Best British Short Stories 2020 Nicholas Royle (best way to read ebooks txt) 📖

then talked a little bit about her life. She didn’t mention her faith again, and I didn’t want to be the one to bring it up, but it seemed important.

She looked pretty normal, well dressed, carefully made up, with an expensive haircut, the kind of woman who you would speak to if you were buying perfume for your girlfriend or your mother. Only as she left did I notice that she wore the most solid, sensible shoes I’d ever seen.

‘That’s the fifth one this week,’ I told Zuzanna from the other room. ‘They are all having dreams about Donald Trump. I wouldn’t mind, but why now? I thought we’d have got used to him by now. Did British people dream of Obama? Of Clinton? Of Dubya?’

‘Dreams are contagious,’ she said, ‘you know that.’

And I did know that. I had told her everything I knew about dreams whilst she worked on her algorithm.

‘Maybe it’s a sign that you should stop,’ she said, ‘and, by the way, I have finished the beta.’ And she pronounced it to rhyme with feta not with metre. I loved how she said the word.

‘That’s great news,’ I said. But I have appointments booked in all week …’

‘Stop now,’ she said, ‘before you catch the contagion.’

Her logic was impeccable.

That night in bed we made love and as I moved on top of her, finding my rhythm, I pleaded with her to ‘say it’.

‘Beta,’ she said, ‘beta, beta, beta, beta, be-ta …’

Zuzanna was a software engineer originally from Katowice who I had met via an online forum but who happened to live in the same city as me. Soon we were dating, and before I knew it she had moved in. My dream-consultation business had been going for over a year and had turned into something of a success. People were looking for something in their lives.

I had gone online to see if there were any dream apps that I might be able to recommend, and that’s when I’d found Zuzanna. She was marshalling a team of programmers across Eastern Europe and South East Asia to develop an AI bot that would make me redundant. The demand for dream consultation meant that the business would never develop with just one person doing it. Zuzanna had great plans for her software to go global. She paid her programmers in a cryptocurrency that was powered by the amount of new dreams appearing in the world. Every time someone wrote about their dream on social media, Zuzanna’s bots scraped the information and fed it into a database. In the early days new dreams appeared every few hours, but now, with a substantial database, new dreams were becoming as rare as mathematical primes.

The next morning I woke early. Zuzanna was already at work taking advantage of her programmers being in different time zones. I returned to my booth in the labyrinth of shortlet offices in Carmichael Street and carefully attached a sign to the door.

DREAM CONSULTATIONS ARE NOW ONLINE

Because of unprecedented demand all dream consultations will now take place virtually.

Our team of operators will respond instantly – day or night – to your latest dreams and for a fraction of the cost of an individual consultation.

Sign up here.

And as well as the URL that Zuzanna had given me there was a QR code that people could scan.

I spent the next hour cancelling appointments. I emptied the kettle and unplugged it, cleaned up the small kitchen area and took the memory card from the server linked to the CCTV camera that looked over the entrance hall.

I walked home rather than getting the bus. At each major junction was a group of Jehovah’s Witnesses, quietly and unobtrusively going about their business. There were more women then men, though I noticed that there were never any single-sex groupings. They stood next to a sandwich board and handed out literature, but mostly they just talked amongst themselves. I noticed that the women all wore very sensible shoes, like the ones Carol had on, and suddenly it made sense – they were standing up all day. I remembered where I’d seen other Jehovah’s Witnesses and went around town until I’d been to every location, but Carol was not with any of them.

Over the next few weeks, I no longer had any reason to be at home. The dream-consultation software was running like a dream. The AI bots were sophisticated enough to not need manual tweaking. Zuzanna was mainly dealing with the associated problems that came with having a software platform going viral. Our joint bank account went in the red at one point as she bought more server space, more cloud hosting. We’d not considered the difficulty of scaling up. The free trial had brought people in, but was costing us a fortune. She sold some of her cryptocurrency via one of the new exchanges, and I cashed in an ISA I’d had for over a decade.

By the end of the second week, things were stable, but Zuzanna had been asked to fly to San Francisco to meet some venture capitalists who were interested in investing. I could have gone over with her, but she didn’t need me there, and I have always hated long-haul flights.

Our last night together we didn’t even want to make love, it was enough to just lie beside each other in a kind of mutually exclusive silence punctuated by occasional small reminiscences.

‘Maybe you will have dreams when I’m away,’ she said finally.

‘I don’t think so,’ I said sadly.

Over a year earlier, several months before Zuzanna moved in with me, there were a group of us from work in the pub. It was a happy-sombre occasion. There had been a large number of redundancies. I’d somehow managed to hang on, but most of my friends had taken the money. Jack started by saying ‘I had the strangest dream last night’. Everyone groaned. ‘We don’t want to hear it,’ Lindsey said. ‘No, I do,’ I interrupted suddenly. ‘Tell me.’ I listened to what