Where Our Dreams Go

Andrews | Chapter 1

"Hold on to your nuts." Harriets calls through my drop pods intercom, "We are launching in 5, 4, 3" I hate this part "2, 1. Launch".

My entire body is hit with enough g-force to make it feel like I'll end the trip as soup in my own gravity boots. They tell you in training not to worry and that it only lasts 15 seconds, but when your bones feel like they're being liquified, 15 seconds is a hell of a long time. I try to count it down. If you can visualise the finish, then you know it will end. So through gritted teeth, I countdown from where I think we might be, 12, 11, 10, 9. The pod shudders slightly and the lights go out.

Images of shattered pods fill my mind from the training program, where seals had been missed or eroded and the pressure literally rips them apart at the seams. Harriet has been my engineer and operator for the last few missions. I liked her, but if she gets me killed, I'll haunt the crap out of her. The pod lights turn back on, followed by a series of warning signs lighting up the screens that all thankfully disappear. Keep counting, I think. Knowing it must have been more than a second of darkness I still start from where I left off, pretending as if the blackout hadn't happened 8, 7, 6, 5, 4. It's in those moments of darkness that I ask myself why I made the choice to be up here pissing my pants, I could've been driving around delivering pizza, could be out there freeing an innocent person in a corrupt courtroom. I could've been wearing a white coat and healing the sick, selling second hand equipment at a boot sale, even building apps or something, but no, I wanted to save the world. I wanted to be a Dreamcatcher.

It's been more than a hundred years since we've had to resort to using fossil fuels for our everyday life. Back then, our planet had used fossils to power everything from cars to electric razors. Killing the planet with every drop of blood our people pulled from her with full Government backing. They knew what was happening to our home, but still they pumped out propaganda and misdirection. Not wanting to face the more difficult option of searching for a different energy source. It was far easier to keep the entire world in a state of ignorance with pretty words and fake statistics.

'The rising global temperature and forest fires have nothing to do with burning the lifeblood of our planet, it's only natural for this to happen so new trees can be grown.'

'We were always going to have an ice age.'

'No way is the smoke pouring from factories weakening the ozone layer.'

They kept up this charade until, finally, our planet decided she'd had enough. That precious ozone layer of ours just burst like an overfilled balloon, the shredded pieces now a patchwork above us. Its destruction marked our entry into the age of 'scorched earth'.

I shake away the graphic images in history books. We would all be dead if not for this planet appearing from nowhere, the planet of the dead, of their dreams to be more precise. It appeared from nowhere and slotted in amongst the other planets in our solar system, as if it had always been there, hidden inside the shadow of the moon. It's visible now, on a clear day, from the planet's surface as an absence of light in the otherwise perfect sky. A pinprick of midnight in the blue and gold fabric of our horizon. While its surface casts no light or warmth, there is an energy pulsing from it in invisible waves. They filled the air on our planet with a kind of static, it made the atmosphere more dense and harder to breathe.

Smarter men than me studied it and found something we desperately needed, energy. Enough energy to power our whole world for centuries to come, maybe forever because this power source came from the dreams of our dead. There are two ways this can be done as far as I know. The first is via large panels sitting on huge space stations in front of our planet, storing the energy pulses in batteries and shipping them to our homes. The second way is more dangerous and involves Dreamcatchers like me, which means two things. There aren't a lot of us and it pays a lot.