I don't have normal dreams, so "bad" dreams are nothing special for me. I don't know why. I get migraines, so maybe it's a circulation thing (then again, I get hemiplegic migraines, so maybe it's a neurological thing). Maybe I'm just an imaginative person. Maybe I'm too sensitive. But dreams like this are nothing out of the ordinary for me. Sometimes I get night terrors, real shaking-in-the-darkness, sitting bolt-upright, nasty things, but I haven't had one of those in a few years. But I have these long-form story-type dreams every night. I just have weird dreams, bad dreams, vivid dreams, and that's nothing out of the ordinary.
I'm not generally an optimist, not on the everyday-scale at least. I work with people. People, individually, are pretty okay. Most of them, anyway. People on a grand scale can do some pretty amazing things. People on a mid-level scale where they have just enough reinforcement from their peers to be astonishingly shitty.
But I'm very hopeful. I think in the next couple of dozen years, we're gonna see a lot more of space, maybe with human eyes, thanks to our astonishing ingenuity (or, I mean, we're at least gonna try - s'gonna take a while to get there, in all fairness). I believe that we can do something about the crap we're doing to our planet (that we're doing to ourselves on this planet; the planet is gonna be here longer than it's gonna take us to get to space). And I think that we'll get our interpersonal and institutionalized hatreds sorted out.
Or we'll all successfully kill each other off and nature will sort it all out.
Actually we'll probably never do that last one right up until we're all dead.
Either way.
Point being, I don't generally think of the future as a bad or a scary place. I like to read a lot of science fiction, sure. The Martian was one of my favorite books (and movies) of the past couple of years - I, for one, welcome my potato overlords. I'm in love with series like like James S.A. Corey's The Expanse, where there's a lot of interpersonal troubles, there's a lot of ...what's the word for geopolitical except for the whole solar system? Do we have that word yet? We'd better get on making up that word. Here, I'm just gonna do it. Consider it my service to humanity. Solarpolitical. Spell check says it's not a word. That's because it's not, spell check. Not yet. So anyway, there's a lot of solarpolitical trouble, and people are still generally shitty. But Earth has gotten its shit together enough to have a planet-wide government. Mars and The Belt are like the Wild West. And Earth doesn't like Mars and Mars doesn't like Earth and nobody likes the Outer Planets. But - hello - we made it to space. We live there now. Then. We will be living there then. Whatever, you get me.
Apparently, my dreams do not. My dreams do not get me at all.
I've had a few dreams like this in the past, and I always have a hard time shaking them off, probably because I am such a techno-optimist (as opposed to an anthro-pessimist, as we've pretty well established). But last night's was something... special. And I don't mean like keep it in a little wooden box and remember it fondly-type special.
Aliens are gonna hate us, you guys. I'm just telling you now - is what my brain said last night.
(A couple of people are gonna point out that the aliens hate us in one of my super-optimistic examples, and I'm just gonna ask, somewhat hypothetically, is that really an alien? Some aliens? It's an alien thing, but... well, we're getting off topic.)
Part of me wants to tell you all about this dream from beginning to end. And part of me knows that the only thing more boring than listening to people who don't know you give you book recommendations while you smile and nod is listening to people tell you about their dreams.
So I'm gonna paint a picture for you instead. I'm gonna try and avoid all the "and then I can't really remember this part but -" No. To hell with all that. I'm gonna tell you what my brain wants you (me) to know.
Italics means dreeeeeaaaammssss...
Imagine that you are one of two head coordinators on a space station, but so far in the future that a space station is more like a gated community or an indoor mall than a space station. Perhaps it's so large that it has its own gravity or so advanced that it generates its own gravity without spin. Imagine that you have a partner of the business variety or possibly the government variety who is basically your backup, but you've both been on the station so long you're mostly just very good friends. The station is mostly self-sustaining and gets by on routine maintenance - as long as you submit the orders on a regular schedule, everything is already taken care of. Your job has become a largely ceremonial one and you're both mostly called upon to be the face of the station.
Lately, though, there have been some odd things happening in the station. Elevators malfunctioning, airlocks seizing, and other things that seem almost entirely unrelated except in that they're all mechanical (or possibly simple electronic) failures that might only reflect the station getting old. You and your partner dutifully call in maintenance and have the problems resolved - after all, minor nuisances on a space station can become huge problems very quickly. And while it's strange that so many things are going wrong at once, all it means for you two is extra paperwork, so after a long day, you both end up at the station bar, feeling about as old as the station seems to be. You have a few too many drinks and a good many laughs and a similar amount of hours go by. The lights on the station have dimmed and your partner gets up to leave. He digs in his pockets to pay for his drinks and sneakily pays for yours too - he gives you a little wink and you think maybe you see something there. Maybe you're just hoping you do, but he smiles at you as he walks away. You feel warm. Maybe it's just the alcohol, but you like the feeling nevertheless. When he's gone, you glance back down at the table and see something else beside the money that your partner has left as payment. Three stacked American dimes. Thirty cents. The smile on your face splits into a toothy grin.
Right after you both had arrive on the station for the first time, you discovered that three stacked dimes was exactly big and small enough to keep the door between your office and your partner's office unlocked without setting off the alarm that would signal a breach - all the doors on the station were supposed to remain locked at all times in case of any emergency situation so that areas could be sealed off more easily, even a space as small as the area separating two offices. But having to submit to a retinal scan every time you ran out of correction fluid or request forms and wanted to borrow some before submitting a requisition for more was a hassle, and sometimes it was nice to drop in unannounced with coffee or muffins or good conversation. You never thought that there would be coffee or muffins or White-Out on a space station; you thought it might be austere, clinical, paperless, tasteless. But it turns out that all office spaces, even those ones outside earth orbit, are very much the same. The good conversation turned out to be a bonus. Those three dimes had remained jammed in the locking mechanism of that door for years now - the one broken thing neither of you would ever call maintenance about - and now here they were, in front of you on the table.
An open door.
You swear under your breath. There was something there. There is.
In your rush to follow your partner, you almost knock over your drink into your lap. You run to the elevator bank, hoping he won't have been able to catch a lift yet, but he is already gone. With a defeated sigh, you mash the call button and wait patiently for another elevator to greet you. After what feels like an eternity, a soft electronic chime signals your admittance into an empty elevator car, and you punch for the third floor - not your floor, but his. The elevator seems to take forever to start to move, as though it's really considering its options. You tell it to come on in quick, repeated mumbles. Finally, with an unexpected lurch, it begins its ascent. Second floor. Third. You wait for it to stop. It doesn't. It goes on to the fourth, fifth, sixth, seventh before it ceases its ascent. You've been filing reports about this for days. You don't know why you hadn't seen it coming.
You exit the elevator and make for one of the quick-lifts. The main elevators traverse all thirty upper floors of the space station, as well as the three lower levels. The quick-lifts, small glass structures, access only floors one through ten, where most of the residential, retail, and work spaces on the station are located. You would have taken one of these, but from the bar the main elevator bank was closer. You trudge down the hall to the nearest quick-lift and select "three" once more on the panel. It descends; six, five, four - your heart skips a beat - three... but no! Two, one, and it lets you back off. You haven't received any complaints about the quick-lifts, so this is new, unexpected, and frustrating. You stumble out of the glass car and make your way for the stairs, wondering now if you should just return to your own apartment on the eighth floor. It is a quicker walk to your partner's level, but thinking about all the work you'll have to deal with in the morning with both elevators and quick-lifts on the fritz - as well as the airlocks still being dealt with - you wonder if it might not be better for you just to get to bed. You push open the fire door to the stairwell -
- And your partner is there, sitting on an aluminum bench.
He picks up his head and smiles when he sees you, but the expression flattens out quickly and he says heavily, "Elevators are fucked."
"Yep," you agree. He slides over and makes space for you on the bench. You sit down beside him. He puts his hand on your arm. He's done it before. It's a comforting thing, an intimate one, but not in the way you were thinking about a half an hour ago. It's the quelling gesture of someone who knows what kind of trouble you're about to face. You start to lay your head on his shoulder. So much for an open door.
Your head jerks back up.
No.
His hand drops and he turns to you. "What is it?"
"Doors," you breathe.
You explain it to him as you explain it to yourself. Every mechanical failure aboard the station has been in a part of something that would allow you to evacuate the facility. The airlocks lead, ostensibly, to empty space, and those that don't lead to the docking station where your ships are located. The elevators give access to the lower levels where each resident of the station has their emergency suits. They don't, however, have roof access, where the escape pods - shuttles for those who can't make it to the docks in an emergency - are docked. It's not so much a roof as a thirty-first floor and it's air- (or more, space-) tight, but the terminology doesn't matter. What matters: only the stairs lead there.
You and your partner make a shared motion as you look up the spiral staircase toward the roof.
Neither of you has ever climbed thirty storeys faster.
You get there first and slam yourself against the fire door that would allow you roof access. It doesn't budge. When you back away, you realize you didn't even need to touch it to realize that it wasn't going to let you out. All of the gaskets and reinforcements that would have engaged in an emergency are in place. This door isn't moving.
"Shit," your partner swears behind you and throws his hands down as though wishing he had something to lob at the floor.
"We have to go back down. We have to check everything," you say.
"Shouldn't we tell someone?"
"Who would we tell? Us? We're in charge of this fucking station." But you shake your head, jostling the panic away. "You're right. Put in a call. Put in a call to whoever will answer."
"What do I tell them?" Not a jab, an honest question.
"Tell them someone -" You pause, start again. "Tell them someone doesn't want to let us off of this station. I'll check all the doors in this quadrant."
"Meet me back by the elevators?"
You nod and start back down the stairs, taking them two at a time, but in the back of your mind, you're still stuttering.
"Tell them someone," you wanted to say, "or something."
*******
You meet back up at the elevators and start to say, "Locked - they're all -"
"It doesn't matter," he cuts you off, and he grabs your arm. "Something's coming."
The artificial lights have started to twinkle and brighten, signalling the beginning of the station's work day. Morning. The effect is a subtle one, but hints of reds, pinks, oranges catch on the white walls of the station, on the greenery as the small misters simulate dew. This place can be beautiful, you're gently reminded. This place can feel so much like home. But it's much, much more fragile than that. And you wonder, as you see the fear rising like artificial sunlight in your partner's eyes, if this fragile box of glass has already been dropped, and just hasn't hit the ground yet.
"How much time?" you breathe.
"None."
The fear you saw in him sucks you in, pulling you helplessly out into a starless vacuum of panic. You feel tears welling up in your eyes.
"What do we do?" he asks you.
"Our job," you say. "We do our job."
You feel a ship begin to dock. The station shakes gently. It's stabilized, but the very structure itself quivers. This isn't a small ship.
People are waking up now, others are returning from late-shift jobs. The first floor, the main, open floor, starts to bustle. You and your partner walk toward the doors to the launch pad, neither saying anything. Neither asks how they could have gotten past all sensors, all radar. Neither asks how they interfered with the locks. Neither has to ask why they wouldn't announce their arrival.
Whatever they are, they're powerful, and they don't mean well.
Slowly, the once-unmovable airlock to the docking station begins to slide open. You hold your breath. You feel your partner's hand on your back. The sun rises.
Anyway long story short, some tentacles reach through the airlock and you're the first victim of an unfeeling, uncaring alien race who has no plans for your station other than to turn human bodies into egg sacks for their species while you remain conscious and aware and basically spend the rest of your screaming.
THANKS, BRAIN.
