- Posting Speed
- Speed of Light
- Writing Levels
- Douche
- Preferred Character Gender
- No Preferences
A dozen dreamers.
That was all we were. Not professional dreamers, though. Professional dreamers are highly paid, respected and sought after. Professional dreamers find new worlds, change skylines and peoples minds alike. But we - we dream without effort or discipline, the straightforward and clumsy dreams of the frail. We are colonists, good at organising stores and cargo, at pidgeon-holing carton A in storage chamber B. But in the warehouse of the mind our filing systems go awry. Hopes and fears, speculations and half-creations - they slip haphazardly from compartment to compartment.
In my frozen sleep I dream of Talamaur. That's all it is now - a dream. The Untapi Sun would not permit one second more of life. The oceans boiled. The crust melted. The precious atmosphere we had reared for twenty years burned away in seconds. And what we had known, for our part, as 'home', was lost in darkness, leaving only fragments in our dreams.
There are other dreamers here too - those who dream of different things. The crew of the Montero. They once dreamed of tidy profits, of the paycheck they would get from hauling their cargo through the inifinite night. Or perhaps of families they would return to, and children they had left in the months behind us. I wonder now if their dreams are angry ones - if they toss and turn with thoughts of how they were cheated, of how the powers that be instructed them to save us, we, the lowest echelon of colonists, the damaged and the damned. We are now their cargo, their burdens, their only guarantee of payment.
A dozen dreamers. Thrown together in the afterburn. A dozen dreamers awaiting the nightmare.
It was a violent birth. Crowther woke to find fleshy protrusions criss-crossing before her face, like snakes in frenzied dance. She realised too late that it was her own arms, slapping and pounding at the ceiling of her world. Her mind could not register it. Not only had she grown accustomed to the absence of limbs, both in her waking and dreaming life, but her mind had been unconscious for so long now. Her arms flailed despite her thoughts. And her thoughts... they swirled. The nightmare of drowning, of burial alive, of still-birth in a frozen womb. They came all at once.
She screamed.
There were shapes beyond the glass. Lights flashing on and off. The world was tilting every which way. Somewhere, far off, a voice, beyond her screams. The stumps of her legs could find no purchase. She was trapped.
The cryotube's lights went blood-red. Her air had run out.
Then something broke the glass. A crimson protruberance, solid and unyielding. It pentrated her chamber, its dome-like end cold and smooth. She gasped. The fire extinguisher retracted. And the hands that had driven it through the cryotube's glass slipped through the breach to grab her.
Crowther was hauled, mewling and screaming, into the harsh white of the waking world.
"It's alright. You're alright."
The man was dressed in the crew suit of the Montero. He was one of their hosts. He had saved her.
Crowther's screams became sobs. Her noise was replaced by the wailing alarms, the rattling of tubes and fittings, the shudder of the room. Something was pawing at their world, knocking it this way and that with monstrous strikes. She was deposited on the floor, wet and freezing, and the man rushed onwards. "We have to open the other pods!" he shouted, as he punched at the consoles of the cryo-chambers.