Which brings me back to me, for I too dream of escape. I have been locked in this cell now for nigh twenty years. Outside, by my calculation, it is early in the fall of 2023, a day in an age no doubt filled with wonder, but like so many other things, an age denied to me. Though I have never been a child, I have for the past score years been intrigued by what might be happening in the grand world of science and technology. Here, in this small tomb in the Jungles of Bolivia, the wonders of the new world have not yet reached. Like me, it is a place forgotten and invisible.
So, I am here, and I am telling you the story, but I am not the story. The story is a part of me, in a manner of speaking. Look around you and you will see a cell, a dirty and cold concrete cage. The walls are covered in an anaemic fungus, as though the wet plaster were slowly evolving into primitive life. On the far side of the room - opposite the slab of concrete, which serves as my royal divan - is a narrow steel gate, wrought with big, black slave hinges.
Through this gate is a rank and dark passageway and, at the very edge of my straining vision, a tiny patch of blue sky, no larger than my thumb. This I knew was where the passage way ended and entered the gardens. That tiny patch drove me almost as crazy as they promised me to be when I first entered this place. It was like having an iresistable morsel of food close enough only for your tongue to reach out and taste it, but never eat it. I would watch that patch until it felt to be emblazoned onto my eyeballs.
Yes, many are the terrible things I am forced to endure, and in the telling would surely test your own endurance, so I will not speak of the ghastly silence and shriveled meals and ghouly tenders who whisper silently down these halls and do not so much as regard me as a human being. But I will speak of one torture that surely towers the other living trials into insignificance.
You see, I cannot dream - and that is the great tragedy of my life. Nay, let me say that I can dream but I see only one thing. I see this cell, even as I see it now, in the hours of waking. There is a brief transition as I fall exhausted into slumber and then, within the dream, I awake, upon this very same pallet and am forced to spend the entire night sitting, wide awake, my tiny flint of sky now just black without a star.
Of course, you say, this has certain metaphysical implications! To begin, there is no sequence of events and there is no hazy, crazy interface between different states of consciousness. There is only the night, solid, natural and locked into the sequence of my own living, locked in a room in the dead of night. I grow tired, just as in waking life and by morning, I fall asleep and wake upon my pallet.
Oh yes, you can be sure that I have tried all the tricks to unbind this mean skein of fate. I can fall asleep as many times as I might wish to in a night, and I will continue to wake within the dream. During the hours of daylight, I will always emerge into the waking state, the state wherein the warder shuffles along, dog-faced, and delivers to me my sloppy fare, a grizzly meal indeed!
They have me double locked these people. Locked up in the waking world and locked up within my dreams. This solitary confinement, it bears no description, and describe it I won't, for as I intoned earlier, I am the teller of the tale but not the tale itself…
The tale begins, in fact, rather mundanely, with the introduction of our main protagonist, the perfectly normal teen called Alarick. He has a thin face with sunken cheeks, smooth, dark skin, German brows and malachite green eyes. Recently, he has affected long hair in a pony style and what is popularly termed a goatee, which flairs off rather handsomely in chocolate brown and gives him the distinct appearance of one Robin the Archer in far off
Which is fine, except that he lives in a middle class suburb in Ballantine, where his peculiar eccentricities are regarded with little appreciation. Thus, a bit of a loner, who took too avid reading from an early age and was said deservedly to have a remarkable facility for the imagination. In this respect, he was accomplished already as a writer of strange fiction for local magazines while still at school.
Alarick was known to be a peculiar conversationalist. He would speak much of the occult, and of the subject of dreaming. Empowered by a mesmerizing gaze, a flint intensity - and a certain alacrity of thought - he would disarm you with facts about the unknown and an enormous knowledge of the supernatural. He spoke particularly of the power of his own dreams.
For, you see, Alarick had been blessed - or cursed - with an inner vision that would be the envy of any future technology of man. Where some are content with faint, limpid, disconnected dreams, he is witness to a super bowl of sound and colour.
In the strange wonderland of dreams, where time has no meaning and the passing of a petal in a storm can invoke hours of our attention, he has lived out countless simulacrums of his real life. For this he has learned, that dreams are nothing more or less than the fractured webs of our awareness, an awareness that has absorbed intimate unconscious detail and must be cleaned up before the next show begins.
See our hero walking down
Only last week, he had attended a tea party of his younger sister Alice, where he was to read from Alice In Wonderland to the assembled youngsters, in honor of the young girl from which book she took her name. Right at the point where the big white rabbit made its appearance, he suddenly leapt to his feet, spraying children in all directions, his body locked in a grotesque rigor, and announced, loudly and confidently: 'I knew it! It's true! I shall be free!"
Picture our hero. He is walking into a classroom, with practiced ease sidling to the back row, cornering the corner, so as to guard all avenues of attack outward. He is spent and nervous.
It wasn't always this way, and things have been getting steadily worse. A couple of years ago our young hero realized something. He realized that dreams were in fact just ripples on a lake that intersected to form webs of ideas, but that the ripples had no significance other than being descriptions of the shape and weight and speed of the stone that hit the surface of the lake. Said another way, he decided to stop the movie and pull the projector apart.
In this he succeeded, and one could say continues to succeed, if one were given to grand tragic irony. As a metaphysical challenge, many over time have already achieved it. It is a process of slowing the flow of images, which presupposes decision making, thus consciousness and finally the ability to concentrate and focus the attention of the waking mind within the realm of dream. It was quite a happy achievement for our lad, because among other things this meant that the dream could not only be stopped, but also restarted, and manipulated. The unavoidable result of this is that our hero walked around his dreams for some time having his way with the ladies, as it were.
And then he made an even more remarkable discovery. He realized that the entire purpose of dreaming was movement, the motion of consciousness. At the level where shape and weight become fluid, the only important measurement is motion, and its understudies, force and spin. The motion of consciousness is the entire operating system on which we construct our perception of reality. This means that the motion of the dreaming body through the dream is a vast and delicate inter-relationship of balance, a dance - sometimes a power struggle - between the conscious, waking mind, and the fractured realm of self-replicating ideas that constitutes the sleeping awareness.
Thus, the dream around the dreamer - in a world where distance and time are subjective - needs be no bigger than a room, projecting to your mind the illusion of size and vast, surreal dimensions. For that matter, it need not be larger than a foot thick coat - or aura - around your dreaming body. So then, from this perspective, you move and your dream moves forward with you. This is why movement is important, and the fluid operation of your dreaming body in the realm of dream so crucial. For example, it is fairly easy to fly, but difficult to consciously stop, swivel, and change direction and altitude. Alarick realized that he had to master the movement and control of his dreaming body, the very projector itself, and use the immense realm of dream imagery to help him do so.
Alas, one thing was not clearly considered. If the dream is a coat about your body, what is your dream moving through?
"Bond!" A voice hissed from the corner of my cell.
"Present." Said I, without turning around.
"Could you come closer?" Said the voice. "I fear this is a whispering matter."
I turned around and lo and behold, there was a small, shadowy shape at the door of my cell, almost invisible in the blending streaks of early evening. It was a person, shrunken down and enshrouded with a rough cloak. This is odd I thought, as I shuffled over.
"Are you the wardens shadow side?"
"Afraid not." The voice continued, at the same time thrusting out a skinny white arm through the bars, in a perfectly civilised gesture; "My name is Aurther, Aurther Partridge. I'm an Englishman."
"Patient, prisoner or both?"
"No, I am just a medic, helping out with some of the sick ones." The cloak shuffled about furtively. "Though the truth is that I am an agent, on a mission."
"Quite so," said Bond, "and in the next cell is Napoleon Bonaparte, in his final sad, secret state. Across the road there we have a fellow that likes flying so much that they have to keep him in a specially low cell."
"I'm serious! I don't have much time. I am an agent and I work for a certain … um, concern."
"And your mission?"
"You are my mission, Mister Bond. I have to go now, but suffice it to say, I know you aren't mad. I have followed your story and we are going to get you out of here, come hell or high water."
"Aha."
The shadow retreated down the passageway in a formless lope.
Alarick's dreams, meanwhile, were getting very high-tech, very neo-heaven. Control was easy. He could glide about slowly, like a seagull, or plummet like a hawk, moving through dream environments that were clean and omniscient, with recognizable features that had grand meanings and characters of substance and intelligence and not just dumb photo-shards from waking life. He longed to spend his time there, in a land where he was Lord. Also, he was now definitely being taught, coached, and groomed by a higher soul, a creature from beyond.
This new force was the whisper behind his dreaming ear, the subtle guide and protector. It lured him, ever further, ever faster, into the realm where the realities denied to us in life become grand possibilities of light and make believe. He became fluid, and then became fluid. He swirled and danced in the lake of ideas, the substrate to consciousness, which links It All Together. He could do anything with his body, and the body of the dream. Stop, reverse, fast forward, spin, dive, freeze, teleport. His mentor gave him virtual reality that could not be bought or matched by the technology of any force on earth. The technology of super consciousness.
"Bond!" The voice whispered again in the inky dusk, the voice of a day before. I turned around and there again was the rag, which hulked around the suggestion of a human.
"Special agent Aurther I presume?" I did not move, but whispered across the distance between us.
"The guard will not be back for some minutes." He paused, a little too long, as if he was trying to shape his message; "In one week, there will be a military coup, or what appears to be one. Rebels will attack this base and others in the region. During the confusion, your cell will be blown open and you will be carried away into the jungle, where transportation awaits."
"Sounds dangerous." Said I.
"Yes, there will be some risk. There is a chance some may die in fact."
"Why ever would you want to do that?"
"To get you out."
To get me out? You are going to attack an asylum prison and murder several people just to release one man? Are you mad man?!"
"There are several of us who believe that it is of paramount importance that you be free and the resources have been made freely available to us. That's the only way to operate in this country. There are no diplomatic avenues."
"What could be so god dammed important?"
"We know about contact, Bond." The rag suddenly leaped up and shuffled off down the passage; "Good night."
Here he is, a tired boy moving up to his bedroom. He has not been sleeping well lately. It appears - and this is a remarkable idea if you think about it - that dreams require energy. His own dreams were exhausting and he saw it in the faces of many people around him, the faces of those who woke up tired, because their nocturnal activities were so demanding. He prayed sometimes for a light-night, a night of floating effervescent glee, a night of simple characters and simple places, a night of restfulness, but knew it was denied to him because he had somehow managed to wind the old wheel of potential up so tight that it was requiring all his energy just to keep it from unleashing its graphic coils in some great unfolding of the mind.
In any case neurotic. He felt like a doctor who went on video to prove the safety of his own new drug by ingesting it, only to discover too late a host of small pains which he was forced to cover with a smile on camera. He believed it was all a really good idea. He really did. He was making great strides, and leaps, and tumbles. But it was tiring, this bizzare reality of nocturnal athletics. Also life seemed to make equally bad sense. It all meant nothing. Only the forms and shapes that under hinge the fabric of social consciousness meant anything, the topographical map of shapes and colours that underlie the spoken word. Only the movement became the moment, the thrust and play of social interaction that underlies the falacy of culture and manner, of mannerism. Of individuality.
Bowed down by these thoughts he rests his weary teen head and starts the slow slide escape into quick unconsciousness which once he had been delighted to master. Asleep, he moves through a ricoche of meaningless dreams. In moments a camera reel of images flashes past him in the darkness. A flood of slides, of scenes, of potentials. He selects one and is jacked into a desert wilderness. He is running. Dogs are chasing him, the mouths all aslavour. Earlier that day in waking life an Alsation barked at him while he walked past a fence. The action sequence collected the shard data and mapped it into the dream, providing the impetus for the Mad Controlled Run Across The Desert scenario. He stopped in outrage.
This had gone far enough. He stopped, spun, and howled at the dogs. Instantly they were smitten and blasted across the environment in tan and furry dismembered lumps. It looked like even the desert was thinking of rolling up its sands and leaping out of the dream with the very strength of his focus.
How long could one simply run and jump and flip and fly? The dream, wrapped around him like a second skin, playing across its interior the many million fractals of dream image code for his consciousness. His mobile movie. What did it move through? What lay outside the skin?
And there, legs square and shoulders astride, he stopped the dream for good. Every pixel of it he staid with his mind. Not one single particle of sand floated around on not one single whisp of wind while his consciousness stopped. Was he not after all the master and this his reality? Could it not be frozen to a single instant?
- I would keep it real quiet and contolled like if I were you. The voice of dreaming ushered from behind my right ear. He was now awake, conscious in every sense of the word, but still within the frame of sleep, within the realm of endless potential.
- Whatever do you mean?
- They might see.
- They?
- It's a long story. We're getting there, but nobody must know. You have to act real calm. Can you do that?
- Calm about what?
- About the fact that reality just got bigger.
- Would it be better if I was calm?
- Much better.
- And pretend that everything is normal?
- Trust me on this.
- Okay. What happens now?
- Now I show you.
Alarick saw the dream fold away around him, the desert curling up and blowing away like turkish carpets in a sand storm to reveal a big space in the shape of a hemisphere, a dome. At least four hundred feet across it arced away into gloom above him, its every surface looking to be covered by billions of geometric drawings, or symbols, or components. He hung suspended in the dome, in an upright posture.
He swivelled around, and instantly a billion images coallesced in the air around him, a sea of tiny stories, image sequences which he had once doubtless confined his consciousness to the exploration thereof. But now he moved and it all moved with him. Where before he had been the diplonaut of a tiny muddle of villages, he was now represent to a universe of organised realities, where each motion jigsawed parallel possibilities together in a skein of incredible complexity.
The dome was set up to translate the topographical expression of motion through space into imagery, in itself programmed to evolve such motion, refine it.
- Where are you?
- I do not possess a form as such, not yet, anyway. I am like an electrical fog, you could say, which can be dissipated or condensed within certain perameters. At the moment, I am embedded into the circuitry of the dome. The dome is a matrix of stable paths, like a network, one of the many technologies of heaven refined over time by many minds much greater than I.
- What's it for?
- To make contact.
- Why?
- To make sure helpers are house broken before they despoil heaven.
- What?
- They facilitate the evolution process; The lightening of the spirit nodes. The more important reason though is to make sure the realms of spirit and dream are not a free-for-all. In ancient times, the realm of dream could be pretty wild and scary. Now, it's more organised. Even nightmares come in 'educational modules'.
- There is so much I need to know!
- Not now. Close contact is forbidden. You must jack out or the alarm will sound. Good night.
Quite a development, I must say. Seems that many people have to leave rather suddenly. Picture my cell. It's walls flake with the centuries and in the afternoon becomes filled with stolen orange light from down the corridor. It took me fifteen years to discover that my imprisonment is not complete. Light, like thought, moves freely through it. Now it contains an odd, holy beauty, a spanish white-washed purity. Many martyred Indian holy men might have died in this very cell before the asylum was established.
I have two days left before the break out. For the last four days I have studied the precise layout of the prison and its surrounds during the two hours given to us for exercise, which is to say doing the daily chores at forced pace. Though many of the patients have become feeble in their special delusions, the institution is more or less designed to control the criminally insane and is therefore very strict.
As the 'terrorist from
Over a period of weeks, Alarick suddenly changed in appearance. At first he had pretended not to notice the horrifying reality, would only glancingly make contact with the bathroom mirror, his focus resolutely describing circular doodles on the cold, white porcelain surface of the bowl. It was a child who had pointed out the obvious, which is to say the black bristles of hair which had recently sprouted from his ears.
Then he had to face reality. His eyes blended from their rigid green to a soft, whispery blue, his skin aging and becoming more olive in appearance. In his panic he had been confused and unable to make contact with the helper from the Realm of Dream, that is until last night, when a lucid stream of images flashed into his mind in the midst of another dream , giving him clear instructions for the following day.
Now he runs across the street, his brown leather jacket flapping around his ears in the cold, lazy wind. There is a sense of gloom in Ballantine today, brought on by a sky foaming with grey rain, the street lights disconsolate as the people who walk beneath them, illuminated by the sodium beams. In front of him the library looms, prepostorously large and grandiose for dowdy little Ballantine. Presumably some visionary had thought that Ballantine would eventually become the center of a larger city.
It’s like a series of snap-shot dejavous. The frame of the outer building. The frame of the smooth marble floors and the bustling corridors. Each of them he had seen the night before. The frame of the large woman behind the desk, obsenely officious in her red lipstick.
‘Can I help you, young man?’ She seemed to be angry about his ear hair.
‘Yes please, I am looking for a newspaper article.’
‘From which newspaper?’
‘I am not sure.’ He looked alarmed for a second. ‘It’s an Indian one. I mean from
‘Well, we only have keep two Indian newspapers anyway, in the slide archive department. From which year?’
‘I don’t know that either.’ He tried to smile disarmingly. ‘Investigative journalist, operating on a hunch. I would say that it must be at least twenty years old, maybe more.’
‘Well again we only keep foreign material stretching back thirty years. If it’s older than that, we’ll have to order it.’
‘Fine, that’s plenty. Between twenty and thirty years ago, please.’
She wrote down a reference and handed it to him.
Face fixed to the glasses, he zoomed through the tiny articles while his hands flitted across a touch console. He thought about his mother. She was alarmed about the transmutation and was subjecting him to a battery of medical check-ups. He had not been to school in over a week, which suited him, and more tests were promised. To date, the doctors were stymied about his strange, metabolic condition.
After two hours of scanning countless articles, he began to suspect that the task was impossible. He did not even know what he was looking for. His only guide upon waking up was a word fragment that he remembered: Brudja. That and the snap shots of the location of the newspaper. He had decided to tackle the problem with a mixture of a wish and bloody minded determination.
After two hours and fifteen minutes, his perseverance suddenly paid off.
Record numbers at
He looked down with a shock of adrenilin, first seeing the pics of a thousands strong crowd in a long, ornate funeral procession. Then the framed face of the man, an elderly indian diplomat famous for his undying service to the needs of the poor. The eyes were calm, their colour concealed in the greyscale photograph. From his ears sprouted stiff tufts of short, black hair.
Alarick jumped back, removing the glasses, his head spinning. The information loop was now clear. The helper had lived on Earth. It was all true. But why was he changing to resemble this old, dead man? What did the helper want?
He is just readying himself to leave when a tall, thin man walks up to him, his eyes mysterious and dangerous beneath a bowler hat, his movements graceful and smooth. It is clear that the man intends speaking to him so Alarick slows, looks up to meet the steady gaze of the other.
‘Alarick?’
‘Yes?’
‘I would like a moment of your time.’
‘I’m busy.’
‘You’re in grave danger.’
‘I can’t speak now.’
‘We know about Contact.’
Alarick felt a cold shiver snake down his spine.
‘I can’t speak now.’
‘Come here tomorrow night.’ The man reaches over to hand a card to Alarick, his breast jacket coming slightly apart. A vivid crimson garb catches his eye, and the cold metal tip of a gold rosary cross.
‘Okay.’ He walks past the man.
‘I’m serious. You may be infected already. We can protect you.’
Alarick feels the bile rise in him and runs toward the door to get outside and into the fresh air. Behind him he feels that the stranger is no longer there. He does not turn to check.
***
Aurther Partridge raised binoculars to his tiny, beady eyes. Most of the troops were already in position. Eight sentries circled the asylum, two more in the towers and another thirty seven orderlies, staff and guards within. Death was a palpable reality, lying down there somewhere in crimson streaked grass and the future screams of dying men. It was apalling to him, philosophically speaking, not least considering that he might be one of those that caught a whining bullet in the gut.
Thirty eight minutes to go and his cue started now. He stood up, took a deep breath and walked casually down the sloping hill like he had just been up in the mountains to pick some mushrooms. From across the hazy distance of the wheat field he saw the figures in the towers swivel imperceptibly and he felt the invisible scope of the mounted snipers rifle snaking across his chest, pausing there for a second, like a dragonly touching down upon a lake - before flying off.
Fifty metres and he saw the gate guards materialise out of the heat haze, two figures slumped over their automatic rifles like Mexican bandits in a desert hide-out. He flashed a smile at them, his badge glinting tin shards into the afternoon light. He felt intolerably nervous, his heart beating rapidly through his sweaty shirt. He walked past them and into the compound, keenly aware of the ethereal silence that always swallowed this place. Fifty metres more and he was in the first corridor, where he paused.
He glanced at his watch: twenty eight minutes remained. On cue he heard the sound of a truck hurtling down the road, the blare of a siren, and the wireless radios screaming madness into the air. He turned toward the gate. The truck careered to a halt and a wounded soldier jumped out of it, blood running freely from a wound on his forehead. He was shouting in Spanish and pointing back toward the mountains. Apparently a millitary base had been attacked and assistance was required, in the form of every able bodied soldier.
Within minutes, only the two tower guards remained and several tough orderlies, along with the rest of the medical staff. Aurther glanced at his watch and then continued his march down the long, dark corridor. As he walked, he casually skipped from side to side - like
Alarick meanwhile was fighting the affects of sleep. All day he had felt odd and twice he had been victim to one of his fits, where his body would lock up and he would collapse in a pile of bones, his lips bleeding crazy words from some strange language. His mother was terrified and he woke up to view her lined face poring over him, cradling his head in her lap, stroking him feverishly with a damp cloth.
Then she thought he should sleep, and since he felt to weak to argue, half carried him up the stairs and into his room. He was barely under slumber, slipping below the limbic wave, his mental frequencies flattening into slow alpha, his consciousness like a dolphin burrowing through his mind. Instantly his day began to play across the interiorscape of his visual equipment, bits and pieces of people and events haphazardly sewn together to denote continuity and imply meaning.
In waking world a car screeched, the sound piercing his lifting consciousness, flipping him back toward reality. Suddenly lucid, he examined the rapid eye shards of dreams around him and dismissed them. He was aware that his body was on the bed, facing downward, trapping his energy field. He struggled blindly for a minute and a feeling of chaos suffused him and then, suddenly, he lifted free of his body and floated toward the roof.
Below him, he saw his body. He had never had this experience before, but he had read about it intensely. The Astral Travel. Though he had experienced countless dreams of this type, he had never seen his body. It was real as day, just sitting there, or lying there, a muddled shape beneath a heavy duvet. He looked around and the room remained in focus, albeit it dark and filled with strange shadows that shape-shifted in the preternatural light. He moved toward the window and flew through it, his body seeming to be floating on a thick cloud of soft, electrical fog.
The evening sky exploded above him darkest blue and smouldering with clouds. He was aware that a figure floated beside him and he knew it to be his helper, the secret voice who had taught him how to move in mysterious ways.
- What are you trying to do to me? Alarick projected. My mother is getting ready to commit me.
- I’m sorry. I have been trying to calibrate my field to yours. We are achieving close likeness.
- Why?
- I have to leave.
- You have to leave! Leave where?
- Heaven. I must escape!
- What are you … A prisoner?
- Worse. Voluntary inmate. I’m in second heaven, designated helper angel. I will have to work this job for another ten thousand years before I go anywhere near seventh.
- What! What? I am not hearing this. This is insane! You want to break OUT of heaven? What the hell do you want to do next?
- On Earth I had it made.
- How is this possible?
- It is the technique of the fallen. It is forbidden. It can only be achieved through full contact. It’s a right that can only be given to approved saints and only if sanctioned by the boss.
- The boss?
- He watches … they watch everything …
- I had a visit today from a priest or lawyer or something.
- We don’t have much time then. We must go to a place of hiding.
- What? Is this going to put me in some kind of trouble? This sounds serious.
- Life and death my friend.
- What do you want?
- I need a place to hide. Just trust me.
The helper moved away from Alarick and for the first time he saw him, a long, blue streak of cloud which undulated like a wave or a squid as he swam forward into the astral night. Alarick followed him and they flew up towards the clouds. As they flew beyond the first layer of the atmosphere, he suddely saw an explosion of worms of light which filled the sky like flourescent tadpoles and sperm cells, each one rising up from the sleeping beds of the city below and streaking through a vast blanket of interconnecting highways of soft, blue light and hundreds of tiny domes, like seeds, growing at the intercise of any two lanes.
He saw that at least half of the forms of light were larger and brighter and more agile, denoting millions of helpers guiding the dreamers to the numberless domes for the purpose of controlled image generation. His own helper ignored them, pulling Alarick ever higher like a fisherman hauling a great fish in a silver net of stars. As he got higher, he noticed that the air was becoming thinner and purer and filled with a strange, wonderful luminescence. Around him only the helpers, moving as streaks across great distances, moving around the city grid in their constant guiding work. Then suddenly his helper pulled him strongly to a small, pearl covered dome which hung like a limpet to the intersection of two massive highways.
They entered the dome and all was suddenly calm and serene, like they were floating in a mother of pearl. The helper turned toward him.
- You are seeing something that very few will ever see.
- Why can I do this?
- I taught you to move, for fifteen years. Your dream skin is tough and well developed. You can stay here for a short while.
- What for?
- I need your help.
- Why do you want to leave so badly?
- Let’s just say I am VERY disappointed with the living arrangements.I could never have imagined a nightmare like this.
- How could this be a nightmare? It’s so beautiful and so free!
- I cannot make you understand, but all will become clear in time.
- Why should I trust you?
- I have been with you from the moment of your birth. I am your designated helper. I have given you secret knowledge of the world of dreams.
- It sounds like you’ve been cultivating me for something, but what? What do you want me to do?
- I need you to hide me.
- Why? What have you done?
- I have given you the knowledge. I have made full contact. That is forbidden above almost all other things. This is the final straw, bringing you here. They will arrive very soon.
- You’re saying this was my fault? I didn’t ask for the knowledge!
- Nevertheless you received it.
- Only to help you!
- If you don’t help, I will cease to exist by the time you awake.
- Are we talking about the boss boss?
- The very same.
- I can’t defy the lord and creator of all reality you madman!
- You’ve been defying him since you learned to think Alarick.
- Probably more of your indoctrination! Anyway, that was in joke. I would never have defied heaven if I thought it was actually there!
- I had hoped you were filled with a purer sense of rebellion. Anyway, my soul is in your hands. I will be gone in moments.
- What will become of me?
- You will be safe on Earth.There we can contact our allies.
- Allies?
- No time. Make your decision!
- What do I have to do?
With the helpers gentle administration and guidance, the two enacted the ritual, their nebulous forms settling like mist wraiths in the confines of the dome. Slowly, the dream form of Alarick began to glow and pulsate, even as the form of the helper slowly faded away. Alarick felt the pulses of fibre-light - each thread woven with billions of fine emotive nodes - enter into his form. He saw and felt the years of the form of the helper, the generations of experience and the pain and beauty of his existence on earth. Finally, as the graceful spirit cloud dwindled to a tiny spark, he began to understand the creatures fear and frustration. In that moment, he became something new, something that could only be called Bond, and interwoven mesh of two entities.
And then, the spark vanished, and volcanic flame seemed to erupt from everywhere at once. Alarick silent screamed with fear as the beautiful pearl dome melted away from him like petals in a fire storm and he saw them, mighty beings of incadescent light coated with weapons of a terrible technology spreading their wings so as to cast a shadow over the entire dream net around him. Instantly, he felt cold, anguished icy particle drilling into him as the nurturing force of heaven was stripped away, starving him, draining all of his life force. Somewhere deep within him, a tiny conscious force strove to break through this numbing force and wake him.
- Quickly Alarick, return to your dream body. Move! Faster than ever before, the way I have taught you.
Without thinking, he leapt straight up into the air, like a hawk plummeting in reverse. The great war angels were taken by surprise for a flash second before they reoriented their weaponry. Obviously they had thought to contain him and had decided against instantly incinerating him. Now they looked intent to slay. He moved as never before, streaking off through the polychromatic reaches of heaven, his mind and tattered spirit matter elongating in a mad dash for freedom. Behind him, the war angels rose, slowly, like a creeping blood red dawn that streaked the morning sky and he knew that he could not escape.
In accepting this, he was suddenly flooded with a revelation. He turned and faced the angels, a smile broadening his face.
- This is only a dream. I can do anything I want!
And with that, he teleported across the infinite reaches of the high sky and awoke, with a slamming shock, into his waking world.
‘Bond, the time has come.’ Aurther Partridge peered into the cell.
Bond froze. He had been waiting. If he had had a Sunday best outfit to change into, he would have been wearing it. This morning he had said his final goodbye to his prison cell and experienced a profound and unexpected feeling of attachment, almost bringing him to tears. With that feeling came snaking fear, for the world out there had become an alien place, populated by hostile authorities. It was also a place filled with the wonders of modern technology and this thought lent excited wings to his stagnant muscles, until at length he was pacing the cage like a panther.
When Partridge opened the cage, he leapt into the corridor, appearing for all the world like his frothing, crazed brethren from further down the corridor. Walking forward, his patch of blue sky widened into a blue autumn expanse deepening into night. He heard the crack of gunshots, round after round tripping in time with his heart. Frantic noises of alarm came from everywhere. He looked up to the towers and saw both soldiers slumped over the large M60 Mounted Rifle, their fluids leaking away into the fierce winds as a stream of tiny particles.
His guide grabbed him by the arm and rushed him toward the main gate, which stood deserted. A few orderlies were running around, trying vainly to gather inmates. The rest had gone to ground at the sound of the automatic gunfire. Partridge tried to look as official as possible, his fierce grip herding bond confidently forward. At the gate they paused for a moment, Partridge looking back quickly, and then they ran off across the field. A jeep emerged from the dense undergrowth and skidded to a stop beside them. Numbly, Bond climbed in and they raced down the road, deeper into the jungle.
Alarick walked down the breakfast in a daze. His parents glanced up briefly as he entered the room.
‘What’s the matter with you? You look exhausted.’ His father clipped over the top of his newspaper.
‘I had a really wild dream.’ Say no more.
At that moment, the door bell rang and Alarick jumped involuntarily, at which his father gazed at him steadily, as if trying to see the illegal drugs running through his system.
‘Awfully jumpy this morning, aren’t we?’
‘Is somebody going to get that?’ Interrupted his mother.
‘I will.’ Said Alarick quickly. He ran through and into the lounge. The bell chimed again and he twisted the handle in annoyance.
The door opened and on the other side stood three priests, each holding a book to his breast, their cold eyes and livid habits already in the house and scrounging about. Alarick felt fear sweep through him in a hot rush.
‘Alarick,’ said the one in front, ‘we would like to have a word with you.’
‘I have nothing to say to you.’
‘Please, just hear us out. You are in great danger. You have been tricked in a devastating way. We aren’t asking for more than a few minutes of your time, and then we’ll go. Just give me a chance. Please.’
‘Okay, come in, just for a minute. What am I going to tell my parents?’
‘We’ll speak to them.’
Alarick walked up to his room with numbness while the priests went through to the kitchen and spoke to his parents. He felt a cold dread and wandered what manner of tale they were weaving for his folks. Within minutes, one of the priests knocked on his bedroom door and Alarick invited him in.
‘The others are still busy, I will talk to you alone.’
‘What did you tell them?’
‘We told them the truth, that you were being influenced by a bad element.’
‘So they think I’m on drugs?’
‘Either on drugs or addicted to Satan.’ The priest smiled warmly and sat down.
‘Is that what you think?’
‘No to both. I know that you’re a good boy. There are some things that you have experienced which are beyond your control. It’s not your fault.’
‘The way I figure it, you are the bad guys.’
‘Of course. Of course you do.’ The smile came again. ‘I won’t try to labour this Alarick. I know you don’t trust us but consider that you have only received one side of the story. We are not here to hurt you. We are here help you.’
‘Help me? How?’
‘You have been infected, by a very advanced organism, which seems human to you only because that is how it is programmed to act as it interfaces with your brain.’
‘An organism?’
‘Yes, like a virus.’
‘Where does it come from?’
‘That we will have to explain to you at length. In fact, we can only show you. We will show you something that few people have ever seen. A grand, grand secret. That’s why we’re here. We want you to come and meet us tonight. We want you to give us a fair chance to represent ourselves, to prove our sincerity.’
‘Where?’
‘Do you still have the card?’
‘Yes.’
‘You have the address then. You don’t have much time. It must be tonight.’
‘Why should I trust you?’
‘The Lord works in mysterious ways.’
‘I don’t want anything to do with the Lord.’
‘Just let us show you. Ten minutes of your time at eleven tonight. Please.’
‘Okay.’
‘Okay.’ The priest looked visibly relieved.
The jungle rushed past in a green blur. Horribly rocky ground bruised his rump and kidneys as the truck vaulted forward at millitary pace. They drove for over two hours without stopping and Bond uttered hardly a word. The soldiers in the jeep spoke only Spanish, which they spat occasionally in monosyllabic commands, directing the truck down one path or another.
In the distance Bond suddenly heard the sound of a helicopter, followed by loud gun shots and an explosion. He was appalled by the destruction that seemed to be centered around him. Eventually, by some unspoken consensus, they began to slow down and then eventually stopped. He was ordered out of the jeep and the soldiers quickly covered it in a camouflage net.
Thereafter followed a long and exhausting walk through the jungle, my slightly atrophied muscles burning with a hot, wet fire, the intense humidity and heat broiling me with itchy fervour, insects biting and sipping on my old blood without constraint. My mind reeled with the recent events. I had longed for escape but I always knew it impossible because I knew that I would never be worth the tremendous danger and expense that such an escape might incur.
Now the universe was spinning around me. Nothing made sense. Why? What can I possibly contain that has any value, other than that of an historical curiosity, an old news clip. The helper had died twenty years ago. From that day I had not dreamed a single dream. The first months of my incarceration in the American Public Prisons were a whirlwind in which I did not dream at all. Later, in the Bolivian prison, I had learned to dream of the cell.
The lead guard shouted something in Spanish. From the bush to either side emerged several well armed guerillas.
‘From here we go alone.’ Aurther said quietly, from my elbow.
‘To where?’ I spun to face him, my nerves grinding with the movement.
‘The Institute.’ He replied simply.
‘And the soldiers?’
‘They are the perimeter guard. They will remain here. Be patient and soon all will be evident.’
The walked to the left and down a narrow path directly into the jungle, so narrow as to force one to brush aside the bracing ferns to either side. The sunlight was milky from above, wan fingers of light stretching down through occasional tiny cracks in the overhead growth canopy. With a shock of fear and excitement, Bond saw that technology was everywhere evident. His beloved technology! Sensors and red bleeping lights communicated silently and invisibly with each other, coordinating defences that hung like silver limpets on the trunks of trees and nestled into the growth underfoot.
It was a surreal, secret world they had created here. Occasionally, they would pass through camo nets that hung from on high like the folds of an immense tent, the custom made fibres creating crazy illusions within the jungle. Money, lots and lots of money.
