Notopia

  The three to two ratio was all he needed to justify the implementation of his plan. Now, all he needed was a calamity of some sort to put it in motion, and this recent dream collision might just be the ticket. The Dreamer/Seeker gathering being held this evening would be just the place to announce this new process.

  The crowd at the park gathered as expected. Dreams mingled with seekers in an odd twist of meet and greet. Notopia itself stocked the food and drink tables in a potluck fashion, complete with paper plates and pressed paper utensils. Several mobile trash receptacles that said, “Thank you” every time anything was deposited into them roamed the grounds, and in typical Notopia style, whatever found its way into the cans instantly vanished.

  On stage, Roger walked across to a podium and spoke into the microphone. “Welcome everyone, Dreams and Seekers alike! I wish to thank our broadcasting company for putting this little event together. Go right ahead with all your discussions and networking out there. I’m quite sure that if anything significant is said up here, it will be on the news broadcast later this evening. Now, here is my favorite news journalist, Delilah Roberts.”

  Roger directed Delilah courteously to the microphone amongst a spattering of applause. “Thank you, Roger, and again welcome everyone! I want to say that I hope this event is as successful as the prior ones have been. I know that within days of last month’s social, nearly 30 seekers and dreams departed Notopia. Yes, we are a little sad when folks leave, but we know both are much happier in their coexistence together. So please talk, mingle, and search, and I wish you all the best of luck.” With that, Delilah waved for some people to join her on stage. “We have five dreams we will spotlight for you tonight. They are each going to give their story and then join you for the balance of the evening.” Delilah looked at the first dream to speak before turning back to the crowd. “Well, it certainly looks like someone has big dreams!”

  Cumulo stepped up to the microphone. “Hello everyone!” His stature, demeanor, and confident smile captivated the audience. “I am not alone here today. I have three companions here with me,” he announced while waving at Nimbus, Strata, and Cirrus, who waved back exuberantly. “We bring teachings of inner happiness and confidence to those who suffer in life without it. If that touches your dream, please come by and see us and say hi!” Cumulo waved in a departing gesture to the crowd and stepped down.

  One by one, the dreams stated their purpose. Some were grand, some were humble, and some ventured into realms whose purpose was not recognizable. As they finished, they stepped off the stage and mingled into the crowd.

  Roger went back to the microphone. “Thank you for sharing those dreams. I hope you will all find a match this evening. I want to share with you the latest figures on matches. As of last night, Notopia has reached what I think is a critical juncture. There are now three seekers for every two dreams. Now I don’t want people to get alarmed. We all know that seekers more often arrive well before dreams, and perhaps this is only a temporary circumstance. We do not want seekers claiming dreams that aren’t theirs, only to have them die needlessly. Also, we don’t want dreams, in being anxious to be discovered, to latch on to seekers falsely. I am announcing a new program that will introduce newly arriving seekers to Notopia on a case by case basis. The individual education sessions will be conducted by competent seekers and should reduce the rate of false connections and speed up the rate of settling in. So, if any seekers out there are willing to help out, please register at the Museum Office. They have all the information there. We would like all seekers to sign up. Let us know whether you wish to participate or not. Thank you all again for coming.” Roger smiled and waved. Now, with his plan underway, a happy group of seekers would soon be turning over the information needed to help destroy this place.

  Not everyone in Notopia had gone to the park that night. Leo sat in his basement with four others. There was Charles, Phil, Enrique, and Shelly, all of whom had been in Notopia for several years. They had met several times before at picnics and other public events, but tonight things were somber.

  “I’m sorry you lost that dream, Leo. Why wouldn’t she stay?” Shelly asked.

  Shelly was most likely the oldest person in Notopia. She had straight, shoulder length, grey hair. Her glasses gave her an intelligent look and her thin frame, with her perfect posture, commanded respect. She held a doctorate in literature, and her 12 books covered relationships, travel, cooking, philosophy, and motherhood. She was patient and loving, and her mind was very sharp. “Leo, did you ever find out what Roger said to the last dream you talked to?”

  “She was adamant that Roger told her there was no longer a seeker here for her. The man is up to something awful, I can feel it,” Leo said.

  “Feel it? All we do here is feel things, Leo. Feelings don’t help us,” Charles said.

  Charles was a heavy-set man with a thick white mustache, and, like Shelly, he was older than most people in Notopia. He walked with a cane and dearly loved to read to his five rambunctious grandchildren.

  “I don’t know what to tell you, Charles. You are a fireman. You see these blue fires every day, and you see Roger do his ‘questioning.’ He is behind this, stealing our dreams, and we are left here with the hopes that they will return, or be born again or something. We have to tell someone what we know, but who?” Leo said.

  “We are all in agreement, Leo, but there is no one in authority here. There is no government, no monetary system, no one in charge of anything. What if we get all the groups together and confront Roger, tell him what we know?” Enrique continued, “I think that if we force him to tell us what he is up to we can figure out his connection to all this.”

  Enrique was a young father of three from Guatemala. It had taken him a long time to accept Notopia, mostly because he had more than enough on his plate taking care of his family and felt the thought time was not productive. He had been raised with more love than food and learned early on in life to never show his hand and never be intimidated.

  “He can easily deny it all, and besides, all of us are never here at the same time. If we weren’t all linked through the fire department, we would not suspect a thing, or believe any of it,” Leo said. “Charles, has Roger seen the video from today?”

  “I’m quite sure he has. I watched it a dozen times myself, and that was no dream randomly colliding with another one. I don’t know how or why, but that collision was deliberate and calculated. It’s bad enough that dreams are being deceived and leaving while their seekers are looking for them, but if he has created some way to keep them from arriving then I don’t know what we are going to do,” Charles said.

  “Guys, I think Enrique is right. We need to confront Roger and find out what his intentions are. It does not make any sense that he would send dreams away or prevent them from arriving. I mean, his dream is either already here or yet to arrive, and dreams are only for the betterment of all. There are no evil dreams,” Shelly said.

  “I also used to think that, Shelly, until I saw Roger’s painting. That murky abyss looking thing makes me cringe every time I see it. I swear that, now and then, I see something lurking about inside it,” Leo said.

  “That’s just the paint, Leo. You know that. His painting is just as unfinished as mine, and he has been here longer than me. I agree though, his colors are downright freaky,” Charles said.

  Leo leaned back in his chair. “I don’t know guys, suppose it’s nothing, and he is not involved at all. I would think he could be a big help with all the videotape he has. On the other hand, if this is all his doing, it might push him to start something we are not prepared to deal with.”

  “Who is the new girl, Leo?” Charles asked.

  “Her name is Gwen. She is very bright, and she is adapting faster than anyone I have ever seen. We can’t bring her in on this yet. She knows Roger in real life and apparently they are close friends.”

  “Perhaps she can shed some light on him from his real-life persona,” S
helly said.

  “She is very close to him. I didn’t get the impression they were lovers or anything like that, just long-term close friends. I can try to talk to her, but it will be difficult not to arouse suspicions; she is very astute.”

  There was a pounding on the door—the familiar two slow knocks. Leo opened the door and in came a gray-haired elderly lady. “You guys are not going to believe what happened at the park tonight,” Jill chimed in without any greetings. “We are all supposed to go to the museum and register for something called a Seeker Assistant Program.”

  The room rumbled with murmured objections to this notion as Jill raised her hands to calm them. “He wants to know where all the people live so he can send over ‘greeters’ to orientate the new arrivals and guide everyone to their dream.”

  “That’s BULL! He has something else in mind. I know it,” Enrique said, and he glared about the room. “We all know it! We have got to stop him!”

  Chapter 9

  When Pandora cracked open the clay vessel (sometimes referred to as a box) given to her by Zeus, she didn’t just unleash all the evils in this world but also those from beyond. While the evils to beset man flew from the vessel, eluding her desperate attempts to contain them, a handful of others merely crawled out and made their escape on foot. These creatures were not like the others as they were not able to manifest themselves in humans at that time—they were new evils humanity will face in the future. Since they could not yet draw an existence on humans, they left earth to drift about the heavens and wait until humans evolved enough to come to them. These Myrms live beyond human comprehension both physically and spiritually. One day, they will make themselves known, and it will take far more than any conventional method to generate protection from them.

  Myrms drift throughout the universe, with some making routine visits to earth to determine if they can become a pestilence on humans yet. Myrms, like all pestilences, are very aggressive and anxious to unleash the destruction they harbor. The first Myrm to work his way into humanity was known as Shemyaza. He took over the lead position of a large group of angels who were fooled by him to do his bidding. He could not infect humans, but he could deceive angels into believing they were to interact with humans intimately and share a vast amount of technology that would aid humanity in its development. The offspring from these encounters were giants and often caused great harm to humans. When God finally learned of Shemyaza, he removed him and his band of angels from the planet.

  Since then, a few Myrms have worked their way into humanity. Most often they appear as viruses that science claims were dormant, until now, or were recently deposited on earth from a meteor or even comet dust.

  A particularly nasty Myrm is Urkabis. Urkabis is a pestilence waiting to prey on and consume human subconscious energy. He has tried, with limited success, to infect humans and Sigmund Freud first realized something was up when he discovered the Id. Urkabis’ attempt to penetrate the Id failed, and he has been searching for a subconscious entryway ever since.

  Urkabis is a particularly crafty entity. He has observed humans over thousands of years and noted a potentially useful activity utilized by all ethnic and racial groups—lies. In particular, the lies that become outlandish concocted stories to cover up a previous lie or indiscretion, or even an egregious violation of the human laws. The ones that intrigued him most were those stories that spoke of the terrors used to dissuade children from doing things. Monsters in the woods were created when a child thought about running away, or evils that lurk about when children shirk chores or tell lies themselves. Urkabis noted that all these stories had long-term effects on the subconscious minds of the humans. However, it wasn’t until he came across the human writer, Edgar Allen Poe, that a possible connection between his needs and the human subconscious came to light.

  Poe was the first to write stories of the macabre that affected adults and children, and it appeared to effect Poe as well, as he died in anguish from “brain fever.” Nobody knows what brain fever truly is, but if it were something generated from the mixing of the Id into the subconscious, then this would be a game changer for Urkabis. Urkabis found further examples in the book written by Brahms Stoker, ‘Dracula.’ This book, however, was not just a story out of nowhere. Rather, it is a pieced together conglomeration of various diary entries made by many first-hand accounts and characters themselves. Urkabis began to wonder if Vlad III, Prince of Wallachia, had been taken over by another Myrm whose name could have been, Dracula, and that Myrm began his pestilence upon humans through this fear-filled tale of vampirism. Urkabis then noted that many deaths associated with Dracula were officially recorded by humans as brain fever.

  But how could he use this information? As he studied the case of Dracula, he learned that many humans were drawn to the concepts of immortality and all-consuming lust. The combination of these impossible outcomes left their subconscious open and vulnerable to any outside influences that could bring them closer to either ideal, but Urkabis wanted to be more than just another vampire. He also noted that people had nightmares about these vampires and the many monsters that had been fabricated. That fact fostered the first link in Urkabis’s theory. Entry to the subconscious could be attained through dreams. So, rather than the event spawning the dream, perhaps he could have the dream generate his desires. As he pondered how to get into a dream, he started to realize that dreams were not only limited to sleeping. Dreams were also the creative vehicle for artists, inventors, and engineers; in fact, all humans had dreams outside of sleep. There had to be a way to connect a dream to a person, which meant a pathway already existed, and all he would have to do is hack his way into that process.

  Urkabis recalled climbing out of Pandora’s clay vessel with numerous other Myrms. Perhaps others, like Dracula, had found ways to penetrate dreams and the human subconscious, but there were no written records beyond that of Stoker’s, until 1946, when archeologists found a number of clay pots containing ancient writings on scrolls in caves near the West Bank of the Jordan River. While much of these writings are still being deciphered, one event caught Urkabis’s attention—the story of Shemyaza and Enoch. Apparently, Shemyaza, a Myrm, had succeeded in taking over an angel’s mind, and then fooled, or controlled, the minds of 200 subordinate angels. They were subsequently cast off the earth, but he wasn’t done with his evil endeavors. During his close work spent influencing humans, he became aware of a link between human aspirations and the humans themselves. He discovered that he didn’t need to physically abuse the humans to evoke terror in them. He had found Notopia, the farmland of dreams, aspirations, and all ideas being brought to fruition by humans. Not being human, he would have free reign in this world and could begin to wreak havoc on human development.

  Shemyaza moved too fast. He failed to realize the totality of what he had found, and he hadn’t given any thought as to Notopia’s creation. It was the Collective that had created Notopia to monitor and control the dreams of humanity. Shemyaza was now something the Collective could not tolerate. The Collective never considered that an intruder would work his way into Notopia and now they needed a human to dream up a way to rid Notopia of Shemyaza. They brought Enoch to Notopia and told him he was being shown part of heaven. They showed him the problem and explained that they needed his help. They would return him to earth where he could dream up a solution away from Shemyaza’s influence, which he did.

  Urkabis put all this together and realized the only way into dreams was through Notopia, and the only way into Notopia was on a hijacked dream that was exactly like his dream. But why would a human dream be about destroying humanity? Notopia is only a facilitator for dreams that are considered favorable for humanity. So, how could a human be tricked into dreaming such a thing unwittingly?

  I need a foil, Urkabis thought as he had found a way in.

  Roger was an impressionable lad who loved to spend endless hours outdoors. He was forever building dwellings with branches that he piled up and often slep
t outside in them. He was also curious about which plants around him were edible. As he got older, he taught himself the nutritional benefits and medicinal values of the plants around him. His love for nature inspired his parents to let him go to many nature camps during the summer. Roger would write to his parents from camp, asking questions like, why do people build such big houses? And, why don’t people depend on nature more? The things he was learning in school did not seem to coincide with what was needed in real life to live on the earth. Of course, it was Urkabis who was planting these seeds of discontent in his young mind. Urkabis made them all seem so natural in their progression that all seemed very reasonable to Roger and his parents. His parents convinced him to go through college and be a part of society, at least until he had the resources to create the natural style of life that he craved. This seemed logical to Roger, and he continued to learn about nature and the earth while attending college. The more he learned, the more he became convinced that humanity was destroying the planet, and although there were some good people out there who wanted to help the earth, they were far too few to have an impact. He began to wonder how this human mindset of exploitation could be changed. Urkabis recognized the opening and was pleased.