“What did we see in the portal?” Bolt asked.
“I can’t say I know,” Zack answered. “I wish I did, but I do not.”
“What did you see?” Max asked.
“A land of chaos. A beast with one eye,” Zack answered. “I can’t say I still remember much else.”
The room itself sported four tipped pods, each at an angle which suggested someone might lay inside them quite comfortably. The feet of these round coffins formed a circle with just enough space in between them so one might squeeze and walk through. The pods reached to Bolt’s waist at their lowest, and his neck at the highest. Thick cabling and segmented wires of various thickness slithered from the edges of them and connected to a central console. Apart from the machines, the sterile–smelling room was empty.
“What are these?” Bolt questioned, walking around one of the pods, touching it and inspecting it. The metal felt strangely warm.
“For lack of a better word, these are Dream Machines,” Zack said and moved in between them to the central console.
“Dream Machines? Is that a joke?” Bolt chuckled, removing his hand from the metallic surface.
“You seem to be asking that a lot today,” Zack smiled. “They’re my prototypes. I figured cryogenic stasis is a bit of a dull way to experience the boredom between traveling the stars. So I made these.” He accessed the controls of the middle console using mental commands and one of the pods opened up. It was all quite anticlimactic. No steam rolled out of the machine, no shriveled hand grasped the edge. Only a dank smell of stale air escaped the pod.
“So how is being inside these different from a normal dream?” Max asked, standing near the window and looking down at one of the pods. “That’s what you do in them, right? Dream?”
“Well, they are called Dream Machines,” Bolt snorted.
“For one,” Zack said, “you don’t drift into deep sleep after the REM stage is over. In fact, it’s never over. You dream as long as you’re inside the machine, and your dreams are entirely controlled by you. Which also means, and this is the good part, ye? You can live entire lifetimes within the dream and only a small amount of time will pass in the real world.”
“How does that work? How can you dream an eternal dream?” Bolt asked.
“We can adjust the speed at which your brain processes images and thoughts. By suspending most bodily functions we can do this quite easily.”
“Isn’t that dangerous?” Bolt questioned. “I mean, I’m no expert, right, but that doesn’t sound safe. Doesn’t it pose some kind of danger?”
“No, you’re not an expert,” Zack smirked, “But since you asked, not really, it’s just the frequency by which the mind processes images that is accelerated. That’s all. Basically, your neurons fire at the same rate, since they already fire at basically the speed of light, it’s only your perceptions that are accelerated.”
“How do you get out of it?” Max asked. “How do you exit a dream?”
“It’s quite simple really, you just think about getting out and a door will materialize somewhere inside your field of vision. You walk through, and you’re awake. And if for some reason the imagery you see is too powerful, we can still wake you up by disconnecting you manually, through our program.”
“What does that mean?” Bolt asked, “How can imagery be too powerful? You mean nightmares? How would you even know the person is having a nightmare?”
“Sometimes the unconscious mind projects things that stir some very deep feelings which are then processed into images and visual metaphors. This mostly happens the first time a subject tries to use the device and hasn’t yet gotten used to it. Because the feelings you experience inside are still very real, the dream itself begins to feel real and you forget that you’re in fact dreaming, allowing subconscious concerns to take over. It’s not much different from how you usually dream, this device just helps you remember that you’re dreaming and focuses your mind so you can create things without the pointless chatter of random thoughts.”
“You haven’t answered my second question,” Bolt said.
“What was it again?”
“How can you tell when someone’s having a nightmare.”
“It’s all in the brain’s wavelengths, really. When you’re experiencing something unsettling, ye? Your brain fires up, so to speak. I can see these things clearly on the central console here.”
“I have to say,” Bolt smiled, “apart from the potential of inducing some sick nightmares, this actually sounds like it could be fun.”
“It is!” Zack assured him and looked at them both in turn. “You guys wanna try it?”
“If this is how I’ll spend most of my time on the ship we’re going to, then yes” Bolt said, “These things are on the ship, right?”
Zack nodded. “As far as I know. I made these prototypes ages ago.”
“Then hell yes I want to give it a shot. Max?”
“Very well,” Max sighed, “fire it up.”
A second pod gaped open and they both climbed inside one. They laid back on the padded cushions, their eyelids closing almost immediately. The pod’s locking mechanism engaged with a hiss of pressurization and Zack’s voice rang over the small internal speaker.
“Select dream sequence one,” he told them.
“Wha?” Bolt managed.
He had no idea what Zack meant until he drifted into REM. He saw a menu open up, a blue square with one column of letters. The signs on it where difficult to focus on. Bolt found he could not read them, yet simply understood what they meant. They said: Dream server Alpha: Sequence one. He thought–clicked it and felt himself enter a clear and relaxed state, wishing someone had shown him this technology before.
***
Max tried to do the same thing. Like Bolt, he willed the dream to begin. At first, nothing happened. It felt like his mind wished to focus on something beyond the edge of the menu. An invisible thing which called out to him, like the sound of his own demise. He recoiled from it, shrunk away, turning inside the pod. It was too late. He managed to mutter an incoherent something, and then the nightmare began…
The hot pulse of adrenaline surged in his veins, amplifying his senses until he could smell the fear of those present like a malignancy upon the air. His delirium extended for a few more blood–soaked moments, until the sensations of the mortal world returned to him. Quickly he remembered all too well what he had been doing, even while he could not control it. But how long had the others been there, staring in terror? How long had they remained quiescent with the shock of the sight before them? The answers didn’t come.
He looked down upon his victims, their smells clogging his mind. He looked at his own bloodied hands, felt the liquid drying on his face. Scratches were spread all over his arms and face, each gash clawed by his victims in defiance of murder. The wounds burned hot and leaked.
His heart leapt in his throat as he saw his wife lying before him, mutilated, his children already cut and carved in a fashion suggesting that whoever did it had taken took great pleasure in the act. It couldn’t have been him who had done it… could it?
The shapes around him looked human, but had no eyes or ears, nor any other features he could properly identify. All they had were maws. Saliva dripped from each diseased and toothless openings. One of the figures spat a curse with its trembling voice, then asked him, “Max, what have you done?” It had the voice of his wife, twisted and grotesque, slurping each word. But how could this be, she was dead, lying slaughtered before him…
The sentence never truly registered, it was as if everything was right as it should be. Right as it must be. As if his taste for fresh meat had grown with each new fatality until his wife was next, and oh what pleasure her dead and bluish skin brought him. No! He thought. This is all wrong. I haven’t done this! I would never do it! Thoughts such as these rolled past him, quelled by his subconscious along with his wave of remorse and guilt over something he couldn’t understand. Crushed by his own mind, he beg
an to wonder nonsensical things and lost himself further. How did they discover me? Had the people of his town finally found the trail of blood leading to my place of work? Had they heard the muffled screams of his victims? But I had gagged them! I had to gag them, he reasoned. They wouldn’t shut up! They wouldn’t let me work!
But those things didn’t really matter, he was going to have to fight his way out, that much he knew. Yet no sooner had he even managed to grab hold of his cleaver which he had dropped in the moment of recomposure, than he felt the hard pounding of wood upon his head and body, and the feral grasp of hands that tried to pin him down. He screamed out as his bones cracked under the weight of the blows. He heard his name mixed with curses, not his real name, but the name he was known for, the name his people had given him with smiles on their faces and eyes full of hope. They called him Daddy.
For a moment, he could hear different voices call out to him, empty voices without substance, as if emanating from a deep crevasse where nothing but disease could live. Disease and men who plot how to spread it. Behind all the mawed faces and blows, he saw a man, a hooded stranger with a face concealed in shadow. Only his mouth was seen. It smiled. Max heard his own skull crack with a wet, crunching tang and felt his world implode.
***
Try as he might, Max Byron could not recall how he ended up in such a horrid place. He thought it best to put such concerns behind him. Yet no matter how much he felt like he deserved to be where he was, no matter how much he wanted to believe he had done something terrible, he couldn’t help but want to escape. He wondered whether the memory of his imprisonment had corroded with time, or had been beaten out of him by some prison guard he couldn't remember ever seeing. All of these options seemed more likely than the prospect of the prison being built around him… and still, somehow, that thought felt closest to the truth. He didn’t know why.
His reality now consisted of a solitary cell. Its dark walls of roughly carved and sectioned stone stank of filth and grime and dried blood accumulated over who knows how many lifetimes. They were like the walls of a well, dank and overgrown with things he didn’t want to touch or go near. A single drainage pipe, a hole in the center of the cell expelled a stench Max hadn’t managed to exclude from his mind even after decades spent in the dungeon. Surely it had to be decades? He couldn’t remember anything tangible but this cell.
The only reminder – and in fact the sole assurance of life beyond these walls – came once a day, when someone slid aside the lower part of his cell door and pushed in a never–washed glass of water and a piece of rock–hard, mold covered bread. The mold stank like everything else. It gave him nightmares and half–remembered hallucinations.
Days and nights melded into one as years passed with no distinction, nor brought any change to his condition. Sounds of men and women moaning and wailing as if from a great, hollow distance constantly reminded him of the torment he was cursed to endure for crimes he only vaguely recalled. On occasion, he wondered whether the cries he heard came due to some perverted abuse or by the torture of hunger, but could never be sure. He concluded it had to be both. Sometimes, he could hear someone walking up to the door of his cell and could just barely make out a shadow that their feet cast in the crack below the door. Max was never sure, but sometimes became certain the person behind was cackling.
“Hello?” He would croak. “Who’s there? Help me God dammit!”
But the figure just stood there. Eventually, or if Max walked up to the metal door, it moved away, he could hear footsteps echoing. He cursed and yelled for the person to come back. His requests were always ignored.
Dreams, such as they were, came full of images that haunted his waking hours and offered no relief or escape. They often consisted of two quite grotesque individuals who bickered about how it was possible for Max to still be dead. He didn’t understand what they meant.
One day, while in the midst of a vivid dream of a hooded and smiling figure holding what Max associated as his own brain and attaching a small device onto his optic cord, the door of his cell opened with a sobering screech. He squinted and moved his hand to shield against the glare of orange illumination and watched the feet of two silhouettes move into his cell. They were both heavy–set men, their eyes and faces without expressions, as if a sock had been pulled over their faces.
“Get up, you murdering scum!” the man in front of him said, his tone roughened by decades of tobacco abuse. He spat on the floor.
“He said get up!” the other spat and proceeded to beat Max over the head with a wooden rod.
The pain of the rough lumber against his naked limbs was nothing compared to the torture and hurt of solitude – the decay of his mind which he had undergone for all the years spent trapped like a rat. Still, he felt his rage grow with each hit placed upon him.
Stop fucking hitting me!
Despite being beaten, Max stood up, eager to see where the two men might take him. And it even seemed that, in the short moments of physical pain, he felt more alive than he had in years.
Standing on his feet and almost all skin and bone, Max still managed to strike an imposing figure. Towering over the two guards by a head and shoulder, he took a step forward. The two men didn’t seem bothered by this in the slightest. The one that had beaten him said, “What the hell is this abomination?” The disgust was evident on the man’s voice, referring to a protrusion which grew out between Max’s eyes like a horn.
“How should I know?” the other said. “He’s a freak. Get’em down to the pit.”
The other man nodded and slapped Max on the back of his head with his rod. “Move!”
They pushed him out of his cell and turned right, venturing through a tunnel laden with numerous doors of the same metallic design. The doors were all angled strangely, as if whoever had built them was insane. Torches filled some of the spaces in between the gates, saturating the air with their oily fragrances. Hard shadows pooled around the quickly dispersing light as unseen droplets of water threw ominous and echoing sounds throughout the corridor. Chains of shackled prisoners rattled from within the sealed doors. The voices behind the portals all sounded familiar. The smell was just as bad here as it was within his own cell, only here, in the dark corridor, the smells had merged into a stench Max could only interpret one way – death. He couldn’t recall ever walking the narrow passage before.
Every few strides, he felt the jab of the prison guard’s rod upon his lower back and heard him growl, “Keep moving.”
The tunnel went on for a while, until, at length, the three came to a fork in the passage. One way lead up via winding staircase, while the other further down into the fuliginous depths. The guard that had moved in front of him stepped to the side and pushed him down the staircase. The rough texture of the carved stone cut through Max’s feet like shards of obsidian.
Upon his descend, Max thought little else but how best to attack the two men and attempt his escape. Yet just as he felt he played the scenario enough to consider all the variables, the staircase ended and the area in front of him opened to reveal a small round arena packed with people. Numerous torches and oil–lamps illuminated the place. One of the men showed him into a holding pen bared by wood. The arm–length–wide space was stationed near a small amphitheater carved roughly out of limestone. He looked up and could see some of the faces upon the stages looking at him with revulsion, elbowing their friends beside them to take a look as well. Their faces mirrored those of their friends once they saw him.
Those who didn’t notice his coming were too engrossed in whatever violence was happening behind the wooden gate to pay the newcomer any heed. They cheered and roared for blood, exulting with every thrust of a weapon that ended with gore.
From their sudden outcry and the sound of something big hitting against something equally big and wet, Max knew the fight was over.
“You have just witnessed a fight of the ages!” a narrator yelled. “Who can still rival the Madman?” The man’s voice so
unded familiar. It sounded fat and bloated, and as two chained prisoners pulled on a thick rope from either side and opened the gate, he could see the man atop the arena, his bloodthirsty eyes locked with Max’s.
“Behold! A challenger,” the man said, ignoring the fact that his so called ‘challenger’ had no choice in the matter. Whispers spread over the crowd like darkness after the setting sun, and the stench of death and sweat hit Max like a brick wall.
Despite the smells and the sights, Max felt a power in the madness before him, he finally saw someone who he could vent out on. Physically. The only problem was, he didn’t know why he wanted to do it.
He didn’t wait to be given a weapon, nor did he need one. Weak and frail, with decades of stagnation sleeping in his bones, Max leapt at his opponent. The reek of dismemberment about him was like ambrosia dripping from the chalice of some dormant and distant monster residing in the recesses of his mind, hissing as it told him, “Yeesss, go on. You want to do it. You know you do.” And he did. Max heard the crowd gasp in surprise as he snatched the sword–wielding wrist flung at him with something approaching skill. He could see the skeleton of the man before him, and it seemed perfectly natural to him that he should. Max didn’t wonder for a second how it was possible. It simply was. He simply did. As a result, he knew precisely where best to apply pressure to dislodge or easily break a joint. With a twist of his hand, the man’s wrist–bone cracked, leaving the sword and the hand wielding it to dangle in a semi–firm grip like a wet towel. The crowd went rigid. In the sudden silence, Max sensed the beating of his own heart deep in his ears, he even heard that of his opponent’s upon the air. He parried a fist flung at him in desperation and watched the look in the man’s eyes as he realized the next second would be his last. Max took the sword from the man’s grip, the bones of the broken wrist crunching in resistance as the man howled in pain, until his screams were snuffed out, replaced by gurgling and groaning as Max sliced the man’s neck in half with one fluid motion. Blood gushed out and squirted over his face. A grin most wide and wicked revealed his teeth. Why am I smiling? Faces stared at him in horror as Max jumped down over the collapsed man and began to devour his neck like some crazed bloodhound. No! Stop! “Never,” something told him.