zero hour

Metaverse Dream Sequence (I)

Part One-

The Extraction

She had been dreaming vague dreams of regret, guilt, fear and shame. She could not fully remember the details, her head hurt. Her eyes were closed. Her back was broken, though she did not realize it just yet.

In the distance she heard a bird's cry carried on the wind. Her head throbbing and cloudy with the remnants of dreams and drugs and booze and quite possibly multiple concussions. She noted that the bird sounded lost, confused, and unsure of itself... and then laughed at herself for such a silly personification.

"Birds don't have feelings," she reminded herself silently.

Pain suddenly raged, her conscious mind shut down in order to cope. In the darkness, she eventually could hear voices. Urgent shouts, and commands, grunts and the sounds of unseen physical effort. Her body being lifted off the ground. The pain of broken bones jarred her recollection.

Her flight had gone down, crashed. The memory of it wafted up from the dark cloudy depths of her mind. She had been at an Airport. But which city? A business trip. In what market? At the airport, in the bar, on the TV, reports of yet another drone campaign. And, in retaliation, another suicide bombing near the US Embassy in some war torn desert country. Safety alerts, travel advisories, the usual fear-mongering that she typically ignored and dismissed as political theatre.

And then it happened. The flight she was on was hijacked. The certainty of this memory was sharp in contrast to everything else in her jumbled mind.

She had been sleeping lightly after her third cocktail and a couple of pills. She hated flying. To tell the truth (the hidden truth which she usually repressed), she was deathly afraid of planes, and the possibility of meeting her death in one. In recent years, she had been struck with this ever increasing terror: "This plane will crash and burn, with me in it."

She had good cause to have this fear. The world had gone mad, war had transcended its usual boundaries and protocols, and the 'bad guys' had gotten better and better at using civilian airplanes as weapons. Ironic, considering the fact that the inspiration for this new trend had been, in reality, a false flag operation. Most of the people she knew, still believed the official explanation: Jihadists had forced the planes to crash into the Twin Towers as acts of ideological warfare. While it had eventually become clear to her, and most rational minded people, that 9/11 had in-fact been in inside job, the sad truth was that copycats sprang up and spread like wildfire. As the trend grew over the next twelve years, she had felt increasingly anxious about business travel. The paranoid dreams she started having immediately after 9/11 got worse and worse with each new incident of a plane gone missing or crashing mysteriously that showed up on the news. To cope with the dreams, and the anxiety behind them, she had taken to indulging more and more in preemptive drinking. Regardless of the time of departure, she would spend an hour in the most conveniently located airport bar before any flight. Upon take off she would continue her regimen of vodka martinis, and would often cap things off with two muscle relaxants, just enough so she could endure the flight. She would avoid sleep, in order to avoid dreaming the horrifically vivid dream of in flight disaster during her flights. But apparently this time her little regimen had failed, and she had slipped into slumber without meaning to.

As she was waking up from one of these prophetic dreams, she questioned reality. "Am I still dreaming?", she asked herself as he realized that things were not as they should be. Without much warning, just as she was regaining consciousness, the flight crew abandoned their posts with wild shouts and cries, in a strange mix of several languages, and gathered together at the front cabin, next to the emergency hatch, all of them with gas-masks on. Passengers were trapped in their seats, numb and already partially paralyzed by the drugs that the hijackers had covertly pumped into the cabin moments before. All watched with horror in their eyes and silent screams on their nearly paralyzed faces. She sat there, panicking and unable to utter a word, her body unresponsive to her mind's commands, dull, like putty. She had been dreaming something.... Was this still the dream?