.comment-link {margin-left:.6em;}

Fermius Firefly

A Dream Log, whenever I remember the dreams I've had.

My Photo
Name:
Location: San Marcos, United States

Fermius is a pen name drawn from a series of short fiction I wrote when I published the small press magazine Stellanova (on paper.) I play RPG games to escape from my daily grind as a technology wage slave for the state of California. I eat out a lot in order to do my part in supporting our increasingly service level economy. I am butler to 2 feline masters. If you ask them they will tell you I'm not very good at it, late with dinner, don't have enough hands with brushes in them, and sometimes I even lock them out of their office.

Tuesday, July 03, 2007

Red Goop

        I dreamed I was on another world. We had some red goop in glass vials with long glass necks on them. The necks were about 16 inches long and slightly curved. The bottle was maybe 15mm across. When the red liquid poured out of the bottles, two of them, each took on the form of an animal it had been exposed to and then the shapes, a snake and a tiger rolled together and tussled for a few seconds. In the tussle, my bottle was knocked over and the neck broke from the bottle.

        Another technician managed to get his goop back in his bottle. I was trying to get a burner going so I could melt the end of my broken bottle and neck back together. That didnt seem to work as I had nothing that I could hold the hot glass with. I got the idea to seal off the end of the neck and heat a length of it in the flame and then blow a new bottle shape in the bottom of the neck. That sort of worked. We didnt have much luck coaxing my goop back into the bottle.

        Let it cool a bit first, then well try again. Its contained for now.

        I closed the all glass enclosure with my red vaguely cat shaped goop in it. The goop prowled around its enclosure, much like a cat, then suddenly shifted into a snake form.

        Look! the other technician shouted, grabbing a camera.

        The goop shifted quickly back and forth between the cat and snake shapes, and then settled into a plantlike state. We hadnt seen the plant state before. It actually unrolled leaves and the color shifted a bit. It turned them to the lights of the lab.

        Whats it doing? the technician asked.

        Feeding, I replied. It seems to be storing energy from the lights. Theres a tiny increase in mass, as there isnt really anything but the dust in the enclosure to use as nutrients.

        I dont see any dust.

        Thats why it was romping around. It was collecting more material.

        The alien absorbed energy and then did something completely unexpected; it changed again, this time into a catlike bipedal form.

        There must have been skin cells in the dust in the enclosure. It has absorbed some human DNA, the technician shouted, surprised and shocked at the thought of if.

        Or it is a really good mimic, I said, It has had quite a bit of time to observe us recently. I doubt that there would be enough information in a few skin cells to replicate, in miniature, a human form.

        The technician calmed down.

        Much later, I was outside the buildings, taking a break when there was a loud grinding noise from beneath a military vehicle. The gunner, a young woman, was thrown from the gunnery chair. The vehicle rolled back and bucked as the pavement beneath it rumbled. Her back snapped as the vehicle rolled back over her, folding her backwards.

        I called for my team to get her out of there. There was a wild red goop under the vehicle. We pulled the wild goop into a tube and tried to get it all.

It found the wounds of the gunner, and retreated partly into her body. In so doing, it made repairs. The gunner gasped back to consciousness.

She reported that there was no longer any pain and she wanted to get up and go back to work. The doctor showed up and we helped him with the red goop, but it was now fused with her. She started to become frightened when she saw the color of her skin, and the unusual nodules under her skin at her back and neck.

While I was pretty sure she was going to be all right, I didnt know what effects we would see long term from the symbioses. The cat and the snake that had been exposed many months ago were both doing well, and behaving normally. They both had the same discoloration of the skin and unusual nodules under the skin along the neck and spine as the soldier was showing. Both seemed healthier than ever, especially when they could spend time in the sunshine.

Ad astra per technica,

FF

0 Comments:

Post a Comment

<< Home