The last time I saw the night sky it was a deep blue; stars twinkling and bright. The air was crisp and sharp, the wind flowing over my skin. I took a deep breath in, the feeling almost feeding the hunger of days without food. I fought for those brief moments of nature, of something real. Something that grew without the help of humans.
It has been ten years since that moment. I remember it clearly though. Every night, every dark and cold night, I think about that dark sky. I think about what it was like to breathe fresh air. I remember how much I sacrificed to have that brief moment of freedom before they pulled me back in.
And every day since then, I have dreamt of seeing the sky again.
Tonight the games are being hosted again. They say the winner will be given a whole day topside. The last one who went up was torn apart by the storms though, but if the weather times out right, it can be the most beautiful experience a human can expect to have anymore with mother nature.
I lost the last time we had a game. Thankfully it is no longer a requirement to have only one survivor, since the labor force started dwindling after the first two games caused some of our best engineers to lose their lives. Such a waste. Now the only source of music we get is Frank and his constant screaming. Frank never did do well with the weekly dream harvesting.
Ah yes, I should mention the darklings. They call themselves the Sakiin, but everyone in the pit calls them darklings. Their eyes are purple and black, seemingly empty but when they stare into you for the harvest, you can see the dark sector of the galaxy they were born from. You can sense the emptiness of their broken home and the suffering their star caused to their people. Such a tragedy.
As the rumor goes, the sudden change in their sun from the experiments they were performing caused some kind of damage to their brains. They were in a constant state of perfect attunement with one another, but after the cataclysm, their lack of perfect attunement broke their ability to connect with the collective.
Since they had been in a state of perfect harmony for so long, the disturbance destroyed their ability to tune back in with each other. It created a kind of void in them, an emptiness. Forever their dreams were darkness, unused to the lack of friends to connect to. Ever since then, they have been scouring the galaxy for species that could dream, imagine, create, and love. They harvest whatever is available and feed it into a new artificial network for all to share.
Lately however, they have been digging a little harder since everyone is getting tired, and it has been so long since most of us have done anything that would give us anything but nightmares. They tried to be subtle at first. They took over the whole world within a day while we slept. They fed off our dreams, our ideas, memories, but then they began to poison themselves with the darkness found within the hearts of our people.
They drank too deeply, too hungry for our minds and souls, and they discovered our inner sickness. And now, it’s not only a drug to them, it is their sustenance. My name is Faren, and I am a dreamer for the Sakiin collective, but soon, I will be the only answer to the survival of a species that caused the suffering that I, that we, experience constantly.
I will break the systems that never should have been placed, and I will show them that we can co-exist. That we are not livestock to be fed upon, we WILL create freedom, and if they must perish so that we survive, perhaps that was always their fate. Perhaps the horrifying truth is, we are all too broken to be saved; but what I know is, I will try until I die.
There is nothing else worth living for right now, nothing else worth fighting for. Freedom, that of our minds and that of the people who believe they need to cage us to survive. I will end the feedings, the games. I will break the cages, shatter the super complexes that pepper the once human surface of our birth home
We will take back the one thing that was always ours.
Our freedom!!!
