zero hour

Metaverse Dream Sequence (II)

From a deep sleep, she woke up in her seat on the airplane- first class, about halfway down the isle to coach. Startled and disoriented, it took her a moment to recognize where she was- on the flight, before the hijacking, before it crashed... staring at the back of the seat in front of her, the video screen embedded in the seat dark, blank, and reflecting her own face back at her. He face looked odd, unfamiliar, different. She couldn't quite put her finger on it.

'What else had happened? It must have all been a dream. The crash, the lonely bird... the doctor.'

She closed her eyes and tried to clear her mind.

The sound of the bone saw echoing in the darkness.

'It was just a dream' she silently repeated to herself over and over and over again.

"More like a nightmare", the Doctor said from the seat next to her, his voice so close, she could feel his breath on her neck.

She shut her eyes even tighter, dreading what she might see in the seat to her left if she opened them.

She silently debated- would it be worse to see him there, his light blue scrubs splattered with her own blood and brain matter, or to find the seat next to her empty.

To her right she could feel heat of the sun on her shoulder, the sensation of it so precise that she could tell that the window screen was exactly half way down... she could sense the movement of the sunlight slowly traversing the bare skin on her arm, shoulder, neck and upper chest. The plane was banking, tilting severely towards the sun and then away from it. 'Wait... why am I naked?' she asks herself but then immediately realized the absurdity of asking herself that in a dream.

'This is just a dream' she says to herself in her mind, asserting it as if it were fact, as if by asserting that fact she would gain narrative control of the dream. 'This is just a dream' daring him to react or respond again, 'This is JUST a dream!'

"Actually, it's more like an choose your own adventure movie... with commentary" the doctor replied with a snarky tone.

"What the fuck does that mean?", she says opening her eyes and turning to her left to face him.

But he's not there. The seat is empty.

"FUCK!" she screams, and moves to stand up, and fails. The lap belt is cinched tight, the band digging into her bare waist as she strains to get up.

The latch is jammed, won't lift an inch let alone open up. Suddenly she realizes how cold the metal latch feels against her naked skin, just above her pelvic bone.

"Please, remain calm Mrs. [insert name here], allowing yourself to panic will not help you or the situation", the Doctors voice on the airplane's PA system, "Please remain seated with your seat belt fastened until the plane has come to a full and complete stop."

"What is this?" she asks weakly.

"That's a bit difficult to explain." the doctor's voice behind her. "Best to just sit back and let it all happen."

She strains to turn around and see over the back of her seat. It seemed oddly larger than it should have been, like she had shrunk, or it had somehow grown over-sized.

Walking up the isle, the Doctor in bloody scrubs that somehow also looked like an airline attendants uniform, pushing the drink cart.

"Let what happen?" she asks him, her voice sounding sluggish. The doctor does not reply, the cart jingling with glasses as he slows it to a stop just in-front of her. "Let What happen?" She asks again, this time sounding to her own ears as if she were drunk or drugged. She did not feel drunk or drugged... "What have you done to me?" she slurs the question out like a person about to fall over from the effects of a sedative.

"Champaign?" the doctor asks, reaching down to the carts lower compartment.

"Who... the fuck... are you?" the effort of speaking left her out of breath and panting hard, "What the FUCK is going on?"

"You can keep calling me The Doctor for now." He stares at her a moment and then continues, "Please, enjoy this bottle of Dom, on the house, sit back, and relax, and enjoy the in-flight movie"

He sets down a plastic champagne glass on the folding table and then pops open the bottle, just as the screen in the seat-back in-front of her flickers as it turns on. As if by impulse she goes to reach for it, but can't. Both her hands are actually restrained, strapped down to the armrests. She notices that there is no one else in the plane. She is alone on the plane and it's flying in circles. Why is the plane flying in circles? Why is she the only one aboard? Who is this Doctor and what does he want with her? Why does everything feel so real and yet so dream like? What happened to everyone else on the flight? What happened to her life? To her satisfaction? When was the last time she felt happy? The last time she felt love? Why had she chosen the path she had been on for the past ten years? Was she dead? Was this Death? Would she suffer in Hell? Could there really a last chance for heaven if she repented everything at the last moment and swore allegiance to all the things she had dismissed her whole life? Was this Doctor God or Satan? Was she just hallucinating all of this? Was it real? Her mind racing, spitting out questions faster than her mouth could ever form them.

Leaning in, uncomfortably close to her face, his features obscured by protective face-mask, the Doctor says in a tone so calm it could be mistaken for deviously sinister,

"Relax, please. Relax!! There really is no point in asking all those question now. You really wouldn't understand the answers anyway... Not in your current state of ignorance. Perhaps when we are done with you, perhaps after the full series of procedures, perhaps then... then you may able to understand."

She wants to scream. To spit in the Doctor's face and then scream and scream and scream... until she wakes up. 'I MUST wake up!!!', she insists in her mind.

But something about the vividness of it all. The heat of the sun on her skin through the Plexiglas windows, the belt cinched too tight on her naked abdomen, all of it feels too real to be a dream. Even in the so called vivid dreams, which she feels she has been having more and more in the past 15 years, even in those hyper realistic dreams, nothing ever had such tactile 'realness' as the sensations she was feeling now.

"I'm not dreaming." she says in a startled whisper. Realizing that this seriously could not be a dream, no matter how strange and impossible, a dream it can not be.

The Doctor suddenly smiles, as if in approval of her realization, "No, you are not dreaming this," the doctor's voice both inches from her face and inexplicably also on the speaker system, "This is not a dream." He then inexplicably disappears.

She screams again, no words, just panicked screaming, on the verge of really loosing her shit and coming completely unhinged. Continuing on the speakers, "Nor is it a drug induced hallucination. All of this is about as real as anything in reality ever gets."

What do fuck did he mean by that. His wording so specific, so unusual... he had to mean something by it. But what, she could not comprehend. The fear and anxiety and panic was peaking and her mind was racing, trying to analyze every last detail. Just then, as if it had been waiting for just this moment to grab her attention, the TV which she had noticed turn itself on, but had remained blank and very dark, suddenly flashed an almost painfully bright white. The light seeming to seep out of the screen in some kind of impossible cinematic special effect flooding her vision, filling the space around her and blotting out everything else out. A total white-out, she was plunged into a empty nothingness. There was even a total blocking out of all sounds... no more engine hum in the background of every moment, no subtle creaks and moans of metal under the stress of moving though air at high speed. Just absolute silence. She could not even hear her own breath, nor feel her own heartbeat. Realizing that really dropped the floor out from under her last shred of sanity. She could not sense herself, the most basic and fundamental sensations of every day life, were now impossibly gone. She was nothing lost in nothingness...

And once again, after what felt like an eternity of emptiness, the haunting sound of the surgical bone saw, behind her, in her blind spot, so close that her ears tingled.