We pass each other Cards: his says "My name is Dan Lawson. We've worked together for three years. You owe me twenty dollars." It goes on to describe things we've done together after work, the time we rented a condo on the Gulf Coast with our girlfriends of the moment, and so on. Mine sticks to the bare facts: "My name is Tony Vargas. We've worked together for three years. I do not owe you twenty dollars, you write that on every Card. We've never slept together." I add the last sentence to every Card it applies to; some people think it's crass, but I find it practical.
We glance at the Cards, which have become a necessary and rarely ignored part of social etiquette since New Mexico, and nod. Generally the Cards are not necessary, but since New Mexico, since dreams went public, it's important to have a reminder of who people are to you in real life. Not everyone adopted them right away, but most people over thirty have an embarrassing "I kissed the woman I thought I'd slept with but had only dreamed about" anecdote, or the equivalent. Of such things is daytime television built.
As Dan's Mazda gets air off a pothole large enough to sleep in, polyhedral orange raindrops fill the sky and the heavy bass of nearby car stereos transmutes, notes becoming visible and glossy-electric, reconfiguring into a heavy, pounding beat which shakes windshields.
Most bleedouts are still just in your head: the wild dog someone else imagines might be able to bite you, because you can imagine the pain, but it can't dig up your flowerbed. This is different. This is like my cigarette trick. If the beats were heavier, the windshields would break, and even taking a hit of Lucidin or one of its pharmaceutical cousins wouldn't change that.
These beats don't come from ordinary dreams or daymares. They're the chorus which follows the Soporifics. I haven't seen them in the city for awhile: the Sops are federal, usually sticking to west coast cities. The West's wilder than the East since New Mexico because of proximity. Same reason this hemisphere's jumpier on dreams -- parts of Europe have hardly changed at all, although Australia's in the same boat we are. On the Discovery Channel they said it had something to do with the Aborigine belief in the Dreamtime, but mostly I think they say things like that on TV when they're not sure what's going on.
"Sops," Dan mutters, shaking his head. The reverberation on the Mazda's windshield echoes back small black clouds of red-winged hornets which buzz angrily outside the car and fly off -- that's Dan's doing, not the Sops.'

