I dreamt I was at a Cory Doctorow reading, and Cory came up to where I was seated and handed me a medicine bottle filled with pills. And because it was Cory, I downed them all. But then I looked down at the empty bottle suspiciously, wondering what I’d just done. There was no label on the bottle to tell me what I’d ingested, however.

“Trust me,” he said.

And because it was Cory, I did.

He them brought over a laptop device a few feet square, bristling with glowing vacuum tubes, but still light enough to rest on my knees. He slipped headphones around my ears, plugged them into the machine, then plugged in a microphone as well and handed it to me.

He told me I should begin to wail.

Before I could, however, he asked if he could borrow my phone. He was disappointed to see when I handed it to him that it was an iPhone. But not disappointed in the way you’d expect Cory to be upon seeing an Apple product. Instead, he asked me, “Why don’t you have the most powerful device?”

“I don’t need the most powerful device,” I said. “I just have what I need to do the job.”

I saw the sadness in Cory’s eyes, so added: “Look, I can cut up a board with a saw or a nuke. But I don’t need a nuke when I can get away with the saw.”

“Nukes are cool,” he said.

I agreed.

And then I woke, never finding out what chemical wonders awaited me from the drugs, or what technological marvels would occur were I ever to get the chance to wail into that microphone.