Evacuating the Morphs

This dream starts in water. Unusual, most of my dreams end in water, that insistent urge of morning impinging on the dreamscape. This is also one of those dreams where I am somebody else in a situation far removed from any day to day reality.

I and several others trudged through a muddy bottomed stream, waist deep in water. Hundred foot high trees, vine covered on either side of us. There was the whine of machinery high over head, well above the trees. A spinning electric sound. Making our way along the watery path to hide our trail. We came at last to a small marshy field, open, contained on the other end by a small ridge made of glassy rock. Obsidian. We seemed to be in a small caldera. Across the marsh I could see pockets of steam rising into the air. I put everyone back into the trees and told them to get some sleep, we would cross the marsh in the darkness, under cover of fog.
I knew there would be fog, and the fog came. It built up in the marshy hollow, and as the temperature in the clear sky above dropped, the bowl filled with thick mist. I woke up our group, about four women, six children and one other man besides myself. I seemed to be the only one with modern arms, and even that was only a bolt action rifle with less than 100 rounds of ammunition.
I had some flashlights, the LED kind. I tuned them to a low red glow and gave them to the women, showing them how to flash them a little brighter when needed, but telling them no to do so unless it was really necessary, there were enough flashes in the mist that ours could be easily mistaken for natural processes. The steady parade of electronic whines over head had vanished, now replaced with only an occasional patrol. The owners of the craft, the ones we wanted to avoid, seemed to dislike moving around at night. I hadn't expected that. I found us a trail, one that took us through the warmer parts of the marsh, trying to hide our heat signature against the warm water springs and the streams and currents that flowed through them. We made it across the marsh, coming out near a steam filled spring feeding a waterfall out of the caldera and down into a jungle far below. The man and women of the group began gathering vines and weaving them together into a pair of ropes. They explained that it would only be sturdy up to a certain length, and then would be unreliable. The vines were not pliable enough to knot together, so I dropped down on the end of the first span, searching the steep slope for a tree thick enough to turn the second rope around. We descended, each woman taking one of the smaller children on their backs and the rest climbing down in pairs, lashed together by lighter vines. I climbed back up to the top and cut our vine free, using it like a "U" to lower myself halfway to the next tree. I then found a rock to loop the vine around and repeated the climb. Finally pulling the vines both down into the forest, hopefully hiding our trail. I knocked several rocks down to provide an excuse for the damaged foliage and we unwove the vines and arranged them as naturally as possible further down the trail. We followed game trails down the side of the cone until we reached a burned out village near its base. It was still dark, so I risked a trip through the grocery store, picking up canned goods and items in glass jars. I wasn't familiar with the writing or images, so hoped I had found something useful.
The women were glad to see the supplies and immediately started opening cans and distributing food. I couldn't eat it, it smelled like skunk and horse droppings. Fortunately I had MRE's in my backpack. They thought those smelled horrible. After a short meal break, we got back on the road, but only until the mist started to clear and the alien craft began to fly regularly. We found an old mine shaft and camped there. I opened up a 6x9 notepad computer and started scanning the maps of the area, I found what I thought was the town, then figured out about where we were. I tried to explain that we needed to get to a coastal area, and as the city along the coast was being occupied by their enemies, we would need to go around. I found mine tailings on a hillside overlooking the ocean in one of the aerial photographs. There was no way to know for certain if we were in the same mine complex. The children had been gathering fruit and water was plentiful in the mine. I asked if they could stay inside out of site for a couple of days. I wanted to find out if this mine came out on the hillside near where we needed to come out. I left the other man with the group and one of the women came with me, she had worked in these mines when she was a child.
I found out why she only worked here as a child. Once you got into the newer parts of the mine, the shafts were only about 5 foot tall, frequently smaller. Although she didn't know the route, she knew the general layout of the mine, and could tell for what a shaft was used by its size and cross section. I had a UV marker that we used to mark our path. It was the second day when we found the opening overlooking the beach. I waited until nightfall and used a UV laser to find my ship and report in. We made arrangements to rendezvous three days from now. The trip back took only about eight hours, I marked our trail on the map and on the beams. The LED flashlight highlighted the symbols I'd used in mapping the place, and allowed us to find our way back without all the back tracking and exploring. My guide had gathered several chunks of a chalky material and used it to create a nearly smokeless fire when we got back. Apparently the older children had risked another trip to the abandoned market for supplies and they had hot food that night. I also heated up some of mine, although it didn't really make much of a difference. I did find that I could eat some of the fruit that they couldn't, and most of the jungle fruit and nuts they could eat, I couldn't. Apparently our biology was very different. In my head I knew they were shape shifters, but I had not seen any of them leave their human forms.
Even though we were back with the group, the woman who'd accompanied me slept curled up with me. Up close they smelled like horses, or clean cows. Not unpleasant, but not particularly attractive either.
Shortly after we'd headed down the tunnels I heard an electric whining noise behind us. I gave the UV flash to the woman and dropped to the rear of the group. I made my way back to an intersection, and just as a precaution, changed all the marks on the beams to the same mark. I then headed down a side tunnel that I knew would eventually return to the main tunnel and back to our path. Ahead, I could hear the group running. I made some noise to cover and a small flying disk entered the main tunnel. I knocked over some of the chalky stone and lit it on fire. The electric whine intensified and the saucer flew towards me. I made sure it didn't see me as I sprinted down the hallway. I found a depression in the ground with a collapsed beam in front of it. I dropped prone and readied my rifle. The saucer game into the narrow tunnel, I could see puffs of air spiraling around its surface, it had bumps all over it like a Dalek. There was a sensor array dangling from the bottom of the craft, it finally spotted me and swiveled a pair of laser tubes around. I fired, hitting the sensor pod.
The pod exploded into debris, like safety glass. I racked the bolt back the brass clattering into the catch cage over the receiver. I fired again, hitting one of the laser tubes. The saucer tilted from the off center strike, causing its laser to pulse down the wall as it tried to bring it to bear on me. I fired again, just to keep it off balance, then on the fourth shot managed to strike the second laser. I rolled back and crawled quickly around the corner turning back to take a shot at it where it had climbed almost to the ceiling. It blew up, caving in the tunnel behind me. I barely avoided getting hammered by the debris of the blast. I raced back to catch up with the group. When I caught them, there were two of everyone. I thought I was seeing double, but they had come across another group of changlings. Somehow we had missed them, or I had missed them, my guide had known they were waiting for us. She didn't tell me because she didn't want me to abandon them when they took on another half dozen children. They really didn't have a very high opinion of most humans, it seems we were the ones attacking them and driving them out of this area. Even though we were all the same, all the time, we could be at war with one another, that was confusing to them, so they chose to think of me as a different creature from the ones attacking them, just morphed into that form, as they had done to get along when we first colonized their world.
We hadn't know they were capable of intelligence, actually, neither had they, until they had accidentally consumed one of us, that is. Intelligence spread through their species like wild fire, and some humans had adopted and begun teaching them, others had begun hunting them for other purposes. Our colony was trying to rescue as many as we could from this island, once we'd discovered the poachers. My group would be the last group out. Presuming we could make it. For some reason the poachers were far better armed than we were. When we got to the beach our submarine surfaced and unlimbered its deck gun. We used the pulse laser to keep the flying saucers away while loading the morphs aboard. I got a message that the colonial air patrol had managed to ground a poacher shuttle and rescued more of the morphs. Once the poachers reached orbit, we really had no way of stopping them. I jumped aboard last, the sub rocking under my weight. Pulled away from the shore. I fired the last several rounds in the rifle and managed to knock down three of the five drones. Our UV laser wasn't as effective as they had some sort of reflective coating. Their lasers, on the other hand, had done considerable damage to the deck. Fortunately the water caused their beams to disperse some. Still, I had several hole clean through my calves and one arm. My body armor had absorbed the chest hits, and I'd not been hit in the helmet or face. I dove into the water along side the sub and swam to the dive port on the underside. I wasn't looking forward to cleaning my rifle after swimming in the very algae full ocean of this world.
The dream kept going, mostly showering, cleaning my gear, teaching the woman morph how to use the doors and computer pads. (Which we called emersons even though mine was clearly manufactured by Mitsubishi.)

I noticed that the longer the morphs spent with us, the more they moved and smelled like us. It was a little disconcerting to know that this was not their shape, and some of them were using their morph to make their clothing, and some were wearing clothing. The more they read, watched and communicated with us, the smarter they became. At night they would meet in the galley, the only place large enough to gather, and share what they had each learned, but still they somehow kept and developed their individual personalities.
The crew were a little bit leery of them, but the morphs were just so darned nice that you couldn't help but like them after awhile. The morphs figured out how to make radio waves, and began communicating with morphs all over their world, of course, we helped by giving them rides to all off the communities we could find. The population of intelligent morphs went from several thousand to a couple of million in just two weeks. The dream got very strange when they began to design their own aircraft and started taking on their own defense duties. They really liked my colonial group but were a little patronizing after awhile, we couldn't learn and grow as quickly as they could. We couldn't packet share what we'd learned during the day. They just felt sorry for us.
We could, however, think faster than they could, as individuals. So the scales were somewhat balanced. The woman wanted to stay with me, a permanent personal guide or guard, I couldn't really tell. I know by the time the dream ended she looked different then when it started, but I couldn't really pinpoint when the changes had occurred they were so gradual.