The Dreams

these dreams will be modified and integrated into the main story line in key places leading up to his discovery of the fated galaxy he came from. For now enjoy them in their raw state.
        

Dreams:

The fire wrapped the air around him yet he was untouched. It hammered the landscape, waves of flames turning everything that would burn into heaps of ash. It felt as though he was right there, standing midst the unimaginable devastation but he wasn’t. Those he saw still clinging to life writhed in the suffocating atmosphere of their once lush planet that was now only a simmering hell. This world was now held tightly in the clutches of death and was quickly nearing the same fate so many before had suffered, no one would escape, nothing would be left their end had come.

 A form of black inky smoke floated hundreds of feet above the surface. It was darkness, pure evil the inky smoke at its center was shaped like a woman’s body watching with pleasure, her victim’s suffering while feasting on their souls. This dark spirit with a power step through the barriers between the physical and spiritual realms was without equal in this place. He watched his presence unnoticed as the inky form lashed out with countless thousands of dark tendrils, slashing the air, latching onto the souls of those who were trapped here on this doomed planet. Death, fear, apathy, they permeated all reality and all senses here in this place. The cloying stink of it, the vile presence and the hopelessness emanating from those still left living filled his mind to where he felt he had to get away or he would go insane trapped here forever.

One moment his presence was on the surface of the doomed world, the suffering and death saturating his senses and in the next he found himself high above in the sky looking down on the dyeing world floating on the edge of where the atmosphere would have been. He floated there, a witness as the surface of the planet began to crumble. Lava burst up through fissures as the world slowly splintered, the crust fracturing as columns of plasma rained down from behind where he floated. The oceans fell away drifting into space, giant sections froze instantly as the water hit the vacuum of space. Gravity was entirely lost now as the planet was nothing but a cloud of rubble and then a flash, a glimpse of a bigger picture, the solar system and the horror that filled it and then he was gone.

He awoke with a start, disoriented but safe. He lay in his bed aboard the United Earth Explorer ship. He sat up shaking, drenched in sweat the sheets he had wrapped himself in as he fell asleep thrown far from where he lay. “They were getting worse” he thought as the familiar tremors wracked his body, convulsions that seemed to follow these so vivid dreams without fail, recurring dreams that felt like more than just random unconscious nightmares. Sitting up he ran his hands down his face and then up through his sweat soaked hair. He felt dizzy and shook his head in an effort to clear his addled mind. He couldn’t let it slip away, he had to remember and had to record what he had seen. “How can they feel so real? It's Like I am viewing another galaxies reality somewhere out in the universe". He gathered himself working to control his breathing in an effort to force his heart rate to slow and to push down the adrenaline that was racing through his body. He reached for his tablet and began entering the details, the images and the feelings, everything he could remember about this latest dream. All that he had seen in the dream he sketched: the dark inky smoke in the loose form of a woman, he noted the how the evil one had seemed to enjoy the slow drawn out destruction of life under her hand. He sketched a diagram of the solar system as best he could, recalling the medium sized star in the center and the five planets all in different stages of being harvested by swarms of the black glossy ships. 

When his notes were finished he laid back, rolled to a dryer spot on his bed and closed his eyes. He was determined to find his way back, hoping that he might for once return to were this dark one lurked in the deeps of his dreams and learn more but he knew he would not get his wish. If there were something out there, something dangerous, something unknown he wanted to know about it. It drove him, a feeling inside that told of a necessity to find the answers. There had been many of these horrific dreams since the first had left him confused and afraid to close his eyes. After the first time he had been afraid and forced himself to stay awake for days until the fatigue finally pulled him under. He had awoken after hours of calm uneventful rest, startled when he awoke; cursing himself for giving into the need for sleep but to his relief and surprise there had not been a relapse of the nightmare. He returned to the strict eight hours out of every twenty four that he had always tried to follow and for more than a week there was nothing until as suddenly as the first time it happened again and he awoke in the same fashion as before. This time though he was intrigued more than afraid and went directly back to sleep to find only the calm rest he was accustomed to. From that point on they came randomly and it took only a few more of the terrible visions before he saw the patterns and begin making detailed notes to track and compare similarities from one to the next. 

Dream Two.

A voice filled his mind, another joined it, they cried out, hundreds of millions of them reaching for him in their last dying moments. Their tragedy and their despair filled his mind as life after life was extinguished. It seemed an endless ocean of voices thick with desperation and hopeless fear. It was the darkness, the voices, cries of the countless all of them the feast for one. They screamed numberless in his mind reaching for him to witness their destruction. The shrieks increased in their intensity and the darkness shifted to a scene. Billions of sparks flickered over the surfaces of three planets the tinny sparks dying as quickly as they came to life, a vast space filled with the pieces of broken moons and that of one of the larger world’s plaid out in his view. The victims of this solar system had breached a veil of darkness preventing them from calling out but their small victory meant nothing, there was no saving them and each and every one of them knew it. The sparks of life glimmered as they transitioned to the spiritual plane their life energy glowing bright for the brief moments when they felt hope before being captured and devoured, erased for eternity from all existence. The three larger remaining planets began to break apart now, shattering as the locust ships made short work of them. He was left floating, searching, hoping to find just half of one of those lost voices that had somehow brought him here but they were gone now, only the complete silence and the calamity of destruction was left a tapestry of destruction spreading out through the vast distances of this solar system.

A star and around it the remains of planets and their moons, now no more than masses of dust being harvested by the swarms of black glossy ships so numerous they would be impossible for one mind to count he thought. A ripple in space, a shimmer of substance, an obsidian diamond materialized, huge, dwarfing the large sun that had until now dominated the space. It slid into existence creating a new center in the solar systems gravitational field, shifting the balance for a few brief moments before it all came to an end. A flash of light filled his view followed by a shrieking trill that reached deep into his sub consciousness, a historical cackling, malevolent laughter and then he felt something new as though the dark one had touched him somehow latching onto his presence but before it lasted long enough for him to name the feeling he was gone.

He snapped back to consciousness, drenched in sweat and shaking more violently then he had ever experienced before. They were becoming more frequent and more intense he thought. He rolled to the wall side of his bed, away from the puddle were he had been thrashing moments before in a dream that had as usual felt to real and repetitive for it to be only just a dream. His head spun as he reached up to the shelf in search of his tablet. He felt the tips of his fingers find it and pulled it down to begin recording everything he could remember.

As he sketched and wrote his notes he flicked his fingers triggering the room’s wall display. A starry night, the Milky Way galaxy flashed to life on the fifty thousand square foot half sphere of his rooms ceiling. He sat with his back against the padded wall and noted the moisture on his skin and the way his bed sheets had been scattered. He sketched the diamond shaped ship, the solar systems star and its planets marking groups of X’s where the swarms of ships had been. In some cases were the black glossy ships were more densely packed he gave an outline of a cloud where the hundreds of thousands if not millions of moon sized ships floated along the orbits of each planet in the system. He noted details describing the emotions he had felt wile witness to the events, the deaths of worlds and stars, the darkness, the voices and their cries, how they had lit up as they transitioned from the physical plane to the spiritual and how the aura of darkness had somehow maybe sensed him and touched him ever so briefly.

Aboard the explorer star ship were his friends, the few family members they had left and Daniel currently made their home they traveled at light speed through solar systems to and from planets and asteroid belts where construction of new installations for future human expansion were currently under way. His breathing was heavy and his mind swam as he made a few more sketches with detailed notes from his most recent dream while the images were fresh in his mind. He sketched the formations of the locust ships and then sketched and noted the diamond shaped ship that had dwarfed everything with its scale. He described in writing how it had slipped into existence near the end of the dream right before he had felt as though the dark one had reached for him and briefly touched his presence. Feeling like he had recorded all he could, he put his tablet back and activated his command center screen. He wouldn’t try for more sleep this time, not now that his mind was so active with new ideas and new possibilities. He wanted to analyze these most recent notes and compare them to previous notes to hopefully at last find some concrete answers.

With his intellect, a mind that had lead him to see past the limitations of earths sciences he had revolutionized technology, designed Ai systems to manage mining, terraforming and construction projects in space and started migrating the poorest peopled from earth to installations off planet where they were given luxurious accommodations, education and a future with expansion as their purpose. It would have been a gross miss step for him not to study these so intense recurrent dreams that lead him more and more to believe they were a key to finding some new revelation beyond what anyone could imagine and maybe, maybe he secretly thought, maybe he and mankind were the only hope for the victims who seemed to call out to him and summon him to witness their destruction.

A ten meter wide holographic display appeared floating in the center of his room. The screen shimmered for a moment as it came to life. To an untrained eye the activity on the display would have been incomprehensible. Columns of numbers read out, icons cascaded, lists of new star systems surveyed appeared with corresponding columns showing planetary sizes, types of life, habitability, areas of interest, mass, elemental makeup and spatial coordinates for each celestial body. He saw that over the past twenty four hours there had been three hundred million new systems scanned noticing the overall number of planets with organic life now at just over two hundred million. He saw there was a new max diameter in the water world class of planets coming in at over ten times larger than mankind's home world, Earth. There were systems with multiple stars at their centers. huge rocky planets moving on strange elliptical orbits in and out of their solar systems habitable zones and gas giants whipping around tinny dense dwarf stars so close the side facing the star was a storm of flame. There were belts of ice and rock making up massive formations of debris along these orbits. He flipped desktops to view images of the most interesting newly discovered planet surfaces, quick play footage of landscapes the Ai had selected as unique or most similar to earths environments flashed by as he watched for some kind of sign. The Milky Way he was beginning to see was filled with habitable worlds stringing out around stars in the Goldilocks regions of each galaxy, large, small and plentiful. Planets lush with plant life; mammals known and yet unseen and in some cases indigenous humanoids resembling the early history of man on earth when we still lived in caves.

After a few minutes of reviewing the active exploration programs and their newest findings in the hope of finding a clue to what was happening in his dreams he called up the custom software Staz and Jimmy had created to track and analyze his notes and got started. When the display finished loading the new desktop with the custom software he saw that the most recent dream had the same characteristic signature as all the rest, no surprise. His body had risen in temperature the moment it had started accompanied by the signature spasms that were getting progressively more violent with each episode. He rubbed at his sore neck as he looked over the charts and graphs showing a consistent increase in the activity of his nervous system when he was linked to a dream. The charts also showed that they were lasting longer and longer each time giving him reason to believe that he was reaching deeper into that other reality. The Ai's intuition algorithms highlighted trends and assembled strings of image sequences showing the sketches he had made in those confused waking moments when he would push himself to record the still clear images in his mind.

He was beginning to have little doubt that these dreams were somehow connected to a reality that was happening in the very moments he slept in some other far distant corner of space. Dreams where he felt certain he was crossing the unknown distances to witness events of horrific magnitude. Somewhere in the ocean of galaxies he felt it, they were connected and it drove him. He felt a strange connection to a people and a place he believed existed on the brink, in the clutches of some malevolent destroyer. From the notes he had been taking there was no doubt that what he was witnessing was the feeding grounds of some star destroying force with a hunger for souls.

The images and notes danced across the display listing passages from his sketches and their accompanying notes. They showed a progressive time line, the first of them disordered and scribbled as he rushed to produce them still confused and afraid of what he had seen but when he had made the decision to embrace the nerve wracking experiences focusing more towards recording everything in detail in order to look back from where he held power a clear picture began to develop.

He never considered that he was ever at risk while in the dreams. His world as he knew it was one of limitless potential leaving him naïve to the potential dangers that lurked there in the unknown. These intensive dreams that felt so real and spoke of new possibilities, levels of reality he had never considered, possible destinies far beyond what his conscious mind had ever considered and the more he learned and the more it scared him the more intrigued he became.

The loss of life, countless lives, a walker of the spiritual plane, one who takes the souls of its victims wile leading an armada of unstoppable strength, the swarm, the locusts. The Ai had recognized a trend that showed the swarm was consistently increasing. The length of his dreams were getting longer and through the monitoring of his cerebral activity the charts showed the levels of synaptic activity were gradually increasing, he was sustaining higher levels of mental bandwidth with each consecutive experience. These findings gave him the idea that he could be getting drawn into the realms sooner while at the same time gaining strength as a presence and then he remembered the feeling of the dark one reaching for him and that fear he had long forgotten returned new with a sharpened edge. 

Dream Three

He saw it all from a wide angle, a dual star system with seven huge planets orbiting in the habitable zone and among them the clouds of black glossy locust ships. Beside him he a white wisp of smoke appeared in the form of a person, a person sitting perfectly still in the lotus position clearly fixed in deep meditation. He blinked and saw that there was not one but hundreds, all in the distant corners of his mind, white ribbons of smoke all fixed in a state of meditative focus. Everything felt calm until suddenly it changed, it began. His presence shifted, pushed to the surface of one of the planets, buildings collapsed, landscapes broke apart, impacts of plasma rained down from the sky and the bodies rising weightless, writhing in agony their skin burned and melted from an acidic mist that had filled the atmosphere for days leading up to these final moments. The mist had paralyzed the people of these worlds trapping them in agony, weakening them while keeping them in a pain filled stasis barely clutching to their lives but unable to find relief in death.

The ones causing this he thought were finding new slower ways to weaken the minds of their prey before consuming their souls. From where his presence floated he could see hundreds of millions nearly all still living, all of them floating fifty feet off the ground somehow levitating in their semi unconscious states. They were blinded, their skin pocked with sores from the strange acidic mist holding them helpless to their fate. Soft tissues had been the first to go, eyes, lips and ears were eaten away leaving black horrid openings were beauty used to be. By all rights they should be dead, the suffering should have ended days before but while the chemicals filling the planet’s atmosphere corroded their flesh it also kept them alive and helpless. He was there among them, floating at their level, the dream taking him where it willed. He saw the dark one far in the distance, a black hole of a being completely unaware of his presence and then his fear crept in. He watched the life being pulled from the floating victims their sentience ripped from them in waves of thousands and hundreds of thousands as the dark one fed. The form of inky black smoke moved in sudden moments of power, pulling the last beings life from them before snapping out of existence, disappearing completely, the dark tendrils, the deep pounding throb in the aura of souls was suddenly gone. In the next moment he found himself watching again from a great distance as the landscape of the nearest planet shattered. The now all too recognizable signs of escalated volcanic activity signaling the beginning of this worlds end. Continental plates began breaking up into splintered shards jutted up from the centers of the destabilizing planets until they finally crumbled, falling away from their centers into space the pieces systematically atomized and harvested.

The Diamond shaped ship appeared again moving towards the stars changing the central gravitational force in the entire solar system with its sheer mass. The stars expanded, growing at an insane pace, joining as one and then passing critical mass before going supernova. The massive explosion one would expect was not what happened, all of the energy from the stars destabilization was funneled into a stream that fed into the skin of the diamond shaped ship. The entire mass of the sun was absorbed in what felt like only a few moments. This was something he had never before witnessed in these dreams until now. This time the dream had not ended. He felt it, the presence of a power dark and evil, the meditating figures in their wispy forms on the boarders of his mind began wavering and distorting until the cold laughter of a demon broke through into their minds.

A voice boomed in their minds, high pitched and shrill, “One who was lost, I can feel you but cannot see you. You hide in the shadows of a world unknown to us but we will find you. Those with you, those who will end in the same fate as the ones here and now, waiting in fear for the day when I stand over you and take your souls, know that there is no hope for your kind. I am coming for all of you and there is no where you can run”.

A clashing sound like two planets colliding filled the dream. The meditative figures were gone leaving him alone except for the dark figure that had somehow taken hold of him. A mental force he could not resist encased his presence searching for a way to tear him from the neither here nor there of the dream. The shrieking laughter rose in pitch, the dark tendrils throbbing with black energy increasing in frequency as it squeezed him, he was trapped, pain stabbed in his mind and he thought it was his end.

Daniels eyes opened as he gasped for breath. It felt like he had not breathed for longer than someone should be able to hold their breath and live. Wheezing his eyes were full of tears as he coughed the room spinning as he chocked painfully this was far worse than anything he had experienced before he thought as he fought to recover his senses. The Tears ran down his face both from the pain of being nearly choked to death while asleep and the hurt he felt from the emotions that came with witnessing the brutal extermination of life on those entire planets. The rooms Ai had saved his life when it had administered a large shot of adrenaline when it had confirmed he had stopped breathing and would soon go into cardiac arrest.

Shaking he reached for his note pad and started into sketching the images and writing notes about the dream before they faded away as all dreams seemed to have a way of doing. He detailed the star system, the timing, the numbers, the meditating forms a new element he had never seen before, the seemingly real contact with the evil one and then he paused, “the one who got away? What did that mean? Who else could that dark one be referring to other then him” he thought. He had heard those words specific “the one who was lost, the one who got away”, There was no mistaking it. “This creature of the darkness knew of him, the souls he saw meditating in his dream, they must know of him somehow” he wondered. Entering all of the details into the tracking software he switched a section of the display over to the developer tools work bench. There was no sense sitting idle when there was something so incredibly impossible happening in his mind and so without pausing he dove right into it.

The work bench window quickly started flashing. Modules appeared as he called them into the new programs architecture that he was creating. His fingers danced through the air, writing a few commands here and there before transitioning to just pulling icons together watching the big screen in the center of his room while flicking at the holographic key board in front of him. The node based software work bench Jimmy and Staz had developed using all of the different building blocks of code they as a group had created over the past years while building the United Earth Corporation together made creating custom programs specially designed for specific tasks super-fast and easy.

He wanted this simple Ai to take the planetary sketches he had made from past dreams and sequence them in every possible combination and pattern before then comparing them to old star maps for possible matches. He knew that if the dreams were in fact his presence experiencing an event happening in real space somewhere in the far reaches of the universe then in present time the dimensional mapped point data for the now destroyed planets would no longer exist and could not be compared to the planetary system sketches from his dreams. It had to be old star maps and the thought of that gave Daniel a feeling of dread. Sure it could work but it was a long shot.

The next thing he did was create a new sub routine in the main Ai's objective list. A new Surveyor drone force was born, the Galaxy spore. The Spore drones were ten thousand cubic miles of miner flotilla mother ship. Their sole purpose was to process large bodies of space rock and use it to print out complete mining, storage and printing flotillas with the purpose of spreading resource acquisition and mapping activities outside of the Milky Way Galaxy in an ever expanding sphere of discovery.

He recalled the time when unknowingly he had set into motion the laser scan survey of the entire Milky Way. The Ai had taken his off handed design requirement so literally that it had started a search emanating out from planet earth looking for prehistoric genomes needed for the genetic recreation of dinosaurs he had off handedly made a requirement in the new India installations tropical park. This time though Daniel was initiating the new survey on purpose and on a much greater scale. He wrote the specs for a new drone he coined the spore and created new mission protocols for it. When he was done the design and mission criteria descriptions he initiated the new galactic exploration program and the Ai handled the rest. The main purpose for each Spore ship was to travel through galaxies leaving new printing foundries that immediately generated mining, refining and storage flotillas. The next stage once the first resource gathering flotilla was complete and online was to print a foundry dedicated for printing surveyor drones assigned to that region of that galaxy. As the Spore drones were created and sent out to the corners of galaxies farther and farther away from the Milky Way there was an immediate need for data centers in all of the star systems that were being scanned and mapped in order to store the data and make it available for the central Ai. Billions of one meter diameter spherical drones went online executing their tasks quickly and efficiently and a detailed picture of the surrounding galaxies and beyond began to take shape. Daniel hoped there would be some sign or encounter with the demons from his dreams soon. He did not believe the historical star charts would lead to anything and was worried of the possibility that if he didn’t find them soon there may only be empty space of a long dead civilizations ruin left.

A week went by and there was nothing, no dreams, no contact. Another week and he felt a concern that the destroyer had possibly found a way to block him from being a witness. He began going to sleep with a slight sense of disappointment and urgent anxiety hoping that this time he would find himself back there and maybe by chance find another way to figure out a way to locate that part of space but at the same time that last encounter lingered in his mind and he worried that if that beast of a spirit latch on again he may not make it back.

Dream Four

 He drifted through a landscape of stars a white mist wrapping around his legs as though he were standing half submerged in a cloud that was racing across the universe. It was peace, it was safety and then there was a flash that blinded him for a moment before finding himself standing in an enormous hall, a cavernous white hall with glittering gold trim glittering in the filtered light, the mist from before fell away from around his legs dissipating and revealing more and more of where he was. The hall was immense, so large that its ends were beyond the distant horizon as far as he could see in every direction. He stood high on a central platform looking at the uncountable numbers of people blanketing the floor leaving not a space anywhere, all of them sat perfectly still in that lotus pose he remembered from the misty figures in his last dream. There was only stillness, a silence that stretched out in every direction for hundreds of miles. In Awe he slowly turned taking in the spectacle until coming full circle he wondered what was to happen next. Once he was still and the question entered his mind those who had gathered here answered him in a smooth unified single voice. “The one, who escaped, felt by all, the memory of a day so long ago, you, the strongest of our hope from the first days of the Sethrey, the first days when the Gods of Death came to destroy us”.

They spoke as one but no audible sound was heard; instead there communication came to him directly inside his mind. They told of the destruction their galaxy had been subject to ever since the dark ones had arrived and how he had been the only one to escape their clutches, something they all sought to do but none had found the strength to accomplish, only him. As they paused he tried to reply with a thought telling them that he knew of the destruction and then asked how he was to help, how was he to find them, to save them. Their reply was not what he expected. They were resigned to their fates and told him to create a new Olomnri in the peoples he had found far from the hopelessness they faced. They had thought he and all they knew was lost until he had returned in a form none of them had ever known. A new hope emerged and they had decided that they would protect him as much as they could while letting him learn their story in the hopes that he would carry it on long after they were gone. He had appeared in their minds when he walked among their dying worlds enabling them see what he saw. While he dream walked among them so close to the dark one they shielded his presence as much as they could and for a time he had been safe, but now their enemies strength was far more what it had been and there was no way they could protect him when he was so close to the daemon. It had taken many dreams for them to break through to him they said until finally they had found his presence drifting in the stars and brought him to this world of refuge were billions huddled far from where the swarms of destroyers ships lurked among half dead stars feeding on those who had been stranded and left to that fate. They huddled and waited, searching the universe for the hope they had all felt so many years ago. He stood there now, unable to respond with anything but the fierce emotion welling up inside him, “I will find you, you will be saved from this evil, this you cannot prevent”.

It happened with a sudden thundering crash. Audible cackling laughter filled the temples space, laughter that he recognized instantly. The Shrieking insane laughter of the dark one pierced their connection slicing through the meditative calm held by the billions of refugees gathered around where he stood. The destroyer had found him. The mind of the lord of death had followed the disturbance his presence had created when they had brought him here. The distance the daemons mind had traveled to disturb their meeting was too far for it to have real power over these people but there was still a strength left to deafen them with a thunderous penetrating tone.

“You have been protecting him from me! The one who escaped has not witnessed the destruction of your worlds these past cycles, what is your purpose for this when you know there is no hope for any of you", and again the laughter louder now slammed down upon them hurting their ears and filling their minds, "I am Drakon, and to you the one who watches, the strong hope, safe in the distance beyond our awareness, know that we will one day find you and all who exist among you”, silence and then a pounding throb entered his mind. The dark tendrils lashed out at him reaching for him just as they had done before. This time though those who had summoned him gathered their strength and before he was firmly in the clutches of darkens he was gone. The Olomnri had not been overcome by the Drakons mind and were able to send Daniel back safe before ousting the unwanted presence of the one who they feared would have all of their souls soon before long.

He awoke, his eyes snapping open. He turned his head to look at the motion sensor read outs showing how much he had moved in his sleep. The charts showed that he had not moved more than a few millimeters for over three hours until those last few seconds before he had come too where the signature characteristics of when he was in the presence of the dark one had started. He wrote down verbatim what he had heard the Olomnri say and then what the demon had said. “They had been protecting him? Well, maybe that was best, the dreams had been taking there toll but how was he to save them without knowing their galaxies location and seeing how the Drakons armada operated”?