The Last Dreamer

by Nicholas Erik

All the compound’s gates were open.

  They had to move fast.

  The Reverend flung open the door to the silo, and a thick plume of smoke and hot air rushed out, so powerful that it almost made him turn back. But like a traveler in a desert maelstrom, fighting against the whipping wind and the burning sand, so too did the Reverend walk forth into the silo, shielding his head from the heat and ash with a raised forearm.

  He was walking blind through the great structure, but every few steps he snuck a glimpse at his surroundings through slitted lids. Over in the far corner, in the haze of smoke. The still opened weapons cache. And what looked like a body.

  The Reverend broke into a run, his head brushing against burning plants and fiery embers. Ignorant of the pain, he continued on until he reached the prone form.

  A yell outside—the girl—gave him the briefest pause, but the Reverend soon regained his composure and bent over, lifting Devin’s body as if were a bundle of light sticks. The young man groaned in his arms, and the Reverend turned to run out.

  Above, the roof of the barn threatened to cave in, swallow everything that the Reverend had worked for. The marijuana, his congregation—those were gone, but the reason for their existence, for his own existence, sat in his arms. Unconscious, but alive.

  Yes, this young man would carry on the Crusade, even if the Lionhearted perished. A belief in the goodness of the Earth and the blackness of scientific thought.

  A considerable lightness took over the Reverend’s steps, despite the grim circumstances at hand. He almost skipped to the front of the barn, at which point he stopped.

  A masked man stood in the open doorway, pointing a rifle his way.

  The Reverend blinked.

  The man fired.

  And Devin Travis dropped to the ground.

  49 | Unexpected Meeting

  “You’re okay,” Mr. Parsons said, once the convoy was on the road, and he’d debriefed his men. “You’re sure you’re okay.”

  “I’m fine,” Sarah said. She moved down, the leather squeaking as she tried to put some distance between herself and her father in the back of the limousine.

  “I told you she’d be fine,” Mr. Ena said. “Samuel is—was—a religious one. He wouldn’t hurt her.”

  “You’re damn lucky he didn’t,” Mr. Parsons said.

  “What about Devin?”

  “Devin?” Mr. Parsons said, like he didn’t know the name. “You mean the Dreamer?”

  “Is that what you always call him?”

  “Yes—well, no, I suppose I shouldn’t,” Mr. Parsons said. So cool and collected during the siege, he was now having tremendous difficulty fielding the questions of his nineteen year-old firecracker of a daughter.

  “Yeah, you should get on that,” Sarah said, and crossed her arms, stared out the window.

  “The doctors said he was okay. A little smoke inhalation, but nothing we can’t fix.”

  “Of course not.”

  “Excuse me,” Mr. Ena said. “I hate to interrupt, but I have to call ahead, make arrangements. Clearances and such, so that they’re expecting us at White Sands.”

  He held up a finger, and silence came over the limousine as the phone rang. Even in his senior age, Mr. Ena had the power to do that—even with hardened, tough men such as Parsons. There was something about his presence, the subtext of his words, that no one seemed to mess with him.

  The call connected, and Mr. Ena said, “Yes, this is Eagle One. I know, it has been quite some time since we visited. Twenty years, for the autopsy. I have a subject that needs confirmation of Dr. Stanton’s tests. Have you spoken with Dr. Stanton? Good, he’s coming. Our ETA will be a few hours. Expect us around dawn.”

  Mr. Ena returned the satellite phone to its cradle and smiled. “Continue on.” But neither Mr. Parsons nor Sarah seemed eager to revisit their previous conversation. “Very well. Three helicopters are to meet us twenty miles from here.”

  “She’s not coming with us,” Mr. Parsons said.

  “No, she will be driven to the nearest airport. My associates will see that she gets home safe.” Mr. Ena paused and wrinkled his great eyebrows. “Where is home these days, anyway?”

  “You don’t need to know that.”

  “Mistrust is a grave thing, Parsons,” Mr. Ena said. “We’ve worked together how long?”

  “It’s a need to know thing. And you don’t need to know.”

  “Privacy. I understand that. Very well, you give your daughter the instructions, and she can follow them. I don’t need to know. The two of us and the Dreamer will head onward to White Sands, with a small contingent of our best men.”

  “Mission’s over. I don’t need to come.”

  “But your government, surely, will need a liaison and a messenger for the outcome of these tests, Mr. Parsons. And who better than you?”

  Mr. Parsons shook his head, but seemed resigned to the fact that he was going to be part of Project Dreamer for a little while longer.

  Or until he died; whichever came first.

  50 | White Sands

  “There.” Catalina Ena pointed a slender finger over the shimmering white sand. A spotter’s scope was held up to one eye. Without it, the outline of a band of choppers—and the dust that they kicked up—was almost invisible, covered by the endless rolling dunes and the glare of a new dawn.

  Catalina watched as the choppers set down and a half dozen armed guards stepped out. Then, two men—one whom she knew well, hadn’t seen in twenty years.

  Her father was propping up the young man—the Dreamer, Devin—and helping him walk. The leader of Chimera MedCorp snapped his fingers, and, as if by magic, a gleaming white stucco structure emerged from the depths.

  This, everyone could see.

  “The hell is that?” Tommy said. “I thought this was a National Park or something.”

  “The Ghosts get to put facilities wherever they want,” Catalina said. “Guess they liked the view.”

  It looked like protocol hadn’t changed since the failure of the first iteration of Project Dreamer. Once the subject was recaptured, they’d undergo final testing out here in New Mexico, deep underground.

  Disappear into the blinding white sand.

  In the distance, the structure stopped moving and locked in place, looking like it had been there for years. Catalina watched as her father and the other men hurried up the stairs and disappeared into a building that looked like a strange, futuristic alien monument.

  She dropped the scope from her eye and turned around.

  “If they haven’t changed anything, we have five minutes before it disappears into the Earth. And then…”

  “Then we don’t get another shot. They kill him, and whenever Daddy dearest pops his old head up, it’s gonna be after Devin kicks the bucket,” Tommy said.

  “I wouldn’t have put it quite that way, but yes. Anya, where are we?”

  “White Sands, New Mexico.”

  Catalina smiled at the literal interpretation. Yes, she’d missed that. Yes, she would miss it very much, when all this ended. “I mean your progress on obtaining the entry key codes.”

  “It’s government level security,” Anya said. Her laptop was on the hood of Tommy’s truck, and she was typing faster than she ever had. Numbers, letters and symbols streamed by at light speed on the computer’s screen as she worked.

  “Which means?”

  “I’ve had a couple days. I should get in.”

  “And the ATV’s ready?” Catalina said. Tommy revved it in response. “Can you work while we ride?”

  “I can,” Anya said. “But I’d prefer not to.”

  “I don’t know if we have that luxury, child. The dust and commotion from their arrival is settling. We don’t have long before they spot us.”

  Anya picked up the laptop and continued typing with one hand as she stepped on the back of the off-road vehicle. Catalina got in the middle, and Tommy gunned it across the dusty expanse of gypsum. On the eastern horizon, the sun bega
n to dance over the dunes, spraying the brilliant white sand with mango and passion fruit flavored hues.

  The ATV tore by a lone yucca plant on its way to the monolith in the middle of the snow-like desert. Catalina expected to see a troop of penguins or polar bears, so like the Arctic the terrain appeared. But the rising dry heat of the dawn, and the Chihuahuan ravens soaring above, circling over the small vehicle, told her that this was the desert.

  Things just were never quite as they appeared.

  She watched the ravens, even as the building approached, even as Anya tapped her on the shoulder to tell her that the codes were unlocked. Catalina stared at the ravens’ effortless flight, as if it was an omen of what was to come. Were they following her, waiting?

  Or were they, like everything else in this world, living without care for anything else, any true calling or mythical belief system?

  The rising sun blotted the birds out from view, causing Catalina to squeeze her eyes shut. Bright dots flashed beneath her eyelids, the blues and the whites and tropical colors fusing together into an overwhelming kaleidoscope of hues.

  Tommy cut the engine and stepped off. Catalina opened a single eye, enough to see the dusty white steps leading up to something like a white-washed, bright tomb of an Egyptian Pharaoh. The building wasn’t huge, but it was large enough to block out the sun.

  Where there was light, there was now shadow.

  And Catalina gestured for Anya to head up the stairs, punch in the codes, and lead the way into darkness.

  Devin awoke with something of a start. He’d drifted in and out of consciousness, but remembered little. Pieces came back to him; Sarah begging the Reverend for help, leading him to where Devin was trapped, about to burn alive.

  Actually, it was Devin who had led the Reverend back to himself. Saved his own life, with a little help from Sarah’s body.

  Somehow, she hadn’t perished in the process. So maybe it wasn’t the strings of fate pushing his dreams along. He wasn’t an instrument of God, as Samuel had believed.

  Maybe it was all just science. Life was science, and it, too, was completely indecipherable and inexplicable.

  His eyes flung open and he jerked forward.

  Or, he would have, but his arms were bound by tight leather belts, his body strapped down to a gurney. Even his head was locked into place. All that Devin could do was move his eyes, back and forth, across the strange room.

  He didn’t like very much what he saw.

  It was a lab, not unlike the ones at Chimera headquarters—if those had been from twenty, thirty, perhaps fifty years in the future. A great display, perhaps two hundred inches in size, hung on the wall, overlooking a complex looking console.

  A scientist worked the console with halting dexterity. A swipe of the hand would bring an image up, into the air, projected into nothingness, and then the scientist would grab it or fling it away. One or two of the images, along with bits of data, made it to the larger screen. This one was normal, except for the fact that it possessed a crystal clear picture and clarity that allowed Devin to see every detail of each image, as if it was imprinted in his very retinas.

  It was a strange effect, since he was more than twenty feet away.

  From his limited grasp of biology, Devin understood that one of the pictures was a DNA helix—and, from the information below, it was clear that it belonged to him. The other helix belonged to someone else, a nameless party who had, perhaps, participated in the program long ago. Devin squinted and read the name.

  Myra Sylvi.

  Anya’s mother. Devin thought all the way back to the shrimp rolls at Texas China. They were the same age, born on the same day.

  When Myra had died, whatever ability she’d possessed must’ve shot out into the ether, seized control of Devin. Or maybe that was just too damn magical an explanation.

  Another image joined the helixes, this one of his brain, labeled Brain Map A, joined the others on screen. It animated and undulated, different sections firing and then quieting. Devin tried to squint, and saw it change, which made him aware of the numerous wires taped to the sides of his head.

  They were breaking him down, piece-by-piece. Reverse engineering how he worked. And it looked like they were no longer asking permission or for any sort of cooperation on his end.

  Devin mumbled with the gag in his mouth and rocked against the table. After a few minutes, the man turned toward Devin and shook his head. It was a familiar face, but not one that Devin was happy to see.

  Dr. Stanton.

  “Hello, Devin,” Dr. Stanton said, taking a break from his holographic machine wrangling to converse with his subject, “struggle won’t do you any good. You’re held down quite tight, as you can tell.”

  Devin brought his arms up a quarter of an inch and slammed them against the metal gurney as hard as he could. It made a weak ting that didn’t even echo across the tall ceilings.

  “Please, be still,” Dr. Stanton said, his voice not at all reassuring, “once they verify my results, it will all be over.”

  Right before him, Devin saw the entrance to the room slide open with an airlock type whoosh. This got Dr. Stanton’s attention, and his posture stiffened as the new guests walked towards him. Devin tried to flick his eyes up to see who it was, but they were turned away from him, facing the console. A hushed conversation transpired, and the two suited men and their soldier entourage departed, leaving Dr. Stanton with a new partner.

  This man walked over and smiled.

  “You’re doing a great service for your country,” he said. “And for people around the world. Just think, your abilities will change everything.”

  Devin tried to glare at him. The new scientist laughed.

  “I understand your reticence. This type of sacrifice is not one that most make willingly. I’m sorry about all of this.” He turned back to Dr. Stanton. “Mark, are you finished the diagnostic phase?”

  “Finishing…now,” Dr. Stanton said, his hands working the holographic console.

  “Good. Let’s allow our young friend a chance to stretch and eat, shall we?” The man reached down towards Devin’s face. Devin bit down and inverted his eyebrows, like he was going to bite. “It’s all right. I’m harmless. Trust me.”

  Only people who weren’t had to say things like that. But Devin was sick of this rag stuck in his throat, sick of being strapped to a slab with cast-off restraints from a fifties-era psych ward. He relaxed, and the man removed the cloth, undid all the restraints.

  Devin coughed, and the man brought him a glass of water.

  “Who the hell are you? What is this place?”

  “So many questions,” the man said, “so few answers.”

  Devin gulped at the water and watched the man with wide eyes, hopeful that he would reveal some secret. Devin was disappointed; the man just watched with a bemused and sympathetic grin, saying nothing at all.

  Devin handed him the glass.

  “I thought Dr. Stanton was finished with me.”

  “Dr. Stanton might have been finished, but he lacks the resources that we possess. As I suspect you have already noticed.”

  Devin looked around the room. There wasn’t much he had missed, strapped the table. The console that Dr. Stanton worked at—all the ethereal images floating and zipping through the air, controlled by his hands—was the main attraction. Devin ripped the wires from his temples, and the machine emitted a few warning beeps.

  Dr. Stanton, agitated, waved his hands, and the notice was dismissed.

  Behind Devin, however, was something he had missed, couldn’t have seen before. What looked like a small conveyer belt lined the wall behind his bed.

  “I see you’re curious about the Insta-Thizer,” the man said. “Mark, a demonstration.”

  “I’m busy comparing brain maps here,” Dr. Stanton said.

  “We have teraflops of processing power, Mark. It’ll get done. Give the boy a demonstration. It’s not every day that—”

  “Fine.” Dr. Stanton
scrolled through the menus, selected the wrong application more than a few times, but finally got the Insta-Thizer revved up and turned on. “What do you want to see?”

  “What do I want to see?” Devin said, repeating the question because he didn’t understand.

  “Any drug, any time,” the man said. “Synthesized on the spot, in an instant. You just input its chemical properties on the computer and it comes out perfect each time. Rapid testing. No more weighing ingredients or burning compounds. The machine takes the instructions and outputs it.”

  “You’re testing the drug,” Devin said. “You’re going to make it.”

  “Chimera will make it,” the man said. “We’re interested in more pressing issues.”

  “Than public health?”

  “Than public highness,” the man said. “Think of it, kid. What you have, the ability to get inside anyone else’s head, experience their life, that’s what everyone wants. That’s the ultimate high. You want to be Frankie Sinatra for a day? The drug can trick your brain into thinking that. You some sort of sick fuck who wants to be Jack the Ripper? Sure, dial it in. Everything else is dead. Escapism has a new king.”

  “And they can sell this?” Devin said.

  “Can they sell it?” The man let out a low, sad whistle, like it was unfortunate that this was the way the world worked. “They’re gonna make millions, kid. Billions. But that’s not why I’m here. The drugs, that’s just an illusion. A simulacra of the real thing. Ain’t no one actually going to be Sinatra. Thing is, you actually could control the President. Me. Hell, Stanton over here. So I’m around to make sure that your little mind-control tricks don’t get in the wrong hands.”

  “You’re the government.”

  “That’s right. Keeping the land of the free and the home of the brave on the bleeding edge of science. Which, right now, is you. So, what about it?”

  “What about what?” Devin said.

  “What do you want to see the machine make? It’s your last day in the candy store. Might as well make the best of it.”

  “I don’t know. An aspirin.”

  “You some type of square, kid,” the man said. “This machine can make anything. Heroin, Oxys, blow, speed, Ritalin, Zoloft, Viagra, anything that can fuck you up and make you forget that life is a shitstorm, this little wonder can pop it out in ten seconds or less.”