Beautiful Dreamer

Beautiful Dreamer Ben Donnelly When Gregul was five they taught him pain was pleasure. A tall lady came and gave out coloured ribbons. Anoka had the purple ribbon. She was thrown to an attack dog while the other children watched. When Gregul was eleven they imprinted him at deep theta. He was taken to a metal room and strapped to a metal bed. Some nasty men showed him their discipline machine. They showed him anything that could be done to a rat could be done to a human being. They used two big magnets and drew a picture of a thought. They imprinted the picture in Gregul’s head and it hurt. Gregul went away through a little door inside his mind. When he came out of the metal room there was a new boy. His name was GANeol. He only came out when Gregul was scared or threatened. After the deep theta imprinting Gregul could land four punches in a second. He was made to fight the other children while men in special jumpsuits ticked clipboards and snapped pictures. Commander Bekmam was Gregul’s guardian, he wore a suit and tie and he smoked all the time and his breath smelled bad. He said it was time for Gregul to be blooded; it was time to kill a puppy. He couldn’t do it. Commander Bekmam got very angry and the men took Gregul to the metal room, they imprinted him again, and this alter was at the delta level. This new boy was called GAN-01Sunshine. After this imprinting Gregul could headshot a dummy from nine hundred yards over open sights. They told the boy to pack up his belongings, but he had nothing to pack. They sent him to a special place for special boys. This place was the Sakhalin Tactical Development and Research Centre. They made war machines. It was a bad place.

Underneath the ever burning forest fires, the men of Sakhalin made vicious weapons. They used super dense metals forged on massive planets out in the depths of space. The metals were fired out from Jupiter and further, and satellites with huge magnets caught the metals and reeled them in to Mother Earth. These metals went into computer chips and armor plating and bullet tips and ablative coatings and nictating eyelids and lots of the metal found its way into Gregul. They peeled his skull cap back and spiked his brain, and GAN-01-Sunshine was put on a telephone line, so Gregul and GAN-01 were in tandem always. They chopped his arms and legs off. They put him in a smooth solid egg of metal, and sealed him up in there with silicon goo. When Gregul slept he wept, so that GANeol had to take over and block out the ghosts of pain, turning inwards to the reverse Aum. That destroying chorus, the entropic bliss of the void, the Mu. The training was long and hard, but Gregul found his way back to the surface, pushing past GANeol and GAN-01 and finding the world to be vastly improved. Freed from his egg he saw the pine green forests of Sakhalin stretching out for miles around, he flew out over the Sea of Okhotsk, dead and freezing, the Peninsula of Kamchatka with its vast mud flats and blasted volcanic calderas. Out onto the Bering Sea and then speeding over Alaska. All frozen, all wasted. Gregul recoiled in horror, as a monster mind reared up over the Yukon, and tore his fragile little thought form to shreds, in the holy name of the CCCA. He jerked around in the confines of his egg, the soothing voice of the auto doc rasping at his nerves. “Friend friend, no need for concern, example is satisfied customer gentlemen.”

Gregul’s viewscreen flashed a propaganda vid, the Aum Nyet storm troopers off to crush the Kapital. He’d seen it before, it didn’t explain the vision, he told the auto doc. “I am no satisfied customer friend, I want to see files again, classified, top secret all that bullshit.” “Please gentlemen remain calm, all file associations tagged for your eyes now in cache if you please.” Gregul shifted through the files on screen with a tracking interface that followed his pupil movement and dilation. All the specs for the project streamed in at him, too many blueprints, too many things not covered in his basic vocational training, all the big words. “Explain to me doc, nerve attenuation procedure.” “Well well all evidence not yet collected but initial trial shows electrical exchange of attenuated nerves with hrm, how shall we say, links into the prosthetic and robotic realms are much improved in fact we could not have this stimulating exchange without…” “Okay and what about the tank, the Beautiful Dreamer?” “Project Beautiful Dreamer as yet classified in progress and not yet subject to data retrieval. However brand new show Super Cool Roboto has started on channel R5, based on early concepts and suspected leaked information.” “No computer, no, none of that shit, show me the files on CCCA.”

“Regrettably no files on CCCA approved for your hrm, perusal, but many instances of fictional interpretation on file for your consumption if you please.” Gregul scanned the vids, but they were just entertainment propaganda designed for school children to watch. They showed the Combined Commerce Concerns of America as a vast multi-armed octopus, hooking Russian children, tearing resources away from the motherland, burning forests and burying bodies. It wasn’t helpful at all. Gregul went out again, left his body behind under the care of GANeol. Out on the surface the anti air cannons were discharging enormous shells into the air, trying to draw fire on a tiny black aircraft that jinked and dived and tumbled through AI lock-on and manual tracer fire, falling through the stratosphere. Gregul flew in closer, fascinated by this new intrusion. He had not seen another living being for many months. Two men were strapped to the aircraft, one on each wing, tucked up into a crash position and gripping tight to the flight yokes. They wore large compound lenses over their eyes and their mouths were stopped up with respirators. They had thick black latex sky suits on, and lots of interesting devices hung from their support harness. As a volley of twenty millimeter bullets shredded their craft the men ejected from it, plunged down to the smooth green curve of the earth. They slowed their descent with special cables, blooming out of them like spider webs and vibrating in the frozen air, slowing their descent and touching down unharmed on the forest floor. They spoke in English, with South African accents; they had the words Hard Water stenciled on their suits. “Target located roughly twelve clicks below us, deploying pocket nuke to bore us a hole.”

The men moved quickly, taking out firearms and smooth shiny devices, running on attenuated muscles wrapped around metal skeletons. Their minds glowed like magnesium coals, as they cast out nets of pure thought, searching, looking for Gregul. Gregul felt the imperious pull of his body, he was needed. The auto doc was mid sentence, relaying orders: “Example is dissident faction stroke private army Hard Water Security Solutions. Currently on the surface at location twelve priming nuclear ordnance. Cleared Gregul stroke GAN-01-Sunshine for deployment of Beautiful Dreamer. Please to be aware unit is functioning at roughly fifty percent operational parameters and HILaser is cleared only for single sweeps at minimum dilation.” Gregul felt the world roll underneath him, gravity became a redundant force, superseded by magnetism and nuclear fission. The pocket nuke blew a hole through the concrete roof of the institute and the men from Hard Water slid down monofilament cables, formed up on the Beautiful Dreamer with minimal wasted energy. Gregul could feel the heavy skin of the tank as well as his own body, and he pulled himself up to stand on two legs. The Beautiful Dreamer was a monstrous bipedal machine, built to withstand a direct strike from a nuclear device. The men dived for cover, as Gregul dropped away and GAN-01-Sunshine took control of the weapon organs. Gregul could hear the radio chatter of the men, frantic and scared despite the drugs and hypnotic imperatives clustered around their brains. “No way will standard arms work against it, I’m going aetheric, we need a picture of his mind.” “Copy, just a sneak peek, get too close and the ECM will fry you brain-dead.”

Gregul let out a little yelp of surprise, as the man swept up and out of his body, and began rummaging through Gregul’s mind as if it were a document file. Gregul pulsed his most poisonous and angry thoughts direct into the core of the man, watched as the physical shell burst and threw out pink foam, deep red blood substitute. The surviving agent let out a strangled scream and ran to his fallen comrade’s side. They were acting in a most peculiar way. They were holding hands. The man was dying, and his partner thought it a bad thing. They conversed on the psychic channel that intersects all other frequencies. “You need to use its own weapons against it; anything else will just scratch the paintwork” GAN-01-Sunshine was firing the HI-Laser indiscriminately, sending blue flares of superheated plasma down onto the factory floor. After the plasma reached its target a coruscating wave of laser light refracted through it and blew the surrounding surfaces into grey steam. The surviving agent took up a large panel of super dense alloy that had lain on the floor and stood behind it. GAN-01 took the shot and fired the HI-Laser directly at the polished surface. It reflected back for an instant and cut a gaping hole in the shell of the Beautiful Dreamer, striking Gregul’s metal egg and turning his body to pink mist. He heard the Auto Doc prattling away, but it was not a problem anymore. He was out, and free, over the Sea of Okhotsk, the sun flaring, frozen, a reflection of the mind’s eye.