The Walking Dream (A Short Story)

I woke up groggy from a long night, my muscles sore and my head still tired as if I never really slept. I felt the dream cascade on top of me. It’s feeling looming over my mind with omnipresent vividness, but I could not remember exactly what happened.

I was there when he did it all to me. That’s what I could feel. Who was he again, and what did he do? My memory retreated like a wave. I just had the feeling of standing there. 

Except I couldn’t move. I just stood. I just remember standing at attention. For what though? I stood in some kind of line; that’s what it was. A line of other bodies. 

While standing there, I woke up for some reason. Well, sort of, I became aware of my presence, of my body, but I could not move. He controlled my body; he controlled all our bodies. We stood in formation at his command. But who even was he? 

The part of it that doesn’t make sense is that it felt like I was actually there. It didn’t have the fuzziness that dreams normally have. I felt like I was seeing with my actual eyes, feeling the sensations of my actual body, and moving with my actual limbs. I could still feel it in the way my muscles twitched now from exhaustion just thinking about it. It didn’t feel like a normal dream. No haziness in my perception. I swear I was actually there. 

And who were the others? They were countless other bodies; other drones to his will. I guess the more important question remains, who was he? I have a vivid impression in my mind. Of him looming large before me. He did it. He felt like an evil monster bearing down at me from above. But I have no face, no body for him. 

And what did he have us do? I can scarcely remember that either. He had us march. He sent us to do his bidding. As he did so, I saw that he saw that I could see him; that even though my body was still under his control, that my sensations had somehow woken up. He brought me back into a deep sleep, and I lost the ability to remember anything at all. 

I felt like I had barely slept at all. My mind rushed trying to remember it all yet the air of my memory is quickly evaporating. How was I going to go about my day today? How would I survive work? Exhausted, I feel like I can barely move, even though I just woke up. If I had too many of these restless nights, I would have to see a sleep doctor. 

Who was he? I couldn’t get this thought out of my mind. My thoughts felt like ropes that I pulled and pulled until they faded away into nothing. Whoever he was, I did not like him. 

I got up and followed the rhythm I had always known to get ready for the day. I was on autopilot, too tired to do anything else. Eventually, I skated out the door, and the dream just remained as a faint feeling. I could not decipher any details. When I thought back, I only felt a looming terror washes over me. My body convulsed with anticipation. I felt the sensation of standing, of marching, of someone staring down at me. Nothing more.

Life amidst the Cosmic Clash between Chaos and Tyranny

Photo Credit: NASA

(This is a second version of this original short story, with a different emphasis.)

When the world was formed, there were two evil forces. One was Chaos who represented destruction and anarchy, and the other Tyranny who wanted order and control. 

They clashed. Tyranny had the entire universe confined into a small, dense point, but Chaos pushed the particles of the universe apart, causing everything to explode in a hot, fast bang. Tyranny tried to bring everything back together into an order or system, through forces like gravity, electromagnetism, and so on. She would design intricate formations ranging from small atoms to big galaxies, but Chaos would cause them slowly to rip apart. 

Their fight raged for billions of years. Tyranny started to learn that every structure she built, no matter how strong, seemed to eventually fall apart. She realized two things that human scientists would discover far into the future: Entropy (or Chaos) always increases in the universe and that any structured, dynamic system no matter how perfectly built can easily splinter into chaos overtime given very small aspects of how they were initially built that she could not control. In enough time, Chaos always seemed destined to win in the end. 

She had an idea. What if she could build structures that would continue to reproduce themselves overtime? When she tried to build a single system, it would never last forever. Something would always make it fall apart eventually. But, she decided to build structures that could replicate themselves but with slight modifications each time in response to mild intrusions of Chaos (which she called “circumstances”)? Even if the original version disintegrated a long time ago, the newest lifeforms would have adapted and survived. This seemed like the best strategy to build order that can survive the coming chaos and slowly take over the universe. She called these replicating entities Life

Starting on a planet, these got better and better at replicating, becoming a network with other life that expanded across the whole planet. In time, maybe it could expand across the entire universe. As her life started competing more intensely in this environment, some started developing the ability to understand some of the plays in her playbook and write their own. They also started creating information and other systems that seemed to exhibit a type of life of its own. 

As this is happening, she saw one fundamental weakness: these things are reliant on matter, and eventually even their matter might descend into Chaos. She struggles to think. Will life be able to transcend even the matter of the universe, or will Chaos eventually still have her way in the end? 

The Fight Between Chaos and Tyranny (A Short Story)

When the world was formed, there were two evil goddesses. One was Chaos who represented destruction and anarchy, and the other Tyranny who wanted order and control. 

They clashed, their fights forming the mountains, valleys, and other things of this world. Chaos wanted to see the world splinter, and tyranny sought the power to dominate and subdue the earth. 

They were stuck forever in lockstep, fighting with a ferocity that shook the very foundations of the world. The creatures of the earth ran, fearing what would come of this place. 

Their fight raged for centuries with no end in sight, until Tyranny had an idea. She saw how the creatures fled from them and took one that was particularly to her liking: humans. 

They were smart enough to know tyranny and to desire control and domination. This made them predictable and able to be used for her purposes. Yet, they also hated any order imposed on them so much that they looked to Chaos to keep them from being subdued by others. 

Tyranny realized the way to finally win against Chaos after all was to incorporate her. Normally the system she built would become too controlled, and the humans would invite Chaos into their communities to break free from it. 

But before that could happen, she invited Chaos to invade her people’s neighbors by whipping her army into a frenzy of anger and hatred and sending them to attack an unsuspecting neighboring community. Chaos took the bait and joined in the revelry of war, helping the army to consume the people in a chaotic fury. Once weakened, she would swallow this new community into her rising empire. 

She would repeat this again and galvanized her community around her as it rallied against each new foe. Chaos’s fury would unleash, but she could control its bounds and use it to advance her system. 

Every once in a while, chaos would turn inside her community. Maybe her people would turn against their oppressive King or the King would become paranoid and try to wipe out a part of her people. But that was okay. Each of these was like a cleansing purge, allowing the built up sense of feelings and drives within the community to burn away in the cleansing fire of chaotic conflict. For there were always power-hungry humans she could manipulate into taking power back once this fire of chaos had burnt through this fuel. 

This is how she advanced onto the world. She not only took over more human communities but also the animals and plants, as her empire and the new empires sprouting around it to compete engulfed the world. She cut them down into a regimented system controlled by the humans. No longer was she at odds with her goddess equal Chaos. Instead, she walked hand and in hand with her, knowing how useful she was in building her system of control. 

That is, until humans took control of the whole world and destroyed the very resources of the world. That is when Chaos knew she would have the last laugh as she got to rebuild it anew. 

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