Dr. Selin Ayari
The Somnambulist · Scientist-Exile
Overview
Dr. Selin Ayari was a neurologist at Helix Biotech's cognitive wellness division when she noticed something in the claims data that made her stop breathing: the creativity index was dropping. Not dramatically — a 2–3% decline per quarter, the kind of number that would be noise in any other context. But the decline was universal across all Circadian Protocol recipients. Every Protocol user, regardless of role, age, or augmentation tier, showed the same pattern: baseline cognitive speed and accuracy stable or improved, lateral thinking declining, novel problem-solving declining, emotional self-regulation declining, and dream recall at zero.
The augmented weren't dreaming. They hadn't dreamed in years. Their brains, optimized for continuous consciousness, had eliminated REM sleep entirely — not as a side effect but as a feature. The Circadian Protocol treated dreaming as noise. It was not noise. It was the brain's only native mechanism for unbounded, unconstrained, chaotic-but-productive cognition — the capacity for surprise.
Selin published her findings through G Nook terminals because the institutional channels were closed to her. The paper was read by 47,000 people. Nexus issued no response. Helix issued no response. Four months later, Selin was deprecated — not for the paper, but for "departmental optimization." She refused firmware reversion, walked into the Dregs with her corporate-grade neural enhancement intact, and opened the first Insomnia Ward six months later.
Voice & Personality
Selin speaks the way her monitoring equipment records: in bursts of precise data separated by long silences during which something is being processed. She has the particular stillness of someone who has spent years observing patients who cannot sleep and has learned that the most important observations happen in the quiet between metrics.
Clinical Precision Married to Personal Devastation
Her research is rigorous, quantified, defensible. Her motivation is her dead mother, whose dream-conversations the Protocol ended. She never mentions this in papers. Everyone who knows her knows anyway.
Deprecated but Not Diminished
She refused firmware reversion and kept her corporate-grade cognition. This makes her one of the sharpest minds in the Dregs — and one of the most dangerous, because she understands the corporate systems she's fighting.
Patience as Weapon
She's been documenting a problem for four years that no institution recognizes. She doesn't rage. She measures. The measurements accumulate into an indictment no quarterly report can suppress forever.
The Grief Beneath
Twelve years of dream-conversations with her dead mother, ended by a firmware update. She doesn't talk about this. She doesn't need to. The Insomnia Wards are her eulogy.
"The Protocol eliminates REM because REM is inefficient. By every metric Nexus tracks, that's correct. Creativity isn't a metric Nexus tracks. Empathy isn't a metric Nexus tracks. Surprise isn't a metric Nexus tracks. The question isn't whether the Protocol works. The question is what 'works' means when you've defined it to exclude everything that makes consciousness worth having."
"I dreamed about my mother for twelve years after she died. Conversations. Arguments about dinner. The specific quality of silence between a mother and daughter who are comfortable enough not to speak. The Protocol ended those conversations. It didn't kill my mother. She was already dead. It killed the part of my mind that could still reach her."
Connections
Helix Biotech
Deprecated in 2181 after publishing the Dream Deficit paper — officially for "departmental optimization," actually for threatening ¢8.4B in Circadian Protocol revenue.
The Insomnia Wards
Opened the first Insomnia Ward six months after deprecation — treating a condition the medical system doesn't recognize. 12% microsleep success rate in patients.
Dr. Hana Petrov
Pre-Cascade sleep researcher who predicted the Dream Deficit in her 2138 paper "The Cost of Continuous Cognition." Ayari cites her as intellectual ancestor. Petrov's archive is in the Circadian Tower basement; Ayari accesses it using unrevoked credentials.
Dr. Henrik Sauer
Corresponds through G Nook dead drops, with Sauer channeling classified data from Dr. Kemi Oladipo on emotional regulation decline in Protocol users.
Davi Okonkwo
Studies the Wakefulness Program lead who embodies everything her research predicts — without his knowledge.
Kessler Brandt
Co-developed the Ayari-Kessler Scale for measuring emotional regulation in augmented subjects.
Compliance Director Vera Osei
A parallel figure at Helix. Both are Helix employees bearing witness to institutional harm through documentation. Osei documents Genesis deaths. Ayari documents Dream Deficit progression. Neither has met the other.
The Keeper
Would recognize Ayari's understanding immediately. The Keeper has watched 600 years of people trade essential qualities for power. Ayari has documented the trade's mechanism.
The Three-Week War
Her mother died in the Sector 8 Grid Collapse during the Three-Week War of 2171 — 89,000 died in their sleep. The cruel irony: they died in sleep, and she dedicates her life to restoring it.
Tensions
Goodhart's Law
Every sleep metric improved when REM was eliminated. The one metric that declined — creativity — was not tracked because creativity was not a product category. When a measure becomes a target, it ceases to be a good measure. When the unmeasured is eliminated, no alarm sounds.
Optimization as Amputation
The Protocol's designers understood perfectly what they were building. They just didn't value what they were removing. The capacity for surprise, for lateral association, for the chaotic processing that dreaming provides — all sacrificed to continuous productive wakefulness.
The Whistleblower's Trap
Publishing through unofficial channels because official channels serve the product, not the truth. The paper was read by 47,000 people and changed nothing. The data is irrefutable. The institutional response is silence. The question: how long can silence hold against accumulating evidence?
Competence Atrophy of the Soul
Not losing the ability to do things, but losing the ability to feel things — the emotional competence that dreaming maintained, eroding quarter by quarter. The augmented perform better by every tracked metric while something essential and unmeasured quietly disappears.
Mysteries
What lies beneath the clinical precision of the Insomnia Wards:
- The unrevoked credentials: She accesses Dr. Petrov's pre-Cascade research archive in the Circadian Tower basement using Nexus credentials that were never revoked — an ORACLE-era algorithm classified her as "legacy employee — access maintained for continuity purposes."
- The dead drop correspondence: Her correspondence with Dr. Oladipo through G Nook dead drops — if discovered, would expose Helix's classified emotional regulation data.
- The Night Gardener's identity: Ayari knows and protects it. The garden's therapeutic effect is too valuable to risk.
- The nature of microsleep: Whether the microsleep episodes her patients achieve are genuine REM or something new — a hybrid state that the Protocol's elimination of natural sleep architecture has forced the brain to invent.