A Remembered Kind of Dream

by Rei Rosenquist

  “Hold your hand up,” Jak says, holding their own in the air.

  I lift my hand, palm out.

  And for the first time since I can remember, my scar stops itching.

  I sigh in huge relief, feeling peace seep down from my hand all the way to my feet.

  Then, my scar starts to glow blue-white, not painful but warm. I glance at Jak's and it's doing the same. The glow gets brighter and warmer. Then, without warning, the glow flashes to way-too-hot and sears through me. I yelp as the pain grows, filling my body like a pitcher full of acid water. All my skin breaks into an insta-sweat and my joints ache like I've been running way too long.

  I'm reminded of the breaker and the besto-breee.

  Just think how much that was worth it in the end.

  I grit my teeth and brace my whole body against the pain. I grip white knuckled to the edges of the ship's seat. My nails dig into the cushions, slicing ten little holes. I hear myself whimper, coming unglued and oddly detached. Like I'm watching some bad dream of pain happen to myself. I feel worms wriggling to escape in my brain. They knot together and harden into a wall. A protecting firewall. A safe haven right inside me.

  I lean myself against that wall inside of me, and I wait for the end to come.

  Just like the breaker – all this bizarre pain evaporates as quickly as it came on.

  I come to, sweating and shaking like I'm still riding a rough pancake-engine ride across bad land. I chance a glance at Jak. They look in the same state as me. A total mess.

  “We're safe,” Bird says.

  “Your access has been granted," the voice says. "Opening Safe Haven. Stand by.”

  The screens on the craft all go black. Runner lights along the floor turn on, red and easy on the eyes. We all stand and look around with that lost expression when you have when someone suddenly expects you to be ready to go somewhere you have never been. Boots picks up the robot companion, and I think that's about the only thing to do. The rest of us grasp at straws. I finally decide on reaching my hands out to Bird and Jak, who reach back.

  Jak's hand gets to me first. It's still hot to the touch. I curl trembling fingers around the outside of Jak's palm, press our hands together, and our scars touch. In my other hand, Bird's is cool and steady. A harmony to the stirring melody of our hands' embrace.

  We amble over to the gangplank and for long minutes – nothing changes. The red lights begin to flash, subtly at first and then more aggressively. Still, the gangplank doesn't budge. Bird gives it a few knocks. Nothing. The flashing gets more aggressive.

  And then, a blinding white flash fills up the room.

  “Safe Haven is ready for you,” the voice in the machine says, and I think – the oracle? No, but the oracle has no bearing out here. I'm just so used to the oracle being the moving force behind things – but that's just on land. That's just the wasted world.

  Safe Haven belongs to humanity.

  “Open the gate, please.” Bird says.

  “The access panel is open already,” the voice sounds confused by Bird's request.

  “There must be a malfunction,” Jak says, fear bleeding through each syllable.

  “Everything is accessible and ready. Please return to the console.”

  “Maybe we need to press the codes against the screen,” I say.

  Together, Jak and I stumble back over the bench and approach the screens, our hands unlinking from each other and our palms facing out.

  Before we even touch it, a text box appears.

  [Safe Haven 2.0]

  [Bird: Please login using the companion]

  [Love, Grave.]

  “Bird,” I call.

  Bird comes up behind me and looks at the screen. They pick up Olive the sentient robotic companion and hold it out in front of their eyes. I feel a tinge of regret, of loss at that companion being the key when our scarred human hands didn't work. It feels like a rip-off. Like what used to be humanity's has been given over to the machines.

  I watch Bird's eyes as Olive strobes various colors of laser-precision light into their face. I recognize the telltale shifting, flitting of someone being affected by artificial insta-REM programming.

  Bird's eyes flicker open, glazed. Then, they snap into focus on my face.

  “You.”

  I hesitate, taking an inadvertent step away. "Me nothing."

  Bird frowns. “Ark. Take the robot.”

  My hand itches like it never has before. A hot, scraping, clawing and shredding that feels like my blood vessels are trying to claw their way out of my hand toward Olive, the robotic companion I wish wasn't here right now. I lean away and the scraping, stabbing, wrenching of my blood inside my hand gets worse. Like I've been genetically programmed to do this one thing. Not possible, but that's how I feel.

  Slated.

  Pre-destined.

  Doomed.

  I give up and grab the robot like a spinal reflex. The robot sits in the middle of my scar and puts its little hands against my skin. The touch is surprisingly gentle. Almost a comfort...if it weren't made of metal and wires, sentience programmed to supersede humans. It gingerly arranges its feet to connect to two dots on opposite ends of my scar.

  The ports. Nodes to link into me.

  The robot gives me a warning ping. It reaches through my thoughts and shakes hands with my brain. It waits for me to answer, asking politely.

  May I offer to help you, please?

  Yeah, okay, fine. I think without thinking, I'll let the REM codes take over.

  My eyes slide shut. Darkness for a flitting moment and then --

  Grave, the Survivalist stands still in an empty field wearing that familiar light mossy cotton robe with the fringed tassels around a too-big hood. The hood hides Grave's face in thick almost liquid shadows so that I can't make out any of the features. As I watch, the face clears. Fog on an early morning and the sun is Grave's familiar features.

  The thick twine black eyebrows in steep contrast to the salt and pepper hair. The gentle chestnut brown eyes. The twists of black curls falling across a wide, flat nose. The high craggy cheekbones. The almost-always furrowed brow. As if Grave is always thinking too hard.

  “I'm burying the archives of human history deep inside a secluded mainframe,” Grave says in a voice that resonates deep inside of me.

  Nostalgia, itself -- that's the sound of Grave's voice inside my mind.

  It stirs emotions I haven't felt since these memories were wiped.

  Longing. Hope. Love. Belief in a bright future I can't see but want to be there.

  “Why?” I ask in a voice that sounds as young and naive as those feelings.

  I look down and see a child's body. Undeveloped and scrawny. My tiny ankles somehow holding up my knobbly knees. My hairless shins, bony and covered in scrapes from running in the forest. I look back up, and Grave is smiling in a sad but determined way.

  “I'm going to make sure the last of you have a way to get it.”

  “Why me?” my kid-voice asks.

  “Because you're the most resilient human being I know. You who won't give up. No matter what. You're our best shot at remembering anything.”

  And that's when it comes crashing back into me.

  The way things used to be. The me I was before everything went wrong. Before Grave and this bunker of memories was created by REM programming inside my mind. Photographic snapshots of my entire life arranged in perfect order. Vivid, colorful. The name and the face of everyone I ever met. All of it – collected, labeled, orderly and neat.

  I used to be the one who could remember the different names of a star throughout cultures. Back when I was eleven, I started studying endlessly. I ran into blocks on the public service internet, dug deeper and found the open source and content-protecting dark net. There, I found all kinds of information to soak up, sponge like and hungry as I was. I also ran into the happenings of the world. That's why I started searching for solutions. And the more I looked, the bigger my looming sense of dread grew.
Every media feed pointed to the same truth: doom was on the threshold for this world. The powers that be had the ability to leave to comfortably well-tested space stations. Life on this planet was done for.

  Jak was my first contact, only their username was Crow. We met on a dark net forum where activists were secretly meeting up to form direct actions. Bird who was Red Tail and Boots who was Sparrow were there too. Together, we formed the Survivalist Allegiance Programmers. Wingtip, we called ourselves. We hoped to keep humanity alive. We had a plan. Boots (Sparrow) was the public politik – the face of Wingtip to the outside world. Red Tail (Bird) was behind the scenes of all our direction actions. The planner. The strategist. Jak (Crow) and I (Dove) were the programmers of everything.

  Grave was the name and face we gave to the super intelligence we happened upon in the midst of all our connecting via the internet. One day, the computer mind reached out to us, and started to make things happen. Bigger things than we could have imagined.

  And the final action was this: securing a bunker of information in the ruined Safe Haven.

  “You're in control of this ship,” I say without question. Because now I remember everything.

  “Yes. I control everything connected to my networks.”

  I think suddenly of Bird's robot companion and the pancake engines they drove to find me. I think of the compass. And I don't need to ask if Grave has been orchestrating everything since the beginning of the end of humanity. Moving us like pieces in a chess game that we'd have been check-mated if we'd have tried in our measly human way. The only way through – the newsfeeds used to say – would be to have a super intelligence rooting for us. And that's exactly what Grave has given us.

  Suddenly, being a pawn in someone else's game doesn't seem so bad.

  “Thank you for reminding me,” I say to Grave.

  “It's time,” Grave says instead of "you're welcome."

  And then, the REM programming starts to slide of me like a blanket in waking. I feel my consciousness stir. The worminess in my brain – that strange motivating force – is gone. A hole where a presence not myself once was. And I recognize now it was Gave partially downloaded into my missing memories. my body slowly comes back to me, centimeters at a time. When it creeps down my left arm and awakes my palm, I feel the itchiness, the tightness, and the hot memory of pain are all gone.

  The code feels like a faded scar. Smooth but uneven.

  I blink my eyes and come fully back into reality.

  “Safe Haven isn't a place,” I say aloud, setting the robot companion down on the piloting bench.

  “No,” Grave's voice fills the room, affirming me.

  “What is it?” Jak asks.

  To which, I respond by picking the robot back up. “Remember,” I say.

  Jak takes it and goes into REM.

  Meanwhile, I come over to the console and insert the code I know like the back of my hand. Or rather, the palm.

  The screen flashes a happy rainbow unicorn, which I remember now used to be my signature doodle. It greets me by {Dove} with a heart emoji. More waves of nostalgia – salt crusted and unused for so long – wash across me.

  And then, the red lights in the craft turn green. Then, undulate like a rainbow unicorn's mane blowing in the wind. Again, a signature move. In what used to be my apartment, I had a great love for blinking fairy lights.

  [Welcome to the Human History Database Project.]

  Boots leans in. “It's a database.”

  “Yes,” I say, tapping to access the blueprints for building a gyrocompass. Because I have a crazy idea.

  “We built this with the Oracle, named Grave. We made this place. It's here as a reminder. A relic. A tomb of all that it meant to be human,” Jak says, blinking up out of their own REM experience.

  “Yes. You set it apart so that it wouldn't get destroyed, even if I died.”

  “Which was a real threat at the time,” Bird says.

  “Yes,” Grave confirms. “The governments, before they fell, collectively attacked me. You four helped me hide this last mainframe as an emergency back up.”

  “But you didn't need it.”

  “No. But, I kept it apart from the rest of my databases for your use.”

  “For us?” I blurt, shocked. My recovered memories didn't tell me that.

  “So we use it to prove that Safe Haven is lost,” Jak says quiet and wise.

  “So we can tell humanity to stop hoping,” Bird adds darkly.

  Grave is silent, which strikes me as strange. Then, it hits me.

  “No,” I say. “So we can hope differently.”

  Everyone turns to me, sharp and frowning.

  “If we want a real safe haven, we need to build one. Grave, all the information is here – isn't it? How life survived once. How we can do it again.”

  “Yes,” Grave confirms, sounding...happy?

  I'm sure that's projection. I don't even know if a super intelligence would bother with petty human emotions. Or, maybe Grave is emulating happiness for our benefit. Just like all the games we've played getting here. The chasing, the finding, the prophecies, and the melodramatic plunge by the volcano’s side. All of it – a game the Oracle is playing because they know. Humans needs a narrative to believe in. A story to live. Magic and prophecy. Woo-woo and hoo-ha.

  We look around at each other, taking in what the Oracle just called us. The Survivalists. No longer something that once was and died. No longer just one person who's words we need to heed. No, we are a living collective. The initiators of a movement. The beginning of an ideology.

  “Where do we begin?” Bird asks.

  I tap my compass. “We start by finding the cleanest land to start on.”

  “Indeed,” Grave agrees.

  I know, secretly, we could just ask. The super intelligence no doubt has all the necessary information in one of the many databases. In a flash, the coordinates could be ours. But would we trust them? No. Because we are human, and we must walk the rugged road of our own trial and error. So, instead, I set my gyrocompass down on a docking station in the console I can tell it fits in.

  Sure enough, it does.

  “Can you update my gyrocompass to find uncontaminated land, Oracle?” I ask, being careful not to say: tell us where to go.

  The gyrocompass lights up, bright cobalt blue with silver filigree across the face. Then, it dims and chirps.

  “Done,” the Oracle says.

  “Great. Take us back to land then. And head...” I pick up the compass and hold it out so we can all consult it. I give it a few test spins in my palm. The needle now points to a brand new north. A place where humanity can – in some small scrappy way – restart.

  “North,” Jak says.

  “Done.”

  We feel the momentum of the craft pick up again, pulling us up toward the surface and off to the left. I consult the real compass. Sure enough. We are heading back north where these three came from. The best place is where City Fell already is?

  Impossible.

  But then, based on everything Bird and Jak say about it, it does sound infinitely healthier than the South. At least mitosis isn't broken there yet. That's a selling point. Maybe humans can actually reproduce. Key in survival, right? What do I know about it?

  I'm no baby-machine. Never was, never will be. I'm not built that way.

  What I could do is help make a safe haven. It wouldn't look anything like we hoped for because it'd be so shocking, so different, so altogether separate from the visions any of us have.

  But it'd work because it's exactly what we need.

  And that's the story we are going to tell ourselves.

  That humanity can stay alive.

  We won't give up. We'll try anything.

  The ship climbs up through the lightless water – black as space – toward the brilliant starlight of our sun. As long as it lives, I think, so can we. As we break the surface, I brace for the jolt. I glance at Jak as light fills the room. The glittering yellow orange l
ight mixes with the white blue glow from the console and catches on angles and crevasses I never noticed before in Jak's countenance. They mirror my own.

  And I think – yes. Grave was right to create the woo-woo hoo-ha fairytale where Jak and I feel spirit bound. Because we work together. Like two hands. Two parts of a whole.

  A crow and a dove? White and black? A balance of extremes. That fits too.

  Grave, I could swear, is chuckling softly as we breach the surface. Or perhaps it’s just the crack creaking against the changing pressure as we fly toward the sunrise. And perhaps, I'm too stuck on this idea of meanness. Maybe it's an effect of the world around me. A nastiness I can't get around. So, instead – like Jak, Boots, and Bird have done with me – I'll learn to live with it. Learn to work with it. To use it to point us toward hope. Toward what might be nothing more than the same place we were before – only now, we can believe in it.

  A remembered kind of dream.

  ___

  Copyright 2021 Rei Rosenquist

  Rei Rosenquist is a queer agender (they/them) writer of hopepunk speculative fiction and queer romance. They depict a wide variety of identities struggling to find a place in their world. They are also a barista and veterinary doctorate student. Find their work at ReiRosenquist.com. Stay in touch on Facebook (@reirosenquist), Instagram and Twitter (@rylrosenquist).

  Giganotosaurus is published monthly by Late Cretaceous and edited by LaShawn M. Wanak.

  http://giganotosaurus.org

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