Dream: Dead Station
I dreamed of a monolithic, hoarfrost-covered space station with rotating rings. Maybe it was alien. We didn't know how it worked or what had happened. Something had gone wrong and killed or vanished all the inhabitants. On the outer rim, where there used to be a park protected from space by a force bubble, now there were ice sculptures, frozen bodies caught forever in play, and no oxygen at all.
The rest of the investigation team had been there for a while when I showed up. I was a teacher. "Sensei," the woman whose culture was a strange mix of Indian and Japanese said, "who are you here to teach?"
"Maybe an artificial intelligence," I said. "Maybe an alien artificial intelligence."
A small, daddy-longlegs-like metal spider, a cleaner bot, skittered up and began trying to eat my skirt, and I had to shift to persuade it to go elsewhere without hurting it.
There were no real walls in the main body of the station, just wall that was really a honeycomb of hollow hexagons, with a force field to keep out sudden death. I experimented, poking books through one honeycomb. They should have fallen out into space, but instead they were transported to another hexagon, and when they got pushed through that one, another.
When the rest of the team were investigating the frozen park, a maglev train circled around the side of the station, filled with light and life and happy people. But nobody wanted to get off the train at the station. I persuaded one woman to get out of the train, and then another jumped off and came along too.
They said they didn't know what had happened. Later, the second woman burst into flames while she was sleeping. I woke her up before she burned, and the flames vanished. She woke up laughing. "You came along to protect [the first woman], didn't you?" I asked her.
I attribute most of this dream to reading Hull Zero Three, by Greg Bear. It's quite different from this dream, but the common elements are there..
x-posted to penthius.
The rest of the investigation team had been there for a while when I showed up. I was a teacher. "Sensei," the woman whose culture was a strange mix of Indian and Japanese said, "who are you here to teach?"
"Maybe an artificial intelligence," I said. "Maybe an alien artificial intelligence."
A small, daddy-longlegs-like metal spider, a cleaner bot, skittered up and began trying to eat my skirt, and I had to shift to persuade it to go elsewhere without hurting it.
There were no real walls in the main body of the station, just wall that was really a honeycomb of hollow hexagons, with a force field to keep out sudden death. I experimented, poking books through one honeycomb. They should have fallen out into space, but instead they were transported to another hexagon, and when they got pushed through that one, another.
When the rest of the team were investigating the frozen park, a maglev train circled around the side of the station, filled with light and life and happy people. But nobody wanted to get off the train at the station. I persuaded one woman to get out of the train, and then another jumped off and came along too.
They said they didn't know what had happened. Later, the second woman burst into flames while she was sleeping. I woke her up before she burned, and the flames vanished. She woke up laughing. "You came along to protect [the first woman], didn't you?" I asked her.
I attribute most of this dream to reading Hull Zero Three, by Greg Bear. It's quite different from this dream, but the common elements are there..
x-posted to penthius.