Dreams Of Nothing

The collective dreamscape is a wonderous place. A place of escapism, a place of remoteness from the hardships of the monotonous normality of everyone's lives. It was, at least, as it only is when filled with warm bodies.

Certain events have rendered that impossible. One day, the people there eventually, as always, went to wake up to their miserable lives, only to find themselves still surrounded by their own self. Their bodies were all gone — killed — for a reason uncertain. Vaporized, melted, however it happened, the end result was all that truly mattered in the moment.

The formerly corporeal were uncertain of what to think. It was a breed of uncertainty brought on by a denial to realize the truth. Many panicked, many accepted it. They kept living out their wildest dreams, in hope that they would drown out the floods of intruding thoughts on why the things that happened, happened. This however cannot last, all actions have reactions, all events have consequences.

The minds of corporeal beings cannot be so simply severed from their bodies in such a manner without consequence. Those who knew this did not care at first, consequence seems foreign in your wildest dreams. They didn't care that is, until they began to feel the rotten consequences. The dreams began to feel tasteless, like they were being perceived through burnt taste buds. The people who once loved to fly through the sky had their love snuffed out. They only flew with no reason. Those who walked their favorite breeds of dogs no long cared. The dogs walked, the people's detached minds merely did what they felt was appropriate in instinct.

The null progressed on. There was no longer a tongue to feel burned. The wildest dreams of many no longer felt wild. No longer felt like dreams. They could not be called nightmares either really, as it would imply some form of fear. There was no fear, there was nothing at the end. People hovered off the ground, they walked some sort of animal. The figures and shapes all meshed together. The dreams of the severed minds faded into the empty, the ineffable space between awake and sleep, a true void.

For those incorporeal before that day, there was nothing to do. No therapies, no well wishes, and certainly no dreams, could repair the rot into stagnation. All that they could do was turn away, or watch in fits of morbid awe.

O5-13 opened the door to their dream. They knew what had happened, they knew what would happen, they knew what was happening. They saw the people who once were seen living out fantasies only possible in places like this. They didn't see them though, they could feel their absent of feel, much like feeling cold as the absence of heat. They didn't see the girl who wanted to be in a Broadway play more than anything, they saw a thing on something. Something on something. Nothing on nothing. They could only see the incorporeals, moving the absences.

"What are you doing?" O5-13 asked.

"We're taking them away to a place nobody has to look. Nobody wants to see this anymore."

"Can't you help them?" they responded.

"Why don't you ask them yourself, if you're so inclined."

He moved to the Broadway star.

"Are you there? Is anyone here? We can help you, you just need to wake up, snap out of it please. Please."

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"!"

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"Well." The mover said, "Seems like you go your answer."

"No. No…"

O5-13 didn't want to face it, they shut the door. they shut themself, they shut their own dream, they shut it all. In a fit of shuts, the O5 pushed. they pushed themself out, pushing their own dreamscape out far enough away so that none of those horrible facts of reality could be reached. They kept pushing until, without a doubt, They were all alone. In that loneliness, They thought back. A retrospective of what could have happened but did not, why lives were lost en masse instead of saved. The thoughts coated his dream into new paint; an awful shade of color often associated with guilt.

O5-13 thought through what could have been done, until the time began to go by faster than countable.

In a long abandoned bunker in the wastes of a place once called Australia, a machine continued to whirr. The power had been lost to the bunker centuries ago, but still it raged on. What fuels it is unknown, the paint has chipped away to reveal a rotten color, the metal had rusted, but the green "on" light still shines. But for once in eons, something happens. The machine whirrs faster, the light blinks. the little screen on the bottom beams a message through a pound of dust:

REQUEST RECIEVED; BEGINNING TRANSFER