Interplanetary Conspiracy

Date: 9/24/2017

This dream was not only even longer than my usual, but also even more layered and complex. I lose track of where the dream started, exactly. The first thing I remember is a young woman waking up to find that the world has changed dramatically in her sleep. She runs into her brother while exploring a quiet and oddly tidy house, and he tells her that she’s the last of the family to wake. A fraction of the human population fell asleep several months prior to the beginning of the dream, he says, and these were the people who miraculously survived. Everyone else is now either dead, undead, or mutated beyond recognition. Her family is safe. Her parents woke up first, then her brother’s boyfriend, then her brother, then a few other people who had taken refuge with the family, and finally her. The family takes her to a kind of post-apocalyptic mall, as a way of introducing her to what the world has become. It’s a mix of covered farmer’s market style stalls, hurriedly repurposed buildings, and a place that seems to have been very purposefully and lovingly built as a an actual replica of a mall. She, being like me, just wants to go to the repurposed building that now reads “library” on the weathered sign out front. Instead, her family takes her into the mall replica proper. Here, she sees how the economy has changed. Material things are in short supply, and even a small toy wolf is inordinately expensive, at $34. The only exception seems to be video games. Much of the world’s technology has suffered. The internet does not exist in its old form, and re-creations of it are unreliable and unpopular in their alpha and beta stages. Thus, video games have taken a step back and retro games and consoles are wildly popular. They’re all people have to truly distract them from the state of the world, and so they are gathered in the mall in stacked towers of nearly every retro game imaginable — and plenty of new games which have been made specifically to work within the technological restrictions of the post-apocalyptic world. The games cost more than the consoles they’re played on, but all video games and their accessories are vastly cheaper than anything else in this mall — even food, which is pretty cheap in itself compared to things like toys and clothes and blankets and the like. Intrigued and now separated from her family, the young woman continues exploring. Deeper in the mall, she finds a row of theater rooms. They seem simultaneously old-fashioned and futuristic, with special seats and lighting juxtaposed against clips of very old movies run on very old projectors. Many of the movies are shown only in 15-30 minute clips, strung together into a sort of “anthology” of pre-apocalypse entertainment. Very few theater rooms show full movies, and those that do are very expensive and very elite. The young woman doesn’t feel welcome to stand in the doorway and peek, the way she can with the anthologies. She feels excluded and shamed, and nervously tries to find her way back to her family. She winds up lost in the same theater hall for awhile, until an old friend from high school finds her and escorts her out of the mall and back to her father’s car. They promise to talk again soon, and catch up. When the young woman goes home, she notices that every bedroom has a TV and several retro gaming consoles. Even her parents have some. The world truly has changed. I don’t remember much detail from the next segment of the dream. It, too, clips together like an anthology or montage in my mind now — though I know it wasn’t that way during the dream itself. Several years pass in this post-apocalyptic world. Some areas are never retaken, dominated by the undead and the strange mutated creatures who feed on the bright, acid-colored grasses and hide in the inky-dark needles and leaves that sprout at strange angles from the gnarled, twisted, bent shadows of what could once have been called trees. Bioluminescent squirrels with strange, suspicious new behaviors. Cats that seem to be mixed with other animals, but won’t let anyone close enough to determine what kind. Unicorns that look more rabid and radioactive than mystic and wish-granting, glowing a sickly green and dripping an acid-like substance from their teeth. These places are left alone for the most part. The only exception is when groups of teenagers or young adults decide to brave the strange, mutated lands to hunt down squirrels and swans and other wildlife or to gather food and the strange plants that have overtaken these spaces. Many of the animals and mutated plants are implied to be used in defensive technology to hold the lands humans have managed to reclaim, or in the technologies that allow video games and theaters to keep functioning. If unicorns or the undead — or worse still, undead unicorns — happen to stumble across your hunting grounds, you do not keep hunting. You do not fight back. You run, and pray they do not take interest and follow you back to human lands. The young woman goes hunting in these places with her brother and her high school friend several times, and each time finds herself reveling in the adrenaline rush when she flees from looming, worryingly curious unicorns. She jumps fences and breathes hard and when she finally reaches cover she laughs because she’s alive. She also turns trips to the mall into a ritual with her friends, and always bemoans the price of small toy wolves. She goes to the library sometimes. She buys video games often. She finds herself settling into this life, and forgetting the one she had before. One of the games she plays seems to be nothing more than a replica of her own life. The only exception is that the main character she’s constructed is a boy. He lives in the same world as her, but several generations past hers. He is heckled and teased by his friends one winter, for never having seen a full movie. He has only ever been able to afford anthologies, and even then he is never very comfortable in those strangely lit theater rooms. Something about them feels ominous. His friends tease him even more for that, saying that he’s imagining things. They take him to the theater one winter, when he is just barely out of his teenage years, and promise that he will see a full movie before the day is out. He tries to speak over them, to explain that he has a bad feeling about this. It happened in a dream once, and he ended up stuck in the snow out in unicorn lands, where he was buried in a blizzard and left to die. His friends laugh, and assure him they aren’t near any unicorn lands anyway and the snow isn’t a full-on blizzard at the moment. The young woman playing the game realizes that her character is correct. It wasn’t when he went to the theater, but he was left to die in unicorn lands once. When he succumbed to hypothermia and died, the young woman’s game takes her to a new character creation screen. The first one just had options for humans of various genders and body types. This one is far more expansive, with options that range from races living in highly developed alien civilizations to isolated wildlife living on worlds that have never been touched by sentient beings. She can choose their backstories, their coloration, their patterns, their gender, their age, and more. The game she thought was simply a slice-of-life rpg from her own world actually takes place in a vast universe that includes a wide array of planets and alien species and unique storylines. She chooses a semi-aquatic, technologically advanced race and creates an ambitious professor of nanotechnology. She plays through this young professor’s first internship and her attempts to climb up the ladder and start working on truly meaningful projects. She nearly makes it to the top when an inter-office conspiracy is revealed. She tries to expose it, and her character is murdered for her interference. This time, the game takes her back to the first character creation screen. It has saved her presets from her first character. She creates him again. While she plays, he tells his sister about a dream he had. The dream is a recap of the storyline the young woman just played through. He dreamed of the nanotechnology professor’s life. The young woman gets a little farther in his life this time, and he doesn’t die until he goes to see an anthology at the theater. He notices something strange about the juxtaposition of old and new technology — stranger than usual — and when he points it out he is captured by law enforcement and taken away to a strange warehouse. He is questioned, determined to know too much, and ultimately euthanized via something in a syringe that’s shot into his neck. The young woman is taken to the expansive character screen again, more suspicious than before. She chooses a wild creature, thinking she will last longer in this game if she doesn’t run the risk of uncovering more conspiracies. Her creature sires one generation of children before falling into a lake in winter and drowning beneath the ice. She returns to her previous character. She doesn’t have her character go to the theater this time, and it changes everything. Instead, he goes out to eat with his friends at a 50’s style diner. He has a boyfriend this time. While messing around and trying to get his boyfriend to eat milkshake-dipped French fries, he’s interrupted by another of his friends. She’s brought someone she knows, though I can’t recall how. He’s an older man; with long, grey facial hair and a look in his eyes that speaks of knowledge so profound it cannot be properly articulated. Everybody stops, and listens more intently than they want as he speaks about something most of them cannot understand. He says it has happened several times. He says it is common to die by drowning, as he once did in a lake in winter. He says snow and water will kill you fastest, and then you will wake up in your next life. He says reincarnation is real, and it means something if you remember your past lives. He says that those who remember have a purpose. He says that there is something bigger happening. The main character of the game and his boyfriend seem to be the only ones who fully understand, who have a sudden feeling of motivation. They have to do something. The young woman is also motivated, and has her main character start covertly looking for answers each time she returns to his storyline. He starts to learn about a kind of technology that borders on magic. It has been hidden from the public, used only by the elite. He figures out how to recreate it. He starts a project. He builds a room that is “magically” blocked to all but a few he allows to come in, and makes the room into a portal to other worlds. The young woman starts playing very specific alien races between human lifetimes, reading in her game manual that specific races unlock specific abilities and technologies in the human storyline. Each time she returns to him, each time another one of her storylines ends and she goes back to his, she sees things that connect to the other worlds where her other storylines have taken place. As the human storyline unfolds, multiple humans carrying out the same project via reincarnation (in this case the same person because the player keeps selecting the same presets in character creation), it reveals more and more how these planets and civilizations are connected. There is not just a conspiracy on the human world. This is not just a conspiracy between offices on another world. This covers all the worlds in her character select screen. This is something only her human character can solve, only he can know enough about via reincarnation and special world-hopping technology and these dreams of the other races she plays as, only he can do something about by traveling between worlds. Sometimes he dies of old age, not having done anything to expose or overthrow this conspiracy. Sometimes he is murdered as a spy. Still, the young woman presses on. She’s close to the end of the game when she goes hunting in unicorn lands again. She sees the strange trees and a distant unicorn and realizes she has no idea how they got this way. Perhaps the video game she’s been playing isn’t the only one with hidden depths. She goes to the theater to watch a full movie. She seems to have some kind of plan. When she returns, her house is on fire and her secret room is crumbling to ash. She saves her girlfriend — who was once simply her old friend from high school — and thinks that she’ll have to try again. I do not know if she reincarnates or not. The dream ends here.