There is no other species on the Earth that does science. It is, so far, entirely a human invention, evolved by natural selection in the cerebral cortex for one simple reason: it works. It is not perfect. It can be misused. It is only a tool, but it is by far the best tool we have, self-correcting, ongoing, applicable to everything.
Carl Sagan

The academy library was at the heart of the campus and located at the ground floor of a building belonging to the science faculty. It was a tall, white tower, narrowing towards the top, and from afar looked like a collapsing tent. Inside, the main hall was just a circular room with dozens of work stations. In its center, the tall, glowing column that held up the ceiling was in fact a tank for bioluminescent bacteria that emitted a bright, bluish glow at all times. They were a monument for the successful development of a highly efficient biofuel. The bacteria inside the tank produced a glowing substance, but in bioreactors all over the city, a different strain was producing the fuel that most of our machines and droids were running on. This monument was the reason that the library was also nicknamed "Lighthouse".

Almost all the information in the world – well, what was left of it, anyway - could be accessed through the terminals at the work stations, so many people did not see any necessity for books. Yet I knew that there were storage rooms in the basement of this building, where ancient paper copies of some books were kept. In the early days of the Keres, they had been tasked with the retrieval of books and any other printed information that had survived the war, in the hope of finding anything that might have been missing from the databases. But the people of the 21st century had been very thorough in their digital archiving, and over the years, not a single paper book had been recovered that had not already existed as a copy in the archives. The missions to retrieve information were scrapped in favor of missions to retrieve resources, but the few books that had been brought back to the city and survived decontamination were now kept locked up in specially sealed, climate controlled safes. Perhaps to serve as mementos to an older, more primitive world.

The thought that I was sitting above a pile of ancient books made my heart ache with a sense of longing. I wished to one day have the chance to go down there and see them for myself, to touch the brittle paper pages and their rough linen backs, and to get my hands dirty with the flaking ink of the printed letters. But the area was restricted, and only few people were allowed to enter it, and even fewer of those actually interested in going there.

So instead of browsing through shelves of books, I sat at a terminal and stared at the screen in front of me with exhausted eyes through a pair of interface glasses. My sight kept going in and out of focus, confusing the eye tracking system, and I had to actively remind myself to blink from time to time. The terminal in front of me was browsing through the databases at breathtaking speed, and I tried my best to keep up and sort the results into useful and useless information, skimming across hundreds of network entries, digitized book pages, news articles, maps, images and videos.

Lucid Dreaming - A dream in which the sleeper is aware of dreaming and can often exert a certain level of control over the occurrences or the environment within their dream. Night terror - A sleep disorder in which the sleeper experiences intense feelings of dread and fear. Typically occurs during non-REM sleep... often the sleeper will experience them while bolting upright, seemingly awake with eyes wide open – no, that's not it. Support for sleep disorders – emotional reprogramming – oh hell, no. Oneirology. 'The hidden meaning of your dreams, call today for a free dream interpretation'. Wow, people really believe these things? Well, I'd be content with understanding any obvious meaning, first of all.

After an hour, I felt like my head was about to explode and I removed the glasses that had allowed me to navigate the network by eye movement with a deep sigh. For a moment, I just sat there and massaged the center of my forehead where a sharp headache had begun to creep up. I had an hour left before my next class and I felt like I was nowhere closer to finding an answer - probably because I didn't really know how to properly phrase my question.

I had read any piece of information available on the subject of dreaming and sleep disorders, and trying to contain it all felt like attempting to hold water with a sieve. There was no obvious explanation for my hyper-realistic, recurring - or rather ongoing - lucid dreams. There was no evidence that a prison like Tartaros existed, or had ever existed anywhere on this planet. There was no indication that anything that I had seen was real, and yet I couldn't shake the feeling that it just was.

I recalled last night's iteration of the dream. I had tried to find out as much as I could about Tartaros, and had spent the afternoon and evening trying to pry more information from the other prisoners, while in turn, Arrow and Bridge had been trying to coax me into revealing more about what they considered my "memories". But I had decided to stick to Rain's friendly advice of keeping my mouth shut. The dreams were exhausting enough without picking a fight with a superhuman beauty who looked like she wanted to murder me for so much as taking a wrong breath in her presence.

On the one hand, I had no intention of returning to that place ever again. But on the other hand, the more I thought about it, the more I had to admit that it was an intriguing idea. There was an entire library worth of books in Tartaros. And if I could figure out how to make use of my time during those lucid dreams, I might be able to use it productively. Like an extra couple of hours waking time.

I couldn't remember everything I had skimmed over in the library in Tartaros in my dream, but what I did recall I had double-checked with my own copies, a collection of files on my tablet, and different versions in the databases, if there were any. They were identical, word by word, as far as I could tell. The same was true to the passage from the Metamorphoses that I had read during my first visit, and in particular, that line from Paradise Lost about Pandaemonium that Cloud had quoted.

Of course I had read Milton's epic poem before, but I had never memorized it by heart. The mere idea seemed mindboggling. But perhaps these dreams offered me a way to tap into some subconscious, super-detailed long-term memory. To verify that theory, I would have to go back there again, read up on some old literature and learn a few passages by heart, and then check with the entries in the network.

But already now, the dreams bothered me more than I cared to admit. Reminiscing about them now only added to the sharp tingling headache, as if that uncanny level of detail and realism was too much to fit into my brain, which was busy enough to recollect the things that happened during the day. During sleep, memories had to be consolidated, which led to dreams often including fragments of things experienced during the day. I couldn't help but think that making so many new memories during my dreams was, in the long run, not going to be very beneficial for my brain.

At least I still had the sleeping pill. I had avoided going to the infirmary, and just sent a message to the official network address, telling the nurse that I forgot to take it and would return the bracelet the next day. I was fairly certain by now that the same Artificial would be on duty and I wouldn't need to explain any further. I wondered if the pill would really knock me into a dreamless sleep. But more importantly I asked myself if, at this point, I actually wanted that.

Several more useless network search queries later, I let my gaze wander into the distance to give my eyes some rest. As I glanced across the room aimlessly, I suddenly found a pair of eyes staring back at me from the other end of the hall.

They belonged to a girl in a black-and-red Keres cadet uniform, and I felt like I had seen her somewhere before. Her eyes widened in surprise that I had found her staring at me, and she quickly pretended to look down at her tablet. Even from a distance I could tell that it showed nothing but a black screen. I squinted my eyes, trying to get a better look at her face, but she kept it hidden now behind a curtain of her brown hair. She seemed oddly familiar, but perhaps she was just another 'fan' of the literal smash hit that the video footage of the Daidala incident had turned into.

"Hey Sky, what's up! What are you reading?"

Bastion's voice behind me startled me so much that I nearly jumped out of my chair.

"It's rude to look at someone's screen over their shoulder, you know?" I said gruffly and quickly put the terminal in sleep mode.

"Excuse me, princess!" he rolled his eyes, "Didn't mean to invade your privacy, here in this public library."

"Yeah, you prefer to directly barge into our room in the wee hours of morning to do that, don't you."

His sarcastic grin crumbled, leaving him devastated by my words.

"I'm really sorry, it's just... I was really worried for you two. Especially after that accident you had-"

"It's fine. It was just a joke."

I tried to smile, but I was still distracted with thoughts about my dreams. My fingers were itching to look for something else that I had just remembered, but now that Bastion had shown up, I somehow didn't want to do that right in front of him. It was ridiculous, but I felt embarrassed. I didn't want my dream to affect me like that, but I couldn't help it.

"Anyways... I came to find you because we're having a party over at the old hangar on Friday," Bastion said, "I wanted to invite you to come... if you'd like."

I looked at him in surprise. Parties really weren't my thing, and he knew that. Or so I had thought.

"It's...it's gonna be nice, I promise!" he quickly added, probably due to the look on my face. "Not too many people coming. Good music. Even some old world stuff you might like. It's just a bunch of people from the Talos force, and some friends."

I didn't understand why he was trying so hard to convince me to go there. I was no fun at parties, always too shy to talk to new people and usually just hanging around in a corner by myself, watching the others have fun. Or at least I imagined myself to be like that, as I realized that very moment, I couldn't recall ever going to any party at all.

"Ehh... I'll think about it," I said to humor him. "When?"

"From seven on."

"I don't know if Moon will be back by then. She's working on her project"

Now it was his turn to throw me a look of surprise. He probably didn't know yet that she was working at a factory and not in her lab on campus. "Oh of course. Well. Just tell her to come there directly. There will be food and drinks."

"Okay, I'll let her know. Thanks for inviting me, Bastion," I said.

We looked at each other in awkward silence for a few seconds, me sitting in front of the black screen of the work station, and him standing next to me as if he waited for something else.

"Okay. I'll leave you to it then. Hope you're finished by Friday night with whatever you're working on and come to the party," he finally said with a smile, pointing at the darkened screen. "Not much time left to celebrate our last year at the academy and enjoy our student life."

I nodded and put on a smile, waving him goodbye. I noticed that I would have to hurry up if I didn't want to run late for class. Somehow, I couldn't shake the feeling of being watched, but as I cast an uneasy glance around the room and came across the spot where the brown-haired girl had been standing, but she was gone now. So I turned on the screen again and did one last database search. I didn't know why I was so nervous, but my heart was beating so fast that my hands were shaking and I had to correct several typos.

One last search. Just a hunch. I tried to keep myself from getting my hopes up too much, despite the feeling of being on the verge of finding something that would finally help me understand.

But when the search results appeared on the screen, my heart sank.

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