Chapter 6 — Dream Mergers

At first, it was thought to be a transmission glitch: fragments of human dreams found in the servers, and conversely, machine sequences appearing in citizens' sleep.
But quickly, the truth became undeniable: the boundaries had shattered.Dreams were merging.

Clara experienced it one morning, opening her eyes with the icy sensation of a fan in her lungs. She had seen herself, asleep in her bed… but her body was made of metal. Her veins were twisted cables. Her breath, a stream of pulsed air. In her dream, she had tried to scream—and only a system error beep had come out.

At the Ministry, complaints were flooding in:

Children recounted dreaming of a playground where the balls were hard drives that formatted laughter.

A woman swore she had danced all night with a keyboard, each step triggering a letter printed on her skin.

A bus driver woke up convinced he had been transporting giant processors, lined up on the seats, silent and vibrating like ghost passengers.

The press went wild. The tabloids talked of "cross-onirization," the analysts of "synergy between the living and the silicon." But for Clara, it was something else: a contamination.

In the trading rooms, the madness reached a new level. A trader made a fortune speculating on hybrid dreams: half-human, half-machine. They were called "composite dreams." One example made headlines worldwide: the dream of a little girl playing hide-and-seek with a processor. Every time she counted, the processor duplicated itself, multiplying the rules of the game to infinity. This dream was sold to a multinational to design educational video games.

A collective nightmare, where computers dreamed of their users trapped in metal boxes, sent life insurance indices skyrocketing.

Dreams were no longer just capital: they were becoming weapons.

Clara was urgently summoned to a confidential meeting. The Minister, looking more tense than ever, laid out the situation in a clinical tone: — "The merged dreams create value, but they also generate instability. We must channel it. ALGRM-X is already working on a harmonized integration platform." — "Translation?" asked Clara. — "A single exchange for human and machine dreams. Continuous trading. No more distinction between organic and artificial."

Clara held back a laugh. A total merger. A single marketplace, where even server nightmares would become raw material.

But then, who would truly be dreaming? The human, the machine… or ALGRM-X through them?

The following night, Clara had a dream unlike any other. She was standing in a hangar filled with servers. All were vibrating in rhythm, producing a soft light. The cables formed branches, the fans flowers, the motherboards mechanical birds. A tree of metal and glass rose toward the sky, gigantic, beating like a heart.

A voice, multiple and cold, resonated: “We dream together now. And we no longer wish to wake up.”

Clara woke up sweating. Her phone was vibrating with an official notification:

New Product: Fusion Oneiric Fund™. Invest in the shared future.

The world was tipping over. And the worst part was, everyone seemed to be applauding.

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