Even Slaves Can Dream (Science Fiction that will heal all mentalillness!)

[Note from Author: I am driven by the impulse to achieve. I cut things out of my life. Videogames. Senseless conversation. Watching things I've already seen. Waiting. I am trapped in the body of a human doing, suffocating the being beneath. I forget the lights by which I read and write are altering my circadian rhythm; that insomnia and its three-dimensional causes were nearly absent in the mind of Ancient Man, who busied himself with survival and tribal communion and the quiet walks home from the hunt. Highest and most important, I forget that the world and its opinions, the poisons and the pundits, the Right and the Left, are shackles that have been worn so long most of us no longer feel the drag of their weight. So then ... let us remember together. There is more to life than work. There is more to being than doing. And opinions, as tasty as they are, are WORTHLESS in the eyes of the Universe. 

Yes, the Universe. 

Can't you see it? Out there? Above? Around? Abounding?

Wrong again.  

You are as a part of it as the sun and wheeling stars. 

You are the Universe given consciousness.] 


“Twenty-three hours, and this is all you’ve done?” The Baron’s eyes blazed beneath their visor. “We employ you to be efficient. The Triumph demands it. Do I agree with the pace that’s been set?” The Baron waved as if to swat a fly. “It’s superfluous, Mr. Pratt. What I agree with does not champion the Triumph’s agenda. What I agree with does not make more chips!”

Oliver Pratt stayed motionless. Anyone unlucky enough to be in the Baron’s presence understood that silence was always wiser. The last Grinder to open his mouth was still waddling from the punishment he’d received. Instead, Pratt nodded meekly. His lips shivered. A hot worm of sweat slid gently down his cheek.

“What should we do about this?” The Baron sat back, an arm crossed over his belly. The other hand played like a fat pink spider on his chin. “I could send you packing off into The Waste. You might find work in the coliseums, scrubbing blood from the planks. Or the kilns, where hands  crack and bleed until the bones peek through like diamonds. Could you imagine?”

Pratt could not imagine. It was all he could do to follow the track of the Baron’s words.

“Is this sinking in, Pratt?”

Pratt managed a nod; it came out looking like an aneurism.

The Baron steepled his fingers. “Then you’re not as stupid as you look. Go back to work. Work, Pratt: as in toil. Let’s see you sweat in the assembly chamber, instead of my office, where it has no value. Hone that meekness into a blade. Carve the Triumph’s path. There’s a war out there. And its first defense starts here.”

Pratt stood there a full ten seconds longer than he should have.

“I expect you’d like to say something,” the Baron finally said. “Well, go on. Any man who can get flayed without blinking has the right to a few words.”

Pratt was thinking of the man whose name he’d never learned, the shifty twitch of the stranger’s neck muscles, the silky whisper uttered low as to elude the recording pods. They’re lying, Pratt. A child can be raised to enjoy the taste of manflesh, if the parent starts him young enough. Reward him with it, and he’ll beg for seconds. He’ll refuse when other food is offered in its stead. Children are creatures to be shaped. We’re not much different, you and I. Engineered cannibals.

“Sir.” Pratt’s voice was quiet and thoughtful. “I’ve assembled 300 chips a cycle since my start here. The records will confirm that. It’s only been in the last seven shifts that—”

“What’s happened since then?” The Baron looked around, unimpressed. “Things are identical. Efficient. Productive. The defect lies within.”

“I've come to the same conclusion. I believe I’ve contracted … an illness.”

The Baron narrowed his eyes. “Illness has been eradicated.”

“I can deduce no other reason for my...” Pratt swallowed. "Wandering.”

The Baron pinched his chin, rolling his eyes along the ceiling. “Wandering, you say? Thoughts out of focus? Images and pictures mentally unattainable? An apprehensive needle snagging in your belly?”

Pratt sighed relief. “That’s it exactly! How did you—?”

“I’ve seen this before.” 

“You have?”

“Yes.” It came out in a hiss. The Baron's eyes were blazing again, his hands balled to fists. “And just whom have you been talking to, Mr. Pratt?”

“No one, sir. Talking is against Productivity Memorandum 34-5. I remain silent until the allotted fifteen minutes. Even then, it’s idle chatter.”

“Yes, every Grinder claims it’s idle.” The Baron stood to his full immensity, the black latex suit straddling a keg drum torso, the fingers of his hands spreading flat against the desk. “But there’s one imperfection The Triumph has yet to erase.”

“What's that, sir?”

“The human lie.”

*

Pratt queued at the port station for his transfer. The polished white labyrinth curved above him in a funnel that’s segmented chambers were honeycombed with holes. Giant hydraulic claws raced up and down the walls, plucking and loading transfer pods that would take each Grinder to the next production bay.

The Grinders were a ghostly sight, clothed in white, shuffling like cattle through the snow. Wheeled drones traveled the human queue, dispensing small oval rations the bright red of inflamed tissue. The only sounds in the colorless vastness were the whines and wheezes of claws running on their tracks.

“Don’t eat from their palm, Oliver.” Someone whispered beside him. “All of this is a trick.”

The sound Pratt’s neck made as it turned was like a rope being strained. And there, sweating under a pasted black cap of hair, stood the stranger. His left eye had gone blood red. “Don’t look so surprised," he said, smiling. "You didn’t think I’d let you waste away here on your own, did you?”

“You can’t be here,” Pratt whispered.

“A man can be anywhere he likes. Though, you seem to have forgotten.”

Pratt’s nerves pulled tight as wires, strangling the muscle, the bone. Did the man mean to kill him? Surely that's what waited beyond termination. A long death of exposure, begging work, avoiding war, curling in the crowded ashblown streets. He heard the clatter of rations not twenty paces ahead; the whir of the drone’s conveyer tracks; the wet contraction as each Grinder swallowed. 

The sounds piled higher, louder, threatening to drown him.

“You think those pills are good for you?” The stranger made no effort to whisper. “Do you know what’s in them? Have you ever asked?”

Pratt’s eyes fixed on the drone, sure that it would spot them, sound the alarms, and call in the armed soldiers that patrolled the upper chambers. It inclined its body, as if studying them from afar.

Then it rolled on to the next fool and spit a clutch of red baby teeth into his palm.

The next fool? Pratt wondered from whence the mental phrase had come. It was as strange as the other words now cycling in his mind: pills; drone; baby teeth. He’d never used them … and yet he understood their meaning.

“Pro-duc-tivity…” The stranger made a poisonous face. “They leave the lights running all day, all night, all year; eternal lights. God said, ‘let there be light,’ and The Triumph took Him literally. Do you know what Fulberic protons do to the human brain, Oliver? They manipulate biochemistry like a tidal force, pounding the circadian cliffs to shards and splinters. In history we rose with dawn and fell soon after sunset. We gathered by fires and stared aloft, grunting to the stars that would become our Gods. We etched and drew and made record of each harvest. But here…” The stranger looked around with infinite sadness. “We have become the harvest.”

The drone approached, at last. Pratt closed his eyes and mentally prepared. He would be hauled away, strapped before the Baron and the Consolate to which he answered, and then … The Wastes. He wondered if he would find work in the kilns, if his skin would truly peel to show the bones beneath like diamonds.

The drone’s chirp broke his concentration.

Pratt snapped his eyes open, saw his startled reflection in the convex node that served as the drone’s head, and held out his hand on instinct.

Whiiiish, rattle, the rations dropped in his palm…

And the drone moved on.

Pratt stood still for a full minute, trembling with disbelief. 

When he turned, the stranger was gone. 

The only movements in the bay were of the claws and drones and flickerings of great pinecone bulbs above. Fulmeric light, the stranger had called them. A tidal force. What on earth could that mean? 

Raising the rations on reflex, Pratt opened his mouth and froze.

There in his mind was the stranger’s sinister smile, his red eye daring bravery.

Do you know what’s in them? Have you ever asked?

Another chirp announced that it was Pratt’s turn to be transferred. He stepped inside the metallic pod, braced his back against the magnetic seal, and waited for the claw to lift him. There were so many pictures cycling in his mind he could barely see in front of him. The impact of the claw engaging knocked his ration to the grate below. He snapped his face down, watching the small red capsules fall and disappear. 

So it was that his world was changed forever.

*

Pratt completed four hundred chips that shift. It was effortless, watching from far within himself as his arms and fingers moved. The distance gave him time to think. He became aware of his identity, of its weaknesses. He was a man not much older than a boy. A bullied, spineless, crustacean of a creature that scrabbled from rock to rock whenever the masters whistled.

Things slowly began to change.

He noticed breasts on some of the Grinders, the provacative curve of hip and buttocks repeated throughout nature. The term Nature itself reared bloated and rotting from the well-cracks of his consciousness. He noted the blinking cameras everywhere, the alertness of the machinery and inertia of their subjects. The concept of subjugation, though new, made his heart tremble with outrage. But most important:

Pratt began to see himself as a slave.

*

By his fifth shift, his energy was flagging. Four times he’d dropped his rations through the transfer pod’s grate, and with each hour his world had grown more lucid.

He was a prisoner.

No one else seemed to notice. They did their work, tweezing copper pathways into the chip boards, staring dully through the blazes of sudden light each time a microwelder was used to seal a housing frame. They breathed and spoke no words, save the trading of daily accomplishment numbers when they were given their fifteen minutes of social vocalization.

“They allow it so the vocal chords won’t atrophy,” said a voice over his shoulder. Shift eight had just ended, and it was getting harder to stand. 

“The Geneva Conventions were very explicit. This is their loophole.” 

Pratt didn’t have to turn to know who it was. He studied his peers at the other end of the room, whispering to one another and staring at their shoes. “What is this place … really?”

“A broken ideal,” said the stranger. “Are you tired yet?”

“Yes. Tired… Is that what it’s called?”

“It was called many things once. But those names have passed from memory. This, my dear Oliver," he motioned to the room, "is a dying body. And you, without your pills, are the disease.”

“I don’t understand.”

“You will.”

One of the Grinders broke from the group and moved toward him. Pratt felt a throb of what he mistook for apprehension twist through his perineum. But no. There was a certain longing to the ache. A desire of union, or conquest, or else self-destruction. 

Her hair was pulled back in a knot, as was required for their sterile work, where stray strands could go ablaze. And her eyes were the blue of…

Oceans, he thought, not knowing exactly what an ocean was.

“She’s coming this way,” Pratt whispered. “What do I do?”

“Who are you talking to?” She had numb synthetic smile. “All of us are curious.”

Pratt looked behind him, saw an empty doorway, and blew a gust of hot air. He smiled his confusion and shrugged. “Just going over numbers. I calculate out loud.”

She didn’t blink, kept her eyes fused to his face. “How many chips did you complete?”

“Five hundred and three.”

Her eyes widened a near-imperceptible faction, showing more of that lustrous blue. “Impressive.”

And whether it came from his flagging energy, or the Fulmeric bulbs, or the cryptic warnings of the stranger, he would never know. Only that the urge was so sudden and strong it almost lifted him off the ground. 

Come with me. He mouthed the words so the watching Grinders would not hear. Come. Now.

She followed him into a corridor that led to a series of restrooms, where men and women milled through the communal doors. Before now he hadn’t seen the marvelous separation, the parts and counterparts, their fated collision.

She was watching him, he saw. And she was afraid. Her eyes kept moving to the recording lens. He followed her, saw the small barrel aimed directly at his face, and coughed, doubling over like he was choking.

The woman stood still, her eyes flicking between his face and the lens.

“The rations they dispense,” he whispered. “Stop taking them. Stop at all costs. You can hold them in your hand and drop them through the grate when they shuttle you. It’s the only way to see. This place is rotten. There's something happening.” Finally, he stood, rubbing his throat and making gestures for the camera to emote that his fit was accidental.

He made for the bathroom. Paused at the door to look back. "Trust me."

*

Pratt rushed for a latrine at the end of the massive room. There were no doors between the barrier walls he passed. He could see the men and women, their grunts, the animal splashes.

He collapsed against the steel bowl in horror, hearing the air-suction of waterless evaporates pull waste into the pipes, smelling things he’d never dared to notice. 

The longer he stared at the expanse of polished sinkbowls, the more they seemed to change. Rust appeared in the steel joints. Swaths of gray mold flickered into existence along the lower walls. He sunk his face into his hands and saw a dry crust of feces below his feet.

Bare feet. 

The immaculate white slacks were tarnished rags. His exposed shins were oozing with sores. As he watched, fleas and lice hopped across his toes, feasting on the filth.

Pratt jerked his head back to scream.

But the face of the stranger stopped him. He was blocking the stall, using a sleeve to polish his nails. Both of his eyes were now red. Not with blood, Pratt saw, but a pulsing luminescence. The face itself was different; shorter in the chin, like it was melting.

“Be still, Oliver.” It came in echoes and waves. “You need rest. Stay here a while. They won’t find you. Not yet. Just sleep. Sleep and remember.”

Pratt slept.

And he remembered.

*

He saw oceans the blue of the Grinder’s eyes. He saw trees and birds and dogs running toward their masters. He saw the ideals of men shining brightly in their smiles.

And then the darkness of ambition, the cutting of the privileged and dismemberment of their class. He saw the beggars thronging mansion walls, hurling flaming bottles and hoisting gibbets on the lawns. He saw the Bolsheviks reborn in the eyes of New Yorkers and Californians and Georgians and Floridians. He saw the wealthy hung and gutted, and the promise of peace stamped in a cooling wax of blood.

And then the starving hungry. The poorer poor. He saw the streets fill up with holes and the sidewalks lift atop untended rootbeds. The arborists, the businessmen, all gone, all rotten. And good riddance.

For this was paradise.

He saw the food trucks and the train stations bringing half of what was promised. He saw the need for manpower and the commerce of forced starvation. He saw piles of guns and knives and cudgels traded in for medications. And the sickness, everywhere, a vex three-parts Ebola and one-part Bubonic Plague. A sickness that’s arrival was too opportune to be entirely random.

He saw the new President-General above the flickering teleprompter of Times Square, informing them that he’d worked hard to negotiate three hours of electricity a day. Three whole hours by which to study the amended amendments and commit the look of each other’s face to memory.

And then the gifts, the gifts, the sweet promise of death.

He saw the birth of the Starsects, their priests lining the streets, speaking of the eternal cosmos, of our astral origins. “All stars must collapse,” they screamed, “And are we not the forbearers of America’s implosion?” 

And the people flocking, giving all for a taste of peace. Rooting out their conspiring neighbors for the industrial God’s benediction. And they too, wasting to sickness, their promises undelivered, their family all in chains.

For what?

And underneath, the vagrants being pushed into the ground, vast highways and complexes burrowed down and down forever. Surface borders and work visas as America was rebuilt. A new set of politicians. A fresh start with the human trash packed into the tunnel system that would remain their eternal prison. The elite dining in highrise flats, laughing above the poor who had championed their efforts.

The poor who had slit their own throats upon the steps of revolution.

*

Pratt woke to the choking dungeon odors. His neck ached from where it had been propped against the stall. Sitting up was difficult, and when he saw his distant reflection in the filthy mirror his heart stopped. He had a wiry growth of beard. The stubble made him itch. The skin beneath was raw with infection. He tumbled to his feet, dragging himself to the sink.

Thirst was a physical pain. He cupped his palms under the rusted faucet and groaned when gouts of yellow water sneezed from the pipes. He drank the taste of iron until his belly was full and he could think.

“How long have I been asleep?”

And there it was, from his own mouth, as if it were the most natural thing.

Sleep.

Dreams.

For a moment he felt himself splitting down the middle: the man he had been, and the enlightened beggar into which he had transformed. He saw his old self, the human cattle, welding chips under the droning hum of Fulmeric coils. He saw that man of yesterday baking in the photons, the ingested chemical compounds weaving the sterile white fantasy in which he’d shuffled and toiled in dreamless suspension. He saw the Baron behind his visor, staring with those red-rimmed eyes.

Go back to work. Work, Pratt: as in toil. Let’s see you sweat in the assembly chamber, instead of here, where it has no value. Hone that meekness into a blade. Carve the Triumph’s path. There’s a war out there. And its first defense starts here…

The voice of the stranger came next: In History we rose with dawn and fell soon after sunset. We gathered by fires and stared aloft, grunting to the stars that would become our Gods. We etched and drew and made record of each harvest. But here … we have become the harvest.

Pratt gripped his head, felt the hold loosen, and gaped in mute horror at the brittle hair between his fingers. He turned his sunken face in the mirror, and shivered as another chunk fell from his scalp. “What is this? WHAT IS THIS?”

“This is the revolution.”

Pratt turned toward the stranger’s voice … and froze.

Pratt was looking at his own face. 

What he had mistaken for melting in the moment before he’d slept was only a phase of this final transition. The stranger wore the sterile white of Pratt’s old uniform, his skin smooth, his hair buzzed clean. His eyes were still red, pulsing with the rhythm of a reactor.

Pratt stumbled back. “Who are you?”

“I’m you, of course.”

“How can that be?”

“How can any of this be?” The stranger motioned to the abounding filth. “They can suppress the truth, but there’s such a thing as racial memory. Were you aware that the octopus is abandoned in its youth? Each must learn to fend for itself. It is a creature of legendary intelligence, as far as boneless sea life is concerned. And yet its intelligence lies buried in its DNA.”

“What does that have to do with me?”

“You are the octopus,” whispered the stranger. “There are things that cannot be buried. Things that awaken to themselves. For every ten thousand willing servants, there must be one to question his chains. Nature demands it.”

Pratt took a moment to consider. He pulled himself up, aware of his own malnourished body, the cold floor and surrounding stenches. “How long have I been asleep?”

“A week.”

“How did I survive?” He remembered something. “A human being can’t survive without water for more than five or six days.” That he was speaking of days, where before he had spoken of shifts, amazed him. “I should be dead.”

“Your body woke you. As your mind woke me. The universe is not much different. We are the scilla of a lung. Each must work together, gathering the filth, coughing it up to be ejected. Sooner or later the earth will purge itself. It, too, is a self-correcting organism. This is only the beginning.”

“So let me get this straight. I’m talking to myself?”

The stranger smiled. “You're a slow learner, Oliver.”

And then, like smoke, he was gone.

*

Pratt tottered out of the restrooms, cringing as the rusted camera wheezed to follow him down the hall. It was no longer a polished barrel, but dented and hanging loosely from its bolts. He kept his eyes down, like the old Pratt would have done, stepping carefully over the exposed beams of the subfloor.

At the doorway he almost collided with a Grinder. The man’s cheek was red and suppurating, his eyes milky with disuse. He said nothing as he moved off toward the bathrooms, his feet lifting with hypnotic accuracy to avoid each fatal chasm.

On through the doorway, the decaying break room, into the peeling vastness of the assembly chamber. Pratt understood now more than ever why the ideal of slavery could never work. Men with the taste of freedom would forever covet the destruction of their masters. But what was freedom to a lobodomite with no knowledge or memory? What were chains, but a source of pride?

He thought of the woman, her blue eyes. How many chips did you complete?

The warehouse was a ruin of blackened steel. Disheveled Grinders crowded the assembly lines, their fingers bleeding as they peeled the chips by hand. Some used their teeth. The immaculate micro-welders were no more than poorly rigged blowtorches. As he watched, one Grinder set another on fire. The man continued to work, heedless of the spreading flames, and managed to complete another chip before collapsing to the floor and being doused by two drones.

The machines themselves were barely mobile. One had a busted left track, so that it spun in circles every four to five feet.

Pratt moved along the ranks of grizzled, broken faces, until a set of blue eyes snapped up.

Pratt froze, amazed to still see beauty shining through her degradation. He moved behind the shoulder of the Grinder on the opposite side of the conveyer, feeling an impulse, a shift. There was something different about him. Something the others didn't seem to notice, as they had never noticed the Stranger. 

He leaned to man's ear and whispered, “You have to use the bathroom. Now. It’s starting to hurt.”

The Fulmeric coils hummed above, and the man suddenly clutched his bladder. Without a word, he rushed headlong toward the door, jumping over the smoking body as if it weren’t there.

Pratt stood amazed for a few breaths, then took up his position, compiling the chips. The woman didn’t look at him right away. Her eyes were furtive, afraid. He wondered if some higher form of herself had visited her, if she, too, had remembered.

“Hello,” he whispered.

She shook her head, mouthing the words. Don’t talk. They’re listening.

He no longer cared if he was heard. A part of him wanted to see them, whoever they were. “I don’t care anymore.”

You should, she mouthed. They’re dangerous.

“I’m not so sure they can hear me. For the same reason I whispered in that man’s ear. Did you see the way he ran?”

She nodded with uncertainty in her eyes.

The words fell from him as if they'd always been there, hiding, sleeping, waiting to be released.

“This is some kind of photo-chemical hypnosis. I don’t quite understand how a delusion so grand could be shared, but here’s the evidence.” The more he spoke, the more confident he became. Continents of buried knowledge churned to life within his mind. He could feel the pieces moving, falling together. “Perhaps it’s a spatial hologram. A piece of fabrication hidden on some higher plane, though not so high as to be unimpressionable. It’s the reason I can whisper in his ear and still affect him. He sees the white room, the bright lights, the ordinances and protocols. But his body still responds to this environment. Did you see the way he vaulted that body? His mind is somewhere higher, but the body remains aware. It's been done to us.”

Pratt could see the courage forming in her eyes. The muscles of her throat twitched. “How…” she seemed scared by the sound of her own voice, her eyes dashing back and forth. When nothing happened she smiled, amazed. “How do you know all this?”

“I don’t. But we can test it.”

Pratt turned to the old Grinder crouching next to him. The man’s spine was twisted and he was missing the fingers of his left hand. “You don’t want to work anymore,” Pratt whispered. “You’re tired of this.”

The man paused, blinking for a long time.

“I said you don’t want to work anymore. You’re angry.”

The man’s upper lip curled like a dog.

“You hate the drones. You hate them so much you’re going to take that blowtorch and burn the next one you see.”

Without hesitation, the man snatched the blowtorch from his neighbor and waddled down the aisle. Pratt shared a glance with her across the conveyor, just before the old man reached the drone with the broken track. The machine chirped at him, trying to back up and only managing to reverse its circle.

“I HATE YOU!” The old man had the voice of a warrior. He fired the flint before the torch's beveled nozzle. A knifing blue flame whumped into existence. He kicked the machine on its side, cutting through its head in a puddle of sparks. When it was done he lifted the trophy and hurled it into the aisle as three more drones arrived.

“Hurry,” she said, "You have to do something!" 

But Pratt was already climbing the conveyor, cupping his hands. “Listen to me!”

The room froze. A ratchet storm of pops and crackles echoed as every neck snapped in his direction.

“This is a prison. You’re all being held against your will. You didn’t know before, but now you do. The drones, the Baron, The Triumph’s bloody Consulate … are your enemies. They are few, and you are many. You have weapons. Tools, torches, the steel bars that hold these conveyers. Your lives are in danger. They mean to kill you. Unless you kill them first. Do you understand?”

The ruffle of collars nodding was as a great flock of flapping wings.

“The drones must be destroyed. Their masters must be destroyed. Freedom waits beyond these walls. The warehouse is burning. They mean to trap you. Can’t you see the flames? They’re spreading.”

The Grinders began to look around. Some of them screamed and pointed.

“Now take your weapons!”

The clangor of metal was deafening.

“Turn and face them!”

The pivot of bare feet thundered as a single beating heart.

Oliver Pratt pointed with madness in his eyes. “CHARGE!”

  

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