Was it the dream that kept him awake, or being awake that kept him dreaming? Once it hadn’t really mattered, because one was the same as the other.  He’d come quite a ways since then, no longer afraid to close his eyes to slip into the blackness, no longer afraid to open them to the Technicolor nightmare that had once been reality.
     The screams of the addicts were harsh counterpoints to the soft nylar blankets that served him for a home.  How lucky was he not to suffer their pangs and withdrawals?  He wouldn’t make light of their troubles, feeling his inner pain could be no match for the demons that had devoured his unfortunate shelter-mates.
     It was not that he had beaten his addiction.  He still felt the pain of his broken body; still felt the need to escape into the sim-vids and the mem-chips.  But whenever he found himself moving to jack into a player he no longer held, he would always grit his teeth and weep with bitter shame.  Whenever he really thought about plugging in a wire he got sick.  The memory of being self-helpless while those around him died was the strongest call to quit.
     Eyes flicking open, he looked up into the smiling face of a shelter nurse.  She stopped her motorized cart and waited patiently while he struggled to sit up.  “Still wide awake?  How are we feeling today Master Ringtail?”
     It took a few more minutes of wading through the fog of memory for him to respond.  Shaking a heavy head he replied in a voice broken to gravel, “I’m still here.”
     “That’s a good thing.”  Her cheery reassurance was a frustration all it’s own.
     “Is it?”
     “Of course it is.  Giving up never solved anything.”  No, and neither had just lying there.  He wanted to push her away, wanted to call her a fool.  He wanted to make her see the hopelessness of living.  But that would take more effort than he could spare.  She was all smiles as she worked his too thin legs and tail, making him sit up, lie down and sit up yet again.  At his labored breath and hiss of pain she cooed at him with the soothing sounds of a mother comforting a child.  “Do you need something for the pain?”
     The pain!  By The One did he ever, though he knew there was no way to make her understand.  The Feds had done the basic repair work.  His backbones no longer ground against each other when he shifted.  Sure, the nerves were still tattered, screaming the distress of once torn muscles and limbs.  The bastards hadn’t even bothered to rewire what they couldn’t fix.  They’d done just enough… just enough to make him mobile, and then had given him a black card to drag him under.
     No, not drag him under, but to drug him under.  Unlimited prescription!  It had once seemed a blessing.  But he had no interest in taking something to dull the body.  It was a habit from which he knew he would not have the strength to break.  And beside that, the old injuries were not the true source of his pain.
     No, he knew there was no way to explain it.  The drugs she could give him would simply send him back into that black sleep, where he would relive his personal nightmare over and over again.  There was no way around it.  Even if his last aware thoughts weren’t of that terrible time, the screams of the junkies around him would certainly send his subconscious right back there.  No, he was no longer afraid of what he’d find in the blackness… he was intimately familiar with what awaited him there.
     But she could not know what really ailed him.  And he had no desire to tell and thereby relive it.  Instead he simply shook his head.  “No.  No drugs.  It doesn’t hurt that bad.”
     She smiled and patted his hand, leaving a bottle of water and moving on to the next patient.  No, she wouldn’t see pointlessness. She couldn’t be made to understand.  She was “volunteering”.  She was doing something useful for others, helping those less fortunate.  She had a reason to feel good about herself.
     Jasper Ringtail looked down at his wasted body and laughed. The shelter was his last stop, a place to die.  The nurses would never understand what made the young man laugh so harshly at the same time that he cried.