Dreamcast (Part 1)
Today was the day Shawn Xiao was promoted. The sky was clear, the sun bright, and he'd woken up early for once—unusual for a man who typically treated his alarm clock as a suggestion rather than a command.
Breakfast was bacon and toast. The bacon was perfectly crisp, the toast warm and soft, and his mood lifted accordingly.
What Shawn Xiao didn't know was that in two months, he would say goodbye to all of these beautiful little things forever.
But I can tell you this much—when he closed his eyes for the last time, he wasn't unhappy.
1
Shawn Xiao worked at LD Technologies, a company that had risen to national prominence on the back of a single product: Dreamcast.
Dreamcast was live streaming, but not as anyone had known it. A few years back, people had live-streamed themselves eating, singing, chatting—the mundane theater of daily life. But audiences had grown numb to it. Watching strangers go about their boring routines had lost its novelty.
Dreamcast changed everything.
On the Dreamcast platform, broadcasters didn't stream their waking hours. They streamed their dreams. Around the clock, a rotating cast of Dreamers—selected and vetted by LD Technologies—broadcast the inner landscapes of their sleeping minds.
And those landscapes were extraordinary.
People with vivid imaginations became instant celebrities. Viewers could ride along as a Dreamer soared over the Pacific in a hot-air balloon made of clouds, explored the interior of a whale's bloodstream in a microscopic submarine, or stumbled through a city where every building was made of cake. The illogic of dreams was precisely what made them addictive—there was no script, no revision, no second-guessing. Dreams were raw, unfiltered, and utterly real in a way that no performed content could ever be.
Dreamcast also satisfied something deeper: voyeurism. Dreams revealed the dreamer's true self—their fears, desires, and insecurities, stripped of social pretense and waking rationalization. People discovered that the tough-guy coworker dreamed of being chased by sentient cats, mewling and scratching until he woke in a cold sweat—funnier than any comedy special. They watched thrill-seekers dodge ghostly pursuers through impossible labyrinths, hearts pounding alongside them. And they glimpsed the dark corners of dreamers' minds, where impulses too dangerous to act on in waking life played out without consequence.
LD Technologies' moderation team censored the worst of it—the blood, the erotica, the content that crossed legal lines—but enough remained to make Dreamcast the most talked-about platform in the world. Investors poured in money. Viewers showered Dreamers with virtual coins purchased with real currency. LD Technologies' market cap soared like a rocket, making it the darling of the tech world.
Naturally, more and more people wanted to broadcast their own dreams. But LD Technologies held the keys tight. They claimed technical limitations prevented them from opening the platform to everyone; only select Dreamers received broadcasting privileges.
This curated approach paid off. The platform never descended into chaos. Instead, audiences devoured each new Dreamer announcement with the enthusiasm of fans awaiting a new season. LD Technologies' unofficial motto became a badge of honor across the internet: "LD makes gold."
Before his promotion, Shawn Xiao had been one of those casual viewers—loading the app out of curiosity, dipping into dreamscapes during his lunch break, occasionally drawing inspiration from the surreal imagery for his own art.
Then one night, he saw himself on Dreamcast.
At first, he thought he was mistaken. He squinted at the phone screen, held it closer, sat up straighter in bed. It took a long, disbelieving moment before he could confirm what his eyes were telling him: the person in the broadcast was him.
Seventeen-year-old him.
The Dreamer whose dream he'd stumbled into was his high school desk mate, Tina Ding.
Shawn Xiao dropped his paintbrush and sat upright before his easel, transfixed. In the dream, Tina Ding sat at her desk, stealing glances at the back of a boy who was fast asleep, face-down on his textbook, snoring softly. The boy in the dream was unmistakably him—the same round cheeks, the same unruly hair, the same slumped posture he'd perfected through years of classroom naps.
The dream's theme was unmistakable: secret love.
The chat scrolled rapid-fire with viewer comments. "This is so bittersweet," someone wrote. "She's never going to tell him, is she?" Another viewer urged, "Just confess already!" Others, moved by the purity of the emotion or simply dazzled by Tina Ding's beauty, showered the broadcast with coins.
And then there were the snarky comments: "The guy she likes is sleeping like a pig. Is she blind?"
Shawn Xiao might have been offended. Instead, goosebumps rose along his arms, and a tide of bittersweet recognition surged through his chest, overwhelming every other thought.
She liked me. All those years ago, she actually liked me.
He remembered a particular rainy evening in his senior year. Tina Ding had caught a cold and was slumped over her desk, drowsy and congested. He'd sneaked out of school during evening study hall—risking disciplinary detention—and bought cold medicine at the pharmacy, stashing it in his schoolbag. But when the moment came to hand it to her, he couldn't do it.
He was terrified she'd discover how he felt.
Because back then, he was fat. Genuinely, unmistakably fat—the kind of fat that drew stares and cruel nicknames. And Tina Ding was achingly, luminously beautiful. The gap between them felt unbridgeable, like the distance between the earth and a star.
It never occurred to him that the star might be looking back.
So he buried his feelings deeper and deeper—through graduation, through his first job, through his promotions, until they were so far down he could almost pretend they didn't exist.
But Tina Ding's love—quiet, steadfast, hidden for a decade—had finally surfaced in the one place she had no control over: her dreams. And in that moment, watching her younger self steal longing glances at the boy sleeping one desk over, Shawn Xiao found the courage to dig his own buried feelings back up.
2
At first, Shawn Xiao was elated.
In Tina Ding's dream, she loved him. That had to mean something.
But the more he thought about it, the more his rational mind intervened. One dream didn't prove anything. Dreams were slippery, treacherous things—they exaggerated, distorted, projected. Maybe after she woke up and replayed the dream in her head, she'd write it off as a nightmare.
Shawn Xiao commandeered this pessimistic thought and settled in to watch Tina Ding's broadcasts every night, hoping for clarity.
Her Dreamcast channel was rich and varied. Childhood adventures in sunlit fields. A surreal whodunit set on an ocean liner. Mysteries with twists that kept her audience guessing. She'd attracted a devoted following—tens of thousands of regular viewers who tuned in religiously.
But the constant through-line, the thread that wove through her most-watched broadcasts, was her youth. Specifically, her youth with him.
Every time Tina Ding's dream turned to the landscape of adolescence—school hallways, rainy afternoons, fluorescent-lit classrooms—Shawn Xiao's heart pounded. What if she'd moved on? What if someone else occupied her dreams? Each time, he held his breath and watched.
And every single time, the boy in the dream was him.
He saw the day they first met. A rainy afternoon, the corridor slippery. Tina Ding was carrying a stack of exercise books down the stairs for the teacher. Her foot slipped. She stumbled forward, books scattering everywhere—
And he appeared. A chubby blur of motion lunging to catch her. Except he'd misjudged the floor too, and instead of catching her, he tumbled down the entire flight of stairs. The crash was thunderous. Students in nearby classrooms turned to look.
Tina Ding gripped the handrail, mouth open, heart hammering. The fat boy picked himself up from the landing, wincing but grinning sheepishly. "Ah-ah-ah! Sorry, sorry—you dropped your books, let me help you pick them up!"
Before she could say a word, he was already on his knees, gathering the scattered exercise books with far more enthusiasm than coordination, as if the spectacular fall hadn't happened at all.
Tina Ding wanted to ask if he was hurt—how could anyone fall down a full flight of stairs and bounce back like that?—but he was so earnest about the books that she swallowed the question, left with only a lingering, baffled thought: Fat kids don't feel pain when they fall?
Shawn Xiao, watching from his sofa, burst out laughing. He remembered that moment perfectly. He'd thought he was being a hero—rushing to catch a damsel in distress. Instead, he'd rolled down the stairs like a medicine ball and then pretended nothing had happened because his pride couldn't handle the alternative.
The truth was, his entire body had ached for a week afterward. But when he looked up from the pile of books and saw those luminous, startled eyes, the pain evaporated, replaced by sheer panic that he'd been staring too long. "Ah-ah-ah" was all he could manage—a feeble, mortifying noise that had tumbled out before his brain could catch up to his mouth.
He'd felt like such a pig. How could a pig stare at an angel and not burst into flames?
Then came another memory-dream. A chemistry lab on a rainy afternoon. Tina Ding's lab partner knocked over a beaker of solution, then immediately blamed her. The teacher dressed Tina Ding down in front of the entire class, and by the time the bell rang, she was fighting back tears, alone in the empty lab, struggling to clean up the mess she hadn't made.
A knock on the door. She turned—and there he was, the same chubby boy, peering in with an expression caught between bravery and terror.
"Tina?" he said. "I'm supposed to lock up the lab. Are you... are you almost done?"
She shook her head, eyes brimming. A tear escaped down her cheek and she swiped at it furiously.
"Wait!" He rushed inside, his voice suddenly sharp. "Did you wash your hands?"