.0. The Last Dream
She had started talking about the dream a little too early. Later, she learned it was better to keep it quiet. To keep it secret.
It had been coming back to her since early childhood, always the same. Back then, it made no sense. It wasn’t frightening either. It was… heavy. Slow. Immense. Neither joyful nor sorrowful. In the dream, she felt too large. Not large like an adult. Large like something that does not know walls.
No ground, no sky. Only a cold expanse, scattered with frozen stones, sharp-edged, motionless, suspended in a night that was not quite empty. She drifted between them effortlessly, fluid and swift, never touching them. Each movement carried everything else with it. Her body followed a logic known only to itself.
She felt her weight without seeing her shape. A dense mass, carried by its own velocity. It was neither tiring nor painful. She simply… was. In the dream, she never wondered what she was. Children do not ask themselves such questions.
It was cold, but not like outside. A cold that does not bite, that does not cut the skin. A cold that exists because there is no more warmth. She passed close to the stones, sometimes so close she might have brushed them, but there was no fear. The trajectories were certain; the mass knew them by heart.
Sometimes there were other shapes. Elongated. Serpentine. Silent. Scaled skin, colored and gleaming beneath an unknown light. They did not look at her. They simply glided alongside her.
When she was a child, she spoke about the dream without thinking. Often in a whisper, to the figurines she sent flying across her room, mimicking the elegant sweep of the scaled creatures. The adults listened only halfway. They smiled. They said it was pretty, that she had imagination. They asked if she had seen those monsters in holo-films.
To her, there were no monsters. Only companions for travel and play.
As she grew older, she learned to stay quiet. The words she used were not the right ones. She spoke of stones drifting too far or too close, of silence filling her chest, of creatures too vast to be contained in a single sentence. The looks would change then. The smiles would stiffen, just a little.
So she kept the dream to herself.
Yet it always returned. Not every night, not regularly. But with a strange fidelity: the same sweep, the same stones, the same companions.
During adolescence, she began to notice something else. In the dream, she did not breathe. She did not need to. Movement was enough. Speed carried everything. She moved without a precise destination, yet never at random. The stones, the ice, the void, everything seemed arranged according to an external will. Never could she deviate from the path. Never could she speak. Never could she turn her head. She was not free. She was not imprisoned either.
As an adult, she tried to analyze the dream. She searched for symbols, traumas, formative memories. Once, out of curiosity, she even tried to provoke it. In vain. The dream came when it wished, and left without warning.
Over the years, she felt something change. Something that stirred, that made the extraordinary mass she was begin to falter. An immense fatigue… ancient, accumulated. She woke like that hundreds of times, her heart calm but heavy with sadness, her body weighed down. The dream was neither a warning nor a promise. Just a state. An erratic yet faithful companion.
The dream returned to her one last time. Once too many. Immense and heavy. Vivid and overwhelming. Inside the flight simulation pod. She did not immediately understand that the system was not exploring her memories. It was searching. It plunged into the dream with the precision of a guided missile. The mass roared. She screamed inside the cockpit. Around her, the creatures came apart, dislocated puppets seized by panic. Stone cut. Cold bit. Light burned.
Something within her finally answered.
For the first time in her life, she heard everything. That mental noise she had so long been deprived of, the one that had isolated her from humanity. She perceived every detail of it.
The neural link had been an invasion. Her perception crushed everything else. Around her, minds screamed, terrified, scattered like fragile creatures without shell or claw.
She imposed silence upon them. And silence came.
Her superior’s voice crackled through the speakers, ordering her to calm down and surrender. There was nothing left but freedom. The weapons of the guards rushed in collapsed onto the chrome floor of the simulation lab. The soldiers’ inarticulate bodies followed, falling in turn with a dull, muffled sound.
Freedom. Pain. Solitude.Freedom. Pain. Solitude.Freedom. Pain. Solitude.
Nothing made sense anymore, except that litany of suffering and isolation, and a burning desire to tear free the one thing she could not reach.
Her path to the hangar was strewn with inert bodies, littering the floor, glassy-eyed and staring, mouths frozen open. The ship awakened without resistance, answering her mental commands like a docile slave. She left the convoy far behind her.
The asteroid belt held none of the magnificence of her dreams. Inert, black, and lethal, it was nothing more than a slow, heavy mass of threatening rock. The creatures were not there. No ballet of bright, iridescent scales. No dragons winding between colossi of iron and basalt.
Only the gaunt shapes of skeletons coiled around smaller remains. The glory of their beauty had been left to the mercy of cold and the oblivion of the void.
The screams of the shattered creatures returned to her memory. She screamed in answer. The ship’s communication system crackled with orders and threats of court-martial. She ignored them.
The ship surged toward the remains of her playmates, whispering to them, soothingly, that she had finally come back.
She found herself wondering -without truly wanting to know the answer- how many other children had dreamed of the same thing.
