Episode 42: Please State Your Response in the Form of a Question

Everyone dreams. Some people dream of what they want. Some people dream of what they have. Some people dream of what they don’t want. Some people dream of what they fear. Some people dream of things that they never thought about before. Some people dream in the past. Some people dream in the present. Some people dream of the past. Some people dream in the future. Some people dream of what they dream of.

You can tell a lot from someone’s dreams.

* * *

A tangle of limbs was present in the back of the van. Between those limbs, two bodies were pressed against each other. The faces were facing each other, both with eyes shut, mouth open and most importantly smiling, and emitting a gentle snore. Her long brown hair was tussled in with his medium length blonde. They held each other as they slept, and dreamt.

The short haired acne ridden boy slept furiously, sitting erect in his own passenger seat. Behind him, a curly haired Mormon boy was stretched across the backseat, twitching in his sleep. In another car, the smaller and younger but more mature and older sister leaned against her big little sister, both sleeping comfortably. The passenger seat was tilted all the way back, and held a girl who was as old as either of them, moaning terror as she slept restlessly. A pretty and skinny girl curled up in her own leathery backseat and slept in a vaguely catlike position. Outside, the two adults paced around the four vehicles, pointing their guns into the woods and across the road. In three hours, they would trade places with the furiously sleeping short haired boy and the catlike pretty girl, and sleep in each others’ arms in the leathery seats, as the youths paced the perimeter and pointed their guns. For now, though, they talked, meaningfully, apologetically, lovingly.

Far distant, an accidental queen slept amongst her subjects, an unusually meditative rest. They slept restlessly. Amongst them an aging soldier and his wife slept too. He slept calmly but worriedly, she slept with a heavy conscience. Distant from that too, there rested gripingly another Mormon, an accidental hero, a strange redemptive force, on a hard table. He muttered complaints in his sleep. Near him slept his right hand man and his left hand woman. And distant from both of those too, an angry Asian boy, an accidental and uncaring savior, slept casually next to the corpse of his brother in programming. Neither body moved. An angry boy who was no longer a boy found himself sleeping, though he wasn’t tired.

An ancient hunter, a misplaced nurse, and a frightened bald man slept too. But it was a dreamless sleep, more of an unconsciousness. They had only flashes, of visions and of thoughts, and of death. The nurse heard a song in her sleep, a song of hope… but it was faint, and she could not remember the tune. The hunter felt that he was hunting himself, and that soon he would catch himself, and he had a brief vision of him approaching himself from within, but then he woke up… The frightened bald man heard a whisper from above him that wasn’t above him, and it said something that he could not recollect, something about the sky, something about escaping, something about codes…

The others dreamt in full.

* * *

Todd-who knew he was a Corporal, and should really write to his parents, but not about what had just happened-slid out of bed He smoothed out his short red hair. The room was stifling hot with the curtains drawn. Behind him, he heard AnJennifer roll over into the hollow left by his body.

Then, with both hands, and considerable vigor, he threw open the curtains and let in the round, white light of the full moon. Behind him, he thought he heard AnJennifer sigh in her sleep.

Behind him, the bed went glink. He began to say something and turned. As he did, he missed the penguin fly across the moon (but he saw it, even though he wasn’t looking, and he didn’t acknowledge it)

A wolf lay in his bed, its fur the same as AnJennifer’s hair. It looked nervous. The scene demanded that he draw his sword… He descended onto the bed and kissed the wolf’s muzzle, and stroked her fur. AnJennifer licked his face nervously…

* * *

She stumbled out of the door. She stumbled out of the door. She stumbled out of the door. On the other side of it was another door she stumbled out of the door.

She slammed into the fifth one-or was it the qilth? She could never remember when she stumbled out of qil, counting the doors (she stumbled out of). She stumbled out of the door out of the stumble. It got darker and darker and dark out of the door. Doors after doors after stumbled out of the door. Jennifer leaned against this one, hoping she stumbled out of the door. There was a voice on the other stumbled out of the door. It told her that it was stumbling out of the door to help her stumble out of the door. She believed the stumbling voice out of the door she stumbled out of the door. But she stumbled out of the door knowing that it would never stumble out of the door to her she stumbled out of the door. She stopped at a door (she stumbled out of the door) and looked through the peephole (it stumbled out of the door). On the other side, the friendly face of a young boy, ten, maybe, with an afro smiled at her she stumbled out of the door. On the other side the friendly face of a young boy, seventeen maybe, with blonde hair, smiled and loved at her she stumbled out of the door. On the other side the penguin waddled past, she stumbled out of the door, she wanted to stumble out of the door into his arms, she stumbled out of the door, trying to on the other side the friendly face of a young boy, seventeen maybe, fall into his stumble doors. On the other side, the friendly face of a young boy, ten, maybe, whispered for her to stumble out of the door, he was stumbling out of the door, she had shut the door for him to stumble out of the door she stumbled out of the door, searching for his stumbling arms.

She stumbled out of the door. She stumbled out of the door. She stumbled out of the door.

Jennifer stumbled out of the door…

* * *

Waldo was on a soccer field. The goal was Sylvie, the ball was a heart, but he wasn’t sure whose heart it was. The goalie was Sylvie, but she was also Mina and Elli. The other team was ten strong, all of them Todds and Minas and Ellis and Peters and a penguin. He was playing alone. His goal was his father, yelling incomprehensibly, telling him that he had done wrong, that he had to kick past the other team. His team’s goalie was his mother, but she wasn’t really there she was in the goal. Waldo focused, kicked the ball which was a heart. Elli the goalie caught it, and tossed it to Mina the goalie, who bit it, who tossed it to Waldo the goalie, who walked off the field with his heart… Waldo the kicker fell to his knees, pulled another ball from his chest, and kicked it again…

* * *

Elli was with his family. It was Christmas. His family loved Christmas. They were the most gently materialistic family that Elli had. The family penguin sat under the tree. They loved each other. Elli loved his family. He hugged his sister, he kissed his mother on the cheek, he was small but still as old as he could be and he sat in his father’s lap. He began to cry; he wasn’t sure why. He was just so happy here, in his house, with his family, the neighbors rotting on the counter. The blinding light from the floorboards lit all of them up like angels. Elli held onto his family…

* * *

Dawn could neveralways tell when she was dreaming. It was so similardifferent to realityfantasy. The fog of life lifted from her eyes for these hourseternities. She saw a crowd, it looked familiarstrange but apart from it was a penguin. She knew it was more important here than the crowd of friendsstrangers beckoningpushingaway tofrom her. She floated between two mirrors. One showed her as she was. One showed her as she was. One showed her as she wanted to be. One showed her as she had been. One showed her what had been in her, it looked like her, but it was sadder than her. The qilth showed her where she had to go, but it pointed in directions that didn’t exist. She went in them. She passed through five lands, always steps behind the penguin, and she was wearing a young girls’ blue dress and it fit her perfectly, that she thought was curious. The dream resolved itself into reality, and it was no differentthesame…

* * *

In here, Marty was in control. She woke up her sister, she made her mom stay home, she sat on the sofa. Her father kept bickering with her, though. That was the way she liked it, she decided. Then Mom went back to working all the time. She decided that was the way she liked it. Then Sister fell asleep. She decided that was the way she liked it. She had always wanted to be the older sister, but this wasn’t it at all, no. But she decided that was the way she liked it. She lay across the sofa, and grew, and grew, and grew, and she was huge, and her sister was tiny, but she decided that was the way she liked it. A girl waved out the window but Marty couldn’t fit through the door to see her, and her skateboard broke beneath her, and the penguin was afraid of her, and she was stuck trapped but she decided that was the way she liked it. In here, Marty was in control…

* * *

The scaled faces peered down at her. They were always peering down at her. When they were there at all, they were peering down at her. But she was always alone. When they weren’t peering down at her she was alone. She couldn’t move. She didn’t want to be alone. Being alone was worse than being peered down on by the scaled faces. There was a hopeless mewing all around her, she thought maybe the cats would come to her and not let her be alone, but the cats never came, and the mewing wasn’t really mewing it just sounded like mewing. It was cries for help. Mina didn’t understand the language-that was because it was all meows-but she knew that they were trapped like her. She didn’t dare cry out, and the darkness enveloped her again just after a penguin flew past, the mewing with her all around her, then the darkness was gone again and she thought she heard some people calling for help in English, and they were, but they were gone quicker than she was. Then it was dark, and she could understand some of the other cries for help, and they smashed her head in but she woke right back up…

* * *

She was hideous! She couldn’t stand it, being so hideous. So she moved into a cave, deep under a mountain, carrying her lost beauty with her, and she swam. And she fished and she ate fish (and a penguin) and she began to speak to her lost beauty which she carried with her, when she left it behind she was invisible and that was worse. And on her birthday, a horrible tiny man came and she was going to eat him with the help of her lost beauty, but he stole her beauty! She followed, but it took her nearly fifty years to catch up, and the horrible tiny man’s relatives had her beauty now, and they were taking it to destroy it, because too many people wanted to be as beautiful as she had been. She helped them, and they called her “Gollum” because that was the noise that she made, but the nicer one called her Sylvie, and he was nice to her, he wasn’t beautiful but he knew how hard it was to give up her beauty. She began to love that horrible tiny man who was nicer-they were Waldo and Elli, they told her, and Elli was the nice one, Waldo kept tying ropes around her and things-but he wanted to destroy her beauty, and she had to have her beauty. She promised her beauty that she would betray them and take it back. But she was too hideous to do it the right way…

* * *

(Later) Sally was at HQ, waiting for orders from Joe Hill. He came out, but he was silvery and liquidy. She thought nothing of it. She saluted smartly, and he flashed her a scaly grin. He produced a folder, manila with a picture of a penguin, and handed it to her. She read the label: “Case File Qil-Trans Universal Energy Leakage around Colorado”. She opened the folder. The first sheet inside said in big letters “Moda Garden-Highly Susceptible.” The next sheet was clearly a map of Moda Garden. There were Green Dots all over the map. The largest one was on George Custer Memorial High, and around that dot were words.

Sally’s head snapped up and stared at Joe Hill. He smiled his scaly smile again, and said in a croaking voice, “Trust me…”

* * *

(Later) Jack’s conscious mind didn’t know about the consciousness of his subconscious mind. His dream mind had an ability to navigate the dream world, and his subconscious was in control of that. It couldn’t reach his conscious mind, though, so the vast stores of information that he could find went to waste in the waking world. On the borders of the dreaming, if he was awakened, the subconscious mind got random tidbits of messages across, but they were never significant. The thoughts of the conscious mind always rained down into the subconscious, however, so it solved almost all of his problems before he knew they could be solved.

For ten years, his subconscious mind had spent almost all its time in Dawn’s dreams. That was where he had met the penguin. They were, as far as such things are possible, friends. Dawn’s dreams during that frozen time were a journey through unspeakable and incomprehensible worlds. The penguin was a native of the Dreamworlds, and it forced Jack’s subconscious to only watch her. It told him that she would never find her way home if there was anything comforting for her in the Dreamworlds. This sleep, Jack’s subconscious watched Dawn’s dreams again. She was journeying again, which she hadn’t done since she had woken up. The penguin told him that the map in the qilth mirror that she had stared into was the map to herself, and that her two major minds were trying to combine again like they once had. The penguin then pointed in a direction that was, as near as Jack could think of it, upwards. Jack looked, and there was a multi-colored sheet covering the dreaming. Jack asked what it was, and the penguin told him that it was another one of the side effects of the ripping of reality earlier. Jack’s subconscious understood and began to roam the dreamlands…

* * *

Joan is conscious of her dreams. It’s one of the unintended side effects of the training she received. She has no control over them, but she can tell the difference between dreams and reality. Many of her dreams are memories, and they are vivid ones. Tonight, she dreams of a job she carried out about six months ago.

Joan is upstairs in her room, in her dream. She is practicing emergency combat with her bed pillow, which is shaped like a penguin. She hears a knock on the door from downstairs. Her Masters, masquerading as her parents, open the door, and she hears cordial voices. The door to her room is locked, and the floors and walls are sound proofed, and the vents are closed so the sound doesn’t echo through them. But Joan has her secrets; souvenirs that she had secreted away from some of her more unusual targets. From a secret locked compartment beneath her bed, she takes some sort of sonic stethoscope. She presses it against the floor. Her Masters are talking to a young man; his voice is disguised as that of a commanding mysterious figure, but she can hear through the disguise. He is a teenager, in the better end of puberty, though his voice is still squeaking. The three of them work out the details of the job; the deal is disguised as a conversation whereby he is asking for a date with her. She learns, through this veil, that she is to assassinate three guards outside of a high rise apartment building. The payment is information on where to retrieve highly but imprecisely valued precious stones with a variety of remarkable qualities, none of which she cares about. The teenage boy stands and leaves, and Joan quickly returns the sonic stethoscope to its hiding place. While there, she risks bringing out the hyper-sensitive binoculars. The windows of her room are programmed to be conveniently tintable on command, so that she cannot see those who hire her. Her binoculars allow her to see through any number of objects, substances, and surfaces. She focuses them to look through the wall at the boy who hired her; He is hidden beneath a black cloak. She identifies the material as Quasi-Dimensional Silk, and focuses the binoculars to see through that too. All she can see before she has risked looking for too long is his brown, curly hair. She is curious.

Time Passes.

Three days or so after this, Joan is taken in a dark car to a tall apartment building in the center of Denver. She is made to understand that it is New Year’s Eve. When she is put out of the car across the street from the tall apartment building and led to an empty room in an office building across the street (she counts seventeen floors) she takes a quick stock of the other building. She counts twenty-three stories. She also counts three burly men hiding in the shadows around the building trying very hard not to look like they are hiding in the shadows around the building. She pulls her case to her and opens it. She quickly and calmly assembles the high powered sniper rifle inside. It is a thing of beauty. Affixing the silencer forces her to suppress an ecstatic whimper. As she lifts the gun, her chest heaves up and down with a longing breath. As she pushes it through the open window she licks her lips desirously. She aims and bites her lip. She pulls thrice in rapid succession, each one sending a shudder through her body, and with the third one she cries out sharply. She topples backwards, and gasps happily for breath. Fireworks are exploding off in the distance. After a couple of minutes, she sits up, smoothes out her skirt, and begins to disassemble the rifle. As she does, she looks out the window. From the seventeenth floor of the other building-in fact, the window directly across from her-A pretty teenage girl, slightly older than Joan, with brown shoulder-length hair, wearing nothing more than a tee-shirt and a pair of panties (Joan takes note of this only in case she is forced to do combat) has climbed out of her window, and is beginning to rappel down the building. Joan watches her for a moment, curious for a brief moment whether she knows about the assassination. She closes her case and leaves the room…

* * *

His last mission. The war of 2008. Horrible. Invading Australia, their army secreted. A madman developed a penguin bomb. His brother-bleeding. His brothers in arms-dissolving. His sisters in arms-screaming. Steve screams against them, it will counter that scream, aiming across, pull, shoot, kill kill kill kill…

* * *

Lucy Looked. Down: The earth was made of space. Left: The horizon became a Dragosaur. Right: The colors blurred together. Behind: The penguin led its army forward. Ahead: The spin slowed. Above: The sky wasn’t. Lucy screamed. Lucy called for her husband to protect her. Lucy did not see him coming. Lucy tried to run…

* * *

It is long ago. He is rich and powerful, living in Jerusalem. In his care are a set of brass plates, with a list of people who begat people; near the bottom are the names Sam, Jacob, and Joseph. A man comes to retrieve the plates, but he refuses. The man comes again, with much to offer. Laban takes the things, but does not give them the plates.

He is in Sunday school, a few weeks ago. He is listening to the story of Laban (the rich), wondering what his parents were thinking.

He is in a silvery world, inhabited by only penguins. A ghastly presence appears before him, and takes nearly an eternity to resolve itself into the face of Elder Smith VI. He smiles, and melts into a silverness that matches the world. “He lied,” Laban (the child)’s voice rings out through this silvery world…

* * *

Hanh is alone. He’s always alone. But then she comes, the Korean beauty, the goddess (she’s not really, he tries to tell himself, but he can never believe it) known by names innumerable, even though there is only one. But there are two, who look alike; why has he seen them, but never together? The Delaileh, she is the one he wants, to be with, to hold, to… The penguin shudders in tandem with him. The penguin always shudders in tandem with him, and watches what follows. He has a picture of her nude back, but here he has all of her, clothed as he wishes, he presses against her, he opens his mouth desperately, she wraps her long arms around him, she…

* * *

Ujer has no dreams tonight. She does not sleep tonight. She is arguing with herself-what is right, who is true, where is reality? She cannot find the answers-Is this a dream? she asks herself. If it were, she decides, she’d be able to sleep. What sense does that make, she counters, if she was dreaming she would be asleep anyway but who is really the savior? At one point, she thinks she sees a penguin walking at the edge of the room, but it was just a shadow…

* * *

“Zach…” a voice wafts in. Zach slowly opens his eyes in response. “Look familiar, Zach?” the voice wafts again. Zach is strapped to a tan colored table, by leather and metal and wood and a few things that he doesn’t recognize. He tries to stand up, and is surprised to find himself passing directly through.

“The fuck?” he cries out, as he stands up and examines the room. It looks like something out of Star Trek to him, though something tells him a more thorough knowledge of science fiction would cause him to compare it more to something from Star Wars. He looks around.

“Does it look familiar?” The voice wafts once more, slightly more urgently. Zach takes in the room. There are control panels, but they are not designed for use by a hominid form. In fact, the only place that Zach feels he fits (not that fitting matters at all to him, so he begins to sit in what appears to be a seat designed for a very small diplodocus, a kind of dinosaur that Zach didn’t realize he knew anything about and doesn’t care that he knows now, complete with a very long slot for a tail) is the table that he woke into this dream on; for he suddenly realizes that this is a dream, but not a normal one. Where’s that goddamn penguin?

“Yes, it does,” Zach says calmly, surprised that he doesn’t add a “fuck” or “shit” to it. “I can’t… figure it out…” He is surprised by the unsureness in his voice. He is surprised by being surprised. He is surprised by being surprised by being…

“Try to remember,” The voice wafts urgently, removing Zach from the cycle that had threatened to be perpetual. Zach tries to remember.

“You and me,” the voice wafts, slowly approaching, opening a door across the room. Zach spins to stare at the door; it is a tan-yellow color, like everything else in the room. “We were projects. Designed by THEM.” Zach hears the complete capitalization of the word, wondering how he hears it. Zach nods, remembering.

“The Silver ones… Like Joe.” Zach finds that he his no longer afraid of the oozing Joe Hill he had seen earlier.

“They can take any shape,” the voice wafts, becoming excited, and Zach can see it now as some kind of smoke, appearing near the table that he was strapped on. “But naturally, they are silvery, and scaly…”

“Reptoids?” Zach gasps. He has never heard the word before in his waking memory, but there’s something in the back of his head that brings up words. “Saurians?”

“They have another term for themselves,” The smoke begins to resolve into a human shape; it is peachish, barely visible against the rest of the room. A mouth appears, about where the mouth would be on a slightly short human man, and grins a Cheshire Cat grin. “The Anunnaki.” Zach is uncertain how he should react to this, so he does not.

“Why the fuck?”

“They needed soldiers, for the oncoming war.” The smoke resolves itself further; Zach recognizes it as the man who was just killed, and realizes that he is sleeping next to the corpse. That explains much, he thinks.

“What war?”

“The Zombie War. They needed soldiers, so that humanity would survive. They need humanity to survive.”

“Fuckers!” Zach exclaims.

“What?”

“Humanity is shit!” The dream-ghost of Kevin frowns.

“I was programmed to believe that. Stolen by the Other Side. I don’t know who they are; they stole me, reprogrammed me, to kill as many humans as I could, but to leave their heads intact. So they would become zombies, and kill more. You have to st…”

“Don’t give a fuck for you. What about me? And that hateful fucking bastard? He keeps killing people, but he did the Silver Reptoid thing.”

“He was stolen by the Other Side too. But I was just a prototype; you were too. I wasn’t nearing completion when they stole me. He was. He was also a more advanced project. He was genetically half Anunnaki. Not a prototype. The Other Side reprogrammed him. He is unstoppable.”

“Nothing’s unstoppable. And me?”

“You were a prototype, but you were earlier than me. When they were working on me-I remember it now, I remembered it when I broke all the programming…”

“Shit! Fuckin’ Tell me before I wake the fuck up you fucker!”

Dream-ghost Kevin glares. “I broke all the programming and now I want to save humanity again. I’m dead, though. I can’t be zombified; they mixed that up on you.” Dream-ghost Kevin hesitates. “You broke free before you could be finished. They couldn’t find you; neither could the Other Side. But they had a fail safe; I don’t know why. I don’t know why they told me. They didn’t tell me that either. When the spell was cast-they couldn’t stop the spell, you know, they couldn’t for some reason, they didn’t tell me the reason for that either-all of the incomplete prototypes were to die automatically. The Other Side shut that off in me, but no one shut it off in you.” Dream-ghost Kevin hesitates again. Zach glares at him. “What they did to you, it changed things in you. You… Retained intelligence under the circumstances.”

“What the fuck are you saying?” Zach yells.

“You are not alive, you fool! You died 5 hours ago! You are a zombie…”

* * *

Sunny hates dreaming. He hates everything now. There is nothing that it can be said he mildly dislikes anymore. He hates it all.

He hates every action he takes, even in this dream world. When he kills things-which he isn’t enjoying, but it’s the only solution he can think of to his hatred, he hates thinking of how he could do it otherwise, so he doesn’t, he takes the easiest course-they don’t actually die. They disappear-he knows they just wake up. He hates that. He does not want them to be just… waking up. He wants them to die. But he hates that, too. He hates everything. He hates, more than anything, that penguin that is running from him, that’s always running from him. He shoots a silvery tendril forward from his hand and catches the penguin.

“I brought you here,” it says in a language that he hates. “I brought you here to protect them!”

“I hate!” Sunny screams, ignoring it. He squeezes and twists, snapping the penguin’s neck. The dreams begin to shake…

* * *

The penguin awoke. It was not really a penguin, of course, but that is how it always masked itself in its home realm. It had not been awake for centuries. It looked around its current residence, and in a forgotten, eldritch language, spoke:

“Fuck!”

Despite not having fingers, it did something comparable to snapping. A blondish human boy who looked about sixteen appeared before it.

"Oh," the boy said dazedly in English. "What now?"

"You have been outside and watching for a very long time, Mark Sky." The thing that put itself into dreams as a penguin rumbled in its language. "I have been inside and feeling for even longer."

"Uh-huh..." Mark Sky said slowly, curious as to how he understood what the thing had said. "What did you say you were?"

The thing ignored his words. "What have I missed, Mark Sky?"

Mark was silent for a moment. "You're the first thing to talk to acknowledge me for thousands of years; does that help?"