You’re peeling ginger in the communal kitchen beneath your rental unit when you decide to quit. The job is killing you. Surely and not-so-slowly. You used to love weaving dreams for your friends and family. When you were a kid, you’d run to the neural scanner in your mom’s office as soon as you got back from school. You’d hop onto the stool in that small, blindingly white cubicle, tug down the helmet from where it dangled above your head, and squeeze your eyes shut. You’d sit there for hours and hours, growing planets and rearranging constellations until your big brother started banging on the cubicle telling you he was going to eat your dinner if you didn’t come out in ten . . . nine . . . eight . . .

You’d run out, yelling whichever new cuss word you’d learned during recess at him, a shiny new bioplastic card clutched in your small hand: a new world, fresh and ready to be uploaded to anyone’s implant with just a tap to the temple.

It wasn’t until college that you discovered people could get paid for spinning up imaginary settings. But of course, there was a job for it. The current dictator of your country imprisons the poets and painters who dare to defy him, but he’ll happily pay for the realistic worlds he enters just before falling asleep. You guess he’s testing out his plans for global domination as he slumbers, but honestly, you have no idea what goes through despots’ heads. Still. Besides the occasional tyrant, dreamweaving hasn’t been a well-paying profession for the last fifty years. Nevertheless, you have a talent for it—or rather, you hadn’t known how ridiculous it was to apply for a professional license when you had no formal training at all. Not until you’d been approved and hired by the seventh-biggest dream synthesizing corporation on the planet. You’d been so proud of yourself, then. Your career started off with a modest bang, and even to this day, you look a lot more successful than you really are.

Now, whenever you think of dreamweaving, you taste stomach acid. Your heart thrashes against the bars of your rib cage. Your vision blurs at the edges. Now, you’re pretty sure the next dream is going to be the end of you. For what? Not money, not fame—you’ve spent the last ten years forcing yourself not to care, and you are mostly successful. All you want now is stability. But they say only ten percent of artificial dreamworlds actually turn a profit (they’re right), and you’re ninety percent sure you’re never going to weave a moneymaker. Which means you are never going to have job security. You will spend the rest of your life living from paycheck to paycheck. Everyone lives like that, of course—the problem is that dreamweaving was your only hobby, and then you had to go and turn it into work. So, you have work . . . and more work. The moment you do something you love for money is the moment you love that thing a little less.

And yet!

Your older brother believes in you. He is certain that all your hard work will pay off any day now. The same goes for the talent scout who hired you. And, for some reason, your niece, who’s spending the summer with you (uncool) and your partner (somewhat cooler) instead of her hip friends across the city. But you can’t wait for good fortune to knock on the thin door that separates you from the other fifty desperate people in the building. Not anymore. Because that’s what it comes down to, in the end. Luck. Oh, skill plays a role. So does hard work. But at the end of the day, you’ve got to get lucky if you want to survive in your industry—lucky enough for a scout to hire you; lucky enough for the company to approve you building your own new concept instead of just plugging it into one of their AIs; lucky enough to get a couple implant ads promoting your product, which hopefully convince enough people to buy your dream such that word of mouth can take over from the marketing department . . .

Everyone at the corporation is overworked. Everyone is expected to juggle four or five different jobs. There is not enough time, and not enough money to ensure that every dreamworld is a success. The people who own the synthesizers are aspiring trillionaires, so the budgets are tight. You focus on the good things—and there are, indeed, many of them. Befriending other dreamweavers, exploring the beautiful and dangerous realms they build. Long chats with memory librarians kind enough to archive copies of your work for their cities. The occasional patron who messages you over the Feed to tell you how much they liked the rainforest in your latest world. One person tells you the endless miles of dense greenery reminded them of their home a decade ago, before the trees got cut down to make way for farmland.

When you were just starting out, you were bitter and jealous of everyone and everything. These days, you’re just tired. Dreamweaving professionally made you a measurably worse person, and it took so long to undo the damage. You got whiny and hubristic, and now you have frequent panic attacks. It used to be hard to root for anyone, yourself included, especially when you were doomscrolling on the Feed, and all you saw were posts about major worldbuilding deals nestled between reports about human rights violations the next city over. When you finally blinked away the implant screens, you’d be certain there wasn’t a point to dreamweaving at all. But in your heart of hearts, you do actually believe that art has the power to change the world. At least, art has changed your life. You know with aching certainty that you would not still be alive without the dreamworlds that gave your mind a place to run to when things got bad. You had no idea just how difficult things could be for the creators behind some of your favorite escapes. A blessing is a curse from a certain point of view. The reverse is also true, especially if you chose your fate. If you fought tooth and nail for it, every step of the way.

You just want to be able to retire one day.

You should’ve gotten that econ degree like your father told you to. Or gone into tech. Your engineer and programmer friends are no less miserable than you, but at least they make a lot more.

By now, when aspiring dreamweavers tell you they’re working on their license applications, all you can do is wish them luck and hope they’ll be more successful than you are. That the industry won’t break them over its steel-capped knee. Some of them do quite well. Some of them end up like you, with thousands of credits of college debt and unpaid medical bills and a cramped housing unit they can barely afford.

And yet!

The knife slips. Its smooth steel edge nearly bites into your thumb, but you manage to twist your wrist at the last second, and you finish peeling the ginger unscathed. Your niece has a bad cold, one of those old bugs they stopped making vaccines for, so you’re making the honey-ginger-lemon tea your mother made you when you were small. You drop chunks of bright yellow root, one by one, into the bubbling pot on the stove.

You’re not going to quit. Be honest with yourself. What else are you going to do with your one, precious life but* this?* You’re a coward, but you’re also brave. So are all of your dreamweaver friends, who are easily half the reason you’ve able to keep afloat for this long at all. Tomorrow, first thing in the morning, you have a meeting with a creative director—your handler—to discuss “next steps.” This is a nice way of saying that either you’ll contractually agree to build worlds based on prompts the company knows it can market well, or you’ll hand over your ideas to an AI to generate.

This job will actually kill you. You know that. You’ve got stomach ulcers, and your pulse screams in your ears.

And yet, the fire inside burns anyway.

Author profile

Kemi Ashing-Giwa

Kemi Ashing-Giwa is a writer and grad student based in Palo Alto. Her work includes The Splinter in the Sky, This World Is Not Yours, The King Must Die, and several short stories, which can be found in Reactor Magazine, Clarkesworld, Anathema: Spec from the Margins, and a few other places.