Chapter Text
August 1st, 1999.
The headband grips snug against their forehead. The cool, deflated pillow against their cheek starts fading away in a slow blur as the dial-up modem starts ringing in their head.
It’s not the same as hearing. “Hearing” implies a sound wave hitting the ear drum, implies audio. There’s no noise to be heard besides the uncomfortable shift against the sheets and the dull inward-outward drone of their breathing. This? This is all from the inside.
The sensations, the pillow, the sheets start fading away. The deep red-brown of the inner eyelid that dances with barely-visible shapes is slowly replaced by a striking blue, like an artificial sky.
"HypnOS — version 1.04," it greets them.
re3koning_inc, as they’re known, not-awakens in their own copy of Hypnospace. It’s… not a place they say they enjoy. It’s a concept, for sure. They mainly tell themself that they’re here for research purposes. In the steadily growing Dot Com Boom, everyone’s on the lookout for whatever magical solution the internet is going to spit out next. Hypnospace dresses like that solution. They’re a hacker. A “computer scientist” — dumbass label, frankly. But they’re not so far up their ass that they can’t see the merit in sleeptime technology.
That’s what they tell themself, at least.
Like routine, their cursor guides their conscience into their own personal Hypnospace News Center. No, not the actual Hypnospace News Center. There hasn’t been anything worth reading there that can’t be found in the waking world – and hell, the HNC is usually a few days behind anyway.
They’re not shameless enough to have the page bookmarked with a cutesy little Skull Icon like some might, so they have the pathway memorized instead. The Homepage. The Cafe. Five pages down. [ Yes, I’m THAT Dylan. Hi. ], he tells them. They can almost feel their somewhat-unconscious eyes roll in their sockets. It’s a force of habit at this point. Click.
They scroll slowly down the page, glancing over for inconsistencies. News. Some new itch for their brain to latch onto that continues to affirm that, as always, he has no fucking clue what he’s doing.
His status practically never changes. It’s plastered everywhere over his page, “I made hypnospace! I made hypnospace! You remember that shit you bought? Don’t forget me!” It’s pathetic. Pathetic, but not out of character. He’s always been one to beg for attention, undeserved or otherwise. He wants recognition. Well, if you make something worth recognizing, why need to beg? They almost feel bad for the guy… before they remember what an asswipe they know he is.
…Huh. There is something new here, it turns out. They draw themself out of their disdain-fueled haze to hover over Dylan Merchan’t “SECRET PROJECT”, all caps. A quick once-over affirms that this is, once again, another one of his get-famous-quick schemes. Secret Project. By their guess, this will probably fizzle out and he’ll throw a fit that no one bothered to pay his work mind again and he’ll start right back over in roughly 4 months.
Sadly, that’s the boring thing about cycles. They’re cyclical. BWL.
Re3 pulls themself away from this jack-off of a webpage, then moves their screen back to face their bookmarks. They spent a truly not-insigificant amount of time designing the entrance to M1NX, but honestly, who has time for that nowadays? Why bother remembering what 40-character string of letters, numbers, and whatever characters they made their password after the last break-in just for the theatrics? Just stupid.
As the Safe Mode activates, the text detangles itself like snipping gum out of tangled hair. Before they can begin to rattle on about how unbearably stupid of an update that was, the latest post catches their eye.
Dumpster. That motherfucker.
[ heads up: I told Dylan Merchant. it’s cool though, he’s a fan. ]
They can almost feel the headband constricting them begin to steam up from the flash of anger. It’s almost enough to wake them up, right then and there, as if this Hypnospace session were some kind of nightmare, cold sweat and all.
“You’ve got to be fucking kidding me,” the subconscious murmurs. Dylan Merchant. Should. Not. Be here. That was like, rule number one. Fuck.
He won’t recognize them, they know that. They’re smart; their tracks are covered. Nothing suggests that Dylan would be able to narrow down who they are— they even bought their HypnOS Headband out-of-state. Still, the proximity is too short to let them have peace. Act natural, they tell themself. Firm, but natural.
Refreshing the page for the next 10 minutes, they affirm to themself, is natural.
Scarcely restraining themself from immediatelly telling him to off himself is natural, too.
So is opening their version of Dylan Merchant’s ChitChat login. Naturally.
It’s only natural for someone they know so well.