dehydromon
In April 2049, the United States debt had grown so large that the countries to which it had become permanently in debt demanded superiority, and began to treat the United States like a second-world country. Worried about what this could mean for the future of the country, three of America’s top scientists put their heads together and came up with an idea that could potentially triple the combat efficiency of the military, allowing the US to restore its place as the number-one world superpower. The government thought it saw potential in the program, and borrowed forty billion more dollars from other countries to fund it. The people of the United States, of course, were sure that the government had just dug another whole it wouldn’t be able to climb out of. Unsurprisingly, it ignored the people and continued with the project.
The idea was rather simple: if human dreams could be influenced by technology, then perhaps technology could be taken one step further, and what happened in the dreams could influence the real world in some way. The three scientists worked for over a year on such a technology before coming up with what they believed was what they were looking for. It was injection that would theoretically put the host into a state of “pseudo-sleep”, in which the subject was only partially dreaming, while the rest of his or her mind was functioning normally. Once in this state, a device they named the “Neotrancer” could induce the desired enhancement in the dreams of the subject, and then create a neuromagnetic field around the subject which would allow whatever enhancement was induced to affect the subject in real life.
Of course, it was all theory, and very few people were willing to potentially surrender their lives for such experimental technology. So what did the government do? They got desperate. Since no one from any of the three branches of the government was willing to let themselves be injected with serum, they secretly began to inoculate carefully selected US citizens, and monitored their reactions. In the first stages of the experiment, the subjects appeared to react just as hypothesized, but it took only one week for the first experiment to go wrong, followed by all the rest. The problem? None of the subjects woke up after falling asleep on the seventh or eighth night. But there was something about what they dreamed about that was different from any other dream.
It turned out that the scientists had unintentionally set the dreams in the Medieval Ages, but there was more to it. Since the dreams were originally all meant to take place in the real world, with the presence of other test subjects, the ones who fell into the dreams all fell into the same world — A world that seemed much more real than any other dream they had. Here, they had the enhancements they were meant to have carried in the real world — “powers”, if you will — but also various other changes. Some exhibited controlled mutations, growing parts one would normally find on other mammalian species. And then there were those who didn’t inherit any changes. None of them had the faintest clue where they were, nor did they have any memory of who they were in the real world. All they had now was what they dreamed, but that was the interesting thing. Anything could happen in a dream, couldn’t it? That was for the subjects of a failed experiment to find out.
Back in the real world, the scientists still had very mild control over what could happen in these dreams, but the problem was they had no way of seeing specifically what was happening in these dreams. From time to time, they would come back with a new thing to try on these subjects, using different kinds of what they believed were actual enhancements, to see if
there was a way to peer into what the experiments were dreaming about. Unbeknownst to the scientists, many of these “enhancements” turned out to cause disturbances in the dreams of those under the influence of the injection. Sometimes it created enormous natural disasters, other times it created monsters that tried to kill the subjects in their dreams, and sometimes it would kill the test subject altogether.Trapped, lost, and confused, they must coexist with the people of the land, whether they be native or dreaming. All in all, there is only one important question to ponder…
What will you dream?
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