I was a freshman in college when I heard the news on TV that Hiroshi had died. They called him video game entrepreneur Hiroshi Yamamoto, who clearly had to be the man I had been dreamwalking with for the last three years. Sure enough, he was present neither in World of Dreams nor in the studio. So I figured that was over and I was on my own now. I’d learned a lot; enough to be dangerous, but I wasn’t planning to use my power to steal, kill, or worse. I still hadn’t actually achieved my primary goal, to be able to turn it off, but being able to direct it and with so many ways of directing it basically ensured that I could always go somewhere safe.

A couple days later I received an email from Hiroshi. For a moment I was excited to think maybe he had survived or faked his death or something, but the email put a damper on that. It was a dead-man-switch message, one sent out automatically after a computer system detected his absence.

But the message went on to say that in his will he had left me control of his company. The email itself provided his passwords to log into his World of Dreams account and access Herren. He invited me to go in and modify her shield so that I could dreamwalk into her. She had complete admin access and Hiroshi wanted me to use her to run his company! The next day, one of the company’s lawyers, who was serving as Hiroshi’s executor, called me to say the same thing. The company wasn’t sure how this was going to work, and neither was I, but apparently they were at least partly aware of the special thing we had in common.

I told him that I felt like I needed my own lawyer right now, and he responded that it was reasonable for me to hire my own personal lawyer since he and his team were the company’s lawyers. At the same time, I had a controlling interest in the company (or would, when the will was fully resolved) and if I wanted not to participate in any part of the arrangement that Hiroshi had set up without my knowledge, I was free to appoint someone else.

But I wasn’t looking for a way out. I needed to find out if there was something specific Hiroshi was doing that required our advanced dreamwalking ability, or if all that was needed was for me to be here to monitor for others with comparable ability. I asked if it was going to interfere with anything if I simply took a few days to figure it out, and he said it wouldn’t.

I talked to my parents first, who were even more surprised than I was to hear that I had inherited Hiroshi’s company. But Dad said he’d try and find me a good lawyer, figuring that, given my inheritance, I could afford it.

I talked to people at the college next. The people I talked to knew of the existence of dreamwalking, that I’d promised not to use it to interfere with anyone here, and nothing more. Most people at the college didn’t even know that. Now I had to explain a lot more, and they were most worried that it was going to take too much of my time and I wouldn’t be able to complete my classes, but they also said they could be flexible. If I needed extra time to finish some assignments, that was fine. if I needed to drop one or more classes, I could do that too. And of course I still had no idea about the time required.

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Dad came back the next day and put me in contact with two lawyers. One primary lawyer specializing in inheritance and tax issues, and a second lawyer in Japan who would help me deal with the ramifications of owning a company in Japan, and the requirements that imposed on me. That made sense: Two different lawyers for two entirely different aspects of different countries’ laws.

So I had each of them join me in separate remote meetings with different groups. The tax lawyer was with me in a meeting with the executor and another lawyer representing the company. This was surprisingly simple. Hiroshi had left me all his stock in the company, a lot of money, and a small box of tangible items. The executor was holding all the money in a temporary account for me, because there was a significant estate tax owed to Japan, but he could use some of those funds to send me the small items.

My tax lawyer had explained to me before the meeting that there were two kinds of taxes relevant to this situation: Estate tax, which was a tax against the estate itself paid by the estate before the assets could be transferred to heirs, and inheritance tax, paid by the heirs if they live in places imposing such a tax. Both taxes had a significant threshold before there was any taxation at all, but this was well above that. Fortunately there wasn’t inheritance tax here in Georgia, so I only had the estate tax. A complication was that the company was privately owned, so it was going to need to be appraised to establish its value. And if I did need to sell part of the company, I couldn’t simply trade it in the market, because there wasn’t a market for this; I’d have to seek out a private buyer.

So when I came to the second meeting with my Japanese lawyer and the company’s leadership, I brought up the fact that I might have to sell part of the company to pay the estate tax and that I needed to have the company appraised. This naturally led into a discussion of just what the company consisted of. It was a small company. The company lawyers I had met were not employees of the company, but of a law firm the company retained. The company employed a few programmers, a development manager (the leader representing the company at this meeting) who had reported directly to Hiroshi, a techie who managed the company’s servers, and a combination HR/facility manager. They used a marketing and distribution company who helped sell the software for a cut of the price, and two designers on contract who designed the beautiful world settings Hiroshi was so proud of. They only had the one product; Hiroshi had never been interested in making anything else. The design studio was just a product Hiroshi had purchased licenses for.

Although it meant my inheritance was smaller than I had thought, this was actually good in a way. It meant that the company would be worth less money and my estate tax would be less. And it meant that Hiroshi wasn’t managing a huge staff and whatever job he was asking me to do was likely to not be too crazy. I asked the manager to work with the company’s law firm to hire an appraiser to establish a legal value for the company.

So this left me wondering what Hiroshi wanted me to see in his admin interface. How much was there to manage, really? The manager logged into the game using his admin account and showed me, using a screen-share within our meeting, where I could access reports on player activity and skill levels, and lots of other things, and basically told me to go in and have a look.

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These meetings had taken place in my evening, in order to happen in working hours in Japan, so I logged into Hiroshi’s World of Dreams account after the meeting ended to set up Herren for my own use. There was something clearly wrong with the character, though, because the game displayed some kind of error where her breasts should be, though she hadn’t looked that way when I was logged into game-Sarah through the computer and Hiroshi was playing Herren.

I dreamwalked into her that night to see just what was going on. And what a shock! She had absolutely enormous breasts, so much so I had to rebalance myself to keep from falling over, and she had busted out of her clothes. That must have been the error; the game was programmed to not display naked female breasts no matter what, but she didn’t fit in her clothes.

So I went into the admin room the manager had showed me. The first screen let me choose the language for the interface and it was apparently available in all the languages the game supported. So I went in and explored. One of the databases I could access there held the character records. Indeed, it was possible for me to edit all the character attributes which were ordinarily locked after character creation, and Herren’s breast size was off the scale, well beyond what was normally available, with an alert next to the value indicating the range normal users are allowed to select. I switched them down to a reasonable size and found my body updating immediately, which was rather disturbing but relieving. Herren’s clothes were still torn, though, so I went back to her quarters, removed them, and found something else from her closet to wear.

There was a stack of documents in Herren’s quarters. They seemed to be Hiroshi’s personal notes, but they were in Japanese. I didn’t see a way to translate them here, so I ignored them for now. I went back to the admin interface and studied all the reports in detail. There were reports on all kinds of things, such as player logins and advancement. There was even a report showing outside access to the game via dreamwalk. I wasn’t sure how Hiroshi had managed that, but there were no accesses to any accounts but mine and Herren’s in many pages of logs. If I looked years back into the records I could find Umberto and that other girl I’d dreamwalked into once.

The logs included accesses to the other sites for other languages. In the other sites, the only dreamwalks into any characters were into Herren. I found the room of portals to the other schools, which I looked into briefly. It was implemented on a hub-and-spoke model; the Japanese school was the hub, and had a large room with portals to every other school, identified by the language name written in that language above each portal. The others just had a single portal in this room leading to the Japanese school. Hiroshi had visited them all sometimes, but not often, as all the logs could be read from the admin room of any of them.

Another thing I found in the logs was Umberto’s death. I hadn’t ever heard of player characters dying while the player was offline since then, and I was curious how it had happened. It turned out that Umberto’s player logged back on, but not having been able to build the shield before, he was still unable to build the shield, and got taken over during the game. He witnessed Umberto’s death and “game over.” That was indeed a normal game occurrence, and just about the only way for the player to lose the game. At any other sort of failure, they could keep trying until they learned, though some players might reach the maximum of their abilities.

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I brought the stack of Japanese documents home. Here, I could use Google to translate things for me. It wasn’t perfect, but it translated most things well enough for me to figure it out. I ended up printing out copies I saved of Google’s translations and taping them to the side of every page, so they became these double-wide Rosetta-stone sort of pages, and took them back into the game. It became my nightly dreamwalk project to read the documents, learning a fair bit of Japanese as I did so. As I figured out the inaccuracies in the translations, I wrote in the correct translations by hand.

This left my days to go to classes normally, and occasionally internet calls in the evening with the company. The week after my first contact with the company, the appraisal of the company came in, and Hiroshi’s estate could be resolved. The taxes took a good chunk of Hiroshi’s money, but I had what became a bit over a million dollars left once it got converted to dollars. That wasn’t set for life in my age, but it helped.

There were some other money matters that got resolved as well. The company paid Hiroshi a dividend every year, which was how he had the money that had paid all the estate taxes. As the owner, that income was now mine, but there was some paperwork that needed to be completed, and I established a permanent bank account in Japan, and hired an accountant to handle both the taxes on that money and my personal taxes in the United States. This additional income made the difference; with it, I really was set for life, if I didn’t waste it frivolously or need massive funding to support whatever I was doing.

The papers were indeed Hiroshi’s notes on every aspect of the game. Eventually I found a history of the game among them, which explained the money situation, among other things. Hiroshi wrote:

I started dreamwalking before there was such a thing as video games. I mostly visited fictional worlds, and sometimes visited real people or without a body I just viewed places, which could sometimes be in the past. It was quite a while later when there were video games developed enough for me to visit them, and at first they only had short sessions, but pretty soon, at first as standalone PC games, long-form games developed which created virtual worlds I could visit in the guise of a character.

When I started building World of Dreams, which was initially called by a Japanese name that translated into English as Sleep-Space, I privately hired a programmer to make it as a work for hire. That gave me a basic working game, and I worked with him to make it as realistic a simulation of dreamwalking as I could.

But it needed a lot more to be a game I could sell, and I wanted to sell it so that it would become well known enough to attract any other possible dreamwalkers. So I formed the company, and initially I was paid as an employee like any other. This was when the designers were hired to build the beautiful fictional city-scapes, which replaced views of real-life Japanese locations which made up all the scenery before that point. Once we were actually able to sell the game, I earned a royalty for the core parts of the game I owned myself. Also, by this point, I could dreamwalk into the characters in the game, and I helped adjust whatever didn’t match between the gameplay and what I could really do.

The English version came next, along with a multi-server architecture to support different versions of the game. I discovered that the direct translation of the Japanese name into English sounded like a porn game to English speakers, so the first actually released English name was Dream Master.

It was only after the English version had been out for a while that the company had earned enough money to buy my share of the game outright. After that, once the company accumulated money again, we changed to a profit-sharing model. I, as the owner but no longer a significant active contributor to the game, earned a fixed dividend provided the profits were enough to cover it. The excess is divided among the employees to reward them for building a successful game.

After this time, the employees managed the game themselves, and I only gave them advice. There were several releases over the years on different platforms and sometimes under new names, but it’s basically all the same game, and in fact players on different platforms log into the same servers and play in the same game world. Servers are added when needed; the English and Japanese versions each use several rack-mounted servers.

Another paper told the story of how Herren had ended up the way I found her. Hiroshi was bothered by how Helen didn’t have any breasts when he dreamwalked into her, and he used the admin console to try and fix it, but even when he pushed her bust size beyond the maximum players were allowed to select, to the largest setting he could enter through the admin interface, it didn’t help. He had apparently never bothered to turn the size back down.

The box of physical possessions turned out to be mostly other games Hiroshi had owned physical copies of, and passwords to online games. Just as I had bought a copy of World of Dreams to make my own account to dreamwalk into, he had bought his own copies of games he frequented. It was often out of necessity for Hiroshi before he met me, because he only had access to his own game sessions and those of people he had dreamwalked into until I came along and showed him other ways to find targets. These games included all the super-sleazy adult games where Hiroshi went on virtual dates, which, while dreamwalking, seemed like real dates complete with real sex. I visited them and they were mostly what I thought, more like prostitutes than actual dates, ready and willing to date you anytime and do anything you wanted.

I avoided visiting those any further. I still hoped to find someone in real life. In high school, I had dated Brad until the time he drugged me, and then mousy David, but since coming to college I hadn’t dated anyone. I would, again, in the future, but I felt like I wasn’t ready, for some reason. It was different for Hiroshi, who was old by the time he encountered such games and may have considered himself too old for real dating. Either that or he just got addicted to the quick thrills.

But Hiroshi had been too closed-minded in thinking that games like that were the only way for him to have virtual dates and virtual sex. Any fictional world where people went on dates and it was implied that people had children in the usual way was a place where I could do so, just by finding out when two characters were going on a date and then being there at that time, and I had my choice of which side of the date to participate from. And it was a realistic date with someone who acted like a real person, not a yesman or yeswoman who was just going to do whatever you asked. I proved this by attending the Pigwarts spring formal, and a few other events, alternating whether I did it as a man or as a woman. I actually liked it as a man more, which worried me a little.

Once I was through with the papers, I did visit other games, only occasionally coming back to World of Dreams to keep an eye on what was going on and watch for more real-life dreamwalkers.

All along I had continued checking in on Tommy and Becky periodically. It wasn’t long after I finished with Hiroshi’s papers and belongings that I saw that Tommy and Becky were planning to get married, and now that I knew how to dreamwalk without completely taking over a person, I could attend silently by watching it through any of the guests, while still experiencing it as clearly as if I’d been there in person. In the week before the wedding, I left each of them a small wrapped gift along with a note telling them how I’d be watching. And then I watched, just like I said, though nobody knew whose eyes I looked through and only Tommy and Becky knew I was there at all.

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I wanted to continue Hiroshi’s quest to search for other dreamwalkers. But my reasons were different.

Hiroshi was idealistic. He knew he could do something unique, but powerful, and limited his use so as to not draw too much attention. He wanted, more than anything else in the world, to find a friend who could do the same thing, without exposing the friend to the world, either. Sadly, by the time he did so he had only a few years of life remaining, but we enjoyed our time together. And by making me his heir he had exposed me a little, but the world quickly forgot me, much as the world had said “who’s that?” upon news of Hiroshi’s death.

But I know my ability is dangerously powerful. I can dreamwalk into anybody on Earth. I tested it with brief dreamwalks: I can control them all. It wouldn’t matter who was president, prime minister, premier, or dictator, because I could control whoever it was. I chose not to, to avoid getting in over my head in situations which are too hard to control, as Hiroshi and I both did when we were together. But if two people can develop this ability, others could as well, and who’s to say they will be so scrupulous? That is the best way for me to use my ability, to detect other dreamwalkers and protect the world from bad ones.

I looked to see if Hiroshi or I existed on other Earths, using the way I had transcended the menu interface to search all worlds at once, but there weren’t any. Then I realized that if there were and if they had the same abilities, they’d be shielded, and I couldn’t find Hiroshi when he was shielded, so the same would apply to our counterparts. Also, if Hiroshi had died on other Earths I wouldn’t see him.

But I found ways around that. The developers confirmed that they didn’t themselves practice those techniques, and I could look for and dreamwalk into their counterparts. To the extent that they existed on other Earths, they weren’t working on World of Dreams. They mostly worked on other games, instead. World of Dreams itself didn’t exist in these worlds. My family didn’t shield themselves, but the only ones I could see were the ones from my Earth. Either they didn’t exist at all on other Earths, or all my counterparts had taught all my family members to shield themselves. I had actually tried teaching them once, and when they failed, I dreamwalked into each of them and was unable to bring up a shield. So I assumed they didn’t have the ability and that their counterparts, if they existed, likely wouldn’t, either.

I could find copies of any famous person on dozens of Earths, perhaps thousands of them, all of those worlds similar to my own. But Hiroshi and I and some of the people close to us were unique. Clearly, unlike in the fictional World of Dreams where it was common enough that millions of people had at least minor dreamwalk abilities, in reality dreamwalking was an incredibly rare ability, and I wasn’t certain it had ever developed for real on any other world. But I made continuing Hiroshi’s work my quest.

Hiroshi’s remote dreamwalk detector within World of Dreams turned out to just be the advanced NPCs watching for their enemies to dreamwalk, the same thing he and I did, but on a larger scale and done by game characters. Both shielding and detection were abilities he developed after he was able to dreamwalk into the game, by having the game characters learn to shield against and detect him, and he learned the real-world equivalent by having the game characters teach him when he was dreamwalking into Herren.

The game had tuning parameters which regulated the strength of game characters’ dreamwalk abilities. Hiroshi had set those carefully, allowing the strongest in-game NPC dreamwalkers to visit any part of the fictional in-game planet, and no more. Player characters could also only go that far unless they were being controlled by real-world dreamwalkers. That override could take place during character creation, as I had done with game-Sarah, or as the game adjusted to the behavior players exhibited. But even so, Herren and game-Sarah had never actually been strong enough for the game characters to dreamwalk outside the game. When Hiroshi and I did our travels together, we met in the game and agreed on a target to go to, which we did from our real bodies. While investigating this now, I temporarily set Herren's skill to the maximum possible. It still wasn't possible for Herren to dreamwalk anywhere other than World of Dreams, though she gained dangerous levels of power within the game, obliterating the mind of an NPC from a story she dreamwalked into within the game. After that happened I immediately set Herren back to her original dreamwalk strength, but whenever Herren dreamwalked into that story she controlled that body as well as the one she dreamwalked into.

I think Hiroshi realized the same thing I did: While to anyone outside the game the NPCs just seemed like sophisticated programs, when you dreamwalked into the game, those characters seemed as real as any other people, and definitely did things beyond what their programming covered. If we could dreamwalk into the game, it served to reason that a sufficiently strong game character could dreamwalk out of the game, discover our real world, and all hell would break loose. Even though I hadn’t been able to do so on maximum, who’s to say what might be possible if you weren’t already dreamwalking into the character but natively there?

For this reason I rejected the idea of making more powerful dreamwalkers in the game, ones powerful enough to dreamwalk into the real world. The idea had its attractions: Program them to visit every sleeping person just long enough to tell whether that person had the ability to detect dreamwalkers in the real world, then keep an eye on those people to see if they ever dreamwalked, and/or use them continuously during their sleep as dreamwalk detectors. But the risk of rogue NPCs causing havoc was not worth it.

So I had no real-world mass dreamwalk detection ability. The only things I could do were to keep the game going (hoping to draw in dreamwalkers like me who wanted to learn more about their ability), keep dreamwalk detection going around me when I was in the real world as much as I could (to catch random dreamwalkers), and watch the news for weird things happening that could be the effects of dreamwalkers.

I learned how to keep my dreamwalk detection on continuously, any time I was in the real world or even in other games when I had a character with some mental abilities who could do it, just as I kept my shield up. In fact, I avoided games where I couldn’t do those things, as not having them made me feel vulnerable. And I wasn’t too surprised not to find a single dreamwalker except for characters dreamwalking within World of Dreams itself.