Dreamscape
The story of the Dreamscape, a facility from a civilization long lost.
They called it a city that never woke. Enraptured in the eternal Dream, this city slumbered onwards, with only the conscious few monitoring the needs of the many. This was the Dreamscape.
Monolithic machines rumbled ominously, a deep, guttural growl that foretold their failure. Bleary-eyed engineers flitted through the machines like flies to a lantern, making adjustments here, replacements there, ensuring the Dreamscape still ran.
In the center lay the city, a sylvan expanse of stasis tubes, each with a sleeping occupant. This was a city that never aged, frozen in their reality.
Following the sickly blue liquid, we find an occupant. This one, a young man of sixteen years, has a unique dream. All of them do; the results of the multicolored wires that write and snake from the implants in their skulls to the edge of the sickly blue stasis tubes.
This occupant was once a social outcast, in another time and place. Before the bombs, before the radiation that forced them under the earth, before the eternal Dream.
This one had wished to have the beasts of the forests part of him, who had the spirit of both bear and man, at least in his mind. They called him "fur-fag". An antiquated insult, but one they used nonetheless.
In the Dreamscape, "fur-fag" had found his place. One where he is what he is in his mind, that strange mixture of bear and man. There, he was accepted by others like him; the simulation hadn't the heart to tell him his friends came from his mind, that he was alone. Even if it did, it wouldn't matter to "fur-fag". They were real enough friends to him.
And so, "fur-fag" slept on, suffused by the Dream, embraced by the Dream. Those bleary-eyed engineers were surprised when they monitored the dream, when they saw its setting. Not the woods, his supposed home, but an eternal "convention", as "fur-fag" had once called them, a kind of place he had never visited before the Dream began.
But enough of this "fur-fag" and his little world. We return to the city, the Dreamscape, the incessant rumbling machines. An engineer with a sad face who read the radiation levels every day, and wondered if other cities lived on. An engineer who had discovered that the radiation had subsided at long last, that the shattered remains of the flag he once pledged to were piecing together.
Grief lay in this engineer's heart, as he would be forced to wake the city from their rapture, to bring them to work again under that tattered flag. He threw the switch.
The city woke.
"Fur-fag" was the first to disappear, but not the last. The people were unwilling, weak from their Dream, wishing to return to the rumbling machines, the eternal slumber that enthralled them.
By the time the road-weary men in green reached the city with their tattered flag, half the city had left, unable to live outside of that beautiful dream. The men in green brought those who once dreamed to their own city, away from the dark, silent halls that once held them in thrall.
Years later, an occupant moved into the Dreamscape. It seemed to know it well. It was an aged man of sixty-five years, grey with life's turmoil. By his hand the machines rumbled into life again, a quiet rumbling this time- enough to hold thirteen humans in their thrall, not a city as it once did.
The old man smiled as the machines rumbled to life. He climbed into an ancient stasis pod, once held by a young man called "fur-fag". Then his friends came in as well, climbing into the adjacent pods.
"Fur-fag" entered the Dreamscape again. It looked more worn, older- though he supposed that was part of his own growth. He met up with friends again, new friends, yet of the same form as before- half-man, half-beast.
The Dreamscape would never tell, but "fur-fag" knew these friends were genuine.
/tag "SciFiSummer"