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Fermius Firefly

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

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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.

Friday, May 23, 2014

Deserted Island, Robot Invasion

In the first dream of the night, I landed on a deserted island, dropping from who knows where on a parachute to land off the shore of the largest of three small islands. Fortunately there were some date palms, dandelions and lots of easy to spear fish in the shallows between the islands. I set about getting the lay of the land, hoping to find fresh water. There was a little pond in the center of the largest island, but it was brackish at best.

I was able to use the parachute to make a large dew collector and managed to find several plastic jugs washed up around the beaches that I could use to store the water. I made my shelter near the brackish water and went to bed the first night after a handful of dates. The subsequent days involved swimming out to the two smaller islands. Neither of them had much to offer save a large rock which I figured I could use for a signal fire. There weren't any land animals, but plenty of insects and shore birds. I soon discovered why the shallows between the islands were so bereft of sand. The tides drew back and revealed a wide rocky expanse surrounding my three little islands, tons of tide pools, the humidity was intense. Apparently, the islands were at one point a single island, and for many hours or days at a time, they continued to be a single island.

By the time the dream ended, I had been there several days, and knew that I needed to find rescue, as the fresh water issue was going to be a problem.


In the dream just before waking I was dodging around the edge of a little village, broken down stone walls, overgrown hedges, empty buildings, but not yet ruins. I was separated from my group when there were a number of ripping static sounds and thunderclaps. The robot invaders had arrived. There were three main types, two smaller car sized robots. One with red lights and long manipulator arms, and the other with long cattle prod type appendages that could shoot shocking bolts about forty yards or so. There was also a huge robot in each of the four groups that had teleported into view. The huge robot had many turrets with which it could barrage a bunch of small grenades, some of which had gas, and some of which were essentially little EMP pods. The gas was caustic, but not really toxic to people, it covered metals with a corrosive slime, however. I suspected it was actually made of nanites, but didn't have a way to determine that.

We had discovered early on in our resistance that the robots would not actually attack unarmed people who made no aggressive moves towards them. Unfortunately they were pretty determined to salvage any sort of vehicle or electronics they came across, whether it was being used or not. We'd also discovered that they really didn't like smoke, and if you could surround a group of units with smoke, they would teleport away in short order. We were armed with leather and plastic "guns" that fired a stream of liquid that, on contact with the robot surfaces, would create huge volumes of smoke. (This was easier than trying to get the entire ground around them smoking, and if you could hit the robots just below their sensors, you could trick them into thinking they were fully enveloped in smoke.)

Soon I was running around, diving behind walls and hedges, spraying the nearest group of robots in smoke generating spray. I wasn't sure I would be able to get them all, but discovered that if I got the sensors on the big one, and most of the smaller ones, it would teleport out. This time, however, it left one of the smaller robots behind. My squad mates wanted to blow it up, but I thought it might be better to capture it and study it if we could. It was apparently out of ammunition, or low on power, because it was unable to defend itself with the cattle prods. The weapons weren't even crackling like usual. The robot cowered and tried to back itself up against a building. When I touched it, it felt alive.

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