it's always about the end of the world with you
I just had the most intense live-through-the-end-of-the-world dream. It started as I think a critique of some imagined new Crichton novel, about how we were gearing up for this major war using hyperintelligent machinery (sci-fi robots, actually, like a steroided C-3PO, but the further into the dream the less it was about droids and the more about household technology of the near future). I know it was influenced by a sentence I read about Gary Numan's body of lyrics, about simultaneously embracing/depending on and fearing/being undone by technology (I was hitting Wikipedia hard last night) and thinking, hey just like in The Andromeda Strain, which I'd just watched.
Anyway. I remember being in one of the central command rooms with the 'roided droid (seriously, it was like they took C-3PO and pumped his metal body full of muscles until it bulged) who was the local brain center or something. There was such a horrible "evil" from him, even when he was "under control" as part of a government-funded and -maintained war preparation program, I could just sense that this machine knew only destruction and malice of the most incredible and insidious nature: he was designed only to think of ways to kill an enemy that couldn't be stopped by conventional means. I witnessed all of this as some sort of Ian Malcolmesque naysayer who was part of the project and witness to the destruction.
And as these things do, it got out of control. First the military and then the government -- first ours and then all the militaries and governments of the entire world -- were wiped out by the machines, war robots and such... So quickly, in a matter of minutes, every machine had taken a target, moved in, destroyed, returned to its original programming. This first wave I witnessed up close. I (Ian) must have died, too (though I distinctly remember telling someone in charge what I'd seen and how they could shut it all down if they moved quickly enough; I don't remember knowing if anything came of my passing on information).
But the second wave... See, the networked technology overrode all media and the masses never knew all their leaders had been destroyed. They just kept on buying delivery pizzas and TV dinners, watching sitcoms and complaining to each other about their jobs.
They went about their days, and the technology began to prey on them. Most of the work was done through some kind of low-level hypnosis which kids seemed to be immune to. Parents started killing themselves, or simply lost the ability to protect oneself from harm (like reaching their bare hand into the red-hot spiral grills of a heated stove unit).
In a stroke of dramatic/narrative genius, I witnessed this as a child (9? 10? years old) version of myself, and things got bad right on Halloween. The parents had all been sort of zombified into ignoring the real news, whatever leaked, and more and more concerned with -- you guessed it -- consumerism. My parents (not Bobby and Pixie specifically, even though my younger brother WAS my brother Brendon) ordered us pizzas, delivered by robotic car and cooked by automatic machines, and somehow the pizza killed them. Before they died, while waiting for the pizza, I remember being 10 and saying, "Mom Dad did you guys see this?" and trying to show them the huge headlines on an indie newspaper reading "WAR!!!!" but they didn't care. My mom started acting weird (and my father may have been killing himself upstairs already) before we ate or left trick-or-treating, but as kids we sort of let it go. I wish I remembered details, but I don't: I remember she was acting funny, we argued about the pizza, I realized something was wrong. I took an entire boxed pizza under my arm and my brother by the hand and led him out of the house, knowing it wasn't safe.
We wandered through the neighborhood dressed up in costumes (I don't remember mine, I think Brendon was Hank-Venture-as-The-Bat) past other abandoned kids. They had wagons full of candy or other yummy foods deranged parents had given them (and I knew clearly, even as a boy in the dream, that these kids loose in the streets with so much bounty was because all the adults in the houses they'd just visited were by now dead). A comical cinematic moment: each kid I knew I walked past, he showed me some cool candy or treat he'd received from a house. I kept showing the same slice of pizza I was eating, and they kept flipping me off because a whole box of pizza was still the better prize.
We went through a stadium, abandoned except for some kids and teenagers just partying like it was Lord of the Flies Arena Style. A couple straggler parents, seemingly oblivious to the mayhem of teens in control, were screaming at their child about diseases and how they had to get home now. I knew the parent and the child would be dead in no time. There was a large man who was chucking literally hundreds of black kittens out of an open-air skybox or something similar to their gory deaths below. He did this with the eeriest of casualness, humming to himself. Very cinematic-creepy. Down below, where Lord of the Flies was going on, I remember thinking it must have been raining exploding kittens as they hit the ground. I got my brother away before he registered what was going on.
In the stadium bar we found a few adults still alive, and I remember watching the big kids pour themselves drinks, and I was given a bucket-size glass of whiskey filled to the brim and told to drink. I did, and a very drunk woman in her early 40s I knew (a teacher? a neighbor?) was trying to reason with me to stop. I knew she wasn't affected yet. She was kind of an off-the-grid/green lady, and a little crazy/quirky, and drunk, and somehow it'd kept her safe so far. She watched in horror what was happening around her but couldn't make sense of it. I had the werewithal to grab my bro by the hand and lead him away from the danger, and grab the lady by the hand and lead her, too.
At this point I remember some weird stuff. I remember knowing that inside my kid bro's body was my wife's spirit, and that I was really an adult, and how hard it was to be in love with someone inside your four-year old brother's body. I remember there was an infant we had out of nowhere, who had our mom's spirit inside him, and we were trying to keep him alive, and I remember knowing that the drunk woman we'd saved would become our only chance of getting out of the city alive and surviving this crazy technological-hypnosis holocaust. I remember the infant fell off a high roof and landed, horrible and bloodied, and I (now a grown man in a ten year old body apparently) was the first to make it to the bottom and I was the one who saw the body, knew both the baby was dead and my mother (my body's mother? this is complex) was dead, and I hid the child's body in some box and tossed the box into some bushes before my brother (wife?) and our crazy-drunk woman guide (who'd sobered up and was merely crazy... I compare her to any of the eccentric second-career ladies who sign up for classes at the Film Center) could get down to street level and see the horror. And I remember knowing, the blood's not going anywhere; they'll know what happened, but they won't have to see what I just saw. We have no time for burial (there was the atmosphere of a zombie world, but I don't know if there were zombies or just kind of that The Happening style attempt to outrun a mind-controlling force that had already gotten everyone else).
With all the administrations systematically down, of course there was no power (so could be roving gangs, The Road or even Mad Max style... that makes sense to me) or other networks up. I don't know how the mind control thing manifested at this point, but we knew we had to get to the country and we three travelled together: Me (man-child), Brendon (boy-wife), and Lady (crazy/drunk), and the further we went the more we saw the world tear itself literally apart with cruelty.
There never was any more about the actual war robots the government had made, so you could maybe make the case that that whole Ian Malcolm episode, of witnessing & informing people, was some kind of a success, but by then the "insidious death to all humans program" (through some kind of mind control/alteration) had someone spread into appliances, the media, and so forth. And remember this all took place in a slightly more advanced world than now (I'd compare it to Minority Report, maybe? -- This was, without a doubt, not just my Michael Crichton dream but my Steven Spielberg one, as well), so there was a lot more dependence on technology than even by today's standards, many examples of which I vaguely recall seeing/living through but cannot remember now.
Seriously. I wish I could convey to you more detail, because this was a doozy.
I mean seriously: THIS WAS ALL MY DREAM.
Anyway. I remember being in one of the central command rooms with the 'roided droid (seriously, it was like they took C-3PO and pumped his metal body full of muscles until it bulged) who was the local brain center or something. There was such a horrible "evil" from him, even when he was "under control" as part of a government-funded and -maintained war preparation program, I could just sense that this machine knew only destruction and malice of the most incredible and insidious nature: he was designed only to think of ways to kill an enemy that couldn't be stopped by conventional means. I witnessed all of this as some sort of Ian Malcolmesque naysayer who was part of the project and witness to the destruction.
And as these things do, it got out of control. First the military and then the government -- first ours and then all the militaries and governments of the entire world -- were wiped out by the machines, war robots and such... So quickly, in a matter of minutes, every machine had taken a target, moved in, destroyed, returned to its original programming. This first wave I witnessed up close. I (Ian) must have died, too (though I distinctly remember telling someone in charge what I'd seen and how they could shut it all down if they moved quickly enough; I don't remember knowing if anything came of my passing on information).
But the second wave... See, the networked technology overrode all media and the masses never knew all their leaders had been destroyed. They just kept on buying delivery pizzas and TV dinners, watching sitcoms and complaining to each other about their jobs.
They went about their days, and the technology began to prey on them. Most of the work was done through some kind of low-level hypnosis which kids seemed to be immune to. Parents started killing themselves, or simply lost the ability to protect oneself from harm (like reaching their bare hand into the red-hot spiral grills of a heated stove unit).
In a stroke of dramatic/narrative genius, I witnessed this as a child (9? 10? years old) version of myself, and things got bad right on Halloween. The parents had all been sort of zombified into ignoring the real news, whatever leaked, and more and more concerned with -- you guessed it -- consumerism. My parents (not Bobby and Pixie specifically, even though my younger brother WAS my brother Brendon) ordered us pizzas, delivered by robotic car and cooked by automatic machines, and somehow the pizza killed them. Before they died, while waiting for the pizza, I remember being 10 and saying, "Mom Dad did you guys see this?" and trying to show them the huge headlines on an indie newspaper reading "WAR!!!!" but they didn't care. My mom started acting weird (and my father may have been killing himself upstairs already) before we ate or left trick-or-treating, but as kids we sort of let it go. I wish I remembered details, but I don't: I remember she was acting funny, we argued about the pizza, I realized something was wrong. I took an entire boxed pizza under my arm and my brother by the hand and led him out of the house, knowing it wasn't safe.
We wandered through the neighborhood dressed up in costumes (I don't remember mine, I think Brendon was Hank-Venture-as-The-Bat) past other abandoned kids. They had wagons full of candy or other yummy foods deranged parents had given them (and I knew clearly, even as a boy in the dream, that these kids loose in the streets with so much bounty was because all the adults in the houses they'd just visited were by now dead). A comical cinematic moment: each kid I knew I walked past, he showed me some cool candy or treat he'd received from a house. I kept showing the same slice of pizza I was eating, and they kept flipping me off because a whole box of pizza was still the better prize.
We went through a stadium, abandoned except for some kids and teenagers just partying like it was Lord of the Flies Arena Style. A couple straggler parents, seemingly oblivious to the mayhem of teens in control, were screaming at their child about diseases and how they had to get home now. I knew the parent and the child would be dead in no time. There was a large man who was chucking literally hundreds of black kittens out of an open-air skybox or something similar to their gory deaths below. He did this with the eeriest of casualness, humming to himself. Very cinematic-creepy. Down below, where Lord of the Flies was going on, I remember thinking it must have been raining exploding kittens as they hit the ground. I got my brother away before he registered what was going on.
In the stadium bar we found a few adults still alive, and I remember watching the big kids pour themselves drinks, and I was given a bucket-size glass of whiskey filled to the brim and told to drink. I did, and a very drunk woman in her early 40s I knew (a teacher? a neighbor?) was trying to reason with me to stop. I knew she wasn't affected yet. She was kind of an off-the-grid/green lady, and a little crazy/quirky, and drunk, and somehow it'd kept her safe so far. She watched in horror what was happening around her but couldn't make sense of it. I had the werewithal to grab my bro by the hand and lead him away from the danger, and grab the lady by the hand and lead her, too.
At this point I remember some weird stuff. I remember knowing that inside my kid bro's body was my wife's spirit, and that I was really an adult, and how hard it was to be in love with someone inside your four-year old brother's body. I remember there was an infant we had out of nowhere, who had our mom's spirit inside him, and we were trying to keep him alive, and I remember knowing that the drunk woman we'd saved would become our only chance of getting out of the city alive and surviving this crazy technological-hypnosis holocaust. I remember the infant fell off a high roof and landed, horrible and bloodied, and I (now a grown man in a ten year old body apparently) was the first to make it to the bottom and I was the one who saw the body, knew both the baby was dead and my mother (my body's mother? this is complex) was dead, and I hid the child's body in some box and tossed the box into some bushes before my brother (wife?) and our crazy-drunk woman guide (who'd sobered up and was merely crazy... I compare her to any of the eccentric second-career ladies who sign up for classes at the Film Center) could get down to street level and see the horror. And I remember knowing, the blood's not going anywhere; they'll know what happened, but they won't have to see what I just saw. We have no time for burial (there was the atmosphere of a zombie world, but I don't know if there were zombies or just kind of that The Happening style attempt to outrun a mind-controlling force that had already gotten everyone else).
With all the administrations systematically down, of course there was no power (so could be roving gangs, The Road or even Mad Max style... that makes sense to me) or other networks up. I don't know how the mind control thing manifested at this point, but we knew we had to get to the country and we three travelled together: Me (man-child), Brendon (boy-wife), and Lady (crazy/drunk), and the further we went the more we saw the world tear itself literally apart with cruelty.
There never was any more about the actual war robots the government had made, so you could maybe make the case that that whole Ian Malcolm episode, of witnessing & informing people, was some kind of a success, but by then the "insidious death to all humans program" (through some kind of mind control/alteration) had someone spread into appliances, the media, and so forth. And remember this all took place in a slightly more advanced world than now (I'd compare it to Minority Report, maybe? -- This was, without a doubt, not just my Michael Crichton dream but my Steven Spielberg one, as well), so there was a lot more dependence on technology than even by today's standards, many examples of which I vaguely recall seeing/living through but cannot remember now.
Seriously. I wish I could convey to you more detail, because this was a doozy.
I mean seriously: THIS WAS ALL MY DREAM.