As a human I had enjoyed those computer games where you build a tower defense system or your own virtual city. Whenever I slept, waiting for nightfall, I was playing something similar but far more advanced, the graphics quite spectacular.

Simon was only the first veteran. I had men from the wars in Korea to the Persian Gulf in my system now, a UN army medic with time in the Congo suffering from Huntington’s disease, a helicopter pilot with Alzheimer’s disease who had flown weapons to the Contras for Reagan. Now they were in my mind, erecting defenses and drilling people. A man who had worked for Israeli intelligence in the 1980s was bothering Nancy Belmont with different levels of sensitivity to certain pieces of information in her meticulously organized-archives of everyone’s pooled memories. Finding such international experience in a small Canadian city was at first surprising to me, though in time I accepted the new context: some people had very interesting lives but didn’t blab about it on social media.

I had engineers, machinists, construction workers, guys who could fix anything at home or under the hood, allowing Karl Ruckert to put the finishing touches on new buildings, making cars and trucks and roads that sped up construction. The former plumber Casey Eliot Durant was turning a patch of the ordered mindscape into a sort of 3D Escherian Venice with raised canals on bridges and waterwheels and lifts and secret doors underneath falls that snaked underneath to other areas as a scenic sewer for quick and covert access, plying his secret waterways like a Charon with buttcrack. An installer of security alarms named James Hart proved to be very useful outside my head, though he insisted that I not rob certain stores with his knowledge. Inside, he was wiring up every virtual door and window to a sophisticated central room that looked like NASA, covered in screens. The burglar Jeremy Ardaugh was the natural tester for new security work, and his smuggling experience with drugs was further used to secure checkpoints.

One night a great-grandmother of the Odawas came to the deck of her children’s home while I was prowling the night for people ready to launch, creeping me out for a change. Leaning into the darkness with her nightgown rippling in the cool night’s breeze (her family would have been horrified to see her out there on such a night, when an early snowfall seemed possible) she beckoned me over with a dry, creaking finger. She was Daphne Laframboise, and she said that had been given a special dream with a strange talking rabbit, telling her to come out tonight under the new moon and leave her body behind.

“I know the old songs,” she said, uncreaking her finger to point at my heart. “I know what you have inside you, and what sits on the Spirit Island that pains you so. I can bring that power to the monster in your heart.”

Nanabozho is a trickster, so I was keeping a close eye on that one. But of course I couldn’t say no – after waiting for me outside for so long in just a nightgown, a woman her age probably wouldn’t recover fully. I resigned myself to at least some kind of trick, playing on my desperation and heartstrings. She got along very well with Daniel Fairstein, who seemed to be something of a musical prodigy whenever I toured my crew’s quarters.

That was combat points, engineering points, lore points. Morale couldn’t be ignored, so my ‘sims’ had off-time and personal space that they could decorate. The dead radio DJ Paul Massie was yucking it up on the surreal airwaves again, giving regular announcements and taking calls, concocting bits for each day of the week that drew groans but also a sense of normalcy that seemed to be appreciated by many of my ‘citizens’. I felt like some Machiavellian prince allowing the peasants their distractions, their music, their alcohol, their sports and parks, as long as they clocked in at the factory.

I had doctors – Ali Bashir, a cardiologist, an eye doctor, a dermatologist. On the outside these guys could ‘guide’ my healing process. Dr. Lee would ask me to stare at a scratch with a silver fork to watch it seal shut, commenting on how it wasn’t just an acceleration of normal healing. It was less human, or at least less adult – she had theories about unnatural stem cells and different levels of pluripotency, suggesting that my cells were being regressed to a near-conception state to remake my body so perfectly each time. That opened up a lot of internal bickering about whether or not I was harvesting stem cells from people, which I let the doctors generally have on their own.

They still couldn’t tell me why that pink spot on my shin had come back exactly the same after all the scratching. I thought that a veterinarian would be good to collect in the future. Research points – very important.

Rachel Montgomery, risen from her fentanyl coma, drifted about uncertainly for more than a week before settling down making wind chimes. Nothing but relentless jangling wind chimes on every surface she touched … but hey, try sprinting past those things quietly, Nocome.

The schizophrenic homeless drunk I had picked up in Barrie – then called Gumball, born Charlie Arnold McDermot – had gone wandering off into the ‘uncharted’ regions of my less conscious mind where Nocome was thought to be lurking in a rickety old dump truck, and not come back for several nights. But he returned from the Salvador Dali wilderness in his truck hauling things that manifested in my more controlled dreamscape as cement, or firewood, or explosives. ‘Resources’ of some kind that he had found out there, sniffing them out like Trashcan Man in my favorite novel on the hunt for fire. It took me a long time to finally work out what was happening:

He was stealing from Nocome’s own fortifications and camp.

On September 27 I absorbed my first murderer, the perpetrator of a hit-and-run on some lonely rural road twenty years ago that was never solved. The man needed a lot of convincing that he wasn’t in Hell, and when he learned that he was enlisted in a giant upcoming conflict with a fanged horror from the forests he still was not very convinced. But apparently he was quarrying rocks for the mental walls like no one else in his repentance, so of course we all called him Sisyphus.

Chester was no longer a tiny little white football – just about everyone was feeding him ‘scraps’ under the table, and my dreamscape’s laws didn’t make Chester into a fat dog – he was more like a prehistoric direwolf now, lunging and posing over the battlements and sniffing suspiciously at cracks in the walls, hogging the fireplace in the big eating hall I had discovered by accident one day.

Daniel Fairstein’s tutelary Buddy had changed even more incredibly, gaining detail and size, drawing from the dreams-within-the-dream from my inner army into some blobby hydra of all their various childhood imaginary friends, mashed together like the replicas of the Antarctic Thing. The result came to be known as Snuffleup, and it keep snuffing up more meta-dreams to become ever larger, feeding at times like a hungry maggot on the edge of the unexplored regions beyond the fortifications. Dozens of crudely-drawn figures were raised up from its mass like people buried to their waist in its psychedelic flesh, giving the impression not of controlling heads but of cartoon or clay-mation people caught in quicksand, studding the back of a hulking sea slug or caterpillar. If this was something I could use come winter, I would have to keep it stored below in captivity like the Rancor, with a special door up above in the floor of my inner sanctum.