Dream Catcher

[Degorram]

It must have been easily past three in the morning – he could feel it in the room before he felt the need to lift his glasses and rub his weary eyes. Here in this tiny office, pitch black except for the pale glow of the three four consoles, you couldn’t see the subtle changes of light that might alert one to the turning of the world. It was so far underground that no noise from above, no early morning rush of traffic nor sleepy birds chirping at sundown, could tell him when to abandon his post and trade shifts with someone else. But there was always a feeling, some change in the atmosphere that told him when his shift was coming to a close.

 

With a sigh he resettled his glasses and leaned back in his chair, staring blearily at the readouts on the center console. Slightly abnormal, but nothing to be worried about. Still, he had better tune Inder into the changes when he came to relieve him. There was no margin for error, and ignoring even the slightest tremor could mean death to millions.

 

The thought alone was one he had gotten used to, and yet every time it crossed his mind (which would be once about every twelve hours or so) a pale shiver crept across his scalp and down his neck. On a good day, he could brush the feeling off and return his mind to some mundane task that needed doing. There was a small stack of reports left that needed to be coded into the console on the left…but tonight he couldn’t seem to push the feeling away. The tingle, like a soft breathing on his back, continued down into his shoulders until he felt compelled to turn his eyes onto the console on the right.

 

Don’t play around, he thought in the sharp, panicky tones of his incoming shift relief, Thomas Inder. You stare at that thing too long and it’s going to start staring back. He sat up and placed his chin in one hand, leaning slightly to the right so that he could get a closer look. Shut up, Inder.

 

A small square of live video was his only visual relief from the long lines of green-texted data that filled up the other two consoles. How could he resist the urge to rest his eyes by gazing down on it every now and then? Besides…the figure in the video had been asleep for longer than he had been alive. Those eyes weren’t going to open just because he happened to be watching.

 

Somewhere even further underground than where he sat was a chamber rigged with sixty kilotons of nuclear explosives. If triggered, the resulting destruction would set off a chain reaction in the core of the planet that would send the tectonic plates spinning out into space at several times the speed of sound within minutes of pushing the button. But popping the Earth inside-out like a kernel of corn had long ago been measured as a better sacrifice than what could potentially be done to the human race on an intergalactic scale if the being below ever woke up.

 

He often wondered how tall she was. Contained in that upright cylinder of glass, she looked downright petite: slender limbs and hips, a small mouth, and long, pale hair, forever flowing upwards like smoke in a suspended state of partial gravity. The second-skin garment that covered her narrow frame was pale as well, a similar tone to her skin, and frankly, seen through the color distortion of the console, she could have just as easily been nude as clothed. He rubbed his eyes again and thought, for the thousandth time, if perhaps he was a pervert for noticing. It isn’t as though she’s human.

 

A soft knock on the door behind him pulled his eyes away from the screen, and the shiver that had spread to his knees dissipated like it had never been there. It suddenly felt very warm in the little office, comparatively. He turned, feeling slightly unwell, and turned the three padlocks on the door so that his relief could enter.

 

Inder poked his head in, a perfect match in all ways to his partner sitting at the computers: scrawny, hollow-eyed from uneasy sleep, with glasses perched primly on the bridge of his nose. His hair was pillow-swirled and standing on end from widow’s peak to crown. Even his eyebrows seemed sleep-mussed. “G’mornin, Ian” he mumbled as he slipped into the room and locked the door behind him again.

 

“Mmm,” Ian replied, running his fingers through his own hair sympathetically. After hours of not speaking, it was difficult to feel like talking. “Long night.”

 

“Agreed,” Inder said with a groan, pulling up a second chair and collapsing lankily. “Didn’t sleep for beans….I kept jumping up from my bed, reaching for the light switch and not knowing why.”

 

“We don’t have light switches.”

 

“I’m aware,” Inder said grimly. “I spent the rest of the night wondering if it was just a reflex leftover from life on the surface or if it was…..” he glanced at the screen and grunted.

 

Ian began to wonder if maybe informing his paranoid partner about the abnormalities in the data was a good idea. “It happens to all of us. Every time I get out of the shower I grope around for a good five seconds looking for a towel before I remember to set the fan to blow-dry. It’s just habit.”

 

Inder did not look convinced. He was instead looking warily at the video console, chewing on his lip. “The beings outside of time,” he said softly, and his shoulders shuddered. “I wish I had never landed this miserable job. Two degrees from MIT and a decent career promised to me, and somehow, instead, I find myself in a hole fifty miles below the surface of the earth watching a sleeping god.”

 

“You say the same thing every morning,” Ian quipped. “Though I’m pretty sure you’re spending more of your sleep shift coming up with different, more dramatic ways to say it.”

 

Inder glanced at his partner and squinted unappreciatively. “It’s not as though I can say you don’t understand.”

 

Ian shrugged in agreement. “We’re only here for three more years. Then we’ll have our choice of positions on any planet in the Formation we want, remember? That was the carrot they dangled.”

 

“Well, maybe I didn’t consider how much bigger of a carrot I would need to keep my thumb glued to a suicidal amount of nuclear devastation.” He rubbed his face. “Speaking of – anything to report?”

 

Ian hummed absently. “Not in so many words.”

 

It took nothing more than the absence of a simple ‘no’ to put Inder on full hair-crackling alert. He sat up in his chair faster than he had sat down in it, eyes on fire with, no doubt, the fires of the bombs they were sitting on. “What is that supposed to mean?” he said loudly.

 

Ian waved Inder away from the console with a growl. “It means what it means,” he said. “There were a few blips in the data over the course of my shift, but they were all well within the normal range of movement. It’s not like she’s started dreaming again.”

 

“It better not be,” Inder hissed. “We can’t exactly sing it a lullaby and hope it normalizes. If it pushes past the Irraden, there isn’t a stronger drug we can dope it with.” He tapped his finger stiffly on his thigh. “I’m not even sure why we keep it alive.”

 

Ian looked back at the figure far below him, and wondered the same thing, but with a different feeling of dread than his comrade. We are such stuff as dreams are made on.

 

 

The soft, summer afternoon had settled in with hardly a whisper when Ian found himself standing at the top of a small hill in an otherwise uninterrupted sea of flat grasslands. Though it must have been high noon, the sun was nowhere to be seen in the rich, cloudless cerulean canopy. It was inexplicably gorgeous out – he had never seen such a perfect day in his life. For miles around the golden fields were crowded with waist high fronds, each blade of grass identical in shape and size.

There was something inexplicably reverent about the scene. The horizon seemed blurred and blushed with canter smoke, and a humble quiet lay over the shimmering grasses that whispered their prayers in the wind, their bowing heads tickling his fingers. The constant movement of the fields was an almost shocking contrast to the utter stillness of the sky. Yet Ian could feel no wind, warm or otherwise. It was as if his body was hardly there at all.

 

He could hear bells, soft and distant, echoing off of the invisible walls of the world-cathedral. Gradually, he started following the sound, feeling a strangely urgent need to find the priests who rang them. They held the key to something important. Or maybe he needed to confess; though what his sin was, he didn’t know.

 

Somehow he had knowledge that he was walking for miles, even though the farther he went, the less his surroundings changed. After some time, and yet no time at all, he sat down, only his head and neck remaining above the sea of grass. He sat, and he waited, somehow still at the top of the same hill he had started on. Far in the distance, the bells chimed.

 

After a time he felt compelled to look back the way he had come, and he turned to see a tree growing in the middle of the path he had taken. Its bark was black, ink-dark in contrast with the sky and sun-fields that surrounded it, like a mid-day shadow casting itself out over the sunlit landscape. The branches, gnarled and angular, were bare except for the brass bells that hung in varying sizes from every limb and twig.

 

Suddenly at his side, standing as if she had been there for hours, was a pale-clad figure staring down at him. Ian didn’t have a chance to see her face before he woke up with a strangled yell.

 

 

Ian slapped his hand over his mouth to stifle the scream and spent several minutes concentrating on the resulting pain across his cheeks, trying to shut out what he had just seen. Finally he peeled his hand away from his face, holding it up so he could watch it shake. His whole body was trembling. What was usually just a creeping chill over his shoulders had invaded him entirely and was starting to feel hypothermic. He leaned forward over his legs and hid his face in his hands, trying to slow his breathing with deep, controlled gasps. On the opposite wall, the clock ticked methodically. He had been asleep for only four hours.

 

After these dreams, Ian was never able to finish his rest-shift. He rubbed his face wearily and stared at the clock, disappointed. No matter how little he had gotten, it was impossible to try and slip back to sleep. He had spent hours before lying there, sweating, staring at the image of that blackened tree burned against the backs of his eyelids. But this was the first time he had ever seen her there too.

 

He rolled over and plucked at his sleep suit, now growing hot against his icy skin. The bedroom that he shared with the two other operators in the facility was only the size of a large broom closet. One narrow bed, one desk, a bathroom through a door on the right that contained a shower, toilet, and sink. This far beneath the earth, digging was a challenge, and the living areas were appropriately downsized. There were three cubbies embedded in the wall over the bed that held their few belongings, but otherwise the room remained devoid of any customization. Ian stood and pressed his fist again the control panel next to the door. Behind him, the bed rotated in the floor, appearing again a moment later with fresh sheets and a new pillow while Ian let himself into the bathroom.

 

The shower was as hot as Ian could make it, and it still wasn’t warm enough to chase away the chill. He stood under the water, just soaking, for longer than his fair share of designated bathing time. He’d catch it from Inder for that, ever the loyal patriot of structure. Structure is the only way we keep this facility running 24/7 with only three operators. Ian had heard it plenty of times. Shut up, Inder.

 

After groping about for a towel, and cursing grouchily when he remembered there were none, Ian dried off under the strong current of the ceiling vent and slipped into his day-suit, fresh and still slightly warm from the tiny laundry closet adjacent to the shower. He fingered the cloth uneasily for the first time as he realized that, were it not for the looser cut of the suit and the various zippered pockets that adorned it here and there, the regulation clothing for living at the heart of the world was eerily similar to the bodysuit that covered the creature below.

 

Now that he was up, he had almost eleven hours until his next shift in the observation office. Living under the regimen of three eight-hour shifts for working, sleeping, and conducting routine daily tasks just didn’t seem natural to Ian, seeing as how none of them ever managed to finish a rest-shift, and everything that he could possibly do in his life-shift could easily be accomplished in less than three hours. There were two books in his cubby that he had read five times, and after spending half of your waking hours monitoring a screen, watching any holovids to waste time lost its appeal.

 

Ian strapped on a pair of soft-soled boots and leaned against the wall, staring at the empty bed that now looked as if no one had ever slept in it before. If he felt like exercising, there were a variety of outdoor scenarios he could choose from in the exercise simulator. He blinked and a flash of golden grasses reminded him that he didn’t exactly feel like being outdoors at the moment.

 

For an hour or so Ian roamed the single hallway that circled the observation office, allowing himself to be fooled that he was actually going somewhere. The white walls, themselves perfectly curved, lacked any distinction to distract him from his wandering, and the few doors that he passed were unmarked.

 

At long last, his muted footsteps led him back to the same place he always went when he couldn’t sleep. He announced his presence in the cafeteria lounge with a couple of knocks on the door before walking inside to be enveloped by a thick cloud of smoke.

 

Adam had his feet perched on the table and was leaning as far back as he could manage in the space available, balancing his chair against the wall behind him. He had turned the lights down so that it was almost as dim as the observation office, his face illuminated not by the pale glow of the consoles, but by the red light of his flaring cigarette. In spite of the darkness, Adam was wearing a pair of sunglasses that glinted with each puff of smoke.

 

“You’re up early,” he mumbled around the filter that hung from his lips. He peered over the top of his glasses at Ian’s drawn face. “As usual.” He pushed the sunglasses onto his forehead and watched Ian from under his eyelids, blowing a stream of smoke through his nose.

 

“I don’t suppose you ever get tired of being in the dark,” Ian said, sidestepping the unspoken question. He put his back against the wall and half-shut his already watering eyes against the stagnant cloud.

 

“Not as tired as I am of fluorescent lighting,” Adam said, tapping ashes into his cereal bowl, mostly untouched. “None of the light down here is real. Even the simulator…you’re not supposed to be able to differentiate between it and the real world but I can. I can tell.” He gestured at the cereal and raised an eyebrow at Ian. “Breakfast?”

 

“Not hungry.”

 

“Me neither.” Adam brushed a few strands of his hair away from his face. Unlike Ian and Inder, he hadn’t gotten it cut since their arrival six months ago. He flicked the sunglasses back down onto his nose and settled against the wall with another draconian sigh.

 

“The sunglasses are a bit overkill, though,” Ian said. “You want to be blind as well as agoraphobic when we leave?”

 

Adam shrugged listlessly. “You don’t like them? And I ordered you a pair just like them too.” He paused in thought, then smirked. “Post man might have some trouble finding our address though.”

 

Ian returned the smile wryly. “Smart ass.”

 

“That’s why I’m here, baby,” Adam said. With a practiced twist of his hips, he stretched one foot over to the wall and kicked the control panel that turned on the air filtration system. With a gentle hissing, the smoke was sucked through a vent in the ceiling and replaced with clean, specially piped-in air from the surface. The temporary suction made their hair rise and extinguished the cigarette, half finished, which Adam tucked behind one ear for later. “God knows we’re not here for anything else. Damned boring waste of time.” He tapped the panel again and the ceiling gradually brightened back to normal light-levels, making him wince as he let the legs of his chair hit the floor again with a clack. He pulled the sunglasses off and tucked them into the chest pocket on his day-suit, which was identical to Ian’s. “So - what’s got you awake at this ungodly hour of the morning?”

 

Ian rubbed the back of his neck and crossed his arms over his chest. “Just….can’t sleep, I guess. I’m having these weird dreams and they wake me up.”

 

Adam stirred the cigarette ashes into his cereal, not meeting Ian’s eyes. “Do you have them every night?”

 

“No, they’re inconsistent.” Ian pulled a chair out of its slot in the wall and sat down at the table across from Adam, crossing his legs so he wouldn’t bump the other man’s knees. “Some nights I have them and some nights I just lie awake thinking about them. It’s the same dream though. It never changes. Or….well, at least it hadn’t changed, until…”

 

“Until last night.” Adam said, giving up on the cereal and shoving the bowl into the dish cubby at his elbow. “Or should I say, for you, tonight. For me, this morning.”

 

“What time is it, actually?”

 

Adam pressed a small bulge in the wrist of his suit and squinted at the numbers that lit up on the fabric. “Almost 10:30. Strange way to live, isn’t it? None of us being on the same schedule.” He pressed his thumbs against his eyes. “You’re the only one who actually gets to interact with more than one person. How’s Inder doing, the finicky bastard?”

 

Ian laughed softly. “Still finicky. Actually I’m sure he’s had a very tense observation-shift. There was a slight anomaly at the end of mine and he, uh – he wasn’t happy to hear about it.”

 

“Oh, piss,” Adam scoffed. “We’ll be lucky to make it through to the end of this run with Happy at the controls every sixteen hours. Say, if we’re vaporized in the night, you can have my sunglasses.”

 

Ian tried his best to smother laughter, but the ensuing chuckles died on his lips as the image of a black tree popped into his mind again. Adam, taking note, tapped the side of his nose, suddenly serious. “Do these dreams of yours always follow an anomaly in the data?”

 

Ian blinked and said nothing. He hadn’t thought to check. In the pit of his stomach, a nagging wish that his observation-shift wasn’t nine hours away began to gnaw at his uneaten breakfast. Maybe I should take up smoking.

 

Adam grunted, pulled the cigarette off his ear, and chewed it thoughtfully. After a moment of silence, he pushed back the chair and stood, stretching his arms. “Come on – let’s get some commercialized sunshine.” In two steps he had reached the door, but paused before opening it to look back at Ian, tapping his forehead meaningfully. “Mm – don’t tell Happy, eh?”

 

 

He could hear bells, soft and distant and echoing. Gradually, he started following the sound, and noticed that the farther he went, the less his surroundings changed. After some time, and yet no time at all, he sat down, only his head and neck remaining above the sea of grass that swirled around him in the breeze. He sat, and he waited, somehow still at the top of the same hill he had started on. Far in the distance, the bells chimed.

 

After a time he felt compelled to look back the way he had come, and he turned to see a tree growing in the middle of the path he had taken. Its bark was black, ink-dark in contrast with the sky and sun-fields that surrounded it, like a mid-day shadow casting itself out over the sunlit landscape. The branches, gnarled and angular, were bare except for the brass bells that hung in varying sizes from every limb and twig and a single, simply constructed swing. A young girl was sitting on it, swaying back and forth, her toes barely touching the ground though her pale hair curled in loops beneath her feet. She was petite and narrow in her youth, her body covered in a suit much like his own except that it was a light cream color that matched the color of her face almost perfectly.

The girl turned to look at him, but before he could meet her eyes, Ian jerked awake again.

 

 

Adam, leaning his face back towards the warmth of the sun, glanced down at his shivering companion and raised his eyebrows. “You fell asleep so quickly, I didn’t feel I had any right to wake you. Was that the wrong decision?”

 

Ian stared up at the intensely blue sky of a perfect summer day and thought in his split second of waking delirium that he was actually outside. The grass that he had ripped out of the ground was cool against his fingers, locked away behind clenched fists, and he raised his right hand to let the blades catch the breeze and fly away. There was even some dirt under his fingernails. But this world was no more real than the golden one he had just woken up from. In reality, he was still miles underground, encased in a simulator that made the outside world seem possible again.

 

“You know the doc-bot can give you drugs to keep you from dreaming, right?” Adam stuck a piece of grass in his mouth.

 

“I know,” Ian said wearily. “I’ve thought about it, but…I don’t want to be like her. I’m not interested in spending my sleep-shifts drowning under the influence.”

 

The sun reflecting off of Adam’s sunglasses gave him a perplexed look that was mimicked by the curious twist in his mouth. “Don’t tell me you now feel sympathy for a Dream Weaver? They create worlds in their sleep and destroy them when they wake. We’re lucky to even be here. ”

 

“If I’m going to have problems sleeping, they’re going to be natural ones,” Ian argued. “Come on Adam, look around you. Look at how we spend our days. We don’t really do a damn thing down here but make sure that the little squiggles on the page are all lined up. The system runs itself, and we mill about in a hamster-run so far down no one even knows we’re here.” He sat up and gazed miserably at the verdant hills that stretched for miles around them, interrupted by a haze of indigo mountains on the horizon. “None of this,” he said, gesturing at the landscape, “is even real. Sometimes none of it feels real. At least when I wake up screaming, I know I’m not still asleep.”

 

Adam pursed his lips. “And you passed the psychology screening tests?”

 

Ian glared at Adam sarcastically in response.

 

“We have another inspection in a few months,” Adam pointed out gently, trying to redirect the conversation away from Ian’s growing agitation. “Maybe you should request leave.”

 

Ian’s shoulders relaxed very slightly. “No…three years isn’t that long. I just have to keep telling myself that and remember where I want to be when they’re over. I’m—I’m just tired.”

 

“Hmm,” Adam agreed, and sat back again, legs crossed, breathing deeply through his nose. For a few moments they sat silently. Finally, he announced his incoming question with a loud sniff. “So what color are her eyes?”

 

“What?!”

 

Adam stood, stretching his back with a satisfied groan, and turned for the exit of the simulator before Ian could recover from his shock. “If you find out, let me know.”

 

Ian sat still until Adam had gone before he looked down at his clenched left fist. He opened it slowly, fingers shaking, and the green grass immediately caught the wind, accentuated only by a few blades that were now a vivid gold.