I woke feeling oddly disoriented. The park was blue, and the sky was green, but I’ve seen far stranger. The overall effect as I watched the locals, the indigs, play at their summertime games was peaceful and calm and well-ordered.



The attraction of having ten men grab a near ton of cut tree-trunk and hustle it across the park, only to drop it with a thump and a cheer escapes me. Then they came back the other way. I saw yellow flags attached to each participant’s waist, and surmised that they were the local town’s team in practise for the big match.



The locals looked human, and yet I wondered. The old half-forgotten ghost of solipsism rose up out of its grave to taunt me. I had quickly discarded such thoughts after my first verse to the world of some Avian Stone Age telekinetics. There had been too much detail for my mind to imagine.



So I set out to put my mind at rest, and with chills running down my spine I found I could not. It was a peaceful, idyllic scene, but good is not any less real than evil so I did not get nervous for that reason. But I tapped into some of the log-toters’ minds looking for evil, petty things such as speeding their transport or something. I found none. The chills started.



Either they were an unfalllen race, or something weird was afoot. I looked at grass, and the blades seemed readily different from one another, but a certain numbing sameness came off the park like a dull mist all the same.



I spotted a purple sidewalk, and wincing at the color walked over to it. There were no broken edges anywhere, but that was possible. Duracrete gets invented in 2050 in several verses I’ve visited. Worse, there was no garbage in the cracks.



I wandered the town looking for half-done projects, and buildings ill twisted to another purpose from what they had been constructed for, and empty houses, and squalid parts of town, and I found none. This was not a place that humans lived.



“All right, what’s going on?” I asked the air politely. It is always polite to warn whatever before you start mashing things up. There was no response. I reached out with my Chained Poltergeist telekinesis, and let it a little loose. The empty section of street I stood on became shrouded in dust as chunks of concrete flew this way and that, but somehow it felt wrong. And then the lights went out.



I lay in a cryonic like chamber edging a dark hallway with dents and smashes echoing about as my poltergeist savaged the real world and disrupted power supplies. I calmed it down, and with fury gleaming in my face shattered my confines and levitated out. Oh, I could have as easily clambered out, but sometimes you want to make a point. I saw my reception committee of frightened and nervous techs.



“We tt-t-thought you were an accidental releasee, and so we popped you back into the virtual reality. Y-you were just laying unconscious in a hallway.”

“Why are they in there?”

“Its good for them. Much more comfortable than out here.”

“Do you have to fight high rates of suicide, solipsism, and general depresssion?”
“No.” said the director type, and “yes” said a tech.

“Try not to lie to me.” I said gently and sweetly like an angry deity. Then I reminded myself of the dangers of power to my own self. I did not want to add this world to the small collection of wince-whenever-I-recall-it worlds.

“Its natural; the human mind has an innate taste for reality. A lack of the feeling of reality, and you get fleeting terrors of the night crawling about in the daytime.”

“But we need to keep them in here. There’s not enough resources to keep them on the surface. We have overpopulation.” The Director said.

“So you instead spend more resources on a sim than they would require on the surface.” I reach into the Director’s mind, and I see a world of the priviledged who live in the sunshine on mile square lots, and the Dreamers whose subconscious minds run the programs that manage the robots while their conscious minds drift through a candy corn confection of boring days at the park.

“Let my people go.” I say softly.

“What?”

“Let my people go. You tell your pharaohs, your kings, your premiers, and the mighty among you that unless they turn from their evil their nightmare will begin.” The statement rang off the rock walls with cool certainty; I had meant to say that, but Another had said it for me using my mouth. That always gives me the chills; when I engage in prophecy. And I could see easily how to capture the priviledged’s minds with their own devices, and lock the priviledged into a mechanical autism. I really hoped they chose the right path.

A Deity had intervened into space-time and reduced human freedom by doing so; especially my freedom. I was here for at least seven days I figured. The priviledged were in the waking world for that same period. And then the Owners of Dreams would experience Nightmare.



Tadeusz