he was younger, there had been a popular slang thing going around; a little rebellious thing kids did as a nose-up to adults, because everyone knew that World’s past had been a stupid, dangerous place, weren’t they told so in school? So