Nocturn Core (Abridged)

Nicole and I were staying with my parents in Texas. Austin was sick, but my parents couldn’t take him to the hospital because the health care infrastructure had been taken over by a group calling themselves (simply enough) the Organization. My mom did her best to take care of him, and his situation seemed stable. We assumed he would be able to wait a few weeks for a military action to sort out this mess with the Organization. As the days wore on, the news reported that the Organization’s reach was spreading. They captured residential lots for use as barracks and weapon storage. What they didn’t capture, they ransacked. All of the food, water, and valuables were stolen from countless homes in the vicinity of the hospitals. It was a terrorist attack on a level the country had never seen. We decided to build a secret basement beneath our home. Although building codes prohibited the construction of basements in Houston, the area beneath our house was suited to that, so we didn’t have to worry about any serious health issues – at least, that’s what my dad thought. I wasn’t so sure. He finished digging it out in two days, and we moved a good portion of our food down there. We left enough food upstairs that the Organization would just take it and ignore the possibility of people hiding under the kitchen tiles. It wasn’t long before the Organization made their rounds… We could only get the news by radio now, and many of the standard broadcast stations had been knocked out, so much of what we listened to came from other people like us living in secret in their own homes. The airports were under the Organization’s control now. Everything seemed to be getting worse, and Austin’s condition wasn’t getting any better.

A few days after the Organization stopped running in and out of our house, my dad and I went outside to check out the area. It was spooky how normal everything looked. The streets were empty, of course, but the houses all looked fine on the outside. We went door to door trying to find anyone who had hidden themselves properly. We found a couple of corpses, but I tried not to dwell on it. I didn’t know any of these people, anyway… We found one family that did the same thing as us. Their basement area was a little larger, so they invited us to come stay with them. My dad wasn’t sure it was a good idea, but we agreed to attend a party. When we got back, we told the rest of the family all about it. We went back to the larger hideout the next evening to try to enjoy ourselves for the first time in a while. Unfortunately, a passing truck under the control of the Organization stopped in front of the house. The driver picked up the music playing in the basement from his vehicle. Before we knew this had happened, the driver called a couple of loading trucks to the scene. They infiltrated the house, broke up the party, and captured everyone as prisoners.

We were loaded one by one onto the trucks with our mouths gagged and our wrists bound. I thought it was dumb of them to leave our ankles untied, but when they closed the back of my truck and locked the door, I realized there wasn’t much we could do to escape. I had to sit in pitch black darkness for the whole ride. I wasn’t even sure where we were going… After the first few turns, I was lost. Maybe in Illinois, I could’ve followed the trail better, but I wasn’t familiar with this area. I knew Nicole wasn’t on the same truck as me… It didn’t seem like they were shipping women anywhere different from the men, so I was relieved at least by that much. I had even less of an idea where she had been sent, though. The truck stopped at another house, and they loaded some more people onto the truck. It was becoming crowded in the cargo area, but they didn’t care. We were just merchandise to them. I supposed we would probably end up doing slave labor for the rest of our lives.

By the time we reached the next stop, I realized the knot binding my wrists was loose enough to wriggle out of. I freed myself and cautiously undid the knots binding the men on my left and right. We left our gags in so the Organization wouldn’t notice we had untied our wrists. It worked like a charm. We could undo the knots just as well in pure darkness as in blinding light, so it didn’t matter that we had to work on them en route. We had most of the prisoners free by the third stop – and that was way more people than they were ready to deal with. We had to leave some of them bound, but we were able to rush the soldiers in charge of the loading process and take their guns from them. Only a few people died. Someone else killed the driver of the truck. We were the only truck on this street, so there was no one else to challenge us. Everyone scattered, and so began my long journey across the country.

I found out they had taken me over the border into Oklahoma. I figured it would be fastest to make my way back to my parents’ house from there. I didn’t have a car, and besides, the roads were dangerous with the Organization about. It seemed they were no longer content with just taking supplies. They needed an army of slaves for something. I didn’t intend to trust my fate to chance again. I walked from Oklahoma back to Houston, sneaking into restaurants when necessary to supply myself with water and food. I kept away from the major roads when I could and made short work of crossing them when I couldn’t. I don’t know how long it took me, but I made it back to my parents’ house. I was a little disappointed to find that I was the only one who made it back… None of my family members were in the same truck as me, so I hadn’t been able to free any of them. I didn’t check the other house to see if those people had made it back. Their hideout had been compromised. Although ours was empty, at least I figured it was secure. I stayed there for about a week to give Nicole time to find me. When she didn’t show up, I put a backpack of supplies together and took to the wilderness again. This time, I headed for Illinois.

Traveling during the summer was rough, so I was grateful when things began to cool down. It meant that I had taken a long time to cross the country, but I hadn’t been counting the days, anyway. I was too worried about what might’ve happened to Nicole and my family to think about something as abstract as time. Eventually, I made it to the edge of Chicago. A big storm blew in from the west, and the whole area quickly flooded. I jumped on the back of an Organization truck when the driver wasn’t looking and rode it into the suburbs so I wouldn’t have to spend so much time in the pouring rain. It pulled off into someone’s backyard, so I took the chance to hop off the truck and continue on foot. As I passed a house, I saw a television on inside. I wondered how long it had been playing… There didn’t seem to be anyone in the room. The TV played an episode of the Fairly Oddparents in which Timmy Turner gained the power of invisibility. He tried to save a girl on a motorcycle from the Organization, but he was unable to do anything. They threw her on a train and took her away. I couldn’t help noticing I was in a similar situation…

I had to wade through three feet of water to get across Nicole’s street. Her house was empty. Her garage was empty. All of the canned food was gone, and it basically looked like no one had been there in ages. I noticed that Cleo was also gone… I figured she had decided to fend for herself if she was still alive. Since there was nothing for me to find in Chicago, I decided I might as well go back home and prepare the house for my family’s return – if they ever returned. The trip back took even longer than the trip there; I had lost much of my motivation. The winter months weren’t so bad since I made it far enough south to avoid most of the snow. The new year arrived, then spring, then summer, and I finally made it back to my parents’ house. When I went inside, my heart sank. There were people everywhere. I immediately assumed they were with the Organization and threw up my hands in surrender. It wasn’t worth fighting anymore, I decided. If they were going to kill me, whatever… I didn’t want to live in fear like this anymore. Then my eyes narrowed. Nomad was with them. Nomad wouldn’t join the Organization. I noticed many of them had weapons strapped to their bodies. Some of them – including Nomad – had war paint on their faces. These were rebels preparing to stand up to the Organization. They laughed at my surrender and pointed me to my mom and sister. I was shocked by how similar Chelsea looked to my mom. It had been a year since I saw them, and Chelsea changed quite a bit. I hugged each of them several times. By this point, I was already in tears. Just finding one of them would’ve been enough to make the past year of running worth it.

I headed straight for the secret room, hoping to find my dad and Austin. My mom grabbed my hand before I could reveal the entrance. She hadn’t told the rebels about it yet, and in case one of them really was working with the Organization, she didn’t want them to know. She said she didn’t know if my dad was awake right now, but he would come talk to me soon. I sat down with them in the kitchen to wait. My mom explained that she and Chelsea had been separated from my dad and Austin early on, but they were reunited at the start of winter when they made it back to the house. She spared few details of their experiences… The Organization was trying to construct something to control the minds of the human race, but the details of this weren’t exactly clear. I made a mental note to ask Nomad about this later. Within half an hour or so, my dad walked into the room. He had a pistol on each side and wore a bulletproof vest. I felt small compared to him. It was obvious he’d been through a lot in the past year. I hugged him several times, too.

Immediately, I asked him about Austin. I hadn’t seen him in the building anywhere. I assumed he had just been in the basement or something. My dad put a hand on my back and led me outside. Because of his silence, I already knew what had happened. The tears started flowing. He took me to a little garden beside the house. The plants were artificial, and they had words written on their leaves. There was a little piano in the back for some reason with certain keys marked. It was a memorial for Austin. I knelt in front of it, wondering what I should do. Praying didn’t seem right, but what else was I supposed to do in this situation? My dad read the memorial leaf by leaf, but I couldn’t understand any of it. The whole thing seemed ridiculous, like he would tell me at any moment that Austin was actually just sleeping in the basement. That was just a hopeless wish, however.

“How long has it been…?” I asked, covering my eyes.

“Since November,” he replied. “We couldn’t get him the help he needed. The winter was too much for him, even here.” I could hardly breathe. My only brother was dead, and I never got to say goodbye. I knew how my dad felt about his brother’s death. Was this normal, I wondered? My thoughts raced out of control. I wondered if I would ever see Austin again… Probably not, I decided. There was nothing left of him. I knelt there for several minutes in grief before I could even move. I knew the Organization could come by at any moment, though, and if they saw us here, they would want to search the house. For the sake of everyone inside, I sucked up my tears and went back inside. I sat down on a bench in the basement to be alone while I tried to grasp everything that had happened. All the time lost, all the families torn apart… It was all because of the Organization. My immediate family gathered in the basement to try to cheer me up.

“When I saw Josh was here, I thought he was going to tell me he brought Nicole and two kids,” my dad joked. Clearly, this didn’t help much.

“I haven’t seen Nicole since the party,” I choked. It took me a few times to get this out. I went through my whole trip in summary, stopping whenever the horror of Austin’s death or the year without Nicole gripped me. When I finished telling the story, everyone seemed to agree that I should try going back to Chicago and finding Phil. He might be doing secret work for someone in the city, my dad suggested. I couldn’t imagine anyone having a stable job with the country in its current state, but it seemed remotely possible that he could be working in secret. In that case, he might have a place for Nicole and her family to hide. Knowing Nicole had to turn up somewhere, I agreed to give their idea a try. They probably wouldn’t see me again… I could come back and find all of them dead. We went outside for some reason and sat in the backyard. The sun was already setting, so it was too late for me to leave. I would have to stay for the night. After I finished talking to my family, I turned back to the house. A number of the rebels were staring at me. As Apheri appeared at my side, I put my hand on her black hilt.

“The Organization will pay,” I whispered.

I saw Symphony standing in front of me. I blinked, and then there were two. I blinked again, and then there were endless clones of Symphony as far as I could see in the incomparably large room. My heart started racing. I blinked again, and it was just one Symphony again. I started to calm down.

“Complete me,” she said in her flat, high-pitched voice.

“I will as soon as I can,” I answered. She reached forward. I blinked, and she was in front of me, gripping my shirt.

“I am already complete,” she responded. I didn’t understand. “I have waited forever, and I will wait forever. Time is not a hindrance.”

“What do you mean, you’ve waited forever?”

“Forever.” She stepped forward, fusing with my body. I felt a rush of energy, and then it all vanished. I looked behind me, but Symphony wasn’t there. Chunks of metal started falling from the impossibly high ceiling above me.

I had a dream in which I was part of a group project about completing group projects. Alex and a girl from Japan whose house was destroyed in the recent tsunami were my teammates. Alex and I had most of it planned out. I recall a strange period of time during brainstorming in which I couldn’t remember who I was. A strange jumble of identities flowed through my brain, and with every passing second, I was convinced I was someone else. When we managed to decide what we wanted to do for the project, all of this stabilized, and I remembered my true identity. We were going to have the Japanese girl stand up with a poster that said: “I just can’t wait to start part (a)!” We interpreted it more as a project on procrastination than anything else. It was fortunate that we finished our project in time; our instructor announced that we would be continuing the discussion of DSM criteria for dissociative disorders.

I was talking to Ben about him visiting us in America and us visiting him in Australia. There was a canyon in Australia that I was particularly interested in seeing, but for some reason, he wouldn’t talk about it. We went through a list of reasons why it was a bad idea – too far away from Brisbane (either twenty-five minutes or five hours, he never specified which), food for the trip, silly things like that which are rarely the biggest factor in planning an international trip. He and another Australian guy debated how well the car would hold up on such a long drive. We were in some kind of virtual reality world. Ben had spent a lot of time converting image data to 3D models of scenic places in Australia, but he wouldn’t let us see them… I was confused, so I pressed this a bit. I finally told Ben flatly that I wanted to see the natural beauty of Australia, and I would see it with or without his help. He wouldn’t talk to me or Nicole after that. We got involved in some kind of weird mind meshing game where we turned Ben’s brain into a marble and rolled it around in our thoughts, making him rethink his decision. He eventually decided he would cooperate with us after all. As we learned, the only reason he had argued was because he thought my request to see the sights in Australia was my way of criticizing his appreciation of nature. Since it was settled, we apologized and settled our disagreement. We missed each other’s company too much to hold out alone anyway. Ben made what was supposed to be a bold statement, then – he would buy a bike in Australia and ride it proudly to show the world how much he loved natural beauty.

The dream jumped. Ben and I were meeting up at a restaurant and hotel. We were all going to stay there together. One of the employees at the restaurant, a woman with blond hair in a sophisticated, black uniform, asked if I needed any help. I declined any assistance; I was waiting for someone, I said. I stood in the middle of the busy restaurant as waitresses zoomed back and forth between tables. I observed that the hotel was separated by a swamp-like stretch of gooey, red organic tissue. I dared not step on it. I asked the blond woman from before how I should cross it. She pointed out a narrow path made of stone that led across. All of this was clearly a reference to Althea’s swamp in the Sword of Truth series. I thanked the woman for her help as Ben appeared in the distance… He was riding a bicycle! When he approached the restaurant, he hopped off the bike. He asked me which coins he was allowed to use as payment in America.

“The American ones,” I laughed.

“The quarters, dimes, and nickels, then…?” he asked, nodding.

“The pennies, too!”

“No…” he said in sincere disbelief. “Really?!” He came into the restaurant after paying some kind of bike fee. Even inside the restaurant, he rode that bike everywhere. He nearly fell in the living swamp water as I was showing it to him. I warned him about it… At best, the water would just creep us out. I didn’t want to find out it was deadly and acidic. Anyway, we went to the winding stone trail. Naturally, Ben had to ride his bicycle over it. He nearly fell in twice; one of the stumbles put most of his weight over the edge, but Ben somehow floated to safety. I asked if he was feeling alright… He was having a lot of trouble with balance. Although he assured me he was fine, he seemed very dizzy… He started coughing and eventually vomiting bile. I invited him to sit on a bench with me and rest before we continued onward. He accepted the offer. I took photographs of the swamp.

The dream jumped. I had a false awakening in Nicole’s bed. The room looked as it did before she rearranged the furniture. I understood that this room was connected to the hotel from before. I kept hearing sounds like a squeaky bike outside. I tuned it out as I relaxed in bed. It was a bright, new morning… Nicole stirred and immediately asked about the strange, periodic bouts of squeaking. I told her I would check it out. The next time we heard it, I saw up and looked out her window. In the street was a metallic figure attached to bike wheels – one big, one small. It cycled freely down the road. I figured out what was going on instantly and ducked out of view.

“You can’t be serious…” I said, mostly to myself. “Get under the bed! Now!” I urged Nicole. She and I managed to squeeze under the bed together. It looked like it would be easy for the robots to detect us if they checked the house; the bed seemed higher up than it actually was from our low vantage point. Anyway, the moment I saw the human-like design in what otherwise could’ve been an interesting vehicle, everything came into place. I knew it was an artificially intelligent robot. The fact that I heard several on the street – but no cars, frighteningly enough – indicated that they were large in number. I suspected they had built up their forces in secret and overwhelmed our society. They hadn’t checked our room while we were sleeping, I decided, or we would be dead. Our robotic overlords had no reason to allow us to live. I explained all of this quietly to Nicole. We watched, terrified, as a robotic sentinel walked past our door on its metallic legs. They didn’t have feet – just long, narrow legs. I wished I had Apheri.

Once the coast was clear, we knew we had to get Ben. Nicole and I went to the bench outside where he stopped to rest the previous day. A fleshy cocoon surrounded it now. I gestured for Nicole to follow me in. It was empty… I didn’t want to imagine what the robots had done to him when they found him. Order is a disturbing foe… We heard the squeaking of metal joints as a robot sentinel approached the cocoon. Nicole told me to hide, but there was nowhere to hide! I prepared myself for a fight. The robot raised its arms when it saw me and opened fire. Bullets filled my body. I tackled the top-heavy machine and tumbled with it into the murky water outside. Nicole gasped, fearing the electricity would kill me as the robot’s body began to crackle. Fortunately, it didn’t. The robot turned into a small bug on my arm. I crushed it with a finger, but like a cockroach, it seemed to come back to life despite seemingly fatal injury. I crushed it again, and it took flight. It bit me, injecting nanobots into my body. I couldn’t destroy it.

“They’re immortal…” I laughed uneasily. What was I going to do? I basically resigned myself to my fate. I couldn’t fight this… I couldn’t imagine how, but the robots had conquered us overnight, and they would exterminate us without fail. I saw them marching toward us. “Go hide, Nicole.”

“What about you?”

“I have something to do… It’s our only chance.” My body was full of bullets. There was no way I would survive – but maybe I could save Nicole.

The dream jumped. I was walking around in tunnels built in a Minecraftian style. I was just above bedrock. Everywhere I looked, I saw robots mounted to the floor or ceiling. When the first one saw me, a white laser trained itself on my forehead. Intense battle music started playing. Inspired by this, I ran for my life as bullets rained on me. I turned away from the few that were shooting me and nearly fell to my knees when I saw hundreds of robots staring at me. There was no escape. They had me trapped. I ran for my life past one of the three in front of me. It shot a boomerang sword at me, cutting off my left arm. Blood spurted out.

“No way…” I choked. It shot the sword again after it returned, taking off my head this time. The bloody head rolled as my body slumped forward. I heard Nicole commenting on how cool the weapon was. I saw her standing by the lighthouse on Sailor’s Isle (Skies of Arcadia). She practiced throwing the sword. It was nearly Apheri’s length and probably just as heavy, but it moved through the air like a phantom.

I was in the living room of my Omi’s old house in Louisiana. Austin was playing old video games. I went into the bathroom to relieve myself. Sometime later, I flushed and realized the toilet was clogged. Not only that, but a massive lump of waste (about the size of my head) had somehow ended up in the bath tub full of water beside me. I fished it out with a plunger, but I kept dropping it back in the water and on the floor of the bathroom. Every time I dropped it, a little chunk fell off. Eventually, it was small enough to fit in the toilet, so I put it in there. I didn’t clean up the mess on the floor. I put the plunger back in the bath tub, and suddenly, I was floating on the surface of the water with a fishing rod. A message appeared at the top of my field of vision, warning me that something was approaching! I tapped a button on a controller several times and pulled a Gyarados out of the water. The traditional Pokemon battle screen appeared. I didn’t have any Pokemon yet, so my health bar appeared. I only had 19 HP. The Gyarados had several hundred. I knew this couldn’t possibly end well, and I couldn’t remember the last time I’d saved my game, so I fled. I got away without any problems. As I swam to the edge of the bath tub to get out, I had another random encounter – this time with a Magikarp. It was much weaker, obviously, but it had some abilities other than splashing around like an idiot. I ran from that fight, too, to save time.

I encountered a Rattata on the tiled floor of the bathroom. I decided I was going to catch it. I punched it in the face when it was my turn, and then it bit my arm. This continued for a couple more turns. After that, my health was getting low, so the game asked me if I wanted to use pills to heal. I started popping pills. The rat did the same thing. It wouldn’t give me the choice to stop taking pills every turn… The Rattata and I both restored ourselves to maximum health. Interestingly, I had seven health bars, and the Rattata had nine of them… When I punched it once, eight of them disappeared. I prepared to throw a Pokeball and capture my first Pokemon…

The dream began with me driving home in Texas, reportedly from my job. My parents still lived in their old house, so that was the neighborhood I went to. All of the stores in the small shopping center clustered around the Subway were gone. In their place was a huge supermarket. The parking lot was a mess of broken slabs of concrete. I went into the store, and Nicole called me. I could hear the cast of Glee in the background; she was watching it while talking to me. Just from the actors’ voices, I was able to reconstruct the episode in visual form in my head. I laughed when Will suddenly swept Emma off her feet in a rare moment of manliness. She giggled and pleaded with him to let her down. When he did, she calmed down a bit.

“What was that?” she asked. “Some kind of… fatherly instinct, Will?”

“I’m gonna beat my children…” He said it so calmly, so unabashedly! It was almost as though this was supposed to sound romantic. I cracked up laughing. The show went to a commercial break without a comment from anyone else. Nicole didn’t think it was funny at all, but I was enjoying the chance to see how pathological Will’s perception of life had become over the course of the show. I grabbed a can of pasta off a shelf and waved it around in the air as I joked with Nicole about how that was the best line in the whole episode. The can was covered in something sticky like orange juice, so I switched it with another one. I went straight to the checkout. I guess pasta was all I needed… A plump, black woman waved me over to her register. She swiftly processed my single item. When she printed a receipt for me to sign, I just wrote my first name. I carried my one grocery item in a bag back to my car. Instead of getting in the driver’s seat, I climbed into the back of the car… The air conditioning turned on as soon as I closed the door.

“I’m so glad it does that,” I murmured to myself in relief. It was a warm, humid night in Texas. I wondered briefly how it was possible for my car to do that, but I didn’t worry too much about it. I locked the door. I didn’t want to get mugged. Only then did I lean into the front of the car and turn it on. I quickly flipped on my lights and popped the car into drive, then spun around to the only exit onto the road I could see. My side of the exit was horribly ruined; huge slabs of concrete blocked the way. I swerved around it and angled the wheels so I could easily turn that way. I made a right onto the street once it was clear. Basically, the street was divided by a huge median with trees growing all over it, so in order to get to the correct side of the street, I had to make a U-turn about thirty yards down the road. I must note that this U-turn was impossibly tight; my car pivoted around the narrow, three foot wide tip of the median without any difficulties. I found myself in a turn-only lane going left and had to switch. Then I saw a yellow light.

Yellow, I thought. Yellow, yellow, yell – oh! I realized I was supposed to stop at the intersection up ahead! The light turned red, but I was still going too fast. I slid right into the middle of the intersection. Oops. I figured it was better to just keep going, so I put my foot back down on the accelerator. Almost as soon as I passed through the intersection, I saw a cop coming the other way. I was horrified. He must’ve seen me – how could he not? I knew he would pull me over as soon as he could turn around. I had to act swiftly. In order to evade the police, I planned to take an unusual route back home. I turned left onto a small street, disappearing from the main road before the cop could find me. This road bisected another in a place that looked like the suburbs of Chicago. I started talking to Ben on the phone. I didn’t have to hold it up… I could just hear his voice. This is probably a fortunate side-effect of using headphones when I’m on the phone lately. Anyway, Ben complained that it was snowing in Australia, but we somehow determined that it was actually raining because it was forty degrees in Brisbane. Ben pretended to be confused about the temperature. He said it was 40 to 100 degrees outside – first in Fahrenheit, but then in Centigrade. That didn’t sound right at all. If he was using the Celsius scale, much of that range would be intolerable, even lethal. I turned onto the next street. Traffic lights and driving in general were beginning to pose crippling difficulties. I couldn’t focus my eyes properly on the lights, and some kind of weird, yellow dot appeared in my field of vision to direct the car. On top of keeping the wheel straight, I had to keep this light in the middle of my perspective with my mind in order to keep the car going straight. Anytime I looked away from the middle of the road, the car turned in that direction. The only way to counter it was to turn the wheel in the opposite direction at the same time. As one can imagine, this wasn’t easy. It was incredibly difficult for me to multitask in this dream on top of everything else, so it’s no surprise that I went through three red lights in succession before finally stopping.

Ben explained that he needed help with a quest. The road took me along the edge of a massive, red curtain – the kind used in theaters. I knew there was an abandoned hospital inside. Ben needed to get into the hospital and retrieve something. I stopped the car, got out, and slipped under the heavy curtain. The hospital was dark, and many of the doors and windows were boarded up. Ben transformed into Goofy (Mickey Mouse). He started going to the main entrance, but I insisted that I knew which entrance was the right one to use. I had done this quest before, I said. Actually, I was just attempting it for the first time – but with Ben’s help, I knew we would be fine. We circled around the building to a small back door. Inside, we found two elevators and a door to a stairwell. The stairs were the obvious choice… The building probably wouldn’t have any electrical power to spare, considering the state it was in. Despite that, Ben went for the first elevator.

“I don’t think that’s going to work…” I said. He pushed a button. The elevator dinged at us as it opened. Nervously, I followed him in. “What if we get stuck in here? This is a bad idea… I hate elevators.” The door slowly closed. Ben picked a floor, and the elevator began to drop. The walls were made of mirrors. Staring at reflections of reflections of myself wasn’t helping my sanity. Ben apologized for choosing the elevator; he hadn’t intended to disturb me. We would take the stairs back up, he promised. When the elevator stopped, I stumbled out. Moving was difficult down here for some reason… Ben didn’t have any trouble, though. We were inside a small Minecraft level. The path curved around a pit of sharks before coming to a slide. I almost slid straight down, but there was a lava pit at the bottom! That would have meant my death. I had diamonds and quite a bit of iron in my inventory, so I was glad I hadn’t fallen. I had to slip into a tunnel on one side of the slide. I found it difficult to make any progress… I got my legs in the tunnel, but the rest of my wouldn’t move at a normal speed.

Ben started arguing with another guy in the room with the shark pit. The guy said that the official Minecraft system made dirt grow infinitely high over time, simulating growing grass. Anyone who still played the old Minecraft was in denial, he claimed. Ben made jokes about dirt reproducing like guinea pigs as he hopped across the shark pit. He ran past me into the tunnel. I followed him as a point of awareness as he jumped skillfully across a couple pools of lava, then trudged right through a tunnel half full with lava without taking any damage. I thought he was doing this because he had food to heal himself afterward, but I realized after he emerged that he was wearing chain mail. He was invincible! He came across some kind of harpy woman and didn’t realize she was an enemy for a few moments as she slapped him with her wings. He killed her in a few seconds.

My awareness returned to my body, and I followed after Ben. Since I didn’t have anything to protect me from the lava, I planned to build a path through it. When I got to the tunnel of lava Ben traversed before, however, I saw that it was just steaming water. I figured I would probably be okay… I waded to the other side without taking any damage. A puddle of water on the ground just past the tunnel (where Ben encountered the harpy before) took the shape of a woman. It was a water elemental. I struck her with a bolt of lightning, but the damage was paltry. She was resistant to magic, being a creature of magic herself. I knew cutting her wasn’t going to do me any good. What did I do in the past when I encountered these, I wondered? I vaguely remembered running. I considered calling Ben for help, but he was way ahead by now.

I befriended a black man named Bob. At first, he seemed pretty normal… I understood that a number of people I knew on campus had warned me not to associate with him, but I didn’t see what the problem was. He said he would show me his house. Instead of taking me to a residential area, he led me to the shore of the Chicago River where he had a mat of old, hardened newspapers set up under a bridge. I quickly observed that he was homeless. Immediately, I lost interest in the friendship; my positive experiences with homeless individuals were few and far between. I stared at the long since faded ink on the newspapers as I pondered a way to lose Bob. He would follow me if I tried a normal method of escape. I came up with a plan – I would take the train! Since he was homeless, he probably couldn’t pay the train fare. While I finalized the plan in my head, Bob asked me about random people. I didn’t understand his questions, but I soon figured out why – he thought the people were standing there with us! Bob was having serious hallucinations. I was glad I had figured out a way to distance myself from him… That wasn’t the sort of company I needed. When I told Bob I was going to the train station, he said he knew a shortcut. Rather than insist on just walking to the nearest one (the Green Line was only a few blocks away), I gave in and followed him.

The dream jumped. I was in an underground passage, following Bob with next to no idea where we would surface. He stopped me before a ladder and asked if I was sure about going on the train. Something about it frightened him. I insisted on continuing. I needed to get somewhere, I said. Bob started growling to himself in rage, but he cooperated. He had to release at least ten trap doors on the way up. These were intended to lock people out of his secret passage. He complained the whole way up about trains. When we emerged, I was stunned. We were on a train platform. My plan had been completely foiled by Bob’s clever shortcut… Of course he wouldn’t pay the fare – he could just skip the entrance! A quick look around revealed that we were on the Green Line, but a bit further west of the river. I wasn’t going to lose him so easily, it seemed… Surely, he wouldn’t be able to follow me onto a bus to the suburbs. He couldn’t tunnel his way into that one. I got on the next train to arrive and sat down close to the operator in case of an emergency. I still wasn’t sure what to expect from Bob. He took the seat next to me. As soon as the train started moving, he burst into sobs. This drew quite a few stares, but I let him cry. I did my best to seem like I didn’t know the guy. This continued for a few awkward minutes before he calmed down. He asked if I liked his new boots. Confused, I stared at his feet. He was wearing sneakers, not boots. He showed me his hands, and I realized he was supposed to be holding something. He was hallucinating a pair of fine boots.

“Oh… Yeah, they’re very nice,” I said in a kind voice. I came up with some kind of oxymoron to describe them, and he doubled over in laughter. I sensed that he might be on drugs. He was one of those people who don’t breathe when they laugh, so his chuckling was coupled with wheezing noises. Another black man walked up to us during this fit of laughter. He was wearing a baggy, black jacket, baggy jeans, and white sneakers. He was also half-wearing a baseball cap; it looked like it might tumble off his dreadlocks any moment.

“Shut up!” he shouted at Bob. He continued with a stream of vulgar, obscene name-calling before finally calling us both annoying. I tried again to pretend I didn’t know Bob, but the association had been made. I suddenly realized I was blind. It didn’t bother me much for some reason… I focused on what I could hear of the situation. The vulgar man came over to me and put his hand on my head. I’d rather not transcribe verbatim the ultimatum he gave Bob, but in essence, he wanted me to publicly pleasure him, and Bob had ten seconds to convince me to do it. I wasn’t going to have any of this. I teleported to the other end of the next train car over and pressed the emergency assistance button. I could see into the first car from my current position.

“There’s someone dangerous on the train,” I said. The guy stared at me from the first car with wide eyes. He started walking toward the second car.

“Attention, passengers…” an automated voice began over the intercom. “A dangerous customer has been identified. For your safety, lease be watchful for threats to yourself and others as we work toward removal.”

“He’s on the second train car,” I told the operator through the assistance system. The guy was approaching me in long strides. Instead of attacking me as I expected him to, the guy brushed past me on the way to the next car. “Make that the third,” I said. “He’s trying to get away.” The train stopped at the next station, and a bunch of people got off. I kept an eye out for the guy who threatened me and Bob, but I didn’t see him.

I was slowly transforming into a robotic spider. My tongue was extremely sticky and removable. For some reason, I gained the ability to scale vertical walls with ease after licking them once. I used this ability to sneak into Nicole’s house through a window. This seemed to take place about five years in the past… Nicole and Jess were much younger, and they were still friends. They were sitting together in Nicole’s room. I crawled in and hissed awkwardly. That was my form of speech. Jess wanted to kill me and flush me down the toilet, but Nicole stopped her. I probably had it coming to me for letting that cat get flushed halfway down the toilet…

“He’s kinda cute…” Nicole argued. “I wanna keep him.”

“You want to keep that?” Jess scowled. Nicole knelt in front of me and gently stroked my head.

“Let’s teach him some tricks. Come with us, okay?” She and Jess went into another room. I followed obediently. They helped me correct my robot spider speech impediment, and I regained the ability to speak normally. I informed them that I needed to be at school at 8 AM, but I wanted to see Nicole before leaving. Nicole insisted that I could ride the bus with her. We started waling around outside. When I asked her about it, she admitted her bus driver probably wouldn’t let me ride to school with her… I was sorely disappointed; before I realized I wouldn’t be able to, I was enjoying a flashback to that giddy feeling of interacting with a crush. I tried to cling to that simple happiness.

“Well, at this point, I won’t make it back home to catch my bus… I need a ride one way or another,” I said.

“Don’t worry,” she assured me, “my mom will take us.” A bunch of people came out of the garage together. Everything smelled like smoke. Nicole smiled widely at them. “Oh, you were doing that thing!” she laughed.

“What thing?” asked her dad.

“That thing!” Nicole repeated. They still pretended not to understand (if they did understand in the first place). Mike and Eric were walking together. Eric mentioned something about being good at video games.

“You know what that means…” Mike said.

“Uh… No,” Eric said, shaking his head.

“You can reach into the fabric of the universe and bend it to your will! Space and time are your playthings! And rainbows? Don’t even get me started on rainbows. Wow. Just kidding, Eric – you can’t do that stuff.” Eric seemed confused. We continued looking for Nicole’s mom. I couldn’t remember what she looked like, so every time we saw a woman, I wondered if it was her. We decided to go in the garage, but Nicole went off on her own by the time we got to the backyard. Jess started laughing at me. She challenged me to destroy a glowing, black pillar in the yard. I punched it with all of my might several times, but I couldn’t break it. I continued into the garage. It was shaped like a barn. Once I was inside, I saw that they were on a platform near the ceiling. It took me a few tries because I was starting to lose my robot spider powers (it seemed to be caused by getting my tongue dirty), but I climbed up onto the ceiling and dropped down onto the platform. Something inside my body shattered. A console attached to my robot spider body sent out an error message.

“OV/OL,” Nicole read. She and Jess puzzled over what the error message could mean until a woman came up onto the ledge. She picked me up and sighed.

“Over voltage overload,” she said, explaining the console output to the girls.

“Oh no!” Jess cried. She seemed genuinely upset. I couldn’t figure out why. “We broke him!”

“Not to worry…” the woman said. “I’ll take care of it. You two should get ready for school.”

The dream jumped. I was my normal self again. Nicole and I lay on the floor in the living room (except it was my Oma and Opa’s living room). There was trash everywhere… Spilled drinks (grape soda on white carpet, jeez), half-eaten candy… I tried picking it up while Nicole and Jess played a fighting game. Justin was at Nicole’s house, so he played, too. He explained all of the unique headgears available in the game when I started watching. Nicole was playing as an incredibly powerful wizard with refined command of electricity. Scamper walked into the room and started eating food and toys left in his reach. I didn’t want Nicole’s family to get mad at me for things my dog did, so I made him drop the toys. One looked like Eric’s Guile figurine. A bunch of people had to leave again. I saw Beckman walk by. He complimented my talent for programming, and I took it to heart. Justin joked that Beckman seemed to be into me. I told Justin that I had a history of guys falling for me.

“Like Justin,” I said. I didn’t realize I was talking to Justin…

“Justin?” he asked, bewildered.

“Tynne. Serenity.” He fell onto his back in shock. Then, he started to cry.

“Serenity never gave me a chance…” he wailed. I hugged him to calm him down. After that was settled, I went into the kitchen to organize the refrigerator. I sorted the fruits with care. Nicole’s mom finally showed up. She asked if we were ready to go. I replied in the affirmative – just as soon as I was sure the refrigerator was in order.

My roommate was replaced with a guy named Alex. He had a black cat named Sylvester. We didn’t talk to each other much at first. One night, as I was trying to fall asleep, I heard Alex murmuring in his bed. He had a stuffed lion in his arms. I knew it was named Simba because he frequently talked to it during the day… The next day, he accidentally spilled a whole container of bleach on my bed, so I helped him clean it. I joked about him doing it on purpose. He also accidentally dropped a bag of chips behind the bed. I refused to pick them up. The residents of the connecting room, Sandy and Tyler, knew Alex from high school. They were dating. They hardly ever came over to our side of the suite, but Alex frequently went downtown with them to parties. Alex had to go somewhere, so I decided to take the initiative to clean up our messy room. I finally disposed of the bag of chips. It was empty… I wondered where the chips had gone. I also washed a bunch of dishes by hand in the bathroom. They weren’t my dishes, but I was still worried someone would be mad that I didn’t dry them off and put them away.

Standing in the doorway between our bathroom and the other room, I gave Tyler a creepy stare. He was watching the History Channel. Confused and a little concerned by my weird smile, he explained that he never goes to class on Mondays. He always just watched the History Channel to learn things. I wondered if I should be doing that… Apparently, I was in the same history class. Tyler had to use Alex’s computer for something, so he came over to our room. Shortly after, we heard pained whispers behind the door.

“Help me…” a voice wailed.

“Just a second,” called Tyler. The whine repeated. I realized the door was already cracked open. Alex poked his head in. “Wow, it’s just Alex… Prick.”

“You know you love me!” he laughed. Alex was amazed by how clean the room was. He started looking for his chips.

“I threw them away,” I explained. He reached into the trash, pouting.

“But floor chips are the best kind of chips…”

“Well, no one’s been eating said floor chips, so…” Alex looked up at me with a raised eyebrow.

“Dude, Sylvester’s been snacking on those for like a day!”

“Really?!” I was surprised I didn’t notice…

“Dude! You ate my donut?” Alex asked Tyler.

“Yeah… What of it?” replied Tyler.

“Nothing, just saying…” He stared sadly at the half-eaten donut in the trash can. I sensed that he was considering eating it. I decided to go to the bathroom, and Sylvester followed me in. The cat started unrolling the toilet paper while I was urinating, so I sent him away. Then he hopped in the toilet itself – before I could flush down my waste. “This cat is psycho…” I flushed it with Sylvester inside the bowl, hoping he was too big to get stuck. The cat ended up with his head and front paws sticking out of the bottom of the bowl. He was soaking wet and could hardly pull himself out… He managed, though. After shaking off his back feet, he trotted back into the room. Alex cracked up when he saw what had happened to Sylvester. I secretly wondered if the cat could talk… Tyler and I discovered a stuffed warthog that played recorded sounds. Although it takes us a minute, we realized they were all recordings made by Alex when he was a kid. He had kept this since he was a child.

I logged onto a Minecraft server and built a strange bridge. It went in loops and snaked around instead of following the most efficient path. I seemed to be limited to a fairly small area, but the buildings reached much higher into the sky than normally possible. After completing my bridge, I returned to the ground to prepare a new weapon. I wondered if I could make a crossbow… I tried a bunch of combinations of items with no luck. When I arranged five normal bows in the rough shape of a crossbow, I was able to make one. I sensed that, like in Ragnarok, I could refine the weapon if I found the necessary ore. I went looking for phracon to use on it. MadMonkey from Dreamviews walked up to me, and I thought he was going to kill me for my items, so I shot him three times and killed him. He didn’t lose anything, so he didn’t seem to mind. I wandered around a bit and got into a fight with another player. He had diamond armor, but I was still able to kill him. The problem came when his friends teamed up against me… They started using super powers – shooting beams of blue light at me, moving at twice normal speed, and absorbing my health, for example. I tried to activate my own super powers, but it seemed I didn’t have any yet. Lame! I decided I would log off before they killed me rather than lose all of my belongings. Unfortunately, I died just before I disconnected. I saw my stuff spill onto the ground before the client closed.

The dream jumped. I logged back onto the server in a safe area at the top of a gigantic skyscraper. I started jumping to increase my acrobatics skill (as though this was an Elder Scrolls game). I thought that if I leveled up my skills, I would be able to use super powers like the others. One of the guys I fought earlier mentioned my name in the chat.

“Nice fight!” I said to him. The people who killed me seemed friendly. The only one I didn’t get along with was the guy who attacked me in the first place.

I went to the doctor’s office with my mom. Our doctor was an interesting woman with a voice and a personality like a man’s… Deep down, though, she still had that motherly instinct. She had a terrible habit of smoking in the hospital, which a blond nurse kept coming into the room to ask her to stop doing in front of us. It made no difference to her. The doctor explained that she only checked teeth on the first visit, so she had us each open our mouths and show her our teeth for three seconds. Once that was done, she took off her rubber gloves and shrugged.

“That’s it. See you next time.” Before we could leave, however, a white-haired man with glasses came into the room. He smiled faintly when he made eye contact with me.

“Excuse me, but I’d like to step in as this boy’s doctor starting next week,” he said. Our manly woman doctor put her hands on her hips.

“What? Why?”

“I think I understand why he’s here… Would that be alright?”

“Well, sure… As long as he’s fine with it, too.” Everyone looked at me.

“I don’t see why not…” I said. In truth, I just wanted to get away from this doctor’s smoke. Now that all of that was settled, we were able to leave the doctor’s office. I overheard my new doctor whispering something to the woman after we exited the room.

The dream jumped. We returned to the doctor’s office sometime later. My doctor was late, so the woman doctor took me into her room anyway. I noticed she wasn’t smoking… That was a good sign. She checked our teeth again, but she was a little more thorough this time. She paid particular attention to my teeth, and I thought that meant they weren’t doing so well, but she smiled after each of the three rounds of inspection. She only had one complaint.

“Try not to go so hard on your front teeth,” she said. “They’re in pain.”

“His teeth are in pain…?” my mom wondered in amazement. I understood what the doctor meant, but there was no way I could explain it to my mom. She lacked the experience to assimilate it. The doctor asked about my life and studies, so I explained my academic interests and lucid dreaming practice.

“I also work at an airport,” she said after I mentioned studying electrical engineering. “My job is to assess risks and input danger zones in the airport mapping system. We isolate areas with cones and what have you, then put the danger point in as a user under the protection platform with a timer for removal.” She shrugged her shoulders. “It’s a pretty complicated job sometimes, but I enjoy it.”

“That’s so good of you!” my mom complimented. “You’re keeping people safe at the airport.”

“Yeah,” I added, “and most people at the airport probably don’t think about…” My mom interrupted me, but I let her finish. Neither of us really listened to what she had to say. It’s not that we didn’t care, but it literally could not be anything important – we both understood this as a fact.

“Go ahead,” the manly woman doctor urged me after my mom was done speaking.

“Well, as I was saying, most people at the airport probably don’t think of it as dangerous. The ones who are terrified of airports are either scared of the people or the planes, and the people who don’t have that fear see airports as a fairly safe place. Without people like you, that wouldn’t be possible.” The doctor smiled. I almost expected her to give me a fist pump. The door to the room opened, and in walked my new doctor. I noticed he wore a white sword on his hip, but I didn’t say anything about it. The woman doctor started smoking again, and I covered my mouth and nose so I wouldn’t get a headache. Smoke gives me serious headaches…

“Oh? Are you smoking again?” my doctor asked. “When we met last week, you said you were going to stop that dirty habit…”

“It’s not me, it’s…” She trailed off as a red portal appeared behind my doctor. He drew his sword.

“It’s her!” A fancy, red car appeared beneath the huge portal. It drove out of the building and down the street. I saw it long enough to notice a woman with pale skin and fried, blond hair in the driver’s seat. Her eyes were as black as the night. Both doctors rushed to the front of the building, and I hesitantly followed them. My mom came along to tell me not to wander around the doctor’s office.

“We’ve got to do something…” the woman doctor said in a hoarse, choking voice.

“Well, that’s what he’s for, isn’t it?”

The dream jumped. I was in the basement of a store in the Imperial City of Tamriel. A bunch of women with bizarre, neon hair colors lurched around the building naked like zombies. I cut through their bodies with Apheri, and they dissolved into black shadows. I felt that this was all part of Oblivion. I wondered why there were still NPCs here, thinking that I’d deleted the mod that implemented them. I supposed their zombie-like behavior was the result of null dialog and a lack of AI presets; they didn’t know how to behave, so they just wandered around aimlessly. Anyway, once I destroyed most of these, I saw a girl sitting with her legs crossed on a rounded ledge built into the corner of the room. She was wearing a shirt, frilled black skirt. Her hands rested at her sides until I approached. Then she looked up at me and screeched. It was the woman who came through the portal at the doctor’s office! I saw her name for a brief moment – Lusark Decidies or something like that. Her black eyes seemed to suck me in, but then she transformed into a bloody heart. Her membranes attached themselves to the floor and the ceiling, suspending this pulsating lump of organic material in the air. I slashed across it, and she howled again as her blood shot out into the room. She transformed into a web of needles next. The area around her became a fireplace. There was some kind of weird, razor-sharp curtain attached to the mantle. When I rotated a wheel on the base of the mantle, this curtain was moved in line with the woman’s needle web. The whole time, electricity was shooting out of the walls at her for some unexplained reason. I heard voices talking in the back of my head.

“That final boss was boring,” one guy said.

“No way! The lightning was really cool.” I continued cranking the curtain wheel. The woman groaned at the pain. She shot needles at me, but I didn’t care. I was pretty sure I could survive if I just killed her quickly.

“You know, a lot of people compare her to Lady Gaga, but I don’t see the similarity.”

“What? She’s Lady Gaga’s oversoul. Didn’t you know?”

“I don’t think so…” I kept cranking the wheel, and the curtain got stuck on the corner for a bit. When I got it through, it started going toward the wall. If I could get it all the way to the wall, I would rip out all of her energy – I just knew this instinctively.

“She doesn’t try to stop you from finishing?” I asked the voices. The curtain was almost to the end.

“Sure she does.” A hand reached out of the web of needles, grabbing the curtain and crushing it. She was much more powerful than me; even turning the wheel at full force, I couldn’t keep her from jerking the curtain back. I put some more effort into it, but it was no use. I was losing. I heard the door of my room open and felt my physical body roll over. What would my roommate think if he saw me turning an invisible wheel in bed? I woke up.

I was walking along some train tracks. I was some sort of duck… Joining me in my travels were a chicken and a cat. We heard a train coming, but we didn’t know which way to look until it zoomed out of a nearby tunnel and nearly flattened us! We waited for it to go back through the tunnel in the other direction – the tracks were set in a loop behind us – before walking through it. On the other side of the tunnel was the Dragon Ridge. The mountains were jagged and unforgiving, and some of them looked as though recent rock slides had buried sections of vegetation. The other animals turned into Nicole (the cat that was not a cat) and Zeddicus Zu’l Zorander (the chicken that was not a chicken). Nicole pointed out a heart-shaped rock high above us. It lay on the summit of a smaller mountain. We had to be close to Naven, she said. We climbed over a hill of loose rocks; they were so finely grained that Zedd got his feet stuck in them like quicksand. On the other side of the hill, we found a lone cottage. When we entered the building, I knew immediately that evil had made this place its home. The interior was an exact replica of my grandparents’ house. I sat down in the dining room with a sign that read “Yeah!” in bold, red letters. Before long, Voldemort entered the house. I was fortunate this time… He went straight to the back door and exited onto the patio. He came back in through the front door almost immediately after, went to the back door again, and… This time, he turned around. Our eyes met. He glided across the dining room with his black cloak billowing as though a violent storm was stirring up inside the building. His hand clasped the wand sitting on the table. Immediately, he fired a volley of spells at me. I repeated his words, tossing the same spells back.

“Expelliarmus!” My wand popped out of my hand. Crap. “Crucio!” I fell to the ground, effectively paralyzed. I didn’t feel any pain, though. Voldemort put a foot on my leg and stood over me with his wand pointed at my heart. He smiled. Slowly, he pronounced the name of the killing curse. “Avada… kedavra…” A green bolt of energy shot out of his wand and bounced off my body. Voldemort’s face contorted. “What?! Why can’t I ever kill you?!”

“Because love is forever, stupid,” I said. I shot him with the same spell several times in succession before he finally died. I was glad I was able to protect Zedd and Nicole from harm.