The giant is starting to rot and Minerval still has no news from the man that’s dreaming it. The programmer must be sick, she thinks: if he were dead the forest would dissolve and then the rest of the dream would too, like the time that old man’s brain turned off with her inside it. She can tell he’s sick because he’s not printing the objects she saves. As the giant rots, the objects fall apart as if they were living things too.

The programmer defines himself as such: I steal objects from people’s dreams and I print them in 3-D. That’s why he programmed Minerval, his pearl hunter in a sea of brains. She prefers to define herself as a cartographer of dreams: I can’t leave my world but I can broaden the limits of the map. Every night is an exploration as if smoke excreted from the pores of the hot soil allowing her to see only one step ahead of her. First, she expanded to the dreams of his neighbors in his apartment building, then the block down, then out into the neighborhood, but mostly she explores the dreams of the creator himself. Now his brain is failing, and Minerval doesn’t know what to do. She stumbled on the giant two nights ago, by chance, but in the terrain of dreams, chance is arguable. Now she finds her way back to it thanks to the smell. The giant fell on his side, in a clearing in the woods near a town of carpenters. His eye sockets are empty and full of ants. His eyes must’ve been the size of large beehives, all that remains now is a trace of bloody honey. A kid could sleep inside that cavity. Minerval tries to climb up the giant, but his flesh is slippery. It would be great to print the skull in actual size, she thinks. But how do I save it, and what titanic machine would be needed to print it out? Then she remembers: the programmer is sick, maybe dying, and all of this is his fever dream.

She’s frightened when the dream blinks in and out, as if a silent ray of sunlight were momentarily melting all the dream’s participants without their realizing it. The carpenters’ faces fall, the giant’s rotten flesh drips, the blackened trees collapse. For half a second everything blurs: the forest, the town, the animals and the rocks. Then everything goes back to normal without the living or the dead ever noticing, only she notices. These interruptions occur when the dreamer wakes up, and when he goes back to sleep. In the interim, the dreamer and his dream each carry on with their respective lives, and at night the dreamer returns again to the wide uncharted world of his dreams. Due to the frequency of the glitches, Minerval knows that the programmer is being startled from sleep again and again, without fully awakening from his swampy fever.

              Ignorant to their precariousness, a handful of carpenters approach Minerval. We called a father from another town, they say, it took him a few days to get here. It’s an old man with no legs, carried along by his companions. He looks at her with curiosity for a second (What do they see when they look at me? Minerval wonders) and then he turns his gaze to the giant. Let me touch him, Father Niebla says. They set him on a tuft of pine needles near the giant’s mouth. With his hand covered in powder he touches the swollen tongue that sticks out from between the giant teeth. We have to bury the giant before it’s too late, Minerval tells him. He’s rotting and he’s going to poison everyone. That’s going to be hard, answers Father Niebla with tears in his eyes, because this giant was the god of this place. Without him there’s nothing and if he dies we’ll all die with him.

               Where should I go? Minerval asks. Anywhere they know what we should do, answers Father Niebla. Before they carry him away he takes some knives and pliers from his apron. I’m a carpenter too, he says as he pulls out one of the god’s teeth. So they’ll believe you, he says. The tooth fills Minerval’s entire hand and it has holes in it. An interference in the dream momentarily liquefies the tooth, her arm, and the father, whose cranium melts then solidifies a second later without him noticing: he wishes her luck. So that it won’t be too heavy on the journey, once Minerval is alone she saves the tooth in the file with the objects she’s collected to be printed in 3-D. Father Niebla’s powder stains her hand, and as the hours pass her face and chest are marked with powder too.

She travels from the carpenters to the blacksmiths and from the blacksmiths to the fisherpeople, and then to a place the dreamer has never visited. The forest gives way to a rocky desert and the rocks finally slope down to the sea. Beyond that, a city rises up. In the boat provided by the fisherpeople, she finds a net made of fish bones which she saves. The programmer has instilled in her the joy of finding objects that have never existed before. The thing she likes most is a blanket made from bees that gather and scatter, a warm hive that protects whoever wears it. The bees are golden and they communicate with each other, and with Minerval. When it gets cold she puts it on. Lately, there are more and more holes in it. The climate inside each dream is random and doesn’t obey any rules that a program like Minerval can understand.

Her job is to burglarize dreams. Children’s dreams are the most fruitful, fast currents that pull her into caves full of hidden treasure. From these places come the best trophies: the oddest, most dangerous things, the things she keeps for herself. She has also explored animals, but their dreams are more confusing and they tend to break her code. After these visits, she returns to the main dream mentally muddled and physically exhausted, but the sophisticated pieces she sends to the printer are worth the effort.

The programmer sells the 3-D printed dreams and his clients buy them without really knowing why they find these strange objects so fascinating. They are at once decoration, tool, and art. From time to time, someone buys the product of their own dream and they place it, feeling both satisfied and disturbed, in some privileged spot in their apartment. When this happens Minerval makes a special nighttime visit: without exception, the object reappears in the dreams of its creator, but this time as an artifact from the real world. This is Minerval’s greatest pride, she can say: I made it real, I took it and introduced it into the world, I’m the real creator.

But ever since the programmer got sick she hasn’t been able to visit other people’s worlds: if he dies, like the giant, she will die with him. She’s willingly locked in this world, immense, but limited to only one person, her creator, and the constant contact feels suffocating. It’s an eternal, lethargic present tense, murky, and imbued with the smell of death from the god’s decayed tooth.

Have you ever dreamed again and again about a city on the horizon that only exists in your dreams? The programmer does, and Minerval reaches this city, in the blue hour between night and sunrise. The planks of the port are as hot as if it were midday. The programmer has glimpsed this city so often in dreams that the edges are frayed and gleaming, whereas the unexplored urban depths are a dull gray fog that Minerval illuminates with each step.

The city is walled and there’s no way to enter without being seen. The program makes it difficult to abandon her human form, presumably because the programmer wanted to prioritize the search for objects. The guard on shift opens the gate with a key that resembles an open hand. He’s drowsy from the suffocating heat and Minerval seizes the chance to steal the key from him after he locks the door behind her. The lengths some dreams will go to defend their objects is surprising. They might fire him for this, she thinks, and then: it’s just a dream. It’s hard for her not to feel sorry for these creatures, without knowing whether they’re even as real as she is.

She knows who she’s looking for: a merchant on the shore told her before she sailed to visit, an expert in gods that had once solved a problem involving a failed offering. In exchange for the tip, Minerval gave him one of her most prized objects: a brush with organic bristles that cleans the hair as it untangles it; she hardly used it and the bristles were beginning to fall out.

The glitches in the dream are becoming more and more frequent: as she steps into a doorway she is no longer in the city but in a jungle, and when she gets through the door she’s once again in the city. In the last few minutes before a dreamer awakens, their dream becomes so chaotic that all its elements combine: the wing of an airplane could turn into a bridge, the rain becomes blades of grass, animals may morph into loved ones. But the programmer still isn’t waking up and it’s getting hotter and hotter as if a bonfire were melting the bricks from the walls of the alleyway. She finds the theologian in a lethargic state, nodding off in a leather chair.

Minerval slaps him and a cloud of powder rises from his cheeks. How do I bury a god that died in its creator’s dream, she asks the program. The theologian looks at her, his eyes transparent: each dream has its own god. But this god is dead, Minerval responds, I saw him rotting. Gods don’t die, says the theologian, they are just replaced. You have to harvest the soul of the dead god and transfer it before it’s lost. How do I do that, Minerval asks. The theologian points to a translucent shrine, where a silver spatula sits, indented on one side like a spoon. Minerval saves it with her other objects. The dream blinks and the roof dissolves: I’m not going to make it, she thinks. Does this mean you’re Minerval? The theologian asks with a melted face. The glitch is not corrected and his glass eyes fall from their sockets.

Minerval disposes of herself, breaking out of her human form. The heat helps soften her body and she moves like a spirit over the water and the desert, floating above the sails of the ships and the tops of the trees until she reaches the heart of the forest.

By the time Minerval gets there the giant’s body is a skeleton covered in worms. She brushes them aside (as they intermittently fuse with the bones) and clears the skeleton of spiders and roots. She slides the spatula over the divine bones: the god’s soul is unctuous and pools up in the spoon like cream. The leaves of the trees burst into flames. And now what, she asks herself. The trees fall down, the giant ribcage rises from the soil like fangs. Minerval takes the cream and rubs it on her face that’s no longer there, on her phantom chest, over her arms that are not really arms. Then everything goes still, like the last circular reverberation of a stone falling into water.