Earth, 2278. Underground, millions of humans are sitting still, tethered to machines in an elaborate prison called Greenhouse, a facility built beneath the soil by colonizers from another planet.

Rows of motionless, grey-pink human bodies sit there, each one alone, connected only by a network of Posts: the machines that supply these bodies with everything needed to keep them from withering.

Images stream through the Post’s wires and into the minds of the humans in Greenhouse: falsified memories of nights out, good meals, watching films, fighting in wars; marriages, birthdays and funerals, all tailored to each body’s genetics and funneled into their skulls like water. The brains within these helpless heads lighting up at the images, emitting theta waves. The Posts harvest these brainwaves. To the race that colonized Earth, theta waves are a prized commodity. Humans do not live, their happiness is the ore drawn out from Greenhouse, the mine of minds.

The extraterrestrial firm that owns Greenhouse recently began testing new Posts. These are equipped so that two humans can be placed on one Post, promising increased efficiency --- the technology still in beta testing. This cost-cutting measure, pitched by an over-achieving intern, was proven on paper but not in practice.

Some handfuls of humans were kept fully alive. Including Guards, keeping watch over the whirring machinery and their once-fellow-man. The eleven Guards at the two-human-per-Post section were tired from hauling and hooking-up the limp clammy bodies all day, troubleshooting cabling, filling out reports. So they began drinking earlier than usual, unable to hear a distant rattling of cabling over their own voices, the laughter more tuneful as the night went on.

One unit - one person - woke up.

Theresa’s eyes were able to briefly see her-self. Her hands clutched her stomach to discover it tethered with metal and plastic, like she was a fetus and the wires were her umbilical cord. As she pounded against the Post that connected her to her new cellmate, she found her voice worked just like it always did in the false images. She saw a thin clear optic wire, spewing blue laser pulses on the wall behind her. It seems this had come loose.

Every nearby Greenhouse guard bounded toward the piercing sound of a human scream. They combined their strengths to hook her back up to the Post. As they restrained her they saw her eyes dart to her silent neighbors in their rooms. The Greenhouse guards eased her back down to her cradle. Later, drunker, the guards would agree that she had probably seen close to forty pale neighbors before the sedative reclaimed her senses. A numbing calm returned to her brain and she was instantly taken to a scene at the edge of a canyon. This was right where the dream left off, but the image began to flicker, morphing instead into one faint, grainy face forming on the horizon.

It was a face she recognized: her new cellmate in Greenhouse appeared above, her face a constellation sat between either side of the dusk canyon. The pixels of the face twisted and fused with the artificial Arizona sky.

The pixelated face’s first words to Theresa come out hoarse. “Was that you just now..?”
“It was,” Theresa answered. “Could you hear me?”
“I’ve heard everything the whole time our bodies have been in that town,” Claire says. “Did you see that door?”

Hypnopompia
(instrumental)

Guard Cmdr. Hall’s office was located down a winding hallway. It was secluded enough that if the motion detectors would go off, he would just assume that a guard had tripped the sensor by accident. His job was to keep tabs on the cells from his office. In theory, if a human ever came-to like Theresa had, Cmdr. Hall’s pudgy finger would enter a four digit PIN, allowing him to then press a big blue button.

Cmdr. Hall was told that the blue button would unleash a swarm of nano-drones he could then use to sedate would-be escapees. He had never needed to push it, so it didn’t matter that he was never trained in how to pilot the swarm, and, though he had never admitted it to anyone else, the entire time he had served as Guard Commander, he had never even known the passcode. The only code he knew by heart was the one that opened the exit when his shift was over.

Claire lay awake one day when a Guard said it. “1-7, 1-6.” She would never forget it.

Theresa’s brief and violent awakening would have been the first time that the deployment of these drones would have been called for. However, since no one noticed that Claire had been awake, no Guards were on the lookout for her spying eyes.

At the canyon, Theresa winces. “I did see a door. To the right.”

“You saw it? You? You---okay,” the voice in the stars replies. “I’m Claire. Want to get out? I do too. Let me tell you what I know.”