Holy shit this dream was amazing. I couldn't wait to wake up to write it all down.
The setting is this vast capitalist ultra-technological society, a megacity without end where people and androids live side by side. The Apples and Googles of the world still hold a lot of power here, but their vast resources have also made them more attractive to high-tech fraud and theft. The fuzziest part of my dream is when a hacked android infiltrates some corporate headquarters, which was this entire Deus Ex like scenario but it's too distant now, but it ended with the android walking into the CEO's office, about to access the air-gapped network on which the most valuable corporate secrets are stored.
But there's a twist. Behind him appears the CEO. He smiles knowingly. The android turns around and he knows his attempt failed. The CEO wipes the android's OS remotely and a counter appears. Corporate: 27568. Rebels: 5632. The Corporate number ticks up by one. This scenario repeats a few times, and at one point there's an old female android talking amicably to the CEO how one particular approach was almost certain to fail, but she tried it anyway because it was so exciting and all the other, more succesful approaches she'd already done so much that she was bored of them.
Now fast forward some time into the future. A black male android is talking to his human friend about the contacts he has within a pharmaceutical megacorporation, and brags about the tech and secrets he'll be able to steal. But in a network hub some distance away, a colossal snake-like machine approaches. Its head is formed out of hundreds of tubes, out of which emerge prehensile wires that pull out massive bundles of fiber-optic cables, searching for the communication channel that these guys are using. When it's found it, the entire machine splits apart in smaller wires and dives into the cables, fanning out fractally at incredible speed. The android knows he's been compromised and runs.
The next bit is similarly fuzzy, but he eventually arrives in the cyber-slums where most androids have their shitty living spaces (as opposed to the lush bioengineered habitats the rich people have) and he finds a female friend to talk about how much danger he's in. They used to have this friendly competitive dynamic, the rebels and the corps, but now he's being hunted down like an animal. It was only yesterday that they completed another heist with not much apparent ill will.
"Wait, yesterday?" the woman says. "That was two days ago. I thought you were in hiding for all of yesterday."
He thinks about it. This doesn't make any sense. How can an entire day just be missing from his memory? The stress and heat of the slums is making him sweaty, so he takes a swig of water. Then another, and almost downs the whole bottle. But wait, there's something wrong. This doesn't sound like how water is supposed to sound. In fact, it's buzzing. His water bottle was swarming with nanites!
In a panic, he runs out, but reality starts to break down for him. For me as well, and I can't remember much after this, other than desperately trying to wake up, failing, thinking I've woken up and trying to find a way to write this down, and then actually waking up and remembering less than half of what I wanted to write down. It was an absolute rollercoaster.
