…another short story I wrote..

Dreamland

“Dreamland! We turn your dreams into reality!”

Dreamland. The most famous invention company of the 25th century on Earth. “Inventions are made for government purposes, on a global scale, but can also be custom made…” – a pleasant female voice coming from the display explained.

Looking at the miniature table in front of him, with his freshly transplanted eyes, he started thinking whether company doormen where equally invisible five centuries ago. From what he heard, they were.

Everything from what to think, what to believe in or how to act at any given moment was also engraved into him. He was a Class 5 humanoid and he couldn’t afford the autonomy of individual thinking or conclusion making that was specific for Class 1 and Class 2 humanoids, even though there was some talk that the government wanted to make some changes there as well.

Hans Archambault was an agent, and, independent thought process, which was considered to be potentially dangerous, was now completely redundant and he was glad they spared him the tedious process.

Despite doctors’ interventions, it still happened from time to time that Class 3, 4 and 5 humanoids had fantasies, even though their lives were programmed. Some said the fantasies were their wishes from their past life. It seemed you couldn’t get rid of those, not without a complete lobotomy. And lobotomy was currently reserved for offenders only.

Hans too had one of those past life wishes. As a kid, he saw Dreamland reach its prime and he witnessed many almost unfathomable inventions turn to reality as if they were created by a wave of a magic wand.

He liked to imagine going down the yellow brick road to the Wizard of Oz, much like in the story read by his parents when he was a child, to ask him for courage, and brain, and a life outside poverty.

Unfortunately for him, his parents, both offenders, were lobotomized before being neutralized. After his time in orphanage, Hans got a job as a doorman at Dreamland. It would be paradox, if his new bionic eyes and that tile embedded in the brain, allowed Hans to know what that is.

Without knowing it, Hans was close to getting his biggest wish come true. He wished for teleportation more than anything. To see how other people or other species lived somewhere else. “The impossible invention” was considered as alchemy of body and soul for centuries, an inadmissible act against all laws of physics. And physics was still the same as it was five or ten centuries ago, just as it was during the ancient Greek philosophers.

What they didn’t know is that people have travelled to other spheres and galaxies completely unaware of it. In their dreams. Some managed to meditate to such states, but most did it unintentionally, while dreaming.

“Dreamland” had no illusions that they could package human consciousness and sub-consciousness into a box and sell it, so they decided not to pay this occurrence any significant importance.

Hans, a Dreamland employee, deprived of his individual thought and decision making capabilities, was still living his dream somewhere inside.  And one lazy afternoon, while taking a nap near the system he was maintaining, he went far, far away, further than he ever went before.

Some extraordinary bright beings, in this unusually bright dream, told him that he didn’t have to live like this. That all people living on Earth are imprisoned by their own fears. They also told him that the plate in his head is a lie. That those things they made us all believe in, are, in fact, impossible. The voice was telling to a Hans, who never felt so alive, that he is free. That he was born free and that he will die free.

Shock took over him when he woke up. But Hans tried to revive such a special dream. To verify all that he was told. To imagine that there was no plate in his head. For a moment, a resistance that was also programmed in his temples stood between him and his freedom. The next moment, a wave of unbelievable happiness and love spread all over him in all the colours of the rainbow.

There was no Dreamland building as he sat on a meadow surrounded with flowers, mountains and a river stream. Hans never saw a river before. Or a mountain. Or a forest.

He never knew the smell of flowers and their colours. They told them, while he was still a child, that nature “resigned” and that it ceased to exist. They told them that the new simulations of nature were much more bearable.

Hans made a flower coronet, surrounded with endless green meadows bursting with colourful flowers, fruit trees, with a dark green, thick, tall forest lying in the distance. He could hear the river ripple as he bent over the small bridge that emerged right then, just so he could better see the small fish swimming in the crystal clean water, glistening with golden sun. He soaked in the smell of flowers which swung in unison, drowning the buzzing of the bees and the song of the grasshoppers. He instinctively knew that those sounds belonged there and that those small animals form a complete harmony with the landscape that surrounded him.

There were no other people near him, or any buildings, or any signs of life as he knew it. Even so, something genuine, cold and warm at the same time, something with a smile of a father and a hug of the wind, so far but so familiar, gripped his soul and what was left of his battered body and didn’t let it go. And he never felt that safe in his life.

He chose a tree, one he thought was slightly prettier than the rest. It shone with big red fruits, flirtatiously dropping the branches almost to the ground. Even though they seemed attractive he decided not to damage the perfect harmony by picking a fruit.

He heard laughter and he hoped that he wasn’t alone, he hoped others too discovered teleportation.