A Remembered Kind of Dream

by Rei Rosenquist

  January 2021 Volume 11 No 1

  A Remembered Kind of Dream

  by

  Rei Rosenquist

  I've been living out in the deserted junk-land alone for as far back as I can remember. Open brown land mottled with grey uninteresting trash that has no name because who cares? It’s a black hole of a corridor leading from nowhere to nowhere else. Volatile-fog covers the sky every day. The sun can barely break through the grey-green muckery of the endless vog. The air is unbreathable, tasting of dirty feet and smelling worse than my filthy mouth.

  I wish I could wipe the clouds of yuck off the surface of the earth, but I don't know how.

  A sharp wind with sand in it claws at my face. I cover my eyes with my hand, but the motion makes my palm burn.

  The tips of my fingers play at the edges of a scar: an ugly mean circle in the middle of my palm. One of my many strange inconsistencies. I have others, mostly small gaps in my memory, but none of my other issues are annoying as this scar. It itches violently all the time, but right now is worse than ever. I scratch at it until the itching turns to pain. My fingernails pull away bloodied. I wipe the blood on filthy canvas pants.

  Time to go back to camp for cover.

  I turn away from the wind and start to move. I don't get far before I'm coughing up thick brown phlegm. I raise my blood-stained fingers and tighten the fraying straps on my gas mask.

  Best feature of my life, that: having a gas mask.

  Worst feature: restlessness.

  In this ruined wreckage of a world, nobody is a nomad. Nobody chooses to go out and rove the open land alone. Nobody adventures or crosses the unnamed borders between one nowhere and another.

  Only me. The wandering. Pitching camps in dusty holes and thinking I'm clever. I don't feel clever. I feel hopeless and lost. I don't even remember why I set out. I keep going because I don't know what else to do.

  Who knows. Maybe one day I'll get lucky and somewhere that feels like home. Maybe some dusty hole will turn into a set of welcoming open doors.

  Ha. Ha. Ha.

  Not in this world.

  I'm about to unzip the flap of my tent when a low growl makes me freeze.

  I perk an ear and listen.

  The sound isn't far away, most likely moving up through the dry lakebed I passed through yesterday. The ground trembles; big machines getting closer. The roar of them approaches faster than I expect. The huge machines kick up a giant cloud of dust that blinds me in two seconds flat. Sand and grit blasts through the tiny cracks in the seal of my gas mask. Hurts like getting hit in the face with broken glass. I wince, hunkering down beside a bag of gear I shouldn't have left out but did. I jam my head between my knees and wait the rumble out.

  Old boom-boom powered engines roar up all around me, coming to a simultaneous halt of silence.

  A motorcade.

  Shit.

  Motorcades mean people. People mean trouble.

  Nobody likes an outsider. All the scavengers and looters I've run into across this barren world are territorial. New things frighten them, and when they're scared, they attack. Owning next to nothing, I'm a pretty easy target.

  I stand and pull down my browned-out mask to see what I'm up against.

  The motorcade is made up of three slapped-together cars made from parts soldered together on top of a big pancake-shaped engine. Each machine has six too-big tires sticking out too far from both sides. Despite their "artistic" shape, the machines look unstable as fuck. Like I wouldn't want to go even the tiniest distance in one. Not to mention the ruckus and mess they kick up. Dust and chunks of junk with tires like that.

  Oh, and the stench. Their dump-truck hand-processed bio-diesel has already made me sick to my stomach. Sour, tangy, a little too close to the shitty sewage they use to make the stuff. This little family gang stinks sky high.

  The riders clatter out of their machines, coming straight for me.

  Oh. Great day.

  I go to hide behind my gas mask, but the straps are tangled around the cord of my hard plastic and rusted metal compass. It only works occasionally, but I can't bring myself to toss it out. Don't know why. Nostalgia or something. Right now, it's a big hassle. I try to work the two free with no luck. By the time I have the straps and compass cord untwisted, the reeking clan is already upon me.

  Their personal smell is worse than the bio-diesel, arguably worse than the vog. The sharp stench gets in my sinuses and bursts like little painful fireworks. I’m reminded of old jokester chem-blend candies we kids used to eat for fun. Only, this smell makes my nose bleed pretty instantly. I tilt my head back and curse loudly in Common Yu -- a language I hope they speak.

  I draw my only weapon, which is a rusty shiv.

  “Fuck you and your old world pollution!”

  Someone at the top of an engine that looks like a snake made of trashcans waves at me. No weapon, just a red swollen hand. I don’t wave back.

  “You alone?” someone on the ground says into a megaphone in Japogues.

  Ah. So, these kids are most likely trash collectors from the eastern banks of City Fall.

  I see a few gas masks, some goggles with both lenses in. Clothes are all patchwork and hand-stitched stuff. The look is a very clear agender lack-of-attention approach that indicates anyone's identity and sexuality is none of my goddamn business.

  Definitely City Fall folk.

  Not a bad lot, all in all. I had the most luck getting by without heckling and threats going through that region. Had the most actually edible foodstuffs and the easiest time getting water that didn't make my gums bleed. Swell and ache, sure. But not bleed like the chem-heavy, plastic-peppered stuff out west. They still believe in the old technology, don't assume everything they don't understand is some magical spell cast against them, and they treat each other, if not with kindness, with respect.

  Someone even complimented my scar, thinking the strange uneven lines were an intentional design. I suppose at the right angle, one might think so. I don't exactly remember the accident it came from; too traumatic. But I know it's nothing but damage. Still, it was a nice thought and better than the woo-woo fanatics who think it’s some kind of cursed mark.

  Weird kind, they are in City Fall, but tolerable.

  I might even be able to find some filter replacements and new seals for the mask.

  I wave to the megaphone holder, signaling I'd like to talk. They nod and wave back. I slowly approach and stop halfway between where I'd been and their machines. Megaphone crosses the distance between us loudly in a pair of too-big black fake rubber clankity jankity boots. The other two follow slightly behind. One has an impromptu gas mask made of water bottles that's such a wreck, I can't make out a single detail otherwise. The third one with the swollen hand has big brown eyes, exposed. Fool thing, but then their infected hand indicates Swollen Hand isn't the best decision maker.

  The four of us stand in front of each other and bow slightly at the same time.

  This: a physical contract.

  We aren't going to kill each other.

  Yet.

  “Name's Ark,” I say, extending my scarred hand like I'm going to shake. Which is a weird old world thing to think to do. People nowadays don't ever touch. Still, I've stuck my hand out, and I'm sticking with it.

  Not one of the three reach back.

  I pull my truncated gesture back and cross both arms across my chest. The scar on my palm itches and burns with embarrassment. My cheeks glow red.

  Water Bottles tilts their headgear, giving me a once-over. “Arc?”

  “You mispronounced it,” I say, recovering my cool. “Ark. With a K.”

  Megaphone glares at me. And to their credit, those two words do sound exa
ctly the same in both Common Yu and Japogues. Literally no audible difference.

  I’m making a joke I made up a long time ago, back when I was living at this Survival Skills camp with kids from around the whole world. We liked to make language puns and jabs at one another's accent. We liked to pretend we didn't understand each other when we did. The joke is pretty pathetic, but sometimes I get a laugh or a sigh.

  This gang isn’t the humor circus though. All three of them eye me like I'm from Mars, and no one responds at all.

  “Nevermind,” I shrug.

  “You have food,” Swollen Hand says instead of introducing themself.

  Ok, so they are also not the polite-introductions gang either. Fine.

  “Had,” I lie and hope nobody is smart enough to recognize my bow lying in the wide open beside the rest of my camp behind me.

  “What’s that?” Water Bottles points behind me.

  The impromptu water-bottle gasmask full of murky water so obscures their face I can only see a shaved head, kind of a dusty brown. Could be anyone under there.

  I shrug and look over my shoulder. Most often, these crackerheads have no idea what any of my gear is. Chances are Water Bottles here is pointing at my coat. I follow the finger to my window frame set up.

  “Tent,” I come up with.

  Meat dehydrator is the truth. It’s not great, but on a hot day (all of them for the next several moon cycles) -- it does the job. Nothing I've eaten from it has killed me yet.

  “Funny tent,” Swollen Hand says, their normal hand perched on a rubber-clad hip.

  “Like your clothes,” I say and give a chin jut at Swollen’s pants made from recycled tire. You can still see the worn down tread. Must have been a rear tire because it’s pretty smooth.

  “Thanks,” Swollen mistakes what I’ve said.

  “What do you worms need?” I ask blankly.

  “Direction,” Water Bottles says. The word is pretty garbled through the muck and warped plastic, and it comes out sounding more like “erection” which I find funny enough to laugh out loud.

  “Yeah,” Swollen Hand sighs, mistaking why I laughed. “We’re lost.”

  “Can’t help,” I say, and this time being honest. “There is nothing but lost out here.”

  Megaphone frowns at Swollen Hand. “But the oracle said if we found Ark--”

  “The oracle?” I start.

  And here I'd taken them for City Fall folk. But then they should have said--

  “The last mainframe,” Swollen Hand says, looking me dead in the face, reading my shock and disappointment.

  "You know what it is?" Megaphone asks, eying me sharp.

  “They," I correct.

  I don't actually care what pronoun people use for the oracle. Being persnickety about the personhood of the last mainframe is even more moot than arguing about what name to give it. Every living human being knows the last mainframe is sentient. No question whether it’s alive or not. It has a personality and intelligence beyond the human capacity which it proved double-fold when the wars started, then ended in a flash.

  I personally think the oracle is wise enough that it couldn't care less what word an insignificant, nearly-extinct human being uses to refer to it. Much less what pronoun.

  But this is a clever tactic. I'm proving what I know without going into detail or starting an argument.

  Everyone nods altogether.

  Another physical contract.

  We're on the same page. Enough said.

  “They said you know where Safe Haven is,” Swollen Hand goes on.

  I shake my head, beads and bones rattling against my neck as my dreaded hair flies through the dirty air. “Can’t say I’ve ever heard of anything like that,” I lie.

  “Everyone’s heard of it,” Water Bottles says.

  “Not this one,” I counter because they can’t make me admit anything I don't want to.

  Truth is, I do know Safe Haven.

  And I know enough about it to know it doesn’t exist anymore. That it’s a drowned fairy tale. A buried myth kept alive by the oracle to help people feel better. It’s empathetic like that. Godly. Likes to spin yarns to give humans something to cling to. I myself don’t like medicine. If it hurts, it hurts. Too bad.

  But I don't want to let these kids down like that. Who am I to tear down their monument to hope? I may be mean, but I’m not nasty or cruel. There’s a difference. Mean is not going out of my way to be nice. Nasty is taking your hurt out on others. Cruelty is violence purely for the sake of making pain. I simply don’t have the energy to waste.

  “You’re lying.” Megaphone leans in toward me, getting up in my face. Which is intimidating all its own because Megaphone is at least a good meter shorter, even on those noisy heels. It takes, I note, stepping up onto a chunk of concrete ideally placed. Or kicked over? I can’t tell but either way, it’s sly.

  “I am,” I say and shrug to deflate the argument. Because you can’t accuse someone of something they admit to doing. It saps power and without power, you have no bite.

  Megaphone stares at me, defeated.

  “Oh come on,” Water Bottles burbles and it sounds more like “oh ho hum” which makes me laugh again.

  Megaphone clops away on those ridiculous boots, tottling over to Swollen Hand’s side, dragging heels and slouching to make a point. They're pouting because I'm not being cool and easy to work with.

  Yeah well, fuck that.

  “What now?” they say when they get to the desired location right beside Swollen Hand’s swollen hand.

  “We ride,” Swollen Hand says unemphatically.

  “Where?” Water Bottles asks, drawing back in toward the engines.

  “Back to the city.”

  The words are without resolve, hopeless and thin.

  Why would the oracle send jokes to me? Surely not because I have any kind of happy ending answer for them. But at the same time, to only send them out here to prick holes in their dreams and send them back again – now that does feel cruel.

  Maybe, the oracle is that: cruel.

  Empathetic but without a human-sensitive heart. A clinical eye that only wants to study what these odd little dying out human beings will do in order to struggle to survive. It’s not like we’ll make it – either way. We are a dying race. Both we and the oracle know it.

  So then, our deaths are but the clicks of gear winding down. Steps toward the inevitable. Why not make it more interesting with senseless puzzle games? Playing with us isn't outside the sphere or relevance for a super intelligence. I mean, we used to do that kind of shit to rats, right?

  Sure, we had “good ends” in mind – but maybe the oracle does too. Only it’s so alien we’d never guess it. Like the rats would say of us if we’d been able to ask, I bet. Something about that makes me want to stand up against it. If only to truncate the oracle’s study. If only for the last laugh.

  “Hey,” I interrupt the depressed departing party.

  Swollen Hand stops struggling with a lever that requires two hands to manipulate. “What’s that?”

  “I said, hey!”

  Megaphone gives me the stink eye so bad I can smell it above the bio-diesel.

  “Maybe I can help you after all,” I say.

  Water Bottles hops down off an engine that looks like a rolling black cube -- an old part of some kind of art structure, back y’know when humans made things that had no use purely for the looks. This cube looks painfully uncomfortable, poorly fit for the function of riding around until the end of time. They pull up to my side, murky smiles the size of my hand.

  “Thank you!” Water Bottles pre-empts my ability to be useful with over-the-top gratitude.

  Next, Swollen Hand gives up on what I’m guessing the clutch and comes over, too. “We’d be in your debt if you’d serve as our guide.”

  “I have a guidance device.” I point at my chest.

  I reach down and hold out the rusty once-chrome compass. I’m careful to keep my fingers over the face, c
overing it entirely. Truth is, it does sometimes point toward North, but I don’t know when or why. If no one else can see it, though, I can buy time to make up a reason why. Something about magic. They’ll love that.

  “Which way?” Megaphone calls down from the highest engine of the three without moving. This engine is pretty standard. Big tires, a central seat, controls, big fat exhaust that blows out putrid smoke wherever it goes.

  I turn the compass toward me, look down, and am not surprised to find the needle whizzing round and round. I tuck it inside my loose outer dust-covered shirt and look up. I point in the direction I was already moving yesterday.

  “That way.”

  I pack quick, shoving bits of busted robots and pieces of broken camp gear back into my torn bags. I wrap fraying rope tangled with wire around everything like I always do and hoist it on my back. Water Bottles comes over and takes my load, offering me a hand up onto their pancake engine machine. As I settle into the half-seat beside them, I get a strange feeling -- like I belong here. Or, like I've just met an old friend.

  I shake it off and say, "Let's rool."

  Another camp language joke. In Japogues "roll" sounds like "rule" and in Common Yu, "rule" sounds like "tool" so I'm making a far-fetched pun about us being useful.

  To my surprise, Water Bottles laughs.

  Then everyone powers up and we roll out.

  We pass a petrified series of trees. Once givers of oxygen, now the denizens of the dead. We pass them with downcast eyes and carry on through what becomes a large lifeless grove. A ghost forest. I think I hear them whispering.

  Turn back. Go away. Leave now.

  By leading them deeper into the desert instead of back toward City Fall, I’m doing them all wrong. They'll most likely die out here. But what choice do I have? If I deny them my help, they’ll end up just as dead. And the oracle will keep sending more parties out to find me. Gang after gang hunting me down. Can't say I know what that super intelligence is up to. What human ever does? But I do know it won't stop until I cave. So, saying yes now is just doing the inevitable sooner rather than later.

  Still, the petrified trees whisper.

  Still, I wave us on.

  ~~~