1Author's Note: All concepts, characters, ideas, etc. are fictional. Any resemblance to real people or events is purely coincidental. All material is © N. Lichfield, 2003.
A note to prevent confusion: asterisks will indicate perspective changes. A solid line will indicate scene change.
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Prologue: 3 months ago...
We were fools.
We had no idea what we would create, tapping into the nearly limitless potential of the human brain...
But you don't say 'No' to 3.2 billion dollars, right? The Company was suffering financially, and...Well, you don't really consider the consequences of tampering with a mind when there's a briefcase full of freshly minted bills shoved into your arms.
We had been approached by the Military on the subject of travel between dimensions. We figured, even though they had taken everything else on our dying solar system, they still wanted more. And with so much money, how could we refuse?
The man-made worm holes, created by actually boring through layers of space- time, had long been proved useless. With our broad-range scanners, we had found that over 90.78% of our galaxy could not support human life, and carting useable oxygen across the Milky Way was just a waste of resources. And so with nothing left to turn to within our reach, the subject was brought up on dimensional travel among the cushy military think tanks. Thus, the money, and our new project.
It was one of our younger scientists, a Mike Svenson that suggested dreams were links to other places. After several failures concerning black holes, tears in reality, even warping space, we were ready to try anything else. Dreams had never been explained, fully. The current theory was they were just scenes mashed together from different times in our lives, played over and over again in our sleep...our subconscious the metaphorical projector. But then, where did nightmares come from? Certainly, some of the creatures that our minds concocted had never really existed before us. It was worth the investigation.
Early on in the project, we discovered that, as humans, we have nearly unlimited psychic potential that is just waiting to be tapped. How exactly one goes about tapping it is another story entirely, one that we were not focusing on at the time...though thinking back on those days, I guess we really should have. Anyway, what we did gain from this revelation is that every single human being emits a special type of energy every waking moment. We didn't know what it actually did, or what we could use it for...but we did know that when a person claimed something as his or her own, like clothing or a home, the object would become literally soaked in the person's unique energy. Some people had, as children, the ability to see this energy, describing hues of bright rainbow colors...but their skill eventually faded as they grew, constantly told that "No, daddy isn't blue honey...why did you color him like that?" or, "Sweetie, our house is brown, not green." When they would draw or paint. This led us to develop energy readers that could detect hidden light patterns beyond the human eye's ability to see, or what the eye had been trained not to see. After several attempts, we got the light frequency patterns right. And we actually saw it happen...a human pick up a dull gray object in a store, buy it...and the object would slowly change to match the color of its new owner.
But I digress. This was only part of the problem, after all. Our study dipped back into the power of the subconscious mind, particularly the part that supposedly controlled our dreams...
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We created a small cover for our operations, placing several clinics advertised to help those suffering from nightmares all across the country. We were surprised by the results; swarms of people arrived, seeking ease from dreams and nightmares that simply boggled our minds when described to us. It was all the more disappointing to find that there was truly nothing we could do for these people besides offer them a safe place to slumber and monitor their brain waves during their deepest REM sleep.
Nothing truly incredible showed, and we were beginning to become disheartened...until a young Japanese-American man, Joshua Fukunaka, approached us with claims that startled us even after what we had seen already.
Joshua was the most unusual case to come to us for help. You see, he had not slept for nearly three days, and it was showing. That in itself was not highly unusual, but his reasons for doing so were.
Every time Mr. Fukunaka closed his eyes as if to sleep, "They" came to him...or rather, he came to them, as he described it. For the past five years, Mr. Fukunaka had been haunted by the same nightmare...a nightmare so horrible he had been trying unsuccessfully to never fall asleep again. When asked to tell us about the nightmare, he would start to convulse for a mere matter of seconds, and then calm. Tears would well up in his eyes, as if it were literally painful for him to recall it. And then he would speak.
At first, there was nothing. Not a lack of color, nor just a lack of space...just nothing. A void in reality. And then, with a flash of brilliance, there was something...a vast, even plain that extended off, farther than the eye could see. He always had a bird's eye view of this place, looking down upon it as if flying overhead. This part always put a sense of wonder into his tone...he actually enjoyed this segment. After a while of flying over the empty, unnaturally even brownish land...spheres...would start to appear. He described them as silver spheres roughly the size of a small home, glittering metallically though there was no sunlight to speak of.
We had heard this before...several other dreamers had described this as well, enough that we had, with some excitement, decided that this place actually existed. The others described often simply drifting into some random sphere, and then their nightmares would begin. They called it the Sea of Realities, and we found no reason to disagree...but for Joshua Fukunaka, it was different. There was no visible difference between these spheres, no real way to physically tell one apart from the other...but Joshua always knew where he was going. One sphere always drew him to it, like an iron filing to a magnet.
Yanked into it as easily as one's finger might pass through a bubble, his horrors would begin.
At first, there was blackness all around him. Free floating, fearing for his very life, he felt so very alone. And then they would come. The size of large dogs, these creatures were reptilian in build, covered in black scale and equipped with long, whip-like tails. Their heads, however, resembled the protruding snout of a Great White shark, mouths filled with wriggling, dagger-like teeth. And their eyes...he said it was like looking into the eyes of everyone you ever hated, but worse. Glittering yellow orbs, glowing as if powered internally, they rested to either side of the bulge, always malevolently narrowed.
They would come to him...and the pain would begin. For hours it would go on, until at last he was pulled into the waking world, narrowly escaping death once more. When asked what he called these creatures, a chill crept up our spines. "I don't call them anything." He stated, eyes suddenly cold and lifeless. "But they call themselves...Shrivers."
A/N:
WOO! Ahem. R&R if you could, please...and yes, this IS going somewhere. Strangely enough, the whole story I have planned is actually based off of a nightmare I used to have. Spooky, eh?