Corrupted Dreams

December 31st, 20-something. I remember the day in all its glory. Children excited about their presents. Parents living their childhood through their little ones. Last-minute plans being made over the phone about a bar and getting drunk until midnight rolled around. The news just could not stop obsessing over the lighting arrangements for the Eiffel Tower and the Opera House. That was the last night any of us spent in familiar comfort.

It happened around midnight in Japan. A full moon graced the earth with its fellow starry companions. There were no clouds, no weather anomalies, no cause for alarm. It was as perfect as it could be. When fireworks were set off into the heavens, one couldn’t help but feel blessed to have left a year behind that had offered nothing but tragedy. One, however, couldn’t be more wrong.

Panic set in the six hours that followed. The night of the East rolled over the entirety of the world without giving any indication of a sunrise. Reports came flying in that everyone from Tokyo to New Delhi, from Baghdad to Rome, from London to the West Coast and everywhere in between was experiencing nighttime at the same moment.

I was in a diner when the news hit our corner of the world. Everyone’s phones started going off to a symphony of ringtones. People rushed outside their homes to see whether what they were experiencing was truly a global phenomenon. News channels raced to bring ‘exclusive reports’. Governments issued orders to stay calm. Police officers were deployed to maintain law and order. Debates ensued whether this was an eclipse of some sort. Conspiracy theories flew high. Religious fundamentalists propelled the notion that Judgment Day had come. But before the scientific community could begin their assessment, worldwide communications were shut down in the blink of an eye.

Mobile phones, emails, social media, your garage made radio sets, even the landlines went out of order in an instant. For the first time in history, perhaps, the digital world stood still.

We watched as the sun disappeared behind a veil of darkness. A few people laughed in disbelief. It was, perhaps, a way to keep madness at bay. Some fell to their knees. Whispers of prayer emanated from the faithful. Maybe God would help us. The rest of us stood in awe and anticipation of what was to come. At least that’s what I like to tell myself. To be honest I was too scared and confused to move even a muscle.

I don’t claim to fully comprehend what transpired afterward, nor do I understand the reason behind it. I can only describe what I witnessed. A blinding light quelled the darkness and shone brightly above us. It was all-encompassing, tearing the veil into shreds which soon vanished into nothingness. The endless sky bathed in divine radiance. We were humbled to bow our heads, if not in obedience then in self-preservation. Mortal eyes are not mean to stare at fire lest it reaches for you.

The winter chill receded in the cave it came from, clearing the path for warmth to grace us. Our bare skins were touched by soothing embers. A wave of relief washed through us. Our fears were taken away. I was not a man of faith but I couldn’t help but feel that we were being prepared for something we were too stubborn to believe in and too ignorant to search for. When the light faded, no longer phasing through my eyelids, I knew somewhere deep down that everything had irrevocably changed. 

There was no human soul in sight when I opened my eyes.

The chilling winter had been replaced by a verdant spring. Outgrowths of vines lay at my feet, hiding something. The trees on either side of the road were laden with fruits. Birds perched on branches, watching me with a newfound curiosity. The sun bestowed its majesty from its throne in the clear sky. I shook my head. Am I hallucinating? I wondered. But the sun seemed like it was to stay there for a while.

The buildings were all still there: the houses untouched, the diners empty. Still, power was on, and you could see the fans droning through the window. Cars, bikes, taxis all frozen on the ground. There were covered with mild vegetation but otherwise looked functional. Nature had reclaimed the planet, but I wondered at what cost. 

I gently pushed the vines away to know if the asphalt road was still real. Beneath their weight, I found human imprint, shadows of people etched into the ground like a nuclear bomb had blown them all way. The recognition of the pattern did not bring me comfort. I thrashed around on all fours to make sense of it, coming out with the realization that the tangible people that once inhabited the space were now ink pressed into fossilized paper. The relief and faith that I had felt a few moments ago vanished in the wake of horror and lonesomeness that came with this strange yet familiar world.

I looked around myself, calling out for someone, anyone, to come and rescue me. I ran as far as my legs could carry me but found no sign of human life, just the artificial constructions left behind by our ancestors. I yelled in denial, comforting myself with the thought that it was all a dream, that I would wake up in the diner any second now. Afternoon came around as I knocked on abandoned homes and wasted away in the daylight. There were fawns running around with their mothers, squirrels darting across the roads. You could even spot a hare or two in the bushes. But with no sign of a verbal companion, I drove around hoping for someone to spot me and tell me I wasn’t alone. At the end of the day, however, it was all in vain.

By the time evening rolled around, I was too tired to explore further. My hands shook, afraid of what the night would bring about. I drove to my home, and when the car broke down, I switched to a motorcycle. In the setting sun, I could see the marks that wheels had left behind on the grass growing out of the cracked highway. Visibility plummeted as the day turned into night. Nocturnals woke up and went about their time, screeching in the distance. When I was convinced I was left all alone, the street lights came to life in an instant.

I stopped at once. I knew the lights were not automatic in the part of the town. Then there must be someone out there looking out for me, for survivors.

I turned around for the power station.

The gate was unlocked. There were no moving shadows I could see through the windows, save for the ones etched on the walls and the floor. I asked if someone was there but no replied. I barged in, not caring to be discreet, and not wanting to. There were a few cars sitting idly by, their windows amenable to force if I needed another ride of out here. The doors of the plant, however, were all unlocked. I surveyed the building, making as much noise as possible for someone to find me. But no one came, for everyone was blown away in the divine detonation.

In the control room was a panel. Amidst the many levers and twinkling lights, I found a message written in shaky handwriting. 

Doors, power, food, and water. Prepare well or be slaughtered.

Next to it lay a revolver. Beneath the paper were five switches.

A shiver ran down my spine. My teeth chattered in my mouth. I took the revolver and ran to close the doors. Somewhere in the distance, a wolf howled for his pack. 

The night that followed was the longest of my life.

The next morning came with news of carnage. Blood spilled on the forest cover, grass beds stomped under canine weight, entrails dragged out and exposed for the scavengers to feed upon. The clanging of rolling metal and gut-wrenching growls still played in my head. Violence is glorified until you observe it from up close, and even cowering by a control panel doesn’t save you from the fear of being chewed alive.

Yet the beauty was undeniable. The terrace of the building provided a bird’s eye view for a few miles. A forest cover extended till the horizon. The once dying river flowed heavily in the distance, nourishing the fertile soil. A breeze ruffled my hair. I had a recurring fantasy about living in such a place, near a forest and a clean river, with minimum contact from society. In some ways, this was a dream come true, a dream dreamt incompletely and without necessary, intricate detail. Nature, or the blinding light, or whatever it was, it had certainly taken some liberty in designing this place. 

Is this my wish come true? Or is this my punishment? I could not say for sure. I first had to see the depth of this dreamland. 

The four switches governed the doors of every house in the city, power supply through the grid and the cars, production plants that packaged food and distributed it through automated vehicles droning around in the city, and water supply through the taps of those abandoned homes. The fifth switch was labeled ‘Emergency’. The control panel granted me access to these amenities. A house was locked in name only; once I’d flip the switch on the control panel, I could open the door with my hand on the knob and nothing would stop me.

The factories that I broke into ran on their own, without a human touch. Pieces of equipment flew over my head, working away through sheer will. Textiles cascaded from the ceiling above, shining in the light peeping in through cracked walls, waving like an ocean in high tide. Machines had grown invisible wings and arms and legs, and dare I say it, even a little bit of will. 

As for the raw material side of things, I couldn’t find out who or what produced them. They just seemed to be there, existing without a cause and in infinite supply. I would open doors to find an endless chain of finished products or an unending heap of wheat and paddy laid out before me. Power never seemed to go out unless I turned it off from the control room. and every self-driving automobile would come to a halt in an instant. Delivery trucks --- which were self-driving in nature and weren't affected by the power switch --- would always move, creating artificial traffic without any passengers. My only mode of transport, although in plenty, were the unoccupied vehicles left behind by my neighbors. Yet I could never find what fueled this perpetual cycle.

All was not glitter though. There was a price for every service used outside the power station, which meant a price for every ounce of food and every gallon of water. There was no prohibition on exploration until you tried stealing something. Even the food the delivery services would throw on the ground would disappear before the next day arrived, and any attempt to pick them up would result in a match to the death.

It was a can of peas that I had picked up which a delivery truck had expelled from its passenger seat. Curiosity got the better of me and as I touched the metal, the door opened and a figure of shadow lunged upon me. 

It was eerily human in a way, it’s head recognizable but without eyes or hair. The entire body had been charred black as if burned in a fire. Two empty sockets stared at the can as it approached me with an unhinged mouth. I screamed in horror and emptied the entire revolver into its torso. A few bullets missed, but enough found their mark inside his husk of a body. The figure contorted and fell down face first, breaking into dust and was swept away with the wind. Although the can was on the ground, I could still see the driver in the truck, making his mind about something. As another figure materialized in the passenger seat, the driver waved at me and started the engine.

The whole experience was surreal, to say the least. Burned, charred monsters were never my dream. I was shaken to my core. I don’t know how long I stood there, but it was enough to make me question if the vines had taken hold of my feet. In time I found out that the more I took, irrespective of my need, the more they'd come for me.

The radios had survived, so that was a plus. Any attempt to appropriate the resources of a home would wake up their burned owners from beneath the vines. Killing was still an option, but I was yet unsure what the rule was about ammunition usage.

I decided to live in the powerplant because it controlled my livelihood. Protecting it was of paramount importance. So when I spotted a bear in the vicinity of the powerplant, I decided to take action. In the moonlight, it looked vicious, black saliva dripping from its mouth. I had realized that the animals looked normal in the daylight, but took on a different form as soon the sun went down.

So I carefully took my aim and fired the rifled I had acquired from a gun store. The bear went down with a bawl. And then the madness began. 

The vines that had grown inside the powerplant secreted a colorless gas. The effects of it were mind-altering. The world bent in shapes and colors too mutated for me to understand. I went for the control panel but fell face-first on the floor. The forest around me came to life and roared and howled with beasts marching for revenge. I could hear them breaking through the doors and running in the hallway, eager to tear me to pieces. The vines reached for my legs and my arms. I struggled against them, somehow freeing a hand to hit the Emergency button. 

A deafening sound bellowed from the alarm system. The vines retracted, beating around in agony. The wolves that broken into the room yelped with pain and turned around, some being stepped over in the stampede. I instinctively covered my ears and curled up in a ball and felt my bones rumbling under my skin. The floor vibrated with an intensity that it felt like it would collapse at any given second. I lay there for a long time, longer than it took for the alarm to shut down on its own. I dared not to uncover my ears, knowing fully well they were too damaged to serve any function for at least a while, eventually falling asleep.

I woke up with the sensation of light sheets falling on my skin. I stirred and opened my eyes to a rain of handwritten letters. This place never stopped surprising.

There was a ringing in my head and it hurt to even open my mouth. I rocked back and forth as I sat against the panel. Desperation sparked anger. A wolf lay unconscious a few feet before me. I don’t know what I would have done had it been in his senses. I wasn’t planning on finding out. I was sick of living in this hell hole. If they wanted to kill me, whoever ‘they’ were, let them come. I reached for my rifle and aimed at the beast’s head. With a bang, the wolf’s head was blown into pieces.

I half expected the vines to reach for me, the animals to come and exact their revenge. But nothing happened. The sun still hadn’t come up. The rules hadn’t changed. Only the animal was inside the building. Is that the exception? I wondered.

I caught one of the pages flying above my head. Visitor downstairs. I prepared my rifle and ran down the stairs.

A woman stood before me in a doctor’s coat. A box of supplies lay at her feet. Another husk? No. She was too alive to be dead. She looked at me with pity and understanding in her eyes. The rifle dropped from my hands. I was too weak to be on my feet. She steadied me, laying me down on the floor. A human touch. I burst into tears, soaking her bandaged hands. The state that she was in, disheveled hair, quivering limbs, watery eyes, patched up clothes all spoke of unspeakable tragedy. Whoever ‘they’ were, they had sent her here.

It took me weeks before my hearing returned to normal. Meanwhile, we conversed on the pieces of paper that had announced her arrival. I discovered she had a fantasy too: to save the world from disease, to cure ailments before they could poison a society. What she never thought, like me, was the price she would have to pay for that dream to come true. You could not have cures without diseases, and diseases ran rampant in her world, too many to cure in time. Unlike my individual suffering, she witnessed a collective one. It was the weight of the dead that pushed her to press her emergency switch. And she landed here.

We have spent years trapped here together. No matter what we try to escape, we keep ending within the city's bounds. There hadn’t been visitors before her, but they come now and then, horrified at what they have witnessed. A naive wish twisted on its head. We cost so many people their lives without ever meaning to. Random survivors stuck in a nightmare of their own making, ending up in mine when it becomes too much to bear.

It was my desire for isolation that triggered this world. Maybe it will fall apart when there is no one left to return.