Project: Dreamer

by Michael D. Britton

Project: Dreamer

  by

  Michael D. Britton

  * * * *

  Copyright 2012 by Michael D. Britton

  It was just like that nightmare he kept having lately, only this time it was real.

  Program Agent Delta Nineteen, privately known as Ben Vincent, felt his fingers slipping. There was no way he could hold on much longer. The gravel on the ledge was digging into the flesh of his fingers, palms, and forearms. The muscles in his hands and arms were beyond cramped – they were completely seized up – and the tendons in his wrists and forearms were stretched almost to the point of snapping. He was starting to lose the feeling in his fingertips – a blessing because of the searing pain, but no help when trying to hang on.

  It had been over an hour now, and he knew he could not stay like this indefinitely. He was stuck – no way to pull himself up, and nobody around to help him. Reaching for his tool belt would certainly mean falling.

  The cold air lashing against his face, he surrendered to cold logic: he was out of options.

  He resigned himself to his fate, and released his grip.

  He felt the pull of gravity draw him downward, accelerating. Much to his surprise, he felt a sense of relief, rather than a fear of death.

  He took a long, deep breath, realizing that in the last moments he had been holding his breath as part of his effort to keep from slipping. The cool air struck his lungs in a soothing manner, somehow diminishing the panic his mind told him he should be feeling.

  Ben had heard stories of people on the brink of death having their whole lives pass before their eyes. He had never really understood what that meant. It seemed silly to him that a person would have all of his memories play out in a compressed form as he was perishing. What would be the point of such a mental spectacle? A chance, perhaps, for regrets – even deathbed repentance?

  As he continued to fall, his thoughts began to wander further, toward those inevitable regrets. Why had he even accepted this assignment? With his seniority, he could have passed, and waited for another. And while he was waiting, a week would’ve passed and he would have retired from the Program. Thirty years old, and free to spend all his time doing as he wished with all the wealth he had accumulated during his ten year career.

  Ten years was all that was ever expected – or allowed – for someone who’d pledged to the Program. Experts had determined that any longer than ten years would do irreparable harm. Ben had the presence of mind to see the irony of the fact that irreparable harm was now coming at nine years and fifty-one weeks. But he just could not resist one more chance to do what he loved, even if it was considered the most dangerous of all jobs.

  That thought returned Ben from his musings to the present circumstance. He suddenly realized that he’d been falling for a very, very long time. Why had he not struck the bottom yet? He looked around himself and noticed that he could not make out anything distinctly. It was as if he was falling through a thick fog, the light growing increasingly brighter and whiter the further he fell.

  After a while, he started to become immune to the sensation of falling. His stomach stopped sending the signals to his brain that indicated a steep and speedy descent. Instead, he felt like he was simply floating, weightless, in an endless sea of whiteness.

  Ben couldn’t remember it happening, but the whistling wind that had been rushing past his body had gradually faded to nothingness. All was silent and white, like a winter morning after it had snowed all night.

  Except for the fact that he was in a featureless void. With the lack of a falling sensation, it seemed to Ben that his descent had stopped. But that made no sense.

  He looked around himself in all directions, but all was the same – white and empty.

  How long had he been in this place – this non-place?

  In an effort to make sense of his situation, Ben pulled up his sleeve and glanced at his watch. The titanium timepiece had belonged to his father, who had passed it to Ben when he’d told him he was planning on following in his father’s footsteps by becoming a Program Agent. Father had started his family after his retirement, as was typical for those who chose this career. To try to have a family before retirement would be foolishness -- since only one in three survived to retirement.

  The watch still bore the scuffmarks on its face from when Ben had taken his first misstep on his first assignment, almost ten years ago. He’d been assigned as a backup that day for a more experienced man, and had to step in at the last minute when his superior had made a fatal mistake. Ben had barely avoided the pitfall that took the life of the other man, and managed to bang up his watch a little in the process of escaping. That had been the first time of many that Ben had narrowly avoided a sudden end to his life.

  But this time, whatever end he was expecting to his life was not coming suddenly at all.

  On a whim, Ben removed his watch and held it in front of his face, then let go. He expected it to float upward, since he assumed he was still falling, and the watch was much lighter than his body. But the watch simply hung there in front of his face. He poked at it with his finger, and it slowly floated away from him, spinning gently on a vertical axis. Before it got out of reach, he grabbed it and placed it back on his wrist. This was very strange.

  Before pulling his sleeve down, he noticed the time on his watch. It was now showing three minutes earlier than it had when he first looked at it. A closer, longer look proved that it was in fact running backwards.

  Very strange, indeed.

  Things were not as Ben had assumed. He started to realize he was not going to die after all, and the realization helped snap him out of his daze and focus his thoughts. It was time to resume his work and figure out what was going on.

  He decided to test his environment by speaking.

  “Hello?” he called out. The sound was flat. There wasn’t the slightest hint of an echo or a reverberation. It was as if he had spoken the word with his face buried in a pillow, except the word sounded clear. He tried again, only louder. “HELLO?”

  The result was the same. He seemed to exist in a bright nothingness – no gravity, no wind, naught but pure whiteness, and no other objects but him.

  Oh, and there was that little “time running backwards” thing.

  Ben started to wonder if perhaps he was dead, and in that place that religious people called hell. But he quickly pushed the thought aside – he’d never been one to subscribe to theories of life after death. As far as he’d always been concerned, death was the end. You’re alive, you die, then nothing but silent, thoughtless, dreamless blackness forever.

  But this was not blackness.

  And he was still in his body and could even speak. No, this was not anything like what he’d expected death to be. Clearly, something else was going on here. But what? Where was the ground that he had expected to bring an abrupt end to his life?

  For that matter, where was everything?

  Ben noticed something else was missing, too. The pain in his fingers, hands and arms was gone. He was not numb, just no longer in pain. He looked at his hands, and was surprised to see no broken skin, no blood. His wounds had been healed.

  With this latest mystery, Ben felt it was time apply the problem solving skills he’d acquired in ten years on the job. This situation, he decided, would be his final challenge.

  To begin, he would return to the rudiments of his training. First step is to assess the environment, so Ben made a mental list of the attributes he could ascertain. The first descriptor to come to mind was of course, white. Beyond that, he could only come up with cold, but not uncomfortably so, weightless, no other objects and chronometric irregularity. He could not sm
ell or taste anything, and the only sound in the environment emanated from him – his breathing and heartbeat.

  Next step was to inventory his tools. My body, came first. That was followed by my clothing, my watch, my standard tool belt, my five senses, and the most important thing in his arsenal, my wits.

  Assuming he wasn’t actually going crazy.

  Of course, he also noted that his watch might be malfunctioning. However, it still made the inventory because timekeeping was not its only function.

  Now that he had a description of his environment and an inventory of his resources, he needed to assess the threats to his wellbeing and discover the options at his disposal. As far as threats went, there seemed to be none that he could think of. Only an eventual need for food, water, shelter and sleep; but the immediate lack of those required resources could not really be categorized as a threat. More like something to keep in mind for later.

  As for his options, Ben could see very few. Wait, came to mind first. That was followed by some more creative possibilities. Since he had always hated waiting, he decided to work his way through the other options, one at a time.

  The first thing he did was take from his tool belt what he considered his least valuable tool – at least, what he considered most expendable right now. It was a small steel ball, that when activated, ejected a set of pitons with great force, used for securing a set of belay anchors in a cliff wall. Since there were no cliffs in this giant white space, Ben thought he would use it to test the environment. He drew his arm back and threw the ball straight out in front of him. It quickly receded into the distance, getting smaller and smaller until it disappeared from sight. It traveled in an unchanging vector – no trajectory, no curvature, and no slowing down.

  Ben made a mental note of the unusual behavior of the projectile. He was about to try the next experiment in his list, when he was struck in the back. His heart leapt in his chest. He turned as quickly as he could, considering he was floating weightlessly and had nothing to push against for support. Despite the awkwardness of floating, he was a trained professional, and his motions were fluid. As he twisted in place, he automatically assumed a defensive position. He experienced a moment of confusion when he laid eyes on his attacker: a small steel ball, floating next to him at shoulder-level.

  After the brief moment of disorientation, Ben laughed aloud. The sound was dull, almost muffled, but not quite. He reached out for his tool and placed it back in its place on his belt. At least that test had not wasted any of his resources.

  He made another mental note regarding the environment: it appears the area is finite, and somehow forms a spatial loop.

  Since he could not see much more that he could do to expand this particular experiment, Ben decided to return to the issue of his watch. He pulled back his sleeve and watched the timepiece for a while. It was still moving in reverse, rapidly and steadily. But something else caught his eye. It was not the watch, but his own wrist. On the day that he had scratched the watch, ten years ago, he’d also damaged his arm. A nasty scar had been left behind, running the length of his forearm.

  The scar was now gone.

  Rather than concern himself with the oddness of this observation, he was in a professional mindset now, so he merely noted the anomaly in his mental description of the environment, combining this latest data with his earlier realization that his latest wounds were gone: area appears to have profound healing properties.

  Ben looked at and felt various parts of his body – places he had collected other scars over the last ten years on the job. All were healed. In fact, the scar on his leg from a childhood accident was even gone. As he looked back at his watch, he wondered if time really was being turned back in this strange place.

  He quickly dismissed that theory, however, since his body was not getting any younger, and his mind and memories remained intact. He was not being turned into a child – merely being rejuvenated. Without enough data to theorize an explanation, he decided to just count it as a benefit of the situation, and move onto his next experiment.

  He pulled another tool from his belt – a high power laser. He set it to a low-energy/high output setting, which meant it could direct a focused beam of blue light over a great distance, but the beam itself was not destructive. He pointed the beam into the white nothingness, and it instantly appeared on the back of the hand holding the tool. It, like the ball, had made a full loop and returned to him.

  He had expected to be able to see the beam cutting through the white mist, the way a beam of light is visible in a dusty room, but it was invisible, indicating that there really was no mist – there was nothing at all in this area to refract or reflect the blue laser beam.

  Ben read the small digital display on the tool. It read a calculated distance of zero. He must have forgotten to recalibrate it. He tried it again, but the result was the same. According to this tool, the distance from the end point at which the laser light escaped the end of the device, through the white space and back around again to his hand, was zero.

  It made no sense. If the distance was really zero, why had the ball taken so long to make its journey around the loop? There had to be another explanation. Returning to his logic training, he concluded that there could only be two options: either the device’s distance measurement was malfunctioning, or “zero” had a different meaning in this environment to the one he had assumed.

  Since he had no way to run a diagnostic on his laser, he could only assume, from all other appearances, that it was functioning within normal parameters. Considering the other known data, Ben formed a theory. If time were really running backward, then that would affect the equation used by the laser to calculate distance. Yes, that made sense. One mystery solved.

  Sort of.

  The theory of why the laser measured the distance incorrectly still did not solve the problem of what the distance actually was, nor why time was running backwards.

  As per his training, Ben ran a sort of mental diagnostic every few minutes, to make sure his most important resource – his wits – were still functioning properly. He realized that the longer he spent in this environment, the more distant his recent memories became. He had a vague recollection of his mission – he’d been sent to Lunatropolis at first, but a lead had taken him back planetside to the mountains of Nepal. He remembered having been hanging precariously from a cliff, but it was only vague. He had no idea how he’d actually gotten here, nor how long he had been here. He was, however, starting to feel very comfortable in this environment – almost as if he’d always been here. But despite his short-term memories fading, his long term was solid. He knew who he was, he knew his job, and he still had enough wits about him to understand that he did not belong here, and that he needed to figure out where he was and how he was going to escape.

  The thought of escape from this environment gave rise to Ben’s next concern: mobility. The fact that he seemed to be floating, and the lack of any other matter, meant that he had no way to propel himself. And had he even a means to move around, it seemed there was no way to navigate, since there was nothing to use as a frame of reference.

  Once again, Ben took inventory. Perhaps he could use one of his resources as a frame of reference. He once again pulled the ball device from his tool belt. He set it in the air in front of him, and watched it float. Now he had a reference point. The only problem now was how to actually move.

  He tried using his arms and legs to mimic swimming motions, but with nothing to push against, he accomplished nothing besides floating in place feeling like a fish out of water. Then he remembered his physics. He recalled the way rockets functioned – by forcing a propellant through a narrow aperture to create thrust. He applied that concept to his current situation. He decided to use his very breath as the propellant, and his puckered lips as the aperture. Now all he had to do was choose a direction and create the thrust.

  He decided he would try to conti
nue his original direction of motion and force himself downward. Looking up, he took a deep breath, and blew with all his might. The result seemed strange at first – the ball appeared to float slightly upward. Of course, it was all relative – the ball had not moved at all – Ben had.

  The one breath had been enough to move him a few inches downward, and he was still moving, albeit very slowly. Before the ball was out of reach, Ben had a last minute change of plan. He reached out and grabbed the ball, placing it back in his tool belt. This little device had proven itself quite useful so far, and he wasn’t quite ready to part with it. Instead, he tore a small piece of cloth from his shirt and placed it in the air as his reference point. He then proceeded to blow his way downward, the piece of cloth appearing to slowly rise, until it grew very small, and finally became too distant to see at all.

  Ben theorized three possibilities for this experiment. Either he would soon discover the piece of cloth rising up from beneath him, indicating that he had looped around to be approaching it from above, or he would find an exit to this environment. The third option was his least favorite – that there was no end to the white space, and that he would float endlessly through this void without ever finding a way out.

  Once again, he recalled his training and experience, and put that option from his mind. He had learned that futile choices and dead-end results were self-defeating. Only useful, positive ideas and theories were contributions worth pondering. It would be too easy to fall into despair and give up hope if one dwelled on defeat.

  Ben kept floating and stayed in positive-thinking mode. As his point of reference had disappeared, he decided to create a new one, by tearing off another piece of cloth and leaving it behind as he continued to move downward under the force of his intermittent blowing. Once that one was gone, he did it again, repeating the process until he’d essentially left a trail of breadcrumbs. He just hoped he wouldn’t run out of shirt fragments before encountering a change in the environment.

  As an indeterminate amount of time passed, Ben thought about the breadcrumbs, and his mind wandered back to his first day in the Program. His final entrance exam test had been to find his way out of a labyrinth in the dark, while evading a pursuer and tracking another. He ended up using a breadcrumb system, to turn the other two participants against each other while Ben escaped the maze. He had been the first to use that strategy. That test, along with his other training results had been so exceptional, in both the problem-solving area and in physical performance that he’d been assigned to work directly under Administrator Field’s command.

  Field was not your typical Program higher-up. Program Administrators were lifelong positions, so they were held by civilian men and women who had never seen fieldwork. But Field was different. He’d actually spent five years in active duty before taking the Administrator position. A near-fatal mission had left him with no legs and only one arm. But his mind was still the sharpest the Establishment had seen in decades. So they made an investment. Two years of surgeries provided him with so many bio-mechanical enhancements that when they were done with him, he was more machine than man. But he was the best Administrator to ever sit in that office.

  Starting on Ben’s first day, Field had formed a special connection with the young agent. Ben was the first recruit in Field’s nine years as Administrator who had completely ignored Field’s robotic body. If he’d mentally acknowledged Field’s body at all, it was imperceptible. Field found Ben’s natural acceptance of his own unnatural state to be refreshing, and decided to take him under his wing and mentor him. Over the nearly ten years since that day, Field had proven himself a true friend as well as a tough-as-nails boss.

  Ben shook himself from his reverie and watched as another shred of his shirt vanished into the whiteness above him. Satisfied he was still moving downward at a steady rate, and careful to conserve his limited resources, he discontinued his trail of breadcrumbs. He also decided to stop propelling himself for a while, because he was starting to get a little lightheaded.

  He looked once more at his watch. Although still going in reverse, it appeared the rate was slowing. The longer he observed it, the more he could see it was slowing down. In conjunction with the slow down, he noticed when he looked below him that there was slight graying to the otherwise white surroundings. A small, indistinct area, directly below Ben, was gradually growing and darkening.

  He assumed he was reaching the end of this void. As he approached the growing darkness, he noticed his watch slow almost to a stop. The environment grew slightly warmer, and he started to feel the gentle pull of gravity on his body. That force increased as his white formless surroundings turned darker and darker. Now the darkness surrounded him, and as he looked up, he could see the white zone growing smaller and darker, until it disappeared.

  Now, all was black, and he once again felt the distinct sensation of falling, as though gravity itself had remembered Ben existed and had once again grabbed hold of him to suck him downward. The temperature had increased gradually as well. It was no longer cool, but roughly room temperature, or even a little warmer. He activated the backlight on his watch, and stared at it long enough to surmise that it had stopped completely. However, the other functions were working properly, so he concluded that it hadn’t actually stopped, but that time itself had come to a standstill in this new, pitch-black environment.

  Ben took a mental inventory once more, and decided to run some tests on this new place. He pulled his laser out of his tool belt and set it to a wide beam. The light was completely enveloped by the darkness. He moved his hand in front of the beam, just to ensure it was actually working. He could see his hand, but nothing at all beyond. He decided he did not like this situation any better than the last, since now his sense of sight was useless, reducing his already limited inventory of resources.

  Before he’d finished the thought, it seemed he could feel something under his feet. He reached down to confirm with his hand, and felt a gentle force pushing back against him. It wasn’t like touching the ground – more like pressing against the surface tension of a liquid, without actually submerging. The force seemed slightly elastic, and seemed to be growing stronger and firmer. Before long, it felt thick, even gelatinous, and after a while it seemed to coalesce into a firm enough surface that he felt like he was actually standing on it. Standing somewhere.

  With this surface under his feet, Ben now had mobility. He started walking blindly in the darkness, one hand holding his laser light, the other outstretched as a shield against unseen obstacles. The laser pointed at the ground, but the ground reflected none of the light. His footsteps were silent. If he hadn’t felt the ground under the soles of his boots, he wouldn’t have known it was there.

  Moving along cautiously, Ben’s mind wandered again. He thought about his most recent mission – the one prior to this one. Field had acted so strangely when issuing his orders. He’d acted as if he were never going to see Ben again, as though he were certain Ben would meet his fate on that mission. It was nothing overt – just something in Field’s eyes told Ben that his old friend was experiencing some kind of deep conflict regarding the orders. But Ben was a professional, and despite his closeness to Field, he knew better than to ask any questions. If there were information that he should know, he would get it. Anything else was potentially dangerous. Ben had struggled with it, but successfully put those nagging doubts out of his mind, and had fulfilled that mission with no problems.

  Once again, Ben focused his thoughts, and repeated the laser test from before, narrowing the beam and shooting it out in front of him, expecting to see it appear once more on the back of his hand. But this time, it did not. It simply vanished into the heavy blackness.

  Alright, that’s different. That means that this environment has different parameters. Perhaps if I travel far enough in this direction I will reach something.

  Ben widened the laser beam again and picked up the pace
a little. His thoughts returned once more to his boss, and the way he’d acted regarding this final mission. In contrast to his unspoken reluctance toward the previous mission, there was no such hint of conflict or suffering within Field this time. In fact, he’d been uncharacteristically jolly. Most Program Agents viewed their final mission with some superstitious dread, and fellow Agents treated the occasion with a certain reverence. Oddly, Field had practically hurried Ben into this mission, seeming nonchalant and ignoring the gravity typical of final missions. Ben had once again chosen to ignore Field’s disposition and get on with the mission. Perhaps it had just been Field’s way of dealing with the fact that he was about to retire his favorite Agent.

  After what seemed like hours, Ben had become quite accustomed to walking in complete darkness, and his stride had become much more confident. He stopped and checked his watch again. It still showed the same time, 00:00. He had no way of telling how long he’d been walking. Feeling a little frustrated, he continued on.

  When he stepped forward, he noticed the slightest, softest sound. He stepped again. There it was again. As he continued forward, he realized that his footfalls were generating the sound, gradually growing from the barest whisper to a normal, audible footstep. It sounded like he was walking on a very firm surface, such as concrete. He reached down to feel it. It was cool, smooth, and dry. He got down on his belly and sniffed it. Nothing. He pointed his laser at it and narrowed the beam. No light at all was reflected. He stood once more and carried on.

  As he continued, the ground slowly started to reflect some of the laser’s light, until eventually it was clear that Ben was walking on a smooth stone surface. Up ahead, he thought he could see a light, but it was only visible in his peripheral vision, when he wasn’t looking directly at it. Every time he tried to look straight ahead, the light would disappear. So Ben moved forward toward the light, his head turned sideways, keeping his destination in his peripheral vision, until eventually he got close enough that he could look at it directly.

  The light formed a thin line in a rectangular shape, taller than it was wide. Without knowing the range, there was no way to gauge the size of the rectangle, but from its shape, it seemed to be the outline of a door. He finally reached it, and extended his hand carefully to touch it. It felt like the floor. He reached to each side of it and felt nothing. He walked around it. It seemed to just be standing there, in two dimensions, the back identical to the front. He ran his finger along the very edge, and felt nothing. Perhaps it really was two-dimensional.

  The light of the rectangle cast a soft yellow glow upon Ben’s hand, and as he stepped closer, it bathed his whole body in the hue. If this was in fact a doorway of some sort, Ben was determined to find a way through it.

  According to his training, he used all of his senses to size up the object. He knocked upon it, and it felt and sounded like solid marble. He shone the laser at it, but it absorbed the light. He sniffed it, but there was no smell. Well, I do have one other sense, thought Ben. So he moved close to the door . . . and licked it. Surprisingly, it tasted slightly sweet. What am I doing? he wondered. In all his years on the job, he’d never licked a door, and the fact that he’d started now worried him.

  Ben felt the surface, searching out a doorknob or control button, but found nothing. Pushing against it with his full weight was fruitless as well. He weighed the logical options and came to a decision. If he was to get out of this place, it was going to be through this door. The light that came from the thin area where the door bordered this environment indicated that perhaps there was some kind of normal environment on the other side. Regardless, he could not stay in this dark void indefinitely, and this was the first object he’d found since he’d started falling.

  He pulled out his laser, set it to high power/high output, and pointed it at the edge of the door. He pressed the button, and a white-hot beam shot out of the end of the laser. It struck the door, and instead of absorbing all the light, it actually reflected the red light energy, while absorbing the rest of the spectrum. He held it steady, and slowly, the red dot grew wider and wider. Ben could hear the material beginning to break down under the intense radiation with a sizzling, crackling sound. When he saw a tiny white dot appear in the center of the red circle, he stopped.

  It took a moment for his eyes to adjust once the laser was off. The door still glowed red where the laser had been doing its work, and the white dot remained. Ben leaned forward and put his eye close to the white dot. It was a hole that led to the realm beyond the door. He could smell the fumes that still floated around the glowing red area where the laser had bored the hole. It smelled bitter and poisonous. The red glow slowly faded to black, and Ben placed his hand near the white dot, to test the temperature. The super-heated material had cooled rapidly and he was able to touch it. The hole was just big enough for his finger, so he stuck it in and pulled on the door in an attempt to open it. It didn’t budge.

  Ben tried to look through the hole, but the light from the other side was too bright, and he could see nothing. He changed the setting on his laser tool, adjusting it for visual reception mode, and placed the tool up against the hole. He punched some buttons on his watch, and the face became a display screen, receiving the images from the laser tool and showing Ben what it was seeing though the hole. Still too bright for him to make anything out, he dialed down the brightness on the display until it was at its lowest setting. An image resolved that took Ben’s breath away.