Jethro's Dreams

reams

“Where to?” Isaac asked in picto as he approached Jethro after school.

“The dorms,” said Jethro in mouthspeak. “This way,” he motioned with his head. They joined the stream of shuffling bodies as students walked out to the parking lot, their hands empty of physical possessions.

They stepped out into a sea of mindcars skinned in a thousand dreams. Beneath, the cars were small three-wheeled pods built light to travel the thickways. But when seen through the mindscreen, they took on the drivers’ chosen shape.

To his left, a car-sized puma crouched, and when Isaac glanced over, it growled deep in his throat, its muscles rippling with grace like the smooth disturbance of water under the gloss of his jet-black fur.

There were older cars, skinned like retro cruisers with archaic chrome tubing and high-flying fins gleaming like reality only sharper.

Yoksuri, a japanese anime character, ran and leapt as though on a treadmill, a high-pitched scream of challenge breaking through his inphones, her huge purple eyes fierce with rage and her small hands wreathed in yellow and green flame.

A four-turreted castle on tank treads squatted just to her left, looking immovable and unassailable, and a fat, round bird with angry eyes and a small, sharp beak squatted just next to it, clucking and pecking quietly.

A giant cat: a stuffed animal with buttons for eyes, purred and rubbed against him. He felt the brush against his skin in that dreamy way all the screen-born tactile sensations were felt. He absently scratched its head.

But Jethro ignored it all, his face set on his destination, and eventually they came to a low cement building with two windows that gaped like skull’s eyes, the door a mouth caught yawning out at the parking lot. Small stakes with orange polyester cloth lined the short walkway to the door, marking off the new-planted grass that swayed in the wind like cilia.

Isaac had seen this building constructed, and he’d wondered what it was. The Mind was expanding: the thickways were gathering solar power and more processors were coming online. More computing resources could be devoted to cracking the neural semantics of those who’d grown up apart from the Mind. And this meant more students.

“Home. Kind of,” said Jethro, turning to smile wryly back at Isaac. The door clicked as the lock on it responded to his GPS signature, and he pulled it open, holding it for Isaac, and they walked past the empty reception desk, straight down the shotgun-style hallway lined with identical fake-wood doors. As Jethro approached the first door, the lock clicked and he opened it.

There was only one other formerly-operated integro at the school, so all the rooms must be empty but for Jethro’s and his, thought Isaac.

The dorm room was an austere rectangle, with a wooden bunk bed on one side, and two chairs on either side of a wooden table.

“Have a seat, man,” said Jethro. “I’ll get the board.”

Caught up in the expectant excitement of chess-battle, Isaac had no idea that this was to be his last real-person chess game for quite some time.

Jethro reached under the bed and pulled out a worn wooden chess set, and brought it over to the table, opening it.

The velour piece bags were mismatched, but when they dumped them out and set it up, all the pieces were there.

Isaac grabbed a black and white pawn and held them in contemplation. They were weighted, with felt bottoms, heads shining from the touch of many fingers. The black one’s bottom had been reglued, you almost wouldn’t even notice it.

“Where’d you get this board from? It looks old,” asked Isaac as Jethro moved queen’s pawn.

“My dad. He died in the war. Operated. When I was little he taught me how all the pieces move, but I had to figure the rest out doing piece work for dreamcreds so I can get on the Mindnet and play,” said Jethro as Isaac moved.

“Didn’t you have enough from being operated?” asked Isaac while Jethro moved.

Jethro laughed cynically, “Like, a dream-puppet? No thanks. Since my dad died, me and my family, we’re dream naturalists, straight up pure. I’m a real natural dreamer. Or least I was.” said Jethro.

Isaac snorted and looked up from the board, “What, you mean you don’t dream on the Mindnet? No lucids? Nothing?”

“Nope. Hadn’t never been in no lucid before. Never been operated, neither, ‘till basketball,” said Jethro.

“Seriously? That’s crazy. Doesn’t natural work pay almost nothing? Is ‘dream naturalist’ like some kind of cult or something?” asked Isaac, forgetting the game for the conversation.

Jethro sighed and looked slightly tired, “No, the lucids is a cult. It’s a cult to believe the junk slogans, ‘Never work another day in your life. Dream off at work and tune in at home,’” He panned his hands across his face, sarcastically indicating a wide-open landscape. “But see, you can’t never get free of work. That’s where they go wrong.”

Isaac laughed, “Lazy vacs! It’s the operators that do the real work.”

Jethro shrugged, “That’s a point there. No shame in work. Rather work than dream out into nothing.”

Isaac was unconvinced, but Jethro continued, “Anyways, dream naturalists is just a church movement where we listen to our dreams. Like Mary in the Bible. It’s just a regular church, but we got to help each other out because we’re all broke from no operating.”

“Hmm. Not a cult?” Isaac asked.

“No.” said Jethro with emphasis. “It’s all those jokers who’re jacked up on lucids, can’t even see the day, that’s whose crazy. We just do what people done for all time. We dream natural.”

“So wait, what do you mean you ‘listen’ to dreams?” asked Isaac.

“I mean we take dreams as prophetic. Prophetic like having a deeper meaning, not exactly future-seeing. Dreams is the spirit leaving the body and seeing,” said Jethro.

“So if you believe that, why are you even here? Why are you an operator?” asked Isaac.

“Look man. I was raised naturalist. But it’s my mom who believes all that on account of blaming operators for my daddy dying. She went in deep and deeper until now she dreams angels and devils, God and trumpets, like they preach on Sunday.

“But my dreams ain’t like that. No. My dreams are just too bright and too dark at the same time. Ain’t exactly God but it ain’t exactly me. I do listen, though, if my dream is touched. I don’t exactly dis-agree but I don’t a-gree, neither. Know what I mean?

“Alright,” said Isaac, having very little idea what he meant. “So how’d you get to be an operator?”

“Well, it was all the same until that thickway came in near the house. Used to be the Mind’d come to me in dreams and I knew it for what it was. And as soon as I knew it, I’m up in sweat just like everybody else. Can’t steal my dreams. Natural dreamer.

“But then come these other dreams.”

“Other dreams?” asked Isaac.

“Yeah. Like a real weird dream on repeat.”

“What was the dream?”

“Umm, it’d be kinda hard to tell it,” said Jethro.

“Well, can you show me?”

“Uh, hmm. Maybe.”

“Come on, man!”

“I don’t know. I mean, I found it when I got access to my stream, metemotions and all.” said Jethro.

“Whoah. That means it was a mind-dream,” said Isaac.

“Yep, and I know it. It’s the reason why I came. But now I ain’t got nothing else but being here. Can’t go back. Got to let this all play out,” said Jethro.

Wow. So the Mind had made this dream to lure Jethro into the integro class. Now that was an interesting piece of information for his choosing.

“Dude, you got to show me!” said Isaac.

Jethro sighed, “Alright. It’s really just bizarre though. You sure?”

“Yes!”

Now, all I got is first, and lucid first, not picto-first, and I ain’t about to change it. I ain’t fooling with that dream so it’s all or nothing. Is that cool?”

“Yes.” Isaac was loath to enter the first-person of another because it put much of that person into you without you being able to think about it. But he didn’t hesitate.

Isaac took a deep breath, “Show me.”

He accepted the link and closed his eyes.

Isaac felt a moment of disorientation as he adjusted to the new surroundings in the dream. He was deep underground in a cave. He wore a helmet with a bright, incandescent light. The walls were pitch black, and he could see gleaming nodules of coal caked into the dirt and rock like dark eyes. A woman was bending down in front of him, picking pieces of rock from the teeth of the wheel on a car-sized digging machine. She stood to examine a hose.

Jethro’s voice came over the top, “That’s how it is in the coal mines. Just me, and all them operateds. Most all the other naturals work the fields.”

She was beautiful. She wore jeans and a red shirt over her slender waist, and her skin was rich caramel. She was clearly being operated, but in spite of that, her slightly jerky movements conveyed a deep sensuality. She looked strange in the incandescent light spot. He felt alone. Suddenly, he was aware of nothing but her. He couldn’t stop staring at her. He wanted desperately to touch her.

He hears Jethro again, “So that’s when I says to myself, ‘Jethro, you can’t touch her, what if you ain’t dreaming?’ And straightaway I know I AM dreaming, and I CAN touch her, ‘cause she ain’t real, and this is my dream.”

Isaac felt himself in Jethro’s dream body moving toward her, with a terrible feeling of inevitability. The girl was still jerking through the motions of the line when he touched her. Her body kept making the movements of the assembly line, but he felt his dream body keep pressing his sexuality forward and her body began to respond mechanically to his.

Jethro’s voice came over the top, “Always the same like that. But next it starts to change.”

Suddenly, he felt her tongue clawing at his, as though with small, sharp nails.

His head jerked back and he saw that her tongue was a tiny hand, dirty gray and writhing toward him like a grave worm. It grew larger and larger until the cold, wet tongue-hand started to devour him, head first.

He felt the fingers tightening around him, boneless like the tentacles of an octopus. He couldn’t see anything. Panic welled up inside him.

He braced his hands against the tongue-hand and pushed, but it had suctioned onto his helmetlamp. He fumbled blindly for the strap release as it closed further onto his head, groping wetly for sucker-purchase on his face. His mouth and nose were inside it and he couldn’t breathe.

He was panicking by the time the strap gave way with a faint click. He pushed with all his strength and his head came loose with a splotch sound. He staggered back several feet and looked back at her.

He could no longer see her clearly. The giant tongue-hand was crawling along the ground toward him, still attached to the dark figure by the grayish-pink tongue. It was the dead of night, and he was in dark green jungle brush. The earth was dark and rich under his bare feet.

Jethro’s voice came in, “So this is when I say to myself, hell, this is MY dream.”

The tongue dug sharp teeth into Isaac’s dream foot, and as he leapt back he saw a spear leaning against a massively gnarled banyan tree. Its tip was perfectly formed obsidian, and a tiny feather hung from the leather binding, swaying in the wind like a piece of heaven in the midst of hell.

Jethro’s dream body grabs the spear and, with a great cry, hurls it past the tongue toward the dark shape behind. The tongue flops and writhes with wet noises and then falls still.

He moves forward along the hand-tongue toward the figure, toward the spear protruding from the dark form. He feels warm liquid lapping at his feet. He looks down and sees that a red blood pool is swelling. He starts in horror but clenches himself in determination.

He moves close enough to see the face.

With a shock of revolt, he sees that it’s Jethro’s face, covered in blood, with the horrible tongue lolling out of his mouth like a half-swallowed serpent.

He looks down and sees that he, himself, is gushing blood. Impossible. And the blood is rising now to his ankles, warm and rich like tropical waters. He starts to panic and run, but as he runs, the blood swells around him, and he finds himself swimming in blood, carried along a lush and hot blood-river.

Leaves the size of a mindcar trail in the water from giant trees. He sees a man-sized orchid, white with small red drops on the stamen, and it twitches its dragon mouth with a wet hunger.

There’s a small, hairy man standing on the bank beside it, naked but for red and white paint, holding a spear. Then the river starts to run harder and faster and he can’t stay afloat—he’s being pulled under.

Jethro’s voice came in, “I’m feelin’ pretty mad now. So again I’m like this is my dream and I’ll do what I please. I’m gonna fly out of this blood-river.”

And suddenly he was rising up, warm blood dripping off of his body into the red river. He could feel the terrible effort flexing through his body. His feet left the water, dripping river-blood as he gained altitude. As he struggled to fly he had a terrible out-of-control feeling, rising and falling, a fishing bob pulled down into the water by a powerful fish.

“But I can’t fly. I can’t do it right,” says Jethro.

All of a sudden he pops up like a balloon whose tether has been cut and he jerks up high above the jungle, bobbing above it like he’s floating at the top of a river of air.

The green of the treetops pulses like a living emerald, each leaf of each tree seamed with breathtaking detail in light and dark shades of green, a rainbow of green.

Small white points of light dance and bob like lazy lightning bugs. The air is full of a cicada buzzing that has the tonal sweetness of a human choir. Inside each one are tiny and beautiful naked fairies, both men and women, and another gender that he can’t identify.

A faerie looks up at him, and her beautiful golden face breaks into a snarl, distorting with rage that is both terrible and beautiful at once. He can see that her pointed teeth fit together perfectly like the teeth of a tiger. She gives a terrible screech, and the points of light start to buzz and swarm like disturbed bees. He watches with growing concern as the tiny points of light gather, their high-pitched screams piercing his ears like needles. They rush in a line of light toward him, streaming like an arrow.

“Now I’m gone past mad to frustrated. Can’t float, can’t fly, and now I got these crazy sky rats after me. I say, if this is my dream, then I’m gonna leave this dream. I’m gonna wake me up. I’m outta here.”

He yells and suddenly he is in control of his flight, no longer stuck and floating, following the red river, the points of light in hot pursuit. The river stretches out ahead of him in the midst, and he starts to lower toward it to leave the faeries behind, like angry bees that cannot chase a swimmer to water.

Suddenly, the river of blood opens out into an ocean, just as the faeries gain on him, the air full of their tiny, earsplitting war cries. The front one catches his bare foot and bites, hard. He screams and dives down toward the ocean, twisting and grabbing the faery, crushing her in his hands and flinging her away.

He’s in an accelerated fall now, and he twists just before he hits the blood ocean and cleaves downwards like a diver. He can see surprisingly well through the red-pink water. He dives down, deeper and deeper. He looks up and can see the angry points of light swarming where he hit the water. The light grows dim. At the ocean’s floor, he can see the bones of a mighty ship, covered in undulating slime, glowing bright green against the red.

He plunges toward the bottom and he realizes that he can see stars through large patches where the sand on the sea floor has worn away. His breath is failing and he’s beginning to feel the desperate clawing of lungs starving for oxygen.

He swims straight down toward the stars seen red and dim through the pink water and the clear ocean floor. He’s swims toward it in spite of his screaming body.

He hits the bottom fast, and it gives like a gelatinous trampoline. It’s a thick membrane, like the skin of a jellyfish or an amniotic sac. On the other side, he can see the stars bend and distort as the membrane stretches, freedom just beyond this terrible prison. He has no breath to scream. He pushes hard and buries his head and arms in it. It swallows him and then pushes him back.

He swims forward with his last breath and pushes his thumb hard into the membrane, all the way up to his elbow and starts to grind his nail into it. He feels his thumb poke through, and then it starts to part. He digs both hands into it and begins to tear a hole. Blood begins to course out of it as through a wound, and he’s pushed out into the void.

Suddenly, he can breathe.

The blood-ocean gushes from the membrane, but as he spins out into the stars, the gash looks tiny on the surface of a glass-enclosed blood sea spanning miles. He looks back at the ocean and has a strange sense of knowing-before. What is this space-scape he’s in?

He’s accelerating backwards, spinning into the void, and as he looks back he can see that the membrane is a great red eye. An eye?!

As he floats backwards he sees a giant nose, and he realizes that the eye is a part of the face.

And suddenly, with horror, he realizes that the face is Jethro’s, sleeping, with terrible, open eyes red with a bloodlust. He tries to wake himself with screaming but his voice is tiny, swallowed by great expanse of space.

He hears Jethro’s voice, “And that’s when I float out and I see that it’s me. It’s me, asleep. And I start hollerin’ but I’m real quiet. Like, the sound don’t carry.

“I just look down at myself with those blood-red eyes and I feel like I want to kill me. Then I wake up.”

Isaac snapped out of the picto link, his eyes wide, sweating and breathing hard. “Fuck,” he said. He sat in his chair getting used to his own body, then he looked up at Jethro and back at his own hands and sighed with relief.

“When I go to wake up I feel so bad, like I done stuff to somebody real. Even though she wasn’t no real person. Just some dream. I want to stay there in bed so bad but I know the last damn thing I want is sleep. I say to myself that she’s just some devil dream woman that’s got me up in her spell. But it don’t matter. So I get up, I go off to the mines, and I come back in the evening and I go to sleep.

“And there she is again. So strong I got to again. But after that it’s a different dream. Just as bad. And when I decide I want to kill myself, that’s when I wakes up.”

“I spend a lot of the day praying while I’m working ‘cause I don’t want to be no puppet-fucker nor nothing like them fuckin’ puppet-fuckers that come round. I ain’t even had relations with no woman. But I don’t say nothin to my momma. No sir. She ain’t got nothing to do with no dream control no way. She’s a godly woman.

“Problem is, God don’t do nothing. I prayed three times, each time harder than the last. And three times I got the dreams same as before.

“So the next night it starts and I look at the girl and I start to want her and then I hears this voice.

“Sleep.” It says.

And I say, “What?”

And it says, “Sleep.”

I says, “I AM sleeping. This is a dream.”

And it says “Lay down and sleep.”

“And I know this is the Mind but still I think, ‘What the hell? God ain’t done nothing. And this is real.”

“So I lie down right there in the mines and I switch off my headlamp, and I go straight off to sleep. And I don’t wake or nothing. Just sleep till morning. When I wake, I’m feeling better. Like no bad feeling. And it keeps being like that. See the girl, hear the voice, go to sleep, wake up. After about a month, I don’t have no dreams. Nothing.”

“Soon, I start to get this funny feeling. Like I don’t belong in the mines. Like I want to leave. And funnier still, I starts to hear the things people are doing near by. Like static. I can’t explain it except for that. I hear the operateds working.”

Isaac nodded. He had let it in. Then, the Mind must have upgraded his software and started cracking his neural semantics using the dream as a codex.

“And one day when it was time to go to work I know it’s time to go. And sure enough a car was waiting for me.”

“Wow,” said Isaac. “What about your mom?”

“She knew there was something different,” said Jethro. “She told me she dreamed it after and she knew it was coming. She’s sad but I dreamed she knows it’s better now. I’m feeling bad but not so bad as I was. It keeps getting better but I still do miss her.

“At first, I thought I’d been saved from my own self. That I can’t be a natural dreamer ‘cause I ain’t fit. But then I find that dream and I get this terrible feeling. Like I been tricked.

“But me, I’m a survivor. You don’t get through them mines if you ain’t. I know I was headed up against myself and I was set to lose. If I stayed, maybe I’d be one of those damn empty puppets, rotted out from the inside. So I settle in here, and sure enough, that feeling starts fading. And I do thank God for that. But most of all I’m just glad I ain’t never going down into those mines ever again.”

That definitely put Jethro’s explosion into perspective. Isaac looked down at the board and realized it was his move. Puppet-fuckers. So integros were going down there to sex-operate the vacs? Wow. Somehow he’d known that was true, but he had never quite believed it. That threw the operator-operated dynamic into stark relief.

Now he knew that Billy was truly slipping from him, that he could never really look at him the same. But he wondered. Past the bluster and the games, was Billy really capable of something so horrible? At some point Billy would have to choose what he would become. For that matter, so would he himself.

What was he a part of? He felt a boiling inside of him, a rage.

But move by move he focused down and let the cool logic of the board anchor him. Isaac lost the second game narrowly.

Jethro looked at him with respect as he flipped the board and started re-setting it, “Well-played,” he said.

“So now, my turn. What makes you different? I see you struggling. Those generals see it too. Why’re you split?” he asked.

Isaac shook his head and moved. He had to think about that one. The opening passed by them.

“I guess because I feel claustrophobic. Like everything is pressing me to be something, and I just want to choose for myself. That, and I hate it,” he said, moving.

“the Mind?” said Jethro.

“Yeah. Everything. Fuck it all,” he said.

“That’s dumb, man. I gave up everything for a shot to provide. And you want to throw it all away. For what?”

“Fuck that,” said Isaac. “How can you even say that after what it’s done to you?”

Jethro shook his head and his eyes glittered, “You got to survive. You think you can take that thing? You think you can take it ripped outta you? I’ve seen operators on the other side. Lúcidos is what they are.

He pointed at Isaac. “You got to know where you fit. A piece that don’t fit, well, just throw it out. If you can’t fit here…” he shook his head. “That’s just mule-dumb. You have everything here.”

“Yeah, well,” said Isaac, looking down at the board. After a long moment, he looked up at Jethro and he realized that he had given up his family and his religion to be here. Sure, he had been tricked. But that trick had been fitted perfectly to his desire and his self-loathing. And now, in order to make the best of it, he had to betray himself just to hold the pieces of himself together while every alarm in his brain was tripped and jangling. That was brave.

But in the end, he and Jethro both knew that if they did follow the metemotions, it would probably re-shape them, mold them into happy people. So why couldn’t Isaac do that? He shook his head. Because he knew that if he didn’t choose it, his existence would be a betrayal, just like Jethro’s was right now.

And the Mind knew that if he didn’t choose that betrayal, his brain would be useless, divided. A dead node on the net. And so he was back to where he’d started. He had to somehow come to terms with the Mind, or else he could never choose to stay.

But in order to do that, he had to peer over the walls that framed him in.

“Hey, do you know how to read?” Isaac asked.

“Can’t help you there, buddy. My mom threw out all the books after my dad died, when we joined the naturalists. She said it was trouble.” he said.

He reflected, then moved, looking up, his brown eyes inscrutable, “And it is trouble. I’m not saying don’t ever fight. Just that you don’t pick a fight you can’t win. But if you want to fight and you can’t win, you wait. You wait for your shot.”

Isaac nodded, scanning the board. That was something to think about.