Dreamworms Book 1: The Advent of Dreamtech

by Isaac Petrov

  DREAMWORMS BOOK 1

  The Advent of Dreamtech

  Isaac Petrov

  Future Notion Press

  Copyright © 2021 by Isaac Petrov

  Published by Future Notion Press — press@isaacpetrov.com

  Primary Print ISBN: 978-90-831552-0-3

  Cover art by Cherie Chapman.

  Cover images © Shutterstock.com.

  Episode art by Maxim Mitenkov.

  This book is a work of fiction. All characters and events in this publication are fictional and any resemblance to real persons, living or dead, is purely coincidental.

  Designations used by companies to distinguish their products are often claimed as trademarks. All brand names and product names used in this book and on its cover are trade names, service marks, trademarks and registered trademarks of their respective owners. The publishers and the book are not associated with any product or vendor mentioned in this book. None of the companies referenced within the book have endorsed the book.

  All rights reserved. No part of this book may be reproduced in any form or by any electronic or mechanical means, including information storage and retrieval systems, without written permission from the publisher, except for the use of brief quotations in a book review.

  One

  A Seminar in the Dreamnet

  Ximena watches with morbid fascination as Atahualpa—in a gesture of foolish arrogance that would turn history on its head—leaves his eighty-thousand strong army on a plateau nearby, and enters his city. His Empire. His demise.

  The Inca’s retinue marches slowly and full of confidence through the narrow streets. The city has been emptied by the war, but the Inca’s escort—a few thousand of his most loyal courtiers, all dressed in the finest garments—walk along with the sure arrogance of power. Some carry fine discs of pure gold on their heads. Others, adorned in cloths of patterned colors, sing songs of praise. And in the middle of it all: the Sapa Inca himself, Atahualpa, godly power incarnate, surrounded by silver and fine feathers, and carried in a ceremonial litter by eighty of his most loyal servants.

  But, crucially, nobody carries weapons. Why? Ximena asks herself. What were you thinking, Atahualpa? You knew there were less than two hundred of those exotic bearded foreigners you’ve heard were roaming your lands, didn’t you? And they sent word they were keen to join your glory, didn’t they? Were you that curious? Were you really that sure that they would cower to your godly splendor?

  The retinue arrives at the open city square and stops. Nobody moves, the singing fades.

  A lone Christian friar exits a nearby stone building and approaches the litter, carrying a cross and a thick book, his breath visible in the fresh winter afternoon. Ximena squints, trying to remember his denomination. A Dominican?

  The man reaches the litter and begins a heated exchange with Atahualpa, hard to hear from a distance, and impossible to follow even by those nearby because of the lack of interpreters. The friar is shouting the language of the conquistadors at Atahualpa, which Ximena’s ancestors would understand but, sadly, she doesn’t.

  The book finally reaches the emperor’s hands, who stares at it like it were a fistful of live worms, and drops it dismissively.

  There is a long silence, like destiny holding her breath. Ximena’s eyes widen with anticipation.

  The friar gives out a sudden shout of outrage and the ambushing warriors begin to pour into the open square from within the surrounding buildings and alleys. Impregnable in armor and helmets of dirty steel, lean swords in their hands, and soulless greed in their eyes, it is a terrifying view. Some ride imposing warhorses—creatures of hell from the look of their petrified victims. They charge, outnumbered one to forty.

  And the slaughter begins.

  Horror and yells of desperation echo against the small buildings as the lives of myriads of unarmed nobles and slaves are slashed with industrial efficiency, a machine mowing the elite of an empire. And it takes time to kill, Ximena thinks, as she watches the dread of sure death reflected in thousands of eyes around her.

  Cannons are hastily pulled out of the stone building, together with a detachment of gunpowder-spitting arquebuses and join the killing frenzy with explosive devotion. Ximena almost looks away. Almost. But her professional pride keeps her mind focused and her eyes disciplined. The smell of blood, gunpowder and feces fills the air. She wonders how the doomed victims are experiencing the sudden shattering of everything they knew sure in their primitive world: the unfathomable chaos, the mythic beasts, the deadly shooting, the smoke, the violence against their god-emperor. Some are surely going mad. A mercy, perhaps.

  As the armored warriors reach the fringes of the Inca’s litter, his eighty chosen carriers, all dressed in the same fine gowns of the deepest blue, hold their stance with stoic fatalism—faith and loyalty written across their faces. They will carry their god all the way to the underworld, Ximena thinks. The foreign swords hack arms and hands with relentless zeal, eager to make the litter stumble and fall. They want the Inca. They need him alive to conquer everything they wished for. The power. The oh so sweet gold. Ximena stares in wonder as the last surviving maimed carriers, eyes beaming with fanatical determination, use their last breaths on earth to sustain the litter upright. With their severed limbs and stumps! The Inca staggers on the tilting platform, his face contracted in disbelief and terror.

  “Ah, here you are.” The sudden voice of Ximena’s grandfather makes her jump. “What are you watching?”

  Ximena makes a quick gesture with a finger and the gory scene around her comes to a sudden, digital halt. Even the stench vanishes. A date and time briefly blink at the lower right corner: 20th December 2515 16:55. She removes her visor-glasses.

  “Abuelo.” She smiles at him. “You scared me.”

  Ximena’s grandfather is quite unlike her. Where she is short, he is tall. Where she has the classic complexion of her Mapuche heritage—dark skin, black hair, broad face—his skin is lighter, his nose larger, hinting at Hansasian ancestry. Her hair runs down in two long braids each side of her face. His is nonexistent. She is pretty. He is not.

  “Sorry, cariño. Are you working on your PhD?”

  “Kind of.” Her heart is still leaping as she chuckles in delight. “You cannot imagine what I’ve found!”

  Enrique sits on the bench next to Ximena, across the glass panels of their home’s cozy winter-garden. “Tell me. But be quick.”

  “It’s the new access to the Lundev archives. It’s… Whoa! I can access all their historical documents, Abuelo. Everything! So easy to do research with this wealth of material. So… It’s almost cheating!” She cannot repress a giggle of joy. “I will complete my PhD in half your time. Mark my words!”

  Enrique smiles cynically. “Don’t get your hopes up. I bet the Townsend University staff has no clue that their Global Program students have this sort of unrestricted access. Wait ’til they find out.”

  “Why would they care? This is an opportunity for everybody at the university! Wait ’til I show them.”

  Enrique scoffs and looks at the visor-glasses. “What were you watching?”

  “Atahualpa and Pizarro in Cajamarca. Amazing! I found this sensorial dramatization by Professor Miyagi.”

  “Kenji Miyagi?” Enrique raises his eyebrows. “The Miyagi?”

  Ximena nods. “Unpublished, purely academic. Spectacular, too. But it looks a bit, uh…”

  “Yes?”

  “I don’t know.” Ximena wets her lips. It’s hard to find the right word. “Hmm, imaginative?”

  “Imaginative, huh? A strange way to describe the work of the greatest historian alive.”

  �
�I know,” she admits with a shrug. “But it looked more like a fantasy than history. It glorified the barbarians. They seemed more civilized than the conquerors. Can you believe it?”

  Enrique nods sadly at her. “Reminds me of some old papers an old lady brought to me when we moved to Entre Lagos. We were the first historian family ever in the colony. I had little time to study them before they were taken out of my reach.” His eyes glide along the pines on the garden outside the glass panels. “Fantastic they were.” He nods slowly to himself.

  “Here, look.” Ximena passes her visor-glasses to him, but he catches her hand.

  “No, Ximena. That’s all very nice, but there’s no time. It’s almost five.”

  “What?!” A surge of adrenaline makes her stand. “Oh, Goah. I lost track of time!”

  “Go. You can’t be late to enrollment. This is your one moment, cariño. The Global Program and the collaboration with the most prestigious university in the worlds—and Kenji Miyagi, no less!—is the opportunity of a lifetime.” His eyes sparkle with pride. “You are our legacy, mi vida. You’ll make the finest historian our family—no, the whole Andean Imperia!—has ever seen.”

  Ximena is about to run, but hesitates. “Abuelo, you are the finest historian—”

  “Don’t.” Enrique shakes his head, and gently pushes her into motion. “You are just twenty-seven, Goah’s Mercy. You still don’t know how much you don’t know. I hope you learn that from Miyagi, and then more that you can teach me. Now quick, run before your future shuts.”

  Ximena leaps away and into the living room. As she runs across the open space, she doesn’t have time to wonder where everyone is. At this time of the early afternoon, at least one of her parents, or possibly her brother and Ramiro his lover, would be hanging around, lying on the sofa, sensonet visors on their heads, watching the world, listening to music, gaming with strangers—usual life. But there is a tension in the air, subliminal, that melts with her haste and leverages her already considerable anxiety.

  Ximena’s eyes flinch over to the digital hour on the glass window as she exits the living room.

  16:57.

  Oh Goah, oh Goah, oh Goah! Three minutes. Three minutes to make it to the new auditorium recently created for the Global Program. Three minutes to meet the world-famous Professor Kenji Miyagi. That is, if she makes it in time. Oh Goah, she won’t make it!

  She reaches the staircase and runs up in leaps of two, a sweat breaking on her forehead. Why did I get distracted like that, Goah’s Mercy? It’s always been her problem, losing herself in her obsessions. She shudders at the thought of missing the chance of a lifetime. If Abuelo had not come for her… The Global Program could really pull her historian career out of the imperial level where her family has always lingered and onto the international stage. She has the unique chance to put the name of the Epullan family on the lips of Academia worldwide. She can’t afford to arrive late!

  Ximena trips on the last step and falls flat on the upper hallway.

  Goahdammit!

  She stands, ignoring the pain, and runs. Her room is at the end of the corridor. Her door, which she painted pink when she was a little girl, is half open. She pushes it and throws herself in.

  Her family, bar Abuelo, is there, staring at her with love and hope. Abuela, Mamá, Papá, and her stupid brother Antonio. Well, he is not that stupid, he’s actually okay. They are all standing around her wu-sarc. Expectant.

  “What—?!” Ximena cannot finish her question before Mamá embraces her fiercely.

  “We are so proud of you,” she says, tears in her eyes. She resembles both Abuelo and Antonio, with her tall, sharp Hansasian features.

  “But hurry, cariño,” Papá says. He and Abuela on the other hand are—like Ximena—pure pre-Columbian indigenous beauty in different shades of wrinkling. Papá raises his finger at the clock on the wu-sarc’s side table.

  16:58.

  No time! “Damn!” Ximena escapes her mother’s arms. “Sorry, Mamá, I really need to—”

  “We’re leaving you alone,” Papá says hastily, beginning to push the rest of the family out of the bedroom. “Just tell us one thing.”

  “Papá, please.” She feels a surge of impatience turning into rage which she immediately suppresses. It’s just her family being her family. “What is it?”

  “Sorry, but we need to… uh, how long will you be asleep?”

  “Hmm.” Ximena stares at the clock, eyes wide with stress, so it’s hard to focus. “It’s a long-format seminar, several uninterrupted dream-days long, but for those awake, just ten hours, so, uh, until about three a.m.? You’ll be sleeping.”

  “No,” Papá says. “I’ll be awake.” He looks at the others as they leave the room. “And I suspect I’ll not be alone. Sweet dreams,” he whispers with a wink. And shuts the door.

  Finally!

  She hastily takes off her robes and lies on the copper-like shiny surface of the wu-sarc. The metallic-looking material immediately reshapes to fit her body, engulfing her in a familiar wave of release and comfort. Her body relaxes in an instant. She cannot avoid a last peek at the bedside table. The time on the clock changes.

  16:59.

  Ximena shuts her eyes and takes a deep breath, trying to rein in a sudden surge of nerves, and speaks the mental command: Wu-sarc, activate.

  A frenzy of vegetation erupts from the bottom of the sarcophagus. A myriad of ivy-looking tendrils crawl up its walls like worms escaping an earthquake, and cover her body in warmth and darkness.

  Ximena takes another, deeper breath to exhale the last figments of stress.

  State REM-phase duration, a deep female voice speaks inside her mind.

  Ten wake-hours, Ximena replies in her thoughts.

  The tendrils around her body tighten with comforting familiarity. She can almost feel the dream juice rubbing against her skin, running through her bloodstream, penetrating her brain, releasing her from reality. The wu-sarc is truly a wonder of alien technology, the dream of every dreamer.

  The University of Townsend is the most important center of knowledge of the Goah’s Imperia of the Americas, and the day Ximena was accepted as a student of history was the happiest in her life. A huge honor. The first of the Epullan family ever to attend the university of the capital of the GIA. But today, any lingering happiness is rashly consumed by an overwhelming anxiety.

  She runs desperately through the busy halls of the University of Townsend. Not the real brick-and-mortar one, of course. That one is several thousand miles north, in the midst of the North American landmass. She doubts the real campus is in much use anymore, except for some fringe operations like those invaluable historical archives she would give her right arm to be granted access to. The real University of Townsend is not really real. It is a permascape construct in the dreamnet, as most human institutions are in the twenty-sixth century. A dream, if you like, inside an inconceivably larger dream shared by all humanity.

  Ximena dodges student after student, their dream avatars robed in the obligatory white-and-blue colors of the university. Her own academic robes, identical to those of her fellow students, flap behind her haste in an accurate rendition of reality. Sometimes the permascape seems more real than the wake.

  Sometimes.

  When Ximena reaches the main hall—an open court surrounded by balustrades and columns several floors high—she jumps into the air and flies straight to the fourth floor: the History Department. It is not permitted to fly in the main building, but, honestly, today she just doesn’t care.

  The main department hallway is empty; the only thing visible is a gate made of intricate iron with Gothic motifs. And this gate was not here yesterday. A signpost placed nearby reads: “Access restricted to Global Program participants.” And behind it, a second, more prominent sign flashes angrily in midair: “WARNING! You are leaving the Goah’s Imperia of the Americas.”

  Ximena’s heart leaps. The gate is closed.

  A lone university steward guards the entra
nce. He is not a real person, of course, but just a character designed by some dreamtech engineer and yet more realistic than even the latest AI prototypes that Botswana spits out for the space habitats. But then, human-like dream characters are only natural, aren’t they? After all, everything in the permascape is being rendered by the melding of millions of human minds.

  “Can’t pass,” the steward says, raising his eyes at her with a very convincing bored expression. He even appears to be chewing gum.

  “I’m in the Global Program,” she says, and points a hasty finger at the first signpost. “Ximena Epullan. You can check!”

  “Sorry, ma’am.” The steward taps an old-fashioned watch on his left wrist. “Seminar’s started.”

  “No.” She shakes off a wave of desperation. “It can’t have.”

  The steward gives her a sideways smirk and keeps chewing in silence.

  “No.” She walks past him, up to the gate, and begins pounding on it. “No, no, NO!”

  The steward ignores her.

  “Please, PLEASE,” Ximena pounds the gate with both hands. She turns to the steward, who shakes his head and scoffs. “Please,” she whispers, desperation filling her like sea water in the lungs of a drowning sailor.

  She stops pounding and falls on her knees.

  It’s over.

  Ximena is not the type to cry—the Epullan are a tough lot—but here, on her knees at the edge of her shattered future, she feels entitled to shed a few dream tears. What will she tell Papá and Mamá? That she was late to her destiny? How long until she can look Abuelo in the eyes again?

  The gate moves almost imperceptibly, pushed from the other side, without noise, until a sudden stream of natural light shines along the widening slit.

  It’s opening! Ximena jumps to her feet, takes the opening crevice with her hands, and pulls with all her strength. Goah’s Mercy, will they allow me in?

  “Hmm, thank you, dear,” a woman’s voice says, tinted with strain. A sweet, elegant voice; the cleanest, purest Hansasian accent she has ever heard. “This gate is sooo heavy. You GIA lot sure have a developed sense of the dramatic.”