"Coffee" Lena exclaimed as she reached for the cupboard. The energy drinks were piling up in her trash can already but her eyes had started to feel heavy. "Just a tiny cup of coffee and that's it. That should make the trick."

Her hands trembled ever so slightly as she put coffee, sugar and boiling water in the mix. She rushed back to her seat in front of the computer. The cold, white light was stimulating enough to keep her from falling into a coma. At this rate she would be done with all her pending tasks for Friday's deployment by Tuesday. She was amazed by how much she could get done when she focused. There were some bugs here and there but everything was running smoothly. She just needed to figure out which part of her script was causing the same error over and over again and then she would be done.

And then she could go to sleep.

The mere thought sent a chill down her spine, a sense of fear she was quick to disregard. She was an adult, a grown up. How could she be scared about what most likely was the neighbor's radio blasting through her wall. He was as lousy and messy as they come, putting even Lena's record breaking level of clutter to shame. Of course he would listen to music loud enough to rupture someone's eardrum! It was no ghostly tune on loop. Just the train wreck next door.

Now, the nightmares were something else entirely, but after spending 36hs working non-stop she theorized she would be too tired to even dream.

She lit a cigarette while she waited for her code to compile. She took a long drag to fill her lungs and released a cloud of smoke into the tiny apartment. She wouldn't allow herself to smoke more than one cigarette a day, but today seemed like a special occasion of some sorts she decided when she noticed the pile of cigarette butts in the ashtray. The light at its tip flickered as she fiddled with it.

Compilation error. Invalid expression term

"Fuck." She hissed putting down her cigarette, exhausting the flame. She couldn't code with smoke on her face. She searched her script for the error not able to make up what was failing now. Her eyes were weary and her head was as cloudy as her smoke filled room. She scanned the words and numbers, unable to make out what was wrong. Perhaps she was too tired, perhaps she should rest her eyelids for a minute. Just for a minute. Not in her bed, there was no turn back once she hit the sack, but her couch looked safe enough for her to crawl and take a small sleepless break. She grabbed a blanket and laid on her back, the most uncomfortable position to fall asleep due to her chronic snoring, always the charmer. Her eyes followed the patterns on the ceiling, the marks of time and lack of painting. Were there smoke stains? Her landlord would kill her. She blinked thrice in a row. The couch was even more comfy than she expected. Was it always so warm and inviting? Or was she just really tired? Her heart was beating fast in her chest after pulling a caffeine-induced all nighter.

"Go to sleep" someone whispered in her ear.

Perhaps she should.

"Sleep."

Perhaps she would.

Darkness beyond the blackest pitch. The abyss had swallowed her whole. Barely existing in such a place was troublesome. A part of her wanted to give in, to be engulfed by all that chaos. Thinking was too tiresome, being too tiresome. It was too much work keeping herself together. She couldn't feel her body anymore, perhaps it was already gone. All that was left was her consciousness, eager to fade away. Why not just give in?

"Wow, Blackstar! Don't get lost so quickly, would ya?" A flicker of gold sparked in the darkness bringing her back to her senses. "I wanted you to relax a little bit, but giving up on, well, existence itself, is a bit of an overstretch don't cha think?"

"What?!" She shook her head. Was she dreaming again? She had to be. But the setting was different this time. No chaos, no conflagration, no messed up building. Just that golden light floating in that eternal nothingness.

She scanned herself to make sure she wasn't a disembodied voice. Everything in place. She didn't understand how she could see herself in all that darkness, but she felt she wasn't going to get an answer.

"Oh, so nice of you to join the party" The voice said, a tint of gold permating the darkness even more as he spoke. "You see, I wanted us to have a good old fashioned tête-à-tête so I figured a place with less stimuli would make it least likely for your brain to emergency eject you from a REM state. Clever, uh?"

"What?" Lena asked again in disbelief. "Who are you?"

"Awww, but you know that already, Blackstar!" He chirped "This is probably the sixth time I have introduced myself, but you are such a hot mess of adrenaline and hangovers you keep forgetting. Every. Single. Time!"

Lena pondered on his words. His voice did sound familiar. And why was she calling her Blackstar? It was just like…

"The moon!" She exclaimed. "You are the moon from my nightmares. The bloody moon with the eye and all that stuff!" she raised her right arm, pointing accusingly into the void.

"Well, at least you got that part right." The golden light looked like silk floating in a sea of black velvet. A space opened between the fabric and a golden eye peeked through making Lena take a step back instinctively. "The name is, once again, Bill Cipher."

"What are you?" She asked

"What am I? Well! For now let's just say that I'm your headspace roommate. Neat, isn't it?" Bill said with something that was as close to a wink as someone with only one eye could produce. Lena stared in disbelief with a look that had the word "dumb" written all over her face. Even in the dreamworld she had no problem to conjure a stunned look. "Except it's not. Llet's just say I'm one of those roommates that move in one day and the next week are throwing out your stuff because they need space for a bunch of vintage furniture they bought on ebay for an exhilarating high price. You follow me?"

"I have never been more confused by an analogy in my life." She confessed.

Bill's eye flickered red for an instant before returning to its golden hue. "Listen, all you need to know is that the longer I stay here, trapped in your mind, the more myself bleeds into your subconscious. Those nightmares you have been having? Well that's just your tiny eeny meeny miny human psyche playing in my backyard. It's not good for me and it's definitely not good for you."

Lena felt her jaw drop a little. She didn't have a clue of what was going on. Perhaps it was that one time after highschool tripping on peyote that had come back to bite her in the ass.

"It is not the peyote! For crying out loud. Listen, woman. I AM A DEMON. SIXTY DEGREES THAT COME IN THREES. I AM TRAPPED IN YOUR HEAD. YOU NEED TO GET ME OUT OR YOU-WILL-DIE."

Lena woke up gasping for air. She sat on her couch and sank her head between her hands.

"What the fuck was that?!"

Her throat felt dry and her hands were shaking vigorously. Damn those energy drinks. She ran into the kitchen and scavenged the fridge for some ice. She filled the glass with water as alcohol would only make things worse. She gulped down the whole glass making her face hurt a little bit from the cold.

She had had her fair share of strange things throughout her life, but this was just ridiculous. Of course, it was also ridiculous that a person would wake up on a saturday morning with twelve text messages from her friends telling her what a great time they had last night pub crawling and that it was a great idea to get matching haircuts even though she vividly remembers going to bed with a high fever on friday night. And it was even more ridiculous to have the principal of your school call your mom because you had spent the majority of your 3rd grade playing with an imaginary friend and you were scaring the shit out of the rest of your class. Everybody knew that Sarah was real, she had just probably transferred to a different school. They were just being dicks. It was a public school. Teachers lose track of which kids are in their class from time to time.

Unable to sleep again she sank back into her chair in front of the computer. Her mind was foggy but her short nap had helped her eyes feel lighter and her heartbeat slow down. But that spike of energy was short lived as she failed to compile her script for the fifth time.

Fixing your code meant looking for fault in your own creation. And being as proud as she was she didn't like the idea of having messed up big time and having to start from scratch, but this didn't seem to be the case. She knew most of her script was pretty clean, free of common logical errors, so she would have to check line by line to find the missing piece. The problem was, there were thousands of lines to read, and she didn't have a clue of where to start.

"Sixty degrees" She heard herself mumbling. The idea was scratching the back of her head and it wouldn't go away. It was crazy, but she felt like entertaining her craziness, she didn't have anything to lose. Well, other than her sanity.

"What was it? Six degrees that come in threes"

Three angles of sixty degrees would probably make a triangle, she thought. But three times sixty was one hundred and eighty. She glanced back at the computer screen. Could it be?

Curiously she scrolled down her script. Lines 50, 80, 110. She wondered in what sort of alternate dimension she would find something there, in what twisted reality she was actually right, and above all, if she wanted to be the version of herself living in such a universe where mindfucks were real. 120, 160 and then 180.

There was no syntax in line 180, no command, only sentence.

YOU NEED TO GET ME OUT.

Well, fuck. She was living in it.