Dream Soldiers
by
Michael D. Britton
* * * *
Copyright 2012 by Michael D. Britton / Intelligent Life Books
I watched as the other man, clothed in a blue coverall, stepped out from behind the rocky outcropping, and brought his weapon up to his eye to sight it.
A blinding flash of light and then sudden darkness.
I could feel a stinging sensation behind my eyes, and knew it was time to activate the wake sequence.
As I came around, the hot pain in my skull dissipated, and I opened my eyes to see Colonel Glen Shafter standing over me, dressed from head to toe in white, his head shaven and his hazel eyes piercing. The stuffy room was dim and quiet except for the hum of the blinking computers that lined every wall.
“What happened?” I mumbled.
“You lost another battle,” said Shafter, turning to peck at a few buttons on a control panel with his left hand. “The enemy took you out – and you’re only alive because you remembered to wake up.”
“I always remember to wake up,” I said. “That’s why I’ve survived more battles than any other soldier in this company.”
“You’ve survived more battles than anyone in this whole brigade, Adams. But I need my men to win battles, not just survive them! The rebels won’t stop until they’ve taken over the entire Earth government. We cannot let them move their ships any closer than one hundred thousand kilometers from the upper atmosphere. But the key is keeping the ones on the lunar surface occupied – preferably asleep, fighting you.”
The lunar rebels were a powerful force of settlers on the moon who’d dissented and were claiming independence. Their struggle to be free of the central Earth government garnered a fair amount of sympathy among Terrestrials at first - until they mobilized and started taking out Earth cities with orbital-launched plasma bombs.
The Earth Armed Forces pushed them back till they were out of range and held them at bay, but the real battle was taking place in labs like this one in Los Alamos. EAF specialists like me took a Richtodyne pill that produced lucid dreaming. It was originally a recreational drug, but the military had put it to good use.
With our brains under the influence of the compound, we’d meet the enemy – also asleep – on the battleground of the unconscious mind, in a shared reality that changed the nature of warfare completely.
A well-trained fighter like me could quickly wake himself if mortally wounded in the dream, allowing himself to start over again fresh.
But if you were shot in your dream, and didn’t have the wherewithal to snap out of it before dying, your brain would produce the chemicals associated with extreme trauma and stop your heart cold.
“I have been keeping them occupied, Sir,” I said. “Even if they tend to shoot me down more often than I can kill them.”
“We need you to eliminate more of them,” said Shafter. “If you can take out enough of their men, they’ll need to send their leadership to the dream front. Then we’ll take our stealth squadron in on the dark side of the moon and destroy their central command while they’re engaged in dream battle.”
“Sir, we’ve lost most of our best men. There’s just me and Samuels, and Hizeki and Marsh left. We can’t take on all their men in the dream front. That’s why I keep getting knocked out of the fight. There’s got to be another way.”
“The only reason those Lunes are winning is because they’re a bunch of former druggies. They were popping Richtodyne up on their little moon commune right from the get-go. We just need to beat them at their own game.”
“I’ll do my best, Sir,” I said. I swallowed hard. “I’m ready to go back in.”
Shafter gave a jerk of his head – the quick nod that meant he was pleased with my readiness to return to the fight. He turned back to the control panel and spoke while inputting commands on the keypad. “I’m providing you a double boost of Alpha Wave Substitute, and I’m sending you in at a new location. This is right at the front where Samuels, Hizeki and Marsh are all fighting right now. You’ll join them in a joint theater.”
In addition to the dream enhancing Richtodyne, the Los Alamos computer was programmed to create shared dream spaces by channeling a digital signal in a datastream wave that permeated our minds and shaped the landscape of our dreams, tying us all together in a mutual, virtual environment. The signal was sent internally to the troops, and also broadcast externally in a wide beam that passed through the minds of the enemy on its way out of the solar system to the infinite reaches of space.
This gave us an advantage we needed – we controlled the fighting environments. There were more of the Lunes, and they were more used to existing in the dreamscape, but we were better trained fighters and held the high ground.
As I closed my eyes and regulated my breathing, I felt my body relax as I slipped away into my little nightmare world.
I heard the weapons fire and the yelling, and smelled the sulfuric smoke and dust. I opened my eyes and I was back in my battle body – a physique of much greater stature than my waking self, equipped with protective gear, surveillance devices, and heavy armaments.
I looked around to see that I was on the moon’s surface, under one of the bio-domes, about a kilometer from what looked like a recreation of the Lunar Capitol.
“Adams! Over here,” called Hizeki. The enormous Asian man waved me over to his position behind a capsized lunar rover. Of course, in reality, Hizeki was one of the puniest soldiers I’d ever met – but a mental giant and well-suited to this kind of operation.
He laid down some cover fire and I shuffled over to join him, skidding to a halt on the powdery surface. The nice thing about this simulated environment was that it approximated Earth gravity instead of going for the more realistic sensation of moon gravity. This also caused the Lunes some trouble, because they were forced to adjust out of their native environment.
From this position, I could see Samuels and Marsh holed up behind another rover, about forty paces closer to the Capitol.
“What’s the plan?” I asked Hizeki.
“We’re gonna take the Capitol,” he said, not looking away from his weapon’s sights.
“Kinda figured,” I said. “But that’s a goal, not a plan. How, exactly, are we going to execute that goal?”
“Well, these guys are good,” he said, finally turning to me. “Every time we hit them, they blink out and come right back, like some kind of freaky video game. They obviously have superior dream control, in terms of knowing when to wake up and recuperate, and when to return.”
It was true. The Lunes were amazing – we had a hard time killing them, because they’d almost always manage to wake themselves up before our ersatz weaponry could do permanent damage.
So, with the help of the Los Alamos computer’s environment creator, we’d dream up bigger and badder weapons with which to take out the enemy. But they would, in turn, dream up more powerful defenses.
But the escalation reached a crescendo – a point of diminishing returns for both sides. It became clear that there were limits to this imitation arms race, placed on us by the dream environment. So, we mostly stuck to beefy bodies and standard weapons, relying on tactics instead of brute strength to obtain our objectives.
“So I ask again,” I said, “what are we going to do to get inside there? And what are we going to do, once there?”
“While you were awake, we came up with a new tactic,” said Hizeki. “We’re going to -”
A bullet found its way through the lunar rover and split Hizeki’s head open from back to front. As he fell face first into the fine powder on the ground, he gurgled, “I’ll be back.”
I waited, but he didn’t return.
He didn’t ma
ke it.
Now we were only three.
I radioed Samuels. “Cover me – I’m going to join you over there.”
I heard a barrage of weapons fire and scrambled to the position of Samuels and Marsh.
As I caught my breath, I said, “They got Hizeki. They got ‘im. He’s gone.”
“We don’t know that,” said Marsh, who looked like a dude you’d see on the cover of Muscle Magazine. He had a blond flat-top and grey-blue eyes.
“He may just be taking a while to recover,” said Samuels, a bald man with black goatee who made Marsh look small. “He could pop back in any time. I mean, we thought you were a goner, too.”
“He was about to tell me the plan,” I said.
“Okay, here’s what we’re gonna do,” said Marsh. “We’re gonna pull a series of SRs to get inside to the Capitol’s dream server.”
SRs, or suicide runs, meant a lot of sprinting, a lot of