So, Sometimes I have dreams that are strangely story like, or seem interesting enough on their own merit that someone could conceivably be as interested in reading them as any of the random stories I write. Whether that is a good thing or a bad thing is yet to be determined.
I was investigating a ship. More specifically, a spaceship. With me was a robotic companion to help monitor the area for any instabilities. He was about my height, and fairly blocky, but humanoid in shape. He quietly followed behind me a short ways before silently letting me know that he was going to check something.
I moved forward on my own, I could feel that something was dangerous about the area, and took my time to look around, the room i was in connected to three others, and was strangely filled with thin walls that obscured my vision. The majority of the walls lined horizontally across the room giving access to the two rooms to either side. Gaps in the walls allowed me to progress forward to the far room.
In that room was a woman, with blonde hair that came down about 4-5 inches past her shoulders. She was afraid and her hair looked rough. Identifying her as potentially stranded, I instructed her to follow me, which she mostly did; though I noticed when i turned around and walked back the way i came, she walked around the path to my right before rejoining me past where the walls stopped and the room opened up.
I brought her back over to where the robot was. She told me that she was being held captive by a shape shifting alien, and the only way she knows of to harm it was to hit it in the chest with radio waves at a certain frequency which resonates with it. The robot stood behind her, and silently i signaled to it to test her to be sure that she wasn’t the alien trying to catch us off guard. She didn’t respond to the radio waves, so barring her lying about the alien’s weakness she was probably human.
Knowing it’s weakness, and having a robot that could utilize it, I walked towards the area with the walls and into the room on what was now my left. Inside was a man who stood at least a foot taller than me, and bulkier as well. He stood with his arms crossed before speaking
“You think you are going to leave with her?” he asked me, his tone of voice sounding like he meant to prevent us from leaving. Somehow I had an observation about his crossed arms, like they were somehow important. Before the thought finished going through my head I began to speak.
“You do not seem ready to fight with your arms crossed like that” I said, as my mind began to float and wonder about how crossed arms ended up an aggressive stance when it was inhibiting to immediate movement.
I suppose though that while I wondered, the robot took action, because when my focus returned to me, the alien was gone. Walking through the room with the walls again, to the last room, we found the computer and controls. It would seem the ship was damaged. Dream memories came to me at this point, informing me that I was on the ship all along, rather than arriving from elsewhere as I had assumed of myself previously. The alien had consumed all of the food, and had begun killing passengers.
There was no food on the ship, and no escape. the computer suggested that it open the wall so we would die quickly rather than spend a week slowly dying. This seemed like a bad plan to me, and I suggested that it wait on opening the door for anyone who didn’t like the idea to leave the room. Nobody else moved.
It reminded me of the scene in an old movie where the sailors in a submarine drowned themselves the avoid the fate of dying a much slower and more painful death at the bottom of the ocean. Before I knew it, the wall was opening, and I took a deep breath. Somehow something in me knew I needed to survive the exposure as long as possible.
It felt strange. I was pulled by the vacuum of space out of the room, but rather than cold, or painful, it was like drifting forward underwater. Somehow at just that moment something caused us all to be moved onto land.
Looking around we were on the surface of a planet, with the ship behind us. There were some homes mixed into the trees, and a voice carrying on seemingly in the background of the view before catching up to myself. There was a man, apparently the leader of this place describing their philosophies.
They believed that the catastrophe that had apparently befallen most of the human race was due to the long running lines in family trees. That it had somehow caused us to stop evolving properly because monogamous lifestyles kept good new genes from being spread from their source.
In this place, there was no marriage; and rather than families raising children, the entire community raised the children as a whole. I didn’t know how their economic structure was; but it seemed likely to be communistic. I tried to keep an open mind, but then what he said caught my attention.
Apparently, in order to own a ship, you are required to ‘contribute’ a child towards the continuation of the human race. At first I thought he meant that I had to either give him my ship or a child to stay in the community; but what he really meant was that he was taking our ship.
I told him that we didn’t have a kid; trying to be tactful about declining; but his soldiers came up behind us. This was when he revealed his intention to take our ship for their colony’s use. I’m sure I would have done something to stop him; but it was at that point I woke up.