This time I arrived in a library.
A large one — shelves extending back row after row, nearly to the ceiling, the aisles narrow and the light overhead a flat, even white with no apparent source, pressing into every corner without shadow. Some people sat at reading tables with their heads down. Someone was standing at a shelf pulling out a book. The room held a particular kind of quiet — not natural quiet but the cultivated kind, maintained collectively, every person contributing to it. I was sitting at a table by the window, a book open in front of me, the chair across from me empty.
I didn't move. I sat and looked at the street outside.
People passed beyond the glass. Someone pushing a pram. Someone with a dog. Someone scrolling their phone without looking up. Everything precisely as it should be — precisely enough to make me tired. I didn't need to spend time working out whether this was the dream. That question had a fixed answer now, regardless of where I woke up.
Yes. This is the dream.
I looked at the open book on the table — a page I'd actually read once, in the right place, the text clear. Just right. Everything here always just right.
I closed the book and pushed it aside.
I'd been thinking about one thing since the party ended: the anomalies trigger system correction. What if I triggered the correction myself, deliberately?
Not waiting to be caught. Going first.
The logic had gaps — I knew that. Even if I triggered the correction, I'd only enter the next dream. But I needed to do something. I couldn't sit in a library and wait to be moved.
I stood up, walked to the centre of the reading room, and stopped.
Breathed in once.
Then I said, loudly: "This is not real."
The library responded. Heads came up from tables. Someone nearby frowned. The collective quiet broke in the particular way quiet breaks when something unexpected enters it — a held pause across the room, then the gradual returning of motion, people glancing and then looking away, unsure what to do with it.
No system notification.
No [Anomaly Detected].
I waited a few seconds. Nothing happened. People around me were already settling back, heads descending, the small disruption absorbed and filed away.
I walked to the service desk.
"You are not a real person," I said to the librarian. "You were constructed by the dream."
He looked at me, blinking once. Then, in a level voice that could have come from any training manual: "This is a library, miss. Please keep your voice down."
Measured, professional, exactly what that response was supposed to sound like.
[Anomaly Detected]
There it was.
[System Correction Initiated — Transitioning to New Environment in Ten Seconds]
I straightened. My heartbeat picked up slightly — not from fear. From recognition. The feeling of locating a pattern.
Ten seconds, and the library was gone.
A school corridor. Break time. Crowded and loud — someone brushed past me, someone down the way was half-wrestling with a friend. A window at the far end open, the curtain lifting and dropping.
I didn't pause.
I walked to the middle of the corridor and said it again, louder than before — this space carried the voice differently. "None of you are real."
People stopped and stared. Someone kept walking and angled around me. Someone said something under their breath.
Five seconds.
[Anomaly Detected]
[System Correction Initiated — Transitioning to New Environment in Ten Seconds]
It worked. Faster this time.
I stood in the corridor watching the faces — the ones that had stopped, the expressions that registered something, the particular confusion that came from not knowing how to process what they'd just encountered. These people weren't real. I knew that. But the confusion looked exactly like real confusion, and something in me turned slightly, watching it. These faces would be gone in ten seconds. The scene would have never happened, for them.
The corridor went.
A shopping centre atrium. High ceiling, natural light coming through from above. People below in slow, patterned movement — queuing, browsing, sitting. I was on the second level at the railing, looking down. From up here the crowd moved like something organised: regular, rhythmic.
I leaned over the railing and called out — not words, just sound, as loud as I could bring it, carrying everything that had been accumulating, releasing it into the space so it could bounce off the walls and spread and dissolve into the air.
Below, everyone stopped and looked up.
[Anomaly Detected]
[System Correction Initiated — Transitioning to New Environment in Ten Seconds]
Third time.
I waited at the railing for the ten seconds, looking at the faces tilted up toward me. Heart steady — not calm, but something close to it. The kind that comes when something has run its course and what remains is mostly empty.
It changed.
A park. Open ground, trees, a stretch of grass, a few people with dogs, a few jogging. The sky the particular blue of a real-looking afternoon, almost too vivid to feel unselfconscious about.
I sat down on the grass. I was done calling out.
Three scene changes. Three triggered exits. Each one worked. Each one was fast. But the outcome was always the same: a new scene. A new beginning. Another version of inside. Not one of them had moved me closer to any actual exit.
I looked at my palm — the skin of it slightly damp from being held tense.
So that approach didn't work.
Or it worked — just not for what I needed. It let me move between cages. It didn't open any of them.
I lay back on the grass and let the ground hold my weight. The sky above was moving — clouds drifting slowly, light changing as they passed. Real-looking movement. The grass's moisture pressing through the fabric was real-feeling. Everything here felt real, except the fact of being here.
I closed my eyes.
No more calling out. No more triggering. Just this, for a moment.
A thought moved through gently: how many dreams have I been in now.
I tried to count. From the beginning: the living room, seeing Mum, the amusement park, the classroom, the hospital, the stretch that felt like ordinary life, the white space, the party, the library, the corridor, the shopping centre, now this park —
I lost the count.
Not because the number was too high — because I couldn't reliably separate which counted as a distinct dream and which were only scene changes within the same one. The line had blurred too thoroughly.
The wind came through the trees. Leaves moved and settled.
I opened my eyes and watched them, for a while.
Then something surfaced — something I hadn't sat with properly before. If the real exit was the time limit, if that was the true mechanism — then everything I'd been doing, the deliberate triggers, the running, the shouting, all of it — might have been delaying it. Filling the time with activity instead of letting the time run.
When the idea formed, I felt something drop through me — quiet and solid, the kind of settling that comes with a realisation you can't un-have.
I didn't know if that was true.
There was no way to know.
Wind again. A change in the light.
[Anomaly Detected]
I hadn't done anything.
[System Correction Initiated — Transitioning to New Environment in Ten Seconds]
I lay there. Didn't move. Let it come.
Ten seconds, and the grass disappeared.