Paul Hardy - The Last Man on Earth Club

No word came from Bell until a brief message arrived saying he would be returning in a few days — just that, with nothing to explain why he’d been away so long, or any show of affection. But still, interversal messages are expensive, so perhaps he just wanted to keep his credit balance from plunging too far. Or maybe he was finding a way to leave me. Or he could have found someone else already. I theorised altogether too many reasons for his behaviour before I told myself to stop being a fool. I had to get on with my job, and there was news for Kwame.

We’d been monitoring his dreams for a few weeks, and had finally managed to piece together enough images to have something worth showing him. He was understandably nervous when I invited him to my office, and unable to keep his non-spill cup steady in his hands as I lowered the lights and activated the wallscreen.

“I have to warn you, this isn’t what you were expecting. It’s not what we were expecting either…”

“The process did not work?”

“The process worked. I’m not sure we got any images of your wife.”

“But I dreamt of her. Every night you were monitoring…”

“It’s probably best if I just show you what we have. If you’re ready.”

He nodded, and I went on. “This is the most complete sequence, although you’ll notice it’s very fuzzy round the edges, and we lose resolution several times. Are you sure you’re ready?”

He nodded. “I am ready.” I pressed play.

The video was silent. We had only been able to decipher the visual element, and even then the image quality was poor, with faint, washed-out colours. But unlike most dreams, the setting and scene were constant. This was not a spontaneous creation of the unconscious, but a memory stuck on playback.

The setting was a cell; filthy, rust-blotched metal walls and a heavy door that did not need a soundtrack for you to hear weighty clanks and slams. An industrial-age dungeon.

The point of view was locked in one place, but the eyes we saw through could look around, showing us the terrible, stained concrete floor and scratches in the walls where someone had tried to keep track of time before losing all hope. When the dream persona looked down, we saw he was sitting on a chair by himself, wearing mudstained green trousers of cheap cloth. Some of the stains might have been blood. His arms were not visible. They seemed to be bound behind his back in some way. I remembered how Kwame’s arms had gone around his back when he had his flashback in my office, and had little doubt he’d relived the same thing then.

The point of view jumped, and the image skipped for a moment. Kwame looked at me, confused.

“We sometimes have problems if there’s too much movement. We think your persona in the dream was startled at this point.” The image reformed and settled on the door. Then looked around again, nervous and harried.

He stared at the screen, perplexed. “Where is this place?”

“You don’t recognise it?”

He shook his head, amazed. “The security services had cells like this. I never saw them.”

“Not even on screen? Or maybe you read about them?”

“Of course, but I was never there…”

“Hm. Well, the dream keeps you here for a while. Presumably they want to scare you.”

“Isolation was a common tactic.”

“I’ll speed on to the next thing, then.” I jumped the video forward to a bookmark I’d set earlier. The point of view looked high on the walls, then snapped to the door. A slat scraped open and eyes peered in, shadowed by a military cap. They glared at the dream persona for several seconds. Then the slat was yanked shut, and the image skipped out again.

When it came back, the door swung open. A man stood in the doorway, wearing a dark uniform. He seemed to be of the same species, possibly the same ethnicity as Kwame. He didn’t move for the moment. Just a hard, threatening look down at the dream persona. Deliberate intimidation.

The picture juddered, losing resolution and colour for a moment. “Our best guess here is that the dream persona is talking, but that’s just a guess,” I said. Kwame nodded, too fascinated to look away.

The image came back and the point of view skipped left, perhaps hearing something in the corridor outside. Another man in uniform came to the door, dragging along a woman in a ragged, filthy dress, yanking her by the belt and head, keeping her doubled over, straggling hair hiding her face. One arm was twisted at an unnatural angle, fingers sticking out in every direction. She’d been tortured.

I paused the movie.

“That cannot be my wife. That cannot be…” Kwame looked up at me. “How could I forget something like this?”

“If it was very traumatic, it’s certainly possible. I’m going to press play in a moment, but first of all you should know that one of those people is about to speak. We don’t have any audio, but we did run it through a lip-reading program. As long as the dream persona is looking at someone’s face, we think we know what they were saying.”

He nodded. “I understand. Please continue.”

I pressed the control on my pad. The people on the screen sprang back to life, the woman shaking while the uniformed men stood very still. The first man asked a question from the doorway, and subtitles sprang up, assessed at 91% accuracy: Do you know this woman?

The man did not seem to get a satisfactory answer. I will ask you again. Do you know this woman?

Again, he didn’t get the answer he wanted. It made him angry. He seized the woman from the other man, and dragged her into the cell, right into the face of the dream persona, filling the screen, shouting as he did so: Do you know this woman? And then he yanked up her head and revealed her face.

It was not the face of a woman. The skin was bruised, bleeding, one eye closed from contusions, teeth smashed. But it was not a woman. This was the face of a man.

Kwame leapt straight to his feet and stumbled back, falling into the chair again. His cup fell to the floor and seeped into the carpet.

“Who is that?!”

“We don’t know.” The man on the screen held the face of the ‘woman’ up against the point of view of the dream persona. ‘She’ wept through ‘her’ one good eye, pleading, desperate.

Kwame stared, shaking his head, half in the chair and half out, as the dream persona looked up at the man in the cap. The subtitles caught the end of his sentence: …what you told us. Tell him, little bird. Tell him!

The point of view snapped back to the ‘woman’ as ‘her’ hair was pulled to force ‘her’ to speak through the broken teeth and blood. Please. Kobe. [Koobey?]

‘Her’ hair was yanked again and ‘she’ gasped at the pain. ‘She’ looked back into the dream persona’s eyes. I love you. I… I… I am your wife…

“No!” shouted Kwame. “That is not my wife!”

The man in the cap dragged the ‘woman’ back, nearly to the door. He spoke: I will ask you once again. Do you know this woman?

“That is not my wife,” said Kwame.

The view fixed on ‘her’ as she looked back, hoping, pleading, crying. And then a look of horror and betrayal as she heard what the dream persona said. And a scream: No! No! Kobe!

The man in the cap thrust the ‘woman’ back to the second man, and ‘she’ was dragged away, screaming one final cry of Kobe!

The dream persona looked down at the floor. The image resolution failed again, losing focus.

“We think he’s crying,” I said. “You in the dream, that is.”

The dream persona looked up again, very suddenly, and saw the man in the cap, standing alone in the door.

That was the right answer, Sergeant. You will be released shortly. You will not speak of this again.