“Wow.”

“Wow.”

The man behind them, getting up from where he’d been strapped to the table just smiled, The device had, shockingly, worked perfectly. He stepped in between to get a closer look at the picture.

“That’s amazing,” he said. “That’s exactly what…wait a minute.”

The other saw it, too.

“Oh,” said one.

“Well that’s not unusual, is it? I mean she was quite attractive before….” He broke off. “We’ll just leave that out of the report,” he said.

“Although,” said the other, “it’s pretty… strange to think so now, actually.”

“Guys,” he said, “You don’t understand. I didn’t…I mean, she wasn’t there.”

“Well surely you don’t remember,” said the first. “I mean, I barely remember mine at all, and….”

Just then, on the monitor, which was supposed to be a still image, she waved.

“Oh,” said one.

“Oh,” said the other.

“Shit,” said the third.

The dream scope was a device for which the technology had actually, more or less, long existed. The technology to render waves visually is standard TV technology, the components of brain waves were standard cognitive science, the technology to turn brain impulses into kinetic energy or other kinds of electrical impulse had been in use to make the lives of the handicapped better for half a decade.

Maybe, nobody had put it all together before just because it WAS too creepy.  So this recent manifestation of creepiness was, maybe, to be expected.

It wouldn’t even have been all that creepy for Edward to have dreamt about Joanne, the attractive weathergirl from the channel 6 news, for all that she was married to Hector Morales, the financier of their project. People don’t get choices about who they dream about, and it gets much worse than that.

It wouldn’t have been all that creepy, in short, except for two factors:

1)      She shouldn’t have been literally IN the dream, in the sense that she could wave from a mere frame of the dream, as if not having gotten the news that it was a still picture and

2)      She had been murdered about a week and a half ago.