Dream Job - @HardFork Series Writing Contest

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Lorelai struggles to run in the hot sand that clings to her feet, slowing her down. Luckily, her pursuers have the same problem. Lorelai escapes the beach and reaches the solid ground and her lungs feel like she's about to explode, because she's unaccustomed to this kind of heavy chase.
Still, she sprints and puts all her energy into moving further, because they're coming and they're getting close. She grits her teeth and puts one foot in front of the other. Behind her, she hears them yelling after her, but she blocks them out, focused on getting away.
Lorelai breathes and suddenly, in front of her, she sees salvation.

And salvation comes in the form of cars. The police cars they came in. And for some reason, she knows the door will be open and just jumps into the car, slamming the door behind her. And now it's dark outside, complete dark, and she can't see a single thing, but she somehow hits the right button to lock the doors. They're closer now. Much closer.
She kicks it into gear and drives away.

For a while, she doesn't know anything about the police. Might even think they aren't coming, but she's not dumb. She knows how it goes and she drives her stolen car really fast over slopes and valleys and for some amazing reason, it doesn't get stuck and glides along smoothly.
Out of nowhere, in the distance, she can now see police cars zooming closer. Lorelai does a 360, which jolts her with a thousand volts, because she's never done that before, but it somehow works and she speeds away from them.

After mere seconds of driving, she reaches a tall, dark tower in the middle of the forest. Even from the distance, it looks very narrow and for some god-awful reason she doesn't even know, she stops the car, gets out and goes inside.
There are people here.
Scientists, although what they could be doing in this primitive place escapes her. Her feet drag her up the steep stairs, although she knows she shouldn't. And suddenly, she hears the sirens outside, but somehow knows they aren't here for her.
And her survival instincts kick in and she breaks free from whatever was dragging her up the stairs and darts down. Now, she's in front of the wooden door and can see them, through the glass in the door. Guns cocked, coming close.

She turns and sees a hiding spot under the stairs and crawls in. And once inside, she sees a second, narrower crawling space and shoves herself in.
A flashlight illuminates the space under the stairs, but not the narrow crawl-space. The police go up the stairs and Lorelai is safe.
For now.

Lorelai woke up exhausted, and somehow still hung up on the dream. She reached behind her ear and unclipped the memory chip, like she did every morning. She set it down, in the little box beside the bed, then slept for another half hour, to get her strength back.
Second time around, she got up for real. She stared at herself in the bathroom mirror. I look like shit.

They really had been driving her hard at work, these past couple of weeks. Everything had just gone complete berserk since her boss decided to bump up the #901 release by three weeks. She'd been working overtime, not getting nearly enough rest, which meant bags under the eyes, which meant enormous cups of coffee, which meant imaginative exhaust.

Although she knew the quality of her dreams was about the same and that the #901 release would be just as good as the ones she had done before, she could feel it in her brain, that her imagination was wearing thin. Ideas struggled to find their way into her dreams, themes were beginning to repeat themselves from one dream to the next.
Of course, customers enjoyed that. They liked it when their dreams (well, her dreams, to be exact) had a common story arc. It made them complex, made the dreamers feel clever. So, recurring characters or settings weren't really a problem for the masses. Only for Lorelai, who was a purist at heart.

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She thought about the early days, when she began working for the company. She had seen an ad for something called The Stuff of Dreams LTD, on Facebook and had made a mental note to check it out. She had always had very vivid dreams, and often thought it was a pity that she was the only one who got to enjoy these little adventures.
From her very first day at the company, they had been a perfect match. The job of her dreams, quite literally. She did what she loved and the company made sure others did, too.

But it had caught on like a flash. All over the world, people were dropping their video games into the bin and wanting this instead. After all, why waste time with a console or VR set when you can just clip on a memory card that transports you to another world?
Of course, this increased demand for new dreams, which in turn, increased work hours, which led to less creativity.
It was Lorelai's belief that the dream makers should be allowed to dream in their own time, because great ideas come unbidden.

But it was not to be, not now, not when they were so close to launching #901. She pulled a couple of drawers open and began to get dressed. Lorelai was one of the few people left who still owned actual clothes.
She'd hated the idea of wearing holograms when it was first introduced and wasn't too keen on it now. Her boss had gotten her special dispensation for wearing it old school, by arguing in front of the Council that this gave Lorelai's dreams a vintage look, which would make them even more appealing.

As she put on an old, loose sweater and a pair of jeans, she thought about the launch. Over nine hundred dreams she alone had put on the market, in less than five years.
That meant an average of 180 dreams per year. She was the most popular dream maker on the market and the Lorelai Cosgrove series was the most frequently experienced.

She put the little box in her coat pocket and closed the door. She took the subway to work, as she couldn't really drive in real life. She sat in a car full of people, many with their eyes closed, as if they were sleeping. Lorelai knew they weren't and she wondered how many were dreaming her dreams. She glanced at the guy sitting beside her – an Asian dude in his mid-thirties – who was peacefully nodding alone to whatever was playing on his microchip. She narrowed her eyes and craned her neck, to get a good look at it, mostly out of boredom.

Oh, the DreamSoft thousand zettabyte, bring out the big guns, baby...
She stared at the ads on the subway car and found her eyes sliding shut. Man, was she tired.

“Wow, looks like a good one, Lore”, Jerry said, taking the dream chip out of his memory card. “Quality stuff you got there.”

“Thanks,” she smiled at him and watched as he uploaded her dream into his computer. Jerry had once been a dreamer too, in the early days, but he found he enjoyed the technicalities behind dreams more than the dreams themselves.

“They'll eat this one right up. I think we'll add it to the #901 bonus pack, what do you think?”

She thought about this...She didn't feel like the dream was done and still had that uneasy feeling she had when she first woke up.

“You know, Jer, I was thinking...why don't I take this one home for a bit more? I'm sure I could give it a bit more back story, if you'd just give me a couple more days. It's not...not full.”

“Oh, sorry, Lore. You know I can't do that. I mean if these were normal circumstances, maybe I could stretch your deadline a bit. But now? Boss would kill me if he found out I let you play around with one of the fragment dreams when there's still the main #901 to finish.”

Lorelai had known this would be the answer. She really wondered why she even tried, sometimes.

“Cosgrove, I want you in the common dreaming room, yesterday,” the boss's voice filled the intercom.

“Byte me,” Lorelai whispered as she shuffled her feet toward the common dreaming room.

This is my entry for the HardFork Series Contest 'Can you see the future?'. Thank you so much for reading. I hope you enjoyed.