by James Phelan
‘Well, I’ve been taking a look,’ Xavier said, ‘and there are some diagrams in there, including how to overcome booby traps …’
‘OK, that is handy,’ Sam said, studying the intricate drawings made from decades of research by Dr Kader. ‘What’s this?’
‘It looks familiar,’ Xavier said, staring at the image on the next page.
‘It’s a field tower,’ Pablo chimed in. ‘Part of a dream machine they built in the 1930s and 40s, based on earlier designs by Tesla.’
‘Nikola Tesla was one of our most famous Dreamers. He had astonishing vision and created incredible inventions,’ Tobias said. ‘The towers were originally designed by him to generate energy, and to transmit that energy either through the ground or the air.’
‘Wireless energy,’ Sam said with a sideways smirk to Xavier. ‘Remember doing that earlier this year in class?’
‘Yeah, I remember,’ Xavier said. ‘Man, that old science teacher we had—remember all those lame ties he’d wear?’
‘Very amusing, boys,’ Tobias laughed, shrugging off their joke. ‘But these towers were assembled in locations around the world by the precursor to the Enterprise.’
‘When it was a government operation?’ Sam asked.
‘That’s right,’ Tobias replied. ‘It was called Bureau 13 then. Mac used to work for them. He was their last Director before they shut the program down.’
‘Man, how old is this Mac guy?’ Xavier asked.
‘Old, but still very capable,’ Tobias said. ‘Anyway, they installed these Tesla towers around the globe and listed them as special generators for telegraph communications. But they were really put in certain places around the world to tap into the Dreamscape.’
‘The emphasis is on “were”,’ Pablo said. ‘They were all dismantled when the program ended.’
Tobias countered, saying, ‘I heard there is still one in the Ukraine that was too contaminated to dismantle. And the prototypes are still located in Tesla’s old workshop in Manhattan.’
‘They would be under thick layers of dust and rust by now,’ Pablo said. ‘Inoperable.’
‘Maybe. There are some variations of dream readers still active in public spaces,’ Tobias said, ‘like our own in the Eiffel Tower. And there are several monuments and buildings around the world that have the devices hardwired in, switched off but still able to be activated some day.’
‘Why’d they shut it all down?’ Sam asked. ‘I mean, I understand them putting a stop to what Bureau 13 was doing with the human experiments and creating Dreamers, but why switch off all these Dreamscape recorders? Wouldn’t it be useful for us? I mean scientifically, to collect all that data over the years, to better understand how and why we dream, to better see what we are capable of?’
Pablo was smiling, and he said, ‘You are very astute, Sam. And yes, this has been an argument for a long time. But it comes down to privacy. Who is to say if we are allowed to see into everyone’s dreams?’
‘And who’s to say what happens if someone else taps into it?’ Tobias said. ‘That’s the real danger, and why the program was shut down. And why this race to get to the Dream Gate is so vital for us to win. Imagine if someone not only had the power to look into everyone’s dreams—imagine if they could control them.’
‘Did someone try before?’ Xavier asked. ‘Is that why the Department 13 or whatever got shut down?’
‘Yes, only it was after they disbanded the Bureau, by some rogue scientists of Mac’s,’ Tobias said. ‘In America, at a place called Three Mile Island, they tried to power up and switch on the world’s biggest dream antenna, hooked up to several skyscrapers in the city. It would have tapped into the dreams of the entire eastern half of the United States, right up to the Rockies.’
‘But it failed,’ Sam said. ‘You taught us about that meltdown in class, right?’
‘That’s right,’ Tobias said. ‘The scientists defected to Russia, and a few years later tried the same thing there.’
‘And failed again,’ Xavier said.
‘I’m guessing you also learned what happened at Chernobyl,’ Pablo said. ‘Tobias has taught you boys well. And now you know the truth of those meltdowns. This is what caused it—they were in over their heads, it never should have been allowed.’
‘Times were different then,’ Tobias said. ‘Russia and America were two great powers pitted against one another, each wanting the ability to affect a nation’s dreams, to see everyone’s secrets. But they never understood that the power of the dream world is too much for us to control like that.’
‘What did they do?’ Sam said. ‘These field towers?’
‘They read dreams, among other things … but they didn’t work, least not on the scale envisaged,’ Tobias said. ‘Tesla’s original concept was for a special power field to be tapped into, firstly in the ground, and then in the atmosphere.’
‘Huh?’ Xavier said.
‘He wanted to turn the atmosphere into a conduit for electricity,’ Tobias said. ‘That didn’t happen, so Bureau 13 bought up all the devices and searched for other power sources that were big enough to tune into the Dreamscape. One was placed at Hoover Dam—even that didn’t work.’
‘How about in Brazil?’ Sam said, tapping Dr Kader’s notebook. ‘Did Tesla ever set up towers here?’
‘Not that we’ve ever heard,’ Pablo said. ‘But it’s been my life’s work studying dreams in this country, and there are amazing stories from survivors of mass, shared nightmares during the 20th century.’
‘Who was doing all these experiments?’ Sam asked.
‘The Director of Bureau 13. A man named Louis, but they called him the Dream Catcher.’
‘Is he still around?’ Sam said.
The two men were silent. They looked to Xavier.
‘No,’ Xavier said, stunned, as though he’d been hit by a bus. ‘But his son is. And his grandson.’
‘Who’s that?’ Sam asked.
‘Dr Dark’s father,’ Tobias said. ‘Louis was his father.’
‘And my grandfather,’ Xavier said. ‘I had no idea. I knew he was a successful scientist, that he spent his last days working in the Ukraine … I wonder why my father never told me.’
‘He’s probably ashamed of it,’ Tobias said. ‘As brilliant a man as your grandfather was, he was out of his depth. He dared to dream as big as he could, but he overreached.’
‘It’s OK,’ Sam said, putting his hand on Xavier’s shoulder and looking his friend in the eyes to try and reassure him. ‘We’ve been in the, well, dark, about a lot of things.’
Xavier smiled at the reference to his name.
‘There’ll be time to learn more, from your father,’ Sam said, then checked his watch. ‘But right now, we’ve got this journal to work through and a ferry to catch.’
‘These descriptions in the journal match the map,’ Pablo said, pointing at the big-screen image of pages from Dr Kader’s journal. It had been nearly two hours of painstaking reading, with Sam and Xavier tackling the first fifty pages and Pablo and Tobias the next.
‘The river mentioned, the River of Doubt, matches up with descriptions of rapids and waterfalls, here, and here,’ Pablo said. He pointed at the map. ‘There may well be more descriptions of the entrance to the city, but we are unsure.’
‘Where’d Dr Kader get this information?’ Tobias asked.
‘He’s an Egyptologist at heart, but I know he had a bit of a da Vinci interest on the side,’ Xavier said. ‘His life’s work is studying antiquity, but even with all the Egyptian stuff, he has always had a passion for the Renaissance.’
‘What’s that?’ Sam said, inspecting the sketch that Dr Kader had made.
‘Looks like hopscotch,’ Xavier replied.
Pablo got closer to the screen to make out the scrawled handwriting. ‘It looks like it’s a description of the booby traps at the entrance to the Cloud City.’ He turned to look at them all in wonder. ‘Could it be?’
Then the Guardians burst through
the door.
22
‘All right,’ Tobias said, having conferred with one of the Guardians. ‘Stella was sighted in Brazil, a few hours ago. She’s got a couple of teams of rogue Agents with her. But she’s disappeared again—she could be anywhere now.’
‘We should split up,’ Sam said straightaway, ‘and break up into a couple of teams ourselves. You guys,’ he motioned to Tobias and Xavier, ‘go with the Guardians to the east, and make a lot of noise about it so that one or both of her teams pursue you. Meanwhile, Pablo and I will get to the ferry and meet the Dreamer.’
Tobias nodded and said, ‘Good idea.’
‘We’ll take the journal with us,’ Sam said to Pablo. ‘And Tobias and Xavier, when you get back here, keep analysing the scanned copies and all the information we have.’
Pablo nodded but Xavier looked unsure.
‘Pablo and I go alone,’ Sam said, adjusting his dart gun on his hip-holster, then picking up his backpack. ‘That was the dream—and having the two of you make a diversion, that’ll help us change things up, cool? And if she does catch up with us, then we’ll change it some more. I’ll go with the Dreamer and use the journal to search for the Gear while Pablo keeps leading the chase away from us.’
Xavier finally seemed to agree.
‘Wait,’ Pablo said, looking surprised. ‘You mean we go now?’
Sam smiled. ‘No time like the present.’
‘But I haven’t even packed …’
‘I know how you feel,’ Sam said with a smile.
Sam and Pablo’s first leg of the expedition was in a seaplane that flew them up to the river in the city of Porto Velho. Pablo seemed either ill from the flight or by the suddenness of it all. Sam felt saddened during the flight when he saw great swathes of dense green forest cleared to smouldering orange-brown mud, making way for cattle.
People got to eat, I suppose …
The set-down on the water felt like riding a skipping stone, and as they climbed from the aircraft, Sam put his backpack over his shoulders and helped Pablo up onto the jetty. The academic might well have been an expert in the history of his country, but he was no field-man, a fact his brand-new safari-type outfit attested to—as well as the trouble he had walking across the uneven planks of the jetty.
Great, imagine if we land in trouble on the ferry.
‘That’s it,’ Sam said, pointing over at the ferry named the Roosevelt-Rondon. A big vessel, it was exactly like in his dream, painted pale yellow with blue window frames and with four tiers of decks. There were large paddles at the side and rear to propel the boat along the brown river.
‘Then let’s get ourselves some tickets,’ Pablo said.
The paddleboat cast off and began its gentle sway up the Amazon River. On board, Pablo settled into a chair in the diner where assorted trays of high tea were amassed. He continued to read through the journal while Sam familiarised himself with the boat. There were two dining compartments, one on the large main deck, and one on the top level that served more as a noisy bar full of commuters, drinking and playing cards and dice games as the river passed underneath them. Sam calculated there were maybe two hundred people aboard spread out over the upper decks, the lower deck taken up with cargo and livestock.
Out on the rear deck, Sam watched as other watercraft chugged by. He scanned the faces, hoping one would be familiar from his nightmare. His phone rang. It was Tobias.
‘Hi,’ Sam said.
‘Hey,’ Tobias replied. ‘Where are you guys?’
‘On the ferry,’ Sam replied. ‘About half an hour in.’
‘Keep your eyes peeled,’ Tobias said. ‘We just had word that Hans and his German Guardians touched down in Peru.’
‘Peru?’
‘He’s coming at you from the other side.’
Great. That changes things …
‘How would he know where we are headed?’ Sam asked.
‘Now that’s a million-dollar question,’ Tobias said.
‘Maybe from Dr Kader, if they have him captive?’
‘Maybe, but the timing is too suspicious,’ Tobias sighed.
‘It’s like he knows where I am right from when I first arrive,’ Sam said.
‘Exactly.’
Sam was silent, then said, ‘How does he do it?’
‘If we can’t get rid of him for good, we’re going to somehow have to flush out his source of information.’
‘You think it could be someone back at the Academy?’
‘Maybe. We’ll see. Meantime, we’re tracking your location and we’ve sourced two helicopters so Xavier and I will be able to get to you within a couple of hours if need be.’
‘Any sign of Stella?’
‘Yeah,’ Tobias laughed. ‘They’re about a hundred kilometres from us, stuck answering questions from the local police after we tipped them off that they were a group of poachers.’
‘Nice! That should buy us some time.’
‘My thoughts exactly,’ he said. ‘Good luck,’ Tobias said as he hung up.
Sam gazed out at the river behind them. ‘Come on Dreamer, where are you?’
23
ALEX
‘Ready, “Thor”?’ Shiva asked.
‘When you are, Shiva,’ Alex replied.
‘Go!’
From the comfort of a couple of large beanbags, wearing their wraparound visors, they entered the playing field of the latest first-person shooter game, hunting down an enemy as a two-man team. Shiva was awesome with his shots—“one shot, one kill”, he liked to say while playing, while Alex preferred to blaze away on full auto and take his chances that he’d always manage to reload before getting blasted out of the game.
‘So, let me get this straight,’ Alex said. ‘You’ve coded this game so that each bad guy we take out is actually a nightmare being destroyed in the Dreamscape?’
‘Yep,’ Shiva said, tossing a grenade into a room full of targets.
‘This seems like too much fun to be doing something actually useful and life-changing in the real world!’
‘I’ve linked all the bogeys in the game space to the different types of nightmares that we’re coming across in this local area,’ Shiva explained. ‘And don’t worry, the fun will wear off when you see the hordes that are marching against us as the nightmares grow and multiply.’
‘You should get others recruited into this,’ Alex said.
‘The whole world is playing against the nightmares,’ Shiva replied. ‘They just don’t know it.’
‘Huh?’ Alex pulled off his visor to stare at Shiva.
‘I’ve managed to code a whole bunch of games and link it to the world system of gaming consoles, via Jedi’s supercomputer.’
‘So people all around the world, right now, are playing their regular “shoot ’em up” console games on the internet, and all the while your program is running in the background?’
‘Yep!’
‘That is so unbelievably awesome, but I have no idea how you even thought of it—let alone did it.’
‘What’s really cool is how I patched it into the electronic waves that our Dream Towers around the globe tap into—genius thinking, right?’
‘Absolutely, man. I’m totally blown away.’ Alex pulled back on his visor and adjusted his sight, shooting a couple of bad guys out of a window at the top of a building.
‘Just don’t get blown away in here,’ Shiva said.
‘Thanks, I won’t,’ Alex said, as their avatars regrouped behind a shipping container, reloading and patching themselves up. ‘There’s a team headed for us, eight of them.’
‘On it,’ Shiva said, moving his guy into position. ‘Thirty seconds.’
‘Backing you up,’ Alex said. ‘So, how’s this “changing people’s dreams via computer games” work exactly—via electro what?’
‘How long you got?’ Shiva grinned.
‘I got all night, man,’ Alex replied. ‘Top right!’
‘Got him. Well, OK, let’s see …’ Shiva sa
id, as his avatar broke from cover and Alex mirrored his moves, crouching behind obstacles and laying cover fire while Shiva moved to a better vantage point. He started to shoot sniper fire at the attacking force. ‘What you have to first understand is that we are all energy, and that our minds are all operating at certain wavelengths …’
‘Ah, Shiva?’ Alex said.
‘Yeah, Thor?’ Shiva replied, switching to a rocket-launcher to take out an attack helicopter that had kept them hunkered down behind a crane at the city’s docks.
‘You hear that?’ Alex asked.
‘That rumbling?’
‘Yep.’
‘I thought it was the chopper,’ Shiva said.
‘The one you just ditched into the bay as a flaming wreck? A dozen people will have a sound sleep tonight because of that and they thank you, I’m sure,’ Alex said, ‘But no, I hear something else.’
‘Yeah, me too …’
Their avatars looked around in every direction, but aside from the carnage they’d wreaked, there was nothing to see.
‘What is that sound?’ Alex said, exasperated.
‘I’ve got an idea,’ Shiva said. He took a moment to flick through his inventory and then produced a small model plane. ‘Launching a UAV to give us eyes in the sky.’
The little aircraft was thrown into the air like a paper plane, and then its propeller took the aircraft soaring high into the sky.
‘You can patch into its view to see it on one side of your visor,’ Shiva suggested.
‘Got it,’ Alex said.
Shiva took the aircraft up and started circling it overhead, overseeing their two guys standing on the docks, waiting. From that height, they could see the full extent of the destruction of the city by the nightmare troops. There was also the path that they and the other gamers had carved through the terrible landscape.
