Great Escapes (Prologue and Chapter One)

***GREAT ESCAPES***

 
PROLOGUE
They thought I would forget.

They thought I would just lie down, satisfied with clean sheets, and forget all they told me. No matter that it was the truth, but they knew I would never catch on. They had serums in syringes especially formulated to make a man forget. Comfortable, clean rooms I was supposed to be happy to sleep in, even if only for a few months before being tossed out and left to the unenlightened. Unenlightened myself, as they would have it. That's what the needles were supposed to do, anyway. Yes, friends, they thought I would be just fine because you can't miss what you don't think you ever had. The truth is malleable, right? They merely implanted it in my head to see how I would respond. In those illumined months the truth was charted with meticulous care, as filtered through my own personal experiences, opinions, dreams, ambitions, hopes, desires...and nightmares. If only they had surgically removed it after that first bad dream I would probably not bear such a grudge as I do. I wouldn't give a rat's ass about the truth. When it was given or how it was taken away. But they waited.

It is a single nightmare that drives me towards the lost truth. The truth I lost. Truth I never would have had and likely would never know again. Not in it's totality. Maybe not at all. It is a long nightmare...6 months in the space of a single night's slumber. I've heard it said, and likely it's true, that the dream state lasts only a few seconds. Not even half a moment and yet the suspension of corporeal time allows the experience of moments, hours, days, weeks, months, years, who knows but we could experience entire lifetimes between one second and the next. 

So 6 months, really, is nothing. Right? Nothing at all. Zilch. Nada. That's what it all comes down to. Just expendable dream time. No matter that the world turned hateful towards me, it was only for a second or two. Imprisoned in an air conditioned, nuclear-powered incubator, convinced that I'd done something deserving a life sentence. 

They knew better. 

Only 6 months. 

Only 13 seconds. 

Ah, to know the things I was told, settling even for those 13 seconds alone. Wondrous, glorious prophecies, eons easily condensed into 6 months. It should have been enough. More than most people will ever see, feel, taste, touch, smell, understand, comprehend, know with the absolute certainty even reality does not offer. Seconds & months, I should have realized that this knowledge could not be hosted for the duration of a lifetime. There's only room in this universe for one God.

So they tell me it was a dream, and like all dreams it can (and will) be forgotten. I know this is true, at least the part about how they are forgotten. Only makes sense...it's easy to recall a special moment in the past, triggered, perhaps, by a song or a smell or the way a woman walks. But who can recall a  single second? Not enough time for the embers of emotion to be fanned into deja vu. Add up all the seconds spent dreaming and you still won't have enough time to catch and codify the collective memories. Maybe a handful will make a lasting impression. Yet even they feel tenuous, as if they could slip through the cracks into forgetfulness at any time. No matter...you'll reach out and grab them, and you'll hold on to them like a character in an old black and white serial. The anti-hero who grasps his enemy's hand, with inconceivable strength, to keep him from falling off a high cliff and spiraling down to a rocky death below. Spin and twist to your will, they remain. The atoms of time are little more than stragglers still convinced, despite the apathy of others, that they are capable of something lasting. 

Maybe it actually was a dream. 

One of theirs. 

The only difference being that they had the luxury of waking.  

CHAPTER ONE
"Great Escapes Dream Implant Manufacturing Company". 

The sign is rather nondescript considering the implications of all it represents. The building, relatively small and unremarkable. Nothing at all like what you'd expect from a firm specializing in the manufacture and sale of dreams. But it isn't even a consideration for the proprietors. There is  logic in low overhead. It doesn't take a lot of room to store a million tiny micro chips, even if the information coded in them contains millenia & galaxies. For all we knew there are more lives represented in a single bowl of chipped quartz than have ever actually been lived out in the real world. The "real" world...ha! Now that's a concept that's fast becoming antiquated. 

There aren't a lot of people who work in the manufacturing wing. The technology has become so advanced, practically perfected, that there's really no reason to keep engineers or technicians on the staff. Just a handful of coders to tweak what already exists in the archives. A few minor details. Nevertheless, details that will make a world of difference in the customer's experience. The tone of a lover's voice. The level of hatred towards an enemy. Just a touch of melancholy when a lucid moment  suggests it's not real. Slight variations of the implanted dream's perceived reality as specified by the customer cannot be tolerated. These things are important because the customer could actually retain the "dream" long enough to recall possible defects after waking. There's nothing worse than signing up for a trip to the Bahamas and winding up in some backwoods town in Arkansas. Oh, well, perhaps there is something worse. Not a few cases, kept "hush hush" by the corporation, have resulted in the necessity of ice pick lobotomies for customers who have not paid for, and did not want, the special "Halloween" temp-paradigm (which, I assure you, is every bit as terrifying as you'd expect from an implant based on the holiday). 

So what though, eh? You're gonna wake up anyway, right? That's all fine and good and seems like the logical point-of-view, but you forget that you're in an implanted dream. Until, maybe, the last few dream moments. It's only natural that such a situation would be cause for disgruntlement. With a full money-back guarantee the coders had to be very careful not to let such intrusions occur. 

Then again, very few people had ever succeeded in getting the best of the Great Escapes money-back guarantee. Litigation was usually thwarted by the tried-and-true "Dream-Within-a-Dream" defense.

The plant was located on the east side of mile marker 200 on Interstate 49, where, for the most part, it existed unseen to passing motorists. It was situated in this desolate region for a reasonable reason. You see, dream implanting had become such an inseparable part of everyone's lifestyles...much as the Internet was in the early 21st century...that it's materials, technological secrets, and everything about it, right down to the junior coders, were as closely guarded as even the massive storehouses of nuclear weapons that littered the land like a sea of push pins stuck in a map. It's brain trusts, time warping machines, indigenous templates and even the massive holograph integrator, all were as safely defensible as was humanly possible. Fortified by a shield dome capable of withstanding any and all atomic explosions, the Great Escapes Dream Implant Manufacturing Company was the safest fortress on the planet. No one knew this, of course, other than the chief CEO, a few senior officers from each branch of the military and the President of the United States. 

So, how did I get here?

There were a few among the Great Escapes ranks who thought it would be unethical to ride out a nuclear attack knowing they would come out on the other side unscathed. Very few citizens had even heard of a shield dome and fewer still had the ways and means to purchase and maintain one. "How can we live with ourselves," said these dissenters, "knowing that 99.99999% of mankind will be annihilated while we sit here talking about the meaning of life, heaven and hell, the nature of reality?" These qualms were quickly discarded when the truth set in...human beings, the entire race, were either dreaming or thinking they must be dreaming. There is comfort in believing you are asleep even if you're wide awake.
**************

I'm going to die. 

I can almost hear the warning sirens in the distance. The lights are flashing on and off. A strobe effect that would knock an epileptic to his knees. I know the camera is pointed towards me. I'm pretty sure that the postmortem assemblers have enough footage of my body so that I don't have to worry about abnormalities. Pretty sure. My mind races to confirm. I mentally scan my entire body, checking off each inch until I'm certain they've got it all in the memory banks. Inch by inch. Limb by limb. 10 fingers & 10 toes. Eyes and mouth and turned up nose. Satisfied for the most part, still something nags at me. Something very small, yet important enough that it distracts me from the seconds that are left before the bomb lands, point blank, on top of the cell...In the frenzy it hits me...

I turn around, bend over, pull down my pants and stretch wide my ass cheeks, hoping that the camera will squeeze off a shot before it's too late. I stand there, bent, for too long, not long enough, until the man with the stick and gun opens the door and says, "Pull your pants up".

I do just as he says, choosing to believe that his authoritative tone was not a command but a confirmation that now, thank the Holy god in heaven, I am complete. The assemblers have everything they need to put me back together before I wake up. 

I close my eyes.

I say a most sincere prayer of repentance, then the required mantra: 

"Now I lay me down to sleep
I pray the Lord my soul to keep
If my soul the Lord should take
I pray He finds me when I wake."

After the first "Amen" I take a peek to see where I am, hoping to see you by my side. 

Four grey walls. 

In my fear I wonder...are you still there, waiting for me to arise? Will you be there when I open my eyes? Will you be in the other room waiting for me to rouse myself, grumpy as usual in the morning? Will I wake up to an empty house as you've gone out to get us some coffee and donuts? Or will your absence be permanent? Through death? Disregard? Disagreement? Will I feel the soft brush of your breath on my shoulder or the vacuum left behind by spent rage? 

Were you ever there at all? 

I chant the supplemental mantra:

"Now the Lord my soul doth keep
In Him I find the dreamless sleep
Within His love I wish not wake
Though offered back, I will not take.

Amen."

**************************

This was the first defective dream implant I received from Great Escapes.