Dreams and Legends Read online

  Contents

  Title Page

  Copyright

  Dedication

  The Wake

  The Wilderness

  The Trouble With Bears

  For The Loss Of A Rose

  A Crisis Of Faith

  Our Spot

  The Lock And The Clock

  DREAMS AND LEGENDS

  Jason Spadaro

  Copyright © 2015 Jason Spadaro

  All rights reserved.

  "The Wilderness" is released under the Creative Commons BY-NC-ND 4.0 International License.

  For more information, go to http://creativecommons.org/licenses/by-nc-nd/4.0/

  http://jpspadaro.tumblr.com/

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  http://www.amazon.com/Jason-Spadaro/e/B00USTAQW0

  https://www.goodreads.com/author/show/13650103.Jason_Spadaro

  This is dedicated to the weird, the free, and the unlucky.

  The Wake

  It's like walking in sand. There's no solid spot to anchor yourself on. Every step pushes the world around a bit. That's what The Dreaming is like.

  Every step in the endless feedback loop of nanites and pharmaceuticals changes the same neurons that were creating the world you were experiencing. Like slipping down sand dunes, wherever you dreamed erodes a little further toward some unknown base state. The base state of... whatever.

  Okay, to provide a context, an anchor for what I'm saying: I worked in the dream tourism sector. See, after medical and nano technology fixed most of the physical things that could make life awful, they turned their sights on something a little less tangible. I mean, psychopharmacology had been around for a long time, but it never had been targeted towards dreams, and specifically their content. They figured it was too abstract and wouldn't make much money. Lo and behold, they give it a shot to try to shore up the walls of an industry under siege by its own adequacy, and they have a hit. More than just lucid fantasies, you could share dreams through nanite transmitters, tune the length and content, and remember it all the next day. Perfectly lucid.

  Once it was declared safe, and marketed as "definitely not like drugs", the whole recreational, dream-tourism industry was born. Sure, you could record dreams, and sell them, stream them, or declare them public domain for anyone to dream about. That's not where the money was, though. The real cash was unique dream experiences. Let the punters tap right into your meat brain.

  I remember talking to Troy about the issues, one day. We'd met in my head, a vast desert extending to the horizons. Troy and I met periodically to trade ideas, and discuss the industry. We always met at my dreamscapes, though. While I enjoyed a good epic-questing clientele, Troy specialized in nightmares.

  "Maybe go for an 'Arabian Nights' feel. That would be in line with what you typically do."

  The thought passed through my mind, and something like the Taj Mahal and a magic carpet were just there, right in front of us. "Maybe. Fighting skeletons?"

  Troy chuckled. "Let me take the reigns for a second."

  "Okay..." It was hard to know how dark it was going to get when Troy wanted to demonstrate an idea.

  A skeleton warrior, with four arms and chunks of putrid flesh appeared in front of us. It had ornate bronze armor, complete with helmet, and a scimitar in each hand. What really struck me was the smell. I thought I was going to throw up.

  "Something like that?" he asked.

  "I don't want to choke their meat bodies on their own vomit."

  "You're not trying. Smells drive memory." The skeleton disappeared. In the distance, a shadowy figure flowed behind the dunes. It was far away, but I could make out that it was humanoid. Most of the time.

  "Shadow warriors?"

  Troy rubbed his chin. "That could be an idea. I've had good luck with that before. Gimme a second."

  "Wait, you didn't already make one?"

  "Nope. Where'd you see that?"

  "It's over there." I pointed to the edge of the dune. It was still there, slinking in the distance.

  He looked at it, and glanced over to me. "That's not mine."

  "Well it's not me either. Where'd it come from?"

  Troy looked a little nervous. "Dunno."

  I figured it had to be wake deprivation. I'd been working for hours before Troy had even shown up. I rubbed my eyes, and looked at him. "Man, I gotta wake up for a bit. Maybe grab a cup of coffee."

  "Yeah, me too."

  "Hey, I'll mess around and let you know if I have any good ideas."

  Troy smiled. "Let me know if you have any problems waking up. I have one hell of a cure, something I save for my most jaded customers."

  I could only imagine. "I think I'm good. I'll see you later."

  He left, with a quick blink out of my mind. When I was sure he was gone, I gradually worked my way out of sleep. When you spend as much time asleep as I do, you've got to do it gradually, like divers take their time coming up to avoid the bends. Too fast, and people with crap health have been known to have heart attacks. The thing is, lying in bed for twenty hours a day can take its toll on your health fast.

  I drifted up to a nice theta wave frequency, and rubbed my eyes, slowly opening them. Carefully, I sat up, and made my way to the bathroom to clean up before the fierce hunger set in.

  I stared at the mirror. The face looking back at me looked like hell. I barely recognized him. The guy in the mirror was emaciated, pale, atrophied.

  "This job's going to kill me." I shook my head a little while I finished cleaning up so I could grab a huge breakfast at the diner down the street.

  I needed a cup of coffee.

  ~ ~ ~

  On the way to the diner, I called up Jen. She was as much of a work-a-holic as Troy and I, but had a more captive audience. She catered to all genders and (almost) all persuasions, but here clientele were mostly men. There were plenty of guys that got hung up on having their sexual fantasies going on in another man's head. She was arguably better at the epic-adventure dreamscape than I was, but went with wet dreams because she knew she could make bank without ever feeling that she was directly involved. She let impossible dream entities fulfill her client's equally impossible fantasies. And she did make bank.

  You could also argue that she was a better entrepreneur than I'd ever be.

  We ate pancakes, sipped coffee, and talked shop. She was looking as rough as I was; it must have been a busy week for her, too. The whole industry had been exploding in the last year or two.

  "Heard anything from Hendricks?" she asked through a fork full of hash browns.

  "Nah." Hendricks catered to a niche. I always figured falling dreams would lose their novelty. He swore by them, though.

  "Weird."

  I leaned back a little in the diner booth, resting on the red plastic that did a mixed job as a cushion. "Probably got out of the business. I mean, who wants to spend their every sleeping moment sky diving?"

  "Apparently it's big."

  "I heard that, but I doubt it."

  "Nah, it's big. Not as big as Roman orgies, but big. I've seen Hedricks' calendar."

  I still wasn't convinced.

  Jen wiped her mouth, and sipped more of her coffee. "That's part of what has me wondering. We share some clients, and they were pissed. He's been missing appointments."

  "That's ugly."

  "Yeah, and despite what you might think about his business target, he's a professional." I noticed some worry across her face. I'm sure I seemed worried, too. A few of us had been in the field for years, and we all tried to keep in touch. It was still that point when the whole medium was being defined, and you kept tabs on everyone so you didn't fall behind. Someone just dropping off your radar didn't happen.

  Unless the
y just got out, because they couldn't handle it.

  That didn't sound like Hendricks, though. He would have stuck with it. Even with the whole falling thing. I drummed my fork against the table. "Do you... have his number? Know where he lives?"

  "Nope."

  "I'm not sure what to do." And that's where we left it. Dropped the matter, because we couldn't do a damn thing about it, it seemed.

  We finished eating, and went back to what we do.

  A few days later, though, Jen left me a voice mail. Hendricks had emailed her with an address, and said he was in bad shape. She'd never met him in person before, and didn't want to go alone. I got it an hour or two after she'd left it. I called her up, and told her I'd meet her there. I could hear anxiety in her voice.

  When I got to his place, she was standing outside her car looking at the house. I got out a quick "hey", and she looked at me. Her look was a mirror of what I was feeling. It wasn't fear on her face; it was hesitation before the unknown. Neither of us really knew the guy outside of professional circles, and now we were going to walk right into his house without knocking.

  We walked up to the front door. It was open. Cautiously, we looked down the hall and through the rooms. It looked orderly till we came to the living room. Sprawled out on the floor was a tall, skinny guy, passed out cold.

  "Yeah, that's him," said Jen. It was a sad sight to see.

  "So... ummm... what do you think we should do?"

  She wrestled with the idea for a second. "Not sure. Check to see if he's breathing." She stood there, eyes wide and arms crossed.

  I knelt down, and I thought I felt breathe. He had a pulse, too. "Yeah, he seems alive still. Should we try to wake him up?"

  Jen leaned over and yelled at the body, "Hendricks! Wake up! It's Jen!" Nothing.

  I sighed. "Let's get him onto the couch."

  "Yeah."

  We lifted up the body, and got it in a position that seemed like it'd be comfortable at least. I went out to the kitchen and looked in his refrigerator. I grabbed a bottled water from the bottom shelf. When I walked out drinking it, Jen shot me a look, but didn't say anything.

  "Maybe we should call for an ambulance." I was just thinking out loud at this point. It felt strangely like one of my meetings with Troy.

  "Let's try catching him in a dream first. I mean, he looks asleep. Maybe he was trying out a new cocktail of dream enhancers. I know I've been pretty out of it when I get a strong mix."

  "Maybe. You or me?"

  "He's expecting me," she said. "Here, I'll do it. Keep an eye on us. It'll take me about a half-hour to get ready."

  She took a handful of pills out of her pocket, and settled into an easy chair in his living room. Slowly counting backwards from a thousand, she spent the next thirty minutes going to sleep. Every professional has their own methods and techniques, more refined and practiced than what the punters read on the back of the over-the-counter dream pills they sell for ten dollars. Hers was counting. I liked to start narrating the dream in my head, till I was there. It was all a matter of preference.

  Hendricks apparently liked to slip into a coma.

  About an hour after she started counting she woke up. She looked a little shaken. "That was weird. Just weird."

  "Weird dreams are our business." I chuckled nervously.

  "No, really. I got him, sort of. He was like... half shadow. Like he was almost only sort of there. He was garbled half the time. He said we should get him to hospital, that something isn't right. He went really far out, though. I told him the date, and he looked nervous. He's been out for over thirty hours."

  "Shit."

  We called an ambulance and waited.

  ~ ~ ~

  And that would have been that, except it wasn't. No happy ending here. He stayed in the coma, and soon couldn't even be reached through dreams. Meanwhile, we continued working.

  I was working on my dunes a month later, slipping and sliding about the sand when I noticed something. My hand started to go fuzzy. Like things weren't clear around the edges, and when I touched the sand it swirled. The sand warped and twisted, until it melded into my hand. I tried to pull free, and couldn't.

  Something was wrong here. The Dream wasn't behaving right. I pulled myself out, and cleared my calendar for the next week. I needed a vacation.

  I was on hour twenty five, just trying to finish the job.

  ~ ~ ~

  "Damn it, Jen. Something isn't right."

  She looked down at her coffee. Then she looked at the window. I could tell there was something else, based on how she bit her lower lip.

  "Jen, what is it?"

  "I had the same thing happen the last time I worked a long shift, too. A couple of times. And it got worse each time."

  I felt real uneasy. "How bad is it?"

  She laughed, and it was sad. Here eyes were sad, her mouth was sad, and her entire posture sitting at the table became sad. "I need to be careful. Last time it was both my legs up to my stomach. I almost melted into the ground."

  "Shit," I whispered.

  We sat in silence for a while. I could tell that she was asking the same questions. Should we write it off as an occupational hazard? Should we start looking for new jobs? It ruined your body and mind for any other type of work, though. Should we sleep?

  "What can I do instead?" She looked out the diner window. There wasn't any anger or sarcasm in her voice. It was a legitimate question, sent out into the endless space of the subconscious. Traveling through the worn out husks that were our perfectly good brains, it eventually got swallowed up by the void.

  We went back to work.

  Next week, I couldn't get a hold of Jen. She'd slipped into a coma, like Hendricks. I went to the hospital, stood in her room with lit equipment and tubes, and wept. You know, the whole "hospital room" feel. When I told Troy about her, the whole scene, he got out. I stuck with it for a few weeks more, till I partially faded out while working with a client.

  I met Troy at a park a few months later. It was a rare in person meeting. I was always amazed by how clean cut he was in person. It was easy to assume he'd be the kind of guy covered in corpse paint and pentagrams. He was sitting on a bench, black jeans and dark blue dress shirt, sipping on an energy drink while feeding bread to the pigeons.

  I sat down next to him, and soaked in some of the summer sun. It was nice. Stress had been high, and it was a quiet moment. Some kids played in the distance, caught in their own private fantasies.

  He leaned back on the bench. "You heard about the class action lawsuit against the pharma companies?" he asked.

  "Sure. Is the lawsuit going to get me a new job?"

  The Wilderness

  It was the bones in the woods that made the noise. It echoed past the trees, through the forest. It boomed over the mountains and down the valleys. It was a great drone.

  Carter put his phone back into his pocket. "And that's the end of our cell reception."

  "What the hell was that?" Sam asked, looking out the side window of her car as she drove.

  "My phone."

  "No, didn't you hear that?"

  "Mountain noises," replied Carter, taking the last drag of his cigarette, and discarding it out the passenger window. He pressed a button on the door and closed the window.

  "Mountain noises? What does that mean?"

  "Noises that mountains make. You know, mountain noises."

  "That doesn't even make sense."

  They drove about a half-hour longer, down the main road, then up a little dirt mountain path to the campsite in a clearing. Last year they went to a small campsite in a small park. Sam hadn't been impressed. They had been close enough to the other campsites that they'd been kept awake by their neighbor's drinking all night, and could walk to a park building with a vending machine within ten minutes. It had seemed less like camping and more like renting a fire pit for the evening.

  Sam wanted something more authentic. She talked to one of the rangers about it when they left, a
nd had been told about the site they were settling in now.

  It was serene, quiet, and isolated. They set up their tent, and cooked a campfire meal. Sipping beers, Sam and Carter talked quietly.

  "Isn't this better than last year?" she asked.

  "Yup, no doubt. No noisy neighbors, nowhere to go. We're outside civilization, drinking a beer, with nothing to do tomorrow."

  Sam smiled, absent-mindedly playing with her brown pony tail while looking into the night sky. "Well, not absolutely nothing. Let's take a hike in the morning."

  "That could be fun."