Born from my Restless Dreams

“The world is indeed comic, but the joke is on mankind.”

― H. P. Lovecraft

We divided ourselves in two groups, one went upwards towards the upper floors in search of a safe room where they could wait. Björnson is leading that team as he knows this facility like the back of his hand. Also, his injuries prevent him from moving a lot so he needs to find a place to rest.

Our team, led by captain Liu, is composed of himself, Marina, three engineers that came with us and myself. We are taking the shortest route to the drones control room, running towards the south-east direction. Captain Liu is in the middle of the group, guiding us while we keep him safe. In the front are Marcellus, the engineer from my team that kneeled in front of the valentinian temple and myself. In the back are Marina and two other engineers. Marcellus took Björnson’s weapon and I exchanged my stun gun with Captains Liu’s weapon. It so happens that Marcellus was drafted into the military when he was 18 years old, as he was the only other one who had used a weapon before, Captain Liu chose Marcellus and me to go in the front. As we run, the dull echo of our steps against the concrete floor fills the silence of the long empty hallway.

The plan is to get to a room where we can take an elevator that leads us directly to the drone control room. Captain Liu explained the route thus “First we will pass through the freezer where we store the perishable food, next we will find the store room for the non-perishable food; they are not far away from each other. The third one will take a bit longer to get and it is where we store the spare parts for the drones. Between each room there will be long corridors”. The biggest danger along the way is while we are inside of the 3 large rooms as these have narrow stairs at their entrances and almost no place to hide inside them. If we were to find drones in there we would have to take them out before they can see us. I really hope we don’t find any like that and God help us that none enter while we are already inside. Besides that, the hallways give us plenty of space to see the drones getting into range.

We enter the first of these rooms and there aren’t any drones inside. As each of us enters, we hear a series of short beeps followed by a long one. According to Captain Liu, that's the sound of the system registering us as guests by scanning our chips. After crossing the door we stand on a 1 by 1 meter platform from which we can see the whole room. To the right there is a metallic staircase leading downwards to the lower floor. The inside is freezing cold, with several white lights coming from the ceiling. We were lucky no drone was in here, now we just need to pass through two more rooms and we will reach our objective.

As we exit the freezer I see a drone in the hallway looking away from us. It has smoke coming from it and is raising its front leg towards the ceiling. I didn't think too much about the scene in front of me and shot at it. Thankfully it was a static target so I could hit it straight in the head, making it fall to the ground and not move anymore. After checking it wouldn’t rise back up, Captain Liu told us “let's slow down a bit, there could be more nearby. If we find any it will be easier to stop and aim if we aren’t running”.

I didn’t notice it because of the drone but the walls and floor of the hallways are different from the ones we passed through before. They are made of polished wood and the lights have a yellowish tint to them. On some of the walls there are painted carvings of large white mountains with deep black shadows and coming from behind them, rays of golden light. Before I get more distracted admiring the beautiful art pieces, we notice the door to the next room in the distance. On each side there is a large window from which we can see light coming. The captain really wasn’t kidding when he said the two rooms were close.

As we get closer to the door we see from the orange light of the windows a couple of shadows appearing from time to time. This is bad, if there are more than 2 drones in there we might need to take an alternative route. We stop some 5 meters before reaching the door and talk about our approach. Captain Liu took the initiative and said “I’m sure all of you saw those shadows. Let’s reach the windows to see what we are dealing with. If we only see two we’ll try to take them out at the same time. Even if we are successful, do not lower your guard. There could be more outside our field of view”. I grab my rifle tightly trying to not fall to my nerves and nod my head in agreement. Marcellus nods as well, looking more relaxed than me although still with a serious expression on his face. Then the captain continues “If there are more than two drones visible only try taking them if they are far away from the stairs. If they are close we’ll have to take a longer but safer route”. We nod in agreement again.

Marcellus and I crawl towards the windows while Marina, the Captain and the two other engineers stay back looking attentively at the door and us. Marcellus takes the left window while I take the right one. At the same time we slowly rise up to see what is inside the room, myself sweating bullets while I grab at the rifle with all my strength. Then I freeze, my eyes fixed on the bizarre scene in front of me. Down at the center of the room, I gaze at what seemed like a golden child floating on its back over what looked like a disk of fire. Its proportions compared to that of a two-year old but its size most certainly are not, reaching around 2 meters tall. Its hair black and straight with a beautiful shine like fine silk, with a length going beyond its body, down its head and towards the disk of fire it flowed around, looking like an exquisite fabric delicately being moved by the wind. Its face is smooth and wears a perpetually static smile on its small red lips. The eyes are partially open, enough to see the black sclera around its golden pupils. The arms and hands move delicately around as if it was performing an elegant dance with them. Around it are four drones, three of them are on the ground motionless, completely set afire. The last one is still functional but already with smoke coming from its legs and head. The standing drone has the same pose as the one I shot, looking in the direction of the golden child.

Suddenly, I feel something pulling at my shirt and falling to the ground as I turn around and see Marina. Her face shows an expression of worry while her hands gesture up and down as if trying to tell me to calm down. I notice then, that I’m aiming my rifle at her with my whole body as tense as it can be. Immediately I take several deep breaths as I place the gun softly on the ground. Marina approaches me and asks “hey, are you ok? Why are you crying?”. In confusion I prepare to reply that I’m not crying when I notice the irritation on my eyes and my cheeks, completely wet.

After a while I regain my composure and notice that Marcellus is in a similar state to me. I ask Marina “For how long did I stare through the window?”. She replied “you spent around 3 minutes like that, not moving an inch. We got worried at both of you acting so strangely so we came to ask what happened. So please tell me, what is going on?”. I try to think of a way to describe what I saw but as I try to process the memories my body starts to tremble. I give up and say “All of you will have to look at it to understand. Don’t worry, I’ll call you back after a few seconds”.

They four look through the window and just as Marina described, the moment they set their sights on that thing all of them freeze in place. After 5 seconds I softly touch their backs to call their attention. All of them are sweating cold, their eyes darting around as if looking for an explanation of what is going on down there. Marina has her mouth perpetually open, sometimes doing sounds indicating she wanted to say something but then stopped herself. Captain Liu is looking in the horizon with his eyes wide open and his eyebrows so tense it seemed like his skin was about to break. We took a couple of minutes to recover ourselves then, once his hands stopped shivering, Captain Liu told us all with slow and controlled words “Let’s deal with what we can. For now, everyone has to focus on following me through the longer path to take out the drones. After that is done, we’ll think about whatever that was”. We followed him, nobody saying a thing.