Even with their mode of transport it took over an hour to get there.

The boys had created a space shuttle with a glass bottom to see the scape as they flew above it, driven by the ten hypersonic jet engines tacked onto the shuttle’s wings. It certainly would have made no sense to travel this way in real life, but none of them had any idea which vehicle would have been faster than this according to dream logic. If there was one.

As they moved along, the nature of the disk changed. It grew thicker and the dreams clustered up more, leading to filament-like structures reaching from side to side in the disk.

Junior leaned back in his recliner, looking down through the glass. “When we get out I’ll look up the trigonometry to find the center of a disk from its rotation. Now that we know the void isn’t isomorphic we might find a way to teleport there. If teleporters can exist in dreams there should be nothing preventing it. I’d rather not have to travel there every time.”

“Why should we come back there?” Baekho asked. “We don’t even know if anything interesting will be at the center.”

“It’s a much better starting point for any search because it gives us a point of reverence. And who knows it might act as a Schelling point for Sujin.”

“A what?”

The leader gestured at the outside as seen through the cockpit window. “If you had to meet someone in a huge area but no way of communicating, where would you wait for them to show up? At an unmissable landmark. That’s a Schelling point. And nothing here stands out like the center.”

“Wait,” Baekho said, turning to Minhyun. “Why didn’t you just link with her while she was in reach?”

Minhyun shrugged. “My mind grasped at nothing. I don’t know where she is in reality. Guess that’s more important than I thought. Or perhaps, if she has the same powers, she could be immune to people poking her mind.”

Ren walked back and forth over the glass floor. “Does all this answer questions or only prompt new ones? I mean, how come Minhyun never noticed that the disk’s thickness varies. If the center is fixed and he creates the scape always with the center at the same position corresponding to physical space, he would have noticed after moving country. So the center always spawns in the same distance from him and with it all structure in the scape. With me so far?”

“Yes,” Junior said.

“Not really,” Baekho said.

“Your point?” Aron asked.

Ren continued. “Assuming Sujin also has the power to create the dreamscape, who takes priority when it comes to establishing the center? We would expect her to have been around at the same time as Minhyun at least a few times, but Minhyun always spawns at the same distance to the middle.”

“Um, guys?” Minhyun said, “I think we’re here.”

***

It was very obviously the focal point of the scape.

The structures formed by adjacent dreams were so thick that the shuttle had to move as if flying through a natural cave, the dream-cluster’s slowly shifting arrangements leaving only narrow corridors.

Then there were no more dreams. In the area of a rough sphere there was a tiny, golden planet. A softly glowing orb, enticing the boys to come closer – proportions impossible to estimate, somewhere between a marble and a gas giant. It had a complex structure on the outside that might have been shifting or simply been hard to grasp – lines both strongly geometrical and disorderly curved, broken apart by whirls that seemed to rotate whenever the eye wasn’t fixated on them, like optical illusions on a massive scale.

After a minute of deliberation, the boys disintegrated the shuttle. Flying closer on their own, they got an unobstructed look at the orb.

“Any idea how big it is?” Baekho asked. “I feel like it changes size whenever I blink.”

Ren floated closer, almost touching it. “You know you’re just your avatar, right? You don’t have to blink if you don’t want to.”

“I want to. It feels weird not to do all the little things.”

Junior cleared his throat – which was also unnecessary for a dream avatar and only served to gain the group’s attention. “We can keep flying rounds, but I don’t see anything more on the outside than what we’ve already seen. The obvious thing is to try and get inside. Any objections?” Slight murmuring from Aron. A shrug from Ren. “Good. Then let’s find a way. Which one of us are going? Minhyun do you want in?”

“What do you mean?” Minhyun asked. “Won’t we all go?”

The leader grimaced. “Actually… I can’t really say anything against that. There are any number of reasons to split up or to stay together. Let me think. If we all enter there won’t be anyone observing the dream scape which could conceivably cease to exist, kicking us all out. Or we miss Sujin showing up. Or we run into some sort of trap inside and you might be incapacitated so you can’t pull us out if need be. Or the inside- You know what, there’s no telling, really.”

He looked around the area. “No idea how well my future sense works in here, but I don’t see anything happen with more than five percent probability for a while. I don’t really see anything happen as far as it will let me look. Which I suppose is as long as we can possibly stay asleep before doctor Feng pulls the plug. If anyone wants to stay here, I won’t blame you. This is new territory.”

Minhyun hovered closer to the sphere. “I’m going in for sure. This is my territory. I can’t let you go alone in good consciousness.”

Aron flew over to his boyfriend and put his hand on the dream-walker’s shoulder. “And I’m not leaving him alone.”

“I should stay out,” Ren said. “If I use my ability – by accident or because something forces me – we’d have real world consequences that we can’t solve without blowing more stuff up.”

“Then I’ll stay, too,” Baekho said. “Keep us linked, Minhyun. If you’re in danger in there, I’ll nuke the thing from the outside.”

“That’s very reassuring, tiger boy,” Junior sent, now speaking through the link. “Well, then let’s get going. Good luck you two, we’ll keep you updated.”

“Any idea how to get in?” Ren asked.

Junior chuckled. “Actually when you first flew over to this thing there was a ten percent chance you’d just touch it out of curiosity. That’s our way in. But in the timeline where someone goes in, they can’t go back out. I don’t see any horrible pain or other awfulness in the near future though, so… It’s safe for a lose definition of safe.”

There wasn’t much more to do or say. Even though Minhyun knew he could wake up anytime and force the others to do the same, there was a rush of adrenaline as appropriate before taking a step into the great unknown.

Junior took his hand, then Aron’s and dragged them along with the determination of a boy who knew that the future didn’t hold his immediate demise.

The trio slipped into the sphere as if the golden, wobbling exterior was non-existent. No resistance, no sensation. Not even a tingling on the skin.

Then they were someplace else entirely.

***

Of course Minhyun knew dream logic didn’t care about plausible proportions or keeping spatial relations consistent. Still, it was disorienting to appear in the middle of a golden stone labyrinth with a corridor behind him as if he hadn’t just passed a barrier.

The labyrinth was three dimensional. Escherian architecture made it impossible to declare up and down. Corridors ran at every angle, met and diverged in ways an organic structure grows, but were made from flawless gold bricks. Ivy-like plants grew on the walls, appearing vaguely exotic without being opulent. They mostly served to indicate which one of the walls were meant as a floor by not creeping along that one.

Junior sighed after a moment of taking it all in. “I’m in favor of not splitting up.”

“The place sure seems to want us to do that,” Aron said while Minhyun explained their situation to the boys outside.

The dream-walker conjured a rope that tied the three together at the belts. It stretched infinitely and weighed nothing but would keep them from getting lost in case the walls shifted or something like that.

Quickly the boys agreed to walk a bit to get a feeling for the structure of the maze. All they found were more identical corridors with no rooms or obvious focal points. It took a while for Minhyun to realize that the labyrinth didn’t change the way a regular dream does. It must have been able to exist on its own, outside the subconscious, ephemeral imagination of a sleeper.

The walls were unbreakable by standard means – where standard meant summoning a chisel, a jackhammer, a stick of dynamite and a speeding car that raced down the corridor before smashing into the gold bricks to no avail.

Had they found the center of the scape just to have to find the center of the center? What an exercise in frustration. And they had only half the night or so left before doctor Feng would end the experiment. If they weren’t able to find Sujin they should at least learn as much about the nature of his powers as possible.

“Junior,” Minhyun said slowly, weighing every word. “We’re not making any progress, are we?”

“I suppose not.”

“Doesn’t this call for drastic measures?”

“I guess? Do you have anything I in mind?”

He feared it would sound crazier out loud than in his head, but the idea had formed. Minhyun said “You like science, right?”

“Sure. I play sci-fi games all the time.”

“How vividly can you imagine a black hole?”