Ultralight Modular Planes (Alien World)

I dreamed I was a settler on a new world. The world was simultaneously smaller than the earth, so less gravity, and the atmospheric pressure was about three times earth's. An interesting combination in that it allowed for the carrying capacity of ultralight style aircraft to be quite substantial, or for sport aircraft to be very small. It also meant that one had to be careful breathing outside, as the carbon dioxide levels were low, and the oxygen levels were very high. Most of us wore a re-breather sort of thing that fed some of our own exhalations back into the intake stream. The air was so thick that even little kids sounded like Darth Vader. Our homes were built on the edges of our covered farms so that the carbon dioxide we produced would go into the air for the crops. It was a sort of joke that we were burning diamonds to allow our crops to grow. (The world had lots of carbon, but it was all locked up deep underground as graphite and diamond, so, yes, we sort of did burn diamonds.)

I was flying a modular ultralight cargo aircraft of my own design. There were several of them around, and they could join together in a larger structure, either wing to wing, or wing to tail. The resulting shape either added motive efficiency, or lift efficiency. One of the neat things about the air frames was the docking collars on the wings, they allowed all of the data sensors and control signals to be be shared with all of the craft, allowing the coordinated turning of the entire structure.

The wings also had a neat feature in that they were flexible in a way that allowed the airfoil shape to be slender (less drag) at lower altitudes, but become more "normal" shaped when climbing up higher in the atmosphere. The aircraft itself had helium in the wing cells, so the air frame was almost neutrally buoyant at lower altitudes (of course with the pilot module, engines and cargo frames, that was a mere technicality.) There was a launch assistant for the aircraft at ground level, I had painted mine up to look like a giant hand. Onlookers would see a giant hand launching what looked like a balsa wood model (my plane was painted to look like one of the first glider kits I'd ever put together as a kid.)

The cockpit of the aircraft was essentially a small aircraft, allowing the pilot to eject, and then glide or fly back to safety. Pilots of the cargo frames would launch and join formations, leaving their cargo with me to make the slow low altitude crossing, and they would fly on ahead to the receiving field where they would be re-united with a larger air frame. The shuttling pilots would sometimes make four flights or more for every one us long haul pilots made.

My job was actually pretty easy, as the navigation was fully automated. The engine and pilot modules were a blast to fly manually. Most of us didn't bother to spend the money for the automation of the pilot pod, since the bigger cargo air frame had plenty of automation, and airfield beacons were easy to follow. It was a pretty cool system. The planet was clearly smaller than earth, as the horizon's curve was noticeable from a few hundred feet up. The odd thing about the planet was the way the water and erosion worked. It was a much smoother world than the earth, and the thicker atmosphere was great for keeping the small sun's heat evenly distributed around the little globe. There wasn't much in the way of seasons, and about thirty percent of the time it rained lightly, usually just a few hours before dawn. (The rain was trippy, as it was slower than earth rain, but somehow felt thicker. Hard to explain.)

In the dream I was headed back home with a pyramid of six cargo frames, and looking forward to taking a turn around my city in my pedal-powered auto-gyro. (Made possible by the aforementioned combination of lower gravity and thicker atmosphere.) I was almost home when another pilot hailed me and asked to join up, it took several minutes to get the clearance and then, even before the systems had synchronized, he punched out of his cargo frame, darting back the way he'd came. The frame he'd attached next to mine was all white, but with long grey streaks across it. It had seen some better days. Almost immediately it began to trigger various structural and control anomalies. I cut it loose and brought it under the six then flew it into position to be towed behind, where I could cut it loose without damaging the other frames if needed. It was a risky move, seeing as how it was having control issues on its own. And at one point I thought I was going to have to abandon the pyramid to autopilot and manually dock the errant cargo frame. Once I got it slotted in, I was able to shut off its engines and leave its controls just neutral. I would have to manually compensate for it, but it wasn't anything I hadn't practiced hundreds of times. I was a little annoyed that no one had warned me before taking it on, so I strongly urged the receiving station to take it off line for repairs. While I was doing that I started to hear deep chirping noises. I realized they were coming from the gimpy air frame. It made me remember the legends of the rare flying lifeforms that had lived here before the terraforming efforts. Usually, they were part of a sort of modern ghost story, and were used to explain why airships (efficient even if slow) and collections of air frames occasionally vanished without trace. I suspected most of those were either fire, or just plain made up. We were never out of touch with ground control, if there were lots of disappearances, you'd think we'd just be able to look them up.

Short Stuff, Working, Space Survival

Many little dream snippets.

Two featuring miniature people. The first was a vacation trip. Couldn't afford to go our selves, so sent miniature versions on the vacation. We got to be there, but in miniature form. It was like visiting a beach in 'Land of the Giants' mode. While at the beach one of the avatars dropped the room key down a sewer grate. In climbing down after the key, the avatar started growing, good, in that the long drop wasn't long any more, bad in that there was no going back the way we came.

Lots of large stacks of boxes and crates and a dark damp wall full of fist sized hollows, one of which had the key, which had morphed into the key for my old Plymouth Satellite. I had to slide down a pipe, then scale down a stack of moldy crates and boxes to get over to the wall.

---

In the second Little People Dream, the avatars were back home, and they were now living independent of us. They had developed their own personalities and shared our home. One evening there was a glass soup steamer over the fire pit. The steamer rolled off of its stand as the last of the soup dried up. The little man avatar threw himself in front of it where it rolled out into the room, absorbing the shards of glass as the tube shattered. I don't know how he knew the tube would shatter, but had moved faster than any of us. The female avatar raced to his side and collapsed, sobbing, and then shut herself off.

We put them in a series of sarcophagi on a shelf with statues of birds, because, as the avatar's instructions indicated, "There shall only be birds at our grave site." The avatars personalities had been backed up, but we knew that even if restored from that backup, they wouldn't be the same.

---

In another dream I handed in a couple of spreadsheets to an accountant, who was just raving about the quality and speed of the work. (Which mystified me, as it was something that took about twenty minutes.) She was cute, though, so I didn't mind the fuss.

I was sitting at another desk across the hall, and after my last appointment left, my old boss came in to express how disappointed he was that I had taken these other jobs. "All for what?" he asked.

"Less stress, and eight percent more per year in my retirement check."

I was trying out both jobs to determine which one I would keep, if either at the end of the year. One job was full time to half in the second part of the year, the other was half time to full time at the end of the year, so they complemented one another perfectly to make me full time. Both paid considerably better than the previous job.

My old boss wanted to know why I hadn't promoted in his department, so I had to explain that the education cost to do so was greater in terms of time and money, neither of which I would have gotten back on the job, not to mention it was only a five percent raise, not twelve percent.

"It's a waste of your time and talents."

I pointed to the happy accountant and the family that was just making their way out of the lobby, "not to them it isn't."

---

In the fourth little snippet, I was floating in space, having been ejected from my vessel by pirates. I jetted off into orbit near some asteroids and set up my emergency shelter. There was enough ice in the nearby asteroid to flood the cotton candy like walls and get the greenery growing faster than normal, that would scrub the CO2 from the air and in a few days provide food. I had enough emergency rations to make it that far.

I was floating in the center of the sixty foot diameter ball, watching the grass grow, as well as the gauges that showed the atmosphere percentages, the electricity production (the outer layer of the ball was solar panel material) and the positions of nearby ship transponders. Sometime during the second day, another commander drifted my way. He also had an emergency shelter in tow. I extended my airlock tube and the commander rotated to connect. I had still not completely gotten off of my suit oxygen as my bubble was still growing its atmosphere (I could have survived if I had, but didn't want to stretch the growing system.)

She introduced herself, and we compared seed stocks.  We traded some seeds, passing them through the tube. We decided not to visit one another yet. I could see that she'd been out in space far longer than I, her greens had grown more than a foot into her living space, and she'd trained some of her vine plants out into a sort of hammock, or nest. I indicated that there were good organic carbon solids on the asteroid I was orbiting, so we could grow some of the longer rooted plants in time.

She indicated that she was hoping to make a go out here, if she could just get a more permanent shelter. She then asked if she could keep my bubble when I was rescued. I had to admit that I'd been toying with the idea of tethering to the asteroid below and then hollowing it out. She let out a girlish giggle, and asked if I had two spoons. I pointed to my escape pod, explaining that I had my prospecting tools, including a portable mining laser. It was fully charged, still.

Tubers to Hell and Back

The dream started with myself and the brown haired female companion making our way over a fence into a backyard that was completely overgrown with different berry bushes and a plant that had large manioc like tubers. We had a long discussion about how to identify if these were the edible sort, or the poison variety that needed special processing to be edible. Neither of us seemed to know what that migh be, however. We harvested some of the tubers, being careful to not damage the host plant in the process. We took a lot of the ripe berries as well.

Once the back of Little Red was full we headed out on the freeway into the island valley, as we both felt the coast would be too crowded, and there might not be enough water over the long term.

As we were headed across the valley we were forced off the road by a large line of wrecked traffic, we bounced across the flat valley floor, and came to a ridge line that overlooked a wide valley with three symbols on the floor of the even deeper valley below us. We chose to head to the one on our right, as it looked the most like it might be an airfield. I turned Little Red down the hill and we bounced and bobbled over the rough ground, finally coming to an access road of little better smoothness than the plains I'd been driving on. We parked and decide to hike into the central area where there were some lights.

The center of the area was filled with planes. We didn't find any of the pilots, however, we did find a portal of some sort, and it looked like a passageway directly to hell. Just as we decided that retreat would be a better option, we were confronted by a large demonic lamia. Without any hesitation we bundled her up and dragged her back to the portal. When we tossed her through it, the portal closed.

I drove Little Red down into the center of the airfield, but  it was pretty obvious that the off reading had taken its toll on my little car. We searched around for a suitable plane and settled on a single engine plane that still had full tanks. We found some solar panels and set them up to recharge my car, and decided to fly the plane out to look for a tire shop that we could land near. I wasn't to sure about the last bit, but my companion seemed confident that she could land the plane and take off again as long as the roadway was clear. That, of course, was my exact concern, that we wouldn't find a suitable runway.

Being airborn was a liberating feeling, and we both remarked that it was a shame that we couldn't just stay in the air all the time. I suggested that we should see if there was a blimp available. She headed the plane towards the coast, as she knew where the Goodyear blimp hangers were located.

Courier

I dreamed I was working as a courier, flying with a locked silver case handcuffed to my arm. I had no real idea of what was in the case, but the actual item I was carrying was a small SD card tucked into a business card in my wallet. The case was essentially a distraction.

Sure enough, whoever it was who wanted the data I was carrying managed to cause the cuffs to pop open during an "unexpected" layover. I was knocked down and the case was stolen. The police were polite by ineffective, which was fine, I am sure the wildly extravagant but pointless activity gave the thieves time to think they had truly gotten what they wanted. I quietly slipped away from everyone and booked myself on another shuttle to get me to my destination, hopefully before my antagonists could figure out they had several terabytes of encrypted garbage. I would arrive before my scheduled time, as I was taking a sub orbital shuttle, for a rather princely sum of cash, which would alert my employers to provide extra security as the bait had been taken. I was glad we hadn't surgically implanted the data chip, as that would have been messy and possibly fatal.

As I boarded what was essentially a rocket ship, I realized that I may not actually have any real data, and could quite possibly be a full on decoy mission. I wasn't too happy about that. At least whoever was after the data I carried wasn't willing to commit a very public murder to get it. I decided that I needed to make sure I had lots of company when I reached my destination. I looked out over the super modern airfield with actual launch towers (Mag-lev tracks that accelerated the rockets up over the city before the on-board boosters kicked on.)

I don't think I've ever seen so many acres of "don't hit me orange" and titanium white. It was much a "yes, we're living in the future, right now!" moment.

Giving it the Old College Try

After much bouncing around and short bits of flying, I arrived at a college campus. I put away the gaffer's tape cube I had been using to fly, noticing that my hand had rubbed off one of the symbols on the cube. I chatted with a couple of young women as I headed to one of the larger lecture halls. The conversation was actually about their studies and it was a refreshing change from whatever I was used to.

When I arrived at the lecture hall, I knew the lecture was in one of the Balcony theaters, so pulled out my cube and levitated up to the lecture platform, dropping down over the rail just as my friend, the lecturer, was concluding his opening remarks about levitation and flying. I set my cube on the podium and we turned the document camera onto it.

I had to borrow a marker to re-label the sides. I then explained how the piece of alien technology that allowed the flight effect was also very sensitive and potentially dangerous, thus the thick layer of tape. Its effectiveness at reducing both the sensitivity and the micro slashing of the mechanism made the device usable and safe. The labels were really for user convenience, and didn't have any actual effect on the use of the device, other than to make sure you didn't accidentally shut it off in mid air.

There were larger devices found, and they were going to be the focus of the class. Their job, as graduate students in alien technology, was to figure out the principles that underlaid the devices' functions, in hopes that we would be able to replicate the devices.

All in all a successful lesson, and finally we emphasized the dangerous nature of the devices by setting the classroom's version on top of a ham and activating it. It chewed its way down through the ham until it was surrounded by the flesh. Apparently the devices were found in the remains of alien beasts, whose battered exteriors seemed to indicate that they'd been involved in some sort of aerial gladiatorial contests.

I then flew off to a party being hosted by a patron who had become a good friend. I was staying at a nearby hotel, but most of the artists and writers that had been invited to his mini-convention were staying at his home. (Which was the size of a college dorm, and in fact may have been one at one time.) I was pretty frothy by the time I arrived, as using the flying device required a great deal of physical activity, about the level of a good run. I went up to the second floor so I could use one of the showers to clean up before the late morning events.

I bumped into N, her hair was now red with blond and white highlights, very frizzy similar to when I first met her, but about mid back length, what little of it actually hung down, it mostly framed her face in a poofy cloud. It wasn't a particularly attractive look, but it was certainly dramatic. She was back to her insulting self in this dream, but it didn't really bother me. When she pointed out how sweaty and disgusting I was I just shrugged, "I just ran over from the college, so yep, I need a shower and a change of clothing."

Someone asked me why my condition was such a big deal as I headed to the showers. I explained that she was my ex, and they just grunted in understanding.

When I got cleaned up my patron was meeting with the attendees. Someone was talking about the wide variety of attendees to the event, and it was obvious they were vying for the patron's attention, and probably support. The F's were in the front row, and when a group of folks decided to illustrate a point made by another speaker by breaking into song, Phil turned around and asked them to pipe down as they couldn't hear the speaker. He seemed to recognize me so I waved.

I still had a towel over my head, trying to tame my hair into something reasonable looking before I had to speak. I didn't succeed, as the patron introduced me just as I was drying out the inside of my ears. "Sorry, I just ran over and needed a quick cleanup."

"You could have stayed here, you know."

"I'm at the college all week, though, so the hotel was closer."

"I have cars, you know."

We bantered back and forth a bit. N was decidedly unhappy looking when it was revealed that I was the Patron's new publisher and managing editor. Some of the others I knew were much happier about it. Since my publishing house was co-branded with my patrons, I had no intention of letting my personal feelings get in the way of publishing anything that my editors and test readers liked, so no one had any real reason to worry. (Except me if my final choices proved to be unpopular.) I explained what "Un-Conventional Proceedings" was going to be, and there was applause and excitement in the room about the concept.

After the announcement my patron started meeting with individual creators. When the F's sat down I told him he should give them whatever they wanted. Even if it didn't make us all money, it would be entertaining. "Good enough for me!" was his response.

Kinda wish that dream had continued, it was just about the most fun I've had while asleep in some time.

Reunion, Flying Romance, Returning the Cat

In my first dream of the night, I was reunited with the Nerd Girl (Star Wars) who was my first flame. We are both chubby old fans now, and the fire of passion that burned through us as young adults has long passed, however, we did have a good time at one of our smaller local science fiction conventions.

I knew the reunion wouldn't be long lasting, however, as she reeked of camels. When I mentioned this, our long time friend got insulted and smacked me. I had to explain that I smelled not the spitting one humped kind, but the cigarette kind.

"Oh, sorry." 

"I asked for it, I suppose."

"She only smokes those to cover up the other smell."

"I smelled that, too, and even though I'm not opposed, the last person I was with chose that over me, so - not an inducement to explore a long term romance either."

"It would of been so romantic if you'd gotten back together."

"I suppose, but we didn't grow into somebodies we could love."


And with that I was off into the next dream. It was Almost a Super Power Tuesday! The woman I was dating had the almost a super power of flight (which I would argue is legitimately a super power) however, she could only fly if she was bottomless. (Which did limit the appeal of flying, at least for her. Not so much for the rest of us.) If she knew she was going to want to fly somewhere she would wear either stretchy shorts that were easy to pull down, or short, really short skirts and just pull down her panties.

My almost a super power was to become small, about 8 inches tall. The power, at least allowed everything I was wearing or carrying to shrink with me.

We seceded that it was dark enough to fly home after a long walk, so my GF pulled down her panties and indicated that I should sit on her backside.

"I think I'll use your panties as a hammock, you smell yummie." She sighed and lifted me into her underwear and we took off into the sky. I was quite enjoying the view as she had to fly with her legs slightly apart to avoid losing her panties, and me.

"You are so going to owe me when we get home."

"I'll be happy to warm you right up." The dream ended before we got to that part.


I love flying dreams and the flying theme carried over into the following dream. I had managed to locate my girlfriend's favorite cat, played by Teddy Bearheart, my orange tabby. He'd gotten out and had somehow managed to avoid the zombies by climbing as high up as he could, and then leaping from roof top to rooftop when the crowd below got too large and noisy. I managed to hear him mewling above the noise, and climbed up a nearby empty house, then leapt over to the one he had gotten himself to. We jumped to the next house in the row, I was deliberately making noise to draw them with us. We finally came to a house where the zombies couldn't break down the fence to get into the next yard. (It had been raised and reinforced at some point in time.)

There were several hang gliders roped down to this roof. and the entire south end was covered with solar panels. I tried calling down to the people who had to be holed up down below, but there was no answer, though I thought I could hear them moving around. It was getting dark, and the wind was coming up. I made a rope ladder from some of the extra rope and dropped down into the back yard.

Like my house there was a large sliding glass door. The living room held four people aimlessly wandering in the dim LED light. There were no curtains on the windows, they were trampled and bloody under the shuffling feet. I realized that I was essentially only armed with a short sharp stick, and there were four of them, but they didn't seem to notice me. I realized that the light from the LEDs must have made the coated window like a mirror, and they could only see themselves. I, however, could see that they had several book cases in the room full of MREs and dried goods. Enough to keep a couple of people in kibble for at least a year. I knew I was going to have to come back here to clear the place out.

I found myself sneaking around the back of the herd in the dark, then closing the gate of that house's fence behind them. At least the neighborhood herd was mostly contained now.

I climbed back up, and borrowed a second sling from one of the hang gliders. It took a bit of doing to coax Teddy into the sling, but I got him tied in and hung under myself. "Sorry about the bumps, guy, it's going to be okay."

I launched myself into the air on one of the hang gliders. The nylon rope paid out on a heavy spool that I could barely control. I took a few moments to get the glider under control and slowly climbed out to the maximum height the rope would allow. I hoped it would be enough to glide back to my own house. I let go of the rope and the glider immediately went into a nose dive, causing Teddy to shriek.

The herd looked up and I was headed directly for them. I managed to pull out of the dive a hundred feet or so above them and started to climb out, circling wide until I was lined up with the road that led back home. Fortunately I have a wide front yard. Only, I really needed to get into the back yard, as that had the only entrance into the house that wasn't completely boarded up . I angled over, judging my glide, and guessing that I was going to have trouble getting by the two story house next to mine. Or I was going to land in that back yard and have to jump the reinforced fence.

Unfortunately it became obvious that neither plan was going to work, the wind was behind me, and I was barely above the roofs of the houses on the mesa above us, the wind was getting turbulent and I couldn't control the hang glider. I managed to get us onto the roof of the house two doors down. We slide to the edge of the roof and I managed to get out of the sling. Teddy was howling and I could hear zombies out on the street moving towards us. I managed, somehow at the last second to grab a tree branch and used it to swing us out over the lawn and then back to the covered balcony of the house. This house had been locked up tight and we hadn't even tried to break in, as the lower story was completely boarded up. I let Teddy out of his bag, he immediately quieted and cowered at my feet.

I stood a long while, stick in hand, listening. The creatures outside made it difficult to hear if there was anything or anyone inside. The moon was up outside, on the other side of the room from the windows we'd come through, of course. I backed up to the wall and slid along it, Teddy slinking about five feet behind me. I made my way to the back windows and pulled open the curtains. Moonlight filled the main room. It had been set up as a TV room at one time, a big screen dominated one wall, and the bathroom and master bedroom were behind me. There was a small bar to one side of the TV, and stairs to the other. There was no furniture in the room. I stepped out into the room and could see dust float up into the beams of moonlight. I made my way over to the stairwell, it was full of furniture. I turned back to the master bedroom. The door was locked. I tapped gently. No answer, no shuffling, either. The bathroom door was locked as well. Teddy was chasing rodents in the moonlight. At least he would eat well tonight. I stepped out of the musty air into the night on the balcony. The zombies had shuffled up the street to investigate the noise of the now trapped herd.

Finally, a break. I called to Teddy, who picked up his unfinished meal and trotted out to me. We climbed down the tree next to the balcony and I picked Teddy up and ran for our house.

I stopped. There in the middle of the street was my GF from the Almost Super Power Tuesday dream. "What are you doing?" she asked.

"Rescuing my girl friend's favorite cat." I just sort of stood there, confused.

She pulled down her panties and turned around, pointing to the cleft in her now bare and amazingly cute bottom. "Mount up!"

I shrunk down, with Teddy, and she lifted us up to her backside, then thought better of it and put us in her panties. She jumped into the air and flew up and around circling the house looking for a place to land. "Don't worry, we'll get the handsome kitty back to his owner. And then you're going to owe me."

You won't see that on the Walking Dead.

Gremlin Catastrophe

I dreamed I was a Gremlin (thanks ET and Elizabeth, I'm certain) on a
chunk of floating planet. Unfortunately, not the sort of Gremlin with
magical powers, so perhaps more like Goblins. The chunk was a huge
volcanic mountain with chambers in the formerly molten core. There were
close to seven hundred survivors who'd made it underground and managed
to seal off the caves to preserve both water and air. A nuclear power
plant provided energy and heat as well as the power to
electromagnetically shield the living areas, sort of.

The chunk of planet we were on was large enough to provide a bare
minimum of gravity, so we had pipes going to the former surface of our
world, dredging up as much plant and animal life as would fit, along
with air and water before it completely boiled away. I didn't know that
we could actually survive for long, as we'd already lost a couple of our
grow lights, and the replacement stock was very small, only about half a
dozen lamps.

I calculated, with the rest of the survival team, that we had all of
about a year and a half to survive on stored supplies, so our plant and
animal (insects, mostly) growing was going to have to be an incredible
success in order for us to last any longer.

We were apparently a few months into this when I was elected to
represent the non-scientific community of survivors, even though it was
partly my process that had hollowed out the air tight spheres in the
magma.

One of the groups major desires was to get radio working, in case there
were other survivors out there. Even though the science team was not
sure that was truly useful, they agreed to allow some small expenditure
of resources to construct the antenna on the surface. My survivors had
to make the environment suits, though, and provide the technicians. I
volunteered as did another.

The suits were hand made from donated and scavenged materials brought
back by the robotic vacuums that roamed the surface. Meanwhile, we came
up with a way of coiling the antenna wires and then throwing them out to
make up the antenna array. We practiced a few times in one of the
larger lava spheres, one that was partly open to the surface and
therefore nearly a vacuum. We discovered some small snags in the plan,
the wires would sometimes kink up and loop around, causing waves to
build up in them and then they would break. I requested a robot to haul
the lines around, but was denied, as the science team wanted to preserve
the batteries for emergency use. There were a number of technological
item that we weren't going to be able to replace anytime soon, if ever.

The other volunteer and I talked about the plan, and we decided that
rather than just popping out to the surface and tossing the wires
around, one of us would roll out the wires. It meant a couple of hours
of outside time, rather than just a few minutes. It may have been
chauvinistic of me, but I insisted that I should be the one to roam,
partly because I was stronger, and partly because I was actually
smaller.

We made the trip to the surface and one of the science council members
brought me a spare oxygen tank on the sly. That was going to make a huge
difference, adding at least another couple of hours of hard labor time
to the task (presuming no leaks.) We stepped out onto the surface from
the elevator air lock. The night sky was fantastically clear, I could
see the molten remains of the planet spiraling out away from us, the sun
was glinting off of the fragments of the world, many of which still
glowed white hot from whatever had sundered our planet. I saw that there
were some larger chunks still floating whole, and they looked as though
they might have splashes of light on them.

Whether the light was just from the fires of destruction, or signs of
other survivors, we couldn't tell, but were hoping to find out. I ran
the wires out across the surface in long bounds, maintaining tension the
on the wire enough to keep it from kinking. I anchored each end on a
glass insulting stake and we crisscrossed the crater with wire, then put
the receiver up at the focus of the makeshift parabolic antenna. With
about half an hour of air to spare we headed back for the elevator when
there was a huge burst of static on our walkie-talkies.

We looked up. Overhead was a huge blue and green fragment hanging in a
white circle of white hot debris. It was larger than our little
planetoid, and, unfortunately closing fast. I was actually more
concerned about the antenna's survival than my own. We raced back to the
airlock, telling the people below to brace themselves, something large
was coming. It wasn't until we got back below that we found out how
large.

The science council was in our little radio room, crowded around our
small speaker, chattering excitedly to someone about the inbound portal.


I was confused.

The white hot debris wasn't debris, but an interstellar portal, one that
had been poorly aimed, one that had accidentally ripped through our
world. I was a little upset to know that the council had known about the
portal. (Thus why they had been so eager to deploy our magma bubble
process all around the world.) They were now communicating with the
portal's owners on the other side, negotiating a rescue.

The rescue consisted of pulling part of our hunk of planet through the
wormhole, and dropping it onto a world that was being terraformed. We
would be evacuated to a large stable mesa on the planet, several hundred
rescue bags were being delivered to the surface above the large empty
bubble we had used as our rehearsal room. Several thousand more were
waiting to be delivered as we discovered and located other survivors.
The wormhole was a large version of the small vacuum hose carrying
robots we'd been using to scavenge up our survival supplies. Only it
sucked up planets and deposited them on this huge framework of a world,
to which we were going to be delivered as well.

I started rounding up the survivors and getting them to the hallways
leading to the large sphere, I was soon suited up again, and hauling
large silvery spring loaded bags into the bubble, where they rolled
slowly down to the bottom of the sphere next to the door. My partner and
I then rolled the bags into the airlock, where a family would grab one
and head out to the elevator. From there, like a large hamster ball, the
family would roll the bag out to the former parking lot of the facility.
We had to them all there in just a few hours. I don't know how we did
it, but we did.

A lobe of the portal swooped down and they, and the parking lot, were
gone. A few minutes later, we heard them shouting and cheering over the
radio, they had made it.

The two of us who'd stayed behind, though, to manage the communications
with other survivors, were not going to be so fortunate. Until my
partner remembered that there was an airfield nearby. We said our
goodbyes over the radio, then suited up one last time. We bounded across
the remains of the facility, watching the portal grow ever larger. We
found the airport, and most of the planes were a jumbled mess, but there
in a chunk of asphalt was a small bi-wing, staked to the ground. My
partner squeezed into the open cockpit, then I released all of the
tie-downs. I took the longest one with me.

There was an electric cart nearby, I stuck the nose wheel tie down in
its grill and started it up, then jammed the accelerator. I managed to
climb onto the wing and then into the front cockpit. The tie-down went
taut, and we started rolling along behind the little cart.

Since there was little atmosphere by this point, I had no actual
steering control, so just hoped the little cart would roll off the end
of the long slap of concrete and asphalt with enough speed to pull us
out, off the mountainside, and then through the portal well in front of
the mass of planet behind us. Well, that was the plan, anyway.

The little cart hit a bump, and bounced up off the tarmac. It rotated
and struck the ground on its two right wheels. It scooted forward a bit,
then teetered over onto its side. The tie-down strap went slack. The
cart was sliding to a stop, directly in front of us. I climbed out and
pushed on the right wing, then tried to keep pushing, but the low
gravity made getting traction difficult. I managed to tilt the wing up
and over the cart, then had to struggle to catch back up to the plane. I
dug my feet in and pushed hard, trying to stay on the ground and push at
the same time.

We approached the end of the tarmac, where much of the mountain had
fallen away. The small plane tipped up slightly as it bumped over the
shallow ridge the defined the broken runway, and momentum carried it
over the edge. I jumped after it, overtaking it, and several feet above
it. My partner had pulled in the tie-down strap and tossed it out in
front of me.

We hit the surface of the portal, and there was atmosphere. The plane
stalled beneath me and I grabbed the end of the strap. I shot over the
top wing and my fall pulled the plane's nose down, breaking the stall.
We fell, I pulled myself up the strap, watching the first bit of the
mountain hit the surface of the portal, and explode into fire. It was
gaining on us.

"Start the engine!" I shouted, but my partner waited until I was past
the engine and hanging on to the wing struts before trying.

I could feel the heat above us. The engine sputtered. I prayed that the
fuel system was sealed enough for the fuel to still exist. I worried
that the lubrication of the motor might have boiled away in the vacuum.
The propeller turned and I dove head first into the cockpit, trying not
to hit the flight controls as I tucked myself into the flight harness. I
put us into a slight roll and tried to aim for the nearest edge of the
mass being torn up by the portal. Small bits of debris pinged off the
hull and wings around us. The plane lurched as the engine coughed and
sputtered, cutting into the thin air enough to pull us forward.

Our radio crackled to life, the council asking what was going on. "Hell
raining down on this world, how do we get to you?" I asked, but there
was no reply, just repeated calls for updates on the situation. I
realized they must be out of our radio's range.

There was no answer for several seconds, long enough for us to steer
away from the debris falling past us, and soon any answer was blocked
out by intense static interference. I started looking for signs of life,
but there were none, deep canyons and crevasses with an odd silvery gray
framework were slowly being covered by molten rock that seared the sky
and crashed behind us with continuous shock waves that pushed us on the
front of a roasting wave of heat that made controlling the plane
difficult. We dove for well over a minute, our planet roaring through
the portal, being sucked to its final location a bit at a time as it
ground against the portal's surface, torn and collapsing to the ground
far below.

As we got closer to the ground I could see signs of plant life in the
distance, and we both decided to head in that direction, even though, as
far as we knew, we might be flying in exactly the wrong direction.
Clouds blotted out the sun and lighting arced all around us. The heat
began to be unbearable, our little suit batteries finally starting to
run down. We put the plane into a dive, building up our airspeed to the
red-line. My partner let me fly while she tried to find something on the
radio other than static. I told her to try the walkie-talkies, too.

There was nothing, however, but static and heat. At least both tanks
read "full" and when we got lower the air was cooler and smoother. I
spotted several lakes and meandering rivers in the distance and gently
nudged the plane in that direction, we needed to find flat ground to set
down on if we ever expected to be able to take off again. Problem with
grassy fields is that you couldn't see how bumpy they might be from the
air, so a long stretch of gravel shoreline seemed like a better plan. I
found myself wishing we'd looked for a float plane.

The radio crackled and sputtered, but we could make out our council,
we'd been flying in mostly the right direction, to judge by the Vortac
radios, once I got them tuned to the same frequency.

I wondered how their radio was working at that distance, but it dawned
on me that we were probably using a radio from the group that killed our
world. I flew for a few minutes about ninety degrees to our former
course and then took another bead on the radio. The lines were very
nearly parallel, either their radio was moving, or we were hundreds of
miles from their location.

The dream jumped ahead several days. We'd set a lean-too up using the
wing of the plane as a roof. We'd apparently just about run out of fuel,
and were only using the engine to charge the batteries to keep the radio
going. (I figured we could listen about an hour a day for the next five
months or so.)

We'd heard other survivors on the radio, even managed to talk a few
moments to some of them as they passed so far overhead that we couldn't
see them, so knew our little group wasn't the only one that survived. I
kept a fire burning and hoped that someone would fly over and see our
bright yellow plane from the air. We'd managed to find grain and fruit
that was edible, as well as some fish-like things. (Information from the
radio helped identify animals that were safe.) My partner was confident
that rescue would only be a matter of waiting for the collection of our
planet to cease, then the aliens would be able to fly out and pick us
up, they were too busy rescuing others at the moment.

Another time jump. We were indeed rescued, but had to leave the plane
behind. I took the radios and the battery, though, just in case. I was
in a group that was overlooking the deposited remains of our world,
still molten and glowing, but with odd bits of other planes and loose
remnants of debris that had somehow been cast out from the periphery of
the storm and littered about this new world. I'd found some old phone
bills, along with the other papers that had somehow survived the intense
heat, or been blown away from the cataclysm.

It was all sort of depressing. The aliens were very tall, about two to
two and a half times our size, but oddly similar in construction. They
didn't have tails, though. They were very, very, sorry; and seemed to be
doing everything they could to rescue whatever populations they had
found still alive, they had even turned over their pre-built colonies to
us. Still, from a world of several billion souls, we now numbered only
in the thousands.

I looked down at the pile of papers I had collected and then let them
drop from the ledge I was standing on. They fluttered down into the
still molten remains of our old world and vanished in a series of
flashes. I hoisted my radio pack and headed back to our observation
tower.

Aircraft Fantasy, and, Sun Block

In the first dream, I was, once again, flying around the broken world in an aircraft with four wings put together like a "+" sign with the cockpit and the main thruster on the centerline. The cockpit was a funky rotating thing, as the whole aircraft had to rotate 90 degrees to land on its tail like a '50s rocketship. when landed the thing looked a lot like a Christmas tree, especially since it was painted in green camoflage.

I landed in the cleared parking lot of a large strip mall. The cars that had been left behind had been all pushed up against the perimeter of the parking lot as a makeshift wall of sorts. It wasn't immediately clear if they were supposed to be keeping things in or out. The others of the group soon landed in the empty parking lot, most of them in ultralights that would have little trouble getting out in a hurry. A couple of them landed on the roof of the longest building, as they wanted to have a little bit of air beneath them when they rolled off, and the wall of cars made them nervous.

We unholstered our ray guns and set off to open the gates of the mall, to see what we were up against.

Unfortunately, that's where that dream ended.


Sun Block

The next dream started in a much less apocalyptic mode. I was in the park with several of my friends, we'd brought out my telescope to track one of the largest sunspots ever in recorded history. It was big enough that you could just make it out using the pinhole projection method.

I got the scope all set up and even had the tracking motor working properly, we set up a drawing board with paper on it for a screen and had my camera ready as well. It was about five in the afternoon, so we figured we would have about an hour before the sun went behind the houses next to the park. Several of us had brought jackets to sit on, and to wear if we decided to stay and use the telescope after it got dark enough.

I managed to get the image focused on the paper, and there was the giant sunspot, surrounded by a fractal dusting of smaller spots. That surprised several of my friends, as they hadn't been following the photographs. I had printed the photo from a couple of days ago, when the sun's rotation was in nearly the same position. Some of the group started outlining the sunspots with a marker.

"You missed one," CD said.

"No, that's new, it wasn't there a minute ago," SCV, her husband, said, then drew a dot where it had appeared.

"Look, there's a bunch of new ones."

"I've never seen sunspots form so quickly," I noted, starting to feel nervous.

"I wonder how many there would have to be for us to start feeling cooler?" One of the people asked, not sure at this point which friend it was.

"Sunspots are actually hotter than the rest of the sun," SCV pointed out, "so we'd actually start feeling warmer."

"But wouldn't it get darker?"

I thought that it might, as the spectrum shifted into a range that we couldn't see. I looked away from the drawing at the sky, thinking it was a little bit darker than I remembered. The image of the sun was now mottled, much like the skin of a rotting orange. The sunspots were beginning to merge, and SCV suggested that I should start the camera up in movie mode. The sky was getting darker.

I put in a new memory stick and switched over. Just in time. Like soap bubbles merging, the sunspots began to stretch towards one another and to join up, soon the sky was noticably dimmer, a false dusk. About ten minutes after the sun was more "spot" than sun, I noticed there was a huge aurora shimmering above the north and west.

"I think we might want to get inside, or put on some more sunblock. This doesn't look good."

Escaping the Pit

This morning I had what was obviously supposed to be a World Of Warcraft dream. But it was warped to include a crashlanding in a big multi-engined steel skinned aircraft and decidedly non-WoW magical powers.

After the crash I was captured by Orcs and thrown into a pit with a sword and shield to fight other prisoners to the death. I refused, driving the sword deep into the ground and leaning the crappy shield up over the pommel.

They tosses a dirty and beat up looking Gnome woman in with me. We looked at each other across the pit. She sqeaked out an apology and charged at me. Her sword and shield wobbling all over the place. It was obvious that she'd never used either one.

I stepped out of her way and gave her a gentle push as she whirled past, causing her to tumble ass over teacups on the sandy pit floor. She landed, sobbing on the arena floor. I went to her, kneeled across the sword, pinning it to the ground, eased off her helmet and there was the sweetest face I think I have ever seen, bright large blue eyes, filled with tears and fear, green hair and full pouty lips that quivered in terror. I couldn't help myself, I bent down and kissed her full on the lips. “I am not going to hurt you.”

I picked her up and she clung to me, one arm around my shoulder, the one with the shield, and the other clutching my shirt. There was a murmering from the the crown, I am sure that it looked like a man holding a child to most of the gathered Orcs, and that had to be uncomfortable.

Next in the pit was an obviously undead woman. She had no shield, just a pair of wicked looking knives. She turned and spat something fetid at the feet of the Orc who had pushed her into the pit. He jumped back, causing a ripple of laughter from the crowd. She stepped into the ring, walked over to where my sword and shield were stuck in the ground, looked up at the jeering crowd. Then turned to face us, I was holding the Gnome far back, shielding her with my body.

“They are quite angry that you won't fight, aren't they?”

I looked up at the jeering crowd for the first time. They did indeed look angry, angry enough to charge the rim of the pit. “Yes, yes they are.”

“I, for one, take great delight in seeing them angry.” With that, the undead woman spun around with unhuman speed and thrust both of her daggers into the ground next to my sword and shield. “I don't suppose you have a hug for me?” She held out her skeletal arms.

Although she was certainly repulsive, I didn't hesitate but for a split second, shifting the Gnome to a more balanced position, I opened up my other arm and gathered the slender woman to my chest. He cheek barely rested on my shoulder. “Don't expect me to get all teary eyed. They'll send someone in to finish us off soon enough.”

“I wouldn't bet on that.”

A large red drake swooped up out of the canyon and over the rim of the fighting pit. The crowd of orcs scattered. It took some time for the commotion to die down, and eventually a pair of Orcs with long spears came and herded us out of the pit and into a room overlooking the canyon. The only thing in the room was a chamber pot and a sleeping pallet with a thin sheet. It filled the entire floor which is to say the room was small, about the size of a single bed. In highly accented tones one of the guards made a joke about us being lovers so having to share the one bed and pot.

The last two feet of the bed stretched out of the short room onto a ledge overlooking the canyon. The Gnome an the undead woman stepped out to the edge and looked up and then down. “We won't be escaping this way, unless you can fly.”

“Funny thing about that...” I stepped to the edge and dove off, looping through the air and then back to them.

The undead woman looked at me. “Why don't you just go, then, take the Gnome and go?”

“Yes, let's get out of here.” The Gnome pleaded.

“No, we're all getting out, in the morning.”

I managed to fly down and collect a large number of metal pipes and funnels, which I then assembled into a pair of horns, much to the confusion of my cell mates. Finally we laid down to rest, the Gnome tucked under my left arm and curled in tight for warmth, and the undead woman stretched out on my right side, she on top of the covers.

“I don't feel the cold, you use the sheet.” She laid flat on her back, staring up at the sky. It was her who woke us up in the morning. A bunch of Orcs had hung the nose cone of my aircraft over the edge of the cliff above us, and were taking tours, looking down through the windows to see the three of us sleeping together. One of them had dropped a large wooden dildo onto the undead woman's chest. "That way you have one for each. Give us a show!"

They were laughing at us, until the undead woman and I both grinned at them, tossed the wooden object over the side, stage kissed and moved back into the room out of sight. Inside I showed the Gnome how to blow on the makeshift trumpet. We parted it out and they eventually came to poke us back up into the pit. The guards who'd come for us looked around quite a bit trying to figure out where the “Ba ba ba-da, baadum,” sounds had come from. The women actually giggled at them until I shushed them. I didn't want to give the guards any reason to search us.

Once the guards left us I collected the parts of the trumpet and assembled both of them. The gathering crown murmuring over this odd display. I noticed they had gathered all our weapons and shields from the previous day in the center of the ring. and my sword was still stuck halfway into the ground. No one had succeeded in pulling it out. (I had used magic to bury it that deep.)

A fully armored and apparently high ranking Orc stepped to the edge of the fighting pit, looking down on us. “You will pick up your weapons and fight until only one can leave the ring, or none of you will leave the ring!”

“Are you going to come down here and kill us yourself, or are you to much of a coward to face three unarmed captives.”

“There is no honor in killing you.”

“So you plan on starving us to death?”

“No, he'll just send in honorless captives who don't mind killing to execute us.” The Gnomish woman stated.

“Really?” I finished placing the makeshift mouthpiece on my trumpet. “And what if they won't kill us, nor the one after, nor the one after that?”

“Oh, they'll kill us,” the undead woman shifted to watch our backs, and I let the Gnome down to the ground.

The Gnome moved into a defensive crouch, still struggling to assemble her horn. “I sure hope you know what you're doing.” We all shifted into a triangle backs together.

“I knew you would defend yourselves, eventually, you all do.”

“Naturally, but we will not be killing fellow captives today.” I placed the mouthpiece to my lips and started to play. “Ba ba ba-da, baaadump.” The Gnome clapped twice at the end of my call. I played it again, this time, the undead woman joined in. The Gnome finished putting together her small and much higher pitched horn. We played the tune together, and the undead woman clapped, while we both stamped at the end of the tune. I heard the echoes of stamping from the hallways leading into the pit on either side. We played again, and the hallways reverberated with the sound of swords on shields, spear butts on floors and shouts of the final “Baaadum!” The Orc Guards in the pit looked at the doors, then at one another.

The Orc started to look worried under his helmet. After the doors to the pit burst open, and his guards tumbled backwards, pushed down by their charges, he looked positively panicked. But that was nothing compared to the look on his face when he flew down off the edge of the pit to land a few feet in front of me. I climbed out of my makeshift instrument, letting it take the first blow of his mace.

With an odd little twist of my mind, I disarmed the large Orc, stepped up to him, and flat handed him in the center of his breastplate, knocking him onto his back, sand flew from the force of his landing.

“Hold!” I held up my empty hands to stop the advancing gladiators. “We are leaving, and any prisoners who wish may come with me.”

The Orc officer was preparing to make some sort of remark when his eyes widened. He'd seen our rides out of here arrive from the canyon. The orcs in the stands panicked and scrambled over one another to get out. Red Dragons engaged mounted patrols in the sky.

Behind me, dragons landed one by one, then lifted off again with half a dozen prisoners or so on their backs.

I kicked the Pit Master's mace over to him and prepared to defend myself.

I felt a dragon's large toe fall gently, for a dragon, on my right shoulder. “Come, brother, we can leave this place with no bloodshed this day.”

The Pit Master made no move to pick up his mace. I nodded at him, turned, picked up the battered remains of my makeshift trumpet, then shot into the air next to the last drake out. I flew over and landed behind the undead woman and the Gnome.

We wheeled away across the canyon, the air mounted guards giving up chase after only a short distance. I was amazed that there had been no deaths on either side.

In a raspy voice “This doesn't mean I'll sleep with you, you know,” the undead woman quipped with a dry rattling laugh at the end. I noticed that she'd picked up the sinister looking daggers and had them thrust through her sash.

“I will,” the Gnome quietly stated, then played “Ba ba ba-da, baaadump” on her little coronet. Her laughter was like tinkling bells, and I found myself hoping that she wasn't joking.

Volcano Soccer

I dreamed that I was playing soccer at a mountain retreat. The game didn't last very long, as most of the players were even more out of shape than me. 

I spent a lot of time kicking goals from a grassy slope whose downhill run gave me a little advantage approaching the other team's goal. After a bit the other team stopped defending if I got the ball while I was up on that slope. 

As we walked back across the valley, I looked up and noticed that there was smoke and lava coming from the mountain top. The lava was pouring down the slopes and two molten streams were heading right for our little valley, and another stream was headed for a valley across a low ridge where the women's camp was located. 

Since I was in the best shape (and that's pretty sad) I volunteered to run over and warn them. 

The next part of the dream was spent running across the ridge, down across a little ravine, where the bottom was all ready filling with a hot tarry ooze. I worried about there being gasses so took some deep breaths and held my breath as I picked my way down the shallow ravine and stepped over the tar from boulder to boulder. 

I was completely out of breath when I finally jumped up out the other side. I started calling out to the women's camp as I got close, waving up towards the lava flow when I finally managed to get someone's attention. 

I could barely jog the las couple of hundred yards to their camp, and by that time, they had loaded up all their vehicles and left. I stood there in their little valley, wondering how the heck I was going to get out myself, since none of them had waited for me.  

I looked back over in the direction of the men's camp, and there was all ready a tendril of lava headed through the shallow ravine I'd just crossed. There was no way I was going to run back.

I scoured the storage garages, hoping there was some sort of camp vehicle, like a golf cart, anything.  The only thing I found was a rack of kayaks and a bunch of hang gliders, rolled up in their tubes. It was obvious that they hadn't been used in a very long time.

I started putting together one of the hang gliders, figuring that would be the fastest way down the mountain. I called back to the camp to make sure my friends were evacuating and not waiting for me. I needn't have worried, they were all so busy packing and driving out that no one picked up the phone. That was when I wondered why we hadn't just called them in the first place.

I wondered, as I took off with the mountain on fire behind me, if I should try to glide back over to the camp where my car was parked, or if I should just glide strait down the mountain. I hated the idea of leaving my car and camera. I decided as I picked up altitude that I would fly over in that direction and see how close the lava was to the camp. 

It wasn't close, but the road was all ready smoking just a bit further down the hill. There was no way I would be able to drive my car out, and I figured that landing and trying to make a second successful takeoff would be tempting fate just a little bit too much. I whooshed over the camp, out over a stream of lava, the camp looked like it just might survive, as the lava was passing through the valley on one side and another ravine on the other. I could feel the heat rising off of the lava so turned gently down slope into the wind, causing me to suddenly gain altitude. I could see the stream of cars headed down the mountain. Lava poured down into the  ravine that the road snaked around. 

I hoped they would be able to get off the mountain before the lava overflowed onto the road at the bottom.

Dream City Air Defense

The sky over my dream city was full of aircraft, blue and silver torsos with silver short wings. Instead of flying however, they hovered. I was in a very small agile craft and was weaving in and out of them, hunting the actual airborne invaders. 

My craft was equipped with lasers, and cameras. Apparently this was a game aircraft and not really armed. I was supposed to be flying amongst the aircraft that hovered over the city playing a game. Unfortunately there was a real invasion going on. The blue checked cowlings  were actually box kites with short wings. I was flying above them and never noticed if there were physical strings or not. 

I dodged and wove around them until I came upon the enemy aircraft carrier, a giant charcoal colored, plane filled landing field that lumbered through the sky, its defense guns taking shots at the kites that surrounded them but having little effect on the paper craft.

I lined up and made an "attack run" on the carrier. It took two passes of me flying at them with my ineffective game lasers and wing flashes (cameras) to get them to launch an intercept.

At that point I hoped to use my superior speed and maneuverability to lure them into crashing with the kites. 

This was a plan that was actually working as I woke up.

Not Quite Transformers

Another space travel dream. This time we landed in a churchyard next to its stables. The stables were full of little animals. The vehicles of this planet were sentient, and typically chose their own drivers. We were warned not to handle the toy sized vehicles, as they might grow attached to us. 

The only vehicle that was interested in me was a sled. Snow style, stand on the runners type of dog sled. It was red. I decided that in order to not insult our hosts I would take it. Turned out there was no need of snow. The sled zoomed around on the roads, and off it turned out, quite nicely. I could ride on the sled, or stand behind it on the runners, which certainly made it seem faster. By the end of the dream, it had seen one of our books about Christmas and was actually flying around with a cargo of little ones. 

I'm not sure what our hosts thought of that. I also know that our captain was loath to bring any of the vehicles aboard, and he didn't want to leave any of his colonists behind, either. Our hosts thought that there were plenty of room and resources for us, and we would give their old boring society some new interests.

I suggested that we had enough resources and help on this planet that a small number of us could stay behind long enough to build a vessel to follow along. But he didn't like that idea either, as the aliens would know where we settled. 

I excused myself from the conversation and took the sled out for a run.

Trans Dimensional Rift War

          Stale Chocolate bars in a drawer beneath a drafting table. I figured the chocolate would still be safe, but apparently there was too much milk in it and it had turned rancid. The section leader called over the radio to warn us. I found one bar still wrapped and it didn't smell or taste bad to me, but I didn't finish it, just to be safe.
          We reported to the front of the design building where we (a group of about a dozen) were assigned to a virtual machine interface. The mission started in full video with cgi overlays for the multidimensional threats that were brewing in our skies. There was a sort of cartoon aspect to the overlays as more threats began to form. (Apparently the drones were fired out of a cannon of some sort and the wings were deployed once we reached the target area.)
          We had a sort of chemical laser to fire into the micro rifts when we spotted them. There were only about a dozen shots per drone however, so the control center had to monitor who was available and route us accordingly. I was almost on top of a rift shortly after launch and my laser activated and was fired in a matter of a few seconds after my wings deployed. All faster than I could have reacted. I boosted my power draw to catch up to my flight and took the far right tail position of our "V" formation. In many ways us pilots were simply along for the ride, the AI in the drones was much faster than a human pilot ever could be. Only thing the drones didn't have was the visual processing ability and decision making process that went along with it. The control center was wired directly into our heads, so it sometimes reacted to our perceptions of threat before our conscious mind was aware of it. It was a very odd feeling. We flew our patrol, splitting up to surround a newly formed rift. One of the flight was in position to take two rifts when a second formed near by, and she got a double kill.
          We congratulated her, but knew that any of our drones would have reacted the same if we'd had the shot.
          Soon, however, there were too many threats, and the system began to simplify, eventually we found ourselves flying our drones through a sky full of wire-frame models, that, when there finally was a breakthrough (which we were supposed to prevent if at all possible) there was an explosion of black and purple rotary winged creatures that split off in all directions, they sprayed a caustic chemical of some sort that would then violently explode if we got too close. It made following them very dangerous (for the drones at least.) We lost a couple of drones before we figured out this new tactic.
          Our front mounted guns didn't have much ammunition, so we had to conserve by using single shots or three shot bursts or risk not being able to survive the whole engagement. This was the sort of flying and shooting that the drones excelled at. Unfortunately the targets that dropped out of the rifts weren't always the same, so humans had to make the fine targeting calls, as well as prioritizing the targets, and coming up with tactics to deal with the unexpected; like exploding chem trails. In this particular mission, there were just over sixty rifts, and we managed to stop all but two of them.
          When we formed up after the engagement to return the drones to our base, there were only eight of us left. We'd shot down a similar number of aliens (or alien craft, the researchers couldn't agree on that, some believing that the living craft were a drone, like our own.)
          According to historical data, the engagements always lasted anywhere from 21 to 84 minutes in increments of 21 minutes with rifts forming three to five per minute. We didn't have any good theories as to why that would be, just that it always happenend that way. If no micro-rifts formed at the 22 minute mark, then we knew it was safe to stand down for another few days.
          Later I was at my parents old house, still in the world of the rift war, and came upon a drawer full of small scorpion-like creatures. I knew immediately that they were part of the alien invaders' little left overs. I immediately went numb on the right hand pinky and ring finger when one of them stabbed me. Quickly I ran water in the sink and dropped the whole drawer into the hot water. The little silver and blue critters could actually swim, and started darting around picking up their eggs (which were a fuzzy flourescent green color.) It took several seconds to rinse the critters off my arm and hand. The hot water seemed to be slowly killing them, though I had to keep sweeping escapees back into the sink. I used the back of a carving knife for that. After I cut the first couple in half, tricky since they were all of two centimeters long, they learned to avoid the knife by rolling up into a little ball. I'd tried crushing them, but the little ball was impossible to break, so I just rolled them back into the sink. I finally had the situation under control enough to activate my headphone and call it in. I knew I was in for a long decontamination and that my parents' house would be incinerated and passed through a triple zero mesh. (Whatever that is.)

Virtual Flying, Sobbing Apparition

          In what was a very detailed dream, I was playing Axlepyre, running through an instance in World of Warcraft with nine other folks from the guild. We were ducking through a glowing green maze, trying not to touch the sides, the whole thing was rotating, making it fairly difficult. In the fashion of this sort of dream it wasn't long before I was not playing the game, but living the game. Apparently the others in the group had the same feeling. We finished up the current group of creeps we were fighting and decided to mount up and fly out of the area. Soon we were darting over the jungle of Stranglethorne, racing between the tops of the trees and diving down to skim the surface of the rivers. We stopped at the diving platforms and made a camp fire.
          It didn't take long for us to change into far more colorful attire. (Or in the case of the elves in the group, less attire.) I put on my chef's hat and prepared a couple of feasts for the group. In one of my bags I had a chest that was essentially a refrigerator and some sort of magical grill. I set up on the other side of the path and was chopping vegetables and carving fillets, grilling same, and then brewing up some sauces and finally mixing them all together in a large wok. I remember having to stand on a fallen log to get to the top of the grill to turn the meat.
Since half the group were Gnomes there weren't a lot of short jokes, though I did notice that I was the shortest of the entire group, so when there were jokes, I was typically the subject.
          Soon we were all taking turns diving off the platforms, though some of us who could levitate or slow fall cheated so we could do a couple of dozen flips or turns before splashing down in the brackish water of the cove far below.

          I woke up thinking, "that there was worthy zip-line inspired dream."

          In the morning, while laying in bed unable to move, feeling fully awake, I could hear the cats moving around, knocking stuff over in the kitchen. Then, from N's old office I could hear a woman's high pitched wail and long broken sobs. The despair was palpable and I wanted nothing more than to go and comfort the poor woman, all the while concerned that the house was somewhat insecure if she could have just walked in. I could not, however, make myself get up and go to her. The sobbing stopped, and a few moments later the woman passed through the hallway, past the front entry where the light caught her from behind, revealing reddish brown hair just past her shoulders, a cap sleeved blouse almost the same shade brown with cream colored lace collar and trim. It seemed she was wearing a skirt of the same material (brown corduroy, I think.) But I could not tell whether the skirt was long or short as the skirt turned into a dark roiling mist just about mid thigh and going to within about a foot of the ground.
          I heard the cats scrabbling around, knocking into the toaster and flowers on the kitchen counter, then tearing through the living room, frantic claws on paraquat tiles. When they bounded in across the bed they bounced over my hips and across my chest, and that finally woke me up.

          I didn't really look for the woman, but I did find the kitchen to be quite the mess; toaster crumbs, coupons, plastic flowers and a couple of zebra-striped place mats were strewn across the counters and onto the floor.
          I love how fast and how detailed your brain can fill in a scene with very little real information. In this case the cats were probably racing through the house and the wailing was likely Little John's "I'm a mighty hunter!" call (or perhaps his "where the heck is breakfast?" call.)

Donkey Landing Gear

I seem to have a lot of trouble remembering the dreams that I have while on pain killers, and I have been on them a lot lately. There was a little snippet from this morning, however that was just sort of goofy and delightful and reminded me, upon waking, of the fantastic dreams that seemed much more common not so long ago. I was flying, one of my favorite dream pass times, out on the borders of the Dream City I seem to return to time and time again.

I was flying under my own power, done up in some all too small reed and paper wings. Brown and red, but more towards maroon. The sun, in full flight towards the horizon, was dodging large cumulus clouds that dotted the landscape. I was playing about the fringes of the large storm cells, ducking in and out of the scarlet and orange shadows, all while keeping an eye on a blimp with a rickety looking gondola dangling below its puffy outlines.

It, too, was much too small to lift the load it carried. I wove in and around the clouds, always trying to stay out of its sight, but keep it in mine. Soon I followed it down towards a small field lit by gas lamps around its square perimeter. As the blimp dove, a donkey was lowered out the front of the basket. I could hear it bray even as the thunder rattled in the clouds behind me.

I watched as the blimp dived towards the field, the donkey stretched in his sling, his legs reaching for the earth. The blimp flared its approach and I could hear the engines reverse. The donkey was lowered to the ground, as if its desire to stay on the ground would overcome the lift of the blimp once its downward momentum passed.

And, as I soared above the scene on my too small wings, not bothered by the physics of my own flight, the donkey did hold the blimp in place, Waiting patiently for the captain to decide to pull the animal aloft and resume his journey at a later date. It shocked me awake: this absurd violation of the laws of physics.

Zombie Attack, Carmagedden, Blue Movie

Zombies Attack Jupiter III

              There were about a dozen of us at work when the news came in that Zombies were attacking the city. I was wiring the ship's internal video network, a mix of thin copper and fiber-optic cables. I looked over at the slender brown-haired woman who was one of two women I worked with on this project. We both had the "What did she just say?" look on our faces.
              The other woman was back in the Main Distribution Feed calling out the pair colors for us to terminate at each tap point. She told us over the radio that the city was being attacked by zombies. The infection had just suddenly boiled over and reached the tipping point. "This is a different strain, they're saying, very fast acting." She told us to tune to a certain channel when we hooked up the next station's tap.
              My partner asked me to finish up so she could go to the staging room and pick up the thin panel.
              "I have to see what she's rambling on about now. Sounds like she's watching a horror movie, not the news."
              "Right, because we haven't had zombie attacks in weeks," I stated rather matter of fact.
              "That's right, everyone was cured or rounded up," she raced down the curved hallway, shouting back "and stop calling them zombies!"
              I had forgotten that her own parents and sister had been infected in the last attack. I picked up my cell phone and called N. She didn't pick up, so I left a message; "Get to high ground and lock yourself away from everyone else. I'll figure out how to come get you."
              I then called the construction manager to ask him if the site was securable. Again, no answer. I crawled out of the crawl space and hit the intercom button on my phone. "Hey, has anyone else heard about the zombie attack, like, from security?"
              Both the gals on my installation team called back with "no" but there were no other answers. "I've got a bad feeling about this," the one in the MDF said, and then yelped. "Oh! My god! They're in the building, heading up the access stairs!"
              My partner arrived and began hooking up the panel. "There's some of the engineers running ahead of them, it doesn't look like they're going to make it."
              "Lock yourself in, Clair, don't let anyone else into the MDF, you hear me!" I shouted.
              As I pulled myself out of the crawlspace I looked at my partner, who was standing transfixed and trembling looking at the monitor. I read the crawl and froze.
              "Thousands of recently innoculated display New Terrifying Symptoms. Rapid onset, ravaging hunger. Statewide quarantine imposed. If you've been innoculated, lock yourself in. All National Guard units activated, call..."
              N had insisted on being innoculated, despite the vaccine being inadequately tested.
              The crawl continued running underneath footage of bloody-faced people in packs chasing through the streets, throwing themselves at cars and store front windows. Several buildings were seen where the rooftops were a milling mass of feeders, and those being fed off of. I knew, for some reason, that the zombies would climb after prey, but only rarely would they head back down once they had climbed somewhere. I had a locker on the floor just below us, and in that locker was a gun and about two hundred rounds of ammunition. I had stopped carrying it in my tool harness just a few days ago. My partner started switching through the ship's security cameras. There was no one on board but my construction crew. The locker room leading into the ships access way was empty.
              "Clair, I'm going to close the door to the locker room, I have to get something. Can you see the ship's controls from in there?"
              I heard the alarm sound and the ships internal bulkheads began to close. I told my partner to "Get to the control room and lock the doors, don't let anybody in."
              I didn't hear anything from Clair. I tried to remember if she had been innoculated. I knew that the brown-haired woman hadn't, she'd been terrified that this very thing would happen to her.
              "We have to save them," the woman pointed to the security camera image, a group of engineers and designers was racing towards the locker room and the access ramp of the Jupiter III (which wasn't a space ship, but a dirigible.) I noticed that the group was not panic stricken, like one would expect. I realized that they were all infected, and running towards what they knew was a likely source of nutrition. Us.
              We both ran for the access way. I only had one plan. Beat the much younger woman to the door, close and then lock it down. I grabbed the young woman by the back of her shirt. "Get to the bridge, fire up the hydrogen jets and heat up the lift cells. You were better on the simulator than me."
              She slowed and turned back to head for the control room. I heard thumping from inside the MDF and when I got to the plexiglass windows I dove and slid along the floor under them. I looked back to see Clair hammering against the door with bloody broken hands. I was thankful that she hadn't unlocked it before turning completely. I was a little bit worried that she might damage equipment needed to control the Jupiter III, but saw that all of the cabinets were closed. I was never more glad that Clair was compulsive about keeping things neat.
              I reached the access ramp and the guard station was empty, from what I could see, the locker room was empty. It was really just a long hallway full of lockers for folks to put their street clothes in while working. There was a long partition down the middle and there was a men's side and a woman's side. The door at the end of the access ramp was closed but not latched, and was always locked from the other side. I stepped quietly down the ramp and was just thinking of heading into the locker room when the guard appeared on the womans side. He had a handful of women's clothing held up under his nose.
              We lunged for the door together. I managed to pull it shut with a click just as he grabbed the handle from the other side, and pushed rather than pulled to try to get through. I knew he'd been infected.
              "Clair's locked in the MDF and the guard was also infected. He's outside the ramp room though." I rummaged through the guard's desk. quickly skimming through the security cameras. There was a dead body on the woman's side of the locker room, I hadn't been able to see it through the tiny windows in the doors. It only took me a couple of moments to find the external door locks and I closed off the hanger bay. Too late, it seemed. There were several people running across the hanger floor, followed by other infected ones.
              I grabbed the microphone on the desk. "Get into the secure cargo lockers, one per locker. You should be safe there until we come to get you out!" I shouted at them. Some of them looked around to try to see where the voice was coming from. That was a mistake, their pursuers closed the gap to almost nothing. They wouldn't have a chance to enter the storage unit and close it now.
              There was a shotgun locked to the side of the drawers of the desk. I looked in the top drawer for keys. I found ammunition for it, but no key to unlock it from its mount.
              "The hydrogen is preheated, we can get out of here when you have everyone on board."
              "They're loading themselves into the storage containers now. I'm trying to find the roof release."
              "It's not there, its in the hanger control booth."
              "Oh, shit."
              I thought a moment, that being difficult because of the guard banging on the door. I loaded the shotgun and tipped the desk back. I ripped off the security panel. I turned the desk so the shotgun was pointing at the door, and fired.
              Just as I'd hoped, the zombie ducked down to look at the new hole in the door, and I fired again. The hammering and clawing stopped. I pushed the other door open and discovered that the guard wasn't wearing any pants. So much for getting his keys. I went to my locker and grabbed my bag. I found the guard's pants, gun and keys on the bench and took them, too. I locked the door, but realized it wouldn't take a group of zombies long to worry the door apart, now that it had a hole the size of a fist in it.
              "Fire the jets!" I shouted as I prepared to open the door behind the guard's desk that led into the hanger.
              "What? That'll kill everyone in the hanger!"
              "There's no one left in the hanger but zombies."
              "Stop calling them that!"
              "I need to get to the control room to open the hanger and release the clamps."
              "I can do that from here. Get on board."
              Through the small window I could see dozens of other zombies enter from various doors in the hanger. The people who'd managed to lock themselves into the storage containers weren't going to be safe much longer if we didn't get off the ground.
              "Our passengers need us to be off the ground, soon." I shouted into the intercom as I raced up the ramp. I hit the ramp retract and jammed the joystick into place with a leather something from the guard's belt (Pepper spray holster?) and then leapt across the gap into the dirigible's entry way. Zombies were attracted to the noise and movement and began to move towards the opening. (The opening was only about 8 feet above the ground, very climbable for a zombie.)
              I managed to swing the shotgun around, but held off firing in the hopes that one or more of them might not be infected, "Yet" I mentally added.
              The dirigible suddenly lurched up a few feet, nearly spilling me out into the hanger below. I dropped the guard's belt, losing the extra side arm, radio and ammunition. I scrambled back away from the edge of the entry, then swung the door closed and spun the hatch shut.
              "What are we going to do about the roof?" I asked from where I sat on the floor.
              "They've got it."
              "Who they?"
              "The people in the control booth, they're waving at me, we have to find a way to get them out of there."
              "Get them out of there?"
              "They're trapped. We have to help them."
              "Tell them to open the doors and then you can fly over. We can lower a cargo pod to them."
              I heard her relaying my instructions over the radio. Just as I suspected, there was no response.
              "They won't open the doors. They just keep waving at us."
              "Can you turn us in place so I can see them." I stood up and went to the window of the Embarkation Lounge. "I'm at the window of the lounge."
              "I think so, just a second."
              I felt the ship begin to turn, really though it looked and felt more like the hanger rotated around us it was so smooth.
              Just as I thought. The people in the control room crew were a mix of live and undead zombies. The live ones were faster and clever, with some reasoning abilities as well as the ability to navigate in places they were familiar with in life. The dead ones, pretty much follow noise and movement, hoping for whatever it was they needed to keep going. Oddly, though both types would eagerly chase prey, only the live ones would chase prey down stairs. Deaders wouldn't step down stairs unless you were right ahead of them. City dwellers had sometimes been able to save themselves from undead packs by leaping the rails into subway access stairs or even dropping down into sewer access tunnels. Of course, that didn't work if there were live zombies in the pack.
              I really didn't know how my partner could possibly have thought they were anything else. I realized that we were stuck here unless I could convince her to let me shoot the people in the control room, cook the zombies in the hanger, and then make a dash for the control booth to open the hanger doors.I would need to do this before the power went out. After several hours without food, hungry zombies would begin to chew on electrical cords, even ripping up drywall to get to wires with power in them. I was concerned that after making all that carnage, she would then just leave me stranded there.
              That was when I realized we had a time bomb in the MDF. Clair, in a few hours, would be ripping into the UPS in the MDF for a little snack. The voltage would probably kill her, and then a couple of hours later she would revive to finish ripping out our power network.
              "They're all infected, babe," I said as gently as I could, "some of them are stage two." I resolved to avoid using the word "zombies" in an attempt to bring her back to reality a little bit.
              "Clair, too?"
              "Yes."
              "How about the passengers?"
              "Some of them are probably infected and haven't shown yet. That's why I asked them to take separate containers."
              "Oh god, oh god oh god oh god...."
              "Babe, keep us in the center of the hanger as best you can. I have to shut some more hatches." I had just noticed more infected workers racing up the stairs of the catwalk that surrounded the hanger, and they were jumping for the disk shaped envelope of the dirigible. They were missing, and becoming snacks for their fellows below, but it would only be a matter of time before we drifted too close and they would be able to jump to us. I started racing through the ship, trying to make sure I shut every access hatch I knew of, and every one I could find.
              As I closed the last one I knew of I went by a window and saw that we were floating out over the city. "How'd you get the doors open?"
              "I just kept asking over and over again, one of them finally pulled the handle to open them. I don't know that he really knew what he was doing, though."
              "Maybe there was enough of him left to know to do the right thing." I knew I said it just to be comforting. I remembered reading that none of the research that had been done on the infected from the first outbreak seemed to indicate that anything of an original personality survived. There were still hundreds of them being stored in warehouses around the nation.
              Looking out over the city I saw that many fires had started all ready, this outbreak looked like it was going to be bad. I wanted to ask to head over to the Submarine base to look for N, but knew that if this outbreak really started amongst the innoculated, there wasn't much hope.

Carmagedden
             
              Later, I dreamed that I was with an older woman, she had long white hair, down to her waist, the last few inches was a light blonde color. We were following a pair of vehicles that were racing in a flood control channel. There was a wood-paneled white station wagon like MS used to drive long ago, and a black and green stake bed truck with at least half a dozen people in the back. The station wagon was also full of passengers. They cheered and hurled insults at one another as they dodged the large boulders and parts of houses that littered the channel.
              I was recording the whole thing. Stopping only to interview the woman about what was going on. This was what we in the media were calling an "Apocalypse Club" and this particular one was called "Carmagedden" by its members. They raced with a complete abandon and an apparent disrespect for life. The woman corrected me on that particular. "No, we love life, but have come to understand that the demons come for us all, and you don't know when they will show up, or where, so you might as well live large, every day, it just might be your last."
              I went back to following the action from the dirigible (two dirigible dreams in one night!) and managed to get the camera settled just as the white station wagon tried to dodge a house shaped stone, that I soon realized. as we got closer, was a stone facaded house. It fell into the drainage channel and the truck swerved, two of its passengers falling out and ending up under the crumpled home. The station wagon rolled up onto the sloped side of the channel as the house passed just in front of them. A stone fence work tagged the front passenger side and the station wagon flipped and rolled.
              We looked around, but didn't see any demons. We swooped in to check on the condition of the driver and his passenger. Several of the passengers had climbed out and were all ready rolling the car over. The driver was in bad shape. The woman jumped out of the dirigible, dropping the last ten feet to the ground. She staggered over to the man and injected him with something.
              "Thanks." The drivers eyes almost instantly dilated.
              "Can you drive?" the old woman asked him.
              The driver held up his arms, both were a mass of compound fractures, bone and blood glistened in the hazy light. I imagined my news editor would have to censor that image before it replayed during the dinner hour. (It was going out live, now, though.) "No, Dolly, I don't think I can drive any more. It's time." Before I could wonder what would happen to him in a world in which medical care was nearly unavailable (demons seemed attracted to large groups of humans so hospitals and schools were a thing of the past) Dolly had taken out a gun and shot him in the head.
              Other cars began to arrive. Taking on the passengers and then taking off. "Get out of here, it's too crowded." Dolly started waving them off.
              From the slope above a leathery demon, batlike, swooped down on Dolly, the talons at the forward bend of its wings pierced her shoulders and it ripped her head off with its hands. I handed the camera to my sound guy and brought up a shotgun, blasting the demon. The flaming blast ripped its flesh from its frame, but the skeleton just leered at me and it crouched to jump for me. A second blast shattered its head. I immediately started scanning the sky, "Get back in the lift, before more of them show up."
              The club members of Carmagedden raised their intoxicants to us, beer, wine, pipes and needles of various sorts and sent us off with a cheer as they raced off in different directions. As we climbed out of the flood control channel, I watched as club members restarted the station wagon and drove it off as well.
              I signed off. The sound/camera guy looked at me, terror still written all over his face, "that's got Pulitzer written all over it."
              "That's got luck written all over it. Now I'm going to have religious nuts to deal with all afternoon."
              "Do you need more ammo?"
             
Blue Movie

              I was directing a film about two middle aged women who, in order to fight their depression, join an erotic dance class. They form a fast friendship, and end up in a furious romance that takes the form of them recording one another dancing, initially for their husbands and then eventually realizing they are dancing for one another. Finally they record themselves dancing together, this leads to more (not shown in our film) and that film is found by one of the womans' husbands. He feels that the other husband has to know what is going on. A serious complication, the second husband finds it quite exciting. The relationships, to one another, to their husbands and families explode, some to the breaking point.
              We had just finished a day of shooting on the erotic dance numbers, and the respective actresses found themselves fielding offers to help them "take the heat off." I had to send the crew out, finally.
              "My husband isn't going to know what hit him," one of them quipped.
              "I'm wishing I hadn't gotten rid of mine," smirked the other. She turned to me, "What are you doing tonight," she purred, "this is all your fault, you know."
              "I think you'd better call my wife and ask her," I pulled my cell phone off my belt for her.