She compares their deltas. While Six entered her Phase 3 sleep much earlier than Seven, they both remain in delta for the normal length of time. Liz remembers that the previous night, almost all of the patients were in delta at the same moment. She pulls up One’s video. She queues it to 11:58 and pushes play.

   “It’s a bad intersection.”                       “There goes her premium.”
“The girl with the sheets should wear a seatbelt.”
           “Hail, hail the gang’s all here”           “Pick up truck does not stop.”
                                “Guy is an asshat.”             “Close call for Sheila.”

She sits at the pod, staring into the monitors. There is a moment of restlessness amid the sleepers, and then, at 12:04:

                 “Japanese school girl fetish.”          “Little Star Twins.”
           “Cat that is not a cat.”
                                                                 “Answer in a question, moron.”
“Face that launched a thousand malls.”           “What is a Fender guitar, Alex.”

“Frog cat another cat rabbit dog.”

 Totally meaningless and just a coincidence? Please let it be so. Her hand is shaking as she flips up the video surveillance of the sleep lab and at 12:03, she watches herself chew on the edge of her pen, then write in her notebook on the top of a new page. She already knows what is on the page, but flips open her notebook to confirm. At the top of the second page of her ideal Jeopardy categories:
On the video, Jasper talks about a hot date over the weekend. Humza and Liz nod and Humza makes a smart ass comment about getting some. Jasper says nothing, but when Liz turns away, Jasper looks at Humza and makes the universal gesture for oral sex.

     “You’re a good boy.”                      “Not true.”                   “Virgin.”
“Pants on fire.”              “Lies.”
                          “Telling tales again.”                   “Bullshit.”

The next five minutes are without comment. Then she watches herself write in her notebook. Before her pen leaves the page:

                                                 “No spider.”                   “Martyr girl.”
“Painful death.”                   “Angel.”
     “No icy bridge.”     “So young. Too young.”                   “No stopping it.”

 Her hands are asleep. On the video, Liz and Humza both look at their screens and start typing madly. Six and Three have gone into REM cycle.

“More!” she hisses at the screen, as though trying not to wake up the sleepers. She feels her coffee burble in her stomach, so she leans forward in plane crash position, breathing through her mouth and waiting to throw up into the trash can under the desk but nothing happens. From the video, Four tells someone to get off his foot. Two minutes later, One asks his absent wife if she paid the credit card bill. Seventeen minutes later, he calls someone a “Turd Bugle” and then, as if to prove a point, farts.

Liz forwards through everything at quadruple speed. The seven sleepers cycle in and out of delta, but never all at the same time. Liz replays the time period between 11:43 and 12:11 again. She should go wake up Humza and Jasper and show them—whatever this was—play them the tapes and try not to cry when they talk about the girl dying young. She should. She should—something. She looks at the charts again, all perfectly normal and boring when split apart, dissonant and strange and exceptional when thrown together.

One theory of sleep is that dreams are just a nighttime hallucination that the brain simply strings together into a meaningful narrative, which means that all of the sleep talking Liz is hearing on the video playback is just a series of words, echolalia from the day tossed together with her own mind making connections. It’s like reading a horoscope in the paper. Her mercury is in retrograde and the sleepers are air signs.